Did I Say That Out Loud?

Gotta say goodbye...

2012-02-18T08:13:00.000Z

I returned to Blogger last year after Google announced an update to its interface and user experience. Sadly, despite being a complete Googlephile, Blogger is the one product of theirs that I've always been disappointed by - and even though the updates were a major step forward, they're still not a patch on WordPress.

Therefore, although my choice of mobile phone is Google (the new Samsung Nexus running Ice Cream Sandwich (geek moment, I know)), my e-mail provider is GMail, my spreadsheets and documents are all created in Google Docs and my web browser of choice is Google Chrome, my personal blogging platform of choice will return to being WordPress, which just gives a better all round user experience.

Sorry Google. Well done WordPress. My personal musings will be back here - http://markjdaniels.wordpress.com - starting with a new blog on the look of Formula 1 cars for 2012...

Ford Focus dashboard problem

2011-11-20T19:53:00.001Z

My Focus appears to have developed a little electrical problem... When I switch the ignition off and remove the key, the temperature and fuel gauges jump up to point straight at the halfway mark. See pic.

If I put the key back in, they drop to zero and then function normally when the engine's running.

Anybody else had a similar issue our know what the problem is?

Pot Noodle grammar

2011-11-20T14:56:00.001Z

You can always tell you're in for a quality snack when the manufacturer forgets to pot an apostrophe in the word Tony's...

Sir Jimmy Savile - What Did You Ask Him For?

2011-10-29T23:59:00.000+01:00

I'm fairly sure that everybody of my generation, or thereabouts (I'm a Seventies child) wrote to Jimmy Savile and asked him to make a wish come true.

Sadly, today, Sir Jimmy passed away just two days before his 85th birthday. As a child, I wrote to him and asked him to arrange for me to fly to Gallifrey in the TARDIS. In honour of some great childhood TV memories, I thought it'd be nice to find out what you, dear Reader, wrote to Jimmy and asked for...

Clean answers only, in the comments section!

Bumming sandwiches, Stirling Moss, and sex education from Holly Willoughby!

2011-10-18T16:45:00.000+01:00

Ordinarily, I avoid daytime TV like the plague. While mywife might like to eat her porridge to the vision of blood-spattered hillwalkers on Helicopter Heroes or criticise the décor choices made by those onHomes Under The Hammer, I prefer to disappear in to the office with a cuppa andmy laptop, updating spreadsheets, following up blog ideas and generallycatching up with what’s happening in the world of Facebook.

Occasionally, I’ll venture back to the living room to see ifthere’s any chance I can get hold of the Sky remote for a bit before startingthe daily grind, but it’s a rare occurrence. Ali grips that thing so tightsometimes I wonder if she believes it’s stopping her from falling over. (Theonly other member of my family so possessive of the TV remote is myeight-year-old, who’ll do all he can to prevent me from turning off ScoobyDoo.)

But on Monday I found myself sat in the lounge, laptop onlap and ITV’s This Morning programme chirping away across the room from me. I wasn’t really paying much attention to it,until I heard Holly Willoughby’s delicious little giggle and looked up to find somebodywaving what looked like a lipstick holder around on the screen. “This one fitsdiscreetly in to your handbag,” the woman on the screen was telling Holly,before moving on to demonstrate a whole host of other marital aids.

Oh how TV has changed,I wrote on Twitter, as the topic moved on to comfortable sex positions for theover sixties. Phil Schofield and HollyWilloughby on ITV This Morning discussing vibrators and sex positions for theover-sixties!

Now, let’s get one thing straight: I’m no prude. I am one ofthe most open-minded, liberal individuals you are ever likely to encounter andI found the fact that a Sir Stirling Moss looky-likey, in blue silk pyjamas ona studio double-bed being straddled by an excited looking granny, highlyentertaining. In fact, I was close to tears with laughter.

My tweet referred to the fact that not that long ago suchshenanigans would have been frowned on if they’d been shown after the 9pmwatershed, let alone at 11am on a Monday morning.

I’m quite aware that the things I say on Twittermight occasionally get picked up and used in the media, but the Daily Mail –that harbinger of doom for the pub trade – wrote a shock-and-awe piece on yesterday’s This Morning and detailed how horrified members of the public were expressing their disgust via Twitter.

My tweet was there in glorious detail, citing me – along withtwo others – as complaining about the material.

I’m quite happy for the Daily Mail to have used the message,but I’d just like to clarify something: it should have been listed on the linebeneath, where one tweeter was said to have found the piece amusing andcommented on having had worse days than receiving sex education from HollyWilloughby.

Well, quite!

While there may be an argument that younger viewers couldhave seen stuff they shouldn’t have, I’m fairly sure any teenager skiving offschool would have been intrigued by Phil Schofield’s suggestion that youngsters“should look away now”. And I wonder how many of our nation’s septuagenarianladies, faced with the prospect of straddling their partner in the apparentlycomfortable “face-to-face” position, got on the phone to their GP and asked, “willmy new hip be able to cope with that?”

The show moved swiftly on from sex education to food, wherecheeky Phil couldn’t resist telling Holly to lick her fingers, before moving onto a piece where we were told to “bum our sandwiches”.

At that point, I was unable to control my laughter anyfurther. Well done Phil and Holly for finally making daytime TV interesting.

--

Update: since writing this earlier today it's also come to light that the tweets were mentioned in today's The Sun, too... http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3879557/Telly-viewers-shock-at-This-Mornings-OAP-sex-romp.html

Kulula Airlines

2011-10-08T01:36:00.001+01:00

I received the following pictures in an e-mail from a friend, and they certainly made me titter! Suspicious that Photoshop had been used I checked with Hoax Slayer but, according to both their page and the airlines' Wikipedia page, the photos appear to be genuine.

Even if they are fake, they're still funny. As are the apparent comments made by airline crew beneath them. I truly hope the airline's real - I fancy flying on them one day!

Apparent comments made by Kulula crew members. (They were, at least, part of the e-mail I received!)

