Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Posted by Antz at 11:49 PM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

A London man, 32 year old Jeremy Butler, has taken finding a girlfriend one stage further than most. He set up a stall in Crouch End High Street in north London at the weekend advertising for a ladyfriend.

According to the BBC website he decided to take a more direct approach, handing out fliers and standing next to a 3m-tall banner reading: "Girlfriend wanted, apply here".

Beats the usual chatup lines and small ads I guess.

Posted by Antz at 1:27 PM | Permalink | | |

For the first time in over a year I ended up partying the night away in a club on Saturday night. Considering my very well documented record of 'having-it-large' the lack of any kind of regular clubbing over the last couple of years hasn't really bothered me much.

As many dedicated clubbers will tell you some day you'll find yourself on the dancefloor and will suddenly realise that clubbing doesn't do it for you anymore. You'll blame it on the crowd, the club or the music but inside you'll know that your soul has fallen out of love with the dance scene.

Breaking with tradition this weekend David, me and our friend Robsta found ourselves in London's Heaven for the evening. As far as I can remember I've not been to what is probably London's most famous gay club before, and having seen some of the amazingly handsome topless barstaff I'm sure I would have remembered. Some of them were so attractive that Robsta is still having dreams about them. Obviously they are either truly lucky to have such fantastic God-given bodies or they live in a world which solely revolves about the gym, salad and shifts behind the bar.

David and Robsta found the spirit of clubbing soon overtook them, but it took a bit longer for the same spirit to work its magic on me. After an hour of not really getting into the music I was worried that I was about to be stuck in a club for most of the night bored out of my mind; luckily the spirit suddenly took hold and the dancefloor beckoned.

The dancefloor held my attention so much that when David wanted to leave the music and cute boys behind I was still very much up for sticking around a bit longer. He went in pursuit of fresh Italian coffee at Bar Italia in Soho while Rob and I stuck it out to the bitter end. Maybe the magic of clubbing hasn't completely left me after all.

Posted by Antz at 7:53 AM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

David's work in the greenhouse over the past couple of months has started to pay off. This picture is of 'Colin' the cucumber; the biggest of the cucumbers growing in the maison verte.

Posted by Antz at 11:51 PM | Permalink | | |

For a number of weeks now I've been building up to buying a new chair to go in the office. I bought the chair that I sit on each and every day at home ten years ago for £15 from one of the hundreds of dodgy secondhand stores that clutter the infamous student ghetto known as Narborough Road in Leicester.

That chair has served me well but after ten years it has reached the end of its useful life; the dubiously coloured fabric has ripped and the yellowing foam inside is gradually spreading through the house as more and more of it escapes (deliberately assisted, I think, by the cats when I'm not looking).

For once eBay couldn't help me in my quest (It is, as far as i'm aware, impossible to test a chair out online. Let's face it the one thing you want to do with a chair before you buy is park yer arse in it for a few minutes to see if it's comfy.) so I scooted off to my local stationery superdupermegastore to have a look.

It appears that unless you spend hundreds on the latest mega-adjustable, spine massaging, robot designed contraption you're pretty limited in choice: You can either have the cheap 'you'll be hospitalised by Christmas' ones or one of the slightly more expensive 'executive' ones made from the poorest quality leather.

After giving the chairs some serious bum action for a couple of minutes I'd got my choice down to one of two possible 'executive' chairs: a £60 which was pretty comfy but the leather had the feeling of a pensioner's skin after years of sunbathing at a Malaga retirement complex, and one that was 25 quid more but actually felt like a cow had been involved in its creation.

I decided that £85 was a lot to spend on a chair and was just about to ask a passing sales assistant to get me the cheaper option when he plucked the price tag off of the chair and replaced it with a new one. Suddenly the price of my cheaper option had gone up to £80. He promised that none of the other chairs were likely to shoot up in price during the next five minutes.

