Dom Davis (The Blog)

Despite being a Tuesday yesterday was technically a Monday. And not just any Monday. It’s the first Monday of the year. The granddaddy of them all. The one that tells you that you have to claw your way through yet another year of Monday’s, each and every one of them out to get you.

Being a Tuesday That Was Really A Monday and being upset about not being able to foist a full week of work on us after informing us that Christmas Is Over, Monday took it upon itself to really get stuck in by giving me the gift of hard drive failure. In my laptop. The computer I now use at home since my big computer is at work. That computer I now do all my photography and freelance work on. Cock!

Thankfully this is not quite the end of the world. Short term I have my iPad for day to day use (which has pretty much replaced the laptop for much of my computing activity at home) and, push comes to shove I can either stay late at work to do stuff on my big machine, or steal The Zozos laptop and use that. I may even be able to coax enough life out of the drive to copy stuff off it before it fails completely.

Longer term there is a complete set of backups. Much of my stuff now lives in the cloud and so will simply sync automatically onto whatever computer I tell it too. The rest lives on an external hard drive which was last attached to the machine the last time I had it on. So my data is safe.

The problem is more one of cost. The period between Christmas and March is a phenomenally expensive one, what with Christmas, most of the birthdays in my family, service charges on my flat, the need to purchase a new rail card, accountants fees and the pound of flesh HMRC invariably wants (or, on good years, the accountants fees are covered by the rebate). Much as I’d love a shiny new, high speed solid state disk in my laptop it’s not something that’s going to happen without dipping into the savings. Sadly, nor is simply buying a replacement hard drive. It doesn’t help that disk prices have skyrocketed due to flooding in Thailand. While I’m sure the accountant can write off the cost of the disk against freelance earnings that’s not until next year, which doesn’t help with the needing the disk now.

Morrisons was heaving last night. There were queues at all the checkouts, people were getting in my way and it seems it was also morons night.

Let’s take exhibit A: A lady who has decided she is going to buy a Bag For Life™, places it n the conveyor and the proceeds to pile (quite literally by scooping out of her basket) her shopping on top of it. It doesn’t take a huge leap of mental agility to realise you need the bag first at the other end of the checkout. My decision that she was going to be a nightmare was borne out by the fact she hadn’t finished shopping either. No, she was there with her family and had obviously decided that the queues were too long so she would dump what they had at the checkout and “claim a place” while her family finished the shopping. One. Item. At. A. Time.

In supermarkets the shortest queue isn’t always the quickest and, lacking the option of shooting this lady¹, I jumped queues to one where they’d actually finished shopping and looked like they would be able to pack said shopping in a reasonable time.

Sure enough my queue moved at a nice pace and, after a time², two women who were obviously friends joined the queue behind me. They proceeded to unload their shopping and, when done, the lady furthest back leant over and took my “Next Customer Please” thing and put it at the end of the conveyor. I thought this was a bit odd but said nothing and replaced it with another “Next Customer Please” thing which the lady then proceeded to pick up…

Music stopped, headphones out of ears, finest “seriously, what the fuck?” face applied and pointed towards the lady who was mid way through telling her friend that she would never buy reduced baked goods but broke off long enough to lamely state that it was her friends shopping. I just took the thing for her, put it back in its rightful place and corrected her with “No, that’s my shopping!”

I didn’t add that they were also my baked goods and the doughnuts are always reduced at that time of night, to be honest, I was quite taken aback, it’s not like there were lots of piles of shopping in the queue ahead of me and she saw her friend unload her basket so how she thought I managed to cordon off her stuff when I was already there with my shopping I do not know.

By now it was my turn at the checkout so I moved to the packing end and proceeded to do just that. Once packed I paid and, as I picked my bag up, noticed something was missing. I looked back and there was my box of serial, with the “Next Customer Please” thing in front of it. When I had put it back it was definitely behind the box of cereal so it would appear it got moved again. I hadn’t paid for it and I couldn’t be arsed arguing so I just left it and headed home wondering why so members of the population seem to posses a brain.

¹ Execution style: blindfolded, hands cuffed behind the back, pistol to the back of the head.

²You may want to keep using more³

³Sorry, Combichrist sample jumped into my head (“After a time, you may want to keep using more”). Brain Bypass from the album What The F^^k Is Wrong With You, Google it, it’s totally bizarre and very informative about cocaine and cocaine abuse⁴

⁴“cocaine abuse is when ongoing cocaine use leads to problems being around others” – just Google it. Incidentally the phrase “What’s wrong?” always starts Psy Storm by Decoded Feedback (on the album Combustion) off in my head. It samples THX 1138⁵ quite heavily.

