The Abbey National have been slammed by the Financial Ombudsman who ruled that their mortgage pricing is unfair. Some of us will be getting big refund cheques.
Mob mentality: MTV awards. That just doesn't make sense to me.
Gamers Interest story: Counter Strike players will face 24 hour bans from all servers if caught cheating. I haven't minded being a "CS widow" nearly so much since I started blogging :-)
The Tate Modern are trialling handheld wireless devices as interactive tour guides. Maybe I'll actually get round to going soon :-) The most enjoyable experience I've ever had of modern art was a guided tour of the Tate when I was at school. Having somebody explain the imagery really made a difference to my appreciation and understanding.
Yesterday, my darling hubby, aka bloing turned 30. We had a lovely night in a pub by the river, catching up with old friends and making new ones. Thanks to all who came, with a particular hello to enthusiasm who we met in the flesh for the first time.
Fortunately we had elected a couple of weeks ago to book today off work. It would be fair to say I'm not feeling particularly lively and alert this morning. Much better to be sitting at my PC idly surfing the web at home than being shackled to my PC and work and being forced to think about stuff :-)
For anyone who cares, my new PC is now almost fully functional. It's lovely and fast, and I'll be spending the next couple of weeks tinkering and installing stuff. It should be easier for me to find a little more time to blog again though, so watch this space...
The FBI have issued a warning to companies about warchalking. Do you think it's a tad worrying that one of the largest intelligence organisations in the world have only just cottoned onto something the mainstream press was talking about nearly a month ago!
I have been looking for a map of Europe today. I downloaded this map puzzle and had much educational fun trying to put the countries in the right place! Test your geography today, and see if you can put the countries in faster than I could (without using the outlines - that's cheating :-). Your time to beat is 4 mins, 24 seconds!
All this frivolity put me in mind of a Jane Austin line. In Mansfield Park, one of Fanny Price's cousins says of her "... my cousin cannot put the map of Europe together ... Did you ever hear anything so stupid?" How very literary - most unlike me!
This is mental! one man, 300 helium balloons, 7000ft. This story comes to you in photos from good old Aunty Beeb. Why? He was aiming for a record-breaking 11,000ft. Looks like a laugh to me - and I'm scared witless by heights :-)
I've got a busy week ahead, so I'm probably going to go quiet again for a while. Main aim for the week ahead - building my new flash PC from the groovy new bits I bought today cobbled together with some of what's in the box I'm communicating with now. Fingers crossed ....
Via enthusiasm I found this database of electron microscopy pics. You wouldn't be able to guess from my day to day life that I'm a molecular biologist by education, so these were of particular interst to me :-)
Also from enthusiasm, an ananova article called "Men Can't Win" which discusses the fact that 1 in 10 women will take offence when a man holds a door open for them. When I was growing up this was called "manners". I really don't understand what the fuss is about. Would the same women take offence if another woman held a door for them? If not, they should notice their own hypocrisy and get over it. If they would, then they've obviously got a bloody great chip on their shoulder, and it's time to grow up. Personally, I appreciate it whenever anybody holds a door open for me. Living in a big city it is very easy to feel invisible - anybody who actually notices my physical presence helps to counter all the people who don't notice me and bump into me or generally get in my way as I'm moving about.
Greenpeace have published photos of Norwegian glacier taken from the same spot in 1918 and recently. The pictures show just how much the ice has receded in the last century. It's worth taking a peek if you haven't seen them yet - this is the best visual evidence of global warming I've ever seen.
Six Ealing comedies have been digitally remastered for re-release in cinemas (no doubt in preparation for DVD releases :-). The 6 include one of my all-time fave films - Kind Hearts and Coronets. This is all part of a relaunch for the studio, who have recently done a remake of Hinge and Bracket. UK TV watchers from the 70's may recall these two - they were a drag comedy double-act who portrayed a ladies of a "certain age and class". What was so fantastic about this particular stage version was that they played all four female parts right until the final scene (when all 4 are on stage at the same time!) which just made one of the funniest scripts ever written even funnier.
I notice that the new auditors have been getting stuck into the books at WorldCom. In the scandal that just keeps on growing, another $3.3billion of mis-accounted spending has been identified. There can be no real doubt left that Andersons were not in on it now - if the auditors can genuinely fail to spot a $7billion error some serious questions need to be asked.
In the latest "animals are cleverer than we think" story, a crow has demonstrated the ability to make tools.
And some Australian researchers have raised doubts on one of the central tenets of modern physics. They think the speed of light may not be constant after all, but may have changed over the eons. Was Einstein right all along? He never quite believed that the Theory of Relativity was correct!
I've come across a few stopping smoking sites over the last few days, without really looking for any. Quite liked this one: from the Beeb, as it has a nice list of withdrawal symptoms and how long they should last, as long as some benefits to spur you on. At this stage I should notice "Breathing easier. Bronchial tubes start to relax and energy levels increase". Well, I get the tube every day (I remember from somewhere that an hour on the tube is the same as smoking 2 cigarettes in terms of inhaled toxins), and I'm absolutely exhausted. Mind you, if I only worked the number of hours mentioned in my contract I wouldn't have to go to work tomorrow, which could well explain the tiredness. My only real withdrawal symptom at the moment is "Night-time awakenings", which I now know affect about 25% of people and should last less than a week. I apologise for the self-indulgence of blogging this stuff, but I figure the more I talk about it the less likely I am to fold as I'll have to admit to even more people I've failed!
A couple more support type links for anybody else in the same boat: quit smoking uk - loads of articles and handy stuff including this advice: "Cut down on caffeine. When you stop smoking the caffeine in colas, coffee and tea can become more potent. This can lead to anxiety and jitters. Try to reduce your caffeine intake and you may find this helps to control some of your withdrawal symptoms." I'll try that tomorrow! It's also worth taking a look at quit smoking 0n-line which follows a fairly similar approach to the book I was talking about yesterday.
Last night I went to see Men In Black II. If you loved the first one (which I did), you'll love the sequel too. It is everything I hoped it would be - funny and engaging. The gadgets and effects were cool, and the storyline was good. Tommy Lee Jones & Will Smith were both on form, and I was surprised to discover that Johnny Knoxville can act! The film also features a strange cameo from Michael Jackson who apparently took the part because he thought the first one was a weepy not a comedy!
On the subject of Jackass, whilst gathering a few links for this post, I discovered that they are currently working on a jackass movie. Oh brother! How sick and depraved are they going to be when they're not restricted by what can be shown on TV?
Another one which tickled me was "stag weekend picture", mainly because I'm more likely to post piccies of a hen weekend :-) Also, I find myself questioning exactly what this surfer was looking for. Were they expecting to find pictures of a particular stag do? Out of 5,500 hits did they find the one they were looking for?
My favourite though has to be "Jim Dowd - Lewisham". Regular readers may recall that I went on a fruitless search a while ago to find information about my MP, only to find that there isn't anything of note. It appears that somebody else followed in my footsteps, and I somehow don't think I was any help :-)
Unclear On The Concept: I've also been visted from an AOL search on "chat groups for gay parents". That shows the quality of the AOL search engine then!
I've only managed time for a quick scan of the headlines today, and only one thing caught my eye: Star Wars Episode II DVD will be available on 11th November (pre-orders from some time in September). I can't believe we've got to wait until May 2005 for Episode III!
