Drunk in Tallinn

Posted by Lester Madden under General

I spent the week in Estonia. Tallinn is such a cool city. It’s the new Prague, cheap and the natives are friendly.

Tallinn is full of hot blonde sexy locals and Hollywood is the local tourist trap where you can go to meet them. It says open until late. I got back to my hotel at 5am (alone I will add) and was woken up at 12pm by reception wanting their room back. – Result.

Alcohol is cheap, being a crappy traveller I just take out a shit load of money and spend spend spend but even then I worked out I had spent less than £100 for the week.

Shoplifting Seagull

Posted by Lester Madden under General

You’ll probably get this in an email eventually, but I had to laugh when Philip sent me this.

A seagull in Scotland has developed the habit of stealing chips from a neighbourhood shop.

The seagull waits until the shopkeeper isn’t looking, and then walks into the store and grabs a snack-size bag of cheese Doritos. Once outside, the bag gets ripped open and shared by other birds.

The seagull’s shoplifting started early this month when he first swooped into the store in Aberdeen, Scotland and helped himself to a bag of chips. Since then, he’s become a regular. He always takes the same type of chips.

Customers have even begun paying for the seagull’s stolen bags of chips!

I have Sky TV (almost)

Posted by Lester Madden under General

The door bell went this morning, it seems the housing people didn’t like my fax much and sent around a couple of engineers to trace the cables I’ve been bitching about. It took them 2 hours and they had to rewire 3 of them.

The Sky engineer came, he spent 2 and a half hours installing Sky.

So the big question, do I have Sky TV now?  Well yes and no. Sky+ needs two cables and after hassle of getting the house builder to install the second one it appears that the cable they put in is duff. So I can watch TV but can’t record or pause TV.

I long for the day when I can just sit on the couch and watch TV

New house blues, all I want is Sky

Posted by Lester Madden under General

You would imaging that buying a new house would be a smooth process. You turn up with your removal van, throw open the doors and everything inside is gleaming and perfect. When I brought my last place it was a new Bovis home. While it wasn’t 100% perfect we had no problems. The site manager called and within a week pretty much 90% of the problems were sorted out.

We just brought a new Persimmons home. Oh my God is my blood boiling.  Let’s forget the fact that we hung a towel on a radiator and it almost fell off the wall. These are not gold stitched towels encrusted with heavy jewels or anything like that, it was a cheap Ikea hand towel. Let’s forget the fact that the upstairs toilet doesn’t flush or any of the other annoying little things that I told them about several weeks ago and am still waiting for some action on.  Let’s talk about the important issue like trying to watch TV and getting Sky installed.

Stop spamming me

Posted by Lester Madden under General

I didn’t win the lottery this week but I have won the next best thing.

Microsoft apparently held an email lottery and I won $800,000, I got an email telling me so it must be legitimate. It’s not even strange that the email was from a Yahoo account. But my good luck doesn’t end there. I also won $10,000,000 in a lottery held by BMW. I think I also won a car but the email is in such bad English I’m not sure. $5,500,000 from several lotteries that I didn’t enter but it was based on my email address so it must be ok.

Skype Bots / PamBot

Posted by Lester Madden under Skype

Ages ago I did a video tutorial on how to build a Skype BOT, which still seems to exist here https://developer.skype.com/Tutorials/SkypeBot I had a video codex issue when trying to run it but you might have better luck than me.

If you’re not familiar with BOTS you can add a BOT to your buddies lists for most IM clients (in my case Skype) and have it search for useful information for you.

Pamela Systems have created a Skype BOT that allows you to search different sources by starting a chat conversation with the BOT and issuing a command.

Eg to get the news headlines start a chat with PamBot and issue the command ‘tell news’

Carbon Footprint

Posted by Lester Madden under General

I caught a few of those ‘Dumped’ programs on Channel 4 (no Sky so I have to watch something).

It finished last night, so if you missed them Dumped was about a group of people sent to live on a rubbish tip for a month.  They could only use what the found at the dump to live on.  Ie they had to make the shelter from items they found, for bedding, and find things to sell so they could make money.

Shame foraging for food wasn’t included; we could have taken bets on who would catch the plague first.

The whole point of the program was to get people to realise what their carbon footprint is, and go green.

I think the idea footprint was around 2 tonnes. 

If found this test I did really well until it came to travel. I scored 11.5 tonnes on travel alone.

Take the test, see how you do.

Moved home

Posted by Lester Madden under General

Wooohoo finally moved in to the new place over the weekend.

The move went well and we managed to get all our things out of storage on time. Steve very kindly did all the driving, just as well really as the van was a bit on the suspect side. The left indicator turned on the hazards and the van wobbled around like it was on oval wheels.

To most people that would mean drive a little slower and apply caution, Steve however drove like he was being chased by the police and there was no way they were going to take him alive. The van was white and I guess that white van man has a certain reputation to uphold.