⁵Early George Lucas film. It’s very bizarre.

So for a while now I’ve been on the lookout for a track I’d head at Slimelight a few times. Sadly I had no clue who it was by, no idea what it was called, and rather got the lyrics wrong when hunting for it. To be fair it is in German and I had thought it was called ‘Stein Um Stein’, which to be fair is the name of a Rammstein track I have. A not so recent compilation purchase which took several weeks to get to me yielded excellent news. There, on the track listing, was a track by ‘And One’ called Steine Sinde Steine (Stones are Stones). Jackpot. Sadly it was a live version, however, 60 seconds later and I had the studio version downloaded an on my iPhone.

So I present for your listening pleasure, And One, Steine Sinde Steine:

Steine Sinde Steine

Lyrics (including translation) can be found here. Enjoy

Recently they have made the self service checkouts at Morissons less annoying. How? By shutting then up. Previously it would be:

“Do you have your own bag?”
“Please put your bag in the bagging area”
“Please scan a barcode or select an item”
*beep*
“Please place the item in the bag”
“Please scan a barcode or select an item”
*beep*
“Please place the item in the bag”
“Please scan a barcode or select an item”
*beep*
“Please place the item in the bag”

And so on and so forth, usually with the odd “Please wait, an assistant is coming” thrown in for good measure. There are four self service tills so it was a cacophony of requests to scan or place items.

Thankfully someone has decided we’re all reasonably au fait with the whole scanning and packing thing and we can work it out for ourselves without the incessant prompting, just the pertinent instructions at the start and the end of the process. For those who really don’t get it there is still the assistant.

The biggest problem I have with Amazon is it’s so damn easy to buy stuff. I’m already registered so there’s no faffing and it’s just a question of search, locate, buy now. Then comes the waiting which puts a disconnect between the buying and receiving, something that I hate. Then there’s the anticipation, is it what I hope it is, or is it two right shoes, neither in the style I’ve ordered (which has actually happened, although the vendor in question was most apologetic and sorted full refunds)?

With the loss of my unlimited data plan for the iPhone, ban on headphones at work and irregular club visits my source of finding new music has shifted away from last.fm and back to buying obscure compilations in the hope of finding some gems. I was made aware of one such compilation recently via Facebook and purchased it from, surprise surprise, Amazon (yes, yes, I know, optical media, how quaint, but it’s not on iTunes so one has to improvise).

My triple CD box set, including such delightful gems as Suicide Comando’s “Die Mother@&£%er, Die” (in this context the Die is the English ‘die’ not the German ‘the’), arrived yesterday. I wasted no time in ripping the packaging open and feeding CD 1 into iTunes. Minutes later and CD 2 was also ripped. The third CD, however, prompted a warning. Did I want to overwrite existing songs? Hmm, now I know I have some of these tracks already, but as part of different albums, surely it’s not going to complain about that? A quick look at my music library showed I did, indeed, have that CD on my machine. Assuming I’d messed up and started at CD 3 I put CD 1 into the drive. Same warning. So I took a look at the two CDs left in the box to see if I’d got them muddled. There was CD 2 and… CD 2. Well that explains it. Minutes later and the whole lot is back in it’s original packaging with a returns label on it. A replacement should be with me tomorrow. Hopefully, this time, with 1 CD 2 and a separate CD 3.

Morrisons sells grapes in ziplock bags. I guess the idea is it’s easy to reseal them once they’re opened. A little too easy it would seem as I saw one guy open up two bags, transfer much of the contents of one to the other, reseal them and walk off with a now bulging bag a grapes, leaving a rather skinny bag on the shelf. From the looks of things this wasn’t the first time he’d done it either. And it’s not like it was a behoodied yoof either. This guy was in his 50′s, if not 60′s. Makes you wonder what other little scams people have and how much of it goes on.

One of the perks I get at work is £80 to spend on wine a quarter. If you’re frugal you can get a case with that, however, I’ve been leaving my money to sit and accrue. After over a year I realised I had nearly £300 sat in my account so yesterday I decided to spend it.

