Dan McNeil's Blog

There are things which wind me up.  Plenty of things.  I do have a few blog posts brewing in my mind and I was concerned that if wrote a string of blog posts all of which consisted of me railing against a particular thing, then I may come across as grumpy.  So I'm going to get a few things off my chest and then move on.  Here are a few things which have the ability to disturb my calm. People who grunt in the gym It's good to breathe in and out at the right time during exercise.  Breathing out during the exertion is generally good technique.  But there's no need to grunt.  The only reason I can think of to grunt is if you want other people in the gym to look at you. People who have long conversations in shops There's a queue of people.  We will want to pay for our stuff and get on with our day.  I know it's nice to interact with the staff, but when they hand you the receipt that's your time over.  It's like when the Queen shakes...

I don't dislike flying.  I don't actively enjoy it.  I guess I just find it a bit boring and quite quickly descend into staring out of the window in the hope that something interesting happens.  Although about the greatest chance of seeing excitement out of the window is if an engine catches fire or something.  Which I don't really want to see. And so yesterday, I flew across the Atlantic. To here.  Vancouver. The journey over went quite quickly.  I actually got talking to my seat neighbours on the plane. Well talked at by one of them.  She was drinking a lot of Baileys.  She put it in her tea (yes tea, not coffee) and over the icecream they bring you in the middle of the flight. Over the years, I've morphed from one of those people who try to take everything onto the plane to avoid the baggage wait into someone who checks in as much as humanly possible.  I didn't even take a coat onto the plane.  Just a few books.  And a copy...

I was at a cashpoint at Canary Wharf today.  I went there specifically, because there's a cashpoint there where you can get USD and it's easier than bothering to leave time at Heathrow or faff around at the airport at the other end. I just wanted a bit of cash to get me from the airport to the hotel when I get to Seattle. Anyway, that's not the point.  The point is that the cashpoint was referring to itself as "I".  When did that start to happen?  "Please wait whilst I am counting your money".  It really said that on the screen. I mean it's one thing that people attribute human emotions and thoughts to animals, but a cashpoint?  It's bad enough that Innocent Smoothies say "I contain twenty bananas" or whatever but I can do without a cashpoint referring to itself in the first person. That's all.

It's been a while since I wrote in here.  It's simply that I've not really had anything that exciting happening.  I've been struck by coincidence recently.  Made it's the new series of Jonathan Creek has set my mind into "lateral thinking" mode. Quite often, I'll have a song come to mind which I don't have on my phone, and thanks to the wonder that is Amazon MP3 download, I can have it on my phone within seconds.  I do that with some utter crap - I admit it.  But only a week or two after I downloaded "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" it was featured on the Graham Norton show on Radio 2 of a Saturday morning.  "That's weird" I thought to myself.  It's a great song - three minutes of space-themed innuendo set to a disco beat - but odd that I should download it on a whim only for it to feature on Radio 2 not long after. It's the same with crossword clues.  I do the Guardian crossword rather than The Times.  On...

When I was a kid, I used to wonder about the prizes on Bullseye.  They'd introduce the prizes when talking around the prize board, and you'd see a VHS player or a barbecue laid out for display.  I used to wonder, if they won the prize, whether they'd pack it up again and send them that one - or would they have another one they'd send to the winning contestants.  And in that case, who would get the display model? Did Jim Bowen have a huge stash of crap HiFi systems at home he'd carted home from the show? I imagined that big prizes like cars (and the speedboats on Bullseye) would be borrowed by the production company, and then if somebody actually won one, they'd go out and actually buy one.  But that whole arrangement didn't seem worth it for a couple of chairs or a crystal decanter. I was watching an old (Terry Wogan era) edition of Blankety Blank on Challenge the other day.  It was much more raucous than I remember.  Kenny Everett was a guest, and he w...

I've always thought that key to success is the ability to change your behaviour to suit your audience.  This weekend, we went down to a lovely little restaurant on the south coast.  The weather was cold and windy but the rain wasn't too heavy and it was a very pleasant weekend. It was my partner's birthday and they celebrated this fact by piping the words "Happy Birthday" onto the dessert place in chocolate.  It was a nice touch and most importantly, pitched perfectly for the recipient.  We've all been to restaurants where they dim the lights and play "Happy Birthday" really loudly over the PA and bring out a cake covered in candles.  Everyone cheers and sings and it's a jolly lot of fun.  Except that me - and most people I know - wouldn't find that a lovely birthday treat - it'd just be crass and unpleasant. The sign of a good restaurant is one which can judge the situation and do it just right for the recipient. But it's not ju...

I always try to be careful what I say.  I don't always succeed, and from time to time I do say things I wish I hadn't, but generally I try to think of how what I say - and how I say it - may affect someone else. I was thinking the other day of my time back at Symbian, many years ago.  Back in the day, I moved down to London for work, and was just settling into a new job, a new flat and the idea that I now lived in London rather than just visited.  I was young, excited and eager.  All of those things have worn off with the years, but back then I was keen.  Back at Symbian we used Lotus Notes for email.  Yes, really.  It had this peculiar habit that whenever you set an Out Of Office message, it would retrospectively send a message to all the people who had emailed you during the day.  I'd never used it before working at Symbian, so I wasn't to know this.  A few months into working there, I had a week off and so set an Out Of Office, as did ev...