On a Kulula flight (there is no assigned seating, you just sit where you want), passengers were apparently having a hard time choosing, when a flight attendant announced,
"People, people, we're not picking out furniture here, find a seat and get in it!"
---o0o---
  On another flight with a very "senior" flight attendant crew, the pilot said,
"Ladies and gentlemen, we've reached cruising altitude and will be turning down the cabin lights. This is for your comfort and to enhance the appearance of your flight attendants."
----o0o---

  On landing, the stewardess said,
"Please be sure to take all of your belongings.. If you're going to leave anything, please make sure it's something we'd like to have."
----o0o---

  "There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane."
---o0o---

  "Thank you for flying Kulula. We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride."
---o0o---

  As the plane landed and was coming to a stop at Durban Airport, a lone voice came over the loudspeaker:
"Whoa, big fella. WHOA!"
---o0o--

  After a particularly rough landing during thunderstorms in the Karoo, a flight attendant on a flight announced,
"Please take care when opening the overhead compartments because, after a landing like that, sure as hell everything has shifted."
---o0o---

  From a Kulula employee:
"Welcome aboard Kulula 271 to Port Elizabeth. To operate your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seat belt; and, if you don't know how to operate one, you probably shouldn't be out in public unsupervised."
---o0o---

  "In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child travelling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are travelling with more than one small child, pick your favourite."
---o0o---

  "Weather at our destination is 50 degrees with some broken clouds, but we'll try to have them fixed before we arrive. Thank you, and remember, nobody loves you, or your money, more than Kulula Airlines."
----o0o---

  "Your seats cushions can be used for flotation; and in the event of an emergency water landing, please paddle to shore and take them with our compliments."
---o0o---

  "As you exit the plane, make sure to gather all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants. Please do not leave children or spouses.."
---o0o---

  And from the pilot during his welcome message:
"Kulula Airlines is pleased to announce that we have some of the best flight attendants in the industry. Unfortunately, none of them are on this flight!"
---o0o—

  Heard on Kulula 255 just after a very hard landing in Cape Town: The flight attendant came on the intercom and said,
"That was quite a bump and I know what y'all are thinking. I'm here to tell you it wasn't the airline's fault, it wasn't the pilot's fault, it wasn't the flight attendant's fault, it was the asphalt."
---o0o—

  Overheard on a Kulula flight into Cape Town, on a particularly windy and bumpy day: During the final approach, the Captain really had to fight it. After an extremely hard landing, the Flight Attendant said,
"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to The Mother City. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened while the Captain taxis what's left of our airplane to the gate!"
---o0o—

  Another flight attendant's comment on a less than perfect landing: "We ask you to please remain seated as Captain Kangaroo bounces us to the terminal."
---o0o—

  An airline pilot wrote that on this particular flight he had hammered his ship into the runway really hard. The airline had a policy which required the first officer to stand at the door while the passengers exited, smile, and give them a "Thanks for flying our airline". He said that, in light of his bad landing, he had a hard time looking the passengers in the eye, thinking that someone would have a smart comment. Finally everyone had gotten off except for a little old lady walking with a cane. She said,
"Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?"
  "Why, no Ma'am," said the pilot. "What is it?"
  The little old lady said,
"Did we land, or were we shot down?"
---o0o—

  After a real crusher of a landing in Johannesburg, the attendant came on with,
"Ladies and Gentlemen, please remain in your seats until Captain Crash and the Crew have brought the aircraft to a screeching halt against the gate. And, once the tire smoke has cleared and the warning bells are silenced, we will open the door and you can pick your way through the wreckage to the terminal.."
---o0o—

  Part of a flight attendant's arrival announcement:
"We'd like to thank you folks for flying with us today.. And, the next time you get the insane urge to go blasting through the skies in a pressurized metal tube, we hope you'll think of Kulula Airways."
---o0o—

  Heard on a Kulula flight:
"Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to smoke, the smoking section on this airplane is on the wing.. If you can light 'em, you can smoke 'em."

Blogging. I'm never going to get round to it!

2011-10-07T09:49:00.001+01:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote that Google's attempts to update Blogger were little more than mutton dressed as lamb, and then I promptly forgot to write to my personal blog properly for ages once again.

Logging in this morning, however, I notice that there are yet more features becoming available, including the launch of some new templates for the Blogger aficionado. You can read more about these by reading The Blogger Buzz; useful if you use Blogger yourself and are wanting to get your site a bit more up-to-date.

The new layout is a bit more dynamic, but you get to choose the look you want: I've set mine to launch in the Timeslide format as default, but if you don't like that you can click any of the other ways to view the site by choosing from the options under the title...

Simply choose another view if you don't like this one...

So, with all the changes, will I use the site more often? I'm hoping so, but my commitments are already stretched. I have a regular blog on The Publican's Morning Advertiser website and on the Inapub News website, and write a regular feature for the Inapub magazine. (I promised a blog to Matt Eley of Inapub earlier this week and still haven't got round to getting it finished!)

On top of that, I'm booked to provide training to several small businesses on how best to use Social Media to enhance their relationship with their customers. And my children want a piece of my time. And I have a pub to run. And the bank manager wants me to start putting some money his way. And, apparently, I'm married...

I doubt, then, that I'll get to splurge my inane personal thoughts to this site too often, but I'll try. In an effort to make it more logical, I've changed the title from its original one of "That Was The Tweet, That Was...", in which I was trying to make sense of my Twitter and Facebook Status feeds on a week-by-week basis (and failing) and have given it a new title: "Did I Say That Out Loud?" The aim is, anything that isn't pub related and that won't fit in to the 140 character restrictions of Twitter, will simply appear here in elongated form.

In the meantime, let me know what you think of the new look - and which layout you prefer...

Steve Jobs : 1955-2011

2011-10-06T01:10:00.001+01:00

I'm not a huge fan of the Apple product line up, don't own an iMac and yesterday derided the launch of the iPhone 4S, laughing in the face of its much-touted 8mp camera and speech-to-text recognition software, something my Android phone has had since I bought it 18 months ago.

But there is no denying that Steve Jobs has been instrumental in the development and growth of the smartphone market. Without his marketing genius and the birth of the iPhone, alternative smartphone platforms like Android and Windows Phone 7 might never have come to the fore.

Tonight is a sad night, flicking round the web and reading news page after news page paying tribute to the man who died today after a long battle with cancer. Apple's own website probably pays the best tribute of them all.

RIP Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

To Poke or Not To Poke

2011-09-30T20:54:00.001+01:00

With all the recent changes in Facebook and the fact that, from today, administrators of 'fan/place' pages can no longer send bulk messages out to their followers (frustrating, as there's a limit to how many people you can add to each message when you're trying to let them know about something), and not to mention the much heralded imminent arrival of The Timeline, how many people have noticed that the 'poke' button has disappeared?

Probably not many. Mashable.com rightly pointed out in their piece "It's Time To Kill the Poke" today that despite all the blathering and moaning and cries of 'we don't like change!' almost nobody noticed that the Poke button has done a disappearing trick and almost vanished from profile pages.

It's actually still there, if you know where to look for it: click on the 'settings' button to the right of the 'message' button in your friend's Facebook profile page and a drop-down menu will reveal the Poke button, still there in all its glory.

So you can still do it, although you might miss it if somebody pokes you back - it turns up just under the new 'news ticker' that has divided so much opinion this week.

The question that people are asking, then, is is it really necessary? Again, opinion appears to be divided. Many say they don't understand it, others think it's pointless; only a few feel it should remain.

Don't Take My Poke Away

But I think it would be sad if the Poke button were to be consigned to the virtual scrapheap. Over the years, Facebook has undergone several design changes, nearly always to the howls of distress from its hundreds of millions of users who don't like change.

The backlash that Facebook receives each time it moves a page around is the soul reason why Google+ will struggle to ever actually gain traction and steal users from the mighty FB. The vast majority of its users simply don't understand and therefore will not migrate; they don't like change, leaving nary a few of us geeky types to play around and extol its virtues.

Google+ is, after all, visually and technically better than Facebook, but users don't like change, so they'll stick with what they know despite their protests; this, despite the fact that most of Facebook's recent changes appear to be knee-jerk reactions to the brilliant Plus's advantages: Lists, for example, are a crude copy of Circles, and the way Facebook now presents new photo albums is virtually identical to the manner in which Google+ presents its users' images.

In return, however, Google+ have their +1 button, their social media equivalent of Facebook's 'like' button. And in the same way that 'liking' or 'plus-1ing' somebody's posts, images or links is a way of saying "I've seen what you've written/posted/produced and wanted to let you know I think it's great but don't want to leave a sychophantic comment to such effect", the Poke button is a way of saying to somebody "hey, I haven't forgotten you and check in on your profile from time-to-time..." (Although, yes, there is a juvenile pleasure in 'poking' a member of the opposite sex...)

But, in version changes of the past, other features were lost and few lament their passing. Not me, though. I can't through a sheep at any of my friends any more, and I miss that. Please don't take my poke away.

Updates sporadic; more soon

2011-09-30T00:20:00.001+01:00

I seem to have been lax about keeping this blog up to date regularly; sorry about that! I promise there's more coming, when I've managed to get my head around all the other stuff I have to do.

International Make Facebook Read Like A Pirate Day

2011-09-19T20:55:00.000+01:00

Avast Mateys: did ye know it's International Talk Like A Pirate Day?

Well if you did (or even if you didn't) did you also know you can make your Facebook page look like it's written in Piratey script?

All you've got to do is click on Account in the top right hand corner, and then select Account Settings and change the language to English (Pirate).

Behold! The page will take on a pirate language all of its own, and it'll look something like this:

click to open image in full size

It's quite novel and can be funny, but beware, me hearties. If ye decide to change it back it can be a bit of a bugger working out where the settings are again.

A bit like when your mates used to change the language setting on your Nokia 6210 to Finnish for a laugh in the pub...

What do you play on radio after a disaster?

2011-09-12T09:12:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was the anniversary of 9/11, ten years since the worst terrorist atrocity occurred on American soil, and if you search the web there are plenty of personal blogs from people recalling their memory of that day. My own is here. They all make for fascinating reading, even if trawling through the web seeking them out does make me feel a little mawkish.

But I tripped across this one this morning and it caught my attention in a different way. One simple question: what music do you play on the nation's largest radio station in the wake of such a disaster?

Chris Price was in charge of deciding what music should be played on the UK's Radio 1 at that time, and this blog recounts his memory of how difficult it is to pick music to play. Interesting reading, in a different way.

http://missingparsons.com/2011/09/soundtracking-911/

Where were you on 9/11?

2011-09-09T10:00:00.000+01:00

Every generation has a date it can remember. One of those “where were you” moments.

For people of my generation, the big date our parents might remember is the assassination of John F Kennedy, or maybe the moon landing. One of my customers remembers vividly where they were when the news broke of Elvis’s passing.

Those of us who were only five when The King died could probably cite the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed as our defining moment. On that Sunday morning, I’d got one friend with a severe hangover on my living room floor when I turned on the telly. My girlfriend wanted to go and see the funeral procession when it passed up the M1 a week later but, embarrassingly, I ran out of petrol on the way and we missed it.

But this week our newspapers and television screens have been filled with far more terrifying images: the reminders of what happened on September 11th, 2001. Slowly, pictures of the tower jumpers have crept back in to the public conscience this week after ten years of being forgotten about.

9/11 is probably one of those dates I’ll never forget. I was sat in my office in Newmarket, putting together a proposal for a website analysis deal, and my colleagues had gone out for a cigarette. Long before they were ostracised from the pub, smokers were removed from our offices and one chap had left his laptop running; the noise from it was annoying me.

Stepping over to his machine, I could see a video of a plane flying in to a tower, people screaming and running all over the place. ‘Cool,’ I remember thinking. ‘The effects in that movie look awesome.’

I made a mental note to berate my colleague for checking up on the latest Bruce Willis blockbuster, and then watched as the CNN website crashed. Ten years ago, the Internet couldn’t handle such a spike in traffic and those of us in the Internet industry set about working on ways to improve server capacity for future global atrocities.

Later that day I was supposed to be go-karting with friends, followed by a curry, but sadly they couldn’t make it. While Newmarket appeared sleepy in comparison following the terrorist attacks, Canary Wharf - where my friends worked - was in lock-down as paranoia that other planes could target our own skyscrapers mounted.

