Cheap Xmas!

It dawned on us that we can't afford to do Xmas this year. Well, we can but not in the true spirit of the season: over expensive, credit reliant shopping binges that we're told we ought to do by the media. So we've settled on something much smaller, limiting ourselves to just £200 for the whole shebang. And that really is everything - each other, three boys, family dinner, etc. Going to be a struggle but then why not? The rest of the year has been and we wouldn't want to go soft now!

Took a walk in to town at lunch time and bought some Fimo. Having spent a nice couple of hours the other day fiddling with Plasticine with Tommy, I thought back to the little Xmas decorations Mrs Brykins and I used to make in our teens. That led me on to thinking what a nice and thoughtful way of spending very little money on people this year.....so if you know me and deserve a gift this year, expect tree decorations, keyrings and other useless junk!

Tomorrow is another day.....

I'm going to start putting the title to these posts AFTER writing them. Mostly because I am starting to write this one with no idea where it's going.

Felt bad all day today - up early to sort out lunches for the boys then fell back into bed at 7:30....only to be woken by Mrs Brykins stomping around at quarter to nine trying to get the boys out the door to school. Bless her - she'd seen me zonked back out so managed to get herself up and ready for work and organise the boys and take them to school.

She could have been a bit bloody quieter though.

Then somehow managed to go back to sleep until almost mid-day, waking with a horrible headache which has been around all day.

So headache = no real brain power, so nothing very much got done.

Tomorrow I WILL get re-started on the business plan. I promise myself.

Ah - there's the title!

Very Little To Report

It's been a while since I updated here, but there are the odd few people (or few odd people) that do look in, so a guilt-update is called for.

Problem is, very little to report! Days currently consist of getting the boys up, making breakfasts and packed lunches, walk to school, home to do cleaning, washing and cooking, bit of Facebook and an episode of 24 or something, collect kids, feed them, do homework, put them to bed, veg out in front of Twitter.

Things may change a little from next week - start work again! Only three days per week so still plenty of cooking and cleaning time. Depressingly it's another job in sales, and that just gave me a point to this post: Tell your children to find something they enjoy doing before they fall into sales!

With no formal qualifications in anything, I drifted in to sales 20years ago. I've hated a total of nineteen years and eight months of it I think. Who in their right mind would WANT to be the person that interrupts people with phone calls or visits to their office to peddle something that, if they wanted, they would find online or in the Yellow Pages? Who would enjoy being told to get lost, to have the phone hung up on them?

Having needed to earn the money to make sure at least one parent could be home while the kids are growing up, I had to stick at it. Now, nearing 40 and in the middle of the worst recession in my lifetime, it's proving impossible to move out of it - especially as I am now having to earn to fund my wife being able to work part-time to gain her own qualifications.

So please, please make sure your kids have an idea of what they like to do and get some training, experience and qualifications!

(Think I'll avoid updating for a bit longer or these will get depressing.)

I can feel myself getting older....

I have a room full of Boy Scouts playing Monopoly here and am huddled in the corner on the pretext of making sure they understand the rules, but really just to make sure they don't get too sweary. But watching out for sweary boys isn't what's making me feel old.....it's the fact that Monopoly now doesn't seem to come with any money!

Not sure if it's just this particular edition, but there's no cash involved. Instead, each player is issued with a credit card and there is a bleep-making machine that transfers funds from one card to another. I can see that it's a nice gimmick for the kids, but how does it teach them anything about handling money?

One of the boys is mine and I remember him, not so very long ago, arguing for some new football boots. I had told him that we had no money right then and his reply was a casual "well go to the cash point then". I had to explain (and it took a while) that the cash point didn't just print money but only gave me the money that I had in the bank. Nothing in the bank, nothing out of the cash point.

But it did make me realise that kids don't really SEE as much money as I did when I was small. That's not to say I was rich, but I do recall seeing my parents pay for things with cash. I understood that people worked for money, that money went into pockets and then out and into the hands of shop-keepers, garage owners, publicans, etc.

In my old age I am now thinking "kids these days....they don't know the worth of money....they think that there's always going to be money on a credit card or out of a hole in the wall". It makes me sad because it's true but it makes me sadder that I am even thinking it.

