Grombles

No wonder we're all in the shit. How I hate bloody form filling, especially when there's clearly no point in the activity whatsoever. Wastes my time, wastes paper (assuming it's not yet interneted), and even more off-pissingly, keeps some civil service twat in a job, paid me, that could be done by a waste paper bin or NEEDN'T BE DONE AT ALL. This morning I received a letter from the Specialist Personal Tax Employee Shares & Securities Unit. My company takes advantage of an HMRC employee share option scheme that basically encourages business owners to share any gains in the value of their companies with their management. Excellent idea which has enabled me to share in the good fortunes of previous companies with several of the people who helped me build them. What works for them, works for me. So far, so good. I originally filled out the necessary forms to advise HMRC about the scheme I had set up for a company I own. I told them who was registered on the scheme,...

We love the whole restaurant thing. We choose from a list of deliciously described items and magically, only minutes later, it arrives in front of us. We eat, we pay and we go home. But what did we eat? What risks did we take? Nothing I'm going to discuss will be any great revelation to anyone, but we conveniently push all ideas about any possible health risks to the back of our mind in the same way that we treat global warming and the demise of the Euro. So far, so good, but sure as eggs is eggs, it will all end in tears. Call it paranoia, but I'm beginning to get nervous - and especially abroad. The dangers from eating food we can't see being prepared are: Contaminated ingredients 'past sell-by dates' (if the country you're in has them), improperly stored or cheaply sourced Incomplete cooking to kill bacterial pathogens Dirty hands, cooking implements and preparation surfaces Deliberate contamination by kitchen staff A country's economic health a...

One of the excuses deists frequently throw at me for the value of having a deity is that a belief in an afterlife provides comfort, especially to the old, the terminally ill and their relatives. I don't have a problem with them believing this, incredible though it surely is, if it helps them to achieve a peace of mind. Of course I'd prefer it if they found that peace of mind from meditation or some more positive activity like mental challenges, music, arts, marveling at the complexity of the universe and our creeping comprehension of it etc. But if it works like a drug to ease stress and worry, then OK. Clearly the loss of a loved one and the approach of the 'grim reaper' are terrifying prospects, so relief of the stresses they cause is understandably valuable. Of course if this aspect of deity worship is then used to persuade otherwise open-minded children of some sort of 'truth' to explain the world, then it's very wrong. And unfortunately, as I type this ...

Over 18 minutes of the 80 minute international between Wales and Scotland this year was taken up by scrums. There were probably only a dozen or so of them, but they kept breaking down and having to be reset. In monetary terms, a ticket costs £80 - that's £18 per person x 80,000 at Twickenham = about £1.5m that rugby fans paid the RFU to watch failed scrums in that match - and that doesn't include Sky subscriptions etc. Unfortunately this has become a regular feature of the professional game, and is exceptionally boring for spectators. Unfortunately it's also impossible for most people, other than perhaps the front row of the packs, but certainly including the referee and touch judges, to know what is going wrong. Generally the referee will get bored and award a random penalty to one side or the other in the hope that it will 'encourage les autres' and show he means business. This might then result in a team gaining 3 points for fictitious reasons with a 50% probabil...

They say one of the secrets of a good marriage is never being bored by your partner. During the course of our marriage I have been collecting what are largely a series of my wife's mixed metaphors which might normally slip by unnoticed, but which for some reason, don't quite sound right. After a double take I realise their genius and jot them down. Some are not mixed metaphors but actually malapropisms, spoonerisms, or delightful figures of speech all of their own. The joy is that her mind works so fast, she finds and combines two figures of speech in the time most of us might struggle for one. But the best talent of all is to throw caution to the wind and launch them into the world whether they have ever been uttered before or not - and especially whether they are physically possible or not. The result is a magical combination of ideas that are far more evocative than either of the original sayings, as well as being more meaningful and infinitely more colourful than the under...

If you've got an iJobs, you've got to use iTunes. He's a genius, and we're all twats for buying his stuff and ensuring we're stuck with his software bollocks that now controls our lives. In particular iTunes (and all the IOS crap his ghost infects our 'soon-to-be-bricks' with). Now iTunes does a couple of things fairly well (although there are no doubt vast numbers of examples out there that do all of these infinitely better, but I'm too busy writing stuff no-one reads to waste my life investigating them). iTunes enables you get stuff you know exists. And it automatically updates stuff you want to be kept updated, like podcasts (we used to call them recordings) and app releases. What it is truly shit at doing is helping you find an app that does something you need. It could be so much better if it took a leaf or two out of Amazon or Ebay's books. But in iTunes there's virtually no index. The closest you can get down to is this: and then...

I'm going to cry. No really. I'm going to cry. My iPhone won't sync the notes I write on it with Outlook. After hours of forums and fiddling, I've discovered that some spotty software developer at Apple has decided that notes written on an iPhone go into an email account (why??!), which some other spotty-faced developer at Google (and I have great sympathy with all acne sufferers, but god knew what he was doing afflicting these bastards) decided should be in my Gmail account (it's an email address, not a folder to keep stuff), and which some spotty-face at Microsoft decided wouldn't show up without crashing Outlook on my incredibly slow and totally knackered Dell, designed by.... some other spotty-faced nutter. I'm a graduate engineer from UCL (lord knows how) and regard myself as technically literate. I read New Scientist, BBC Focus (fantastic mag!), watch endless science and tech documentaries, and am a member of the Royal Institution. I founded a number...