Bizarre Work Experience

 I've had 1 or 2 bizarre work experiences in my life, the tree surgeon who dropped a chainsaw on his arm (lengthways) and I had to hold his arm together with a belt, the e-gaming company where I got secret messages from a shareholder on my second day and asked to sign off the annual accounts in the first week (I was a lowly DBA).  But this one tops them all in terms of "what the actual fuck is going on".  It's office related so obviously dull but I'll translate it to the exciting world of chefing to make it more exciting and relatable!

A Michelin starred chef decides he needs a change of pace so accepts a 90% pay cut job washing dishes in a local cafe.  On his very first day he turns up to find that they've already got somebody washing the dishes, instead they ask him to cook, well they don't ask him, the owners just imply it would be helpful if he cooked.  The cook who interviewed him for the dish washing job doesn't speak to him at all.  The cookery job he now finds himself in is paying the same as the dishwasher.  He thinks rather than standing their doing nothing, being bored, he'll make the best of a bad situation and knock out some meals, might be fun anyway.  He asks them what's on the menu, what should he cook.  Silence.  He asks them where the ingredients are kept.  Silence.  After a while he figures this out for himself and then starts looking for pots and pans, he's about to start when the owner collars him and says he's not to use those pans, instead he can use the 1 rusty pan left in the corner that the existing cook doesn't use.  Fine, he has the experience to manage, the last thing he asks is do the customers have any special requirements or requests he should know about.  Silence.

Reluctantly but clinging to his dream of the easier life he starts knocking out meals with his rusty pan, still the other cook says not a word to him.  The first feedback is good, the cafe's customers have their eyes opened and are very happy.  Feeling that he's made the best of a bad situation he tries for one last time to engage with the existing cook, "what do you think of this, is it ok?"

"Obviously needs more salt and you should have known that all our customers hate potatoes done that way"

And that was my experience of working at IFGL.  Unique, bizarre and utterly fucking mental.

  

The Reason Why I Never Wanted To Work In IT For A Manx Company

 There has been a big increase in ridiculous IT jobs being advertising locally lately.  Ridiculous, how come?  Simply put, a big fuck off ridiculous list of skills and specific knowledge they expect an applicant to have.  90% of it is usually flavour of the month framework/idelogy bollocks that will be completely different next month and the only way to have gained any real experience in it is to have either not slept for the last 10 years AND/OR to have worked at either Facebook or Google.  Or you lie, you lie lots and lots then hope you can expect to pick it up on the job.  Lots of the latter, not many of the others knocking around locally.

Without going in to too much detail it's sort of like advertising for a knee surgeon, who can also do dentistry on the side, oh yeah and is also an expert in the field of accountancy because they might need somebody to go over the books at some point.  But also has a deep interest in baking, just cos.  And forget overtime, don't worry about 80 hour work weeks because "we're getting pizzas in at 9pm!".  The constant career learning, study, work shitting all over life is along those lines.  Then to top it off you are going to get paid around the equivalent of a GCSE C in English middle manager in government whose sole career goal is to retire as quick as possible and make sure they get their flexi days in...to add there is nothing wrong with that, it's all gravy if you can get away with it.

But if the jobs are so totally fucking fantasy land and the pay so shit why does anybody do it?  Brilliant question.  Because if they can't find anybody already here stupid enough then because it's "IT" the government give them free reign to open up to a global market and a whole world of bullshitters (and some real talent to be fair).  The talent moves on to bigger and better things, the bullshitters hang around and the company recruits more fantasy land to make up for it (before eventually realising that the talent is located in parts of the world where the existence is so shit developers have nothing better to do than develop and the cost of living so dirt cheap then can create a development hub there!)   The recruitment agencies over here fucking love it because there is a constant flow of "high paid" vacancies (wet knickers time). Ah how little do they know about what an actual real proper developer is worth.  All this is killing the local market for developers but it doesn't matter to anybody in the DOE because they get paid anyway, in fact they can all get excited about telling the world what a technology hub we are.

They want your soul, your family, your entire existence for mid management government salaries, a bit of pizza and a summer party to splash up on the gram.  In the words of one of my great programming heroes, they can fuck the fuck off the fucking fucks.

ps but if they do want me I'm currently booked up till next June, my day rate is currently £550, I WILL finish at 5pm and you can keep your pizza.

