Sunday, December 06, 2009

A New Venture

As is life was not busy enough Jan and I have decided to head out on a new project. We came to the conclusion that there are not enough web pages around, the internet needs more :)

We are starting up yet another News and Reviews site. It is still in the very early stages of development but we have high hopes for www.narwo.com. Why the funky name narwo? well it stands for News And Reviews With Opinions! And we have lots of opinions. We will be actively seeking out writers for this project, so if you are interested in being in on the ground floor of the next CNN :) let me know.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

An Update From The Trenches

I have decided to take a few hours off from the giant hamster tread mill that I seem to be on. Time to sit back and smell the roses. It has been quite the week, though in reality it was just another week.

Lets see what I did. Well we had our regular Sunday radio show, and true to form a caller dropped another atom bomb that flew around the internet faster than Obama printing bailout money. So, a good deal of Monday was spent in dealing with the fallout. This is becoming a regular Monday mission.

Somehow, and I am not quite how I managed to read a couple of books this week.

What were they thinking?
- this is a look into the world of sports, and the mistakes people make.

Google Speaks - An unofficial look under the skirts of the Google company.

What You Are Turning Me Into - A depressing look at the world of street drugs.

Reinvent Your Enterprise - A look at big business.

Take The E Out Of Ego - A rather curious self help book.

Rumor & Qix
- A science fantasy adventure.

Wow, even by my standards six books in a week is a lot! Actually it will be seven, I am most of the way through Cocaine Memoire.

As for music and movies, that is all a blur. I know there were a couple of reviews, and a couple of interviews, but I'm damned if I can even remember who with :)

The one thing that I do know is that everywhere I look I see 'stuff' still in the shrink wrap. The piles are reaching demonic proportions. Even worse, most of it was unsolicited, it just arrives!

The other problem are the cases that Jan and I are following, they seem to eat up great swathes of our time on the phone. Anyone that thinks the world of Journalism is fun needs a psychological evaluation! It is time consuming and frustrating. You find yourself awash in material that for one reason or another you cannot print. Confidentiality and legal aspects all weigh in, it becomes a quagmire in no time at all.

Oh crap tomorrow is Sunday, the cycle repeats........

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

WTF

Sorry that I have been so delinquent in writing on here, the days just seem to fly by. My wife Jan and I do actually have a life outside of playing. That life somehow has got us involved in three serious court cases. They have consumed our waking moments for several weeks. In fact it got so bad that Jan pointed out that is I didn't get my head out of them we would not be able to pay the bills.

Jan and I live day to day, I'd love to say paycheck to paycheck, but it is not true. We carve out an existence with $50 here and there. Plowing two people into a 16 hour a day investigation for a week has cased a huge problem. We have had to back off a little, just to pay the bills!

So folks, it is not that I have deserted the blog, I have just been more concerned with actual events rather than my idiocy.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Todays Kids.....

It is Easter break, and we are hunkered down. For the most part Jan and I lead a pretty quite life. Yes I review Punk and Heavy Metal, but the volume is always kept down.

We live in a rather spacious duplex, and for most of the time it is peace and tranquility, our neighbors are hard working folks, and whole days go by without even seeing them, they both leave early for work and get home late. They do have a couple of kids, but they never seem to be around. My guess is that the kids spend the weekdays somewhere else.

Well, here we are on the Monday after Easter, we are swarmed with kids in the 3 to 8 range and there is absolutely no adult looking after them.I counted 8 of them. Just running wild, where are the brains of the parents?

The famous joke about telling a kid 'to go play in the traffic' takes on new meaning. Some idiot left them a gas powered childs 4 wheeler. I saw at least 3 close encounters with real vehicles.

This is beyond my comprehension of stupidity!

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Simon Hits Brit TV Paydirt

There is not much I I miss about the UK, and I certainly have no intentions of returning any time soon. However I did enjoy some of the TV programs, there are some excellent series that have cropped up over the years. I recently discovered a company here in the US that specializes in packaging these classic and contemporary programs on DVD. The name is Acorn Media.

Some of the recent items I have vied include the classic John LeCarre screen adaptions if Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, and Smileys People starring Sir Alec Guinness. The rambunctious Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Night Mares, The Cadfael Collection, and Agatha Christie's Poirot. All great viewing. I liked them so much I have put a banner up for Acorn, check em out, they have lots of great stuff. Just click on the ad.

Oh, and I am too lazy to add links to the reviews, but if you plug 'title' Bloggernews into google you will find them.

