Note: This post is dated 31-Dec-08 to keep it here all year long. New posts will appear below it.

My goal for 2008 is to have more days without than days with alcohol. It's going to be tough because it's almost guaranteed that I'll have a drink every Friday, Saturday and Sunday which means I therefore can only have a drink on one other day of the week every other week just to achieve 50%. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think it's unachievable!

Day:	121
Date:	30-Apr
Wet:	84
Dry:	37
Comment:	Too much stress - I am just driven to drink

My boss in work approached me the other day and mentioned it had been brought to his attention that a blog existed the contents of which could be defamatory and bring the company into disrepute. Having written one or two work related anecdotes in this blog, my first thought was 'oh bloody hell, which in-duh-vidual have I pissed off this time!' But no, as it transpired the supposed content of the said blog was nothing at all to do with anything I've ever written about. So breathing a sigh of relief I eagerly set about trying to track down this other blog. I must admit a little bit of disappointment that after using all my search know how and voodoo I was unable to track down anything anywhere on the Internet. I did however uncover this little gem, though who they are talking about and even if it is our company (there's more than one with the same name) I can't be sure.

“Will there be free beer again?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“You’re not gonna stand outside the barriers smoking all the time, are you?” Jim asked.
“Maybe. That cunt from CompanyX won’t be there, will he?”
“Which cunt?”
“That cunt that was there last time. I fucking hated him.” He pestered me while I was smoking. Thought he was brilliant. I loathe people like him and made no attempt to conceal it when he made small talk with me in July.
“Ah, yeah – no, he won’t be there.”
“Good. Let’s go.”

Anyway, this did get me thinking about whether there are any possible ramifications to anything I've ever written about in this blog as there have been a couple of posts where I've been a little bit critical of people I have the greatest of pleasure working with.

Is anything I've ever written defamatory? I don't think so as no real names have ever been mentioned, it's probably only the people I've written about that could identify themselves. And besides, by definition if it's true it's not defamatory!

Could anything I've ever written bring the company into disrepute? Again I don't think so as I never mention who it is I work for and any details that identify them get changed. OK, so some work colleagues may read this and they'll know who I work for but I don't think that matters as it's only stuff that I'd openly speak about to anybody in work who could be bothered to listen to my ramblings.

I've just done my research and am a little happier now I know that in almost every case where a person has been dismissed for supposedly bringing their employer into disrepute for blogging that almost all of them have won their unfair dismissal cases, and these were people who were very open and critical about who they worked for. So I should be safe with my little occasional rant.

By the way, did I mention I work for the most wonderful company in the world and I only wish I could mention who they are so I could recommend you all go out and buy the excellent products right away!

We've had new lights installed in our office as the others were to dim; now it's like being in a solarium! Our only recourse to prevent blinding headaches and allow us to see our screens is to sit underneath umbrellas.

This is an update to my original post on How to make the perfect Chili. That recipe has been the basis for my chili for many years now but I'm always playing around with it looking for new ways to improve it and I have now settled on a slight variation to the original which I think is more perfect.

Here it is - to serve 3-4.

What you'll need:

• 1 packet of Old El Paso Chili seasoning (this isn't cheating, it's a damn good mix)
• 1 large red onion
• 500g lean minced beef (fresh not frozen, this is very important)
• 200ml of Jack Daniels
• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes
• 1 tin of black eyed beans or pinto beans, drained. (Don't ever use kidney beans)
• 1/3 jar of Peppadew peppers

What you do:

• Finely chop the onion and gently fry for few minutes in a couple of tablespoons of mild olive oil
• Mix in the chili seasoning and fry off a bit to release the flavours.
• Pour in the Jack Daniels - being careful not to flambé it - and let it reduce until you have a nice syrupy consistency. This will be quite quick as the alcohol evaporates and your house will stink of liquor!
• Crumble the minced beef into the frying pan being careful to retain nice chunky meat morsels (which is why you cannot use frozen mince) gently fold it in and let it brown on one side before gently turning to brown on the other (do not stir, it breaks up the chunks!)
• Make sure the meat is well coated with the syrup and allow to simmer for five minutes
• Poor over the chopped tomatoes, beans and Peppadew peppers, gently fold in and allow to simmer for another 15 minutes

Server in a bowl with garlic bread and a good bottle of wine, Wolf Blass Yellow Label cab sav works well.

A couple of weeks ago The Wedding Present played in Cardiff as part of their George Best 20th Anniversary Tour. I was so, so excited about this having wanting to see them live for years and I must say they did not disappoint as you can tell by our huge grins in the last photo below.

