January 25th, 2012 by J

Why is it the end of an era? Well perhaps I should start at the beginning.

I have been thinking a lot the last week about a legacy. What it means, what it is and what resonates through time.

For me a legacy is not about what physical mark you make on the world it is about whom you are and the way you affect people through your life. Let me give you an example:

On the 31st November 1919 in a small mining village in Wales a little girl was born to a loving mother (housewife) and father (Miner), she also had a sister and a brother making up the small family. Not an easy life but a decent one.

Forward a few years and the young girl has grown and matured into a young woman in 1930s London working as a PA. A few more years forward and she is now set to be married to a man approved of by her parents and Britain is on the brink of war.

Forward again, Britain is at war, husband to be is off abroad and the woman has fallen deeply in love with another man. A scandal! Thankfully the mans parents are more liberal than most and despite the protestations of her family the woman stays with her love.

Jump forward to the 1950’s, a flat in Wandsworth London, the woman and her husband have a child, a little girl of there own. Life has changed and family ties have been rebuilt. Wife and husband will spend nearly 50 years in this flat, they will see London change around them, people come and go, and life long friends are made. Their child will grow, marry and have a child of her own.

For the next 50 years the woman will be a wife, mother, grandmother and great grand mother. She will have a career spanning 30 years, she will learn and teach the piano, she and her husband will travel to France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Turkey and she will even go by herself to Belfast in the 1990s. She will never learn to drive, She will walk every where, Make her own bread, Sing with her choir, She will loose her brother, her sister and her parents.

Most of all she will live and breathe every moment.

When time starts to take its toll on her husband she will nurse him for 2 years with no complaints until he passes on.

At this point a new chapter will open in her life, while scary she embraces.

Forward to 31^st November 2009, the woman is 90. She now lives in a Small Village in Cornwall; she still walks 3 miles every day with her dog. Life is simpler now but no less active.

The woman still sings with a local choir, still goes the theatre with her new friends, and still goes for Sunday lunch at a local pub.

Forward to 31^st November 2010.

At 91 she has been told by doctors that due to angina she really needs to stop the daily walk, but on her 91st with her family around her she still walks herself into her Birthday lunch.

Time has taken its toll on her appearance but not her mind.

Forward to 31^st November 2011.

At 92 the woman is sharp as a nail as she gives her Great-granddaughter advice on her piano playing, and talks to her Grandson about the entire goings on in the village. She is tired but a fighter.

On the 15^th January 2012 her grandson will visit her in a nursing home where she has been for 3 days. They chat for an hour about all that is going on in life until she says she is tired and he leaves her to rest.

In the early hours of Tuesday 17^th January 2012 Iris finally succumbed to the tiredness that had been nagging her for the last two months and rest for ever more.

Iris was my Grandmother.

I and the generations that follow me through history are her legacy.

Rest easy now we will take it from here……

January 6th, 2012 by J

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls It is time to unite, It is time to stand against the stigma. For too long we have huddled in the shadows only to be snoot-ed at by the supposed Epicurean experts. It is time to rise up and Shout “I DONT CARE”.

What am i talking about i am talking about Tomato Sauce.

I Like tomato sauce! Yes it does go with Cheese on toast, It does go with Pastys it is a sauce! Just because it comes in a bottle and not in a dainty boat, bowel, ramekin or pot does not make it any less of a sauce.

If i asked for mint, mustard, barbecue, teriyaki or soy  would i be frowned at in that look down your nose way NO! but ask for Tomato sauce and you are deemed a lesser human.

VIVA LA TOMATO SAUCE.

And this goes for brown sauce on bacon sarnies too…

November 9th, 2011 by J

And maybe one day we will learn from their sacrifice.

November 8th, 2011 by J

OK so at what point did i start getting older?

A bizarre question given the nature of things and the fact the we are all getting older from the moment we are born, But at what point did i start feeling older?

