Monthly Archives: November 2009

Bringing Home the Bacon

Posted by David Hurst on November 30, 2009 None comments

I do love a nice slice of bacon (or three), and I have a real soft spot for quality sausages, so I was very happy to help out Bringing Home the Bacon with a new website! Obviously, much of the produce was sampled in the name of research – it’s a difficult job, but someone had to do it.

Bringing Home the Bacon specialise in free range, handmade dry cured bacon and sausages. All the meat comes from the farm’s own herd of pigs, so quality is paramount from piglet to plate. There’s also gluten free sausages for pork lovers with allergies.

Anyway, if you’re local to Somerset, and you feel the need for some delicious free range pork goodies, give the website a click on the link above.

It’s a good job I’m not dieing…

Posted by David Hurst on November 26, 2009 None comments

I have this issue with my left wrist: it hurts. Quite a lot sometimes. Fortunately, I’m right handed, but it’s surprising how many everyday tasks set it off. Riding my motorbikes and bicycles is uncomfortable. Picking things up is very difficult. Typing can be painful.

So, after 6 weeks of enduring the discomfort and not wanting to go to the doctors (like a typical bloke), I finally snapped today.

I see my doctor very rarely. I hate going to the doctor and I hate going to hospitals – I’ve had too many bad experiences at the bungling hands of the NHS. My wife, on the other hand, must be on first name terms with her doctor  because she seems to see her every other week, either for herself or one of the kids. She usually just phones up in the morning and then goes straight in. I don’t remember ever seeing her wait for an appointment.

I just phoned my doctor’s surgery and asked for an appointment. The conversation went something like this…

S: “Hello, North Street Surgery.”
D: “Hi. Can I book an appointment with Dr. ****** today please?”
S: “Erm… [pause] no, he’s fully booked. [long pause where no further suggestions were offered]”
D: “Ooookaaaay, how about tomorrow?”
S: “No, sorry he’s fully booked… and, he’s on annual leave next week.”
D: “Right.”
S: “Is it something he could deal with in a phone call?”
D: “Probably not.”
S: “Oh.”
D: “Uhm.”
S: “Sorry.”
D: “Yes. Is there anyone else I could see?”
S: “You could phone tomorrow to see if Dr. Unpronouncable has any cancellations.”
D: “Thanks.”

Maybe I’m being picky, but the surgery didn’t really seem at all interested in my plight or getting me an appointment to see the doctor. Surely, if he can spare a few minutes to talk to me on the phone, he could talk to me in person? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge my doc his annual leave, but you might think that some common sense and planning would take place at the surgery. Given that he’s going to be off, it’s highly likely that appointments will get bunched up during his last couple of days in, and some additional cover might be useful.

I overcame my phobias and issues to phone the surgery and ask for help, and I hung up the phone with the feeling that they just couldn’t really give a toss.

I guess I’ll just add the wrist to all the other maladies that I just put up with, because the docs seem completely unable to fix any of them.

It’s a good job I’m not dieing.

UPDATE:
I phoned my wife and related my experience. She phoned the doctors and immediately got an appointment for this afternoon with her doc! What?!?!?!?!

iPhone 3G for sale

Posted by David Hurst on November 23, 2009 2 comments

SOLD!

As I’ve moved to a Palm Pre, my Apple iPhone 3G 8Gb is available for sale. I will be putting it on eBay this weekend, but any sensible offers received prior to that will be considered.

I have the box, cables etc. – everything it came with.

The iPhone is in good condition, with some minor surface wear to the rear and a tiny hairline crack by the connector port. Not noticeable in general use. The screen and front is completely clear of scratches. Comes with a hard leather slip case.

The iPhone will be wiped to factory settings before sale.

It has OS 3.0 on it and is currently locked to the O2 network. You can get it unlocked at any O2 store if you wish to use it on Orange instead. (You can use it on other networks too, but you’ll need to check with your network on the compatibility).

Looking at eBay, these are fetching anywhere from £150 – £220. I’ll take less than that. Make me an offer using the comments box below (if you can’t see a comments box, click on the title of this post and then scroll down), or email me at davidhurst dot co dot uk.

Re-discovering my love for motorcycling

Posted by David Hurst on November 18, 2009 None comments

For a long time I was completely nuts about bikes, but following the sale of my beloved Exup (which I just couldn’t ride any more due to pain in my knees), a rotten experience buying a new Honda (something I will blog about another day), and a completely useless summer, my enthusiasm for motorcycling had waned somewhat.

At the end of July this year I rode my Suzuki TL1000S up to Bristol and got caught in a typical British summer monsoon. The rain did the bike no favours and it was a truly miserable experience, made even worse when the rear damper failed leaving me with a very springy back end for the 40 mile ride home. I shoved the TL into a corner of my garage in disgust and there it remained until a few weeks ago. I finally got a replacement damper unit and with the help of a friend who is a mechanic, got the old one out and a new one in. I washed the bike and set off for a quick spin and duly came back a couple of hours later with a massive grin on my face and a re-ignited passion for motorcycling.

Why should the TL1000S be the igniter of such passion, when it is a bike widely regarded as being deficient. It has something of a (probably well earned) reputation for being a “widow maker”, and it can be a complete swine to ride. Let’s analyze the bike for a few moments…

Looks
The way a bike looks is a huge factor in how much you enjoy a machine. I had a SV650S as my first bike, which was a fabulous ride, but it looked horrible and I could never get past that. The TL is not quite so ugly as its newer little brother, but it’s no Ducati 1098! So, it’s probably not the look of the machine that excites, though mine is the rarer green colour, has the fairing lowers, beautiful gold and silver wheels and blue titanium cans, all of which adds up to a good looking bike.