We fortunately bumped into Surj, a work colleague friend of Emma's, as it was he who took these photos and advised us to hang around as Gedge would probably be around afterwards.

The gig itself was brilliant; they opened with a mix of more recent tracks, old favourites and some Cinerama stuff before rather bizarrely a man in a rabbit costume came on stage to countdown to the George Best part of the set. I really didn't understand the rabbit but in hindsight it might be an obscure reference to the opening track "Everyone thinks he looks daft"?

There are 7 photos in the album, this is just a random selection.
Click here to view them all.
Click here to view them as a slideshow.

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Gedge

Gedge

Our alarm goes off at 6AM in the morning and the usual procedure is I’ll get up make Emma and I a cup of coffee and bring it back up to bed. Well this morning the alarm sounded and I woke up feeling quite pleased that I’d slept straight through as I’ve been waking really early since coming back from India and not been able to get back to sleep. So I got up, went down stairs to make the coffees and brought them back up to bed.

I sat there sipping my coffee when Emma asks “what time is it?” Six O’clock I reply. “Are you sure?” she says. This gets me thinking oh no have we overslept but I look around and it doesn’t appear any lighter outside than it should do so confused I look at the clock and it’s just turned midnight, I’d only been in bed 45 minutes!

We spent two weeks in Goa, India staying at the Nanu Beach Resort (photos 6, 8) in South Goa. The hotel was On Betalbatim Beach (photos 10-18) situated in the middle of nowhere. This was both good and bad – it was great not being in the middle of a developed resort, we had piece and tranquillity and for most of the time the whole beach to ourselves. On the downside you couldn’t just wander outside of the hotel to go to another restaurant etc.

The hotel itself was nothing special, it was showing its age and in need of a bit of an update. The air-con for instance was definitely no longer very affective and very noisy. The air temperature was very warm even at night it was just too hot to sleep without having the air-con on. There was one night when we had to switch off the air-con as it was so noisy only to discover that it was actually the air-con in the room below us that was keeping us awake! It was so loud that our room was vibrating! I eventually got up in the middle of the night and went to the hotel reception and asked them to sort it out. After a while when they’d done nothing about it I went back to reception and told them I wasn’t going to leave until something was done and if they couldn’t do anything then they’d have to give us a new room! Needless to say they did something about it then.

There was one good restaurant, Martins Corner, a short taxi drive from the hotel which we went to a couple of times. The food there was great and very cheap, you could get a meal for two that in an Indian restaurant in the UK would set you back about £30-40 for about £7!

The food in our hotel wasn’t anything special. The majority of it was vegetarian (90% of Indians appear to eat veg only, probably because of the cost) with one or two token meat dishes. The meat dishes would often be an attempt at a western dish and were best avoided but when they did do Indian meat dishes they were no better. Here in the UK we are used to very good Indian food (chicken tikka marsala is after all the biggest selling dish in the UK) but in India the quality of the meat available cannot compete. One night I had their lamb rogan josh (well mutton not lamb so goat really) which looked really appetising but on eating it you soon discovered the meat was still on the bone making it fiddly to consume and the sauce itself contained many small bone fragments. You soon learned to eat the veg only dishes, which were actually very good and very tasty. However living on vegetable curries for two weeks has had a rather unpleasant affect on my bowels!

One day on the beach one of the local hawkers approached me and as his English wasn't great he handed me a card to read. It turns out he was supposedly medical trained in cleaning the middle ear! I had to read the card twice just to make sure I'd read it correctly and before I knew what was going on he had his tools in my ear scraping away. Of course I couldn't move in case I got injured and so let him get on with it. He was showing me all the wax that was being removed which quite surprised me. When he went on to clean my other ear I let him get on with it thinking he's doing a great job. He starts babbling on about something and then hands me another card to read which says he has found stones in my ear and it costs 250 rupees to remove each! I can feel his tools scraping against a stone and so ask him to yes please remove them. He removed two stones and then demanded the 500 rupees (about £6.50), I manage to haggle him down a bit to 400 rupees but after handing it to him he shows that I'd only given him 300. I am sure he used some slight of hand to make one of the 100 notes disappear but I couldn't prove anything. Anyway, I was feeling quite pleased that my ears were now nice and clean. Later that day whilst walking down the beach someone else wanted to clean my ears and although I told him I'd just had it done he too got his tools into my ear before I could do anything about it. This guy scrapped around and pulled out a huge blob of wax which most definitely did not come out of my ear! I knew then that it was all just a con and the wax and stones they inserted themselves through some slight of hand, not difficult seen as you cannot see what they are doing. I met many more of these 'ear doctors' and told each one of them to get lost in an ever more aggressive manner.