Key Workers Or Just On A Piss Up Jolly - You Decide?

 I can name 5 qualified, coded welders that live on the Isle of Man right now straight off the top of my head just from the circle of people I know.  So on what fucking planet do these qualify as "key workers" that have such specialist skills that they need to be imported?  Maybe I'm missing something here?  Or maybe the Isle of Man's "keyworker" get around is being abused to within an inch of its life by a lot of people not originally from here that fancy giving their mates a break from the shit hole that is the UK right now?  First stop is either an offy or pub.  And you just know only a tiny fraction are being caught, that's the nature of rule breaking.

Keyworkers Jailed on Isle of Man

I'd just open the whole thing up, it's clearly being abused to fuck anyway so why not just shelter the elderly/vulnerable and let everybody else get on with it?  The answer - it's the elderly/vulnerable that run the Isle of Man.  

The Big TT Rant

I'm not saying I'm old, because I'm not but I am old enough to remember the TT how it was as opposed to what is has become.  Growing up on the Isle of Man in a poor family where family holidays just didn't exist it was something we all looked forward to, a time when the island came alive for a couple of weeks!

In the 80/90/early 00's period I'm talking about the whole festival atmosphere was brilliant.  90% of our visitors were from either Ireland, Europe or further afield and the primary reason for coming was to WATCH the racing.  If you look at it overall they were here entirely for the racing, the piss up, tits and strippers, playing on bikes on the prom and if they were lucky getting sucked off by some skank on the beach.  That is what the TT was.  Yes there was the odd person who forgot what side of the road to ride on (there isn't a Manx person alive who doesn't know how to say keep left please in German), yes people still got killed but generally the whole thing was very friendly and like I say as long as the racing was good and/or the beer flowed everybody was happy.  Even the strippers.

But in the last 7-10 years it all seems to have changed.  It looks like a lot of groups of young lads from England now arrive thinking that they are here to "ride the TT".  Fuck knows where they've got that idea (ITV4, social media?) but they turn up fresh off the 4-5 pints on the boat ready to do a "lap".  Instead of being here for a week or more they rock up for a few days with some sort of mission of self destruction and fuck everybody else.  I don't need to guess at this shit.  Last year I was backwards and forwards on the boat a lot during TT and got to see it first hand.  I'm no prude, my own drink driving conviction tells you I can be a proper right dickhead.  But the total "we're here to go as fast as we can, cos we're in the TT" attitude was fucking amazing.  So much so that I told my daughter not to bother picking me up from the boat I'd get a taxi, no way would I want her on the roads when those bellends roll off the boat.  Sorry to say but this is what the TT has become to a lot of people.

What makes it even worse is the moaning from these same cunts.  "It's too expensive", "the mountain roads always shut", "there's too many speed limits", "my tent is wet", "I'm not coming again and your island will be ruined!!!!"  For one, expensive compared to what?  I'm sure as hell they've never been to any other major sporting event.  People were genuinely moaning about paying £100- £140 a night to hire a whole HOUSE (where you could sleep 4 people).  Really?  During the Grand National last year you wouldn't find a ROOM in Liverpool for less than £500 a night.  Some were over £2000.  Don't get me started on the Champions League games.  It was always cheaper to come back to the island and then travel back over a few days later.  The mountain road is always shut?  Yes it is, mostly because some (lets generalise here) wannabe cunt has ran off the road because in their head they are "in the TT".  You are supposed to be here to watch the racing, not make our roads a fucking death trap.  Wet tents, same for the last 100+ years, get over it.  You could have always stumped out for a home stay, you know where the Manx open their houses to complete strangers or even give them over completely, for as little as £100 a night.  You're not coming back and it will ruin us?  Really.  Are people that backwards that they've done zero research about a place before going on holiday.  Nobody even knows whether the TT makes the island any money.  They knows the basic costs alright, and they can have a guess at roughly how much it benefits a handful of people.  But there is the huge unknown of the lost business everybody else suffers.  The island is pretty much closed for business for 2 weeks.  We are an international finance centre. At best, if everything was to be perfect it may account for 1% of GDP, trust me mate you're not keeping that island going in the slightest! The money argument will go on as long as the TT but it's a safe bet that other than government overtime and a small group of businesses the rest of the island benefits shit all from the TT.  We host it out of good will and a legacy, tradition.  Without it our government fears becoming anonymous, like Jersey and Guernsey and for us Manx there is a pride in welcoming people to what is a stunningly beautiful island, plus we like getting pissed in the beer tent :)