Warm and pleasant feeling

Today I was amazed to discover that there is at least one person reading this. Gave me a nice, warm feeling inside. And that's NOT gay, okay?

New job....sort of.

Having been hunting for a new job since mid-July, it seems that the hunt is almost, sort of, over. I've had a couple of meetings with a guy that runs a security company and, all being well, I ought to be starting on the 2nd of November for him.

I'm still working for myself - MUST call the tax man and tell him I am self-employed again - doing sales and marketing for him over the East Anglia region. They provide security patrols, on-site guards, etc, for factories, warehouses, offices and so on.

Good thing is that it's only three days per week - and they are as flexible as I want, so I can still do school stuff, have two late mornings, mess about on Twitter and Facebook and all the things I have got used to over the past few months. It'll also mean I will have the time to do the college courses I am thinking about - so I can (eventually) teach IT in evening classes or to corporate clients.

Start of a new chapter? We'll see - I know all about eggs and pregnant chickens.

Couple more old photos

Just so I can go to bed later tonight knowing that I had at least made an update today, I'm gonna throw a few scans of some old slides from the early 1990's....

Lazy Weekend

Mrs Brykins and the two eldest boys are in France for the weekend - left Friday afternoon and not back till Tuesday afternoon. That leaves just me and little Tommy at home so we're bumming around and doing nothing at all.....no washing, no ironing, no hoovering. Nothing.

Today we lazed around in bed till eleven, got up and had Chocolate Croisants for breakfast, then ham rolls for lunch. We walked down to the chippy for cod and chips for dinner then ate Rolo deserts while watching Merlin on TV.

Got Tommy tucked up in bed and watched back-to-back American Office (which is, I have to say, so much better than the UK version) and now am catching up on Facebook and Twitter.

Found this photo in my archives - memory jogged by someone on Twitter who took a squirrel picture.

It was taken in the grounds of Christchurch Abbey back around 1992 or so and I do recall sending it to KP Foods at the time. They wrote back saying that it was a shame but they were just about to re-brand their nuts.

Bad timing. Again.

Do I do enough to have a blog?

Just noticed that I've not put anything on here recently and sat down to write something. And realsed that right now, life is so crap that there's really nothing for me to say.

Take today - got a lie in as Mrs Brykins took boys to school. Then she went to work, so I lay in bed and finished a book that I have already read twice. Got up, saw that Bioshock had finished downloading so installed and tested that....seems to work okay.

Went through my email and applied for another couple of jobs - trying to do at least four a day now, though only getting any kind of confirmation to one or two. Still - that's a numbers game.

Listened to some of Radio 2 while eating lunch (cold Raviolli from the tin) then cleaned the kitchen, tidied the lounge and dining room and put all the garden furniture away.

Ate a Turkish Delight bar.

Now am sat here, bored, waiting for the rest of the household to come home. Really worth writing about, eh?

Facebook Fan Check Virus?

I'm writing this in the hope that the search engines might pick it up. Just today there has been a rash of Facebook status updates saying: "All those using the FAN CHECK APPLICATION please DELETE it and its PICTURES as it contains a virus and takes 24-48 hours to infect everyone on ur friends list! Please copy 2 ur status 2 let everyone know thanx". After looking into it a little is seems that this is a two-pronged hoax attack.

On the one hand there is the normal hoax/timewaster of getting people to blindly re-post every single mention of a new virus. Quite why people (a) blindly re-post these or (b) start them in the first place is beyond me.

However - there seems to be a second element to this particular hoax - if you Google "Facebook Fan Check Virus" then almost all the results will be sending you to what APPEARS to be anti-virus software or online virus checking web sites. These sites themselves have carry a MUCH higher risk than anything Facebook may currently accidently allow. These sites will warn you that your computer has a virus or trojan and ask you to download a cure. DO NOT DO THIS as you WILL become infected with a trojan.

Stick to anti-virus sites and software you know and trust. NOT those thrown up by random Google searching.

