50+ and proud of it.

Easy one this - " Webber Airborne ". Most interesting part? Michael Schumacher telling Eddie Jordan to sod off during the grid walk. And, did anyone notice Webber taking out the DHL sign? ...well, it makes a change for someone to break something of DHL's instead.

What a bloody palaver! I've finally got back the Power Of Attorney from the Office Of The Public Guardian. This has taken weeks & weeks. A bit of background - POA gives you the legal right to take control of someones finances etc if you believe they are no longer capable of doing it themselves. That said person needed to have signed a POA in the first place (when they weren't barking mad) and when you as an "attorney" decide the time is right, you have to cough up £125 so some court or other in Birmingham to "register" (ie turn on) the POA. I went to Mom's bank today. "Hello, I want to register this POA on my Mom's account, I'm here but the other attorney is in Brazil at the moment." "What's that then?" "Um, it's a Power Of Attorney ?" "Oh, I'll get someone else" Eventually they find Gundip (nice bloke, has a degree from Liverpool Uni it turns out) who starts the ball rolling. " Questio...

At last, something half-interesting. Several "two-worders" sprang to mind this time - "Very Good", "Tyre Choice", and "Very Close". However, I shamelessly settled on "One-Two" (again). Most interesting parts? Hamilton & Alonso making friends in the pit lane... ...and Schumacher not being penalised for his incident whereas the other drivers all got, err, spoken to. So no partisan behaviour there then.

I am bloody mad. Madder than a mad box of frogs on Mad Sunday. Why? I've just had run in with my intransigent boss. I can't even begin to explain, but we've just moved offices (without consultation I might add) and the final email of a long shouting match ended up with "you will sit there in front of the new guy so you can talk to him, you'll be more efficient then". (My boss is located over 200 miles away). You mean, sit under the air-conditioning unit so that cold air goes down my neck? You mean, sit in front of the window so I can't see my screen due to glare? You mean, sit at the desk with a set of drawers that you can only get a pencil and ruler in? You mean leave the nice desk with the large drawers in the corner free as a "hot-desk" so that you can visit every 6 weeks or so? Apparently, yes. The answers were "draw the blinds" and "turn off the air-pack". There are four other people in the office, so, obviously their co...

I was mindlessly staring into the goldfish pond today and noticed the slightly fatter goldfish being harassed and chased by the other two. They did some strange stuff that I'd never seen before - weaving in and out of the plants and even breaking the surface of the pond at some point, and rolling from side to side. It then dawned on me. She was of course spawning and the other two were desperate "to get in first". Wondering why I had my head stuck in a goldfish pond, my wife came out to join me. She took one look at the commotion and shouted "Leave her alone!". TBH, I'm still not sure to whom this was directed, me or the fish. After it had all settled down and the two males swam off for a post-coital cigarette, I took a long hard look at the plants hoping to find the goldfish equivalent of a lump of frog-spawn. What surprised me was that almost every single stem had one or two 0.8mm-sized eggs attached to them and therefore the eggs were spread out of a larg...

Impossible to sum this race up in two words. I found the prophesy from Legard and Palmer rather amusing:- "...he (Hamilton) wants the two Red Bull to start squabbling a bit..." "...they're not going to do that are they really?" So first thought was to say " Lap 40 ", but then a nine laps later we had Button and Hamilton fighting for the lead. And hence " Lap 49 " seemed appropriate. And then we had the "...by the way you haven't got much fuel left" from the pit wall, so " Low fuel " sprang to mind. However, my finally summary has to be " One-Two " :-) Most interesting part? Lewis Hamilton's girl friend flashing to the camera:- I like the way the McLaren mechanic is completely disinterested...

I've just spent a month over the last 4 days attending an IBM (AS400) "CL" programming course in Northampton. For those of you not in the know, "CL" stands for " Control Language " and is the IBM equivalent of DOS batch files with a bit of database file handling thrown in for good measure. It's about 100 years old and is the equivalent of your local hospital getting tips from Florence Nightingale . The tutor was surprisingly enthusiastic about it all. "I'm going to teach you all about DO-WHILE loops and SUBROUTINES", she gushed. Erm, I vaguely remember learning about them in 1975 and emulating them in assembler code in 1977. "What's your job?" she asked. "I'm a business analyst currently doing a web-based program using Visual Studio and ASP.NET, onto a SQL Server database". There was a slight pause and her eyes widened slightly - "Oh, never mind. Anyway." she continued "this is all new to ver...

Day One: Drive to villa in Sicily and find entrance guarded by automatic gates. Hang around a bit wondering how they work and eventually get let in by friends who are already there. Drive 100 yards up the narrow drive to the parking spot at the top by the villa. Gates ^ Day Two: Drive down said long narrow drive and get let out of automatic gates by friend pressing the "open" button by the villa. Get back in later by phoning friend and pathetically pleading for them to open the gates. Day Three: Open gates myself by pressing button by the villa, get in car, drive down long drive to find gates shutting on their own. Can't get out of car because of narrow drive. Reverse back up narrow drive to villa, wife gets out to press button to open the gates, gets back in car and we drive down to find the gates shutting again. Have plan. Reverse back to villa, wife gets out and waits for me to drive down to front of gates. She presses the button and wait for gates to open. They don...