If you ever go to Goa and want to do a bit of site seeing then don’t book any organised trips by your tour operator. Every hotel has a number of ‘resident’ taxis outside which are very cheap and very enterprising. We booked our first taxi driver to take us to Anjuna Flea Market (photos 21, 22) it was a good hours drive from our hotel and on the way back the driver up-sold us a detour to Old Goa (photos 23-35). Old Goa is the old 16th century capitol city and has a number of church’s and cathedrals as a tourist attraction.

All the taxi drivers are on commission from local stores and they’ll always want to do a bit of a detour to various shops on the return journey to your hotel. You don’t have to buy anything but humour them, one of our taxi drivers showed us what he got for delivering tourists to a shop – 12 visits got him a spare tyre for his taxi! One taxi driver took us to a tailors, we didn’t want to go but Emma agreed without realising it and before we knew what was happening we were ushered inside. The tailors will make anything you want made-to-measure for very cheap prices. They bring out the Next Directory, you select what you want and then the fabric you want and a couple of days later it’s ready. We did a trip to Ponda (photos 46-69) to see some of the spectacular Hindu temples and booked it through the taxi driver that took us to Anjuna and Old Goa just because he was a nice chap.

The only trip we didn’t do with a taxi driver, but we could have, was the trip we took to Hampi. As it needed a couple of nights in a hotel at Hampi there was some comfort in knowing everything was pre-booked. Hampi was an 8-hour train journey away (photos 70-80) so there was a whole days travelling to get there and another whole days travelling to get back with just one days site seeing in between. One day probably isn’t enough to do Hampi justice (photos 83-159) but it was well worth it anyway. The train journey alone is an adventure in itself – there was one point when I was listening to my iPod dozing off a bit when I opened my eyes only to see a mouse sat on my backpack cleaning his whiskers!

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There are 175 photos in the album, this is just a random selection.
Click here to view them all.
Click here to view them as a slideshow.

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Cows washing in the river	Rice fields behind hotel	Sunset on Betalbatim Beach	Se Cathedral, Old Goa
Se Cathedral, Old Goa	Sugar stall, Margao Market	Sacred pool, Shri Naguesh Temple, Ponda	Shri Naguesh Temple, Ponda
Inside another Temple, Ponda	Train from Hampi	Train from Hampi	Emma on train to Hampi
Mustard Ganesh, Hampi	Gary at Hampi	Virupaksha Temple, Hampi	Monkeys in Virupaksha Temple

I am sat writing this in Belfast City airport on my mobile phone with a pint of Smithwicks Ale and a sausage roll in front of me. I have another hour before my flight and have to waste it somehow! As someone recently commented to me "that's true über connectivity!"

I'm in Belfast installing network equipment at our NI office and as things went like clockwork yesterday afternoon I had a couple of hours to kill before getting to the airport today. So I thought I'd do the touristy thing again, last time I had enough spare time to go to Giants Causeway, this time with only 2 or 3 hours I had to do something in the city and so decided to have a look around West Belfast in the infamous Falls Road and Shankhill Road area.

This district and others across Belfast are probably like no other place in the UK. The history of the area needs no explanation to anyone, along the Falls Road you have a heartland of the Irish Republican movement and running parallel to it is the Shankhill a heartland for the Unionists. And dividing the two is the so called 'peace line' a monstrosity of concrete and steel that keeps the two communities apart. At the couple of places where roads pass through the wall there are large gates which still today sometimes get shut during periods of heightened tension. Today the wall is nothing more than a tourist attraction with a steady stream of taxis and tour buses bringing people to write there cheesy messages of peace on it.

Personally I think it should be ripped down as it's such an eyesore and symbol of segregation but apparently it gets half a million visitors a year and so someone somewhere is probably counting the money from all those people and thinking it'll cost so much to remove when it's generating so much income. I think that is really sad, whilst it is poignant reminder of recent history and something that will move even the hardest of men it is still a monstrosity, imagine having to live in one of the houses opposite it. And anyway there's loads more to keep the tourists occupied.

There's also all the murals which are on the sides of buildings around almost every corner. There's never any question as to which part of the city you're in, nationalist or loyalist as the murals make it quite clear.

Something I found quite amusing but really only goes to highlight the obsessiveness of the residents was the way in which on the Shankhill side where you had street name plaques on the sides of buildings they had placed additional plaques underneath saying 'Ulster', what's the point really?

