Posted by Johnnie
Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:10:00 GMT
Here is a tip for increased success in life, which I give to you, my faithful reader (or perhaps even “readers”) out of the goodness of my extensive heart. Following this rule faithfully will guarantee a less troublesome life. The tip is this:
If you have recently moved house, and your new house is – literally – next door to a primary school, do not, under any circumstances, get out of bed at about nine o’clock and wander round in front of your open bedroom window in nothing but your boxer shorts.
This tip was brought to you by I Hate Sheep – making the world a better place, one idiot at a time.
Posted in Annecdotes, Ego, Johnnie Recommends, Local Things For Local People | Tags curtains, fail, public nudity, school, tip | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Johnnie
Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:51:00 GMT
Today I found a pork scratching in my bag of pork scratchings that was at least twice as big as any pork scratching I have ever before encountered. That was a worryingly important milestone in my week.
Posted in Annecdotes, Ego | Tags annecdotes, ego, pork scratchings, sad | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Johnnie
Wed, 26 Sep 2007 09:51:00 GMT
I was in a pub last night (which, apropos of nothing, served the most piss-poor watery excuse for beer that I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter), and they were playing Christmas carols. Loudly, consistently. The Most Annoying Christmas Tunes In The World Ever 3 on constant loop.
Now, check the timestamp on this post. It’s almost exactly two months till Christmas. If it’s now acceptable to start the relentless Christmas cheer at the end of September, that means I’m going to be forced to listen to Slade for a sixth of my life. That’s too much to ask of any man.
Posted in Annecdotes, Music, Rants | Tags beer, christmas, marketing, slade | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Johnnie
Sun, 26 Aug 2007 13:29:00 GMT
I’m writing this from one of the public-access terminals at my local library. It’s a thin client system, which needless-to-say runs Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. Gah!
Every two minutes, the system tray pops up a balloon to helpfully tell me that A Java update is available. Apparently I also have unused icons on my desktop – click here to clean them up. Every three minutes, that one.
Finally, the most annoying Helpful Windows Prompt™ of all time, Your computer needs to be restarted in order for the new updates to take effect. Restart now? No, Windows! Don’t restart now, thank you very much! In fact, don’t restart at all. As I’m not logged on as an administrator, I don’t have the privileges to restart anyway, so if I clicked the restart button, you’d just tell me I couldn’t. You know it, and I know it, so stop bugging me! Goddam it! Every five accursed minutes!
God, this site looks fugly on IE, doesn’t it? Sorry about that, those who are forced by circumstance to use The Cancer Of The Internet. Those who do so by choice have earned my eternal hatred. I’m not going to fix it – I spend far too much of my life making websites work under IE.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. The restrictions on this computer are crazy. I just tried to open up a second IE window to grab some urls for this post. Apparantly This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Are you kidding me? Two browser windows is too much anarchy for you? Give me a break.
Ah-ha! I’ve just remembered – I’ve got Portable Firefox on a USB stick in my bag. Happy browsing here we come … nope. Can’t use external storage either.
Bollocks to it. I’m going home. There’s a *nix box with my name on it.
Posted in Annecdotes, Geek, Meta, People I Hate, Rants | Tags annecdotes, frustration, geek, internet explorer and why it must die, linux, meta, microsoft, rants, restrictions, thin clients, windows | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by johnnie
Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:50:00 GMT
I’m back in Yorkshire for the weekend, and I travelled down by train with Laura’s cat in a catbox. The ticket inspector noticed the catbox at my feet.
“What have we got in the box, then?”, she asked, in a slightly patronising manner.
“Well,” I replied, “I think it’s a cat. I mean, it was when I set off, but until we open the box we just can’t be sure, can we?”
She looked at me for a moment with an expression of deadpan confusion.
“Yes we can,” she eventually offered, “you can see the paws through the holes in the side.”
Posted in Annecdotes, Bad Gags, Ego, Geek | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by johnnie
Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:39:00 GMT
This is a story that happened to a friend of mine. Not to me. I’m legally obliged to specify this. In fact, it was my friend’s friend. I don’t even know the guy. This might not even be true. Definately not me. Okay? Tell you what, let’s call him Ronnie.
So, Ronnie had a phone. Yes, it looked a lot like my phone. It was a PDA/phone thing that ran on a main rechargeable battery, but had a second, non-rechargeable back-up battery to preserve data when the main battery was low.
A little while ago, a message popped up on Ronnie’s PDA screen.
Your backup battery is dangerously low on power. Please replace it immediately to avoid data loss.
Fair enough, thought Ronnie, I’ll do that. He looked in the phone’s manual to find out what kind of battery he needed. There was no information. He took the back off the phone to look for the battery. There was none. He Googled ran a Google search on the phone model and the phrase “backup battery”. The results were suspiciously low on usable content.
Read more...
Posted in Annecdotes, Ego | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by johnnie
Wed, 16 Aug 2006 09:11:00 GMT
I’ve been out of contact with a lot of people for a while. Here’s the reason. I moved house.
We were looking for a new place slightly further out of Edinburgh for a while, but they all wanted two month’s rent in advance, which we couldn’t afford, so we gave up. That’s when one of Laura’s friends mentioned that she was looking to rent her house because she was moving in with her boyfriend. We went to look at it. It was bloody gorgeous. She only wanted one month’s rent, so we said we’d take it.
She wanted us to move in immediately, but we had two months notice to work off on our current place. We rang the estate agents, told them we wanted to move out, and asked them to advertise the place straight away.
Two days later, a nice New Zealand couple came to look round the flat. They said they’d take it within ten minutes of walking through the door. They wanted to move in that weekend.
So. We packed on phone a removal company on Thursday, packed on Friday, moved on Saturday, went back and cleaned the old flat on Sunday, and we’re all settled by Monday.
That, combined with some really unpleasant personal life stuff (ask me if you’ve got an hour to kill) has meant that I’ve been off the radar a little. Sorry about that. Back now.
Posted in Annecdotes, Ego | no comments | no trackbacks
