iGet

I'm off to what has become the traditional annual visit to the London MacExpo with Ms Victoria Sponge tomorrow. I have been looking forward to it for weeks. It really is a little bit of gadget heaven. I just love the fact that I can get to see and touch all those wonderful gadgets that you usually only get to read about. This is an especially good year because the lovely Mrs McMuffin has agreed that I really need to have a new iPod. It is only two years since I got the last one, but that is like a thousand years in gadget time. Mrs McMuffin never really get that, but at least, up to a point, she is willing to go along with it. Anyway, the big choice for me tomorrow is which one should I get. I must admit, although I would usually tell people to get the most storage space that they can afford, I think I am going to go for the 30Gb in virginal white. As much as I have loved having a 40Gb iPod, it isn't big enough to hold all of my music, so I rarely fill it. I suspect it will be the same with a new iPod, even though there are the movies to consider. The other thing is the colour. The black ones are beautiful, and I can see their attraction, but for me white just fits the stripped down design.

Well, I'm off to bed now. 'Night all.

firefly

If we have lent you the box set of this series, could you let us know, as it's driving Mr McMuffin mad that he can't remember and we'd like to watch it again. Thank you.

three things i have been thinking about

Flu pandemics. All I hear is moaning about whether the government are doing enough and it seems that we are more prepared for this possibility than any other country in the world. Surely this can't be true?

Kashmir and Pakistan. Help them.

Anti-D. If you are an expert in this area, please contact me as I have some tricky questions that seem beyond the scope of my midwife. I will pay you in cakes for your advice. Lots of cakes.

heartless bastards

Thought I'd share a new band with you. They're called Heartless Bastards and they make catchy rock music. Nothing earth shattering, just good sing-a-long tunes. Probably their biggest strength is their vocalist, Erika Wennerstrom, who has a very distinctive voice, and reminds me a little bit of Grace Slick. I did have an Alison Moyet moment with her. I had listened to the album a couple of times before trying to find out anything about them on the internet, and imagine my surprise to find that the singer is a woman. Being the sexist git that I am, I had just assumed the singer was a man with a bit of range. I really must stop doing that. Here's Onions from their debut album Stairs and Elevators for you to listen to.

PS Mrs McMuffin doesn't like them, so they must be good.

first day in my new job

The last couple of weeks have flown by. Today I started my new job. I have been at work since 8am and my shift doesn't finish until 8am tomorrow, although I am going home in a few minutes. It's been quite a busy day. The best bit was that I got to deliver a commode to someone's house. I've never done that before. No, I lie, the very best bit was getting my payslip, and realising that I have been paid a small fortune for not working. They run a two weeks in advance, two weeks in arrears system, which means that I get my month's wages before I even do any work.

I had hoped to use some of the quiet time at the office to catch up on some blogs, but they have done something odd to the connection, and they appear to have blocked all blogs. They have also blocked my access to Apple, so I can't pick up my email. Why would they do that? I have already complained about not having access to Apple. I wonder if I would be going to far to complain about not being able to read my favourite blogs during work time.

I also received another one of those communicating by email policy documents today. They just drive me to distraction. Why, oh, why do they employ absolute morons to write these things. These fools trot out the same old crap every single time. They all make the same sweeping statement that email is NOT secure. I know email is, for the most part, not very secure, but it is certainly a whole lot more secure than the telephone, faxing or even snail mail for that matter. This particular fool was no different. I am quite convinced that these people are all in their mid-forties and are trying to cover their lack of computer literacy by watching War Games over and over again. You know, that Matthew Broderick chappy nearly started a world war with his hacking skills. There are probably a whole generation of people in high places making decisions about technology about which they do not have a clue. It really is scary stuff.

gVisit

Has anyone seen the fantastic new free service being offered by gVisit? It does something clever with Google maps to create a map where visitors to your site are logged. This means that I can track visitors to this site down to the street that they live on! Once you put to one side just how creepy that is, it is very, very cool. The service is very simple to set up and it looks great. It's free, but if you make a donation, no matter how small - I gave them $1 - you can have your page upgraded to remove any adverts and increase the size of your log. Seems like a bargain to me.