Now i know that there are the smattering of answers out there but i have suddenly notice that a lot of the techs coming in with Companies seem to be getting younger. Now there is a select group of people amongst my friends (the ones that i allow to get away with it) who have always considered me to be a bit of an oldie since i was 14 (ho hum it enabled me and V to buy my first house at 21 and set myself up for the future so screw it) but the question is at what point did i start perceiving people as younger.

There seems to be a strange barrier that you cross through from an age where you see “everyone older as older than you and everyone younger the same age” to seeing “everyone older than you as the same age and younger as younger”. If that makes any sense?
It is a very strange feeling suddenly working with people of 19 – 30 and seeing them as younger than you. Conversations take on a very strange lilt and a vague realisation that the person you are talking to has no idea what film your going on about or what band your discussing.

Now OK i am very well aware that this is something that happens to every generation, I am also very well aware that this is nothing new blah blah etc. But i don’t care i am just puzzled as to when it happened to me!

Now despite what certain people may think V and I have never really had a plan in life, most of the decisions we have made in our time together have been left to fate to decide and for the most part it has worked out pretty well House, jobs, Children etc. We don’t have a 5yr plan, we don’t have career plans (in fact neither of us really know what we want to do when we grow up) and in fact most of those ideals scare the shit out of me.
We do have however a calm in life, For the most part i put a lot of this down to our past. V and I have been through a lot over the years and some of it pretty shitty but we have always held on to what we know and that is nothing!

Where am i going with this i hear you start to cry, well it is simple, At what age did the world flip. At what point did i cross that barrier from J to Mr because it seems to me it just started happening and no one pointed this out to me. Personally i haven’t noticed any difference but it seems the world has, also having a child definitely hasn’t helped as to her anyone older than 16 is OLD!.
What prompted this stream of consciousness is that yesterday i received an email with a CV attached, “Dear Mr…..” Woahhh at what point did people start sending me CVs especially with emails entitled “Dear Mr….” It wasn’t that long ago that i was the one sending CVs to people. I had to take a minute to decide how to handle this as it caught me quite unawares. I replied in the normal manner “thanks for your CV blah blah blah” but it did get me thinking.

The only answer i can come up with is that there isn’t a point it is just a slow quite alteration of perception right up to a point where nature slaps you in the face and runs away chortling. I suspect that in the years to come i will have more perceptual changes and nature will play it’s time induced version of “knock down ginger” but i think i will choose the higher path.

I will take the Moral high ground.

Be the bigger person.

And stick my fingers in my ears and say “LA LA LA I’m not listening….”

September 23rd, 2011 by J

*In order to help others who might also have this issue please feel free to share this or drop me a comment with other answers that have worked for you and I shall add to the list, might save someone a few hours searching*

Ok so the last few days I have had an issue with my HTC Desire S. Every time I try to download anything from the Google market my phone starts the download and then freezes solid.

The only way to break this is to take the battery out, replace it, turn the phone back on and as it is booting hit the download and cancel it at the market before it freezes again.

As you can understand not an exact science and rather annoying. The upshot is that I have been unable to download or update anything, so as is normal in these cases I turned to the Internet.
It seems this is not a new issue as the first info I found about this started in 2010 and is 17 pages long. It seems to appear on different handsets proving that it is a Google issue not a handset/carrier issue and generally revolves around google wanting to move everyone to @gmail. In true Google style (and one of my few concerns when I gave up my trusty treo for Android) they have basically ignored it.

However users have stuck with it and come up with answers. In an attempt to avoid a factory reset I tried most of these before hitting on one that worked.

Below is a list of possible thing to do to get you downloading again.

The one that worked for me:

Phone: HTC Desire S
Network: Orange (uk)
Version: 2.3.3

1. Set Airplane mode on
2. Perform all cache clearing below:
>> settings->(applications on desire s then) “manage applications”  then scroll down to,
>> “Checkin Service”          then select  “clear data”     (Not on Desire S)
>> “Download Manager”   then select “clear data”
>> “Google Apps”                then “clear data”                  (Not on Desire S)
>> “Google Talk Service”  then select “clear data”    (Called Talk on Desire S)
>> ” Market”                         then select “clear cache”
3. Power off/on phone
4. Switch off Airplane mode
5, try your download again.

