Days like these

Every morning at work I read some comics i have bookmarked on my iGoogle page. Today's Dilbert cracked me up. Ever have those days when you have so much to do that the whole day becomes a blur and at the end of it you don't remember what you did? In my job I deal with multiple tasks with different people all day and they often overlap. Sometimes I'm on the phone with someone and another customer will ring the other line. Whoever invented call waiting should be fired.

Dilbert sums it up pretty well in this comic.
Good thing I'm on holiday for a couple weeks starting tomorrow or I might suffer the same fate.

Old Bucket o' Bolts

My car passed 100000 miles today. I felt like there should have been a fanfare and something exciting happening - like a birthday party. But...there wasn't. It was a nice day for a drive though - bright & sunny.

100000 miles... The earth is only 24,902 miles or 40,076 km in circumference (apparently). My car has travelled the equivalent of 4 times around the earth!!! When I bought it, it had about 50000 on the clock. So, of course, I've travelled twice as far as the distance around the earth - and all on this little island of Britain! I find that staggering.
Its a decent car even at 100000 miles. Its best feature is definitely the sunroof! (Or the stereo, but I'll save that for another day)
So in conclusion, I spend too much time driving. Oh well, such is life. Good thing I have all those podcasts to listen to!

When do YOU go home?

Firefox is the web browser of choice for me. Fortunately, they even let me install it at work. This opens the doors for a whole load of useful Firefox extensions and other little gadgets.
Maybe some day I'll get into all the details of some good extensions but the best one I've found recently is called CountdownClock. How many times a day do you look at the clock at work and try to figure out how much time you have left until its time to throw down your pen, pick up your keys and drive home? Its easy enough to make an estimate of the amount of time left, but now you'll never have to do it again. Simply download CountdownClock and it will tell you exactly how much time you have left, down to the very last second.

A nice characteristic of a countdown clock is that every time you look at it, there is less time left than there was the last time you looked. What a nice feeling...

To make home-time even more gratifying, you can set a message to show when the time reaches 00:00:00.

Mine, as you can see, is set to remind me that its time to go. You can also set it to show as a pop up that appears in the middle of your screen.

Only 5 hours, 22 minutes and 28 seconds left....

Podcasts

I drive an hour to and from work everyday and to fill my time, I listen to a variety of podcasts. Instead of an iPod, I have a Creative Nomad Jukebox III. Its so old and big its often mistaken for a CD player. But that's alright because it was cheap, it has 40GB capacity and it sounds great. Its certainly not as stylish as an iPod, as you can see...



iTunes is the weapon of choice for most podcast listeners, but it only really makes sense to use if you have an iPod. Instead I use a program called Juice.



I subscribe to about 15 podcasts and they all come out on different days of the week. The top five are:

BBC Newspod - http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radionews/bbcradionewspod/rss.xml
A daily collection of news from across BBC news programs.

Military History Podcast - http://geo47.libsyn.com/rss
Produced by a teenage somewhere in the US, this podcast discusses battles, equipment and armies from ancient history to the present day.

PC Gamer Podcast - http://www.pcgamerpodcast.com/?feed=rss2&category_name=podcasts
PC Gamer Magazine (which I've never read) editors talk about pc game stuff. It's a good laugh.

Matt's Today In History - http://www.podshow.com/feeds/mattstodayinhistory.xml
Once or twice a week some guy called Matt (not me) discusses an important event in history that occurred on that date.

CBC's Quirks & Quarks Podcast - http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/quirks.xml
I've never heard anyone so excited about science. Covers a wide variety of science related subjects once a week. Usually interesting, but sometimes mind numbingly boring...

And just to finish, here is a picture of a truck I've seen a few times in the daily traffic jam going into Glasgow. I thought the big guy on the back was funny so I snapped it.

Welcome

Well, I decided to jump on the blog bandwagon just like everyone else. Many people I know have blogs (some have 2 or 3) and I've been meaning to make one for a while, just never got around to it.
So finally, here it is.
By the way, ThomasAction is a phrase stolen from my friend and my bro in Canada. When a Thomas scores a goal, wins a game or makes a nice play, the appropriate phrase is "Thomas Action!!". I was going to use TeamThomas which is similar in meaning and just as cheesy but not quite as catchy. Much to my surprise, that name is already taken. So, sorry for stealing your phrase bro.