I've added a link to our gVisit map at the foot of this page.

just thought i'd pop in and say hello

...as Mr McMuffin is doing such a good job of posting with some regularity, please pretend you haven't seen me as I don't want him to stop. There's not much to add to his accounts other than we failed to mention a lovely meal at the Carrot Cakes a couple of weeks ago, Skype has screwed up our phone (to be fair it's probably Mr McMuffin's doing, he just loves to make our phone inoperative) and we have also seen The Brothers Grimm and Broken Flowers this week. I only really enjoyed Broken Flowers and cursed my poor french for not being anywhere good enough to consider going to see one of the more interesting offerings at the various cinemas.

I'm still on a bit of a high from Paris, we were blessed with such gorgeous weather and had such a relaxing time despite the hundreds of miles we seemed to walk each day. After the experience at the Eiffel Tower, I made a big show of sticking out my belly and walking around the queue at the Musee D'Orsay. Unfortunately I just looked like an idiot as no one came running to transport us to the head of the queue, so we decided to leave and not bother with the pretty pictures. We didn't go to Versailles either (bigger queues), we just wandered all over the city centre looking at things and thoroughly enjoying the fact that our most difficult decision was where to eat. I would like to have more days like those.

more stats whoring

We've had a good year, so far. This is our second year of blogging. During the first year we had around 60,000 visitors, which I thought was pretty damn good, but this year we have had four times as many visitors, and the year isn't over yet. I'm not sure what accounts for the huge leap in visitors during the second quarter, but I imagine that it had something to do with being linked to a couple of big hitters, which was nice. I guess also that the drop in visitors in the third quarter had something to do with the fact that we stopped posting regularly for a while. I just love looking at our stats and working out where people come from. It's fascinating stuff.

Mrs McMuffin, of course, thinks I am just being rather vulgar.

serenity

We went to see Serenity last night. I was a big fan of the TV show, which was cancelled after only 14 episodes. Apparently, the media moguls saw the error of their ways when the show sold cartloads on its transfer to DVD, and now we have a big budget, big screen, version of the show. For those of you who don't know, the show is a kind of western/space opera kind of thing. Joss Wheedon, the creator of Buffy and Angel, has written and directed a great movie. It's has an intelligent script with a strong streak of dark humour running through it, and it makes for an exciting movie. The characters are believable and, for the most part, you care about what happens to them. The special effects and action scenes are excellent. In fact, there is a space battle which is probably better than the one in the last Star Wars film (I can't even remember what it was called, although I did enjoy it.) Go to see this film. It is certainly the best SF film that I have seen this year, and even Mrs McMuffin loved it.

some music

A few tracks for you to savour. This is what I am listening to at the moment.

1 Swagger / Calla / Collisions / 2005

Calla are a band from New York, who run/ran in the same circles as The Strokes, until they hit the big time, I imagine. They have a similar sounds, only darker. This is the only album I have heard, but apparently this is them trying to do commercial.

2 Iron Woman / Devin Davis / Lonely People of the World, Unite! / 2005

Apparently Devin Davis made this album in his bedroom over a couple of years. Yes, I know, another one. But, this one is good.

3 S.e.p. Ruined My Life / Matson Jones / Matson Jones / 2005

Girly band who seem to rock out using double basses and cellos. Nice sound.

4 A Letter To Dominique / Louis XIV/ The Best Little Secrets Are Kept / 2005

Another young band from the US plundering back catalogues. This time it's glam rock. It's hard being so old. I keep recognising the songs that they have borrowed. To their credit, though, they do it well and they play as if they mean it.

5 Desperate Songs / Wheatus / Too Soon Monsoon / 2005

Brenda Brown is probably one of the best pop writers around. Why is he, and his band, not more famous?

