It's long been my belief that the cretins in charge of the UK mobile phone industry couldn't market or manage their way out of a wet paper bag, and today I had this confirmed yet again.

The SMS from my operator, O2, said: "From 1 July we're reducing the price of calls & texts when abroad in Western Europe. Visit www.o2.co.uk/international or call 2266 free for pricing details"

So I immediately clicked on the URL to learn more, the 1st of July being yesterday. What did I get?



And in a follow up to being the only UK outlet for the JesusPhone, these cretins now also have an exclusive on the Palm Pré, the one toy I do rather want... Sigh.

(The latest EU-mandated reductions in roaming charges have been trailed for a while, and I'd already discovered by chance that O2 had reduced its roaming fees in the non-EU bits of Europe - that's mainly Norway and Switzerland - to EU levels. I want to know what its new roaming rate for data - currently £3/MB, but the EU says €1/MB 'wholesale' - will be, though.)

I've been meaning to try out my cooking muscles for a while now, and I knew Helma was a bit fed up with work today so I thought I'd surprise her. I did my usual red lentil dhal, plus keema gosht - dry mince curry - and some brown rice. Normally I'd do the gosht with peas, but this morning I found new season British broad beans on the supermarket sell-by shelf so decided to try it with those instead. With a bit of mango chutney and some plain yogurt, it all worked very well!

I should have taken a photo before we started eating but forgot, so here's one taken as we started on second helpings:



Even Freki-dog enjoyed it, when I gave him the emptied saucepan to finish off - he liked it so much that he had to use a paw to stop the pan from escaping...



Now I'm too stuffed to sleep. Sigh!

Had a good time last night in Kingston (upon Thames) at the 10th CAMRA Kingston beer festival. It's on again today - and for anyone thinking of going along, it's moved. The former site at County Hall has been taken over by the University, I don't know what it's done with the old staff social club building, but it's not available for festivals now.

Fortunately the festival's new home is, if anything, better. It's the Kingston Workmen's club on Old London Road (behind Wilkinson), so it's much more central and convenient for trains and buses, and although it looked crowded last night, there was quite a lot of seating space. The club's bar area was rather too hot and stuffy, even with the doors open, but I'd been able to find seats in the hall near the festival bar - and some open windows!

Helma was the first to join me, albeit an hour late and somewhat stressed after having to transfer to a taxi when her train had a "one-under" at Feltham station. As the evening progressed we kept accumulating people - lproven and his lodger Uli, Liam's mate Shaun, and then Skeptics-in-the-pub host Sid and his flatmate Stella.

Needless to say, much beer was consumed (plus a little cider), barbequed sausages were enjoyed, and a fair amount of nonsense was spoken. Helma and Uli also discovered that although they've not met before, not only did they go to the same school but they were in the same school play. In Hannover, FFS!

From today's e-postbag:

Lenovo today announced the ThinkPad T400s created to give business users a thin and light yet powerful, feature-packed PC. Key points to note include:
* The ThinkPad T400s is super-slim at just 0.83 inches thin and ultra-light starting under four pounds
* The laptop weighs nearly 20 percent less than its ThinkPad T400 predecessor... /blah blah/

When the heck did 4lb (1.8kg) become "ultra-light"? That's two bags of sugar, FFS!!

If you want to talk light, HP produced a sub-3lb PC in 1993 - the Omnibook 300 - while my 1998-vintage LG Phenom Express - admittedly WinCE-based, not a true PC - is almost exactly 2lb, as was the Asus eeePC 700 that I had for a while last year.

It's not just the idiots at Lenovo - the latest issue of Wired UK has an advertorial from HP, touting a laptop as "a feather-weight 1.7 kilograms". What kind of chickens are these cretins plucking??

If you've been tempted to watch the live-action TV adaptation of the Horrible Histories books - and thankfully, unless you or your youngest is a CBBC addict, you probably haven't - then don't. It is not good.

First off, it is not terribly funny, and secondly, in their eagerness to "improve" Terry Deary's well-researched books and make them "TV-friendly", the scriptwriters have introduced multiple historical inaccuracies and anachronisms.

In one episode, there's a sketch in which "King Edmund II of England" claims he was murdered by a Viking who hid in his toilet. Now this is Edmund Ironside, the Englisc warrior king who fought Canute/Knut to a draw, then died suddenly. Yes, there is a legend that he was stabbed in the bum by a traitor hiding IN the toilet - but it's only a legend (it might have been feasible in a medieval garderobe, but in an Anglo-Saxon loo??) and as far as I can see, Terry Deary knew better than to repeat it his books.

In another, the monks of Lindisfarne are shown using sign language in 793, as the Vikings raid. Sign language is believed to have been invented in the Cluniac order, founded in 910, and is a post-Conquest thing in England.

The saddest laugh for me was, in the same programme that had a policeman arresting a history teacher for telling fibs (do teachers really claim that Lancelot and Guinevere were real people?), we were told that the Romans wrote curses on stone tablets (they used lead and tin), that the Vikings exclaimed "Odin's thunder!" (Thor's the thunder god, not Odin), and that Arthur, the one character in those legends who probably is based on a historical prototype, didn't exist.

Strange day... We were supposed to be visiting the Triple-fff brewery in Alton this morning on the Twickenham beer festival staff outing, but because we thought to take Freki-dog with us we'd decided to drive (yes, with a Designated Driver), rather than join the others on the coach. As we weren't due at the brewery until 11.30, that meant we could leave home around 10, instead of having to meet the bus at 9.

Except that as we headed out of London my phone rang - it was the organiser calling to say that, as they'd had a really quick drive down, they'd arrived an hour early and were about to start the brewery tour. We were still almost an hour away so sadly decided to abort the drive.

At least that gave me a bit more time to catch up on work, and then this afternoon we took the opportunity to nip over to Twickenham and view a possible wedding venue - the baroque Octagon room at Orleans House Gallery. It's a lovely room, in a nice setting by the Thames, the main drawback is it can only host stand-up receptions. Hmm, we are still debating...

Tomorrow afternoon, Helma and I are due in Viking guise at the Wandle Festival in Merton. We are both tired and wishing either that we'd said no - or that it was a different weekend! But we will go along and do our very best - if anyone else is going, you should find us either at the Chapter House at Merton Abbey Mills, or in Wandle Park.

I am now feeling faintly toasted after spending a bit too much of the afternoon creosoting the new shed in the sunshine, with no shirt on... Oh well, hopefully it'll translate into a bit of a tan...

This last week the patio's been relaid and a new shed base built, so I could replace the old 6'x4' shed with a new 6'x8' version. I decided to save myself some time and pain by getting the guys who did the patio to supply and put up a shed too, which made things a LOT quicker!

Then yesterday we got some shelving to go in there, and I finally unloaded the car from last weekend - it's the new home for the Viking tents and stuff.

So all the junk and Vike gear from the old shed's gone in, but because it's twice the size, there's still room to fit in a workbench as well. That means no more having to saw or hammer in the living room when I'm working on something and it's too wet to do it in the garden! Run an extension lead out there, and it'll be usable after dark too. Hurrah!

We celebrated last night by having a BBQ and inviting a couple of friends over. There's room to store the BBQ in the new shed too. (-:



My hands aren't half achey from the painting though, in fact I'm just tired all over....

Freki-dog spent rather a lot of last week in sheep country, sticking his head down rabbit holes, and over the last few days we have been catching up with the consequences: ticks.

So far we've found and removed nine of these nasty little bloodsuckers. Fortunately, Freki has been very good about this, which is just as well as it must be a bit painful for him.

The next time we take him to the countryside, he's going to be wearing an insecticidal collar. It probably won't stop all of them, but if it gets even half or two-thirds it'll be worth it!

Here he is enjoying his trip on the West Somerset Railway - actually, I think he was waiting for more sheep or horses to bark at...

Is it just me whose brain goes "Gnurgh!" and hiccups, as it attempts to digest the contradictions inherent in this sign?



We saw this banner - with and without anti-MP graffiti - posted all over Somerset, ahead of next week's European parliament elections.

Greetings from deepest West Somerset, which is where we're spending this week. It's very pretty, but of course I've left my camera in the cottage so uploading photos will have to wait.

I'm in the village pub, which has free WiFi, but for some reason it won't let me send email. Everything else is fine - POP, web, FTP - but not SMTP. I did wonder if it's their ISP (South West Internet CICforcing you to use its SMTP server, but the company's website says authenticated SMTP should work fine. Other ideas welcome!

From here, you can hear the steam trains on the West Somerset railway, which has a station not far away - that's something for later in the week...

Hopefully the weather will also clear later in the week. We are getting a little bit bored of drizzle - and the smell of wet dog! Talking of whom, he's getting restless, so I will have to get moving.

A truckload of party balloons:



(And yes, they are on the floor! I don't know what they're filled with, but I think they're fastened to wooden posts.)

I'm in Bloomington Minnesota where I've been attending Compellent's C-Drive customer conference. The event finished yesterday and I've now got my first report from it online at the excellent eWEEK Europe here.

The fact that the company went ahead with C-Drive at a time when others are cutting back says volumes about their approach to business - their attitude is "Screw the recession", it's only a downturn if you let it be, and if you plan for failure, that's what you'll get. It's one in the eye for the moronic and sheeplike accounting trolls running so many other companies today, who know the (short term) cost of everything and the (long term) value of nothing.

As is traditional at these events, there was a social event. This week's was held at Dave & Buster's in Maple Grove (no maples to be seen though). It's basically an amusement arcade for grown-ups, and was more fun than I feared it might be, thanks in part to the Sam Adams Boston Lager, I suspect...

You don't gamble with cash, instead you load up a magstrip card with credits - we were given one each - and then swipe it to either play games or obtain tokens. If playing a game where you can win, your winnings come in the form of strips of paper tickets:



I spent a bit of time playing those coin-shoving machines that I remember from the seaside amusement arcades of my youth, and as you can see I didn't do too badly... (In a somewhat ludicrous piece of inflation, each ticket says it actually has a value of two - why??)

