50+ and proud of it.

Well it's 2 3rd Dec ember and I'm still holding my breath. However, there was a *slight* disaster Friday - I upgraded my m otherboard and of course that w as the end of that. To cut a very long story short, I had to break the R AID array , format the hard drive and reload the OS (ag ain). Still, on the pos iti ve side, I got rid of a load of cr*p that was on the drive sin ce about 1998. If only I can remember the email passwords...

Heard on Radio Kent this morning: "I had a bottle of Salad Cream that had gone off. I checked the Sell By Date and it was the 21st Dec 2012. It must have been Mayannaise instead" Boom Boom !

I knocked on my son's bedroom door the other day. "Um, I'll only say this once, but your car's MOT runs out in a few weeks, can you book it in please?" Time passes. "Hello Dad, my car passed the MOT. I paid for it myself." I had to confess to partaking i n a glass of wine and a sit down.

Last weekend I got two red cards from the Post office - "We have something for you!" (No shit, Sherlock, isn't that what the Post Office does?). Anyway, ignoring the fact that I *was* in on Saturday and that the Postie probably wrote the card before ringing the door bell in an upmarket version of Knock-Down-Ginger , I ventured to the main Post Office this morning. I parked in one of the "½ hour" parking places and walked the 100 yards to the Post Office. The queue was out of the door. And along the wall. And down the side of the main building. It was 07:59. I was 14th in the queue. I know - I counted. It is, of course, the run up to Christmas and it seems the entire population of the town has ordered presents from eBay or Amazon. We all stood in the queue, staring silently at our feet or the Town Hall opposite, occasionally glancing at each other in the queue and mostly looking at the elderly chap at the front of the queue. There was no sign of the man behind ...

Last August I thought it wise to inform the Pension Service that my mother had moved into residential care and therefore (amongst other things) wasn't eligible for her winter fuel allowance. *ring* *ring* - press a load of "1"'s and "2"'s - and eventually... "Hello, how can I help?" "Yes, my mother's moved into care and I just..." "Sorry, who are you?" "I'm her son and I just wan..." "Sorry, can't speak to you, Data Protection and all that." "I have Power Of Attorney (so bloody well listen mate)" "Sorry" "No, just listen please, she's changed her address and I..." "Ah, please send in the POA. Bye" Right. I sent off POA with a covering letter about her change of circumstance, my winter fuel concern and 'please send all correspondence to me', amazingly enough, get the POA back within 24 hours. My sister rang me up a few days a...

O h, and if anyone is interested in that last post, then you need this.

There are times when the Internet can throw you a curved ball and you forget everything you learned - "...well it must be true, I saw it on the Internet". I've recently (like, in the past four years) taken to programming stuff using a SQL Server database where things is slightly different from the Oracle bits I'd done since 1996. Yesterday, I had a call from a guy in one of the manufacturing plants that still uses a very small portion of "my" old Oracle database. "Um, we need to track product in a specific way so that we can witch-hunt the shift-crew who are damaging the pallets in transit..." "Right" I had a quick trawl through the old, existing code and couldn't find anything that did exactly what he wanted. So, rather than dig out the old Visual Basic (VB) compiler and create something consistent with what he used, I thought I'd knock up a very quick report using SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) -...

There are times when a bit of silliness doesn't go amiss:

My wife loves my mother very much. But, I suspect, is slightly relieved that she's not her mother as mine is 97 and of frail mind and body (see previous post...). I always get the impression that there's a certain smugness there - until now. Her Mom is 20 years younger and is still active and of sound mind and, well, n early body. We invited Mom-and-Dad in-law over the other Sunday for Sunday Roast. So we did the usual going-to-town on the joint of meat, vegetables, roast spuds and the like. We had just got the joint cooked to perfection when the phone rang. "Hello, sorry, I'm not very well and I can't travel, sorry. You haven't gone to much trouble have you?" "Oh no. Not at all(!) ", my wife made that wonderful face like she was sucking lemons. "I, am, not, wasting this piece of meat!" "Got a plan then?" "Actually, yes, the meat's done. The spuds are half done and we haven't started the veg yet. Why d...