The extra speed limits?  This is where we are at.  As long as the TT continues to attract people who think they are here to test their skills on open roads then it's only going to get worse for extra restrictions.  At some point there will be a speed limit put on the mountain road.  At the same time I imagine there will no longer be the justification of making it 1 way.  Funnily enough when it's 2 way the rest of the year we manage just fine without daily destruction.  The same as for all the other parts where limits only come in for TT and only in recent years.  Hmm, it almost coincides with the  explosion of "we're here to do the TT" fuckwits?  Maybe at that point the "we're not coming again" gang will actually fucking stop coming and free up the boats for the people who used to come for a couple of weeks to WATCH the racing?  Hopefully.  Then all we need is burnouts on the prom and the strippers back and we can get back to a proper TT. 

Fuck The Fuck Off

Paid a salary of a quarter of a million!  Paid roughly £100,000 more than their UK equivalents!  Get the fuck out of here https://www.manxradio.com/news/isle-of-man-news/nobles-consultants-paid-almost-10m/

Having had to deal with the local experts, or as I like to call them, Average Joe Bloggs Who Have An "Interest" In Whatever Specialty and then having spent months in the UK with my sick relative (having finally convinced the locals they were so far out of their depth it wasn't funny) dealing with people who actually know what they are doing I have no words for the anger I feel after reading that report.  I'm going to forward it on to a couple of the consultants across who dealt with my relative just for shits and giggles.  They openly laughed whenever the Isle of Man was mentioned.  The bumbling, time wasting, amateur hour consultants over here dragged it out for over a month, meaning that by the time he went away he was pretty much on a road to nowhere.  A man that walked in to A&E and who was clearly getting "much" worse with every day wasted whilst they played at being experts. All the time the family were left to rant and rave about how this clearly wasn't anything they were telling us.

I don't actually blame the hospital over here at all, the care he got from the nursing staff was good, excellent at times, even the health service as a whole when they were notified of how things were going south rapidly were very fair in their response.  I just resent I was the one that had to tell them whilst the so called "experts" swanned around like they owned the place, "reviewing it next week".  Fuck the fuck off.

As a certain member of this blog would say, let Google come in and take it over as an experiment, there is no way we it could possibly get worse or we get less value for money out of these consultants.

Disclaimer - Some consultants at Nobles are alright, nothing to justify those salaries in my opinion but alright.   

Isle of Man Cruises?

Another classic backwards Isle of Man example.  There is "talk" of us getting a deep water berth so that we can attract more cruise visitors.  http://www.manxradio.com/news/isle-of-man-news/cruise-facility-will-pay-for-itself-in-five-years/

Once again the crabs fly out with their "it's all bullshit", "the island is crap", "there is nothing to do here", "we don't want change" bollocks.

I've been on a lot of cruises over the last 10 years or so, a lot.  More than I'd ever have really wanted to!  In life I try to judge things on first hand experience and luckily in this case I've got quite a bit.  So on European cruises you generally get 2 types of customer.  First of all the classic Brit/European.  The cruise is seen as a chance for an all inclusive summer holiday where they can get dressed up, buy a lot of booze on board yet never have far to stumble back to their bed.  If they have a family there is cheap baby sitting and kids entertainment chucked in.  We want nice weather.  When it comes to getting off the ship unless it is something they desperately want to see they will wander around the local area, perhaps buy some cheap tat then get back on the ship for lunch to save them having to spend any money on food.  Of course there are exceptions but this is pretty average and covers younger families all the way up to your classic pensioners.  On the smaller ships that visit the island this is the majority of what we get, just take a look in Strand Street on a cruise day and you'll spot them from a mile off.  Generally you don't make money off these people, the cruise lines do, the places they visit don't.