Other possable answers:

1. A) settings / manage applications / market and select uninstall updates. (Not available in Desire S)

2. A) I also have an HTC Desire and found that if I turned off Talk it worked.

3. A) >> log on to your google account on a computer
>>click on Manage Account
>>On personal settings click on Change Password4
>>Change the password
>>Now restart your phone (no need for me even!)
>>Try connecting to google mail it then tells you that you cannot login and you have to edit the account. there you can then use gmail instead of googlemail.

4. A) Change the googlemail.com account to a gmail.com account.

5. A) >>Connected my Desire to the computer and mounted it as diskdrive; the SD card is now not readable for the Desire itself
>>Went to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > All, clicked on the Market app and pressed the Clear Data, Clear Cache and Force Stop buttons
>> Opened the Market app
>>Had fun browsing and downloading apps until I disconnected the USB cable from the computer and make the SD card readable for the phone again

6. A)  Turn on 3G (my unit is HTC Desire, check the tick box near Wireless network. You should see the 3G icon near your signal bar
>>Go to Talk, this should now be able to login
>>Turn off 3G. You will notice your previous downloads will resume automatically
>>Turn on wifi, and the download will continue.

7. A) Shut down the phone –> take out the battery –> wait 20 sec –> put in the battery –> start the phone.

8. A) Change back to googlemail if you have recently changed to gmail and vice versa

9. A) I found a gmail help page ‘Google Mail is becoming Gmail in the UK’ and there they say:

10. A) I created a brand new Gmail account just to use with my phone, Hard reset my phone, Registered the new account on the phone.

11. A)
>> log on to your google account on a computer
>> click on Manage Account
>> On personal settings click on Change Password
>> Change the password
>> Now restart your phone
>> Try connecting to google mail it then tells you that you cannot login and you have to edit the account. there you can then use gmail instead of googlemail.

12. A) Factory reset:
>> Log into Google Mail on the web and change your email address to @gmail
>> Do a factory reset on your phone
>>When inputting your google mail account settings on the phone, use the new, @gmail address
Android users: If you use an Android device and change your address, the following apps may not connect properly: Google Talk and Android Market. The current solution for this is to change back to @googlemail.com, or do a full reset of your Android device and use @gmail.com. We are working on resolving this issue as soon as possible.

Websites that may help you find ideas.

http://myhtcdesire.com/tag/gmail

http://androidforums.com/

Android market help forum

Good luck.

September 11th, 2011 by J

I realised today that i have been blogging since 2003 a total of 8 years. Over that time my blog has gone through many changes and overhauls but in essence i have stayed with the same formula that i started with.

I Blog when i can be arsed.

Blogging for me has been more of a release than any form of endeavour to change the world. I dont care about comments (although they are nice when they are given) i do it for me. Content is always a little tricky and sometimes i can go a little while between posts but that’s life.

When i first started there was a core of bloggers which i followed but over time they have been lost or forgotten. Blogs got taken over somewhere along to line by corporate, political or review blogs and all the decent bloggers packed up and moved on to pastures new. in a slight turn of nostalgia I would just like to say goodbye to some of those who have been left behind.

Kel – from Special K – The best mummy blogger.

Lee ann – from The Cheese stands alone - Un-PC to the last.

Victor – from Publius and co – Rats ahoy.

Markiss – from Markiss – Nonsense from a kiss fan.

Jim – from Snooze button dreams – American heart

Charles – from Digital Zero – Life in images.

and Frank – from Albino Neutrino – Seahorses

Despite the loss of these great bloggers some have stayed on or been given new life Chez Dafyd for instance has appeared from the ashes it would also appear that Belle de jour has started blogging again although under a different name.

In the last couple of years there seems to have been a resurgence in bloggers especially it would seem in mommy bloggers. Now generally i have steered clear of mommy bloggers unless they have a specific style as there is an awful lot of review mommy bloggers i.e endless reviews of baby products, Endless baby picture bloggers or the what my body is doing today bloggers. All of the above are fine but not for me.