This Sunday, then, as we reflect on the opening of the Rugby World Cup, watch the Grand Prix, meet our families for Sunday lunch or, simply, pop down to the pub for a pre-lunch pint, let’s all raise our glasses to those who were lost on that day, to those who lost loved ones, and to those who worked so hard to save who they could.

Can you remember where you were that day?

Snog, Marry, Avoid... or just run away?

2011-09-06T15:24:00.001+01:00

I'm not one for watching voyeuristic TV. I hate Big Brother, and can't abide any of its celebrity spin offs, and late at night when I finish a shift on the bar I'm grateful for the contents of my Sky+ Planner, which means I don't have to see the excess of dishwater TV that litters the back-end satellite channels post-midnight.

Most of these are full of poker shows or shopping channels by the time I sit down to watch them, although one or two might be showing Cupcake Wars or reruns of Pimp My Ride and Road Wars, but occasionally you'll trip across a true gem, like Snog, Marry, Avoid...

The advice here is, usually, to avoid this programme. But a friend left the link below on my Facebook page and now I'm a little bit titillated. I'm not into tattoos and body piercings, and I'm not sure I'd want to marry this girl, but her tongue is certainly intriguing, if not a little frightening...

The world would be a boring place if we were all the same, wouldn't it?

New school day...

2011-09-06T08:25:00.001+01:00

Mixed emotions on new school day: nervous excitement from Malachy, quiet euphoria from me... tears from Ali!

Move BBC Click to BBC Two...

2011-09-04T15:17:00.000+01:00

Dear BBC,

I'm a bit of a fan of the show BBC Click. You know, that one that's tucked away at random time slots on the BBC News channel. It's a bit of a modern day version of Tomorrow's World, with Kate Russell a twenty first century Maggie Philbin.

Well, sort of.

Anyway, this is a great show that I love to enjoy with a cup of coffee, but it has a serious problem. Every time - and I mean every time - a dictator has a go at his people or a hurricane threatens the Eastern seaboard, Click gets dropped.

Now, I understand that such global events are very important and people watch a news channels like yours for the specific purposes of finding out what Kim Jong-il is up to and, therefore, if something important happens the lesser programmes have to be rescheduled, but this happens quite often with Click.

I don't get to watch the programme when it's broadcast because of the nature of my day job, so I have to tape it on Sky+. Most times, this isn't a problem: finish work, make coffee, select Click from my planner list, sit back.

But last week Colonel Gadaffi got beaten and ten minutes in to my recorded broadcast of Click, the news anchor interrupted the show. That's annoying when it happens on a recorded programme. More annoyingly, during the earthquake in Japan earlier this year, even the iPlayer versions of Click were truncated.

I think, however, I've got a solution for you. Being as money's a bit tight, you've had to relinquish the main broadcasting rights of Formula 1 - something else I'm quite passionate about - to Sky Sports. I'm not happy about that, but I understand it, even if I think BBC Parliament would have been a better channel to drop. However, you now have more air time available, and some freedom in your budget, so here's the solution to your scheduling problems with BBC Click:

Move the show to BBC2.

It can have a regular time slot and the news channel will be able to be dedicated to news without the fear of having to interrupt recorded programmes and reduced iPlayer broadcasts.

As that annoying meerkat on the other side is fond of saying: simples.

Google's Blogger gets a new look

2011-09-03T16:04:00.000+01:00

I didn't write to my personal blog much during August - partly because I was ill (turns out I'm allergic to beer... who'da thunk it?) and partly because, with it having been the school summer holidays, every spare minute not spent working on the bar, writing blogs for the Publican's Morning Advertiser, or trying to make sure I keep to my feature deadline with the Inapub magazine, has been spent trying to make sure the children don't get bored - because woe betide me if they do!

So, today being a Saturday and with my wife and eldest away at the Norfolk Spectacular music festival and the youngest palmed off on a friend for the afternoon, I've been trying to catch up on jobs that I haven't got much near during the last six weeks.

The list looks something like this. Read on, it's clearly quite exciting:

vacuum living room and generally tidy flat
install new Vodafone Sure Signal
catch up on backlog of TV programmes on Sky+ box
Write a personal blog...

And the last one caught my attention because, when I logged in to Blogger, I discovered that Google have, finally, given it a makeover. It's followed the modern, clean theme that they are steadily applying to all their products in the wake of launching Google+, and I have to say it has been a long time coming.

The look is great - it's so much more 2012 than the 1998 look of the old Blogspot interface, but it appears to be little more than mutton dressed as lamb. It all looks nice, but the feature set is just as weak as it was before.

I moved back to Blogger from my old WordPress blog in an effort to consolidate all my different web presences under one umbrella; namely, Google. And, with Google having promised a major relaunch of their blogging service, it seemed the right thing to do.

But the problem is quite simple: it's the fundamental, basic features that Google should easily be able to make full use of that are either missing or implemented in a half-hearted fashion.

The statistics, for example, are still incredibly basic compared to those offered by WordPress, and that's definitely disappointing given that Google Analytics is a huge powerhouse of a web analysis tool. And "blogging for dummies" features such as putting links in to my post are not as easy to do as they should be. For example, I like my links to open in a new tab or browser so that my blog remains easy to return to. In WordPress, when I insert a link there's a little tick box that asks if I want to have the link open in a new browser; in Blogger, I still have to open up the HTML code and go and edit the link manually or have alternative text pop up when the mouse hovers over the link...

Luckily, I know how to do basic HTML editing such as this, but it's a faff and I shouldn't have to do it; if I didn't know how to do it it would be even more frustrating!

The tagging or labelling system is cumbersome in Blogger compared to WordPress and it would be really handy if the compose interface showed you your word count - again, ala WordPress. It's easy to whittle off a blog that's so long and laborious that people don't want to read it without you having any idea you've got carried away. A bit like this one's becoming...

Such instant statistical and composition information would fit neatly in to the new side bar to the right of the compose screen, where I can currently perform such banal tasks as telling the blog where I'm writing from or scheduling it for a specific publication date or time.

I could pick holes all day long, but I don't want to. I like Google, I want their blogging service to be the best, but the fact is that - at the moment - it still isn't and I'm wondering if I did the right thing jumping ship from WordPress.

I'm hoping I did, and that Google have a lot more improvements up their sleeve that they'll be launching before the end of the next decade; because that's how long it feels since they last paid this little part of their family any TLC...

