Our new hero!

So a guy has had the brilliant idea of outsourcing his remote working job to China. Paying a sixth of his salary to an outsourcing company and spending his days lazing around doing nothing.

A prince among men.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693

I knew if we waited long enough someone would do our job for us...

Some guy has already written the Underachievers Manifesto. Saves us the bother.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/may/18/underachieving-column-change-life-oliver-burkeman

You should have seen the cover I wanted to print.

Our printer ran out of its black ink cartridge the other day. The colour ones are still full. One of the reasons I bought the printer in the first place is that you can replace the cartridges individually for each colour. We hardly ever use it so this is a bonus.

Anyway, I have a full set of spare cartridges for it, one of each colour. I bought them when we got the printer. I can't find them. I think they are in the printer box, which was recently transferred into the loft.

So I found on Amazon I could get a pack of 8 black cartridges for £5... so I ordered them. Easier than going into the loft right?

Now I will be able to print out the Smell the Glove album cover if I want.

BTW 18 months since last update, impressive huh?

EXAM!

So I did my first Exam since university yesterday, which was a bit odd. It was for the wine course I've been doing. It's been great fun, I've learnt loads and think I did ok on the exam. Didn't do amazingly (probably would have needed to work a bit harder!) and I think some of the exam questions were a bit against the spirit of what we'd learnt. 3 questions on Fino Sherry, really? Of course if I'd got them all right I'd have thought that was fine.

Don't get the results for ages, but if I pass (if I don't you won't hear about it that's for sure) I'll have an NVQ level 2 in wine. Oooooh. That's the vocational equivalent of a GCSE! I definitely didn't get a distinction (boo) but I hopefully got a merit.

What have I learnt? Loads about what wine is made where, especially in France. That trip to the French supermarket wine aisle might be a bit less daunting now. It also turns out I do actually like quite a lot of white wines. Sweet wines, which I definitely thought I would hate, can be absolutely amazing. I had previously enjoyed Tokaji in Hungary but turns out there are loads of sweet wines I like, and not just with desserts. Sweet wine and cheese works well. Like the classic Port and Stilton. Sweet German Auslese Riesling with cream cheese, was really good or even PX Sherry with Roquefort!

For Christmas dinner I can recommend an Australian fortified Muscat. eg. this Rutherglen from Oddbins, or this De Bortolli from Majestic. We've got the De Bortolli.

How to open a bottle of wine with your shoe

This is absolute genius. How to open a bottle of wine using only your shoe.

It's my wife's birthday today.

WTF? I've got a wife?!

I hate the term "foodies"

In many ways I guess I could be accused of having a lot of the attributes of a foody.

1. I have been to a farmers market and bought food there.
2. I have grown my own (pitifully small) amount of food.
3. I watch lots of cooking shows, and shout at the screen at the ineptness and retardedness of the contestants when they try and open a tin with a massive kitchen knife or serve cheap Asda smoked salmon to Raymond Blanc.
   
4. I read the Guardian.
5. I do a lot of cooking, and eating, and generally like food a lot.
6. And wine. And beer. And scrumpy. And recently whisky. And Gin. I'm becoming a drinky.
   

No wait, back to foodies. Yeah, I hate the term. Really, really hate it. Generally I hate the idea of people defining themselves with a single term as if your generalised assumptions based on that word are enough to define them.

I like people who are share a lot of the aspects of being a foody with foodies, but who don't describe themselves that way. People who can come round for food, drinks, cook for me, have a great time, share recipes, talk cooking tips. Slag off stupid reality cooking show contestants who serve Raymond Blanc a packet of cheap Asda smoked salmon. That's all fantastic.

But if someone comes up and says "oh yes, we're both huge foodies!" (and it's always a couple!) I just think, "oh fuck off." It's the smug bragging thing that you know is coming next. Not some friendly chat about food or eating, it's one of those competitive conversations where whatever you've done they've done it more or better or gone to a better restaurant or BEEN MORE TEDIOUS.

Having a dinner party tonight. They aren't dead Guardian, although hopefully the formal monstrosities you describe are.

Hoodies on the other hand, are legends. And I fancy a drinky.

And gutted "Blancety Blanc" couple went out of The Restaurant. :-(

Wine Wine Wine Wine

A few weeks ago the wife and I (wife?! WTF?!) went back into education. Yeah. We got a flyer through the door for a wine course run by the local council adult education place. I've heard really good things about the place, my cousin teaches jewellery making there, and we love wine so we thought sod it we'll sign up.

School would have been so much better if it involved sitting around in small groups drinking wine and chatting about it (rather than sitting around in small groups in parks in the evenings after school drinking terrible cheap cider and chatting about how horrible it was).

It's been really great actually learning stuff, just for the fun of learning it. I'm quite surprised how much more I am getting out of the course already. Much more than I thought I would.

