Has it come to this?

Thanks to a couple of Paul's recent posts and a program on BBC 4 a few weeks ago, I have rediscovered Kraftwerk. It's a bit more than a rediscovery, to be honest, because I didn't get into them that much the first time round. Anyway, I'm really enjoying their music now but there has been a worrying coincidence......

I finally dragged myself into the 21st Century and got a contact phone last month. It's a touch screen phone and it can, of course, play mp3's both as tracks to listen to and as ringtones. Now this is no big deal on it's own but some of you will know that I am an amateur musician so when these events coincide the result can be a bit sad.

http://www.higginson.valiant.co.uk/music/ringtone2.mp3

I never have been able to resist a piece of rank stupidity but I promise to do some proper music soon.

The red beach ball

O.K., you'll probably be sick of hearing about that goal yet again but here's my take on it anyway.

Firstly, I'm surprised that so many people in the game didn't know the rule concerning things like this. Obviously, I didn't but you'd have thought that a referee officiating in what is currently said to be the best league in the world would know all the rules pretty much inside out. Also, a certain former England captain didn't know the rule either. What makes it worse was that the ref could have consulted more with the other three officials since the ball had gone out of play.

The other thing is that, if the incident happened about five years ago then the red beach ball would've been our leading scorer.

Football's a funny old game.

A Cautionary Tale.

If you've read the post below you'll know my son has recently gone into sixth form. One of the A levels he's doing is Computing and a fair chunk of the course consists of learning how to program. The college use Visual Basic 6 as the programming language to teach these skills and I thought it would be an idea to get a copy for home use to make life easier for him. So far so good.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has discontinued Visual Basic 6 and replaced it with Visual Basic .NET and guess what... the two are not compatible. So I downloaded, prefectly legitimately, Microsoft Visual Basic Express 2008, thinking this would do the job. Incredibly, to me at least, this isn't compatible with Visual Basic 6 either. I decided to do something a try that I've never done before : I decided to get a pirate copy.

One of my son's mates got a zipped down copy from some dubious source or other and it came in the form of one archive file with the extension .zix. This meant that I needed a program called "WinZix" to unzip it before I could install it. I downloaded Winzix, from a web site that looked O.K., and ran it. AVG immediately gave a warning which I thought was a false positive resulting from the crack code embedded in the pirate copy of Visual Basic 6. I've seen this happen before but on this occasion AVG was dead right. I installed WinZix and within minutes I was getting unwanted pop-ups and my computer seemed sluggish. I ran a full scan using AVG and it detected nothing at all untoward.

I tried various Anti-Spyware Anti-Malware programs and nothing would shift it. After a day of this I was very close to reformatting the drive and re-installing Windows. Fortunately, I remembered that one of the posters on Gavin's Station has always recommended an anti-virus program called "Avast!" and I decided to give that a whirl. I downloaded it and did a scan immediately.

Within a very short time it had detected fifteen versions of the same Trojan in various places on my computer, mainly in the system restore area. Needless to say, I dealt with them there and then and that seems to have put an end to the pop-ups and sluggishness.

O.K., I was foolish for accepting software from a dodgy location and ignoring a warning from AVG but both WinZix, and the website I downloaded it from, looked perfectly reasonable.

Now I'm running both AVG Free 8.5 and Avast! So far it's fine.

Stear clear of WinZix (and don't be a pillock like me!)

How Times Change... ...

My son has recently started sixth form and now has quite a bit of time during the week when he doesn't have to go to any classes or tutorials etc. Last Friday he got back in the house at lunchtime, had something to eat and then said he was going to play football with a friend.

Now, when I was his age, this would mean kicking a ball about in the street, avoiding the odd car, trying to keep the ball out of neighbours' gardens and hoping Mrs Wilson didn't come out and bollock us for making too much noise. Sadly, this sort of thing now appears to be a thing of the past. For my son "playing football with a friend" means assuming a near horizontal position on the sofa, playing FIFA 10 (or whatever) on his X-Box over the internet with his friend who lives five miles away, and conversing with said friend via a headset that Madonna would be proud of! No wonder there are so many fat kids around these days.

I went to the doctors yesterday with what I would describe as low-level back pain. Guess what I came away with. A prescription? No. Some advice? No. A referral letter? No, not even that. What I got was a bloody web address! O.K., the doctor said it contained details of exercises that may well help so I shouldn't grumble but it does, initially at least, strike me as bizarre that you can go the doctors and come away with a URL.

Whatever next?

Blood

Today was the day I had to go and give a blood sample.

I'm getting to the point where I feel like an old car awaiting its M.o.T. test. I'm wondering "What's wrong this year?" Actually, I already know: my blood sugar level was up last year so the question is whether or not I've managed to keep it down. I've altered my diet and I'm doing quite a bit more exercise so I'm hopeful. I've also reduced my alcohol intake so my liver function test should be O.K.

I'm back to see the nurse on October 2nd so fingers crossed.

Edinburgh

One of the good things about your kids growing up is the fact that the one way traffic of giving changes to two way.

This year the kids chipped in and got a combined birthday present for me and my wife... a trip to Edinburgh! They bought us return train tickets and an overnight stay in a Premier Inn on the outskirts of the city.

We had a great time, the highlight being the best Italian meal I've ever had in my life at a place called Bella Mbriana. It's not cheap but it's excellent and only about ten minutes walk from the city centre. (You can tell it's a top end Italian restaurant : they don't do pizza!). The Premier Inn was quite good. The restaurant was only average but the room was very good. There was no Lenny Henry lurking around either which was a plus!

On Sunday morning we went to the national gallery and I saw a Picasso for the first time, "live" if you know what I mean. To be honest, it did nothing for me. I didn't think it was in the same league as the self portrait by Rembrandt but I'm no Brian Sewell.

Of course, we spent loads more than we intended and we await the next bank statement with a certain amount of trepidation but what the hell... this is the first year our combined ages have added up to more than 100.

View from the clifftop

We went for a walk, about a fortnight ago, along the cliffs between Sunderland and South Shields where I took this photo.

As you can see, it's not a bad view and I would say it's one of those pictures that tells people from outside the area that the North East isn't completely given over to terraced housing and post-industrial wastelands although if you want that sort of thing I would recommend Redcar.