There's a little more info here: http://mashable.com/2009/09/07/facebook-fan-check-virus-hoax/

Current Favourites:

Film: Cashback
Song: 'Soon We'll Be Found' by Sia
Singer: Lucinda Williams
Artist: Marc Quin
Car: Nissan Skyline GT-R34
Food: Kentucky Fried Chicken
Watchmaker: Raymond Weil
Character from The Nine: Katheryn Hale (yum yum)
Sandwich: Roast turkey and pickle
Flower: Tulip
Hair: Red
Pen: Mitsubishi Uni-Pen Fine Line
Book: The Fermata
Radio Station: Radio 2
Website: Facebook
Number: 5
Day of the Week: Sunday
Film Maker: Tim Burton
Drink: Monster Ripper
Toilet Roll: Andrex
Actress: Zooey Deschanel
Chocolate Bar: Galaxy Ripple
Country: UK
Boat: The Savarona
Time of Day: 1am
Shopping Centre: Bluewater
Kids TV Presenter: Anne Foy
Public Holiday: Xmas Day
Social Network: Twitter
4x4: Nissan Pathfinder
Flag: China
Napkin Fold: Fan
Chicken Meat: Breast
Wood: Maple
Instant Messenger: MSN
Bubble Bath: Tesco Kids Rasberry Crush
Takeway: Chinese
Car Colour: Black

My "Freebie"

Watching "My Name is Earl" the other night (damn! I love that show) and the concept of the "Freebie" came up - someone that your wife/husband has agreed that (should it ever be possible) you can sleep with. Normally someone famous.

Well - been married for fifteen years now but I have finally found my freebie: Zooey Deschanel. I first noticed her in "The Happening" (which I also happen to think is a great film) and was struck by her eyes and her voice and now I am sat here listening to "Volume 1" by She & Him (Zooey and some lucky bastard called M Ward) and I know that I am very much in love with Zooey.

Sad, I know.

Strange couple of days

As the end of the school holiday draws near (they go back tomorrow) I am swaying one way and the other regarding this "house-husband" malarky. Am getting to spend some quality internet time and making more and more friends on Twitter and on Facebook and that is good - I think.

Have been keeping on top of the housework (though of course, not to the same high standard as Mrs Brykins does) and the haven't killed, injured or underfed the boys so can't be doing everything wrong. Today I even made stuffed marrows without a recipe. And everyone ate them.

Was nice to find out that I appeared in someone else's dream the other night - shame I can only ever remember Gwyneth Paltrow starring in one of mine. Am sure there have been others but I very rarely remember them.

Today have done final shopping and getting ready for school - everyone has bags packed and uniform laid out, lunches made and shoes polished.

Am now sat all alone as they are all in bed, Mrs Brykins is on another three hour part of her course (two evenings per week in the computer room, then two more evenings each week of homework) and am waiting for Dragons' Den on TV.

That's about my life right now. Anyone wanna (a) swap or (b) employ me?

My mobile history....pt5

I have just remembered that I got to part four and stopped. There's a reason for this - I can't remember the new phones! We're up to about mid-2007 with the Windows smartphones and by this time I was deeply entrenched in the mobile phone industry myself.....which meant that in a very short space of time I went through:

3 x Imate pre-production phones

LG Chocolate

Nokia 6300

Nokis N73

Nokia N95

Samsung U600

Blackberry 8800

Blackberry 8100

Blackberry 8310

Palm 500V

Sony Ericsson M600

There are probably others - I genuinely have lost track of the most recent phones.

But most recently I have been using a Blackberry Curve 8900 as my own phone and in my last job I was given an iPhone for work use. The iPhone was awful - well....awful as a phone and communications evice at least. The on-screen keyboard simply didn't work for me and I just couldn't get used to it. The email, calendar and contacts software were basic in the extreme - great for casual use but simply not ready for use day in, day out in a corporate environment. And the battery lasted less than a day.

But for games, it simply couldn't be beaten. Free and very cheap games from the App Store made it easy to fill the phone up with the likes of Flight Control, Harbour Master and others (one of the reason why the battery didn't last too long I guess) and these games are the only reason I actually miss the phone. Must get myself an iPod Touch soon!

My Blackberry....what can I say? It just works! The keyboard means I can type faster than on my PC. The screen is a gorgeous 480x360 pixels - that almost as big as my very first laptop! 3.2MP camera gives me photos I can print out. The software makes keeping contacts and calendar up to date and sync'd with the desktop (via Funambol online sync) a breeze and all my Hotmail email accounts sync perfectly.