The second type of guest on European cruises is the American family on their major European vacation.  They are here to see Europe, history and have absolutely no bones about signing up for EVERY excursion going.  The weather doesn't matter, nor does travel times or little else for that matter.  They want to see historical shit no matter the cost.  They also want to buy stuff in Europe, cos you know it's from Europe.  They want local food, even if it's just a Walls choc ice in Rome (yes really).  We were once on a tour in Turkey with a group of Americans with Royal Caribbean.  It was supposed to be a historical tour of Ephesus but on the way it stopped at a leather jacket factory.  We all watched the presentation, the other couple of Brits left, the Americans who we were good friends with by then continued to empty the factory shop.  Between the 40-50 of them they must have bought at least that number of jackets, the cheapest of which was £500, some were over £2000!  They were buying them up as presents for family back home, the same jacket in multiple colours, it was brilliant to watch how excited the Turks were. No doubt you could have bought the same jacket from a local shop in town for £50.  We have been on countless tours with those types of cruise guest who get hyper at looking at a few rocks, wet themselves over a "genuine" castle, any castle. We've done the 6 hour tour to look at the thing in the middle of nowhere that turns out to be a grass mound and seen the excited reactions whilst we look on dumb struck thinking "WTF we have dozens of these back home".  In another instance I remember an American woman asking for a shops wifi so that she could use her online banking to transfer money in to her checking account cos she just had to "buy one of these for everybody back home".  It is the cruise lines and how they market a "stop" that creates the frenzy, they can turn nothing in to a must see, once on board a cruise ship you are bombarded with it.

Then because we've raved so much about how "back home" compares to where we are a few have even came to the island to see for themselves, and to a person they have absolutely loved the place!  If for one minute you think there isn't enough history, local culinary delights and unique attributes here to surpass a LOT (as in the vast majority) of European cruise destinations then you need to get out and explore your own island more.

But here comes the big BUT.  There are certain things that need to be right.  Make no mistake about it Douglas is a shit hole, a great big steaming turd of a shit hole.  As a bare minimum you expect to get off a cruise ship somewhere that is clean to walk around, I just took a walk around town this morning and there is fresh dog shit on just about every pavement away from the main street.  There are loads of rough cruise ports, run down, crap looking but always clean.  It's either that or you transfer everybody out of there ASAP, which to be honest wouldn't be a bad idea with Douglas.  The other thing is customer service, not just the meet and greet but in general.  We've found that they don't mind paying a premium but they expect the customer service to be friendly and polite.  They want to be appreciated and not treated like a cow ready for milking, or in the case of a lot of our local shops and services like an inconvenience.  If there is one thing that will get a place a bad reputation and shitty feedback on the end of cruise survey it's the attitude of the locals.  But again we have been places far worse than the Isle of Man so it could easily be resolved.

I also think that the whole £50 million back in 5 years is nonsense.  Lots of tender destinations do very well, it's not the tender process as a whole that is bad but the reliability.  Of course as a cruise guest it's much better to be able to dock because you can get off quicker but on every cruise we've ever been on those booked on excursions have priority to tender.  In other words your big spenders will always be able to get ashore first.  By berthing you are mostly enabling the "quick wander around and a bit of tat" an easier route off and a quicker route back on for their lunch.  And reliability is where we have the next big problem with the Isle of Man and why I suspect they want the deep water berth?  Our weather is fucking shit.  It's not the tender process, it's the "not" tender days when it's too rough to get anybody ashore.  I'm sure if you look back we get more than our fare share of them!  That's what really pisses cruise guests off and for some it's enough to hold a black mark against a place and the cruise line itself.  How do you get around that?  One option is to look at what they are doing with a deep water berth however there is NO WAY IN HELL that the government should be looking to spend that money.  The private sector absolutely has to get involved and then costs hammered down to the bare minimum.   I wouldn't trust our government to manage anything on that sort of scale, history tells you that the "yes men" with lovely ties in the civil service are fucking experts in spending other peoples money at the whim of a consultant without any notion of what's coming down the line.  Could it work?  If they can attract the right type of cruise guests and costs are controlled then yes, probably.  The island really does have a huge amount to offer but you need to get those that are happy to spend here to make it work.