However there are mommy bloggers who incorporate the above while being able to display there individuality and flair along with the attitude of not giving a crap. So for the first time in a long while i have updated my blog role to add Mocha Beanie Mommy to the list.

Does this all mean that blogs are coming back with vengeance…..No! it just means that you have to dig a little deeper for the good ones and don’t expect the good ones to post every minute but give you a little entertainment from time to time.

September 8th, 2011 by J

Monday:

Spent most of the day in aMazing – Got lost in the Maize maze for 1.5hrs went on the toboggan and managed to twist my ankle but spent the rest of the day having a great laugh. P got soaking wet and went on everything.

Back to the hotel to stick an ice pack on my ankle (along with P who had also hurt hers).

Tuesday:

WET!! Still of for a pootle around the island, La Greve de leuq which is a very sandy beach and watched P and V go for a paddle in the rain and hot chocolate and cake at the beach cafe.

Onwards to St ouen bay and a drive along the coast, Quick stop at the Channel islands military museum (not one for military stuff but the chance to have a walk around a bunker in good condition was for me) P surprisingly interested especially in the Enigma machine.

Back to the hotel and then out for a lovley dinner with R and D.

Wednesday:

Met up with a little girl and her mother that P had made friends with at the wedding and went to Fort Regent soft play for a couple of hours. then a wander along the other coast and a cream tea at Jersey pottery before back to the hotel for swimming.

Thursday:

Home time.

September 6th, 2011 by J

Well i am sat in the hotel bar having five minutes and thought i would write an account of what has been happening so far.

As some of you may know i am currently on the isle of Jersey. The reason for this is that i had the honour of being asked to be Rob’s best man so we also decided to make a holiday of it. So a brief lowdown of what has been happening so far.

Thursday:

Airport – Check in………………………………………………………………………….Fli *is that it? Really! but i hav’nt finished my tea* ght – Hotel.

The hotel (les charrieres) is clean and tidy with a good bar, Unfortunately stuck very much in the 70’s complete with trouser press. It does have a nice pool and bar which is good.

Met with Rob parents and family abandoning long suffering other half and little one went off for a lads meal with rob, senior and friend. First stop the lamplighter (a lovely little real ale pub) in St Helier. After a couple of Cornish Knockers (Insert puerile *Phinarr, Phinarr* here) It was on to Jaipur for a curry and a few more cobras, which i have to say was outstanding.

Then we moved back to the Hotel to prop up the bar for a little while before bed.

Friday:

A lovely wander around St Helier and a chance to pick up some bits for the wedding. Wedding rehearsal at the church and a chance to meet the polish contingent, Then an afternoon laying out the reception, moving beer unloading vans etc. Dinner at the hotel and more propping up the bar as more friends arrived.

Saturday:

D-day, 7.30 start (i shit you not) to go and move kegs, Drop back the van and get back to the hotel.

Suited and booted, Rings in one pocket speech in the other off the the church……Via the St Marys pub for a quick stiffener.

Church – Rob Nervous, D stunning, Wedding done and i didn’t even drop the rings.

Reception – Eating, Speech’s (inc mine, Lock legs, forget butterflies done), Drinking, Cutting cake, Dances, DRINK…………………………….

Sunday:

OWWWW – 10am at reception site for clean up, Lunch at the St Marys country pub back to the hotel for a quick swim before heading the a family get together at robs.

Vast quantity of Polish sausage and meats, cake, Remainder of the beer and Vodka.

More to follow but heading out for dinner with the newly weds…….

July 26th, 2011 by J

I will start this by saying that this was a tricky list for me to put together as there loads of films from the 80s that i love and have had to throw away some over others. There is no hard and fast rules as to why all these films fit into my top 20 but all of them have something special that fitted at the time i watched them.

I know there are going to be some disagreements over this list but am happy to hear all views, and then promptly ignore them.

