Bored!

I am so unbelievably bored.

Apart from one or two notable exceptions, no one has sent me an interesting email in days, and even Facebook is a bit like Scarborough in winter at the moment. Not that I've ever been to Scarborough. I've never been in summer, let alone winter, but I imagine not much happens there in winter. If there is a lot going on in Scarborough in winter then Facebook isn't much like it at all. It's possibly more like the moon. But less cool because the moon has a good view of the earth and the whole low gravity thing going for it.

That said, Facebook did recently go through quite an interesting and fun phase where I got to laugh at lots of old school photos (including class photos from when I was 9 and 13 ish). My sister's friends have started putting old photos on now too so I've been having a good giggle at them.

Work is boring. I've finished off a lot of jobs and those remaining are in a pending state whilst I wait for various colleagues to get back to me. What's the bet they all get back to me at once demanding immediate resolutions?

Knocked up

It's probably about time I made an official announcement on this site that I'm having a baby early next year. Thank god! My pregnancy is the only interesting thing going on right now. It's quite fascinating once you get into it but I think I'm stretching the limits of how much even that can entertain me. (I won't go on about it by the way - I have another blog for that purpose - but I will mention it when it's relevant.) At least I know I'm unlikely to spend my days next year sitting on my arse whinging about being bored. I'll probably be wishing for such days to return to me.

Don't get me wrong, I can find plenty to occupy my time and mind with. I have millions of jobs to do at home (just not necessarily the money to do them), there are a gazillion things I'd like to read and as for things I'd like to do today, well, I've already been to the dentist and I plan to go to the gym but I also need to get petrol, fish and possibly some noodles because I can't remember whether we have any at home. The trouble is that these are not things I should be doing in work time and hence getting paid for.

Laptop battery bingo

I'm fairly pleased with myself at the moment in that I managed to successfully purchase a new laptop battery from eBay. My battery hasn't worked for about 6 months, which kind of made my laptop less of a laptop and more of a desktop, which isn't really what I forked $3000 out for. I tried to do this some time back and was bamboozled by the fact that none of the numbers on the batteries on eBay seemed to match those on my battery. I had already tried to get one from Dell and they quoted me $175 which seemed like rather a lot of money, given my computer was only 18 months old, and surely a battery should last longer than that.

I kept periodically returning to eBay and getting bamboozled so eventually I decided just to buy one from Dell. At least that way I could be sure of getting the right part and didn't have to try and figure anything out for myself. This time they quoted me $290!!!! For a battery!!! A new Dell laptop costs $750 and that comes with a battery! So I did a bit more research and discovered that the confusion is caused by Sony's insistence on measuring their batteries in watt hours (Wh) when everyone else uses miliamp hours (mAh), sneaky devils.

Thankfully, there is one common component on all batteries and that is voltage. Once you know the voltage and either Wh or mAh you can do a simple conversion using the formula:

watt = amp * volt

or

amp = watt / volt

Thanks to camerahacker.com for helping me figure this out.

It's probably a bit more complicated than this but it was close enough. I found a battery with similar power outage on eBay, which I could get shipped from Hong Kong for $87!!! What a bonus. A saving of over $200! At that price I figured I could take a risk as I wasn't able to get full use of the laptop, and I wasn't likely to pay $300 for a new battery. Well, the battery arrived yesterday and I'm happy to say seems to be working well. Kudos to me and ya boo suks to Dell!

Willie Wagtail pursues wife

Just for fun, and to stop everyone else becoming as bored as me, here's a lovely little photo of me and a Willie Wagtail on our wedding anniversary the other weekend (that's mine and Toby's anniversary, just in case that sentence caused any confusion). It was taken at Point Cartwright, near where we were married and the little bird seemed to be oblivious to the fact that I am now a married woman and was following me around rather ardently.


Right ho! I think I have procrastinated enough for one day. I shall go and do something a bit more worth getting paid for but probably terribly boring, and perhaps amuse myself with some Skunk Anansie (that's the kind of mood I'm in) for the remaining hour of the working day.

TTFN!

Do you remember the one with the Dambusters?

For some inexplicable reason, possibly relating to the deluge of old school photographs that are currently finding their wicked little ways onto Facebook, today I started to reminisce about really bad old music.

It may also have been due to the discussion in the office as to how London is possibly going to outdo Beijing in the Olympic Opening Ceremony and ideas as to what the London ceremony might consist of.

The Hairless suggested:

"I am thinking of Charlie riding in all dolled up in his medals and feathered hat upon his faithful steed Camilla mumbling "I'm here Mummy...where is the fireplace that needs lighting?" sounds like the best option."

Sanchez preferred a cockney theme:

"I can see Chaz and Dave getting a good cockney knees up going and the pearly king and queens performing a dance.

"Then we will bring on an army of chavs to drink 5 pints of stella and have a fight.

"I think the finale will involve the Queen waving her hand as usual.

"Quality...."

I liked the cockney theme but went for something a bit grander:

"I think there'll be a million morris dancers prancing around the stadium with their handkerchiefs and sticks, jangling their bells, followed by a massive 500 metre may pole with lots of coloured ribbons and more prancing around.

"Then about half a million cockneys, accompanied by pearly kings and queens and the odd beefeater, will march in and do the lambeth walk. Then we'll bring in a huge replica of the spanish armada, light torches all around the stadium to signify the warning of the armada's approach, then set the ships of the armada on fire (and they'll be full of fireworks so there'll be a massive firework display... in fact... we might even have a few of them sail up the Thames just to be a bit beyond-the-stadium, like in Beijing) and use that to light the torch before flying off to bomb a German factory."

Before I go on, can I please point out that I do not advocate the bombing of anything German and that reference was meant to be purely tongue in cheek. However, Sanchez picked it up and suggested a Spitfire flyover and some tribute to the Dambusters, to which I recommended getting all of the athletes to dambust around the stadium on their march, to the Dambusters music, arms outstretched pretending to be aeroplanes, or fingers round their eyes as goggles.

This, of course, is what triggered the old memory of the song that used to always get played at parties where everyone did the actions and sang along to the Dambusters theme. I got confused and distracted at first by the Superman song (remember that one? Comb your hair, spray, Superman!!) but eventually I identified the Dambuster one as being The Music Man. Both were recorded by Black Lace to annoy people at parties for the duration of the eighties and most of the nineties. And so, for your delight and delectation, here are some awful YouTube versions of both. Reminisce to your heart's desire.

Randoms doing the Superman song at work:



Black Lace sing Music Man on Top of the Pops or something. Bad copy but it's the best I could do. Dambusters are about 2 minutes 50 seconds in for those that can't bear to watch the whole thing.



And just for a laugh, and to show I'm not proud, here's one of the old photos a school friend put onto Facebook, depicting me and my good friend Bev, her with classic poodle perm and me with scary Michael Jackson-style white-face make-up: