I had to call on Herr Heimlich today

(see left) because FOMO boy bit off more than he could chew, namely a sizeable piece of chicken which got thoroughly lodged down his windpipe.... The evening meal started off normally enough, Andrea had come back from her evening run, and the chicken curry was prepared and on the table, and we all started eating..... Then Andrea noticed FOMO boy grasping at his throat... she shouted "HE'S CHOKING!!" ..... I flew across the kitchen and pulled him from his chair got behind him and started the Heimlich manoeuvre on him.... it was well and truly lodged and he had very little air left in his lungs.... it was pretty hard doing this to a 10 year old especially a skinny 10 year old, I knew how hard to do it on an adult, and I know how to treat a baby (yes Freya has choked on several biscuits so far.... it's her trademark party piece )......... but I'd never used it on an older child before.... for all I knew I could have done more damage than good, but not left with many options other than to simply watch him go blue and fall over...... I just ramped up the force of the compressions until out it popped.... I have to say not even I would have attempted swallowing a piece of chicken that big, I was astonished he had even tried !!! ..... (Shudder)

Needless to say he was a very quiet boy for about an hour after that..... I have a feeling his life flashed before his eyes ( be that only Nintendo DSi games and ice poles and Pokemon.....thus far....) ... Although he was under the impression that we could have taken him to hospital and had it removed..... erm no...... unless we could have got him to hospital in under than 3 to 4 minutes..... (rolls eyes)

So other than that bit of drama...... today was pretty unspectacular ..... very very hot, almost too hot to be outside.... I thought about trimming the privet hedge .... but that's as far as it got when I realised that I would have to recover the 25 metre extension cable from the undergrowth as it had last been used at my step daughters birthday party in the garden to power the bish bash box (it's a horse box which the kids use to play in) and hasn't been reeled in since .....

on the veg front the potatoes are coming up nicely, we should have a healthy crop of new potatoes shortly, they are flying out of the ground.... it must be all this brilliant weather we are having recently :)

it's too hot to ride my touring bike through the day at the moment, I'd melt in this heat, but I am getting out on it and enjoy it when I do .... I just wish there weren't so many (big) hills around this place ..... the joys of living in Wales I guess :)

I've got Freya again tomorrow our childminder can't look after her ... not that I mind she is a delight to look after and has me in fits of laughter most of the time....... such a character :)

See that slug ?

That's our broadband that is......except it's a slug who has inadvertently eaten it's way through an entire crop of skunk marijuana and wonders why it can no longer move........

We are back down to an unspectacular 135Kbit/sec on our broadband, the modem down trained overnight and our BRAS profile reset itself..... so we have another 24 hours at slug speed until it resets....(or maybe not) the thing is this shouldn't be happening, if I averaged out our bandwidth over a month since this whole fiasco started we are being allowed a fraction of what we are actually paying for......

It's so bad I have had to throttle the kids PC and limit their bandwidth or everybody else suffers when they use high bandwidth applications on the internet, they are currently enjoying 10k/sec as I am .... getting rather fed up with this to be honest..... Ahhh well Xbox boy ..... you're life is over again......

I feel a Chairman's office telephone call brewing for Monday....

although other than ripping out the telephone lines and putting fibre optic in I can't see how they are going to resolve this...... I'm also reticent about letting another BT engineer over my doorstep because thus far they have lowered our synch speed from 2.2Mbits to 1.4Mbits by altering the signal to noise ratio.... which for every 1db given takes away 200-300 kbits sync speed... if they take us any lower we may as well go back onto 56K modems.....

Anyway that's enough about BT....... Yesterday Andrea and I had a lovely day down at Pendine beach with Freya she had a whale of a time digging in the sand, collecting sea weed and even going for a chest high paddle in the sea after the longest walk she's ever done.... (the tide was completely out).... she even found a winkle .... thankfully she didn't try to eat it ......



We finished off with a walk back to the ice cream shop and treated her to a lovely strawberry ice cream.....I'd show you the picture we took mid ice cream..... but it's not pretty or clever.... ahhh bugger it.... here it is :)


The colour is a bit out because the camera was set to a white point on a previous day.... not Auto white balance..... I could correct it with Adobe Photoshop but that's for another day :) .... it was a brilliant day out, the sort of day you don't want to end really :) and yes that is a black eye on her right eye..... she decided to open a drawer on her eye socket a few days back.... thankfully she didn't hit it too hard.. it's fading now... tough cookie this girl ;¬)

Anyway on the way back Andrea decided Freya needed a hat, so off we went into one of the shops and Freya chose her hat..... see below
We have some friends coming over in about half an hour, we haven't seen them for a while what with our commitments and theirs..... it will be good to see them again

It must be Autumn in America

Because a lot of big names are dropping like leaves on a windy day, I heard this morning that Michael Jackson has died at the age of just fifty. The rumours are already flying about about how he met his death, and of course Farrah Fawcett who died yesterday after a long battle with cancer....


