Check out this Canadian Black Bear pretending to be a squirrel and raiding the birdhouse across the clothes line…

#Note: at the bottom there’s also a VERY funny Canadian Bear Warning sign, make sure you read it all the way through, I promise it’s worth it!

This Canadian warning sign about bears is scarily funny, make sure you read it all the way through though…

These pics came in to my inbox from a random person, so I’ve no idea who to thank for them, but thanks for the laughs anyway!

This is a very funny spoof video of Jeremy Clarhsom from the UK’s Top Gear program, called “Clarkson Island”, from Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse.

#Note: it’s only going to be funny for you if you’ve watched Top Gear or are familiar with Jeremy Clarkson…

This letter was (apparently) recently sent by Tesco’s Head Office to a customer in
Oxford.

Dear Mrs. Murray,

While we thank you for your valued custom and use of the Tesco Loyalty
Card, the Manager of our store in Banbury is considering banning you and
your family from shopping with us, unless your husband stops his antics.
Below is a list of offences over the past few months all verified by our
surveillance cameras:

1. June 15: Took 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in people’s
trolleys when they weren’t looking.

2. July 2: Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute
intervals.

3. July 7: Made a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to feminine
products aisle.

4. July 19: Walked up to an employee and told her in an official tone,
“Code 3″ in housewares….. and watched what happened.

5. August 14: Moved a ‘CAUTION – WET FLOOR’ sign to a carpeted area.

6. September 15: Set up a tent in the outdoor clothing department and
told shoppers he’d invite them in if they would bring sausages and a Calor
gas stove.

7. September 23: When the Deputy Manager asked if she could help him, he
began to cry and asked, “Why can’t you people just leave me alone?”

8. October 4: Looked right into the security camera; used it as a
mirror,picked his nose, and ate it.

9. November 10: While appearing to be choosing kitchen knives in the
Housewares aisle asked an assistant if he knew where the antidepressants
were.

10. December 3: Darted around the store suspiciously, loudly humming the
“Mission Impossible” theme.

11. December 6: In the kitchenware aisle, practised the “Madonna look”
using different size funnels.

12. December 18: Hid in a clothing rack and when people browsed, yelled
“PICK ME!” “PICK ME!”

13. December 21: When an announcement came over the loud speaker,
assumed the foetal position and screamed “NO! NO! It’s those voices again.”

And; last, but not least:

14. December 23: Went into a fitting room, shut the door, waited a
while;   then yelled, very loudly, “There is no toilet paper in here.”

Yours
sincerely,

John Doe
Store Manager

WATER

1. 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. (Likely applies to half the worlds population)

2. In 37% of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak that it is mistaken for hunger.

3. Even MILD dehydration will slow down one’s metabolism as 3%.

4. One glass of water will shut down midnight hunger pangs for almost 100% of the dieters studied in a University of Washington study.

5. Lack of water is the primary trigger of daytime fatigue.

6. Preliminary research indicates that 8-10 glasses of water a day could significantly ease back and joint pain for up to 80% of sufferers.

7. A mere 2% drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or on a printed page.

8.  Drinking 5 glasses of water daily decreases the risk of colon cancer by 45%, plus it can slash the risk of breast cancer by 79%., and one is 50% less likely to develop bladder cancer. Are you drinking the amount of water you should drink every day?

Coke

1. In many states the highway patrol carries two gallons of Coke in the trunk to remove blood from the highway after a car accident.

2. You can put a T-bone steak in a bowl of Coke and it will be gone in two days.

3. To clean a toilet: Pour a can of Coca-Cola into the toilet bowl and let the ‘real thing’ sit for one hour, then flush clean. The citric acid in Coke removes stains from vitreous china.

4. To remove rust spots from chrome car bumpers: Rub the bumper with a rumpled-up piece of Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil dipped in Coca-Cola.

5. To clean corrosion from car battery terminals: Pour a can of Coca-Cola over the terminals to bubble away the corrosion.

6. To loosen a rusted bolt: Apply a cloth soaked in Coca-Cola to the rusted bolt for several minutes.

7. To bake a moist ham: Empty a can of Coca-Cola into the baking pan, wrap the ham in aluminum foil, and bake. Thirty minutes before ham is finished, remove the foil, allowing the drippings to mix with the Coke for a sumptuous brown gravy.

