Matt’s Blog

Some things that ought to be banned:

• Parking meters (and other payment machines) that don’t give any change so you end up paying more than the actual fee
• Quiz TV channels that run quizzes 24 hours a day and require you to call a premium rate phone number in order to answer some inane question
• Spam email, junk paper mail and cold calling
• Cash machines where you have to pay to get your money out - I noticed recently that one chain of motorway service stations here in the UK seem to only have this sort of machine nowadays…

After a continued absence, of more than a year, with no blog posts, I’m back again to have another go. I’m a yo-yo blogger, but I think that there are pleny of other people also with blogs containing mostly messages about how they are going to start blogging more again, just like mine

This will, hopefully, be my permanent blog location from now on. The posts prior to this one have been imported from my old blog on blogspot.com which I shall no longer post to. So, if you want to follow my (possibly lack-of) posts then use the new RSS/ATOM feeds listed on the sidebar, or subscribe to receive them by email if you prefer.

Normal service of Matt’s Blog will now be resumed. Sorry for the delay.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Tommy Boyd has been back on the radio since January. He seems to have a regular weekly spot now on BBC Southern Counties Radio.

I used to listen to Tommy’s fabulous cult radio show “The Human Zoo” on Talk Sport radio station where he allowed callers straight to air with “no screening”… It certainly made for an eclectic set of characters that would call up with their rants, bits of prepared audio or general abuse of Tommy. If you’ve never heard the show, then you should listen to some of the clips from his shows. Unfortunately his format/attitude lead to his downfall when he failed to cut off a caller who, on the day of the Queen Mother’s death, commented on the royal family that we should “shoot the f*cking lot of them”. The Human Zoo was a bit of an acquired taste, but there has always been a bit of a hole in my Sunday evenings since its demise.

I’ll be tuning in to Tommy’s latest show, though no doubt it will be nothing like The Human Zoo, especially as it’s on the BBC. At least being on a Saturday evening from 9pm to 1am it may have some interesting content, we shall see.

It’s amazing what you learn by browsing the Wikipedia. Last night I learned that I went to the same school as Nick Park, creator of the Wallace & Gromit animations.

I remember the first one I saw (The Wrong Trousers - still the best one IMHO), it really amazed me with its quality animation, good plot and humor. The whole idea of a penguin putting a rubber glove on its head to disguise itself as a chicken is just priceless.

There is no info in the Wikipedia to link me to the school though, so no opportunity for Nick Park to be thinking “hey, I went to the same school as the guy that wrote that Palm Converter app thingy”.

You have to love the Wikipedia.

Well, as my first post did point out, I started my blog with some amount of skepticism at my ability to stay interested in posting entries for long enough… (I know what I’m like!). I managed three entries and, as you can see, it’s now been months of drought… Sorry for all you guys that have been returning every day to see if there has been a new entry Though of course, you really should have been using an News Aggregator to check for changes, so it’s your own fault

Anyway, I’m going to give this another go and see if I can keep up with it a bit better… I really would like to make this a part of my website if I can manage to keep updating it… We shall see.

Right, talk to you again in a few months