I have a top tip for you, a total bargain garnacha from Tesco. £3.54 and tastes like it should cost at least twice that. Most of us on the course scored it higher than the £8 Rioja we tasted it against. http://tinyurl.com/yh2sfz7

Christmas comes early

HA! I have fallen victim to a cunning marketing ploy. I have been considering getting a PS3 for ages and ages and this morning I got an e-mail from Amazon about their new PS3 250Gb bundles. Console + 3 games (inc. FIFA 10) + HDMI cable for £284... sounded like a bargain and having looked around at other offerings it is indeed a very bargainous bargain.

SO I have bought one and it's coming tomorrow before 1pm. HA! IN YOUR FACE CREDIT CRUNCH.

Do I need a PS3? No of course not. I just want one, it's coming tomorrow. Woo!

I hate being ill

I've been off sick for the last two days with a cold. Being ill is rubbish. Days off work are fantastic if you can do something good with your time, go away somewhere, do something fun or whatever but when you are basically stuck in bed feeling too shit to do anything other than watch daytime TV they suck. I'd rather be at work.

Daytime TV is particularly terrible. On sky we've got approximately 600 million channels to choose from, most of which have nothing good on at any time of the day. During the daytime even the decent channels have nothing good on. I blame the stupid watershed, surely all the kids are at school during the day so they could put good TV on then?

Probably the main problem with daytime TV is the adverts. I've got so used to watching everything via Sky+, so I've recorded it and can fast forward any adverts or boring bits. Actually having to watch a program live with 15 mins of adverts an hour is hell. And they literally time every one of the 600 million channels to have their ads at the same time. It's horrendous.

My wife (Wife?! WTF?) said yesterday that when she rules the world she'll ban adverts, I dunno how the TV companies will fund themselves (in her world, that's up to them) but possibly through product placement. Last night's Chuck (Chuck vs The Broken Heart) featured another of their amazingly blatent segments of Subway product placement. Maybe that's the future. Ah... quite fancy a subway now.

Huh? I thought this blog was dead?

Hey everyone. Yeah, this blog was dead but I was inspired to start posting on it again today. The thing I got inspired by is rather lame. This blog post that was retweeted by Neil Gaiman on Twitter. ANYWAY.

The main reason we stopped posting, I think, was obviously because we were too lazy to bother. We also got busy doing other stuff. Stuff that would have been really interesting to blog about actually. Is that ironic?

That said the reason underlying both those was that almost from the start we were really struggling with the "lazy" theme of the blog. Did every blog post really have to be moving the manifesto for success through laziness forward? Probably not, in fact with hindsight I can't work out why we would even bother with that. Sounds a bit like trying too hard to me. I reckon if I am blogging on here in future it'll be tedious stories about the boring crap that I'm doing in my life, just like 99.99% of other blogs. Although, I guess it will always be implicitly to do with the lazy theme because I am intrinsically lazy.

So the stuff I was busy doing was organising a gig, which happened to be at the end of the reception to my wedding. Which in itself needed a bit of organising. It was awesome. I'm married now which is weird. I got a nice watch out of it though, and a nice squeaky clean bank account. None of that filthy money stuff messing the account up. Just pure virginal clean emptiness. Well not quite virginal because it did used to be rammed full of cold hard cash.

This weekend I'm off for a stag do, my fourth of the year. Previous trips this year have involved Edinburgh (virtual golf and TPs), South Wales (canyoning and metal), Munich (my own one, giant beers, sausages and going to bed early). This time it's Bath for Home Brew, Curry and It's a Knock Out.

I'll probably update about it on twitter (see feed on the left). Oh yeah, Twitter, another reason for not blogging. Why say something in 500 words when you can say it in 14o characters. As you can see, it's taught me to be brief.

LazyView a conversation

M: Why try when I know I'll fail
D: Exactly! That would be a bloggable comment if we knew how to blog anymore
M: What's a blog?

A (worthless, non-corporeal) prize if anyone can work out what it was I'm not going to try and do.

God, I hope this never happens to me!

Lazy Quotes......The Return

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something."
- Robert Heinlein

Heinlein strikes me as a guy who knew that waking up early sucks ass. Think about it, when do you ever wake up early to do something good? Do you wake up early to get drunk? Do some whoring? No. No you don't. It's always something ridiculous like, go to work. Or go on a 10 hour road trip. Or get dragged to go shopping by the ol' Ball 'n Chain. Nothing good happens between the hours of 2am and 9am unless you're in bed.

This quote is also very similar to an Agatha Christie quote ol' soon to be Married Mike posted many moons ago. Writers must be lazy bastards. I knew being a writer held a special appeal to me for a reason. Unfortunately you must be lazy AND a capable writer, so I'm fucked. I am a good story teller though, I just can't write for shit. Maybe I should become a Hollywood screenwriter. I don't need to have much talent and I get to go on strike. Perfect!