In the meantime, if you want to see what else I got up to this summer, my pub had a big summer bank holiday. I made a video if it here...

Morning Advertiser: Customers Can't Speak With Their Mouths Full

2011-08-24T12:53:00.001+01:00

My latest column on The Morning Advertiser is now available at HTTP://ow.ly/6bkNB

On This Day In Facebook History...

2011-08-20T13:53:00.000+01:00

Today's quick blog isn't about things I wrote on Facebook this week, but about what was written on Facebook this time last year...

Can you remember what you wrote on Facebook this time last year? Or in 2009?

No, neither can I, but now Facebook have decided to remind us by handily popping up a little On This Day In... feature when you click to view comments within your profile or look at friends' photographs.

I'd forgotten that on the 20th August 2009, for example, I received a cheque for £25 after winning on the Premium Bonds:

I don't actually remember it at all, and that twenty five quid probably disappeared on something useless, like the Renault Vel Satis I owned at the time.

And the other day I discovered that on the 18th August 2010 I had to put a pound under one of my children's pillows and mused on the fact that inflation has never reached the Tooth Fairy:

It might seem a bit pointless, but it's actually quite fun to have a flick back over what you did this time last year and the year before. I bet, before long, you'll be checking back on your statuses ... and, from what I can remember reading on the Internet's Goliath of a social networking site, one or two of you might be hanging your heads in embarrassment...

;-)

Inapub blog video

2011-08-10T18:32:00.000+01:00

As I'm not feeling very well today, I've found myself stuck in bed flicking in and out of consciousness. During bouts of lucidity, I've lay here bored so I've pretty much read all of the Internet today - and played with YouTube, a site I enjoy but rarely get the time to explore.

But now I've discovered a feature on there from XtraNormal, that lets you create animated videos... to see how it works, I took the text from my Inapub blog on Monday and turned it in to an animated blog. See how it came out here...

I'm tempted to start trying some of these out with my personal blogs. Just, you know, for fun... what do you think?

People of Milton Keynes: Learn to use your roundabouts

2011-08-07T13:29:00.000+01:00

The past week has been long and hectic, but I got it off to a grumpy start when taking the children to my Mum's for a few days. The journey requires travelling through Milton Keynes, which always annoys me because despite it being known as the city of concrete cows and copious roundabouts, nobody who lives there seems to actually know how to use a roundabout. Take, for example, this picture of a roundabout at Kingston:

Kingston roundabout, Milton Keynes
Click for full size image

No matter how many times I approach this roundabout, I always get shoved in to the wrong lane by somebody who hasn't taken a blind bit of notice of the road markings. So here's a little lesson for all you people of Milton Keynes:

Lane 1 is for turning left only.
Lane 2 is for going straight on and (listen carefully, this is the important bit) goes across to the left hand lane as you pass the first exit (because everybody in Lane 1 should have turned left...)
Lane 3 is also for going straight on and (listen carefully, this is the important bit) goes to the middle lane, because everybody in Lane 2 should now be over in the left lane. (Lane 3 is also, obviously, for turning right, which means you would stay in the right hand lane.)
Lane 1 doesn't go straight on. Lane 2 does not lead in to the middle lane, which is what you all do, which then pushes the person trying to go legitimately straight on in lane 2 in to the lane for turning right.

Got it? The next time I'm in Milton Keynes (which will be tomorrow) I expect you all to behave properly. I shall be driving a 7.5 tonne Luton van and will not take kindly to people in the wrong lane.

Right, after that little rant, I need a beer - which is handy because the day after getting cross with the People of Milton Keynes for their lack of roundabout etiquette, I headed to the Great British Beer Festival:

Lots of great fun was had launching the first edition of the Inapub magazine, which lead to a celebratory sampling of what felt like all 700+ real ales, ciders and perries that were available, before heading out for dinner and then a mad dash back to the train station to try and get home in time.

In fact, much of the past week has felt like I could do with an extra three or four hours in the day just to allow for travelling, as Wednesday I had to head back to my mum's to get the children (via, once again, Milton bloody Keynes' roundabouts) - but I did get the chance to pop in to an old haunt. I haven't been in The Wheatsheaf in Maids Moreton for nigh on twenty years, but the opportunity to interview the current landlord for the next edition of the magazine was too strong, and so I took it!

By Thursday I was feeling pretty tired, so the idea of getting up for the pub's annual pilgrimage to Yarmouth Races was not a popular one with me, but the mini-bus was leaving at nine and if I wasn't on it, as landlord of the pub, then there was going to be hell to pay.

The weather was miserable, but the trip was great fun - for once I even did reasonably well on the horses, actually returning home with £5 more in my pocket than I'd left with. But the highlight of the trip was calling in for dinner at The Angel Inn in Larling on the way home for dinner ... where they also happened to be hosting a beer festival (my second in a week!). With 124 different beers and a live band, it was an amazing place to be and, thankfully, the rain had finally stopped by the time we arrived.

The only problem was, all sixteen of us had been on a pub crawl since nine in the morning and the idea of drinking more beer really wasn't going down well with everyone. Next year, I'm going to try and get up there to properly enjoy their beer festival!

I seem to have spent the rest of the weekend trying to catch up (unsuccessfully) on sleep, paperwork and chores that didn't get done earlier in the week.

I'm hoping to have a slightly calmer week ahead but, looking at the calendar, I suspect I'm out of luck...

The BBC can broadcast Formula 1 from my pub...

2011-08-02T01:04:00.000+01:00

At one point, it looked like the most exciting thing I was able to write about on my social networking sites last week were a couple of trips to the cinema:

First up, a visit to the Cineworld in Bury St Edmunds to see the new Cars 2 movie (I now want to be Finn McMissile), then another on Thursday to my friend Mitchel's pub, The Thatchers Arms, to see The Social Network in his excellent pub-cinema. All good fun.

But then I woke up on Friday and it seemed the whole Twittersphere was having a nervous breakdown as news broke that Bernie Ecclestone had signed a deal with Sky Sports to show all Formula One coverage live next year, while the BBC are to reduce their coverage to only half the races, with the other half making up a highlights programme in a Match Of The Day style that's deemed sufficient for us poor mortals without the Sky Sports service.

