Category: Uncategorized

After loitering on my garden for nearly six months the shrubs, bushes and trees that had been really pissing me off had to go. Below is my attempt at smoking out the neighbours, and below that is the whole thing burning normally. There’s now an annoying bald patch on the garden where the bushes were 🙁

The final moments of the Mazda before it was scrapped under the UK scrappage scheme. The back window wouldn’t close, the front passenger side brake was seized, it was leaking water and the alternator was very dubious. Still, 2k for a car which I paid 2.4k four years ago isn’t a bad deal. Plus I get to sell the hardtop on e-bay which may put me into profit on the deal!

Twenty years ago I was a bit of a bad lad and shaved a bald patch into Paul’s head and whipped off Jaz’s eyebrow in a pique of juvenile exuberance.

Fast forward to present day and as a group of nearly middle aged men Paul and Jaz get their revenge.

Below is a picture of the back of my head after Paul attacked me with Jaz’s clippers whilst I slept.

It’s quite difficult to make out the extent to which he disfigured me so here’s a shot of the hair that was chopped off.

Jason denies all involvement in the actual chopping but he admits to conspiring with Paul before the fact and with providing the clippers. Jaz left and Paul right below – Public Enemy numbers 2 and 1 respectively

…………………………………………………………………………….
The upshot of all this late night hairdressing was that my dear wife had to fight back the tears as she shaved off my golden wavy locks and reduced me to this…

It’s been a long slog getting the ground ready but today is the day that Bill broke the ground and started putting in the concrete pillars that my bachelor pad…sorry pool room and bar …..sorry office finally got underway.

Above is the ground before I’d ripped up the tree stump and before I’d dug the trench to lay power, internet and water down to the site.

Below is the trench in mid dig with the micro digger I hired to get the job done.

Below, in the distance is Bill getting some water to mix up the concrete. The blue ducting is carry two Cat5e cables, one of which is shielded [ thanks to Keith for these ] and a water pipe. The black cable is 16mm armoured cable which was organised by Paul. It’s good to have friends!
The wooden boxes you can see are the first concrete pillars that Bill is putting in, there will be 12 in total to support the 5m by 4m floorspace, 1m of which will the raised decking at the front giving an internal space of 15 sq/m which should hopefully be enough for me.

and finally, when complete this should be the view from my office window…hopefully without Bill and a big pile of stuff that needs burning!

There’s a pot of gold waiting for me in the front garden somewhere!

A very dodgy video of me heading down the garden to check my rat trap

Starting with a partridge, it had to be plucked, gutted and generally made cookable. After spatchcocking Percy the Partridge and cooking him over the fire for about 20 mins per side he was delicious!

Breaking through the skin to get the guts out was one of the most “gag-worthy breakfast about to make a re-appearance” moments I’ve had in a long time. Funnily enough Pippin the Pigeon whom I tore apart with my latex gloved hands the next day barely made me wince at all. What a difference a day makes!

If you want to spend three days of your life agonising over why piece x is not square with piece y and then taking apart and rebuilding something over and over again then you too should buy a TP Toys Sherwood tower and then try building it on uneven ground.

An electric screwdriver is definitely recommended to drive in the 55 thousand screws that form the tower.

Still – Amelia loves it and I’m sure as Oliver gets older he will too.

My homegrown jalapenos ready to eat. Get in.

After an awful lot of arsing about and blog posts and stuff, I’ve finally made it to number 1 in the google search results. We had a bit of a false alarm many months ago when I hit number 1 in the google.co.uk rankings..but here it is!

As an added bonus I also get number 3 slot for this neglected blog!

The little furry terrorist above has been wreaking havoc around my house for months now.  Huge great molehills appearing in my garden, greenhouse and from between the cracks in the driveway.  I also blame this wee beastie for the stones falling through on my drive causing lots of work and expense for me!

The final straw came when the furry fucker uprooted all my newly buried tulip bulbs.  He/She just had to go. 

Tools:
1 B&Q mole trap
1 Trowel

Method:
Move the earth from a fresh mole hill.
Poke around with a stick until you find the tunnel shaft
Dig down with the trowel until you expose the underground tunnel 10-15 cm below
Using gloves to keep the human smell away insert the trap and wait a while.
When the trap springs pull the dead mole out, take a picture, write a blog and celebrate.

This is the moment when I had to hand over 100 pounds to Paul "I’m a jammy bastard" Simkiss following our bet made a year previously.

The bet was :

Hey Paul,

Hope you didn’t forget our £100 bet.  On Nov 9th 2008 if the dollar is
less than $1.80 v £ then you win – but if your pound buys more than
$1.80 then I’m ze goose stepping winner marching across red square.

Okely dokely?

So we have virtually an entire year with the pound riding high and then crash bang wallop.  Global recession.  Banks collapsing, governments subsiding bailouts, car manufacturers going under and for some bizarre reason…even though the Americans were massively hit by these factors also…the pound plummets.

Very very annoying.  The fingers behind Paul’s head belong to Megan.  She picks on me 🙁

Having said that, on the plus side we did manage to spend the 100 quid on curry and beer on our night out in Rishworth, so that was good.