Monday, February 16, 2009

My New Best Friend!

I swear that some people have no common sense. We live in a duplex and a family with a couple of young children live next door. They are very nice people, very polite, and about the only bad thing I have to say is that on occasions they play the music a little loud for my taste, but that tends to happen when the parents are MIA. They have a new house guest, I believe it is the ladies younger brother.

About a week ago I spotted something odd early one morning. There was a puppy at the back of the house, it looked well fed, but appeared to be only a couple of months old. It was incredibly shy, and ran away when I tried to get near to it. I guessed that it belonged to someone in the neighborhood and it had somehow got out. The following day I saw the same thing. Now this was really odd!

On day three I noticed a food and water bowl outside my neighbors back door. Later that day I saw the brother with the dog, ah problem solved.

OK, now the damn puppy has adopted me, I can't step outside without getting attacked by this little fur ball. I happen to like dogs so it is not a problem, except getting your toes bitten at 6:30 AM.

Here is the issue though. The property has no fence around it, and these people just leave the critter outside, they are gone everyday from very early, till quite late in the evening. If this puppy is 3 months old I will be amazed, it has no collar, in fact I am quite surprised it has not taken off and got itself run over.

Oh, and our lease specifically states 'no pets'.

All in all I class this whole thing as the very apex of irresponsibility.

These is no doubt that I have spent more time with the darn thing than the owners, after all, I spent several hours outside reading every day.

I don't even know its name, yet I am its best buddy.

I hate to say this, but it is only a matter of time before something bad happens to this cute little puppy. You should only have animals if you are prepared to look after them.

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Plane Crash On The Hudson River

I am not usually a fan of those chain mail jokes that do the rounds on the Internet, I generally do not even open the email, I just put it straight in the garbage can. For some reason I did open this one. No words are required!

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Simon In Print!

Not in a million years did I expect this....

About a year ago on a slow news day I wrote an op-ed piece about a new Temple that had opened in Canada. It cost $40 million to build, and my contention was that it was a waste of money. $40 could finance a good deal of low cost housing, which would be a lot more useful than an ivory tower of worship. Needless to say this article resulted in an amount of hate mail. This of course was the whole point of the exercise, to create dissension.

Yesterday I received an email from a publisher seeking my permission to use the piece in a soon to be released school text book. Get this, it is for a course on religion!

So as of May/1st a bunch of British school kids will be reading my Perls of wisdom hahahahaha

Saturday, January 17, 2009

(Mis)Adventures In Reviewing

Occasionally I venture into product reviews, I don't do it often, and it tends to only be techy type gadgets that have something unique about them. I recently saw a press release for an ultra small external hard drive, the thing was barely bigger than a pack of cigarettes yet could hold 320 gig of data. Better still it appeared to be very flexible, it can be connected via USB, Sata, or Firewire.

I decided that I wanted to play with one, so sent off for a review unit. The PR people were very helpful and told me a unit had been ordered for me and it would be shipping shortly. Fed Ex delivered it on Thursday, and two minutes later I had it in my hot little hands.

The bigest challenge was determining which computer to try it on first. I run a Linux box, and I have had a few hiccups in the past with USB so my first attempt was on an old IBM Thinkpad. I pugged the unit it and absolutely nothing happened! I was not totally surprised, I am pretty certain the Thinkpad is USB 1 and the drive specifically stated USB 2, plus it runs Win 2k, and that may be an issue.

OK, on to the next computer, I decided to hook it up to my linux system and cross my fingers. I plugged it in, and..... absolutely nothing happened. Well once again I was not hugely surprised, I have a IOGEAR media player/hard drive that also does not seem to like Linux.

Oh, don't worry there were still plenty of other computers laying around!

The third attempt would be the proverbial charm, my wife runs a Win XP system with USB 2, this time the unit should bolt right up! So I persuaded Jan to give up her computer for a couple of mins so I could hook up the drive.

I plugged it an and..... nothing happened! Well now I am confused. The company making this gizmo make much of the fact that the unit is easy to open and you can stick in whatever sata drive you want. In fact the box even contains a small screwdriver to get at the ridiculously small screws.

The tech inside me needed to get a peek inside, maybe I could spot the problem of why it wasn't working.

It took no time at all to figure out the problem. There was no damn hard drive in the unit!

I fired off a quick email explaining that it was kind of difficult to review this item, and the following morning a very apologetic company rep called me and told me that a new unit was being sent out asap.