I was never really a fan of Michael Jackson, I liked some of his music, I even bought one of his albums "Thriller" back in the 1980's (who didn't I ask ???) and I have a vague memory of buying the "Off the wall" album but on cassette (yes they sold albums on cassette in those days as well) .... There is no doubt about it the man had talent or he wouldn't have got to where he was in those days.... but it saddened me to hear reports of how messed up he was, as to the truth who knows ? He certainly changed his skin colour and had massive facial cosmetic surgery.. but what makes a person want to change themselves so much and so radically ??? As for the accusations that he was a paedophile... a Jury found him innocent, it doesn't mean he wasn't and it doesn't mean he was...... Juries have been wrong in the past.....did he ? didn't he ? who knows ? if he didn't then that is one hell of a millstone to carry around your neck 24/7


I think only he and possibly his closest friends will ever know that, if he ever confided in them.....He was never really allowed to live a normal life from the age of eleven so it's hardly surprising he turned out the way he did, in much the same way Judy Garland and all the other child stars that went off the rails in later life..............


I'm just waiting now for the media frenzy and all the speculation, and no doubt the scores of people selling stories off the back of his tragic death. This world is a sick place ruled by the power of the fast buck in the back burner, I'm surprised they don't have him pickled and stuffed and posed in one of his iconic poses then wheeled around the world like the modern day Tutankhamen.

One thing for certain his record sales will go stratospheric, the executives who last signed him must be rubbing their hands with glee over this news.... They couldn't let him live in peace and now they can't let him die in peace

Woohoooooo & Ouch

We have broadband again !!! well as much broadband as you can expect living out in the sticks like we do.... but far better than the 29kbit/sec we were getting... we are at a full 1.4 Mbits now :) the BRAS profile has finally woken up and remembered what it's purpose in life is......

So it looks like Xbox-boy can have his internet turned back on, which will please him, his life will no longer be over :) all told it only took about eleven calls to BT to sort it out.... that is providing they have sorted it out, because it's done this before, lulled us into a false sense of security then when we were least expecting it slips back down to semaphore speeds...

Andrea is off work today, she had a really bad night with acid indigestion or at least that is what we think it is, it started after she went out on her run last night, I followed her on my touring bike but soon after finishing her run, she was complaining of pretty bad stomach pain, we both dismissed it, but apparently she had an awful night...... needless to say she's currently ensconced on the sofa with a duvet over her....and she has so far had two cups of tea made for her and they have both gone cold..... She must be ill because

A) she never takes time off work unless its really serious like a limb mutilation or beheading....
B) She never lets a cup of tea go cold.... knowingly

I'm not saying she has a strong work ethic or anything, but sometimes she soldiers on more than is productive or in some cases healthy

I'll keep checking on her, I've offered her Rennie on toast already.... she even turned her nose up at that :(

It was our second anniversary yesterday :)

And it started off quite bizarrely, in that Andrea had bought me a card and placed it in front of my computer and I had got her a card and put it in the airing cupboard, ( you might ask why the airing cupboard ? well she always turns on the immersion heater first thing in the morning for her shower) she completely missed mine and went to work thinking I had forgotten and I sat down for breakfast thinking she had forgotten until after she left for work..... overall a bit of a damp squib... but a few text messages later we were both laughing..... :) and later on we had a lovely meal for two with only the odd interruption from the toothless FOMO boy

These past two years have gone by very quickly for us and for the most part we've kept our sense of humour and had a laugh along the way, we are incredibly well suited to each other, we understand each other, we've even been known to laugh at each others jokes, and we have the most ridiculous conversations from time to time in an attempt to outdo each other in randomness.......and my sleep talking never fails to amuse my wife.... "revolting rotating raspberries" say no more eh ?

