Head Rambles

Grandad February 9th, 2007

I have notice that other people have written strange useless lists in the past.

“10 things you never knew about me” type of thing.

Aw, what the heck……..

I have never lived in a house with an even number. And I have lived in five different houses.

I have no nail on my right big toe. They removed it when I was 15, but left a bit of root in so now I have a rhinoceros horn instead.

I can dowse. You know - that thingy with hazel sticks, to find underground water. It comes in handy sometimes.

Apart from a diary, I have never written anything before I started this blog [apart from letters, e-mails, essays in school, shopping lists and the like].

Of all the companies I have worked for [5] only the last one still exists. Which is just as well as they pay my pension. I managed to bankrupt the rest.

I suffer from tinnitus which means I spend my time shouting “Wha?” at Herself.

I was never in an aircraft until I was 40. Then I flew for an hour and had full control of the plane for 50 minutes.

I am a mistake. My mother told me that when I was young. She never wanted more children. My mother was well known for her tact, diplomacy and willingness to instil confidence in her offspring.

I’m not a bad cook [though I say so myself], and can turn out a mean roast/stew/pie/fry/bolognaise/curry or whatever. I haven’t poisoned anyone yet.

My family tree includes a president, a famous philosopher, a famous actor and a pirate.

I am not a true Irishman, because I have never been barred from a pub. Though I’ve been thrown out of quite a few in my time.

I once played rugby for my school, even though I was as blind as a bat without my glasses, and hated the game [and never scored a try]. I also once played hockey for my company even though no-one ever told me the rules [we won, but that was mainly due to the injuries I inflicted on the other team].

The only sport I have ever been interested in is caving/potholing/spelunking or whatever you want to call it. I’m too old for it now.

I once had to be rescued by the British Army after being trapped overnight by a disastrous flood that wiped out a village.

I am grouchy, have little or no sense of humour and am very difficult to live with.

There. That’s fifteen useless things about me even I didn’t know until now.

If you want to know any more about me - tough. That’s your lot.

• Around the house , Rambles
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Grandad February 9th, 2007

At last I have a real job!

I have been having some problems setting up Silver Hair Internet Technology.

Firstly I need a domain name apparently for my website, but they won’t register it for me.

I tried to buy shit.com and shit.net and shit.org but they are all used up.

I phoned the nice people who look after the IE thingies and they were very rude. They refused point blank. I can’t think why.

Anyway, I have been having some problems getting people to send me money so I can design their websites. The cash just hasn’t been arriving. I had no idea that running a business would be this hard.

So Ron as asked me to help him. He is designing a site and has all the pictures done, So he has asked me to set up the page to hold all the graphics. This apparently is the HTML bit.

He said that as I was a beginner, I should use a table. Now this is confusing. What difference does it make where I work? I prefer the armchair with the laptop on my lap. It’s more comfortable that way. So he can forget about that.

He gave me a brief lesson and I took lots of notes so I know the way to put an image into a web page is to type (image source=”image.gif”). That’s easy enough. I just have to remember what all the images are called.

He also told me to spell ‘colour’ as ‘color’. But that is going too far. I refuse to go the American way so I am going to stick with ‘colour’. The site probably won’t work in America but that’s their tough luck for not being able to spell. The rest of the world will see my colours as they should be.

We had some hard bargaining over price. I asked for only €5,000 because he’s a friend. He offered €5, which seemed a bit of an insult. We spent half the night bargaining, as I’m very tough when it comes to things like that. We eventually settled on €10. He is going to pay cash, so there shouldn’t be any problems with tax or VAT.

Part of the negotiation was that I wanted “This is a S.H.I.T. site” written at the bottom of the page, but Ron refused point blank. The bastard is going to take the credit for all my work.

So I’m now a sub-contactor. I suppose it’s a start. I’ll be very busy over the next three months or so writing this page, so I may not be able to pay so much attention to Head Rambles. I’m sorry about that. Business must come first.

• Web design
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