My top 20 of the 80s

#20 Willow (1988) – Don’t know why i just like the film.

#19 Children of the corn (1984) – One of the first films to scare the crap out of me.

#18 This is spinal tap (1984) – Love to turn it up to 11 and find the stage.

#17 Predator (1987)- A little dated now but still a great film and i but you can all (especially the guys) say at least one line from it.

#16 Tron (1982) – What can i say that hasn’t been said already.

#15 Monty Pythons The meaning of life (1983) – One of the more overlooked Monty python films but i love it the most.

#14 Escape from New York (1981) – Snake Plisskin still a great movie name, chuck in Donald Pleasence and you have a great movie.

#13 Dragnet (1987) – (INSERT THEME TUNE)

#12 The Dark Crystal (1982) – Out of all of Jim Hensons work this is still one of my favs.

#11 Videodrome (1983) – Enter Cronenburg weirdness.

Entering the top 10 became a little tricky for positioning but here we go.

#10 Raiders of the lost ark (1981) – Tricky as i like all three and they were all made during the 80s but i had to give in and go with the origonal.

#9 Full Metal Jacket (1987) – Finish the sentence “me love you……”

#8 The Blues Brothers (1980) – As was discussed on a recent outing when asked why we were carrying sunglasses at night? So when the evening has reached an end you can utter the immortal line “It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark… and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

#7 Mad Max 2 (1981) – One of the few films where the sequal was better than the original.

#6 Blade Runner (1982) – The reason that this is not higher is that it is only in later life i have truly grown to appreciate it.

#5 Stir crazy (1980) – Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor at their best.

#4 Flash Gordon (1980) – The soundtrack, The effects, The cast. Whats not to love.

#3 The Thing (1982) – Still one of the best bits of CGI for its time and a great movie for those Friday night movie nights.

#2 Aliens (1986) – A truly outstanding movie. I know that there is always debate between the 1st and 2nd movies and Alien is brilliant but for me Aliens is the better especially for the time. Aliens was only put in the #2 slot because one of my fav films was made in the 80s.

#1 The Lost Boys (1987) – An outstanding film with a great cast of young actors that for me is one that i can watch over and over again. Corey Haim, Kiefer Sutherland and the stunning Jami Gertz are just fantastic. Many may sneer at my choice of #1 but for me at 10 yrs old this was a great film that has stuck with me over the years.

June 30th, 2011 by J

Rules:
1. Put your iPod, iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer, hit skip if you get the same artist.
3. You must write down that song name, no matter how silly it sounds.
4. Have fun!

If someone asks if you’re OK, you say…
“Lean on me i wont fall over” by Carter the unstoppable sex machine

How would you describe yourself?
“The Impossible dream” by Carter the unstoppable sex machine

What do you look for in a girl?
“Satellite” by Lena

How do you feel today?
“Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” by Hayseed Dixies version

What is your life’s purpose?
“Du Hast” by Volkerball

What’s your motto?
“Live and let die” by Guns and roses

What do your friends think of you?
“Suppose you gave a funeral and nobody came” by Carter the unstoppable sex machine
(which is a little worrying)

What do your parents think of you?
“The Game” by the Levellers

What do you think about very often?
“Three little birds” by Bob marley and the wailers

What do you think about your first kiss?
“Peace sells” by Megadeath

What do you think of your best friend?
“Sinnerman” by Nina Simone

What is your life story?
“Not Fair” by Lily Allen

What do you want to be when you grow up?
“Countdown to extinction” by Megadeath

What do you think when you see the person you like?
“Patience” by Guns and roses

What will you dance to at your wedding?
“Easy” by Faith no more

What will they play at your funeral?
“Wild child” by lou reed

What is your hobby/interest?
“What you gonna do” by Plan B

What is your biggest fear?
“Sweet child of mine” by guns and roses

What is your biggest secret?
“Changes” by David bowie

What do you want right now?
“The Perfect Nanny” by the Gorillaz

What do you think of your friends?
“Lemon” by U2

What title will you give this post?
“Mustang Sally” by The Commitments