6 February's Quiet / Big Star / In Space / 2005

One of those bands that you keep hearing about. Apparently they made a couple of albums that kick-started the whole power pop thing back in the 70s and then broke up. Well, they're back together, and they sound as if the last 30 years didn't happen. Great stuff.

7 Feelgood By Numbers / The Go! Team / Thunder Lightning Strike / 2004

This band have been around for a while and make curiously filmic dance music.

8 Dead Man's Will / Iron And Wine & Calexico / In The Reins / 2005

What can I say? Iron and Wine make some lovely music. It's difficult to be sure what contribution Calexico made to this album, but it certainly has a fuller sound and more instruments are being played.

9 Turn the Lights On / John Cale / Black Acetate / 2005

I had no idea that John Cale sounded this good. He kind of passed me by. Great album.

made me laugh...

I thought this might amuse you. If you stare at this for at least 10 seconds then you should see be able to see a giraffe.

effiel eiffel tower

As soon as we arrived in Paris, we dropped off our stuff at the hotel and made the mistake of deciding to walk along the river to the effiel Eiffel Tower. We thought it would be lovely to view the city from the top of the tower as the sun went down. We didn't realise how far away we were, and it took us nearly two hours to walk to the tower. The second mistake we made was not considering that pratically everyone else in Paris for the weekend also had the same idea. There was a queue of hundreds of people snaking around the base of the tower. We had an ice cream instead, and I consoled myself with this great photo. Fortunately we went back a couple of days later, and while we did have to wait for a while, it was worth it. Mrs McMuffin was very unhappy to find that once we had queued at two different points to get to the top of the tower, one of the workers expressed surprise that she had queued at all. Apparently, if Mrs McMuffin had the very unBritish, bare-faced cheek, to mention that she was pregnant we would have been taken to the head of the queue, which would have been nice. The tower itself is amazing, and one of the few things that I have seen in my travels that have truly impressed me. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say, but I think I appreciated the bloody-minded oddness of someone deciding to build the thing in the first place. It is just so huge. Oh, and the views are fantastic. It also has the distinction of being the place in Paris where you can buy truly the worst cup of coffee in all of the city. The prize for the worst cup of coffee in the world is jointly held by every single cafe in Prague.

spelling mistakes corrected by Mrs McMuffin the wise

andouillette

Everything you hear about French food is mostly true. It really is great. However, I suffered my first ever food defeat in Paris. We sat down to have lunch at a lovely little cafe on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, and I was moved to try something new from the menu. Chitterling sausage with sauted potatoes and a mustard sauce sounded good to me, and it looked good when it arrived. I cut into the sausage and squirmy things oozed out, spilling onto my plate. It looked disgusting, but I persevered and ate a mouthful. The 'whatever it was' sausage had an unpleasant flavour. It tasted ever so slightly off to me. To make matters worse, the texture, oh, the texture...Slimy and chewy and...Anyway, I decided that I really needed to have another mouthful, just to be sure that I didn't like it. This one tasted and felt just the same. Absolutely horrible. I decided that I really needed to have a third mouthful...This was the one that did it. I started chewing, but it was all I could do to stop myself from gagging, so I quickly swallowed it. I really had no idea what it was that I was eating, but I guessed that if they were serving it for lunch in a busy little cafe in the middle of Paris it couldn't be that odd. Turns out that Andouillette is a tripe sausage, and a very traditional French dish. I've never eaten tripe before, and I don't think I ever will again. Don't be put off by this little tale. Next time you are in Paris, try the Andouillette. You might like it.

i've changed my mind...i want one of these instead

This is the machine that I have been waiting for two years for. Plays music, shows photos and plays video. Who could ask for more? Yes, you guessed it, Apple have released the latest incarnation of their glorious iPod and I want one.