Ecclestone is the master of making members of the Formula One fraternity rich, but it's often perceived that he has a certain amount of disdain for the British fans (how often has he threatened to just pull the plug on the Silverstone Grand Prix?) and I can't help thinking that his comments that such a change in the broadcasting rights will be better for us ring a little hollow.

Many F1 fans don't have Sky at all, let alone the ludicrously expensive Sports package, and what about the 'couch potato' fan who likes to keep an eye on the race during his post-Sunday Roast snooze? That fan might not be deemed important to Bernie, but they make up for two things: the chatter about motor racing in the pub later in the week, and the viewing figures that allow Bernie to charge such huge sums for the right to show the sport. That's not the type of person who's going to pay for Sky's coverage, nor are they likely to sit about waiting for the highlights programme to clash with Top Gear later in the day.

Sky have done an unbelievable amount of good for Football, there is no denying that, but I don't have Sky Sports because I don't really follow football much. Nor, to any extent that would make it worth paying for Sky Sports, do I follow cricket. Or the WWE. Or golf, greyhound racing and athletics.

All of which made up most of Monday's Sky Sports schedule.

I quite like NASCAR, and there was a highlights show of that on at 7pm, I suppose. But Absolute Match Fishing, which clashes with NASCAR incidentally, really doesn't make me want to shell out the extra £20.25 a month I am going to have to pay if I, and any other non-Sky-Sports-subscribing-F1-fan, want to keep watching all F1 races live.

And if I want to watch it in HD, like I currently can on the BBC as part of the annual cost of my license fee, it'll cost me a further £10.00 a month.

You could argue that an extra £363 a year isn't much to pay in order to keep a sport that is extremely expensive to run and extremely expensive to broadcast in such high quality, and I can see your point, but about ten years ago Bernie let Sky show Formula 1 on a dedicated, extra-subscription channel.

I paid for that and it was extremely expensive. And extremely awful.

The broadcasters didn't travel to the races, but simply commentated from a box in the corner of a building in London and spoke in voices more monotone than my own, and the coverage was woeful.

The BBC could save money by putting Jake Humphrey and friends in to the same box. Heck, they could come and broadcast it from my pub for no charge. I'd even let them bring Eddie Jordan along...

Talking of pubs, I get a small crowd of knowledgeable F1 pundits in every Sunday to watch the Grand Prix with me (Jake and co would easily be able to get some exciting, if a touch colourful, soundbites for the TV show...) but from next year I won't be legally able to show every race live because of Sky's exorbitant commercial broadcast charges.

You can bet that Formula 1 won't be shown on the two main channels because of conflicts with football, so in order to guarantee coverage I'd have to pay for Sky Business's Ultimate Pack, which comes in at a whopping £522 a month plus VAT for my establishment.

I dropped Sky from the pub last year after they put their prices up because even with football coverage I wasn't getting enough in to make it pay for itself. I'm hardly going to cover such a punitive fee with a handful of lads in every other Sunday just to watch the race, so there goes another bite out of my business for 2012.

And hardly had Sky got their grubby little mitts on Formula 1 than one of the sport's top drivers found his website hacked:

Jenson Button's website suddenly showed in its news section on Saturday night that he had been seriously injured in a road accident and might not be able to take part in his 200th Grand Prix. Thankfully, the 2009 champion was fast asleep in his bed and unaware of the whole thing, and went on to win that race yesterday in spectacular fashion.

Meanwhile, one has to say a hearty well done to the BBC crew who continued to put on yet another excellent show while still reeling from the shock of finding out they were about to be made redundant. If we are going to be forced to turn to Sky next year for full coverage, they could do a lot worse than offer the whole lot of them a contract to work for Sky instead. They'd probably get paid better too.

Finally, just a quick flick back to last week's blog, which focused on my bike ride in Dalby Forest. I mentioned that I'd had to curtail the ride because of a mild injury, which I eventually got round to having checked on Thursday. Without a hint of humour in her face, my doctor confirmed that I have trapped my Ulna Nerve and, for the next two weeks at least, I have to avoid driving, riding my bike, "or undertaking any strenuous activity with my right hand..."

Is Google Chrome a faster or slower browser...

2011-08-01T22:53:00.000+01:00

There's an article on The Guardian's website today that reports Google's web browser, Chrome, has stolen second place in the UK browser market from Mozilla's Firefox.

This is great - I use Chrome and think it's an excellent browser and, although I dabble with the others from time-to-time, I always like coming back to Chrome. I can see how it's stolen a march on Firefox too, which - since releasing Version 4 - has been buggy and slow, on my computers at least.

Both Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox have stolen design cues and features from Chrome since it was first launched, including the much-simplified tab function and the 'Omnibar', Google's address bar that also doubles up as a search bar. Mozilla has even gone so far as calling their's the Awesome Bar.

But it's not that in the article that really got my attention. Instead, it's the amendment at the bottom of the article that seems to suggest that originally the figures showed Chrome's speed wasn't as good as was being made out, so they've amended it so they are!

Quote at bottom of The Guardian article. Click image.

Google+ voting... it's amazing what you learn when you start hitting buttons!

2011-07-31T10:55:00.000+01:00

If you're a Google+ user I just tripped across a lovely little post that came upon the idea of using Comment +1s (Google's equivalent of Facebook's 'like' button) to register votes in polls that you might run.

Pete Cashmore, founder of website Mashable.com, posted the idea on his own Google+ page here:

The premise is simple: write your question in your status box, then put the answers in as individual comments below, allowing your readers to then +1 their favourite: voila, you've got a default polling system without needing to add in any apps or widgets.

It has a couple of glaring failures: right now, neither the iPhone or Android smartphone apps allow you to add a +1 to comments, only to posts; you need to be browsing on a desktop/laptop browser for that function, though surely this will change soon as Google realise such obvious errors.

And I suggested in a comment that it only worked up to a point, as other users simply started leaving comments on the post: 212 comments later and it was a pain finding the original answers. That was when somebody pointed out to me that you can simply disable comments in posts you leave behind. A handy security feature if you're not after loads of people positing all over your thoughts.