Ha, " missed it ". I was in Sicily with a bunch of very old - as in long time - friends and, nearly-old in age too. More on this...

Well, all I can say is " did gardening ". Possibly there was some excitement when Hamilton blew a tyre, but overall it wasn't worth the time. If it hadn't been raining I probably would have cut the back lawn instead. Most interesting part? Discovering that my peas had started to germinate. ^ A pea

"bigot" - Brown Is Going On Thursday. ;-)

As you all know, there's something a bit odd about the Amy Pond character in the latest series of Doctor Who - like she doesn't know who The Daleks are and the like. We all know that "Torchwood" is an anagram of "Doctor Who" and Russell T. Davies threw in "Bad Wolf" throughout the earlier episodes, so I thought it would be a bit of fun to run "Amy Pond" through my anagram solver... Amy Pond = Mad Pony... Amelia Pond = Dope Animal, Impala Done, Opal Maiden... Oh, there are hundreds more, including "Apian Model", so, when there's an episode about killer bees, remember, you saw it here first!

Where to begin? Let's start with the Astra - 100k miles on the engine and a while ago it started leaking oil. "Hello sir, you're leaking oil, we need to look at it." "Ok" "Well, we've looked at it and we think it's coming from the main oil seal. But don't worry we've checked for ring blow-by and that's fine so we'd like to charge you £700 to fix it." "Ok" "Here's you car back sir, that'll be £700." "Ok, I notice that it still leaking oil from the same place." "Well, we need to look at it." "Ok" "Well we've looked at it and we think it's coming from the sump gasket." "It that the same sump gasket you replaced a while ago?" "Ah, well that was over a year ago and Vauxhall only guarantee a year yada yada yada, and it might be blow by." "Is this the same blow-by that you said was fine last August when all this lot kicked off? L...

Hmm, I think " interestingly wet " sums this one up. Made much better by the fact the Jensen won with Lewis second. Most interesting part? Possibly all the shenanigans in the pits. "You can't overtake in the entrance to the pits!" "Just watch me..." and "You move over!" "No, you move over!" "I really think you should move over." "I'm the pit wall, your call."

Hmpf. It's my birthday today, not a significant one mind but a birthday nonetheless - and still miles away from a bus pass. My wife recently suggested that I take one of my oldest friends to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford as we've been "meaning to go" for about three years. He's a mine of information, particularly about WWII and good company to boot. So, yesterday, we took the roadster up the M11. We got to the entrance and waited in line. "Two please" The lady took a long hard look at me. "Are you concession?" My mate was still laughing at lunchtime.

Well, the only thing I can say about this is " boringly dry ". It had all the makings of a great race after qualifying and promises of "it always rains at 5:00pm" and the like, but it failed to deliver. Most interesting part? Ferrari and McLaren getting Q1 wrong.

My two-word summary for this race is " Much better ". It was going to be " Somewhat better " up to point where Vetell's Red Bull brakes failed. Not that I don't like Vettell, not at all, but it did allow Jenson to win... Most interested part? Hamilton getting done by the Melbourne Police for doing wheelies in the car park. I admit to being on the edge of my seat at one point, but this was only as I was trying to get up to make a cup of tea.

We went to Paris over the weekend and I got conned into visiting the Musée de l’Orangerie to see the "really nice paintings" in there, when all I wanted to do was to sit in a nice warm Parisian bar with a bottle of red. The entrance had an airport-style scanner manned by a rather large guard. Presumably in the past they had problems with people smuggling in "really nice paintings". Predictably it went 'beep'. "Emptee yur pokeets please" "Ok, certainly" 'beep' "'Av you got a belt?" "Yup, I have" 'beep' "Put yur camera ovur there" "Ok" 'beep' "Take off yur jackeet" "Hmpf" 'beep' I was now nearly down to socks, shoes and underwear. The queue behind me started to mutter somewhat. " Mon Dieu, les fou Anglais ". The security man furiously glared at me. " What 'av you got that makes eet go 'beep'? " " I do nit kn...

I thought I'd try and come up with a two-word précis for each Grand Prix of this season - in the same sort of way that the Hitchhikers Guide described the Earth. Sadly, I could only come up with " Disappointing Anti-climax " for the much-anticipated opener. The most entertaining part of the BBC's coverage was watching the tumbleweed and listening to the wind whistling gently while Martin Brundle waited to catch Alonso's eye on the grid. Assuming I haven't died of boredom in two weeks after the Melbourne race, I'll give it another shot.

This took me ages to find a solution to this one. If you get: Load report failed when trying to load a Crystal Report into a viewer using VB.NET something like this: .CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = ReportName .CrystalReportViewer1.ShowFirstPage() ' Blows up here then you should try the following: In Solution Explorer, right-click the project (NOT the solution), Add / Existing Item / "file of type" .RPT / Navigate to, and add the report to the project. Then, in the properties of the (new) report change "Copy to output directory" to "Copy Always". Also, it was suggested that you try using the full pathname in "ReportName". Don't bother thanking me, no one else does... ;-)