8. To remove grease from clothes: Empty a can of Coke into the load of greasy clothes, add detergent, and run through a regular cycle. The Coca-Cola will help loosen grease stains. It will also clean road haze from your windshield.

Additional Information: -

1. The active ingredient in Coke is phosphoric acid. It will dissolve a nail in about four days. Phosphoric acid also leaches calcium from bones and is a major contributor to the rising increase of osteoporosis.
2. To carry Coca-Cola syrup! (the concentrate) the commercial trucks must use a hazardous Material place cards reserved for highly corrosive materials.
3. The distributors of Coke have been using it to clean engines of the trucks for about 20 years!

So I guess the question is, would you like a glass of water? or Coke?

1. Leave early, otherwise you will end up spending a LONG time queuing to get in, we were queuing for almost 2 hours!

2. Take a portable seat to sit on, you will spend a lot of time sitting around and having a portable seat will make this a lot easier, especially if the grass is wet

3. Take an umbrella, just in case it rains

4. Wear comfortable shoes, it’s a  big “show ground” and just to walk from one end to the other is about 2 miles…

5. Take something to read, there are some quite bits where you may want to have something else to do, unless you’re with a bunch of friends.

6. take something to eat and drink, there are a lot of concession stands, but they are far from cheap! And it’s mostly burgers and chips, although there was a very popular Noodle Bar towards the middle of the show ground.

7. take some ear plugs, although you can get some there. Some of the fighter jets are very loud, so having some ear plugs is not a bad idea…

8. take some spare batteries for your camera, mine ran out within minutes of being there (who forgot to charge them…), so I ended up taking pics on my mobile instead, luckily it’s got an 8MP camera, so the pics were still ok.

9. If you’re really keen on taking pics or video then consider taking something to stand on to get a better view.

10. If you buy a program, understand that they may not stick to exactly the order published in it, they didn’t when we were there.

I was hoping to take my kids to the Royal International Air Tattoo last year, but it was rained off for the first time in it’s history, so we we’re pretty determined to make it this year, and it was well worth it!

We took umbrella’s just in case, but the weather was kind enough to stay dry, my son and I even picked up a bit of sun burn, so we certainly can’t complain at the weather!

The day didn’t start quite so well though, as we ended up stuck in the queue to get in for almost 2 hours!

Fortunately we did make it in just in time to see the Red Arrows doing their display, which managed to cheer up the kids no end, as they suddenly forgot about all the time spent sat in the car in the queue.

The only down side with seeing the Red Arrows first, was that all the other air display teams we aw after didn’t quite seem as exciting… lol!

but then there was the Avro Vulcan B2 Bomber!

I hadn’t realized that it was going to be there, so this was a pleasant surprise for me as this was one of my favorite toy plane’s as a kid, the distinctive “delta v” shape is just sooo coool!

It seems that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way about the Vulcan, the moment the announcement came over the tanoy that it was about to take off EVERYONE was up on their feet with cameras in hand!

and no one was disappointed, the Vulcan taking off is an amazing thing to watch and hear!

One moment it’s on the runway and the next it’s leapt in to the air at a 45′ angle and is screaming it’s way in to the sky.

I managed to get a great pic on my mobile, but I seriously regret not videoing it instead, the Vulcan’s engines have an amazing roar to them, and the speed with which it leaps in to the air is totally astonishing for a plane of it’s size, after all, this is a long range heavy bomber, not a jet fighter!

The Vulcan was easily the highlight of the day for both me and the kids, but there were also some cool flyby’s, including a LancasterBomber and 2 Spitfire’s, as well as a pretty amazing display from a Chinook helicopter, something that big and clumsy looking should not be able to do what the pilot managed to get it to do.

We headed back to the carpark to try and beat the rush out before the Eurofighter display started, but ended up seeing most of it from the carpark as we were waiting to get out anyway.

All in all the Air Tattoo was a thoroughly enjoyable day out!

Oh, I’ll be a doing a Top 10 Tips for Attending Air Shows post next…

These VERY funny cat videoson YouTube did the trick!

If there’s something wrong with your printer, check the cat…

“The funniest Cat Clips”

more of “the funniest cat clips”

hope you enjoyed them as much as I did.

it’s just over 14 minutes long and it’ll seem a lot shorter, it’s that good…

you’ll probably also recognise quite a few of the faces in it.