It goes without saying that we have also produced a complete nutter and utter darling of a daughter together, who never fails to make us laugh and is so funny, she rarely cries, and has got to the stage of complete gobbledegook speech with the odd word which can be understood thrown in for good measure...... she's trying so hard to talk bless her little cotton socks.... it will come eventually and we'll be telling her to shut up ..... you watch ;¬)

FOMO boy had two adult teeth taken out yesterday, apparently they just crumbled down to his gum margin, apparently it's nothing to do with sugar or sweets or bad dental hygiene....... the dentist said that he very probably had an infection when the teeth were being formed in the gum and they came out with the consistency of dry chalk except weaker...... Anyway he is off school today because of the general he had yesterday, he's no bother really, although I will probably have to threaten him with surgical removal of his Nintendo DSi if he doesn't get dressed before 11am, life is so hard for 10 year olds these days ;¬)

The other two are doing ok, nothing much to report on the two teenagers really, they get on with things, the only things that seem to bother them are lack of broadband and/or lack of lifts into town or if they have signal on their mobiles..... that about covers teenage life these days....

Oh and I've discovered that I can copy recorded TV programmes from our DVR (digital video recorder) I discovered it by accident when I was flicking through the setup, all you do is plug in a FAT32 formatted USB memory stick and dump the raw Mpeg video to it then you can use a free program called any-video-converter and that converts to and from practically any video format you could want, then you can compress it, re-encode it, or edit it, then you simply either burn to DVD or CD or Ipod and you're away !!! it's probably completely illegal but I'm not exactly distributing millions of copies on the web, I'm purely using it to put on the Ipod or to keep a copy of something particularly good, I suppose in reality it's no worse than keeping it actually on the DVR, but considering you aren't allowed to copy a music CD or transfer it to an IPod without the express permission of the copyright holder, I've probably offended somebody.... or maybe not, who knows ?

I was going to go out on a bike ride today but I can't really leave a 10 year old doing a "home alone" by himself, and he isn't up to being let loose on the roads on his bike yet, he tends to panic when stationery or moving objects such as walls and anything else in front of him looms up..... the last thing he tends to use are his brakes, he's at the cycling proficiency of a chimpanzee at the moment, legs down first.......... "ohhh that didn't wor.....CRASH !!".... oops ..... we've actually got a sweepstake running that he'll break either his leg or one of his arms within two months.... we shall see.....

In search of the Golden Fleece

Except my name isn't Jason and the closest I've been to an Argonaut....... is Argos.... the quest in question....... namely the missing broadband bandwidth which is still eluding me and it seems the entire staff of British Telecom....

We were visited this morning by two BT engineers who's first words through the door were "I hear you're having broadband problems ???" I was tempted to say "No we assumed you were both here for the fancy dress party..... what have you come as ? two village idiots ?" .... You may think I'm being a little on the judgemental side here, but the minute he said "Well once the kids get on MSN and Youtube your bandwidth takes a hammering" ....

I tried to point out to him that I wasn't complaining about the lack of bandwidth on the wireless network, MY GOD if we had 54Mbit's on our broadband we wouldn't be having a problem at all !!! No I was complaining about how the ADSL modem down trained to cold treacle speed overnight.......this BT engineer was convinced from whence he set foot in our house that there was nothing wrong with the broadband..... and sure enough after doing a 5 minute test he was overjoyed to tell me that there was nothing wrong with our line or our broadband because we had ZERO errors.....

"Fabulous" I said, now tell me why our ADSL modem down trains to 320Kbits/sec every night ????

"Oh that must be past the DSLAM unit at the exchange it's nothing to do with us"..... I corrected him and said "NO the sync rate is negotiated between that modem you see there and your DSLAM unit at the exchange, it has nothing to do with the PPP server at BT" to which he replied "I wouldn't know about that kind of thing sir....we're not trained for that" ..... that was blindingly obvious from the outset.....

I realised I was talking to a lost cause, so I left them to it and off they went, they eliminated our line by connecting straight through to the DSLAM unit at the exchange and managed 7.2Mbit with no errors !! ..... Well of course they did everybody would LOVE to be five feet from the DSLAM unit.... all this time not one of them considered that the actual LINE might be faulty !!!! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Anyway I immediately rang the Chairmans office and got across my point to them very quickly and they agreed that the line was at fault considering every other angle had been either swapped out or changed...... we will probably get the £99 call out charge levied by BT Openreach like we did before but I'm confident they will cancel it......

I am very slowly losing my marbles over BT and I am convinced if I sent the entire technical staff to a brewery along with an articulated truck full of booze.... they would emerge several hours later stone cold sober.... if you get my drift

Optimus Prime is a wuss

As part of FOMOboy's birthday treat we decided to send him and two of his friends to the cinema in Swansea, well I say send, I drew the short straw and had to supervise along with Xbox boy.... a sort of lads night out with a cybernetic twist.....

