On to Castle Beckington where the scourge badly behaved teen-age daughters seemed to have spread. Whilst not for a moment approving of the dreadful teen-age attitude here I was a little surprised to find the parents completely unaware of that terrible child illness, TDH syndrome (Teenagers Don’t Hoover). I myself contacted this at a very early age and sadly suffer till this day. Most men only recover from this, and then only partially, upon the administering of a “wife”. Tragically it was found that I had a strong allergic reaction to this cure and have had to live with the affliction. It’s a burden I carry with good grace…

And parents, if you think it’s bad now, this is a picture of middle class students away at uni… (picture courtesy of my niece Emily Hardy)

Today’s outstanding spectacle was the sight of two “grown” men using their iPhones to fart at each other using the “iFart” app, 59p at the iPhone App Store. No, I’m not making this up. One of these men had spent half an hour ranting about the bad behaviour of his teen-age daughter, I thing the words “example” and “bad” could be re-arranged into a useful phrase here. I would name names but one of these reprobates threatened legal action if I so much as mentioned his name, so don’t worry Burls, your secrets safe with me.

The fart machine!

This past Sunday was spent with Kim Thrower taking pictures of desperately knackered people competing in the Hastings half marathon. To be honest, I may make fun of them, but the sense of achievement they must get at the finish line possibly might be greater than that of building my own computer, no, really. Anyway, after the exertion of watching the runners we retired to Kims beach hut to lounge for a bit. The sun was high – summer was on it’s way and Kim was drinking lemonade, what the…

Kim and Lemonade, a study in the unlikely.

You want to use Windows as the operating system on your computer? feel free, but please don’t come to me when you get infected with viruses. There is nothing wrong with Windows and I use it for my work but I have come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no way you can prevent getting viruses on your system. I have seen with my own eyes a virus rip through anti virus software and install itself just because a client forgot my dire and pompous warnings about never clicking on attachments in e-mails.

The worse thing is that people have an outdated idea of what viruses do; “if my computer is still working I can’t be infected”, er, no. The whole purpose of modern viruses is not to draw attention to themselves whilst they allow their controllers to sell the use of your computer for, most commonly, sending out spam and attacks on web sites (if tens of thousands of computers all look at the same web site at the same time it can make the site inaccessible)., oh, and while they’re doing that they will be logging every keystroke you make on the keyboard to e-mail to keen Russian gangsters for further analysis and credit card detail extraction!

If you are extremely competent technically and are willing to treat your computer as if it was your enemy you can substantially reduce the risk, if not you don’t have a hope in hell.

Me? the only operating system I’ll put on and get involved with for friends is Linux (The Ubuntu version) and that’s only safe for the moment as there are so few Linux computers out there they don’t bother writing viruses for them.

The other option is gat an Apple MAC, a bit too pricey for my taste but a temporary solution at least.

Many months ago I turned comments off as I was getting 50 or so a day spam comments, I’ve fathomed how to use the anti-spam plug-in now so comments are back.

The King of Castle Beckington is fifty today and has been ordered to stay off work by the divine Mrs S on pain of death. He is basking in the glory of a near victory over his children over the last week-end at the board game “20 questions”. The fact the game was purchased years before his eldest was born gave him another, not to be missed, opportunity to moan about the state of modern education. That his children are all doing better at school than he ever did seems not to matter!

Call me cynical, I’d prefer astute or wise but cynical will do, but are the pubs dying? Now I must admit that my partner in crime and I go out in the week as he spends the week-ends cow-towing to his loved one, but still; the pubs seem to be the haunt of the sad, weird and lonely, mooching at the last bus stop before the abyss. The Jenny Lind is up for sale at £85,000 leasehold, the Crown in High Street £75,000, the Adelade is an empty hulk; a dark place for the odd troglodyte drunk to piss against it’s peeling walls. The new tenant at the Stag has brought a stony resigned face to the job. I think that’s the worst thing; they all have an air of defeat, and not a silent one, a whining snivelling air blaming everything (with some justification in the case of the smoking ban) on circumstances far beyond their control.