All The Bits of the Bog Roll
These are all the articles on the bog roll. You can read them separately if you prefer by clicking on the bog roll in the menu at the top of the screen.
Look What I Made! (16th July 2012)
I am going to be perfectly honest. If you are looking for a well written, perfectly spelt, grammar perfect collection of words arranged into what you humans call a paragraph then I would give up now. There is an experiment where they wrote an article and removed all the vowels and people still understood it perfectly. Some even didn't even notice the vowels had been removed. Its something to do with the brain being quite intelligent and being able to fill in the gaps or not even really seeing everything and making up the rest. Or something. Anyway I have ran out of photos of buses so thought I would give the whole blog thing a bash. I wanted to write something ground breaking and profound but then couldn't think of anything so thought I would start my blog Bog Roll by writing about how I created this website. Woah, woah hang on. I am not going to give you the technical details and dazzle you with widgets and html code. Namely as I don't really understand it myself. Its more of a why than a how.
So firstly you have to understand I am a very hard worker and apart from a brief 3 months when I was unemployed have been in full time gainful employment since I was 17 and before that worked part time from 13 while at school. My dad started work at an early age and was constantly employed (most of his life in the same job). His mother has 8 children and became a widower fairly young and despite having 8 children mostly under 18 worked full time as well. I'm not expecting a medal for this or a pat on the back but just scene setting. Basically throughout history when you look at those paintings of great wars or the family portraits you will see one of my ancestors in the background cleaning the floor, painting fences or just slogging away had at work.
So anyway two months of being off work sick and even worse being stuck at home not being able to do anything was driving me mad. When you are off sick for a long time you start to feel like your days are being wasted. As if you are not achieving things during the day. In my experience you don't as you don't really have any targets or time-scales or normally anyone to answer to. At work you have jobs that have to be done every day and targets to meet and your day is structured to meet them. Creating some kind of web-site was something I had always thought about and 15 years ago I had a little website. I can't remember what was on it or what happened to it but I did have one. So I signed up and hosted all my photos on it and then slowly started adding stuff. I may have only had 27 unique visitors (i.e 27 different people have visited it rather than me hitting refresh 27 times) but its nice someone has visited.
Even if no-one visited it then it doesn't really matter. Its nice to be able to spend my time creating something and seeing it work than to sit doing nothing all day and not feeling like I really am achieving anything.
Older but not always wiser (29th July 2012)
The difficult second entry on Bog Roll you will be glad to know I am writing on Microsoft Word first in an attempt to improve the spelling and grammar.
Today I nearly died. Well nearly was in a car accident. We only went out for five minutes and was on our way home. There is a big roundabout and it is traffic light controlled but on our exit you need to be in the left hand land so that you can go straight up. Its also possible to go off to the left in the same lane and back into town. We were going along in the left hand lane near the junction where it goes straight on and to the left and suddenly a car in the right hand lane got closer and closer to our car with its left indicator going. Mrs LLgoatJ was forced to brake hard and held the horn down as you have to in these situations especially when you have a British made Rover. The horn is so loud and indignant that it has to be saved for only special occasions like someone near crashing into the side of you, stopping for no reason and without warning and when kids run out from behind the ice-cream van. Oh and one other occasion. When you are going out at 3am in the morning. Have carefully backed the car into the drive so you can quietly drive out. The car was loaded the night before. You quietly lock the front door and silently open the car door. Then accidently lean on the very loud horn as you get in the car waking up not just your street but most of the North of England.
Now thankfully we didn’t die or crash but the worse thing was that the very old lady driving didn’t seem to care or notice the big green Rover car she nearly went into the side of, the loud angry horn Mrs LLgoatJ held down for possibly longer than needed She also didn’t care about or notice the white van she nearly also hit who was attempting to go up the left turning at the same time as her. However it got me thinking about car insurance. Despite Mrs LLgoatJ’s father driving a much bigger car and living in the same area as us he pays a whopping £500 a year less than Mrs LLgoatJ in car insurance. Now obviously he has been driving for many more years and so a safer driver? Possibly not. When he first moved to the North it was many months before I pointed out a short cut he had found was actually clearly signed “Buses Only”. He had never noticed. There also is a very dodgy junction where he went into the left hand lane to go straight on when it was clearly marked left only. Both these things he had been doing every day for months without even noticing.
Now I am not saying that older drivers are bad. I am however saying that younger drivers are not automatically bad. Older drivers are not automatically better drivers. Mrs LLgoatJ has only been driving three years and is better driver than most drivers with ten times the experience. Yet she and many other younger or newer drivers are made to pay high insurance premiums.
I have the answer. Secret monitoring of drivers. Without you knowing you are followed and they see how you drive. When traffic lights go yellow do you speed up to get through them? Or slow down and stop. Do you go in the right lane and keep to your right lane? Maybe they could even do tests. Cut them up and see how they react. Slow down before a blind bend and see if they overtook you. It would mean the bad drivers have to pay more and the good drivers get a discount.