It's amazing what you learn when you start hitting buttons in Google+, as there are plenty of features sitting dormant that are only being discovered as people hit them in that childlike way of just pushing something to see what it does. So here's a quick example:

Simply click the drop down button [1] in the top right hand corner of your status after posting it, then select [3] to disable comments. (If you're using it as a poll, best to type in your answers as comments first before disabling them! You can, however, enable comments in the same manner.)

You can also get the link for your post [2], which can be handy for sharing your thoughts straight out to other social networking feeds such as Twitter and Facebook, or simply for linking to within your own blog... ;-)

So, quickly, rush over to my own Google+ page and vote for who you think will win today's Hungarian Grand Prix... it's Jenson Button's 200th race. He gets my vote by default...

Jenson Button's Website Hacked...

2011-07-31T00:32:00.000+01:00

Following up on this evening's earlier post concerning the well-being of one of my favourite Formula One drivers, Jenson Button, I'm happy to report that the news report on Button's website that he had been seriously injured in a crash was nothing more than a sick prank.

The confirmation has come from several sources, including Vodafone McLaren Mercedes' Facebook page:

And Jenson's website has also been updated to confirm it was a hack. Good news on all counts... now let's hope he can go on to win tomorrow's race!

Has Jenson Button's Website Been Hacked...?

2011-07-30T23:27:00.000+01:00

A news story has appeared on Jenson Button's website stating that the 31 year old Formula 1 driver is in critical condition after a road traffic accident:

The thing is, a quick search of all F1 related websites and a scan of the Google News feed yields no reports of the driver having been involved in an incident.

Hopefully, this might mean it's just another case of nefarious hacking; if it's true, I hope that he's okay and able to race tomorrow...!

The On One Hundred Mountain Marathon; I Couldn't Get What I Wanted...

2011-07-27T14:33:00.000+01:00

Last week's tweets were, mostly, to do with just one thing: a slightly scary bike ride I'd agreed to take part in on Sunday. Indeed, my first status of the week read:

I've done several bike events over recent years, but all of them have been on a road bike, with nice safe tarmac beneath skinny wheels, and I've covered distances of up to 100km. My times haven't necessarily been spectacular, but I usually take part in such events for fun and to see if I can do them. Such was the case when my friend James decided to challenge me to taking part in the On One Hundred Mountain Marathon, a mountain biking event taking place in the Dalby Forest between Pickering and Scarborough.

The event, sponsored by On One Bikes and hosted by Purple Mountain, essentially had three routes for the day: a 30km route, a 50km route, and an all-encompassing 100km endurance route. James booked three of us to take part in the 100km route and set about terrifying me with training rides around Thetford Forest.

There is, however, one big difference between Thetford and Dalby: hills. Dalby has them, Thetford - being slap in the middle of Norfolk - doesn't.

Arriving in Dalby on Saturday afternoon, the three of us set up our tents and then headed out on to the red route through the forest to get some idea of the terrain we would be facing the following day. There were some great tracks and trails to ride on, but I am not the most confident of mountain bikers and where James and Logan were tearing off over boardwalks and down plummeting drops littered with what appeared to be boulders waiting to kill me, I tip-toed along in trepidation; still, it was great fun and I was feeling fit so the following day seemed a little less daunting.

Until I woke up on Sunday, that was. The prospect of what we were about to do suddenly dawned on me and if I could have stayed in my sleeping bag, I would. As it was, a night in a tent in a field atop a Yorkshire forest hadn't done much for me; at one point I'd lay awake in the early hours listening to what appeared to be the whole field snoring.

But a sausage sandwich and Relentless energy drink got me going and we lined up at the start, listened to the rider's briefing, and then got under way... straight in to a traffic jam of several hundred riders all trying to enter a single track at the same time.

The official photograph;
shortly before hurting my hand

It took a little while for the riders to find their speed and we all stretched out to be able to ride at our own pace, but early on disaster struck. First, on a set of switchbacks known as Medusa's Drop, James had a tumble that punctured his tubeless front tyre, and more than twenty minutes was lost as we tried to get him mobile again. Then, just a short distance further on, I went over a stone that jarred my hand on the handlebars. I didn't fall off, but the impact trapped a nerve in my hand and as we went on I became less and less able to grip the bar with any confidence.

Now, let's get one thing clear: I wasn't mortally wounded, blood wasn't spurting from ruptured limbs, and I hadn't fallen off my bike in the incident. But, I was lacking in confidence (and, to an extent, talent) and the prospect of riding for almost sixty miles without knowing whether I would be able to hang on properly to the bars as we went from climb to drop and back again was too daunting for me.

At the ten mile mark (16km) we came to a marshall post that indicated the direction we could turn in if we were following the 30km ride. Aware that I was holding up James (who was still spurting blood from his earlier fall) and Logan, and nervous of whether I could continue to ride with them, not to mention unsure whether I was doing more damage to my wrist (by this point I'd lost feeling in two of my fingers on my right hand) I chose to bail out of the full ride and take the shorter route home, leaving James and Logan to continue together.

Getting back to the finish line was pretty straight forward, and a medic on site confirmed that I probably had trapped my nerve and, if the feeling hadn't improved within a couple of days, suggested I get to the doctors to have it checked out; this I've yet to do, but it's quite a weird sensation trying to type on the keyboard and not being able to reach the keys as easily as I usually do, or feel them under my finger tips!

I was disappointed to have not finished the ride properly, but ultimately I think I made the right choice. I wasn't ready for such a challenge and although I think the 50km route was definitely within my ability, I need to go away and train harder. Maybe next year.

James has since told me that the fall has knocked his confidence a bit. I can't see how: it happened barely a mile in to the ride and he went on to complete the full distance in a little over seven hours, with Logan just minutes behind him. The previous night, we'd been working out that it would probably take us nine hours to complete the distance...

Despite all this, the event was great fun, and a big thank you to the organisers for putting it on - although perhaps for next year On One Bikes and Purple Mountain could look in to making sure there are better toilet facilities available (when I got back I pinched James's car and headed down the road to find usable loos that weren't spewing human excrement from every crack!) and maybe a catalogue of cycling parts in the goodie bag could be in English next year, rather than German...