With five quid in it I opted for the more expensive of the two chairs, after all it was much more comfy. My price-hiking friend the sales assistance got me my chair and carried it to the checkout (possibly to prevent someone raising the price before we got there). The till operator, who was at least 10, scanned the box and the price came up: £115. £20 had almost magically been added to my chair in the 30 seconds it had taken me to get to the tills. A few choice words were shared and as if by magic the chair returned (albeit for this transaction only) to £85.

Posted by Antz at 9:29 AM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Had to call the cleaning company to complain that the recently hired cleaners seem to be cleaning only half the house. They've been round twice now to 'do' and both times I've come home to find loads of stuff is clearly still dirty.

A lovely supervisior came round to do what Molly Maid call a Quality Check. Basically she slings on her white gloves and goes round the house with wetwipes rubbing things to see if the team have got anywhere close to cleaning the place properly. It turns out that they failed to do nearly half the tasks they're meant to.

I'm not obsessed about the house being clinically clean but when your paying someone to do a job you'd like them to have a pretty good go at it. The point of us getting cleaners was so that they would get the house spotless in only a way cleaners can. No matter how hard I try to keep on top of the cleaning I can always find much better things to do with my valuable time: going out, blogging, seeing friends blar blar blar.

But the results of having the Molly Maid in had been a total let down; they have even missed some of the things I do on a weekly basis. Anyway the cleaners are back tommorrow to give the house another going over. Hopefully with much better results.

Posted by Antz at 11:12 PM | Permalink | | |

Friday, June 10, 2005

So this is mobile blogging at its finest.I'm sat here in the garden using my shiny new PDA to record my blog entry. Not as straight forward as I'd hoped- but you canit have everything I Suppose. At least I know the technology works at a push. Does this win the 'least Interesting post award'?

Posted by Antz at 8:45 PM | Permalink | | |

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Last week while I was at the conference in London I dropped a few business cards into various bowls so that I could be in with a chance of winning some funky electronics. Mainly the prizes were iPods but one company, Netbooster, was offering the chance to win a shiny Dell PDA. This morning (far too early for my liking) there was a knock at the door and one of Royal Mail's finest was stood there with a big package (please get your collective minds out of the gutter!!).

It turned out that i'd actually won nearly £300's worth of PDA simply for dropping my business card into a prize bowl. Shame it wasn't an iPod but there you go. So now i've got a new bit of kit to play with; one that (unlike my current PDA) has bluetooth which means that (in theory at least) I can surf on the move and blog from wherever the mood takes me. I say 'in theory' because Blogger blows the connection each time I tried to log in today when I was having a mess around with it. Luckily it is possible to email in your entries and the clever bots at Blogger process 'em is sticks them into the blog for you.

Other shiny five-minute wonder toy for my to grow tired with in record fast time. Another item that (no doubt) will be appearing in an eBay auction within the next few months. Probably along with a whole host of gadgets I'll have picked up along the way. Anyone want an official Google changing-colour radio?

Posted by Antz at 8:03 PM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

According to a spam email my Spamarrest account caught this morning "submitting your website in search engines may increase your online sales dramatically. If you invested time and money into your website, you simply MUST submit your website online otherwise it will be invisible virtually, which means efforts spent in vain." No shit. Damn spam is just so informative.

Posted by Antz at 10:02 AM | Permalink | | |

According to The Guardian today "The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders today reports that sales of convertibles, which have more than doubled in five years to 117,000 last year, accounted for 6% of total car sales in May, a new record."

David should obviously be proud that his shiny new (convertible) car has helped to push sales of of flexible-topped motors to record new highs.

He shouldn't start feeling too smug though as one reader commented in the Guardian's Newsblog that is his opinion convertibles are "just a marketing scam for car companies to remove the part of the car and charge you extra for the privilege".

I guess in the same way that bikini manufacturers charge more for bikinis that cover less!

Posted by Antz at 8:10 AM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

A couple of weeks ago David and I decided to get a cleaner in to try and help us keep on top of the housework. David and I both work very long hours and so the last thing we want to do when we have some quality time together is spend it all scrubbing the kitchen floor or with our arms down the toilet.