Weddings & Grand Designs

It turns out planning a wedding is exactly the same as building your own house. Well. Kind of.

Grand Designs is a show that follows people building their own houses. Normally with some grand idea behind it all, hence the name. At some point in the show there's always the section where the novice home builder is swamped by questions and decisions that they don't know the answers to and they have to rapidly learn a lot to be able to answer them. It is in this regard that it's exactly the same as planning a wedding.

Now I've got to have opinions on things like favours*, flowers, table decorations, colour schemes, invitations, chairs, table shapes, napkins. It's exactly like having to choose where your plug sockets and light switches and plumbing goes or what kind of flooring and heating you have... and whatever the other decisions are that I don't understand when they are talking about them on Grand Designs. Slightly overwhelming and bewildering. It also uses up so much of your spare brain capacity that I know totally understand why people become wedding bores. I'm sure I have to some extent much as I try and resist. I can only guess as to how much worse having kids is!

Not that my fiancée enjoys any of those things any more than I do. In fact it's worse for her because people want to talk to her about it and suggest things and ask what she's doing about stuff much more than they do with me. I try and maintain an interested looking expression but I probably do glaze over from time to time.

The stuff that I know about, choosing food, wine, music, getting the stuff for the band etc. is all good, and fun but the other stuff? Urgh. And every time you think it's all sorted you find out it's just the tip of the iceberg. It's just a big party, why is it so complicated?

Thing is though, you probably wouldn't want anyone else deciding where the plug sockets or lights go in your house, or you'd at least want to approve what they chose, and it's the same with the wedding, there's no way to abdicate responsibility. The biggest shock about the whole thing is finding out that you do care about stuff like what colour the sodding button holes are going to be.

It'll all be worth it in the end though right?

*Favours are little presents you get on the table at the wedding, apparently originally they were just on the wedding cake or something. Shops like Confetti will kindly sell you things like little boxes of sweets for an extortionate price so you can give all your guests a few pence worth of sweets each but feel better about it 'cause you've spent £500.

A new beginning.

Right, we've been neglecting LazyView a bit so to mark the start of the year we're going to go back to posting on average 1 blog per day for the rest of the year. Guaranteed.

The Cinema

Is shit isn't it? Was considering going to see Watchmen this weekend, I'm sure it'd be great at the Cinema, but then there are all the downsides.

1. Cost. For two of us to go to the cinema costs more than a Blu-Ray disk of the film
2. Home set-ups for TV, sound etc. are now really good. Not as good as a cinema but still v. good.
   
3. The snacks are a complete rip off. The sweets are ok but massively expensive. I have once had a hot-dog and once had nachos... these are things you wouldn't think it was possible to get so wrong. Even a hot-dog at the football is much better. And how can you fuck up nachos!
   
4. You have to watch with a load of other people, 5% of whom are wankers.
5. On-demand films, and DVD releases a couple of months after cinema release.
   
6. Crap timings if you don't go in the week of release. Especially for a 3 hour film like watchmen.
7. You can't have a beer whilst watching (or smoke if you are a smoker).
   

So we'll probably wait and watch it on HD @ Home.

Isn't it annoying when stuff can't be done on the internet?

What is it, the past or something?

When will we be able to go to the pub online? Or does drinking at home but chatting on MSN count?

Could you play darts via webcam with dartboard in each player's house?

The Space Game

The Casual Collective have released their latest online game. The Space Game. It's a single player strategy game where you have to build structures in space, mine rocks and defend your base from pirates. 

Quite a lot of fun! 

Why does shared misery make you feel better?

This week's bad weather has created all kinds of interesting transport situations. This morning I had 2 trains cancelled and was on my third platform of the morning waiting for the third train. It was scheduled to be the second train on that platform. All good. Then, suddenly, just as a train approached the platform there was a correction to the schedule and my train was now going to be the first train to arrive. ie. The train now approaching the platform. So was it really? Was this one going to stop at Twyford where I wanted to get off or take us all the way non-stop to London. Dunno really. The info screens have been so screwed all week that I just can't trust them. It was freezing on the platform though and the worst that could happen really was that I'd get a trip to London on a nice warm train. So I thought fuck it, I'll get on.

So I'm sitting down and I get my book out but this blonde girl sits down behind me and asks if the train stops at Twyford and Maidenhead.  I said I hope so 'cause that's where I'm going but I don't really know 'cause I just got on and I'm in the same boat as her. And she's happy. And I am a bit more happy too. Whatever happens, we both know that at least one other person is going to be screwed if we're on the wrong train so it's not so bad. 

If you're going to have some shit happen to you, it's best if you have company. Is it the same with redundancy? Does it make you feel better or worse if your work friends are made redundant with you?