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Just goes to show how little thought went into the origenal legislation.

This should be fascinating.

Some thought provoking stuff here. Had I got my thoughts organised I would have liked to take part. As it was I was coming back from Preston on Monday and feeling pretty drained. But many of these people have in a lot of cases reflected my own thoughts anyway.

On Friday a woman stood next to me in a bar, and after a few moments of silence she said.

“you are standing next to a disabled woman.”

I was not sure why she was telling me this or what kind of thing she expected me to say. After a pause I said litely.

“right, well, you are standing next to a disabled man.”

After a few further moments of silence, she slowly walked away.

Nutracheck.co.uk has all sorts of information about how many Calories are in a wide range of products. As a friend of mine has recently gone on a health kick, and someone said to me tonight that there are a lot of Calories in my prefered tipple, Guinness, I thought I would look up some numbers.

A pint of draft Guinness contains 210 Calories. So how does this compare with other popular drinks. There are 256 in Stella Artois, 355 in most Premium Lagers, and 392 Calories in Carlsberg Special Brew! Just as well I rarely drink lager.

I like a pint of Draught Mild which has 136 Calories but like a good curry mild is not easy to find in Worcester. Mild is just ahead of red wine on 119 and dry white wine on 116. I always thought red wine had less Calories than white wine, but if like me you also enjoy a dry white then you would be undercutting the red by 3 Calories, per 175ml glass.

These days a lot of the girls drink things like WKD Blue which stands at 228 Calories per bottle, 18 Calories more than Guinness.

A friend of mine recently declared he was giving up beer in favour of scotch in order to loose weight. while it is true that a single Whisky & Soda only has 56 Calories about a quarter of those found in Guinness and around a third of those found in a pint of bitter. However, one can take 30 to 45 minutes over a good pint of Guinness or bitter, a single Whisky & Soda would probably be gone in a quarter of the time and cost half as much. So over a 45 minute period, most people drinking Whisky & Soda would have spent twice as much money and consumed an equivalent number of Calories anyway.

False economics me thinks. I’m sticking to the black stuff even though on Friday I was charged the princely sum of £2.90 per pint!

A well-researched piece from our friends at the Gruniad!

Now that is a podcast!!!

Not for the easily amused … or should that be not for the easily offended. You figure it out. But I haven’t laughed so hard in ages. Behind the mirth are more serious points than one could wave a white stick at. This has got cutting edge written all over it.

Damon Rose is a much better producer than he is a presenter. And a quick blog search reveals that Damon is gaining a deserved following.

This is pure genius from the Beeb, but not everyone will be amused. I truely hope this podcast flies!

“It must be a terrible thing to be blind but you never hear them complaining.”

This kind of quote does nothing to enhance the quality of life for those aflicted with this horrific darkness. Oh come on! It must be a terrible thing to be raped, wrongfully imprisoned, or be victim of any one of thousands of injustices. But being blind in a developed country in the early 21st century? Is that really such a terrible thing? Besides I bet 3 million quid takes the edge off it a bit!

Rather than printing quotes like this the Daily Record would be better throwing it’s weight behind efforts which actually make a difference such as the Right to Read campaign.

It’s here, and it rocks!

Well ok it’s actually not in the shops in the UK yet as far as I can tell, but you can get N91 in Singapore although the TV ads are hitting UK screens. The conclusion from the boys at allaboutsymbian.com is that yes it’s not perfect but this smartphone really is a daddy! Just holding my breath on the accessability front, still no word from Nuance or CF on making this baby talk yet. But surely S60 3rd Edition is the logical next step for Talks and Mobile Speak. Unless CF is dropping Simbian to concentrate on Windows Mobile 5 smartphone edition.

I have now lived in Worcester just over 4 weeks, and for the most part things are going rather well.  My flat is great if a little on the expensive side, I am enjoying the variety of challenges and opportunities available to me at work, and I have pretty much settled into my new routine.

However, this bank holiday weekend will be a break from that routine as I head north on the train to Preston to visit friends and family.  It will be great to catch up with all the news from the Preston front.  Unfortunately the trip from Worcester to Preston by rail at the time I wanted to travel involves 3 trains and the best part of 4 hours.  However, I am all stocked up with digital talking books, and a few music CDs thrown in my general direction by one of the girls from work.  Not sure what she’s given me, but I’ll run them via FreeDB and/or CDDB when the mobile phone coverage gets a bit better and I can get online with the laptop.  The first one sounded all a bit weird, although good weird.

Having got up at 6:30 this morning and done another full day in the office, I was feeling pretty exhausted when I got on the train at Worcester, but I reckon by the time I get off at Preston I will get my second wind.  Hope to head out for a couple of jars tonight, visiting a couple of family members tomorrow, and I expect I’ll get pretty slaughtered on Saturday night.  Sunday, I intend grabbing a decent Sunday lunch somewhere and maybe I will pop over to Leeds to meet up with more friends.  I am pretty flexable at this stage, the possibilities are numerous.  Monday is a bank holiday and at some stage I will head back to Worcester ready for work bright and early on Tuesday.

It’s great to have an entire bank holiday weekend to myself without having to think about work or anything related to relocation or establishing myself in a new city.  Although as I indicated previously operation Worcester is bang on track.  April has been the most productive month I have had in a long time, bring on May!

Pip pip.

Not content with spamming it’s customers, my Internet service provider, in
my humble opinion, are encouraging us to spam everyone else!

Also spot the contradiction below. Is this a change to the service
conditions or not?

> From: PlusNet Customer Support
> Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 6:01 PM
> To: Customers
> Subject: New features in ‘My Referrals’
>
> Dear David Williams,
>
> This is a notice from PlusNet to let you know that we’ve
> updated the My Referrals programme, with new features.
>
> The main updates to My Referrals are:
>
> – Send up to 5 recommendation emails instead of 1
> – More banners to use on personal or business websites
> – Webmail option to add a recommendation to outgoing emails
> – Widened service to allow non-subscription customers to
> benefit from new referrals
>
> To accompany these new features, the My Referrals terms and
> conditions have been updated.
>
> You can view the updated My Referrals pages at our website –
> http://www.plus.net/my.html?action=mydiscount_static_info
>
> We’re only emailing to let you know about the updates to the
> My Referrals programme. There are no changes the main Terms
> and Conditions for your PlusNet service.
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> PlusNet Customer Support
> http://www.plus.net
>
>
> This email has been sent to you as it contains important
> information about your service and notice of changes to terms
> of conditions. Please do not reply to this email, as this is
> an unmonitored address.