The other much cheaper option is to take advantage of the fact we are a small island and that most of the time one side is going to be sheltered.  I'd look in to the feasibility of  having 2 or more tender landing locations, one on the east coast and one on the west.  Depending on the weather on the day depends on where you land.  Believe it or not the actual infrastructure for establishing a security area is all pretty mobile anyway and it's just a case of having a landing platform available in 2 locations.  Doesn't even have to be permanent.  The island is so small that it's hardly going to make any difference in terms of excursion timings and that type of thing.  As an added bonus on some days you're going to get people landing away from Douglas!  This isn't a new idea, we've been to plenty of locations where you berth but due to the weather, other shipping etc etc you don't find out which berth you're at until you wake up.  I can't see any reason why that couldn't work here?

At the end of the day you are more likely to attract the bigger ships carrying the sort of people who are likely to spend more money (cough American  cough) if you can give the cruise line at least the expectation that they will be able to get people ashore for the day.  Once ashore the Isle of Man has loads to offer that history hungry, local product hunting cruise guest and with a better attitude towards our own unique history and culture there isn't any reason why we couldn't cash in....in my opinion.

The Isle of Man Gets A Regulated Short Term Loan Provider And Facebook Explodes

The Isle of Man is a backwards little place, sorry but it is. I've lived here all my life, love the place, but I'm well traveled and in simple terms backwards is the only way to describe it. Don't believe me then just try and change something or do something new and see what happens? There is a reason why Manx Crabs is such a well known saying.

 Here's a quick example, one which has got on my tits over the last couple of weeks. Bearing in mind the number of dodgy, grey area tax dodging, profit from gambling, money laundering companies we have over here we've only recently got one of those pay day loan companies, high interest low amounts to get you to your next pay packet. 99.9% of us will NEVER need to use such a company. We can go to the bank, use a credit card, borrow money from family, or if you plan in advance join the recently setup credit union, all of which are much much better ways of borrowing money. If I needed to borrow money today I literally have a dozen options. However for the other .1% they're fucked. In the past on the island (like many other places) their ONLY option was to borrow from the local Fat Tony. Some "hard as nailz" cunt on the estate/recently moved off the estate that will hold that leverage over you and your family for forever and a day. They just love young mothers!! Of course this would never happen on the lovely safe, idyllic Isle of Man...yeah right! Seen it plenty of times first hand growing up at a time when people really didn't have the cash floating about they do now. So to an average well balanced human being what is better, Fat Tony or the regulated company charging an interest rate that is set in law? Anywhere else you'd see it as a necessary evil, shit but you understand people live different lives, on the Isle of Man they see it as the work of the devil! And when I say they I mean the upset middle class left wing fuckwits which seem to take over everything Facebook to do with the Isle of Man. Seriously on every advert I've seen there is an assortment of "scum", "should be in prison", "preying on the vulnerable" etc etc comments. Really? The people running Pogo Loans must have way more patience than me (either that or there is a much bigger market here than you'd think..kerrrrching), I'd have given up on using social media to advertise on the island a long time ago. In fact with some of the shit going their way I think I'd be inclined to say bollocks to the Isle of Man altogether.

 It's much better for the liberal avengers* that this stuff goes on away from social media so that they don't have to tell everybody who will listen how disgusting everything different from them is. And that in a sentence just about sums up the Isle of Man.


 * many of whom seem to work in the e-gaming/tax dodging industry

Ever Wondered What It Would Be Like If You Never Met Your Other Half?

I have.  It's a thought that jumps in to my mind every now and then, usually when I'm pissed off about something trivial.  I like to imagine a couple of Karate world championships, kickboxing titles, sunny beaches and an endless stream of hot chicks.  Cos, you know, that's what I was all about back in the day.

Whilst in reality with a total lack of any discipline or self control when it comes to alcohol and an OCD for doing stupid, pointless shit with computers I would have either ended up dead in a gutter or a penniless loner locked away wasting my life on something like this:-


Was a close call.