I can't see me moving away from Blackberry.

At least not until the iPhone gets a slide out keyboard and major software overhauls.

Free Cinema (again....)

Took advantage of Showcase Cinema's free kids offer yesterday morning (kids write a book review, they get in free, so do accompanying adults - runs through the summer holidays on Wednesday mornings) and took William and Tommy and one of Tommy's friends to see Bolt.

Wasn't expecting much, but I really, really enjoyed it. One of the better animated movies I have seen - worth a watch if you get a chance.

Next week: Night At The Museum 2 - am expecting Night At The Museum 1 with seven new jokes.

Still loving the lappy.

Been a couple of weeks now and am loving my little laptop more and more every day. Mrs Brykins is now doing her CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) exams and needs the desktop computer for two evenings every week plus a couple more for homework. Have basically lost the desktop (and my study!) for four or five nights per week.

So have moved myself to my laptop - everything important syncs between it and the desktop, my email and Twitter and Facebook and everything is all in two places so I have re-discovered the joys of sitting in the garden or even watching some TV while I Tweet.

Shame the battery is turning out to be only good for two hours...but then the extended battery (that gives five hours) makes the laptop a horrible shape. And there's plenty of sockets around the house!

So now am thinking about a hard drive upgrade and an additional 2GB of memory.......

Coolest Pic Ever?

Packard Bell Dot M/A Laptop

Having had to give back my laptop and iPhone when I left my last job, it very quickly became clear that the house doesn't function if I can't get to a computer. Then Mrs Brykins decided that she would do her CIMA course online.....requiring the computer for three lots of three hours each week!

I've also been thinking more and more about re-starting my own business (and maybe doing it properly this time) and so I justified the expense of a new laptop. Tesco's had a nice offer on with £70 off the price of a Packard Bell Dot M/A so now a nice shiny black one is sat in front of me. In fact I am typing this on it right now.

11.6" screen (1366 x 768 pixels)

2GB RAM

160GB hard drive

1.6Ghz AMD Athlon 64bit processor

Webcam

Wifi

etc, etc, etc

It's great! It's very small (not even an inch thick) and light and the battery does a good three hours with careful use. It's as fast as my desktop in most things (though I may get a faster, bigger hard drive and an extra 2GB RAM for it to make it a bit quicker)

You've Got Red On You

Doing my civil duty here to protect the general public from lawsuits. It seems that no-one is allowed to use "the colour red" any more as it appears to be owned by the Royal Mail.

Free Cinema

Off to see Dragonball Evolution this morning. Great scheme run by Showcase Cinemas. Throughout the school summer holidays they do free screenings on Wednesday mornings at 10am. Only entry "fee" is a book review by the children....so my three boys have done a book review each and we all get in for nothing.

Not my choice of film, but it's free. This season they are also showing Monsters v Aliens, Kung Fu Panda, Bolt and Night At The Museum 2.

Book review forms and details are on their website at www.showcasecinemas.co.uk/

UPDATE: It was rubbish.

Can someone please tell me......

....WHY I thought it was a good idea to (a) start a blog and (b) why I then started to detail my complete history of mobile phones? I have done four parts and still haven't finished and it's driving me half-batty trying to recall them all and in what order and why I sold each one!

My mobile history....pt4

As far as I was aware, I had done with "normal" phones. The last Nokia (the 6260) had convinced me for good that smartphones were the way to go so off it went to Ebay and the hunt was on for the perfect smartphone.

The hunt ended quite quickly as back then, there really weren't many options. I ended up buying an Orange SPV C500 (same as a Imate SP3). Candybar design, nice big 240x320 screen and Windows Mobile. I really, really ought to have loved this phone. It felt great in the hand and the screen was lovely. I fell in love with the way the OS worked - if I wanted to call someone or text them or anything, I started typing their name on the keypad and it found the person and gave me options.

It's how I have liked my phones to work ever since. It took me a while to realise the difference between how phones had forced me to work before: decide I want to text someone, I first had to write the text and then decide who to send it to. Bit picky, but I liked it the other way round and Windows Mobile let me do that.

But damn! Was it slow? It froze all the time, it needed re-booting three times each day and just in general use it crawled....ten seconds to open a menu!

