Dom Davis (The Blog)

I like Alpen. It’s tasty and it’s got raisins in it which must mean it’s healthy. It’s also got added sugar (as evidenced by the no added sugar version) which may or may not outweigh any raisin based health benefits. Since I’m on a pretty extreme diet (which is going swimmingly, thank you ) I looked at perhaps making my breakfast lower in calories by replacing my Alpen with something else.

First thought was toast. Good old marmite on toast. No, my diet app informs me that this is 300 calories (really?!) and not enough fibre to start my day meaning I’ll be hungry.

Fine, let’s go with no added sugar Alpen. I discovered very quickly that while it looks like normal Alpen it is in fact constructed from little flakes of cardboard cut out and coloured to resemble Alpen but with none of the flavour, save what little taste the raisins can add. Not wishing to be put off I decided to work out what sacrificing taste really gained me. Got to be worth 50 calories at least?

A quick check of the box and we find a portion of Alpen is 146 calories. Compare that to no added sugar which only comes to 141… hang on a minute… 5 calories? I can burn that just smiling about the fact I don’t have to eat the no added sugar crap.

Next up, time to check my portion size compared to the official portion size. According to the box 1 portion is 40 grams. According to my scales 40 grams of Alpen would leave a mouse hungry. Come 10am you’re going to be starving which leads to snacking and before you know it you’ve eaten a whole packet of chocolate biscuits. No, 80 plus grams is much more like a real serving (120 would be better) and that pushes the calorie count up somewhat.

OK, so let’s go the full hog, let’s accept it’s going to taste of cardboard and leave you miserable all day. Let’s eat Special K. Except its diminutive 117 calories comes from a 30g portion. For comparison that’s about the weight of one raisin in my Alpen¹ and if we scale that up to the [now comparatively massive] default Alpen portion it’s nearly 152 calories! For the slow among you: that’s more than my added sugar Alpen.

So what have we learned? Well for starters we’ll be sticking with Alpen for breakfast, and double portions at that ( even occasional forays into Coco Pops won’t hurt provided I don’t do the whole megaportion thing) and when they say “can help slimming as part of a calorie controlled diet” we need to remember that anything (even lard) will make you lose weight as part of the calorie controlled diet. It’s the calorie controlled bit that’s key.

Meanwhile I look for other areas to save on calories. It’s got to be one of the: amount of carrots I eat; the amount of fruit I eat; or all the kebabs. I suspect it’s the carrots.

¹OK, maybe not, but you get the idea.

One of the doohickies I have set up on this blog gives me the top search results used to find it. I’m used to seeing odd, funny, inane and downright weird stuff in there, especially with the old blog.

The top 3 items in the list (we buy any car lyrics; nxea; and spread betting 10p per point) are all easily explained.

Number 4 is “jif lemon” “kidney stones”. Given the way Google works the quotes mean the searcher was looking for two exact phrases. Given my love of pancakes in general and Jif Lemon day in particular added to my predilection to hatch kidney stones you can see why they ended up here. Makes you wonder what they were looking for, perhaps trying to find out if Jif Lemon causes kidney stones (unlikely to be the sole cause), maybe Jif Lemon tastes nice with kidney stones. Who knows.

Which brings us to item 5: “my foot” “x-ray” “nail polish” “blog”. remembering how we specify phrase matches with Google this means our visitor was looking for 4, fairly specific terms and wound up on my blog. Needless to say, I was intrigued. My ramblings are many and varied but I’m not sure that little lot has come up an any one post (prior to today). Of course, I had to Google it and, what do you know, first result . Clicking on the result takes you to the life at home category list which helps explain how I managed to hit all the search terms. Still, just goes to show that with Google, as with so many things in life: random shit in, random shit out

I, like most people, commute on autopilot. Arrive at station, check departure board, head to platform 4, wait for train, get on train, wait for train to depart. If anything is even slightly off it throws the routine quite jarringly. Take, for example, today. Arrive at station, check departure board, head to platform 4, wait for train… train not there.

Now usually this is due to one of two reasons. The most frequent is due to train being delayed. A quick check on the phone (there’s an app for that) or the departure board will confirm this. This also sorts the other problem: that I never checked the departure board in the first place and was just thinking I had from the umpteen million¹ times I’ve done it before and the train is actually going from platform 5 or 6. Sometimes² the departure board lies and the train is marked as on time despite clearly being late. Today was such a day… or so I thought.

Turns out the train was cancelled… due to breaking down… over half an hour earlier. Needless to say this information was not shared in a timely fashion. Not that it would have made much difference, but it’s the principle of the thing. Next train 18:49, enjoy your hour long wait. Joy.