Now I have to admit that getting a cleaner in could be conceived as being incredibly middle class. I guess what is even more 'middle class' is that fact I feel really guilty about actually getting someone in. The little voice in my head (who, incidentally, sounds a bit like Joan Hickson) keeps telling me that we should be able to keep our house as clean as a Barrett showhome 247 without any external intervention. Possibly if the voice in my head actually helped around the house we wouldn't need to get someone in anyway!

So today was the first visit from the cleaner (or in fact the cleaning team as there were two of them). They sneaked in under the cover of (errr) daylight and used their magic to clean the house from top to bottom. By all accounts leaving no floor un-hoovered or no windowsill un-polished. They managed to do in three hours what it would have taken me an entire weekend do to; plus they did it much better than I would have done. It is, after all, very easy to get distracted when it's your own home.

I suppose I should accept that getting someone in to help clean your house is no different to hiring someone to build and fence or service your car. It's simply making best use of time and resources. It simply means that David and i can spend more time together doing things we want to do rather than things we need to do.

Posted by Antz at 11:26 PM | Permalink | | |

Monday, June 06, 2005

I have to admit that the Cropped or Not poll hasn't caught everyone's imagination like i'd hoped it would. In the 48 hours since it's been online only 14 out of the 300+ visitors I get each day have felt the need to support the poll by clicking on it one way or the other.

So far the poll is leaning very much in favour of a trip to the barbers with about 80% suggesting that 'cropped' is the way to go. Have your say by voting here [link now removed - poll finished].

Posted by Antz at 9:03 PM | Permalink | | |

Saturday, June 04, 2005

If you happened to be wandering around Antzonline this afternoon you might has suddenly found yourself transported back in time a couple of years. Without realising it I was slightly over-zealous with tidying up the Antzonline server and accidently switched over to the oh-so-orange 2003 version of the site rather than the current one. It could have been worse, I could have switched it over to the truly horrible Newboy2000 version!

Posted by Antz at 6:54 PM | Permalink | | |

Over the last few weeks i've been toying with cropping my hair again but can't make up my mind if I want to be hairy or not. Obviously once you've committed yourself to the crop (that's 'crop' not 'chop') you're pretty much stuck with it until your hair grows back, so I've decided to use the power of the web to see what you lot think. I've spent seconds setting up an opinion poll where you can choose 'Cropped or Not'. You can take the poll here [link now removed - poll finished]. I've included a picture of me with and without hair to help you decide.

Posted by Antz at 4:20 PM | Permalink | | |

Thursday, June 02, 2005

For the last two days I've been hidden away at the Business Design Centre in London for my annual 48 hour dive into the world of search engine optimisation at the Search Engine Strategies conference. Not, as you'd imagine, a real bundle of laughs but very useful if you're planning worldwide domination of the internet (again).

Having been called the "Best Search Engine Optimiser who isn't actually a Search Engine Optimiser" by someone who actually is one I should be able to fit in pretty well with the geeks that hang out at SES. Trouble is I always feel as if most of the people who attend could do a lot worse than simply getting out a bit more.

I did get to meet a few cool people (who, it seems did get out more) and could have quite happily dragged one of the lads from one of the trade stands off to my hotel room for a night of... well, let's just say it's a good thing I'm happily 'married' and he anything he probably had a girlfriend.

The other highlight of my time in the world of search engines has to be the fact that every discussion session I went to (ten in all) all had 15 minutes of questions and answers at the end where we could all ask about the things that we have been raking our brains about for the last twelve months. The idea being that some bright young thing from Google or Yahoo could then share his wisdom with us and we could all dead happy.

Well that would have been the case if it wasn't for the Germans. At every Q&A session there was a German (not the same one I should add) who hogged the limelight with basically the same question over and over again; "I have a website and I want to know why it's not number one on Google".

Posted by Antz at 10:33 PM | Permalink | | |

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