In the meantime, this is the video from the helmet camera I wore on the route (and, below that, a map of the route I took). It's around ten minutes in length and the choice of The Rolling Stones "You Can't Always Get What You Want" is more tongue-in-cheek than you might realise. The band who played in the adjoining field on Saturday night kept us awake by repeatedly singing the chorus line. Over. And Over. And Over...

Finding the G-spot, and other tweets from the past week...

2011-07-18T15:43:00.000+01:00

Reading back through the endless stream of tweets and Facebook updates I seemed to make last week, one story about my week stood out from the rest.

No, it wasn't the story that Rebekah Brooks had listened in to my voicemails, I really am just not that important. And if she had listened in, all she'd have heard was a monotonous stream of people asking me to pay bills, or price comparison companies desperately trying to make me use them to switch my electricity account.

Indeed, digressing for a moment, I did get a little cross with my current electricity supplier when they sent me through my letter of renewal, complete with an exorbitant price increase, prompting me to post:

An 82.5% price rise is a little extreme, even in today's expensive times.

It wasn't even this little tweet, written on the same day after checking my bank account, partly to see if I could take the family out for dinner, more to see if I could stomach e.On's inflated price increase:

Why-oh-why would Cineworld even think it was remotely clever to name themselves "Classic Web Cam" on bank statements. Yes, I bought my ticket on the 'web', and yes the cinema we visited to see Transformers 3D was in 'Cam'bridge. But c'mon. That could have been a painfully difficult one to explain to the wife if she'd got to the bank statement first...

No, although the news has been dominated by the endless phone hacking scandal that has put me, and many of my customers, off buying newspapers, reading news websites or, indeed, even switching on the 24 hour news channels (and therefore causing me to almost miss this story about Jennifer Aniston) the big news for me last week was finally being able to get my hands on Google's latest attempt at Social Networking.

Yawn. I know. I admit I did post voraciously on this topic last week, prompting one friend on Facebook to suggest that I might be getting more than a little bit intimate with the Internet giant:

Okay, so Google not only managed to launch their Plus service last week, but also announced the pending updates of both their Blogger and Picasa websites, the video-gameish addition of Badges to their news services, and even let a little fun website called What Do You Love out in to the world. (Be careful, though. Try and use it to search for any of the really fun words, and all you'll get back is results of Kittens.)

The thing is, I don't really like Facebook that much, not that anybody would believe that given the amount of time I spend on it, but I have been wanting Google to take the fight to them ever since I got involved in Social Networking, and said so this week in my regular blog for the In A Pub News website.

So I'll apologise for the Google related posts.

Most of my customers were more amused, though, by my antics on Friday night, which lead to me posting this on Facebook on Saturday morning:

An impromptu offer by one of my members of staff to sit with the children after I closed the pub at shortly after midnight meant that I could join the wife and some of her friends at a house party down the road. All the husbands had been in the pub for the evening and had headed off to reclaim their respective spouses, but it's rare I ever get the opportunity to head down with club and caveman instincts with which to drag the lady home.

As it was it was I who got clubbed, by a mammoth mix of alcohol. I've never held my alcohol well anyway, but ending the night at gone four in the morning with a whisky was not the brightest thing I've ever done and, these days, I can hold my booze even less well, it would appear. Approaching forty seems to mean that I will have to make do with herbal teas at the end of the night rather than sloshing up the liquor.

And as the week drew to an end it became clear that alcohol doesn't help when you're trying to fix electrical items in the pub. Eddie the Electrician came round to help me get the pub's glasswasher up and running again. Despite having downloaded the electrical wiring diagram for the washer and determined there was a reset switch that needed pressing, the search took nearly two hours and was almost as fruitless as trying to find the fabled g-spot located, as the switch was, right in the middle of the underside of the glasswasher, behind a cover and through a gap between two pumps, located close enough together to make it almost difficult for an adult's fingers to squeeze through.

This was the picture I posted on Twitter when it was eventually located...

And a second test...

2011-07-17T08:14:00.001+01:00

Almost ready to start posting to this blog properly now! I like the Blogger app on my phone, even allows for location data to be included for if I'm blogging somewhere exotic. Which I never do.

Still, one more test with photos...

Photo test

2011-07-17T08:10:00.001+01:00

Just testing how pictures get uploaded to this blog if I do them straight from my phone...

Yet another attempt at personal blogging...

2011-07-12T17:38:00.001+01:00

So here I go again. I love writing, and I always promise that I'll write something regularly. And, by writing, I actually mean something with some substance. Something with more than 140 characters in it.

And then I just dive in to Twitter and pootle about there, forgetting that I once promised myself to keep my WordPress blog up-to-date and try something in the 500-1000 words category every once in a while.

Of course, I write blogs for two popular pub trade websites - www.morningadvertiser.co.uk / www.inapubnews.co.uk - but those are my musings about pubs and the pub industry. I often forget to write about what happened to me today and I never write that I've eaten a Pot Noodle.

(Well, okay, there was that once. But hey, come on, it was a Christmas Dinner Pot Noodle!)

I am, however, a prolific tweeter and user of Facebook - and, now, I'm having a romance with

Google+. Social networking allows me an avenue to my friends and family and anybody who might be remotely interested in what I have to say (there's more than you'd think, you know). So recently, I struck upon the idea of looking back once a week at some of the things I post to Twitter, or Facebook, or now even Google Plus (most of them will be the same anyway) and writing up a bit more about why I said what I said when I said it.

If that makes sense. For example, it'll look something like this:

58 marktharparms Mark J Daniels
With all @google's latest updates to their look & feel and integration with Google+, it's about time @blogger got a bit of an update!
9 Jul Favorite Reply Delete

I've been dabbling about with Google a lot recently, playing with their new social networking service and trying to tidy up some of my accounts, so I decided to move my personal blog back to Google's blogging service, Blogger. Unfortunately, though, as ever Google seem to have forgotten it exists and so while all their other services are getting a makeover and being morphed in to one to join in the Google+ experience, Blogger still looks like it did five years ago. Even worse, it keeps crashing when used in Google's own web browser, Chrome, but works beautifully in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9...

It'll all become much clearer as time goes on, but basically I'll be picking a few of my favourite tweets and updates from the previous seven days, and expanding on them. Obviously, I'll try and make them wittier than that example. And more interesting.

But hey, come on, I could always just sit here and write about Pot Noodles...