Five minutes later and there is a new twist. A bus replacement service will run at 18:00 and we can find this “in the front carpark”, a vague reference which could, thanks to the layout of Norwich station, technically be either of the car parks depending on how you define “front”. Surprising and welcome as this development was it also worried me. My line is a shuttle service. Train breaks down? Tough. Wait for the next one (or more correctly the other one since there’s only 2). Why the deviation today? Could it be that the train has broken down somewhere that blocks the line meaning later trains won’t run, or won’t run to all stations?

By this point a gaggle of us had formed outside the front entrance of the station (“Excuse me, are you trying to get to Sheringham? Is this the right place for the bus?”) and rumours started cropping up as to where the train had died. Sheringham was given to us by one person, which was OK because the trains can pass there. Cromer was what another person had heard, again, trains can pass there… assuming the train made it to the station. The NXEA website, on the other hand, said Roughton Road area. A single tracked part of the line that would see everything terminate at North Walsham (only half way home) if it wasn’t cleared. Meanwhile, no bus.

Now we start to get organised. People are dispatched to the other carpark (no bus), the station concourse (no bus replacement service listed any more), and to harass members of staff: and I quote “There is a bus, it’s due to be hear at 6, we just don’t know when that is”. Tiny hint: when the big hand touches the 12 and the little hand touches the 6. Hard to miss, divides the clock face in half with the hands. We were also assured the next train would run on time to all stations. No, we didn’t believe them either.

18:20 and the bus arrives. Now the dilemma. Do we get the bus, which should get us where we want to go, but down country roads, or do we get the train, which may or may not get us home on time? We opted bus which, thankfully, was going to miss out all the stations people didn’t need so hopefully a quicker journey. Time will, of course, tell (currently we’re beating the train by 10 minutes)

Update: Bus proved to be the correct option. I’m not even sure if the train is going to make it past North Walsham. Still home an hour late

¹ OK, closer to 100, but who’s counting?

² And by sometimes we mean frequently.

My walk to and from work is a not unpleasant affair of a riverside walk with a short hop over a road to get to the station. I get to see green, wild fowl and endless people walking their dogs. The downside is midges. The little buggers hover at mouth height just waiting for you to ingest, or worse, inhale them. Keeping ones mouth shut mitigates the ingestion problem, but not the inhalation one.

I only mention this because today the bug threat was stepped up a level from passive annoyance to direct assault. I was just starting my walk, trying to remember what the hell I was going to blog about (I did have a topic this morning, buggered if I can remember what it is now though) when: *smack*. Some large flying insect (possibly a bumble bee, if not Mothra himself) hits me in the side of the face and proceeds to get tangled in my headphones. Bearing in mind I’m not good with wasps and this could quite easily be a wasp (or hornet, or killer bee) I instantly adopt the “Argh! Get it off!” position, flailing wildly with my free hand (iPhone in the other, remember?) in order to extricate whatever just dive bombed me without being stung to death. Not a good look, especially since I managed to pull my headphones out and end up with them dangling from the phone.

Thankfully the people from the office who seemed to be having a lovely picnic on the river bank (alright for some) were just a bit too far away to witness me at my finest. It was just the dog walkers who got a good chuckle.

On Saturday I went to pick up my precious which is very shiny, very comfy and very much in a drawer because apparently I’m not allowed to wear it until I’m actually married. Bit of an arse, but who am I to buck tradition?

Anyway, as part of the contributions to the cost of the wedding thing that parents are want to do, my mother had given me a load of old jewellery to sell with the proceeds going towards the ring. One piece was the wedding ring my father had given my mother when they got married. Since he can’t come to the wedding (being, as he is, somewhat metabolically challenged) I thought it was rather fitting.

Still trying to work out what to have engraved on the inside of it. Options include:

• 09/10/2010
• IX X MMX
• Dom & Zo, 09/10/2010
• 1286636400

Answers on in a comment please (“One ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them” has been vetoed, so don’t even think it”)

For those of you not paying attention I’m getting married in a little over 2 months, besides, unless you’re reading this on an iPhone there’s even a little thing down there on the bottom right telling you how long until the wedding [or, if you're really late to the blog and reading this too far into the future, how long we've been married for], so it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Anyway, getting married, so I needed to get a ring. This has not been an easy feat, which is odd since I knew exactly what I wanted: a 6mm heavy court ring… in 950 platinum… costing a small fortune.

