Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Nature Corner - The European Hornet
We had a visitor to the office yesterday - a hornet. It was on it’s last legs and it was dead this morning, so I gave it a decent burial in a pile of dust in the corner of the building’s wall.
This one was about 25mm long.
You can see from the picture below that part of its wing was missing - maybe it came off worst in a fight, or got hit by a truck or something.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
It’s all go at the moment!
My little soccer team Darlington F.C. (The Mighty Darlo) DID actually go bust yesterday and I was about to head down to the Hangar Bar and turn my Darlington scarf upside down, but the fans gathered round the body and resuscitated it…
Darlington go bust and then revived after fans raise £200,000
The club have NO staff (not even players) - they were all made redundant by the Administrator but the backroom staff are all volunteering to help stage the two next home games, the coach is working for free, and what players are still around are going to play on a match-by-match basis. The fans are collecting money to pay their wages while our “Rescue Group” tries to thrash out some sort of community-led business plan. The coach, Crag Liddle, deserves an OBE or something - he’s really the Youth Team coach who’s been looking after the first team for the past few weeks, he’s Darlington through-and-through and a monument to all that is good and decent about the game. I think he’s been the glue which has kept us all together - even the players who had to leave (they had to earn a living) were gutted at abandoning ship and many ex-players have sent messages of support or even donated to the… [Read more...]
Friday, December 16, 2011
Cure for Outlook 2007 running slow
I don’t use Outlook myself, for all it’s quirks I still much prefer to use Opera’s built-in mail client rather than have to run a separate program to check and send mail, but I know someone who does use it and they constantly complained about how slow it was: sending and receiving messages was taking far too long, and the occasional message would get stuck* in the Outbox with no apparent way to delete it, etc.
The two problems mentioned above are probably unrelated issues but the nub of his whinging was that Outlook 2007 was so problematic that he was considering removing the whole of Windows 7 from his computer and going back to XP as he was spending too much time sat looking at his screen waiting for it to do something. He was not alone.
A quick search on the web revealed that his grievance was shared by many other people around the planet, and it seemed that there was a quick fix for this widely shared problem, and it is this…
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Must… obey… giant… sunsets…
This is my facebook profile picture – looks just like Gardabani Power Station at sundown!
I think the artwork is by Shepard Fairey. There’s a great giant-sized version available here which I hope someone will buy me for Christmas! Click the image to see it full size (well, not quite full size, but pretty big anyway).