hello from sunny Paris

Here I q, in Pqris qnd I hqve i,,ediqtely fqllen bqck into ,y usuql holidqy routine:  Zhile ?rs ?c?uffin sleeps I heqd out to explore the tozn; qnd to find qn internet cqfe:  This ti,e; hozever; I hqve been pleqsqntly surprised to find thqt Pqris hqs beco,e the ,ost szitched on qnd connected city I hqve ever been in:  There qre free zifi qreqs qll over the plqce; qnd internet cqfes everyzhere:  Even ?cDonqlds hqs free internet qccess:  The only proble, is thqt they use q strqnge keyboqrd lqyout:  Hqvenùte they ever heqrd of azerty: 

The zeqther heqr is qbsolutely bequtiful:  Yesterdqy zqs sunny qnd hot; qnd todqy looks like being the sq,e:  Our hotel is lovely; qnd very centrql; qnd it hqs qir conditioning:

?ust go noz qnd deliver the shq,poo thqt I hqve just bought for ?rs ?c?uffin:  Cqnùt hqve her going out zith dirty hqir noz; cqn I§

NB This was typed using the strange foreign keyboard layout

iless...and other stuff

We're off to Paris this morning, but I thought I'd leave you with a portrait of the lovely Slinky, dirty little stop-out that he is. We went to Ms Victoria Sponge last night for dinner. When we returned, Slinky was nowhere to be seen. I found him this morning sitting on the chair by the back door. He carried with him the stench of betrayal. What Slinky doesn't know, or care about I imagine, is that we can smell her on him. Our neighbour uses a particularly distinctive perfume, and it is clear that he has been rubbing himself against her. I know, I know, Slinky is her cat, but it still hurts. I tried to put on a brave face this morning and I don't think he noticed the single tear drop into the bowl of turkey and giblets that I lovingly prepared for him. He's now gone for a sleep with Mrs McMuffin. The poor thing must be worn out.

Did I mention that I have made it easier for him to cheat on us with her? I was talking to our neighbour about Slinky and how he no longer seemed to be able to bounce over the six foot fence between our properties. Well, he is getting on a bit now. He is about 12 years old, although he still looks like a youthful kitten. The solution was simple, I have now cut a hole in our fence so Slinky can go back and forth to his heart's delight. And he does.

By the way, dinner with Ms Victoria Sponge was great. The food was so good I didn't want to stop eating. I still feel full this morning.

I am now going to make Mrs McMuffin some food for us to eat on our journey to Paris. She was behaving very oddly in the supermarket yesterday. She became very anxious that there wouldn't be enough food for her to eat, or that I had got stuff that she wouldn't want to eat. I kept telling her it was only a two hours train journey, but my appeals to logic didn't carry any weight.

Anyway, I'm off now, but we'll be back in a few days.

swing...

I don't know if you know but Paul Anka has a new album out. It's called Rock Swings. He covers a variety of well known rock songs, but he has rearranged them in a swing style. Imagine my surprise to find that it's actually pretty good. Lots of people have tried this sort of thing over the years, Sinead O'Connor, Robbie Williams and Pat Boone spring to mind, but this is probably the most successful of all these attempts. I think it works because he has rewritten the songs so that they fit his particular vocal style and...it just works. Here's one of the songs. It's Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun and here's the original for you to compare it with.

we're off...

To have some Chinese food and to see Night Watch. We'll be thinking of you.

UPDATE: Just got back. STOP. Managed to survive the extreme drive home by looking out of the back of the car. STOP. Bless Mr Rock Cake for his generous offer to drive us home. STOP. Chinese food greasy but good. STOP. Film excellent, in a high style, low budget, kind of way. STOP. Kept me involved for more than two hours, which is no mean feat. STOP. Mrs McMuffin enjoyed it too. STOP. Now going to have a cup of tea and spend some time with those nice people in The West Wing. STOP.

