Bottons!

Today started unusually with Nrs Blog asking whether or not chickens have bottons!

(See previous post)

Keyboard update

After fourteen years of diligent service our conputer keyboard has given up the ghost, well alnost.

I discovered this evening that it is falling apart one key at a tine. Why I do not know - nost likely old age. Nrs Blog hardly uses the PC, content to enail on her laptop so she is as yet unaware of the nayhen being caused and cannot be blaned for the problen.

So for those less eagle-eyed followers the "n" key is not working and I an having to nake use of the "n" to replace it.

Amazon review

A long while back I wrote about an Amazon review of "Veet, hair removal" - the customer reviews are still up there and well worth a look!

Daughter-Blog sent me another Amazon review - this time of Gummi Bears, which I have pasted below...

Customer Review

19,775 of 20,062 people found the following review helpful  Just don't. Unless it's a gift for someone you hate., October 3, 2012 By  C. Torok Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Haribo Gummy Candy, Sugarless Gummy Bears, 5-Pound Bag (Grocery) Oh man...words cannot express what happened to me after eating these. The Gummi Bear "Cleanse". If you are someone that can tolerate the sugar substitute, enjoy. If you are like the dozens of people that tried my order, RUN! First of all, for taste I would rate these a 5. So good. Soft, true-to-taste fruit flavors like the sugar variety...I was a happy camper. BUT (or should I say BUTT), not long after eating about 20 of these all hell broke loose. I had a gastrointestinal experience like nothing I've ever imagined. Cramps, sweating, bloating beyond my worst nightmare. I've had food poisoning from some bad shellfish and that was almost like a skip in the park compared to what was going on inside me. Then came the, uh, flatulence. Heavens to Murgatroyd, the sounds, like trumpets calling the demons back to Hell...the stench, like 1,000 rotten corpses vomited. I couldn't stand to stay in one room for fear of succumbing to my own odors. But wait; there's more. What came out of me felt like someone tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a coffee straw. I swear my sphincters were screaming. It felt like my delicate starfish was a gaping maw projectile vomiting a torrential flood of toxic waste. 100% liquid. Flammable liquid. NAPALM. It was actually a bit humorous (for a nanosecond)as it was just beyond anything I could imagine possible. AND IT WENT ON FOR HOURS. I felt violated when it was over, which I think might have been sometime in the early morning of the next day. There was stuff coming out of me that I ate at my wedding in 2005. I had FIVE POUNDS of these innocent-looking delicious-tasting HELLBEARS so I told a friend about what happened to me, thinking it HAD to be some type of sensitivity I had to the sugar substitute, and in spite of my warnings and graphic descriptions, she decided to take her chances and take them off my hands. Silly woman. All of the same for her, and a phone call from her while on the toilet (because you kinda end up living in the bathroom for a spell) telling me she really wished she would have listened. I think she was crying. Her sister was skeptical and suspected that we were exaggerating. She took them to work, since there was still 99% of a 5 pound bag left. She works for a construction company, where there are builders, roofers, house painters, landscapers, etc. Lots of people who generally have limited access to toilets on a given day. I can't imagine where all of those poor men (and women) pooped that day. I keep envisioning men on roofs, crossing their legs and trying to decide if they can make it down the ladder, or if they should just jump. If you order these, best of luck to you. And please, don't post a video review during the aftershocks.

I thought my New Year was difficult...

In the London Times today is an excellent article on page 32.

It seems a 20 year old Australian man from Mooroopna, wanted to surprise his girlfriend. To achieve this he hid and got stuck in a top-poading washing machine. Firefighters took 20 mins to free him.

Amazingly he is not alone! An 11 year old american girl did the same thing in a similar design of machine and he friends called the fire brigade when they failed to free her using peanut butter and ice cream!

Happy Bloody New Year!

Felt a little unsettled this morning looking at the year ahead. At times like this I turn to the ever reliable reassurance of Shelly Von Strunckel, horoscope expert extrodinaire.

Even she let me down with her first words

Aries:
"Ordinarily you overcome problems swiftly."

Back to bed :-(

Christmas Misunderstandings

It could be the Christmas drinking, it could be tiredness from too many late nights or it could be just one of those things.....

I said to daughter-blog, "I'll get myself a beer."

She heard, "I'll be celibate."

Blog Christmas 3

Conversation in the Blog house this morning...

"Lovely, the sun is shining!" (Mrs Blog)

"Where?" (Daughter-Blog aged 22)

"In the sky!" Mr Blog

Blog Christmas 2

On Christmas Eve, Daughter-Blog and I had both been put in charge of cooking the Christmas ham. Mrs Blog had already popped it in the oven so all that was needed was to

• Take it out of the oven at the right time
• Stud the ham with cloves 
• Score the skin
• finish it off
• ...and remove the plastic wrapping that it had been cooked in.

Blog Christmas 1

Christmas this year in the Blog household was the usual affair with one or two exceptions it went pretty well.

