guapacha.com

Watching the hurricane coverage on the weather channel last night I was reminded how that really would be my dream job. I am always envious of those reporters standing in the winds, making the reports before scurrying for shelter. Guess I should have gotten a degree in weather rather than computers.

One of my new year’s resolutions for this site is to include more pictures, oh and to get rid of this annoying lemon flavoured theme. In respect of the first goal, here’s a picture of a hamster-powered cell phone charger:

In the rant of the week, why are local radio stations beeping out the phunk when playing the Black Eyed Peas’ Don’t Phunk With My Heart? One station has even changed the lyric to mess rather than phunk. Last I heard (ph)funk wasn’t a rude word. Sure, it sounds like a rude word but you hear much worse on an episode of Friends each night (and five times a night).

Thanks to a neat new service at FeedDigest.com I was able to add a list of the most recent posts at the other guapacha blogs in just a couple of minutes. Now you don’t need to visit the other sites to see if they are updated. Of course, you could just subscribe to the RSS feeds but I kinda like it like this.

The big news of the week (so far anyway) is the arrival of my new MINI, Carrie, named after the Sex and the City character, not the evil child from the movie of the same name. If you want to know more about her, then head over to the mini blog.

If you like Flickr then you might appreciate YouTube which is for video, what flickr is for photos. You can upload your videos, tag them for searches etc. Like flickr, most of it is pretty pointless – I really don’t care to watch your cat walk across the lawn – but there are probably some gems (read: hot girls) in there, too.

Don’t know why but Sunday when I was packing my bag for the week I decided that I would wear an England sport shirt to the office each day. Unfortunately I only have 4 such shirts so I either need to wear one twice or fail to show up for work one day this week.

I’ve never really paid much attention to the press releases of North Korea (yes, I know what have I been doing) but now I don’t need to. Thanks to the NK News website I can now catch up on everything coming out of there since 1996 and the rhetoric is pretty funny. I particularly like the statement that the US is “a pack of beasts in human skin and the inveterate enemy with whom the Korean nation cannot live under the same sky”.

So poor BA has had to cancel all its flights in and out of Heathrow for two days thanks to some wildcat strikes. Some dodgy dealings by its catering contractor led to a walkout causing some short and long-haul BA flights to leave without food on board. But then today some good old British workers decided to strike ‘in sympathy’ and bring BA to it’s knees.

BA has nothing whatsoever to do with the problems at the catering company, other than being a customer. So why then did the baggage and ground handlers feel compelled to ‘join their brethren’? It would be easy to say its because they are bunch of lazy tossers, easy because its true. I say sack the bleedin’ lot of them, they are in breach of their contract, they can’t argue they are supporting downtrodden BA employees because they’re not and so the strike is totally illegal. Even their trade union says so.

Meanwhile people have been stranded on planes on the tarmac for in excess of 6 hours because they can’t go to the gate as there are no tugs to take the plane there, no people to put the bridge over and open the door etc. And there there is the chaos inside the terminal (though I’d rather be there if I had to be somewhere).

This could turn into a real nasty situation for BA (and the other airlines affected such as Qantas), I hope they are able to sort it out quickly.

I am back from my travels, still somewhat lagged, I think my brain is somewhere between the east coast and here. Got upgraded to business class from London to NY (one of the few upsides to all the air travel I am doing is that AA thinks I am a good customer) which really is the only way to travel trans-Atlantic.

England seems to be ‘two for one’ crazy: the pub we ate at a few times was two meals for the price of one, the supermarkets had many many products that were buy one get one free. I’m not complaining, free stuff is always good (though why it never beer thats two for one?).

Chav is definitely in and big, and Southampton is ChavTown. I think the guys look like dorks but there’s a certain skanky attraction in the chavette’s, at least to my (admittedly non-fussy) taste.

My mum’s condition was a lot better than I had been fearing and improved quite noticeably in the time I was there. She’s still a long way from singing and dancing but we have hope that she can be home in the near future and that’s really all anyone wants at this point. But it was very good to see her and the rest of my family. I will go back again when she gets out of the hospital.

The next big thing for this month should be the arrival of the new MINI, currently somewhere between Miami and Los Angeles, supposed to dock Friday. In the meantime I need to find buyers for my Jeep and current MINI.