skype...again

I've been rediscovering the joys of Skype. I downloaded this excellent internet telephone app some time ago, when it first came on the market, but I couldn't get it to work properly. Things have changed in the last year or so, and it now works brilliantly. I bought myself €10 worth of credit, and that will provide me with about 10 hours of telephoning anywhere in the world. The best bit for me is that I can keep a record of all my telephone calls on my computer, including voicemail messages, which will be great for work. I think I am going to redirect all our landline calls through the computer. I have even set up an account for us on this site. If you fancy having a chat with us, our Skype name is mrandmrsmcmuffin. Remember though that we live in the UK, and we may not be available to chat in the early hours of the morning.

absence...heart...fonder etc

I had a strange telephone call from Mr Rock Cake last night at about 10.30pm. He left a message asking me if I knew where his wife, Ms Gypsy Tart was. Now, even I knew that she had gone away for a few days to Exeter to see friends, and wasn't due back until today. Does this mean that he has spent the last few days wondering when he was going to see Ms Gypsy Tart? Perhaps he has been very busy and just hasn't had time to notice that she wasn't there. I hope he was able to get himself something to eat while she has been gone. There is nothing worse than returning home to a starving, moaning, husband, or so I understand.

lucky us...

We're off to Paris on Sunday for four days. This will probably be our last change to go anywhere until the baby is born. In fact, it will be our last chance to go anywhere without The Boy™ either clinging to us in person or just in our thoughts. God, that puts it into perspective. Unfortunately, we left it too late to be able to fly anywhere, so it's Eurostar for us. Although, I'm not complaining because it's a great way to travel. This time we will definitely go to see the Eiffel Tower and the palace at Versaille. Apparently the palace is so big that it will take us the whole day just to see a fraction of it. I wasn't too excited about the prospect of Paris, again, but as it draws nearer the day, I'm beginning to look forward to it, even though a little bit of me thinks I could have got four iPodnanos for that.

I really must do some tidying up now. I don't think Mrs McMuffin will be impressed if I have spent another day playing on the computer without doing anything about the house, even though I shouldn't have to remind her that I am on my rest days from work.

ibump

A little picture of Mrs McMuffin and our bump. Mrs McMuffin was surprisingly willing to dance around the dining room naked so that I could take some action shots. It all started off as an attempt by me to follow a tutorial that I found on how to create the Apple iPod people pictures, but it was crap and let me down at the last minute. So I improvised and this is what I ended up with. Oh, and I couldn't find the Apple Myriad font either, so I used Futura, which is pretty close. I think it all worked out rather nicely.

ipodding

I haven't even mentioned how much I want an iPodnano, or one of these suits, which Nagl very kindly pointed out to us. Quite possible the cutest thing on the entire planet.

i started my new job on saturday

I started my new job as Director Of The Night on Saturday. I now work on a night time shift rota, which means that I work 90 hours over a two week period, once a month. Two weeks off every month, and I have the days free too. The best bit is that I start my new job with a two week holiday, although they are making me do four days training. The irony is that I am being trained to do something that I already know how to do. I have to learn how to use the department's computer system, but I have already taught myself how to do that with a book and a few minutes in front of a computer. I even had to show Mrs McMuffin and Ms Ginger Cake, who have done the training, how to use it. Don't they realise who I am?

Part of my new job is about reviewing the service we offer over the next six months. The only problem is that now that I have some understanding about how it runs, I don't want to change anything. It almost feels as if I will be getting paid for doing virtually nothing. My dream job.

By the way, the photo was posted using an iPhoto plugin called Photon which allows us Mac users to post photos to our blogs directly from iPhoto. It is very neat, and it works. I found out about it from a great new site called freemacware.com. You'll find lots of cool little apps on the site.

sloth

Perhaps Mr McMuffin would like to say something about the strange photograph he posted, his new job, our time with the Carrot Cakes, our plans for next weekend, his search for the perfect television, his response to the iPodmybaby suggestion, or anything else that enters his pretty little head? Or perhaps he would like to continue being slothful and not keeping up his end of the blogging bargain, thus forcing me into the ever narrowing path of more cat, work and pregnancy related posts. Please don't make our reader suffer, Mr McMuffin, please...