And the band played on...

...in which I discover the joys of the M25

Well it's not quite true to say I "discovered" it; I have travelled on it before, but it's been a while.  My new contract is in Kent, and initially I need to be down here to gather user requirements and so on, which means driving down on a Sunday evening and leaving early on a Friday (trains are not an option this time, as they're simply too expensive and inconvenient, so I'm hiring a car each week).

In its time the M25 has been called a lot of things.  A 117-mile long car park. A rather pointless waste of public money.  The occult symbol Odegra (see Good Omens).  I prefer a more literal description - it's a horribly long and dull stretch of road on which a large minority of people apparently feel that it's perfectly OK to drive like sub-literate barbarians to whom the words "Highway Code" are a mere collection of syllables; and it is also now the bane of my life, especially on a Friday when it acts as a way of stopping me getting home at a reasonable time.

Anyway, I'm staying with friends down here at the moment, which is nice as it means I have someone to talk to in the evenings and they're looking after me really well.  It's been a bit of adjustment as it's such a long way to come but hopefully within a couple of months I'll be able to alternate between being at home and being down here.

So...running.  Yes.  Um.  Oh look, a flying rhinocerous!  Okay, okay, I admit it, I haven't really done any for the last couple of weeks.  We do have a treadmill at home now (and there's one in the garage here too that I can use) so the weather isn't really a problem, but I'm definitely struggling on the motivation front.  So, more effort definitely required there.  On the plus side I do still seem to be losing a little bit of weight each week which will hopefully make the running easier once I do manage to get back to it.  Which will be soon.  Honest.

Apart from that I'm learning lots of stuff about the new programming stuff from Microsoft, but since a very small percentage of people are likely to have any interest in that I shall skip lightly over it.

Lots has probably happened in the last couple of weeks that I've managed to completely forget, which I shall blame on age.  Or possibly madness.  Or both.

In any case, I shall try to make an effort to blog more - it's been a somehat frantic few weeks but hopefully things will settle down a bit now and I can get on with boring you all.

The blog is late!

In which I apologise for the late blog...

Yes, the blog will be late this week. Sorry about that. This is because I'm say in a service station on the M54 with 200 miles to drive...more tomorrow, hopefully!

A somewhat better use of twitter as a customer service tool

In which the colour blue features in a negative capacity

Don't get me wrong, I like the colour blue. Blue skies are nice. Blues music is good. My bike is blue. The shower gel I'm using at the moment (well not this very moment, obviously) is blue.  The book I'm reading has a blue cover.

On the whole though, blue is not a good colour for mashed potatoes to be.  In fact, there are very few foods I can think of that are blue, but tonight my family was subjected to blue mashed potatoes due to the conjunction of my wife being on the phone to me, the potatoes being in a saucepan on the side, teen in training and a bottle of blue food colouring.  Quite why he decided that tipping food colouring into the mashed potatoes was a good idea I'm not sure, especially as he had to eat them.  Apparently they tasted just the same anyway.

Anyway, on with the blog. Slightly late (and from my phone) this week as I had no internet yesterday, which coincidentally is what this bit of the post is about. I asked on twitter to see if anyone else on my ISP was having problems; I got no response, but then today I got an @ message from Demon Broadband asking if I was still having trouble.

Since they don't follow me, they had clearly searched for anyone mentioning Demon and took the trouble to arrange for someone to call to see if it could be fixed. As it turned out it was probably a BT issue, so they couldn't have done much, but I was impressed with the proactive attitude to trying to sort it out.

I was somewhat less impressed when I tried to call the freephone number I had for their automated service announcements and got a service for reporting smokers in Glasgow city centre bus shelters. I'm sure that's very useful, but it's not exactly helpful if you're trying to find out if your ISP had a network fault.  To be fair to them this was because I had an old number on a card they sent me when I set the account up...

Anyway, running and stuff...yeah. I need a running partner I think, I was really struggling tonight (no running since last Thursday) and I only ran 4K.

I would also like to protest at the placement of eateries in the village. On my way to Tesco to buy sandwiches and fruit I have to walk past 2 indian takeaways, 2 chip shops, a pub that does food and a hotel with a restaurant. Can you say "temptation"?

That's it for this week. I shall try to post more later in the week once I'm home.
Apologies as usual for spelling errors and lack of formatting. It's my phone's fault.