Category Archives: Uncategorized

Inflation

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I’ve always been thrilled by the sound of hot-air balloon’s burners (i’m easily pleased).

The photo above was taken in a small town in Spain when I was following La Vuelta (1997).

I would normally steal some amazing shot from Gurgle Images to illustrate my post but have at last found my photo collection on an old USB stick.

The inspiration for this post came when I was checking out my daily newsletter from the excellent Designboom website, I hope you will be amazed by this balloon photo….

…and then visit designboom for the full story.

How I remember passwords

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Some time ago, I tried to help someone whose Hotmail account had been hacked.

This person (who shall remain nameless for fear of embarrassing Nicole) used the password

STUPID….

Just the 6 letter word you understand, even the punctuation I added above would’ve made it slightly more secure.

For a password to be secure it should be at least 12 characters in length and made from a combination of numbers, letters (upper and lower case) and the various punctuation marks and other symbols on your keyboard.

But how does one remember such a complicated collection of characters without writing it down?

Easy! You DO write it down  -but in a secure way.

I have 30+ passwords of 16 characters that are written down in an easily remembered code. Some of the list looks like this:

Amazon  Gn R Blk Blu
Mozy  Gn Blk Blu Red
JobsToday Blk Blu Gn Red
voda gitwizard56 Blu Gn Blk Red

So my ‘JobsToday’ site’s username (deleted here) is followed by my password which corresponds to four groups of four characters which I remember because each group is represented by a colour – Black, blue, green and red.

Using the grid above, read the corner characters clockwise for each coloured box and my password would be

/Ca:#&)=r!?9b497

This looks incredibly complicated, but use this system for a few weeks and you will remember that ‘Green’ means r!?9 and the other groups will be just as easily remembered.

Keep your list as an email in TWO email accounts and write down the password (somewhere secure) of one of your email account passwords until you remember it!

Misunderstood

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piano

At Emerson College there is quite a heavy bias towards arts courses, with wood and stone sculpture, painting and pottery, as well as the performing arts.

When this weeks new students arrived on Sunday, I found myself sharing a table at lunchtime with 2 middle-aged guys who hail from Yorkshire.

Phil works at a Camphill community and has done a few courses at Emerson in previous years.

I asked him what course he was doing this time round.

“Clowning and maths”, he replied.

A forkful of green Thai curry came to a halt inches from my mouth.

“Clowning and maths”, I repeated, searching his face for a clue.

“Yes”, he said, as I looked to his colleague for confirmation. Dave was nodding.

My curry returned to it’s plate.

I looked at Phil, and back to Dave, to see if I was missing the joke somewhere.

“Clowning and maths ?” I tried again, slightly incredulous now.

Phil gave Dave a look that said “is he deaf or stupid?” and me a pitying look as he again said “yes”.

I laughed weakly and said “that’s a weird combination…….”

“Not really” said Dave “the mask helps bring out a more expressive side of the clown…”

“Oh! Clowning and MASKS” I said laughing……

I was telling this story at tea break today and several people nearly choked on their gingernuts. When everyone had recovered, the conversation got round to other misunderstandings.

I was reminded of a friend who was taking a group of builders to a site up in London one day very early in the morning. As they rounded a bend in a country lane, they collided with a deer. The battered Ford looked much the same as it had before the accident, i.e. as if it had been driven over a cliff!  The unfortunate animal also looked as if it had been driven over a cliff, and was killed outright.

Never one to look a gift horse hind in the mouth, my friend had his crew load the carcass into the van and they continued on their way.

When they arrived at the site, one of the builders was instructed to drive the van back to Sussex and put the deer in my friend’s garage.

On arriving home that evening, my friend was amazed to see that the normally quiet cul-de-sac where he rented a house, was blocked by police vehicles and lit up with floodlights.

The houses were set back from the road and a steep driveway led to the garages. The steep driveway to my friend’s neighbour’s garage was slick with blood, and several police officers were standing looking at a very dead deer. A visibly shocked old couple stood nearby being consoled by other neighbours…………..

Promotion

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carMy boss is now travelling in France on his honeymoon.

Today was my first day fully in charge at Wealden Flowers.

My first job when I arrived at the gardens was to count how many flowers we had available to sell and contact one of our main customers, Hilary Moore Flowers.

Hilary has a floristry business with branches in Lewes and Forest Row.

There are a lot of weddings at this time of the year, Hilary supplied the flowers for 5 this weekend!

White sweet peas seem to be all the rage for weddings at the moment. Unfortunately, our 3 beds of sweet peas have been suffering under the onslaught of the rain and it is difficult to keep up with the demand. So filling orders is made more time consuming than it would normally be.

Eventually all the flowers were picked. As well as the sweet peas, today’s orders included Zinnias, Sunflowers, Dahlias and Sweet William.

After delivering the orders I had to take a tyre to the repair shop to have a puncture mended. I was quoted £18.50 for this! Seems very expensive, but I can’t remember the last time I paid to have it done, my friend used to work in a tyre business so I always got mine done for free. When I went back to pick up the tyre, I was told that it couldn’t be mended because a nail had punctured too near the sidewall. This means a new tyre. The shop only has Firestone in stock in that size –  £88!!!

The tyre in question was from an old wreck of a transit belonging to the college where my boss has his gardens. He had borrowed it to transport tables, chairs, glasses, crockery and the seemingly never ending amount of paraphernalia that is required to stage a wedding reception .

After we had finished rushing around tidying up after the party at the weekend, we loaded all the borrowed/hired stuff into the van and set off to deliver it back. 100 metres down the road we punctured, in the single track road that leads to my bosses house. This road is actually a bridle path and the only traffic ever seen on it is on it’s way to or from the few properties that are up there.

Of course, ‘Sod’ had invoked his law and a car came to a halt in front of us. 2 minutes later another vehicle appeared behind us!

After locating the jack and wheel brace, we couldn’t work out how to remove the spare. After much scratching of heads and a phone call to the regular driver of the van (no, he had never had to use the spare, so couldn’t help us) we finally worked it out.

5 minutes later and things got worse….the van fell off the jack!

Nobody was hurt, but I was beginning to wish my head had been underneath to finally put me out of my misery. I wasn’t being paid enough for this, in fact, I wasn’t being paid.

I ran back to the house and got the much smaller jack from the car I am using this week. We used this to lift the car enough to release the trapped jack that the van had fallen on. Then we put the original jack in a more sensible place, at my insistence, as nobody else seemed to have a clue what to do.

We lifted the van.

Fitted the spare.

It was flat – of course it was flat, what else did you expect!

Run back to the house and get air compressor.

Pump up tyre.

Deliver stuff in van.

*****

I had hoped to take lot’s more photos of these

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but decorating got in the way and by the time I had finished they had all grown up and were nearly ready to fly away.

I did get some more shots but they are not good enough to publish. I also took some video footage on my battered digital camera, setting it up on a tripod close to the nest. The results were quite good, but when I attempted a DaddyP moment, the upload to YouTube was going to take a ridiculous amount of time and I don’t have video editing software as yet, so the Blackbird Blockbuster will have to wait.

Talking of the ‘old git’, I think he really may be coming down with something……..

Old Man Funny Face