Not a word you’ll hear from me very often, but I was doing it this afternoon. We even went to the garden centre and bought some flowers (pansies, for ultimate comedy) and herbs.

My gran was a keen gardener – flowers and fruit & veg – but I’ve never been. I’ve picked up a bit from her, but I have a bad way with them. Basically, they die at my hands.

So we’ll only have to see how it goes. I have loads of seed packets but they all need planting April-time which is no good now.

But at least those herb pots that I bought 15 years ago are now in use

There, I said it. And not in THAT way either.

I hadn’t watched it until I saw Blue Harvest. I’ve now got the PVR recording any episodes on TV and I love them. This morning I ate my breakfast whilst audibly laughing out loud at Stewie taking off the opening credits to Police Squad. Genius.

I love the randomness of it – especially when they combine that with pop culture references. In one episode Chris is dragged from the supermarket into a A-Ha video. It’s not relevant to the episode and no reference is made to it again. Random but hilarious.

It’s great when you find something new to really like – especially if it’s damn funny. Of course it’s also rude in a way that The Simpsons and Futurama would like to be but isn’t.

I visited my brother-in-laws yesterday (I mentioned that in my previous post). My wife had mentioned to me that their PC was running very slow and was very noisy. Now I know they’re not overly IT literate, so I thought I’d help out.

My external 2.5 hard drive was packed full of software, I had a PC toolkit with me and a box full of hardware goodies. And a pencil and paper.

We got there whilst they were out – thankfully we knew where the key was, so we were able to get in – and I set to work. The side of the base unit came off and I started it up. Good lord that was noisy. It’s not an overly powerful machine and only has 2 fans in entirety (one rear case fan and the processor fan). The rear fan was, well, rubbish – it was very low quality and had a PSU power connector, so was bypassing the “proper” connection on the motherboard. I had a spare so swapped it over and connected it appropriately. The processor fan was okay but dusty – as was the heat sink underneath. I used my compressed air can to give that a good clean. In fact, I cleaned the rest quite thoroughly too.

The memory.. well I didn’t have any spare of that type so I wasn’t able to help. But they were running XP Pro with 1GB of memory, which should have been fine.

So, I booted into the BIOS and ensured that Cool N’ Quiet was active (it was an AMD machine) and all other measures of that sort.

After that, a swift boot into Windows showed the root of many of the problems – some spyware. That was swiftly removed. I also installed the latest AMD processor driver, did a thorough clean of the system (Ccleaner coming in handy, as always) as well as various de-fragmentations (main file system, registry and page). They also had so many IE toolbars installed that the main browser window was only about half the screen – many of these toolbars have come, by default, from the ISP software and various other software they’ve installed (shame on BT for the former). They don’t actually have a great amount of software on their machine so it was easy to pick over where things had come from.

And that was it. I was down a fan but had a cracking Indian meal that evening, and they were very grateful for my help.

The noise isn’t 100% though. Although Cool n Quiet is definitely switched on, etc, the fan doesn’t appear to be powering down so is still hammering along at full speed – strange. But it’s still a hell of a lot better than it was.

I’m also available for weddings and Bar Mitzvah’s

So, there I was last night, at 9:30pm, pitch black, driving along a back-country road. No houses. No street lights.

A car had just passed me so I put on my main beam for better visibility.

Then I pass a jogger. Yes, a jogger. On the pavement, jogging towards the oncoming traffic. Annoyed at my beam, he flashes a torch at me and then “flips the bird” to show his ultimate feelings. He’s jogging at night. Wearing dark clothing. And he thinks I’m being rude blinding him with my main beam. When I had NO chance of seeing him.

Sometimes people should really get a grip with the reality of situations.

I had a similar conversation yesterday with my brother-on-law about why people so rarely use their indicators any more. It’s simple – what’s in it for them? The indicator is to tell OTHERS what you’re doing. Why should they care about others? Why should they bother going to any kind of effort?

And equally, why shouldn’t the jogger get annoyed at me for blinding him? Why shouldn’t he be allowed to jog in an un-lit area wearing dark clothing and not expect it? Take it to it’s logical conclusion and we may as well just remove that full beam facility from cars – after all, when would you need to use them when such a situation wouldn’t arise?

And all this selfishness is just on the roads. Imagine the difference that can be made if we were less like this generally.