Tuesday, February 28, 2006

For some reason I've always loved Pancake Day; it's probably because it's the only chance I get each year to sit down to some pancakes served with the traditional lemon and sugar. Who cares that I'm not about to begin a Lenten fast and so don't have any need to use up my eggs and butter; I just like this once a year opportunity to have pancakes.

Posted by Antz at 11:58 PM | Permalink | | |

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Over the last couple of days I've been spending a bit of time working on a re-design for my design and hosting side-project Graphicjunkie.

Trying to come up with a new design is always a problem as I'm my own worst client; I never know what I want and I'm never satisfied with the ideas I come up with. I often wonder whether it wouldn't be easier just to get someone else to do the project for me.

As a rule if I like an idea the next morning there's a good chance I'll go on liking it in the months ahead. It's kind of like doner kebabs; seems like a great after a night in the pub but a terrible one the next morning. Few of my designs make it past the next morning.

This one has passed the 'kebab' test and so with a bit of luck i'll start roling it out onto the site within the next couple of weeks. What do you think?

Posted by Antz at 10:39 AM | Permalink | | |

Saturday, February 25, 2006

While David and I were in the queue at our local Boots David spotted one of those body fat calculator gadgets that will work out the percentage of fat that makes up your body. You put in some basic details and put your thumbs on the special metal pads and it tells you the gory details.

Being suckers for a gadget (and because we'd saved a fiver on skincare products) we forked out the £4.99 so that we could find out, in the privacy of our bathroom, how how much fat was hanging around where it shouldn't be.

Once safely locked up at home we do a bit of weighing, a bit of number crunching to convert the measurements into metric and then stick our digits onto the sensors. Four seconds later and our happiness and self-esteem sink through the floor as it tells us we're seconds away from an early death or words to that effect.

Considering that I've lost over 2 stone during the last six months I'd hate to think what the results would have been then; maybe it would have just put a call into the emergency services automatically.

Posted by Antz at 10:16 PM | Permalink | | |

Friday, February 24, 2006

Tonight had the pleasure of spending a quite night in on my own as David had managed to get one of our friends to go to bingo with him. Until recently I got used to having a fair few nights to myself because of David working a London but since he's now back in Leicester we spend our evenings together.

It is nice, once in a while, to have the house to yourself. You get to watch the TV you want to watch, eat what you want to eat and generally not worry about anyone else.

Being able to watch whatever I liked meant I could sit down and watch some of the hours of bonus features on the pile of 24 DVDs that landed on my doormat yesterday.

Don't worry I'm not going to bore you with details of how they built the sets or staged huge train crashes. I'll save that for another day. Unless you really want to know?

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

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Yesterday I passed two major non-smoking milestones. I made it to 50 days without lighting up and also as a result didn't smoke my 1,000th cigarette.

The cravings are getting less all the time now. Only a couple of times a day does the evil weed attempt to make me give in but my desire to not smoke is much much stronger than the tiny voice trying to make me; for a few seconds I feel like a character in an old Tom and Jerry cartoon with a devil and a angel sat on my shoulders.

This weekend it'll be time to drop down to the next stage in my nicotine patches and then the end of the NRT is almost in sight and I can really start to think of myself as a proper non-smoker. One that doesn't have to remember to stick the equivalent of a few fags onto my arm each morning.

Posted by Antz at 3:16 PM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

A couple of of years back David and I settled down on the sofa to watch the first episode of a new realtime US counter-terrorism drama on the BBC called 24.

By the ninth episode I was planning my life around my weekly fix of Kiefer Sutherland and David was pretty much doing anything he could to avoid being anywhere near a TV while it was on. I managed to get him hooked back into it again for a couple of episodes but since then he's gone to all kinds of lengths to avoid being in the same room as Jack Bauer and the team at CTU during any of the last couple of series.

At the minute David's having to avoid the living room for a couple of hours on Sunday nights while season five unfolds in all its realtime glory but sadly for him the situation is about to get worse (in our living room not in the high speed world of CTU) as unbeknownst to him any day now play.com will be delivering series 2,3 and 4 on DVD.

He'll be soo pleased.

Posted by Antz at 5:14 PM | Permalink | | |

Monday, February 20, 2006

Something very strange has happened the the last three posts I've made during the last week - for some reason they've been wiped off of the face of the net and i've only just noticed. Hopefully I still have a text file of the posts somewhere otherwise you'll have to cope with a missing week in my life. Normal service will resume shortly.

Update on 22 February 2006: I've managed to recreate a couple of the missing posts from last week that Blogger seemed to wipe off of the site when I was publishing them. These are the dentists one and the one about the UK government smoking ban.

Posted by Antz at 11:47 AM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

So the UK government has decided that enough is enough and has opted for an all-out ban of smoking in enclosed public spaces. I have to admit that considering my forty-odd days of non-smoking the thought of pubs and clubs without the thick fog is one I'm going to relish.

Many people on the online forums have been going on about how the government's ban is crushing smokers civil liberties' their right to smoke in public places. Who cares that three quarters of UK adults don't smoke?

Having been a smoker for years I was probably just as guilty as any other smoker for generally polluting clubs, bars and restaurants with my smoke. If building owners or the government had taken steps years ago to have proper ventilated non-smoking areas the whole issue of lighting-up in public wouldn't have become such the issue it is.

And it's not just the issue of whether or not people are dying from second hand smoke (because there is some evidence that the effects are in most situations minimal) but simply that loads of non-smokers don't enjoy being in smoky bars and clubs and ending up with clothes that stink and eyes that ache.

