Odd Thomas Odd Blog

Ever since I passed my driving test last Millenium*, I have always made sure that I have carried my license around with me in case I get pulled over. For the first twelve years, my license remained in pristine condition as it hibernated in my cash box for eleven-and-a-half of those years! Then, back in 2000, I bought my first car - which I am still driving today - and my license found a new home in my back pocket, where it was subjected to all kinds of abuse from being sat on to enduring the heat generated by a little salsa dancing. People always said to me that I need not carry it around as it was unlikely I would get pulled over. Being the kind of nervous person I am, that didn't stop me worrying about it. Fast forward to last Thursday and it finally happened. I had been allowed out of rehearsals a little earlier, so headed to my mate's to play PS3 for a bit as I have still to get one of my own. As is normal with gaming, things went on a little longer than expected so I di...

I think that, perhaps, I am starting to settle a little into my new role: today I had to 'have words' with one of the little fledglings. By 'have words', I am in no way referring to the police's interpretation of the phrase (according to my contact in the Met), as that kind of behaviour would result in them 'having words' with me and would put a real dampener on the blogging. No, this was more the bringing into line an individual who has been taking advantage of the relaxed atmosphere here. Whilst we do not operate flexi-time per se, if someone is a little late one day then as long as they make up the time, no problem. I'm as guilty as the next guy for being a few minutes late in, but at least I regularly stay into the evening hours: if anything, the company owes me hours, not vice versa! Although this chap is consistently late by anything up to thirty minutes, he has actually started to make up the time recently, possibly because he is now on some work...

I have to confess that blogging has become rather difficult of late, mostly because work has been taking up pretty much all my time. Unfortunately, this means the only thing to write about - other than my rampant spending habits last weekend - is the currently frustrating world of work. Boooooring! So, last night, I sat down to write something, even if it was only about the impulse purchase of the rather good Spiderwick Chronicles . Nada. I just wasn't in the mood. Then I heard the sirens. Living so close to the local fire station it is inevitable that you will hear sirens at some point and on quite a regular basis, but they rarely come down my road. When the sirens stop at the end of the road, you can be pretty sure they are turning in, which has me leaping to the window like a cat at a goldfish bowl. The last time they headed into the car park for the flats was to put out a car that had been dumped by joyriders and set alight, so my first thought was that the same had happened...

Its been a couple of months since I went through the search keywords that were somehow leading people to this little corner of the web, so I thought I would take a peek to see if anything more of bafflement had been used since April's "white fuzz on my oscar"*. Well, it seems that Gimli is still topping the charts through May and June.  Interest in the diminunitive one does appear to be waning a little, though with searches like "gimli !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" its easy to think short, hairy men are in high demand! To be honest, with the lack of posts I have been making recently, the number of people popping in for a brief spell has dropped quite dramatically, so the weirdness factor of the searches is disappearing with it. However, these are the best of the bunch from the past two months: "police sex toys" backgrounds of bellybuttons bellybutton fluff m...

Last night, I finally got around to getting some of Sunday's pics posted to Flickr . Unfortunately, there is nothing really there that I can add to a portfolio but there are a couple of reasonable ones that I thought I'd post here for you to have a butchers at ... its gotta be better than taking your time up with another epic account! At the end of the first display, the mounted police lined up and made sure their rides shared the applause. Rottweilers are gorgeous dogs, but you don't want to be chased by this one! These dogs love their job... ...as you can see by the fact that they launch themselves at their targets! In the Horse and Hound show, four teams consisting of one horse and one hound competed for the fastest time on the circuit. I believe that the guys at Bower Ashton have this open day every two years, so keep your ears open for this in 2010 ... if you remember!

Despite popular opinion, the good folk in our police forces are actually human beings and have desires just like anyone else ... as this pic by Brian Clear proves! But who can blame the guy, Davina is a bit of a babe :-)

They say that what goes around comes around and that whatever wrong you do to others will be returned back to you three times over. I have to confess that I am something of a believer in this ... which kind of helps when I'm fuming over someone who I feel has wronged me in some way. I think this morning was an example of this in action ... only in reverse! I live in a block of flats that, fortunately*, has its own car park. The trouble is that the road it joins has so many cars parked on it that its hard to see any oncoming traffic, especially with the white vans that park close to the entrance: exiting in the morning becomes something of an accident lottery, and I've come close to hitting jackpot on a number of occassions. This morning, that jackpot nearly included a police car cruising down the road! Luckily, where I had been edging out to see past the vans, he had already seen me and started to slow down. Doesn't stop you wondering if you're about to get pulled ov...

A couple of weeks ago, I succeeded in completing a website implementation using Immediacy CMS for one of our customers (feel free to check it out here *). A week later they went live and their CEO sent an email to them thanking everyone for a job well done and for all of the effort they put into it. Did our CEO - who also happens to be my line manager - mirror the gesture to his own staff? Did he buggery! Another successful project under my belt and he couldn't even congratulate me on a job well done. Thanks for the support! All week I have been carrying out further tweaks and adding in some nifty workaround coding to get round the limitations of several of the plugins, helping the girl at the customer site who has been lumbered with the content management. Its been great, helping someone do a successful job, and she is always grateful for the effort that is put in. Around 9am this morning, a box arrived by DHL with a logo for Bettys emblazoned on the side. At first, I thou...

When it comes to family entertainment my sister is up there with the best, providing many nights of humourous tales. However, she has some rather stiff competition in the form of her husband who, on a recent shout to a public disturbance, succeeded in CS -ing himself instead of his target. Classic!

For my birthday this year, my cousin bought me a great t-shirt with the phrase 'I see Dumb People' emblazoned across it, which I am considering either having blended with my skin as a permanent fixture or copied as a tattoo! Okay, in fairness, I can occassionally be one of those dumb people if I'm not thinking straight, but working in IT you get to meet more than your fair share of people who managed to somehow stumble into the gene pool. Yesterday, I had a call out of the blue from a customer we had finished doing work for three months ago, wondering where we were with fixing an issue they raised in May. Um ... considering we responded with a series of questions and never heard anything back, we're not likely to be anywhere with it, are we?! Especially as they are not paying us for support!! *sigh* Anyway, I said I would look into it and asked them to send me the creation scripts for the database configuration in order that I could duplicate the situation in developm...