Today’s unlikely email:

Please I have loved to get a PC set from you but not financially bouyant.I,ll be grateful should my request be considered. God will surely bless YOU!

Perhaps he’d like one of these.

I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get up for the trail this morning, and I was sitting sipping tea with my headphones on listening to the breakfast show through the ISDN box in plenty of time. It sounds great - just like listening on FM. I keep forgetting that whatever you do at your own end can be heard at the other, though, even if you’re not on air, so when I sneezed and a voice in my headphones said ‘bless you’ it made me jump.

Polo Smoothies are better in concept than reality.

Our performance on the show this evening was fair to middling, I would say. It wasn’t one of our best, although we did get a lot of callers and didn’t manage to get through them all, which is always encouraging. Every week we seem to get more callers.

We had this guy on talking about how he found a flaw in mIRC that could put your PC at risk even if you weren’t running it at the time and it made me think about the hours I used to spend on IRC and Usenet years ago. Wondering what I used to talk about (and how I was ever able to find the time) I did a hunt on my name through groups.google.com. The first hit is the Ballad of Fat mouse, which I wrote after another member, JohnM, told the group about coming home the night before to find a mouse in his kitchen. The following is based on fact, and was posted almost exactly five years ago (20th February 1997):

The Ballad of Fat Mouse

Poor John M came back to his house
and there in the kitchen there sat a fat mouse
It wiggled its nose as it nibbled its cheese
The sight only served to make John M freeze

And then without warning that cold early morning
John M he started to scream
That poor little mouse was filled up with fear
As the shrill little warble assaulted its ear

And then in its fright it ran out of sight
Too scared to put up much of a fight
Close your ears, avert your eyes
For now there comes a nasty surprise

Behind a board the mouse it did quiver
And up John’s back there sprinted a shiver
He followed the vermin and found where it sat
and then with a kick he heard a great splat

The board and the mouse did then become one
And the poor little mouselets lost their dear mum
Poor John M was back in his house
and there in the kitchen there lay a FLAT mouse

1. Gah!
   Of all the nights I could have done with a good journey home, this was the one. I have to be up at 4am tomorrow...
   
   
2. Health
   Up, showered, shaved, dressed and loaded washing into the machine before the breakfast show call, which I consider pretty impressive. The call went OK. We'd...
   
   
3. Vapid PR alert
   Working in PR. It's not all parties, lunches and chasing up journalists' lost luggage. Someone working in just that industry dropped a mouse in the...