This is an achievement?

You mean to say you managed to achieve that vibrant, sh*t brown colour without any additives? Oh Kellogs, you have surpassed yourselves!

Hmm, Google, you know me so well... :)

It's strange what makes me happy.

I use Chrome as a browser. I'll not get into why.

On the Options dialogue, there's a tab in my version called 'Under the Bonnet', containing all sorts of fun settings. For readers unfamiliar with English as it's spoken in England, the 'bonnet' is the part of the car the Americans call the 'hood'. One the American version of the software, it does indeed have a tab named 'Under the Hood'.

It pleases me to a disproportionate level that Google thought of changing that based upon the fact that I'm in England. Thanks, Google.

'Fine, thanks...'

There was a time when I was growing increasingly annoyed by the pointless, wasteful conversation which is performed countless times around the world every single day (but is particularly prevalent on this patch of island). It goes something like this:

Person 1: "Good morning. How are you?"

Person 2: "Fine, thanks; and you?"

Person 1: "Yes, good, thanks."

How annoyingly bland. There's even an etiquette which states that even if you're far from alright, the answer should be just on the positive side of entirely average.

However, I have had a revelation. This dull, run-of-the-mill conversation is a fantastic opportunity for a bit of positive mental adjustment. I've started to find something, anything in the preceding few hours or days which is uplifting, and then focus on that.

It's great! Yes, I'm tired because my daughter isn't sleeping well at the moment. Yes, I'm still separated from my dream job by the yawning chasm of reality. But I had a lovely weekend, the weather's great, my garden is coming along nicely, I've got a summer holiday planned... There's so much to be happy about, and having that dire little conversation around the coffee machine is the perfect opportunity to realise it.

Next time, it should go like this:

Person 1: "Mornin'. How's it going?"

You: "Absolutely fantastic, thank you. Top o' the world. I personally saved the lives of a family of endangered pandas over the weekend, then stumbled across a cure for the common cold in the shower this morning. You?"

Person 1: "Yeah, fine, thanks..."

The Trouble with Opinions

I've come to the conclusion that there are two fundamental pre-requisites for the provision and acceptance of opinions. Opinion-giving/receiving will fail if the following two conditions are not met:

1) You, the asker/receiver of opinions must be willing to accept that you are wrong/the other person is right.
2) The other person, the askee/giver of opinions, must be prepared the accept that they are wrong/you are right.

Most opinion sharing failures appear to be solely due to breeches of these core conditions. There are, or course, auxiliary 'rules' which are always worth considering:

a) Do not seek opinions on websites. The human/computer interface is well known as a magnifier of gross idiocy.
b) Do not seek the opinion of anyone who is a direct rival for love/job/jellyfish. 
c) Do not seek the opinion of anyone who has recently demonstrated a tendency to violate conditions 1 & 2 above. 
d) Do seek the opinions of inanimate objects/pets/furniture/the sky. 
e) Do not seek the opinion of your parents beyond the point at which your age is greater than or equal to two-thirds of the average of theirs. They'll be losing it by this point, and will inevitably lead you down the garden path.
f) Do seek the opinion of the garden path (see point d). 

5 = Monster

I was thinking: it's remarkably easy to make the number 5 into a monster.

The 300(th)

Although only 267 posts remain (including this one), this is, according to Blogger, the 300th post on my blog*. In all that time (over 6 years now), I've been angry, confused, melancholy, and bored, in roughly equal measure. I've tried to be funny, and also made a bit of a stab at clever, but nothing seems to work quite so well as writing nothing at all. So, here's to another 300 posts - may they all be as blank as my mind!


* There have, therefore, been 33 casualties - a fairly high rate of attrition! 

Election Fever Entirely Fails to Grip UK...

There will be a general election in the UK on 6th May.

The BBC News website devoted a full-width banner headline/picture combo to the story.

The last time I checked, the story was only 6th Most Read, and 5th Most Shared.

Epic Giving-a-damn-about-politics Fail. 

About Face(book)

I'm not sure I fit in at Facebook. Although I understand that social network sites are what you make them, and I'm prepared to use them as tools with which to maintain certain channels of communication, I find myself unable to use Facebook in particular in the manner with which others seem so comfortable.

Before I begin attacking them, its worth noting that my 'friends' on Facebook are all people I'm interested in knowing. There has been no sympathy "friending" (oh, how annoying it is that the spellchecker didn't pick up 'friending', but was reticent about 'spellchecker'), and no-one has yet earned sufficient wrath that I have wished to "de-friend" them.

However, and let's be blunt about this, I really don't give a flying fuck about the fact that a friend of mine is about to head to the pub for the afternoon, or about any other similarly inane snapshots of their life. Why do people think I'd be interested in knowing this? When did it become acceptable to be so fucking bland?

I know, there are stale old arguments which run along the lines of "well, don't read it then". Rubbish; I need to read it in case something genuinely interesting happens, like the wife of a friend, who is very pregnant, gives birth, and an announcement is made through this happily convenient, widely available channel. I don't have a choice, because in among the news that someone is clipping their fucking toenails are nuggets of pure news gold.

So, what is the solution? I'll tell you what: boring flags. Every time someone writes something so mind-numbingly dull that it brings you to tears, simply ping the boring flag. Three boring flags in a 24h period and the user is banned from posting for a day.

Problem solved. Now, I'm off to close the bathroom window...