Christmas evening and the Blogs were sitting down ready to watch whatever exciting programmes or films the TV companies had prepared and discovered there was nothing on. Not to be put off we had Plan B - Talk Talk TV with "on demand" programmes and films. Switching to the requisite channel we then checked out the TV guide for something to watch. White Christmas? Harvey? Something Christmassy? Nope - none of them are available, whilst you can watch on demand you can only watch what the TV companies let you watch and that turned out to be nearly nothing! 

The only programme we could watch on demand was repeated episodes of "Come Dine With Me"! Merry christmas Talk Talk!

Attempted Patricide

Stayed with son-Blog in St Andrews last night.

He offered to cook an omelette for breakfast for the two us. Into it went salami, cheese and, according to him, eggs. Whatever the constituents, it did not result in anything that looked like an omelette.After a timely intervention by the World Health Organisation, I opted for toast.

I can only conclude that despite my devoted paternal ministrations I am a marked man!

Hot head

Swiss nephew-blog Ben (See Cooker problems) has done it again. Now aged three he has developed a decent vocabulary and is not afraid to use it.

Seemingly he was out with his parents visiting friends. The friends are a couple, the husband is losing his hair. The hair loss has manifest itself in a bald head, save for a shock of hair at the front, giving a tonsure style.

When left alone with the husband Ben earnestly asked "Have you set fire to your head? Is that why you haven't got any hair?"

Puzzled, said friend relayed the exchange to Swiss-sister-blog who, after a few seconds realised what was going on.

"Ben was watching Home Alone this afternoon!"

Shakespearean Speech Recognition

As the proud owner of a  Windows 8 operating system, I have been exploring the features it offers. One of them is speech recognition. It has caused a few issues.

In frustration this morning I dictated "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears! I come to bury Caesar not to praise him." etc.

It appeared as

"Graham’s brother and a woman named me that the runs were warnings went and knowlton’s our accounts that receives a lot Leeson the ball bounced wearing blue names are the names and generates the backbone so that we meet season with the room"

Back to more mundane technology.

More Vodafone nonsense!

Vodafone have featured more than any other business in the pages of this blog and are continuing to provide ample scope for maintaining their track record.

TalkTalk have kindly agreed to compensate me for the expense of using my mobile phone while they repaired my land-line. In order to obtain the compensation I need to provide an amount. A piece of cake you would think. "Why not log on to your Vodafone online account and check usage and itemised bills?" I hear you cry?. That is what I spent this morning trying to do.

Vodafone have locked my account. I mis-typed the password twice and they had a security meltdown, mistaking me for a fundamentalist terrorist. I went on to the online chat facility and asked if they could unlock my account.

I waited and waited and was then asked "Are you willing to unlock your account?"

"Yes!" I replied.

"You have not got an online account with Vodafone."

"Yes I do. It is the one that keeps sending me emails with new passwords."

"Oh. What is your username and mobile number?"

I offered them.

"You have not got an online account. Please register by using this link."

I clicked and went through the process. It asked for my account number. I searched past emails and found nothing to help. After fiddling about I saw that they could text me the account number. I texted and they texted right back telling me they also needed my post code. Why they could not tell me first time....

I texted again and they texted right back with my account number. Joy!

I entered my account number and opened the section marked "itemised bills" at last I would have the info for TalkTalk....

"Sorry this section of the website is under repair."

Off to find the Scotch.

Having a bad day?

My thanks to a fellow member on Linked In for bringing this to my attention.

A horse stuck in a gate having a bad day, made worse by a cow laughing in the background....

Vodafone's Revenge

It is not clear to me why, but Vodafone have me in their sights. Not in a positive way; they are not really after my custom. They have started what I believe is a campaign to make me realise that I have no friends; it is their "billy-no-mates" campaign.

They sent me a text this week from their voice mail facility, it read,

"You have no new messages, please dial 121"

It took a few re-reads before I realised it genuinely said "No" new messages. So they wanted me to ring the voice mail number to find out that I had no messages and by default must be a billy-no-mates.

I duly rang, there were no messages, I have no friends.

Blind as a bat

At 7.30 this morning I managed to break my emergency glasses.

As regulars will know my reading glasses have had a hard time over the years. They have been run over, buried in snow and mangled by a petrol-driven lawn mower. Last week I broke the arm off my reserve glasses ( effectively my second pair) and today left me with no reserves since my emergency glasses were my reserve  reserve pair.

FOr anyone not blighted by failing eyesight spare a thought for those of us who are! How the hell do you find a pair of reading glasses when you can't read the labels on anything?

Nonetheless by trial and error and twenty minutes of dedication in W H Smiths I solved the problem. Otherwise I might still be wandering around City airport because I had convinced myself that I was flying home from there and without the new emergency-reserve-reserve glasses I would have missed the detail that said I should have been at Heathrow!!

Dongle Disaster 2

Having decided I needed a dongle I have not been easily put off by the troubles outlined in "Dongle Disaster".

Last week I finally managed to buy a dongle and get it working. That does not mean it was without issues - thanks to Windows 8 it took forty minutes to get the thing to work. Having learned my lesson at the hands of phones 4 U I did not leave the Vodafone shop until it was doing what it should.