First things first, I wanted a bottle of something expensive to celebrate Nubbins birth. I believe the most expensive champagne we do is the Louis Roederer Cristal 2002, a single bottle of which put a £139.99 hole in my account. No idea what it’s like, but The Zozo and I will be cracking that bad boy open shortly after we get Nubbin home.

Next up some “cheap” (when compared to the Cristal) bubbly so we can celebrate with others. I’ve always liked Veuve Cliquot so a couple of bottles of that were shoved in the basket. I’m pretty sure my mum prefers Moët and I don’t think The Zozos parents have a preference so a couple of bottles of that were also purchased so we can also celebrate with then. To round off the order and fill a 6 bottle case a cheeky bottle of Bolli was also added. Might save that one for Christmas. After 9 months of being near tee total The Zozo will be able to drink like a queen for a while

Wine choices made I then had to go speak to a wine advisor to place the order for me (audit and fraud prevention means I can’t place my own orders in the office given it’s wide open to abuse). Total cost of the order: £290.94 (with free delivery for being and order over £150). Total cost to my bank account: £0.00. Not going to complain about that price

So they’re improving Morrisons in Cromer. I have no idea what these improvements entail, but two bits of the car park have been closed off and works are going on, and the cigarette kiosk area is covered up and a temporary one set up. Since I don’t know what the changes are I’ve decided to make some up. Here is what I’d like to see:

Both car park works are close to the pedestrian crossings. It’s my hope that cameras are being installed that will sense when cars ignore the pedestrian crossings. This will then feed details of the car (size, location, velocity, direction of travel) to some form of high calibre weaponry or artillery piece. Hellfire anti-tank missiles would also work. Lastly an articulated arm would be used to push the smouldering wreck into a storage pit for later retrieval and recycling. Past experience would suggest the pits would need to be very large and the ammunition would need to be replenished regularly.

The works inside the store are by the entrance. Hopefully a new “express” entrance is being built. This would be for people who are going to walk into the shop instead of just fucking stopping dead once they’ve got inside, thus blocking it for the rest of us. This entry would again use cameras and under floor sensors to ensure people are maintaining a minimum speed through the entrance. Failure to achieve this speed, or stopping dead will result in a hail of 50 calibre heavy machine-gun fire aimed at the culprit.

These two, very simple alterations would vastly improve my shopping experience.

On Saturday The Zozo and I are off to Peterborough to visit the largest Kiddiecare in the universe*. These people have everything from the tiniest little gloves for babies hands to prams to cots to scanning rooms, delivery suites and off the shelf, pre born babies**. We are in the market for a pram so will be glad to find the widest selection of Silver Cross prams anywhere*** along with car seats, free fitting of said car seats and the ability to see if the prams actually fit in your car. Also on the list is a state of the art nappy bin and any other cool things I see. It’s going to be fun. And expensive. Very expensive.

Because the products and services sprawl over three floors and because it’s 2 hours drive away we’ll be making a day of it. What is a little worrying is that we both seem more excited about this day trip than our holiday the week afterwards :S

*Claim may not be true. Geographical area where size supremacy is held may be smaller than stated.

**Product line may have been exaggerated.

***Anywhere being an undefined geographical area that may or may not be larger than the store itself

Chronologically I may well be heading towards middle age but inside I feel more 25¹ and I will fight growing old with every step. Becoming a dad isn’t mutually exclusive to this, I shall simple be a cool dad (or, from the perspective of Nubbin, and possibly The Zozo, an embarrassing one ). To this end I have procured for myself a baby changing bag from Yada Dada,, a company that provides stylish changing bags for the “Urban Parent²“. The bag has pockets for everything, a washable changing mat and looks like a normal messenger bag. What more could you want?

Sadly I was just a little too proud of my new bag. The Zozo asked to see it and I dashed upstairs to collect it. After donning my swish new toy I stood tall and proud and walked out of the bedroom.

*WHAM*

Our house is old and built in a time when people were shorter. 6 foot high door frames were fine in those days. I’m 6’1″ which, if I forget to duck, is just enough to give myself a nasty whack. Normally I remember and naturally bob as I enter into rooms. Occasionally I forget. This time I forgot and was moving at speed. For the second time this year I saw stars. That was yesterday morning. I’ve still got a splitting headache

¹I was going to say “mentally I feel 25″ but I suspect many people would argue that, like most men, mentally I’ve progressed no further than about 11.

²Those of you who read my old blog may remember the Urban Geek bag I had, so there is a theme here.