Counting that lot would take ages, so they're simply weighed and then you can use the total to "buy" junk and souvenirs from the in-house shop. An amusing evening.

Hunting is hugely popular here in Minnesota. Sometimes I do wonder though if the hunters are perhaps a little indiscriminate in their choice of targets...

I had a quick look through the in-flight movie programme and couldn't help finding it all a bit samey. Out of eight films listed there are two starring Anne Hathaway, two with Jennifer Aniston, two with Steve Carell, and two with Jim Carrey.

Fortunately, there's more on the in-flight menu than Hollywood trash. What I actually watched was Wallander: Firewall, a police drama that's well done even if the plot's a bit iffy - anti-globalisation cyber-terrorists murdering their way to destroying the world financial system. The most confusing thing is it's set and filmed in Sweden (Ystad, in Skåne), with Swedish police cars, Swedish text in emails and so on, but it's all spoken in English, with the lead played by Kenneth Branagh. And it's made by BBC Scotland. Bizarre!

I'm bored of TV now, but just realised I forgot to copy over to the laptop all my so far unlistened-to downloads from Radio 4 (From Our Own Correspondent and Crossing Continents, mostly). Bum. I must see if I thought to copy anything worth listening onto my USB stick...

The most annoying thing about long-haul flights has to be the moment when the wretch in front of you suddenly, and without even a glance in your direction, puts their bloody head in your lap. If you're very lucky, they don't smash your laptop PC in the process...

On the plus side, SeatGuru got it right this time, and I have a seat with power, even if I've barely enough lap-space to make use of it. Having an American Airlines gold card helped, as this seat's reserved for "priority" passengers.

The steady devaluation of frequent flyer scheme membership means the card doesn't have much other use though. Gold may still be the top tier for Olympic medals, but in AA's scheme there's now at least two more levels above gold. Confusingly for those who have BA's basic blue card, AA's top tiers are green and blue.

Wow, that was hard work. We took Freki-dog to his first Viking show this weekend, at Corfe castle in Dorset. Stopped off on the way to visit my mum in Bristol, where he behaved perfectly well with her dog, then headed down to Corfe.

It was hard work. We're guessing - he's a rescue dog, so we don't know his history - that he may have been kept in a back garden or field, as he seems to have an issue with fences, especially when a dog passes by on the other side. We're trying to teach him to let us take responsibility for the borders.

More worrying was him barking at some people, notably some of the children - usually only when they were running or being boisterous. He may have had an issue there in the past, I guess.

And when we took him into the castle, it was really quite stressful. We've managed to get him acting a lot calmer at home and on his regular walks, but here there were too many people and too many unfamiliar dogs. It was worst when we wanted to stop and talk to someone, as he just wouldn't settle. If we keep moving, it's not too bad - move him past and away from the thing that makes him stressed, eg. another dog, and he calms down again. Here, it was just too concentrated.

On the plus side, on the campsite we found other dog-owners who took a realistic attitude to what happens when normal dogs meet - there might be a bit of growling and snapping while they figure out who's who, but then they're sorted and will either just ignore each other or start playing, as they wish. The bigger problem is when one or both are on the lead, so they can't sort it out normally. If only one's on the lead it seems to be worst, as that dog is automatically on the defensive.

Here's Freki with one of his new friends, Runa, who's a 5-month old cross of a Saarloos wolfhound and one of the husky types (I think her owner said). She's already the same size as him, so when fully grown she's going to be big!

It was off to the Red Lion in Isleworth tonight for a preview of its bank holiday weekend beer festival. As usual, most of this is in the old cowshed/stables/whatever out the back, although there's also 8 or 9 ales and some ciders on sale inside the pub too.



As you can see, most of the beers are on gravity, with three or four on handpumps - including Wandle bitter from the new Sambrooks brewery in Wandsworth, which was a tad green but should be great by Friday, and Twickenham's Gothick Dark, which was in stonkingly good form. Also on the bar are three ciders and some bottled Belgians, including Delerium Tremens.

Most of the beers are already in excellent form, and should be exceedingly potable by the time the festival officially opens, which is noon tomorrow (Friday 1st). It's open until 11pm on Monday.

The Eurostar menu calls it cream and parmesan risotto, but I know what it really is - savoury rice-pudding. And very nice it is too!

I woke up this morning earlier than I wanted, and spent about 45 minutes trying unsuccessfully to get back to sleep, before giving - and getting - up.

This happens quite a lot, though thankfully the episodes of early morning insomnia - where I woke up around 3 or 4am and couldn't get back to sleep for an hour or two - seem to have mostly gone away. It occurred to me today that if it averages an hour a night over your adult life, that's an entire year spent trying to get back to sleep.

Weird.

Boggle....

"Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems today announced they have entered
into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire all outstanding
shares of Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The offer is valued
at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun¹s cash and debt.
The transaction is expected to close in the Summer."