My Mum is 97 and is now in a very nice residential care home. A while back however, when she lived at home, she was admitted to hospital where she was attended to by a young doctor. He gave her all the usual tests and concluded that, whilst her physical health wasn't brilliant, her mental health was very good. "She remarkable for her age, she still does her own shopping and everything!" "No," I replied, "she *thinks* she goes down the shops, but that was in 1997, she hasn't left the house on her own for at least five years." "Nope, she's really just fine." "OK, ask her what day it is" " August " "Ah, I see what you mean." The other week was her 97 th birthday and it just happened to coincide with a trip to Dudley Zoo . We went to see her the day after the trip to find it had been cancelled "due to lack of interest". Not to be deterred, the home organised for an "Animal Man"...

The correct way:- Turn phone off. Remove little screws. Use sucker to remove screen. Remove LCD. Replace Home Button + circuit. Put back together. My way:- Break car windscreen with log. Get quote from High Street shop because I've been moaned at by wife for being careless with car and "with your luck you'll break the phone". Quote: £20. Buy bits from eBay - £3. Turn phone off. Remove screen. Prise out LCD with tools provided and crack LCD making it almost impossible to use. Buy new screen & LCD off eBay - £22. Replace the lot, turn on - screen doesn't work. Take out new screen. Alarm goes off on phone about a meeting and can't turn off alarm because there's no screen in it. Press little button on side to snooze alarm. Replace old screen in case new one is duff - old screen doesn't work now either. Alarm goes off again. Try new screen again - doesn't work. Alarm goes off again. Phone working but with no screen. Have sev...

I'm quite a fan of Internet banking until now. I have recently opened an account with "another bank" for my mothers affairs. I needed to setup a "payee" (a special banking word for "a person") ready for things called "transactions" (another special word for "moving cash"). All I wanted to do was to pay £90 to someone. Or, "transact £90 to the payee" in the modern idiom. Username - easy Password - um, bugger forgot. Find piece of paper, no, not that one. Blast, where did I put it? Oh, I know, I put it in a file. Find file, open file, read password. Enter password - " Your session has expired, please login again ". "What! I haven't bloody well logged in yet! Wha'you mean? Click " Online banking login " again. Username - yup Password - MyDogHasaLongNeck (Well, it is online banking isn't it?) " We're sorry, your details don't match " Username - yup (again) ...

The correct way to have a bike ride to the pub:- Get on bikes; cycle to a pub; get off bikes; have a drink; get on bikes; cycle back. The incorrect way to have a bike ride to the pub:- Get on bikes; cycle to nearest pub; get off bikes and padlock to lamppost; have a drink; try to unlock padlock... "Hurry up dear, let's get back before it gets dark." "I can't, the padlock's jammed." "Bugger." I asked the pub bar-girl on the off-chance that the pub might happen to have an angle-grinder laying about. No, thought not. We went outside to ponder the situation. I thought about getting a taxi back home and getting the Astra plus my angle-grinder when two "proper" cyclists arrived. "Hello, having troubles?" "Yes", replied the wife, "have you got an angle-grinder in your pocket ( or are you just pleased to see me? Gosh, they're fit )?" "Let's have a look..." They proceeded to...

Here is a snip from an "instant messaging" conversation I had today with a colleague: (1:09 PM) PN: we having some work done but on the under lying servers but I think they're custered (?) so we will not see any difference (could be typing utter cr£p  here) (1:13 PM) PTV: custard = a yellow thixotropic powder, clustered = a method of joining servers. (1:13 PM) PN: dohh  Boom, Boom. Tomorrow, how not to have a bike ride. 

What did you do last Saturday? Oh, not much just built a shed. Oh, and drove a Lamborghini Gallardo. (Oookaay... this video seems only to work if you use iExplore ;-( ) "And the pilot simply said "yup" and walked away" ...what else could a Man want?

Bear in mind that I'm a developer with a VB.NET development environment (Visual Studio) loaded onto my PC. I had previously created an "Invoice Import" program using .NET, and because I was having problems with "Click-Once" deployment, I decided (in frustration) to simply put the .EXE file on the server and get my customer to execute it from there. She got the dreaded CLR20r3 error:     I didn't get this error at first - the program ran just fine - which was confusing to say the least. I guessed that it was because I had VS installed. Wrong. I re-booted my PC and lo-and-behold, I got the error too. I Googled for this error for ages and there was no definitive answer. A lot of entries pointed to "missing file or DLL". But which one? The answer was remarkably simple in my case. I simply chose "Debug the program" and selected "my" VS version (2005): The next box to appear is the "real" error: ...