I have to say I didn't particularly enjoy the film because it lacked quite a few ingredients..... like a plot for instance.... ok there was a plot but it was thinly disguised under a smorgasbord of CGI special effects, which I suppose you would have to have considering Autobots are not amongst us and that mild mannered JCB that you see parked up on the side of the road on the way to Tesco's does not turn into a laser cannon toting metallic die harder John Mclane....(minus the white vest of course) .... the CGI stuff was pretty good for the most part but there was a lot of close up fight scenes with these monstrous robotic meccano kits, and to be honest you couldn't actually tell what was going on for 70% of the time.... needless to say the Autobots under the resurrected Optimus Prime won the day over .... (shock horror) and the Decepticons were hammered (shock horror) evil loses out to the big bucket of nicely coloured bolts.......

That said FOMO boy loved it and thought it was AWESOME, myself and xbox boy then had to suffer three 10 year old boys yabbering in the back of the car all running on sugar overload from 3 enormous popcorn servings and 3 drinks the size of a small waste bin each......... all the way back from Swansea to Carmarthen.......all whilst he got it in the ear from his girlfriend via text for some minor infraction such as having the nerve to be caught in some "other" girls photograph and the said girl posting her pictures complete with xbox boy on Bebo..... I mean how degrading and disrespectful for the poor girl..... (rolls eyes)

It's FOMO boy's birthday !!!

Yes shadow boy has reached the age of 10 years old as of today, he's also been given the title of FOMO boy or Fear Of Missing Out boy..... or in other words if somebody puts some toast on then he has to have some toast, if Andrea and I go out on the decking for a chat or just to simply soak up some evening sun ..... yes you've guessed it FOMO boy makes an appearance.....


He got his dream present this morning a Nintendo DSi ... he had to trade in his old DS-lite to get it mind, personally I think a PS2 an Xbox360 and a DSi are far too many consoles to have, mind you his dad has the Xbox and said it's being repaired, but it's been months now....... anyway life on a console seems that is the way of the world these days, we've tried to wean him off console games and fair do's he does actually step out blinking into the sunlight sometimes and rides his bike, which is more than can be said for the love sick xbox boy, who isn't very chuffed with me at the moment because I have banned his Xbox off the internet until we get a decent amount of bandwidth back off BT.....

I actually got sick of it, there I was one evening just trying to get my email and it was taking days to download, so I logged into the router and had a look at the statistics page and there he was on his MAC address sucking the very life out of our pityful broadband.... I flicked the off switch on his MAC address and as if by magic my email arrived within seconds..... followed thirty seconds later by him coming into my office and saying "my IP address has gone and my gateway....???" to which I replied "I know.... I turned you off"......I think he muttered something along the lines of "That's so gay...." ....whatever that means in Teenspeek these days...... anyway I've told him his xbox is off the net for the foreseeable future at least until BT sort out the wet string connection we currently have..... he was not impressed..... well I can understand it, that's nearly 80% of his life gone down the swanny in one fair swoop..... he might even have to communicate with the family heaven forbid, instead of using the place like a hotel 24/7 .........

I wanna be like you hoo hoo

Well it's happened, my sister is now Baloo at her local cub and scout centre/thingamy .... it's official even her sons have to call her "Baloo" not mum whilst there.... To be honest I can't see how she has the patience to herd a gaggle of boys (or is it boys and girls these days ? I know not) ..... and I was itching to ask if she had to wear a fur costume and who clips her claws ??? so many questions..........


I was kidnapped by my parents today to sort out their Skype to talk to my cousin in Australia whom they are going to visit fairly soon.... to be honest it will be a fantastic holiday for them, although it's a long flight with a short stop off at Singapore.... I think the last time my mother actually flew in an aeroplane they had to have a bloke stand at the front to flick the propeller around shouting "CONTACT!!! TALLY HO!!!"

I'm sure they will have a blast once out there and it's very kind of Sue to put them up and show them the sights and sounds of Australia, they have sorted out their passports so it's just a matter of waiting now, the flights are booked even !!

anyway I must shoot off to do my house husbandry bit, now where did I leave my pinny !!!

British Telecom and BBC iplayer

For those of you unacquainted with the BBC iplayer it streams TV programs to your computer screen and is by default a pretty high bandwidth application, it also allows you to download programs from "other" iplayer users torrent style, so when you download a program to watch it, it sits on your hard drive and as long as iplayer is active shares your bandwidth with other people who want the same tv program.....