I took a few photos with the crap camera in my mobile phone, so the quality isn't that good:

There are 7 photos in the album, this is just a random selection.
Click here to view them all.
Click here to view them as a slideshow.

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A mural on the Shankhill

Someone rang me in work today, the conversation went like this:

Idiot: I'm trying to find the Health and Safety pages on the company Intranet but can't see them, can you help me?

Me: Of course, just click the 'Health & Safety' link on the left-hand navigation bar on the Intranet home page.

Idiot: I can't see the Health & Safety link all I can see is the Business Post home page.

Me: That's not the Intranet, that's the Business Post web site. Go to the Intranet and you'll see the link.

Idiot: How do I find the Intranet?

Me: Do you have an icon for it on your desktop?

Idiot: I have a big blue e is that the one?

Me: Yes it should be.

Idiot: That opens the Business Post website.

Me: Right, then your default home page has been changed. Type http colon slash slash server zero one slash intranet in your browsers address bar.

Idiot: What's a colon?

Me: It's the two dots on top of each other.

Idiot: Oh yes, are those forward slashes are back slashes?

Me: Forward slashes of course.

Idiot: What's next?

Me: server zero one slash intranet.

Idiot: is that a forward slash or back slash.

Me: forward slash.

Idiot: What's after the slash?

Me: intranet

Idiot: It says the page cannot be displayed.

Me: Are you sure you typed it correctly?

Idiot: Yes.

Me: Can you read out to me what you typed?

Idiot: http colon forward slash forward slash server o one forward slash intranet.

Me: Is that an o one or zero one?

Idiot: zero one.

Me: Are you sure it's all spelt correctly?

Idiot: Yes.

Me: Are you sure you used forward slashes instead of back slashes?

Idiot: Yes.

Me: Did you use the slash key on the left hand side or right hand side of the keyboard?

Idiot: The left hand one.

Me: That's a back slash not a forward slash, retype it using the other slash key.

Idiot: Oh, I thought those were forward slashes... What comes after the http?

Me: colon forward-slash forward-slash, that's the right-hand one, server zero one forward-slash intranet.

Idiot: What comes after the last slash?

Me: intranet

Idiot: It still says page cannot be displayed.

Me: Well something isn't typed correctly then.

Idiot: Oh, I'll just keep typing it in until it displays the page.

Me: Well that won't work if you're obviously not typing it correctly. Read out to me character by character exactly what you've typed.

Idiot: h t t p colon slash slash s e r v e r o one slash i n t e r n e t

Me: It's not 'internet' it's intranet i n t r a n e t.

Idiot: Oh it's working now.

Me: I am glad. [as I slam down the phone]

Jan commentated on another post that I'm more patient than I used to be, I think he might be right. I was losing it a bit towards the end and it was coming over in the tone of my voice but I didn't swear at her once! There was a time when I would have cut that converstion off about half way through and just emailed her a link.

We have hanging on the wall in our lounge a copy of The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted in 1562. The painting is a panoramic landscape of death: the sky in the distance is blackened by smoke from burning cities and the sea is littered with shipwrecks. Armies of skeletons advance on the hapless living, who either flee in terror or try vainly to fight back. Skeletons kill people in a variety of ways - slitting throats, hanging, drowning, and even hunting with skeletal dogs. In the foreground, skeletons haul a wagon full of skulls, and ring the bell that signifies the death knell of the world. A fool plays the lute while a skeleton behind him plays along; a starving dog nibbles at the face of a child; a cross sits lonely and impotent in the center of the painting. People flee into a tunnel decorated with crosses whilst a skeleton on horseback slaughters people with a scythe. The painting clearly depicts people of different social backgrounds - from peasants and soldiers to nobles and even a king - being taken by death indiscriminately. (description copied from Wikipedia [click here].)

So why on earth do we have it hanging on our living room wall? I bought the picture almost 20 years ago whilst visiting the Museo del Prado, Madrid where the original hangs. I was completely captivated by the picture which really is something to behold and so bought a copy in the museum shop. I was a youngster in them days still living at home with my mother and I hung the picture on my bedroom wall in a very nice frame made by Mike. The picture stayed there for years before I left home and Em & I moved into our current house. The house was quite bare when we moved in and so we just stuck the picture on a convenient hook that was already in the wall with the full intention of changing it for something more appropriate as soon as. Over 12 years later it still hangs there!

It's funny and a bit embarrassing seeing peoples reaction when they see it there for the first time, they must think we are weirdos or something! Well anyway, I think it's a great picture and it matches our colour scheme perfectly!