Costs & Reliability
The TL is a complete pain in the wallet. It’ll barely scrape 100 miles on a full tank, and due to the savage torque, it munches through rear tyres and drive chains for a pastime. I have had the thing apart more times than I care to remember, but oddly I think this has a lot to do with it. When you have sweated over the machine like I have, you and it become entwined in a strange human – machine love affair.

Handling
The handling is woeful. The heavy steering damper (retro-fitted by Suzuki after a large number of TL riders complained about how dead they were after nasty tank slappers) makes the steering feel anything but nimble, and the 190 section rear tyre doesn’t help. It certainly doesn’t handle anything like as good as my Exup did, but for me this is half the fun! Where’s the challenge in riding a bike that just goes where you point it? If there’s no challenge, then there’s no sense of reward. My Honda CB1300 is eminently capable, but I don’t get off it feeling invigorated at all. With the TL, you have to hang your arse over the side of the bike and wrestle it around tight bends, and that is huge fun!

Engine
Here’s the main attraction. Never has Suzuki built a more exciting engine. This is a snarling beast with savage acceleration and ludicrous amounts of torque. Breathing through some aftermarket cans as my TL does, the noise is a fairly close approximation of the commencement of Armageddon. A good twist of throttle in any gear sees you heading for the horizon as though your life depended upon it. No other bike I have owned or ridden has the same instant response. There’s no hanging about for 4 cylinder wind up to peak power, just an immediate kick up the backside. In fact, despite the power figures of the 90 degree v-twin seeming rather modest in comparison to modern sports bikes, the reality is that it’s all about the way the power is delivered. The Suzuki TL delivers its power much like a girder swung in the face, and I’m not convinced there’s many bikes that could match it on the road.

Conclusion
There’s nothing like the feeling of imminent death to keep a ride exciting, but whilst the TL delivers that feeling in spades, you also know that it is a competent machine and providing you stick within sensible limits, you’ll be going home in one piece every time.

Basically, this is a flawed bike. It always was, and Suzuki knew that, but in building something with flaws they inadvertently bestowed something else upon the bike: soul and character. The TL feels like a living, breathing thing. It’s not perfect and it doesn’t always work the way it should. It’s a complete git to ride in slow moving traffic and it’s pretty damn uncomfortable, but all this can be forgiven it, because when you open that throttle and slingshot towards the vanishing point in a melee of noise and vibration, you will be smiling from ear to ear, feeling truly alive.

That’s why the TL1000S is the perfect bike to re-discover your love for motorcycling.

Microsoft Staff Living in Dream Land

Posted by David Hurst on November 13, 2009 1 comments

I just spotted this quote from Simon Aldous, Partner Group Manager at Microsoft, on the BBC News website:

“What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.”

Uhm gosh. Stop the press. Microsoft copying Apple? Nothing new there at all. All these companies copy each other all the time. Apple copy others too.

But, is he serious – Vista more stable than OS X?

Which planet are you living on Mr Aldous?!

Vista is a dog horrible operating system and there’s no way anybody is going to believe it’s more stable than the highly secure UNIX-based OS X.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft are distancing themselves from the comments. The guy clearly doesn’t have a clue.

The most annoying adverts on TV

Posted by David Hurst on November 2, 2009 20 comments

We all have our favourite TV commercials, and we all have those that we hate. The kind of TV commercials that have you diving for the remote or running out of the room screaming. These companies should not be allowed to get away with it, so in the interests of humanity I’m listing a few of my pet hate TV adverts here. Add your own to the list using the comments feature below.

So without further ado, here are the contenders:

Go Compare
I HATE these adverts. The tune is so annoying it has me rushing for the knife drawer in the kitchen so that I can hack my ears off and cease the appalling pain. No doubt the geniuses in the marketing department at Go Compare believe that a tune that stays in your head all day is the same as a “catchy tune”. No, it’s not. They have no right to invade my headspace with their mindless drivel and I will now go out of my way to never use their insurance comparison service.

We Buy Any Car
Another advert with a ridiculously annoying tune. Frankly though, I find the advert just as insulting as all those “send us your mobile and we’ll send you a cheque” adverts. I am not fooled. I do not believe for one second that I would ever get anything approaching a reasonable price for my car by selling it to this lot. Frankly their advert hardly inspires confidence in their professionalism.

Any of the plethora of commercials featuring the song “Here Come the Girls”
Possibly the most overused piece of feminist drivel in commercial TV history. It annoys the hell out of me and it annoys the hell out of my wife. The current offender is Boots, who have jumped upon the bandwagon of spewing out “female solidarity” instead of actually bothering to properly market their products. Are women really that stupid? I don’t think so. Change the tune.

Marks & Spencer Food
This is not just bread, it’s traditional farmhouse bread made from the finest flour milled by Polynesian nurse maids and filtered through the digestive tracts of endangered sloths… No. It’s bread with a ludicrous price tag.

Not making enough profit from your food? Film it in slow motion, get out your thesaurus and make sure the voiceover artist is in some sort of orgasmic climax. I’d rather chew off my own testicles than shop for pretentious, overpriced food at Marks and Spencer. The one occasion I bought Marks and Spencer food (because it was late and I was at a motorway services and it was the only place open), it was a sandwich and I couldn’t finish it. It was so dry and tasteless. If they can’t even get a sandwich right, there’s probably little chance of them doing anything else. Hence the adverts I suppose.

So, there’s four of my TV commercial pet hates. What are yours?