I was also looking at some rings that deviated a little from the traditional rings: black zirconium oxide, titanium (as one of my friends said: “Nothing says ‘I Love You’ like a ring made from a lightweight, blast proof metal”), ceramic, that kind of thing. These were quite funky, much cheaper and stood out a little but I worried that, while I thought they were cool now, I may look at it in 10 years time and go “what the hell was I thinking?” If you’re going to be wearing something for the rest of your life you want to be sure you’re going to be happy with it for the duration

By this point The Zozo had already found and ordered her ring, solving the ‘platinum is frighteningly expensive’ problem by going for palladium instead which seems, to all intents and purposes, to be the same as platinum^1,2,3 but nearly 1/4 the price. In the end I decided to go the same route and ordered a 6mm heavy court ring in 950 palladium, a move that cut the cost of the wedding by 1/3rd in one fell swoop (yes, wow ).

The ring is now waiting at the jewellers for me to pick up tomorrow (yay!) whereupon I shall take it round the corner to the engravers to have something put on the inside. Not entirely sure what that will be yet, shall have a ponder tonight.

¹OK, granted, if The Zozo goes shoving her hand into a container of concentrated acid her wedding ring is not going to survive as well as her engagement ring but, at this point, we’ve got much bigger issues to deal with so I think we can let that one slide.

²And yes, it’s going to melt before the engagement ring, but again, bigger problems to deal with at 800C, like dying.

³Weighing less is A Good Thing™, now stop being pedantic.

My commute into work involves the use of a very rural railway line. Two trains ply the route, much of which is single track, pass at North Walsham where there is a handy bit of doubled up track for precisely that, get to the end of the line, turn round, come back. Lather, rinse, repeat. This setup has some advantages; except for a tiny bit at the Norwich end, there is only ever one other train that can get in your way (and they can and do turf everyone off to wait for the next train and send the empty train back if things get too out of whack); similarly signal failures aren’t a massive problem as there are only 2 trains to co-ordinate; also it’s a quiet line so I always get a seat, often by myself. The downside is when things go wrong you can easily get delayed an hour waiting for the next train and if a train goes out of service all he’ll breaks loose. Especially if it breaks down on a bit of single track, unable to move so nothing can get past.

This morning the train glided [glode?] into the station without the usual rumble of it’s diesel/electric engine. This is never good. 10 seconds later there is a roar, the engine restarts, all appears to be well. 5 minutes later the engine cuts out again, we glide into Roughton Road station, I start to wonder if we’ll leave. Lo and behold the engine restarts, big roar, we pull off…

200 meters outside of Gunton engine dies. Coast in. Restart…

And so on at every station. Most disconcerting. So the question is was this a defective train which limped from Cromer to Norwhich; a novice driver who kept stalling the engine; or some new operating procedure to save money?

It was with some trepidation I left the office this afternoon and checked the train times. I had visions of a failed train blocking the line, or one train out of service meaning chaos and me getting home late. Thankfully all appears to be working fine. The train has arrived, the engine is running and (touch wood) in 45 minutes or so it’ll disgorge me onto Cromer station, platform 1.

It would seem that these days there are three types of company: those that have embraced the Internet to a greater or lesser extent; those who haven’t; and those who claim to have embraced it but haven’t really. It’s the last lot that annoy me. I’m currently sat on a couple of emails to two different companies, both of whom list an email address in their contact details, and neither email has got a reply. Makes you wonder how many unanswered emails are sitting in their inboxes. What makes it worse is that one of the companies also list two phone numbers. Both these go to voicemail which, given the nature and size of the company (I’m guessing 1 person) is going to mean us playing answer phone tennis until such point as we’re both free to take a call at the same time. Email would be so much easier. The other company is my solicitors and it’s a discussion I’d rather have in writing so there can be no confusion. I’ll have to do it snail mail now which will take far longer.

OK, so if these companies hadn’t listed email addresses I would have to go the old skool route anyway, but at least I wouldn’t be sat there thinking there’s an easier way to do this and I wouldn’t have wasted time waiting for replies that obviously aren’t coming.

So given my recent dillema I spent enough time with iMovie to realise that it wasn’t going to cut the mustard and that cash was going to have to be spanked. One of the nice things about where I work is that we get employee discounts at various places, including Apple. This is about 8% for hardware so I figured I’d toddle to Temple and find out what savings could be had. Turns out the goof folk at the Apple Store were going to give me a 17% discount which, on an upgrade that costs £254, comes to over £40. Bonus. Hopefully I shall finish installing tonight (it comes on several DVDs and a full install is over 50Gigabibbles so it takes a while). I can then work on my video projects… which I won’t be sharing with you lot

So there is tiny flaw in the whole blogging while walking to and from work, namely the small problem of rain. That said, there have been very few days where it’s been raining on both walks but this is the UK and having crappy, drizzly days where it doesn’t let up isn’t unheard of. If it is raining you’ll just have to go find something else to do