Posted by Antz at 10:50 PM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

For the last thirty-something years my dentist has always handled the usual scraping and polishing alongside my annual checkups; managing to squeeze in a full inspection and the cleaning into a 30 minute appointment and all for less then £30 a hit.

Now my dental surgery as employed the services of a dential hygienist to do the cleaning and polishing; obviously freeing up the dentists to spend more time fitting crowns and drilling holes in people's teeth. My regular checkups still cost the same but now I have to book an appointment with the dental hygienist to deal with all the scraping and polishing. The dental hygienist also costs £30 a go. Magically my dental expenditure has doubled over night.

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

Saturday, February 11, 2006

When it comes to Britain's "National Game" David is very much in favour of an occasional trip to some hall or other to try his luck against hundreds of others all armed to the back teeth with felt pens and 'dobbers' whereas I'd rather set my own face on fire while stabbing myself repeatedly with a large blunt kitchen knife.

My problem with bingo is that I've always had a real problem with numbers. If you need someone to remember any combinations, phone numbers or pretty much any other number-related thing you'd be much better off asking someone else. My party trick is being given a three-digit number and magically forgetting it within two seconds - in fact I can usually do the same feat with a two-digit number. I'm all right with one-digit numbers.

You spend an evening with some acne-ridden lad stood in the middle of the hall shouting out numbers while I use my digit-defying memory to find them on a sheet of paper and colour 'em in. It is truly incredible how fast the caller can call the numbers, and how fast my brain can either mix-up, swap round or simply forget them again. It's like asking a blind person to choose paint colours.

Of course my other problem with bingo is that I never win.

Posted by Antz at 3:39 PM | Permalink | | |

It seems that it's not only friendly aliens that have been plastering personal messages North Yorshire cornfields, it seems that local visitors may have been doing it too.

Posted by Antz at 8:11 AM | Permalink | | |

Friday, February 10, 2006

It's amazing what you find on Google Maps. While I was looking at a part of the Yorkshire countryside I came across this stunning example of a crop circle. You can find it here.

Posted by Antz at 1:44 PM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Every morning I go through the same routine. Wake up, feed the cats, make some decaf, read the online news, get washed, get dressed and get in the car for 8.15. It's a seemingly never changing Groundhog-style day.

This morning, however, when I got into my car I found that someone had come along overnight and smashed one of my Mini's rear windows (not a cheapish side window, oh no, they had to smash one of the factory tinted curved windows that goes round to the boot). Whoever it was didn't even break right in, they just smashed the window and left it at that.

What satisfaction can anyone get from smashing someone's window in and then walking off? Do they brag about it to their mates? Their girlfriend? Do they 'get off' thinking about it?

It's not really a big deal I suppose, but you still have to speak to your insurance company and then the car window people to sort out getting it fixed while letting work know that'll you'll be late in, all the time thinking "what did I do to deserve this?"

It could have been a lot worse of course, It's just that it really messes with your morning routine.

Posted by Antz at 10:57 PM | Permalink | | |

Back in 1999 when I first added what was then 50 facts about me on the site fact number 36 read "None of my friends have died." which was, as you can imagine, a fact I was always very pleased about.

On 8th February 2004 I had to change fact 36.

I first met Jon Gaye in 1989 on a National Union of Students Communications training course at some red-brick university campus where I was representing my students union and he was representing his. It was probably because neither of us quite fitted the regular student officer stereotype that got us talking.

As we were both worked in the student movement (him as an Ents officer in Oxford and me as the communications officers at Leicester Poly) we kept in touch and over the coming months got to become good mates. This isn't going to turn into some gay love story by the way. Jon was undeniably straight and as far as I was concerned at the time, so was I. In time he confirmed his straightness by the arrival of two kids and I ended up disproving mine by coming out.

We stayed in touch after our time in our student unions came to an end. Speaking to each other every month or so and making the effort to see one another once or twice a year. It was one of those really strong friendships that meant whenever we spoke there was no need to 'catch up'. We simply picked things up where we left off. I was proud to be asked to be the Godfather of his daughter, Brenna.

As we both got older our lives drifted further a part. Jon got married and settled into the world of IT. I got gay and settled into the online world. We both shared the belief that we should see each other more often but neither of us really managed to do anything about it.

On 8th February 2004 I got a phone call from a mutual friend of ours. He wanted to know if i'd heard from Jon's wife. I said I hadn't. He then dropped the bomb. Jon was dead.

It seems that early the day before Jon was on his motorbike heading off to the South Coast. At 9.40am a few miles from his house he came off his bike on the A4130 and was killed almost instantly.

I still have his mobile number stored in my mobile.

Posted by Antz at 9:40 AM | Permalink | | |

Saturday, February 04, 2006

No matter how hard I try I'm finding it almost impossible to get into doing any kind of regular training at the gym. At least twice a week I leave work with the real intention of stopping off on-route home but somehow I just don't seem to manage to make that turning and find myself driving past.

It probably doesn't help that I don't really enjoy going to the gym in the first place and all my willpower is tied up with my not-smoking campaign (incidentally at day 32 and counting) and the associated campaign involved with stopping myself over-eating to compensate for the lack of fags.

We're a month into the year and I've managed a total of four trips to the gym. Not very good value of money when you think about it. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

Posted by Antz at 11:10 AM | Permalink | | |

Friday, February 03, 2006

Being a bit 'arty' I've always had a secret passion for street art; graffiti and stickering. It's not something I've ever wanted to get into myself but I do have a real respect for the art itself.

One site I've had bookmarked for a couple of years and keep heading back to is Wooster Collective which has been online for getting on for five years and is dedicated to celebrating art placed on streets in cities around the world. Definately worth checking out.

Posted by Antz at 10:27 PM | Permalink | | |

Previous Posts