BT are making noises that the BBC should pay them for this "extra" load on their network, I'm sure the BBC pay handsomely through their nose for the current connection they have to the internet to open up their archives to the paying public, and BT wholesale charge their customers and other ISP's handsomely for the use of their bandwidth and infrastructure... but now BT are asking the BBC to pay twice for the same transfer of the same data.... that's a bit like demanding that car manufacturers pay for the wear and tear their vehicles cause on our roads on top of road tax the motoring public pay....

This smacks of BT running out of bandwidth to share amongst its users and the 21CN upgrade they have in the pipeline for all of the exchanges simply being too little too late, BT already use packet shaping and throttling in the evenings which can turn what should be a swift transfer of data into a long drawn out process with lots of Doohickeys thrown into the mix, and the powers to be have probably prohibited an increase in broadband charges because their customer base would vote with their feet and simply swap to an ISP that was cheaper...... so BT are in a lose-lose situation of their own making.....

Which brings me neatly around to our broadband connection which quite frankly is not as advertised "a blistering headlong rollercoaster ride on the information superhighway....." it's more a sedate stumble with the help of a zimmer frame through a vat of cold molasses.....

Although I have it on good authority that BT will fix this problem, like they have been attempting to do for several weeks now with the urgency of a dope smoking quadriplegic rastarfarian sheep herder..... needless to say if I had held my breath I would have been dead and buried months ago........

This is funny

Dear Mr. Darling,

Please find below my suggestion for fixing Britain ' s economy. Instead of giving billions of pounds to banks that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan. You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:


There are about 20 million people over 50 in the work force. - Pay them £1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Twenty million job openings - Unemployment fixed .

2) They MUST buy a new British CAR. Twenty million cars ordered - Auto Industry fixed .

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage - Housing Crisis fixed .

4) They must send their kids to school / college /university - Crime rate fixed

5) Buy £50 of alcohol / tobacco a week there ' s your money back in duty / tax etc

It can ' t get any easier than that!

P.S. If more money is needed , have all members of parliament pay back their falsely claimed expenses and second home allowances.

It's not looking good is it ?

What with General Motors going into some sort of bankruptcy coupled with a large swathe of our trustworthy politicians suddenly admitting "accounting errors" or "genuine mistakes" when they have been caught with their hands in the till and on the make.... even our brilliant Chancellor of the exchequer has unreservedly apologised and said he had made an "inadvertent administrative error"......He's a bean counter for God's sake if he can't keep his own house in order what hope does he have of balancing the UK's books !!!

These are the people running our country !!! not only do they want the power but also as much money as they can scrape out of the trough.... politicians have sunken to an all time low.... but you can't help wondering if all this isn't interconnected with big business ie/ the banks ..... they were hauled over the hot coals so lets haul the squeaky clean politicians over those very same hot coals and see who gets burned.....

if somebody had been fiddling their expenses in a normal company the very least they could expect is to be sacked and/or be investigated for fraud by the police...... this has obviously been going on for a VERY long time...... I wonder how many other retired politicians feathered their nests whilst in public service ????

it's all a house of cards I have a feeling lots of things will start toppling down I don't think we've heard the last of this by a long shot......


The only other thing that deeply saddened me today was the story about a couple and their 5 year old child who jumped off Beachy head, well they did the child didn't ....the really sad thing is the child was found inside a rucksack and there was another rucksack with his toys in it.... obviously the child didn't want to jump off the cliff so by the looks of it they made a game out of it..... that's the only explanation I can think of regarding the rucksack filled with the child's toys.....it beggars belief what they said to that child before doing the deed......selfish bastards .....

These kinds of stories make me really angry.... I've got no problem if somebody wants to "off" themselves...... its your life do what you want with it...... but don't drag innocent kids with you to your death....kids who trust you and love you, and have a right to live their own life, with or without you..... but to take them with you.......that is just pure selfishness and it's undiluted evil.... but who knows what goes through the mind of somebody who is so disturbed that they see death as their only way out of a situation.

Oh the weather has been nice.........


Addendum :- it seems the boy had died of meningitis a few days before and they couldn't come to terms with his death ...... I suppose with that level of grief you could be driven to do strange things, but putting your dead child in a rucksack then throwing them off a cliff top and then yourself does seem a little bizarre... but I suppose you assume anybody that is found at the bottom of a cliff must have either jumped been pushed or slipped and was very much alive when it happened.....