Having recently moved house I thought I’d run a test on the connection speed I’m getting with my broadband connection.

Most services will limit you to around 7-800KBps upload speed, so it’s really the download speed I was interested in, especialy as that’s what effects stuff like browsing sites, watching videos and downloading programs etc.

I’m not going to mention the name of the first site I first used to test my connection speed, as after the results I got with them sucked I realised I should probably do a bit of research before I called my provider to shout at them…

This first site was showing my download speed as around 2MBps on average, which may not sound too bad, but I’m paying for 30MBps from my provider and it’s not exactly cheap…

It turns out that there are quite a few different things that can effect the speed of your connection, but primary amongst them are the age of your computer and how far you are from the server on which you run the connection speed test.

As an example of the first “variable”, my desktop PC (running Windows XP Pro) is a 2 or 3 years old now and has way too much stuff running on it, so it often struggles simply because of the number of applications I run on it.

I also have a laptop (running Vista) that is just a few months old and fairly high spec.

My laptop, even though it is running of a wireless connection, was achieving on average, double the download speeds of my desktop PC, so the age/speed/specification of the computer you’re using can make a big difference!

I also found a decent speed testing site, after checking a couple of dozen!

the difference with this particular site is that they offer the ability to test your download speed for diffeent servers in different locations across the world, obviously some (like those that are closer) will give you better results.

Here’s a selection of the results I got with my desktop pc for some differenet server locations, bearing in mind I’m based in Cheltenham in the middle of the UK: -

Maidenhead  : 16MBps
London           : 10MBps
Kent                :  3MBps
Dublin             : 10MBps
Kiev                :  2.6MBps
Moscow          :  0.7MBps
New York      :  3.7Mbps
L.A.                 :  3.5MBps
Vancouver     :  2.3MBps

as you can see from the results, the servers in the UK gave me far higher download speeds.

So am I getting what I pay for?

well, remember I said that my laptop was getting double the speeds of the dekstop pc, in fact on the laptop I was able to get download speeds of close to 30MBps for all of the UK servers, and over 20MBps for most of the USA based servers, so I guess my provider (Virgin Media) are delivering what I’m paying for!

one last tip, if you’re broadband/cable/DSL supplier have increased your bandwidth over the last year or so and you haven’t upgraded your modem, then doing so will probably help as well, but have a chat with your supplier to see if they will provide one for free, mine did…

The best site I found for doing internet speed connection tests is SpeedTest.net

I use a blogging “content management script” for this site called WordPress, you might have heard of it, as it’s quite popular and with good reason.

I am a bit of a “web head” and have been building my own websites for a decade or so now, so I know how to “code” a site using “html”, but using a blogging platform like wordpress makes it all SO MUCH EASIER!

Once a blog is set up to add a “post” like this one you simply log on to the admin panel and choose the “write post” option and then write what you want in the big box and put a title (description) for the “post” in the little box, simply click on the “publish” button, and hey  presto, you have a new web page/post!

There’s no need to mess around with html code or stuff like that, unless you want to.

This is why blogs are so popular generally, or at least it’s one of the reasons.

It’s also a piece of cake to change the “look & feel”, or style, of your site by simply uploading and selecting a new “Theme”, which is how I’ve changed the look of this blog.

Of course being a techie there’s also the small fact that this is my own theme, although I’m not going to claim to have written it myself, I employed a clever guy from Indonesia to do that for me, Thanks Andre!

Blogs are also easy to add extra “bits” to.

All those bits and pieces in the sidebar menu on the right hand side of the page are bits that I’ve added using “plugins” (written by other people, and usually free) or widgets to add my own bits of code, like the “contact Mattg” link and the “BlogTactics” setup guide link.

There is another reason why blogs, and especially WordPress blogs, are so popular, the search engines (like Google) love them, so it’s easier to get good search engine rankings (i.e. appear on the first page or two when someone searches on a term that you blog is about).

Anyway, this isn’t a lesson on blogging or how to set one up for yourself, if you want that click on the BlogTactics link in the sidebar, I just wanted to explain why the new look for the blog, and see if you like it.

I’d love to hear what you think, you can leave a comment in the comments box below this “post”…

(oh, that’s another reason blogs are cool, visitors can leave comments, so it’s not like a dumb old “static” website, it’s really a “communication platform”..)