Start of grumpy rant against Microsoft Windows 8

For anyone unfamiliar with Windows 8, let me help. It is an operating system - Microsoft's latest but definitely not best. It has hidden menus which means that if your cursor does not hover over the right place on the screen you will never find them. I found this out when I tried to switch my laptop off for the first time. Gone is the "start" button which you click and then select "shut down"; enter the hidden menu for settings, this in turn hides the "power options menu" (which I would have thought related to battery saving) and inside this subterranean menu is the option to shut down. Call me a Luddite but if you have to use a different and now out of date PC to find out how to switch off your brand new laptop something is wrong!

End of grumpy rant against Microsoft Windows 8
Start of grumpy rant against Microsoft Outlook 2013

Twenty minutes after I had left the shop I was in a cafe trying to use my dongle. Good old Microsoft did it again. Outlook 2013 - this time. The dongle worked fine - the green light flashed then went blue and flashed, finally I had a solid blue light and a stable connection. I opened up Outlook 2013 to check on emails. Or rather, I tried to open up Outlook 2013 to read emails. It opened and then promptly told me that it had detected a "metered connection" (Microsoft speak for - we have found the dongle you are paying for and it is working) and that as such it was switching me to work offline!! Thus they rendered my dongle useless unless I overrode the Outlook basic instinct to ruin my life.

Swiss-nephew-blog learned at the age of two how to operate the Apple IPad and he could not speak or read at the time. How do MS get it so wrong?

Start of grumpy rant against Microsoft Outlook 2013

Colds and milestones

Two messages for this post!

First thanks to all the fans of Drivel and Wisdom, we passed 25,000 hits this week!

Second, Swiss-nephew-blog returns to these pages. (Check out Carrot Mystery, Cooker Problems and More Cooker Problems.Top left on the page is a search facility).

Swiss-nephew-blog is now three and along with his two older sisters suffered a cold two weeks ago. He alerted Swiss-sister-blog to the fact by saying, "I've got a walking nose." She was baffled for a moment or two until she realised he meant a "running nose" but clearly not quite as bad!

Dongle Disaster

Yesterday I popped into the Vodafone shop to try to buy a Dongle - for the technically challenged - a device which lets me connect my laptop to the internet via a mobile phone signal using a device the size of finger.

"Sold out" they told me.

Deflated I walked through the shopping mall and saw a "phones 4 U" store.

"Do you sell dongles?" I asked.

"Yes, Vodafone, T Mobile etc" said the spotty lad called Mark.(I have avoided stating the obvious about Vodafone)

"Which would you recommend?" I enquired.

"T Mobile, they have the best coverage these days."

£30 lighter I left the shop with my new dongle.

Two hours later sitting in Starbucks (I was looking for a WiFi signal and a good cup of coffee, got one not the other!) the dongle did not work. The dongle not working was why I was in Starbucks using their WiFi to try and sort out T Mobile's dongle problems. Having read all the instructions and registered the device I was nowhere nearer a solution. I returned to the Phones 4 U store.

Mark was still there.

"Hi, I bought this dongle from you and I cannot get it to work."

Mark took the packaging and read the instructions.

"Are you able to get a signal?" he asked.

"Yes, look can you see the green light, according to the instructions that means I have a signal."

"Is ti not connecting then?"

I kept calm and avoided any hint of sarcasm..

"No that is why that light is green. It should turn blue when it connects to the internet."

"Oh. Have you topped it up?"

"No, because you told me that it came with three months free!"

"Oh yeah!"

Eventually using a WiFi signal I showed Mark where I had set up my account on the T Mobile site. It asked for a PIN.

Mark entered the PIN number having chosen the number with "PIN" written next to it. This number was rejected as incorrect.. Mark thought the PUK number might work until I explained what a PUK is for.

The site said it would send me a new PIN so I said "yes please" and it decided not to.

By now Mark was sharing my frustrations. He rang T Mobile who passed him through three different departments and left him none the wiser. I sensed that Mark, spotty youth as he was, was fast becoming a grumpy old man.

"They said that they are sorry and would you like a free £30 top-up?"

"Mmmm. How would I use a top up voucher on a dongle that doesn't work and through a website that won't let me access it?"

"Ah. I see your point."

In the end Phone 4 U agreed to give me my money back, although that did require a clearance from senior people in London first. Still maintaining my calm outlook I asked Mark...

"How do Phones 4 U make any money when you have spend two hours of your time trying to sort out T Mobile's mess and have lost a sale in the process?"

"To be honest, we have nothing but major problems with T Mobile, they are absolutely rubbish!"

I smiled and decided to wish him a pleasant day.

Another guy lets the side down

The continuation of inept blokes is entirely coincidental.

I was searching curry recipes and saw a thread of posts. One post asked when the lemon juice should be added...this was the first reply,

Depends what you want to achieve. I normally add it to the chicken after I’ve chopped / diced it, or into the pan at the same time as the chicken, but I’ve also tried adding it at the end which can give you an almost sweat/sour effect. Why not try both and let me know which you prefer?

Read more: Is this the BEST Chicken Madras Recipe Ever? http://www.currytastic.com/best-chicken-madras-recipe-ever/#ixzz2deY7eznA