Wednesday 28 June 2006

Moaning Tennis Players

...and I don't mean Monica Seles. Or did she grunt?

Anyway, Wimbledon is upon us, and the annual debate about equal prize money for men and women has opened again.

Venus wades into tennis cash row

At the moment the men get £655,000 while the women get £625,000. According to Venus, this sends the message that women are 'inferior'.

The article does mention that 'Some argue that men deserve more because they play up to five sets while women play up to three.'

Well, duh! I'd like to actually see a good argument against the above point.

Surely the women should get even less - 3/5 that of the males.

If the men and women both played best of 5 (or 3) then of course they should get equal prize money - regardless of any arguments that the men's game is more entertaining and gets more viewers, which does suggest women are inferior, which, of course, they are not.

Disco Motorbike Man

Fraser's right - this clip is hilarious! (best with sound on)

Tuesday 20 June 2006

Breaking news!

Well the previous press release was really just a bit of a joke, but then it seemed like a decent idea to put out a real press release so we did so with PRWeb.

You can use them to send free press releases, but I opted to pay $40 to increase the press release's exposure. The press release I wrote received an editorial score of 4/5, so my PR 'value' got upgraded to $80.

So here is the officially launched press release:

ComprehensionClothing.com Launches Phonetically Engineered Clothing.

I have had one media contact through it so I will let you know what happens with that.

Monday 19 June 2006

Peaceful Summertown

It's so lovely. Everyone is so nice. I love it so much I might even start voting Tory.

Then tonight, when W and I were in the local delicatessen (Co-op), I witnessed one of the shop workers getting head-butted by an extremely ugly bloke with no chin (lack of chin increases relative momentum of head-buts - quite an evolutionary advantage when you think about it). I think his nose was broken. W was quite impressed by the realistic 'nose breaking' sound.

I would have leapt over there and kung-fu'd no chin's ugly a$$ but at that very moment a tiny kitten was crossing the road outside so I had to do some ninja backflips to go and rescue the kitten from being run over by a huge lorry!

Being a ninja rocks, but it does present tricky dilemas at times.

Sunday 18 June 2006

Passenger Lifts and Stairlifts in Scotland

Just thought I would mention Dad's company Caltech Ltd, who install passenger lifts and stairlifts throughout Scotland.

Lifted from his front page:

Established in 1978, Caltech now has a proven track record as a truly independent lift designer/manufacturer. Based at a central situation in Scotland, Caltech supplies and installs lifts throughout the country.

We offer a prompt 24 hour call out service, 365 days of the year backed by our team of skilled lift engineers. Various types of maintenance contracts are available from fully comprehensive to standard contracts covering all makes of lifts.


One of the few things I miss about the NIMR, is that I worked on the 6th floor there, so I got loads of exercise from running up and down the stairs. Now I work in a ground floor office, so don't really move quite as much. Those lifts at NIMR were really dodgy.

Today's activities: I played in a mixed-Netball tournament today with some people from work. I scored some goals and got surnburnt. I didn't wear a skirt, although I was tempted. I also stubbed my toe and now it's purple-ish. I won't provide a photo. ;)

Saturday 17 June 2006

Balcony BBQ





W and I went for a bike run to Bibury today. "The most beautiful village in England."

Yeah it's quite nice. The 600 Japanese tourists seemed to quite like it. I guess they're the ones that push the price of two sandwiches and a couple of drinks up to £16!

We were also a tad hot in all the bike gear. Need to get paniers so I can stow all the kit and still have fun when it is hot!

Got home and decided to try a BBQ on the balcony. Not one of my brightest ideas. Smoke goes up, right? Hmm... see photos. Bit smokier than I anticipated. Nobody actually complained, but there are lots of dead bees on the grass below...

Food was well cooked though! :D

Thursday 15 June 2006

Numpty!

British Gas man was due to turn up yesterday to fix the leak. He did turn up. I didn't. Okay, hands up, this time it was completely my fault! Dumbass...

In other news... we sold our first t-shirt! It was a jeg forstar ikke (I don't understand in Danish - I can't post the correct 'a' character in 'forstar' here) t-shirt to someone in the US.

I have to get on with marketing this site to try and get the visitors up.