So - having already got in unlocked from Orange (I have stuck with T-Mobile through all of this - probably one of their most loyal customers!), I proceeded to re-flash the firmware (upgrade the software in the phone) to a non-networked one, so it didn't say "Orange" when you switched it on and got rid of all their crappy menus. Then did the sugar-cube trick which cleaned up the outside and all of a sudden I had a shiny, network-free phone.

Ebay time.

I decided that I needed a touchscreen again. And Windows Mobile. So I talked very nicely to T-Mobile (remember - I am one of their best customers!) and upgraded early and landed myself a black MDA Compact.

NOW I was happy. It was shorter than the previous phone, no thicker, and a bit wider but it had a great screen. And it was a touchscreen. So I had better games.

Oh - yes it was faster, but overall it did nothing more than the C500. But I loved it all the same and kept it for almost a year (a record for me!).

But temptation came....Jay at work had an O2 version of the T-Mobile Vario - THAT had a keyboard AND a touchscreen. A lovely sliding-out keyboard no less. Somehow I managed to convince myself to sell the Compact to Stuart (who's "Boggy's Blog" never gets updated) and found myself a T-Mobile Vario.

What to say about that? It was the same as the Compact but had a keyboard. A bad keyboard that was impossible to type on really. And when the keyboard slid out the screen was supposed to rotate.....well it did. Eventually. It was also twice as thick, three times as heavy and uglier than Mrs Ugly's ugly sister on ugly night.

I cried for my Compact but Stuart was never going to let me have it back. So within a week I was Ebay-bound again and......WOW!!! There was a NEW Compact! The Compact II. The same size and shape as my old Compact but better! I had to have it!

I got it! It was shite. It was slow. S-l-o-w. They put a new version of Windows Mobile in it but forgot to upgrade the processor or the memory. I was getting used to crying now. Right then I promised myself that I would buy NO MORE WINDOWS PHONES!

How long did THAT last?

Rat Infestation

Can't tell from this pic, but this is either Charlie or Mike. They're twins and their brother is a bit bigger and white and dark brown....he's called Oscar.

I do have three boys....

....and before anyone complains that I only have pictures of Tommy, here's one with Joe and Will as well:

(Picture taken by Alex Foord at www.alexfoordphotography.com)

Tommy went to the farm....

Maybe this should be a caption competition....

My mobile history....pt3

After the T610, I started getting more adventurous with my phones. I wanted them to DO more, to email, to play movies, games, make the tea, etc. My next phone is one that is still very dear to my heart: the Palm Treo 600.

A full QWERTY keyboard, a big screen (a whopping 160x160 pixels!), a camera, mp3 player, email, and more. And additional software was available - hundreds and hundreds of PalmOS games and applications!

It felt good too - like it was solid. Solid metal - it weighed more than my desk phone and the aerial made it awkward in the pocket, but it didn't feel like it'd ever break.

And it didn't.

Well - apart from the speaker going all fuzzy on me. But that was easy to fix with some tin foil and a no.6 Torx screwdriver.

But the lure of Nokia-land was calling me. I'd resisted for a long, long time (though had endured Nokia phones issued by various employers - we don't talk about those beasts here) but in 2004 they had something new. Something shiny. With a flip. And a twist.

So the Treo went on Ebay and along came the Nokia 6260. It was a smartphone - Symbian S60 and it had a flip screen that twisted. It needed to because it had no external screen so no way to see who was calling you unless you lept the phone flipped and twisted. Then the screen would get knackered and would also need to be twisted round again if you wanted to make a call or text. Or anything really.

The flip was floppy. The keys were bad. The screen was poor. I hated it.

It went on Ebay very, very quickly.

And then I started on Windows Mobile devices. And there were many, all with various problems - most were slow, all were prone to freezing and needing a re-boot. But there were many and I can't even recall what order I had them in now....

Do I like Pink Floyd?

If someone asks me to name my favourite band I will always answer “Pink Floyd” without hesitation. But I am starting to think that maybe I don’t like them as a band....I think I just like Roger Waters. And then, just the “concept” albums.

This realisation struck while watching David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall on Sky Arts this evening.....when I noticed that everything NOT from The Wall, Wish You Were Here, Animals, Dark Side of the Moon or The Final Cut was boring, repetitive and just, well, whiney.