 

At the end of my lane is a little duck pond, needless to say it’s the one pictured above.  I went down with Amelia recently to feed the ducks and I’ve never seen it so still.  There was a beautiful blue sky and the reflections were amazing.  I’m just pissed off that I only had my iphone with me to take a picture rather than my proper camera.  Ho hum!

This photo was just too weird not to publish.  Such a pity the Wyandotes weren’t facing each other too.  They’ve got names but I can’t remember them.  Pretty sure one is called Buffy and I think one is called Blanche.

Buff Orpingtons at the top of the picture and Wyandotes at the bottom.

It finally happened, something finally changed in the google servers that took yours truly, moi, watashi, to the number 1 spot.  Ahhh, I never thought this day would come, a tear is in my eye as I write this blog.

God bless google, god bless wordpress, my hosting partners and all those [ one ] people that wished me well on this mission.  Mark…this is for you 🙂

In my previous post I valiantly declared that my non-waterproof iphone [ see here ] probably just needed a new battery and all would be tickety-boo.  Well, it turned out to be almost the case. 

Above is the phone with the new battery part way soldered in.  It was with a dry mouth, shaking hands and the warning of "don’t short the li-ion battery to the case or explosions will occur" ringing in my ears that I donned soldering iron and non-lead solder.  I was using Bill’s soldering iron initially but it was a pre-77 iron and really wasn’t up to the job as it lacked the fine point required for modern electronics.  If you’re wondering how I know it’s pre 77 then it’s because I had to wire a plug onto it and the wires were red, black and green.  Verrrr old.

After I’d almost completely destroyed the iPhone motherboard and solder was spread across all contacts, the heat-sink, the motherboard, my desk and a pile of receipts to the right of my keyboard I decided that the tools just weren’t up to the job.  A quick trip to Maplin secured me a nice new soldering iron, a solder sucker, some de-solder braid and some unleaded solder – one must think of the environment and all that.  Back to work I went and this time it was much more successful. 

When I powered up the handset I noticed that there was considerable water damage in the screen which just made things look crappy.  In a moment of what can only be described as sheer lunacy I decided to take the whole thing apart and "Isopropyl Alcohol" the screen so that it would be a whole new groovy iphone and I would be the toast of Olde Wigan Towne.

This is the iPhone with the screen disassembled.  People forgot to mention that you need a clean room, sixteen arms and a fucking clue to reassemble this thing.  Not a hope.  I had the screen cleaned up and back together in a thrice.  The handset powered up and there was nothing – the touchscreen had ceased to work.  So apart it came again, only this time I managed to crack the display and also snap the wire connecting the front button to the motherboard.  The new glass was a tenner and I could repair the wire – so I wasn’t massively concerned about this disaster.  I reassembled the screen in a different order [ and yes I do realise I should have taken photos as I was disassembling it 🙁 ] but was all for naught.  I decided it was third time lucky.  Disassembled, rearranged and was in mid reassemble when I managed to tear through the connecting strip from the motherboard to the radio circuitry.  Game over.  Bastard!

 

The last resting place of Darren Steele’s first generation iPhone. 

9th Nov 2007 – 23rd July 2008.  Rest in Peace.

The picture above is an artists impression of the moment my iPhone ended up in the Rochdale canal.  The image above isn’t exactly accurate as it was in my pocket at the time so there should be a fat northern bloke attached to the jesus phone.  Additionally my hazy memory does not recall a large red arrow nor a white "splosh!!" hovering above the canal.

It’s all Simkiss’ fault.  Inviting us out for a boozy do at Rochdale Hornets Rugby match, force feeding us beers in the Dog and Partidge beforehand and then dragging us all down to "The Ship" in Castleton which serves beer AND is right next to a canal.  What kind of moron builds a pub next to a canal – it’s just an iphone disaster waiting to happen.

Anyway, it wasn’t all bad.  A quick youTube search reveals it’s probably just in need of a good soaking in rubbing alcohol and a replacement battery which is currently on order. 

However in order that I may not be without an iPhone for too long I managed to acquire a 3G version today, got it all synced up and then knocked a glass of vimto over on top of it.  It’s still working which is an improvement on the waterproof-ness of the last one.

Anybody willing to take bets on how many months the new phone will last me?  I’m guessing about 3. 

 

I’ve been driving around a fair bit recently heading up to the Lake District to sail my boat and travelling down to Reading to go to the office and the thing that I keep noticing is the petrol price is always 104.9p per litre or 115.9p per litre.  Why do they have to keep putting the 0.9 on the end of it? 

Do oil companies think drivers go "tskkk, just look at that, it’s 115p per litre now.  Still at least it’s not 116p".  Well, people really aren’t that fucking stupid now are they.  It’s like when people advertise their house at £299,999 because then it’s not advertised for £300k and it "sounds cheaper".  Fucking imbeciles the lot of them.

So dear petrol stations and home sellers, let’s call a spade a spade and stop fannying around with 0.9p or knocking £1 of a £300,000 pound house.  Jesus.

A long long time ago, in an employ far far away we had to make a stupid corporate video for Openwave.  It really was a complete waste of time and money. 

Still we had a laugh making our little part of it, and it was better than working.

The line up is Me, Abigail Kroon-Herbert, Martin Bradshaw and Denis Gershongoren.  The man behind the camera is Robert Wakeling.