Feelin Like A Ghost Town

It's all quiet on the factory front this week as the annual shutdown enters its second day.We're using the time to prepare the groundwork for the installation of a brand new CNC folding machine which is scheduled to arrive next week. Our existing folder is pretty ancient now and the new one will provide plenty of benefits including neater folds, speeding up the metal fabrication and removing a bottleneck in the production line. I am looking forward to seeing this machine as it's a big investment.



Last year I blogged about the new mobile phone that I had just received and moaned on like a grumpy old man about the features when I only wanted a telephone. The phone gradually grew on me, especially as the camera was so good. But I didn't like the way that I kept finding it had connected to the Internet without me pressing anything (whilst still in my pocket), especially when Marion told me that I was getting Internet use charged on the bill.Anyway my brief honeymoon with the phone ended yesterday when the touch screen packed in. Someone here at Instanta said it wouldn't be a problem as I could download all the numbers onto a computer and copy them onto a new phone. I duly connected the phone to the computer but it wouldn't transfer until I had deactivated the blue tooth. And how do you deactivate the blue tooth? By using the touch screen. Aaaaagggghh. With the honeymoon well and truly over I tried everything to try and get the screen moving again (including dropping it from a height a number of times). After a fair bit of rough handling, disassembly and reassembly I finally got it to work for about thirty seconds which was enough to deactivate the blue tooth and salvage all the numbers. Phew.



Only two games into the season and Liverpool look to be facing climbing another mountain. I watched last night whilst glancing at a few football forums on the laptop. Those writing were questioning Hodgson's failure to use substitutes but if you looked at the subsitutes available you could see that he did not have many options. The manager provided the quote of the season so far in today's Guardian. When asked about the unsettled Mascherano "The danger of those questions is that I could give you an answer and if my answer is not 100% correct then all of a sudden I'm creating headlines. I have no wish to create headlines over the Mascherano situation." The headline above the piece "Roy Hodgson vents anger at Javier Mascherano for skipping defeat."


Whilst watching the match on Sky I also had a read of the newspaper (you can't really blame me, Liverpool were dire). In it the excellent Charlie Brooker wrote a brilliant piece about the "Ground Zero" mosque. In his usual, very funny and very sarcastic manner he destroyed the anti brigade with what is probably the most sensible piece written on the whole thing on either side of the Atlantic. To sum it up in a couple of words, "It's not a mosque and it's not at Ground Zero". Well done Charlie. If you want to read the article in full click here.

Getting a bit thirsty now. Think I'll try some of that new Drench.

New Year - New Car

The Instanta year starts on the first of July for the first time today and Nick has cause to celebrate with the delivery of his new car. We took one look at the June sales at the close of business last night and went straight out and bought it this morning. Nick is pleased as punch with the vehicle.He tells me that it has 18" alloys which means nothing at all to me but I suppose that my Prius will have them too. Anyway, he needs something comfortable to drive if he is to achieve the targets that have been set for the new year - he's going to doing a lot of miles. So, off you go Nick. We'll see you next June.



My brief return to eBay trading has ground to a halt. There seems to be very little movement in my specialist area of antique ceramics at the moment and I am not wasting hours to sell stuff at a loss. I have got about forty items at home that I would like to sell but I don't think that eBay is the right place at present. Maybe I'll venture out and take a stand at a fair some day in the autumn. The last thing I sold on eBay was an electric organ that I sold on behalf of my next door neighbour. It somehow managed to sell to a church in Barbados. Now I am busy trying to sort out delivery to a London address which is not a lot of fun - especially as the organ only sold for forty quid. Why couldn't it have sold to someone local? Why do favours always have a habit of turning around and biting you?



Here's something else that won't be easy to sell. I just had a quick search on eBay and there were over four thousand England shirts for sale. Hard luck for anybody who stock piled and bought in a load of them in anticipation of glory. The only thing that they can hope for is a Germany win so that England's apparently feeble performance can be put into the context of "we only lost to the World champions".



As a Liverpool fan of over forty five years and a Kop season ticket holder for over half of those years, I would like to welcome Roy Hodgson to Anfield. Things can't get any worse than last season when Liverpool's performances were so boring that it became an ordeal to go to the matches. It is only because Rafa left that I have renewed my ticket for another season. I couldn't care less if Liverpool don't win as long as I enjoy watching the games. After all, it is supposed to be entertainment. So, Roy, please get us to play with a bit of flair. You will win the crowd over and the Benitez days will soon be a distant memory. And a bit of team spirit would be good too. Did you see the England team spirit? And who was the England captain? Precisely.

I just went onto Youtube to find a good video for today's blog but inadvertently typed in Yotube. And yes the site exists as do Gooogle, Gogle, Facbook, Appl and many many more. I wonder how many hits these misspelt sites manage in a day. It would be interesting if we bought a misspelled leading website name and put Instanta up there and saw how much our site traffic increased.I tried "comparethemeerkat.com" but "comparethemarket.com" already has it. I had a moan about the quality of what's on offer at the local Vue at the moment. Well at least we have something to look forward to at Christmas - honest.