I tried listening to Floyd albums after the split...and they just didn’t grab me like the one’s above did. But I did find myself listening to Waters’ solo stuff (The Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking, Radio C.H.A.O.S and Amused to Death) and Hitch-Hiking is still one of my all-time favourite albums.

So there it is. I’ve said it, so now I need to go and change my Facebook profile and remove Pink Floyd from my favourite artists.....and add Roger Waters instead. Problem is – no-one know’s who he is.

My mobile history....pt2

I can't remember why I did it, but I eventually retired my Panasonic and moved to a Siemens S35i.....I have no idea why because it was one of the worst phones I have ever owned. Which is odd because the opinions on GSMarena seems to be mostly positive. Oh well - each to their own.

I have nothing else to say about this phone.

But I loved my next phone....

I was in Milton Keynes one sunny day, supposed to have been selling something - may have been air conditioning at the time. Anyway, I was hungry and headed to Tesco but passed a Phone4U outlet....or didn't pass it. I ended up inside it, signed up to T-Mobile on a twelve month contract and walking out with a shiny, brand new, silver, Motorola T720....my first colour screen phone!

The very best thing about this phone was the menu system - everything could be set to my liking....what items showed on the standby screen, what order the menu items were in, shortcut buttons and everything.

I loved this little beast but....the screen was poor. Very poor. Fine in the dark but daylight, room lights, candles, everything made the screen totally unreadable. It had to go.

I didn't learn....my next phone suffered the very same problem (maybe it was screen technology at the time) but the Sony Ericsson T610 was a delight to hold and play with. Small and perfectly formed. But again, take it outside and the screen was just hopeless. It did have a camera though....

My mobile history....pt1

One of those "Social Scene" things popped up on Facebook the other day - "Five Cell Phones I've Had" - and it got me thinking.

I have now gone through so many different phones, and my memory is so bad, that I can't actually recall many of them. But thought I'd have a go anyway.

My first was a Mercury/One2One M300:

I remember paying £15 per month for this and about £100 up front. The sim card was full-size (a whole credit card that slotted into the bottom of the phone) and it had a two line display. No texting as far as I can remember, no vibrate, no email, no games, no nothing. But I was cool because I had a mobile phone.

I was also skint because I had a mobile phone. Eventually it got cut off. Phone was boxed up and sold at Cash Converters if I remember correctly.

My next phone was some time later - an Ericsson (before they were Sony Ericsson) GA628. One line of text, stubby little aerial and a huge battery. But I was cool again - I hit the credit card and got a slimline battery for it....it was sexy.

The blue keyboard surround was changeable - I had the blue one and a red one, but best of all, I had a black one. I loved that phone.

I also found a great add-on. At the time I used a Palm PDA and with the right cable I could conenct the GA628 to the Palm and ...... get email on the move! In 1998! Of course, it was at 9,600bps and text only and stupidly expensive, but I was a mobile executive!

But then.....Panasonic made a phone which VIBRATED! No more embarrasing ring tones. No more questions from the wife about who was calling me. I had to have one. I ended up with the Panasonic G600.

Multi line display!
Vibration!
SMS!

That was it - the BIG upgrade....to get vibration and multi-line display and, I think, the first phone I had that would send and receive text messages. I didn't KNOW anyone else to send a text message to though. If I recall, I don't think I ever actually sent a text message.

Easy To Be Understood

Sugama = Easy To Be Understood

Back to self-employment?

The more I look for another job, the harder it seems to be. With six of my last five employers going bankrupt or closing down on me, it's hardly may fault that I have changed jobs every six months for the past couple of years.

But that doesn't look good to prospective employers and agencies, so my CV isn't getting me any interviews.

That leaves me one other option - go back to self-employment. I did it a couple of years back....spent two years working for local companies doing IT support, web site design and some marketing.

Today I have registered a new domain name (www.sugama.co.uk - it means "easy to be understood") and will be gunning for web design, IT support and also some business mobile phone contracts.....

Wedding Guest Tommy

Tommy is so cool....he's six and his class staged a "wedding" for their Religious Education lesson. A little girl and a litte boy pretended to get married and all the others were "guests".

They had a little reception and a first dance and everything.