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!