In the meantime, please visit this site, and vote for our t-shirt! It is the red 'jeg forstår ikke' one. Hopefully it will be ranked #1 by the time you visit.

Go on... vote!

Sunday 11 June 2006

Comprehension Clothing is launched!



PRESS RELEASE

Comprehension Clothing is Launched

OXFORD, England, June 11 /SRNewswire/ The design house of Hamill & Renwick today announced the launch of their website, www.ComprehensionClothing.com, selling Phonetically Engineered Clothing to customers in Europe and the US.

Steven Renwick, designer and wanabee-web monkee of Comprehension Clothing, says, "Kev and I have always thought that Scandinavian languages just somehow look and sound cool. With that in mine we designed a range of t-shirts that say 'I don't understand' in several languages - Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic. We also love the idea of the sound of words, and decided to also make t-shirts with phrases written in phonetic characters."

Available at www.comprehensionclothing.com, the t-shirts have been launched to appeal to people who love cool t-shirts and want to have a t-shirt that is original and looks great.

Already the first t-shirts sold have gone down a storm, with the first Comprehension Clothing customer reporting that "girls came up to me in the bar to ask where I got my t-shirt and told me that it was really cool."

Kevin Hamill, shop partner and ninja, explains, "Hey, I'm just this guy you know? How you doin'? Where is the nearest Polar Bear?"

The duo intend to eventually offer bespoke phonetic t-shirts, but for now the phonetic t-shirts all say 'comprehensionclothing' in phonetic characters.

People who want cool t-shirts are advised to surf on over to comprehensionclothing to stock up on some phonetically engineered t-shirts for the summer.

...because some languages are just cooler than the rest.

ComprehensionClothing.com
is the internet's leading website selling Scandinavian and phonetic t-shirts. To be fair it's probably the only one, but that's okay. Kev is based in Dundee, Scotland, but is soon to be exiled to Chicago, USA. Steve is based in Oxford, England, and can very happily tie a double Windsor knot in his tie. It's a shame he couldn't do that about 5 weeks ago though.


Here follows some pictures sent in by one of our customers (actually Kev) modeling the t-shirts:

Kev wearing the jeg forstar ikke t-shirt

Kev wearing the icelandic t-shirt

The gas man cometh...

... and he did fixeth the boiler! We have hot water again!

The main thing that made this repair arrangement so much easier was that the engineer left me his mobile number (hey hey!) so I could actually phone him and find out when he was coming. Not having to deal with the idiots at the BG call centres and their useless booking system made the whole process a lot easier. Unfortunately there is still a bit of a leak so he is coming back on Tuesday to fix it again. Well it couldn't be that easy could it?!

Monday 5 June 2006

Rocket bug


Not what you expect to find in a packet of 'washed and ready to eat' rocket! I'm no entomologist so if anyone would like to identify the insect, please leave a comment. Looks like some kind of exotic wasp to me. I won't mention which supermarket it came from as I went to complain tonight and I'm sure they're preparing the compensation cheque for the 'mental trauma' of nearly consuming that thing. Actually the only mental trauma was that I really wanted rocket on my sandwich. It just didn't taste the same today. :(


British Gas update: Well, the boiler packed up at the weekend, but they were due to service the boiler this week on Thursday anyway. So I phone up to say 'hey, when you come on Thursday, can you do some fault finding to as it's actually stopped working'

So they then tell me they're not coming on Thursday, they're coming tomorrow (today - Monday). Hmmm... not what they told my landlord.

So this morning I phone to confirm that they are coming - presuming that, yet again, I will have to take some time off work to wait for them.

'Oh, no, no-one is coming today.'

'Oh great, so they're actually coming Thursday after all', thinks I.

'No, they're not coming Thursday either. We've got it down for this week, but no particular day.'

Words escape me... for a few seconds till I get angry at the idiot on the phone.

So anyway, the BG person on the phone books the engineer in for Thursday, so we just have to wait a few days with no hot water (although once they fault find - if they turn up - they will have to order a part in then come and fit it again).


But that's not all - when I got home from work tonight, there was a card from a British Gas engineer.


'Sorry I missed you today'


I don't think you could make up a better story of incompetence than the organisation that is British Gas.

Sunday 4 June 2006

Cold showers!

The boiler has stopped working.

I have a bad sense of deja vu...

British Gas to the rescue!

:-(