Toms View of the World

… you need “Exterminate By Chocolate”

(and as a passing note, there’s a new series of Doctor Who starting this weekend…  but if you’re interested, you  probably already knew that)

As part of a series celebrating classic Saturday evening TV show “Jim’ll Fix It” - they’ve recreated the iconic moment of the show, a group of cubscouts have relived their Rollercoaster Lunch “fix it” 27 years after the original was shown in 1980.

There’s a nice story on the BBC News website - which contains a link to the videos of both the old a new versions.

However they are not the first to recreate this classic TV moment featuring that ride in Blackpool. Back in 2002, the European Coaster Club also did a recreation, this time in the interests of raising money for Give Kids the World. The photos from that (rather messy) event are also online - at the ECC Website.

One of the most iconic and memorable bits of tv from when I was young, will be relived again - The new series remembering Jim’ll Fix It is being shown on UK Gold, starting in April.

Sorry for the lack of posts, but between work, and getting ready to hand the ECC website over to someone else, I’ve just not had much time for anything else…

However Easter is rapidly approaching, and with it we see the back of the temptation of Mini Eggs, and hopefully my weight can start heading downwards again, and that I can find the willpower to stick with it…

How many times before have I said that (actually, no, don’t answer that…)

Just a friendly reminder (as I’ve deleted a number of comments recently)  - I have standards for the comments left on this site - and a policy of the types of writing and punctuation I will not accept.

Please read my Comment Policy before commenting (it’s linked from every comment form), however the highlights of it are:

• Proper spelling and punctuation are expected - for example, it’s “because” not “cuz”, I’m is a contraction of “I am” and hence has an apostrophe.
• Spell checkers are available for Firefox, so users of that browser have no excuse at all.
• Excessive exclamation marks are unnecessary.
• Smilies are available for comments, and common strings will be converted automatically -
• You are not writing a text message.  You are not limited to 160 characters.  Feel free to write words like “you”, “are” and “later” without resorting to “text speak”

Of course, this is all applied at my discretion, but if your comment breaks several of these rules, expect it to be deleted.  Minor breaches are likely to be overlooked, especially for “regular” visitors, or folks posting from non-English speaking countries.

Hiding out on various obscure channels on Freeview, Sky and Cable in the UK can be found live phone-in quiz games. The premise is simple. A question is posed, and then viewers are invited to ring a premium rate line (75p a time) to possibly be randomly picked to answer the question on-air.

That’s right, your 75p is basically to enter a random draw, which gets you though to the studio so you can give the incorrect answer to the host.

Why do I say “so you can give the incorrect answer” - well, that’s because the solutions to the questions are so convoluted that not even a professor of Mathematics from Oxford University could get the answer to this one:

Add the pence, listed: Two pounds, 25p, £1.47, 16p and fifty pence.

The answer is of course, five hundred and six. Before you head over to the explanation in The Times, take a few minutes and a calculator to see if you could figure that out. I’ll save you a bit of trouble though…

Adding all the amounts together (the far too obvious solution) gives 438.

Adding any combinations which give smaller answers would clearly be wrong (with hindsight)

So clearly, the solution involves “finding” some more pence…

I won’t spoil the surprise - but there’s no way you’d figure it out without knowing the target to reach… remember, on the telly you’d be told “wrong” or “right” - not given any hint as to whether the answer was too low or high

These quizzes may not be a scam in law - but I suspect that there’s no way any reasonably minded person could be expected to solve it and win the prize.

(or Happy Birthday)

Interesting… I’d not noticed this before, but a number of the companies (and various web forums) that have my date of birth or birthday on file for various reasons, are now using this information to “target” me on my birthday - from a simple “Happy Birthday” message from a forum, to various subtle reminders of ways to spend money with an online store…

If you’re using the Feedburner RSS feed, please resubscribe to the main RSS feed on the site.

This change is to give me more control in the battle against automated copyright theft via RSS.  There’ll be some changes, but the URLs you need are  after the fold (to prevent them appearing in the feed, and therefore being given to the theives - sorry…)

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