Visited Guernsey For The First Time

Heard that it was very similar to the Isle of Man.  I suppose other than a few minor things like being clean, having nice roads, all the shop owners being helpful and friendly, reasonable prices, everybody being able to speak English, a void of boarded up shops and did I mention how clean and well kept the place looked...it was very similar.

I'm assuming they spent some of their tax haven money on infrastructure instead of the government funding a massive job creation scheme for their "mates".

Bookmakers Bitching About Leicester Winning The League?

Massive pay out...blah blah blah

Somebody should ask them how much they MADE in the bets that were lost on people backing the other 19 teams to win the Premier League. You know the teams that were massively backed by huge numbers of loyal supporters?  The Liverpool fans who every year is their year?  The book size for outright Premier League winner is fucking enormous!  I would be amazed if any significant bookmaker lost a single penny on Leicester winning the league.

Sometimes I think that mainstream media understands fuck all about fuck all, yet people just soak it all up.

Going To The Gym - Myth vs Reality

It's February, the time of year when gym memberships go through the roof as people get around to starting their New Years Resolutions after the hangover of January.  I've had 17 years of February's in the gym and I know the score pretty well, I also know that by the middle of March most gyms are back to "normal".  This isn't a post to laugh at people who can't stick to their resolutions, it's more a post of encouragement to let you know that if you've made the gym part of your weight/health goals for the new year and you're regretting it already that the problem might not be with you, it might be THEM.  You see every gym I've been a member off (and I've been a member of most on the island over the last 17 years) paints itself as the "friendly gym for everybody".  I've also done enough training off island to know that this applies globally as well.  I'm going to go over some of the myths of gym membership versus the actual reality.

Myth: We Welcome Everybody

Reality: We welcome everybody who we find sexually attractive or consider them to be a image boost for the gym.  Now depending on the make up of the ownership/staffing of the gym you could be OK here or you may fall by the wayside.  One gym I was a member off many moons ago had a young female member of staff who definitely took a liking for me from day one and I was very pally with everybody within weeks of joining.  Generally speaking if you're young and female you'll be fine, the staff will be on first name terms in little to no time.  The same applies if you are a local celebrity of some sort, consider "gains" to be your main goal in life or have employed the services of one of the regular personal trainers.  For everybody else you'll find them about as friendly as ISIS....OK maybe that is a little unfair as they do stop one step short of wanting to cut your head off just for existing!  Still you shouldn't forget your place, you are a number, a number associated with a standing order.

 Myth: Everybody Working Hard In Their Own Little Spaces With Room For All

Reality: It's a proven fact that the average gym has a higher percentage of selfish cunts than just about any other type of building.  Whilst the photos on the website either show an empty gym with equipment neatly put away ready for use or a healthily full gym with people working towards their own goals smiling away the reality is that a couple of selfish cunts will spoil just about every trip to the gym.  Chances are you will want to punch somebody on most visits.  Why use one set of dumb-bells when you can have a monopoly on five?  Why concentrate on one piece of equipment or workstation when you can leave your clothes, shaker, phone, notepad on 3-4 for when you're ready?  Why use a unique piece of equipment (of which the gym only has one) for it's single designed usage when you can re-purpose it for an entire hour whilst every non selfish cunt looks on at you in disgust?  After all a gym membership is almost the same as owning your own gym isn't it, everybody else is just interrupting your "gains"?  The real beauty of this, the absolute crystal gem of fucked-up'ness, is that if you speak to one of these twunts you'll realise that they in no way, shape or form see themselves as being selfish.  They are simply "maximising their workout".  No you fucking prick, what you are doing is SHARING a space with other gym members who all have equal access to the same equipment as you.  Take your turn, move on. Seriously who ever brought up these fuckers to be so selfish and have so little awareness of the concept of sharing needs to be shot.

Myth: The Friendly Personal Trainer  

Reality: Fuuuckkkkk Offfffff.  Friendly to the point where they realise that you have no interest in hiring their services.  Certainly not friendly to the point where they might offer some safety advise to a 60+ year old gentlemen who is in serious danging of hurting himself on a resistance machine RIGHT FUCKING NEXT TO YOU.  I'm convinced that the only point of a personal trainer is to get people through the initial un-friendly barrier  that greets most new gym members.  I can see no other reason why people are happy to pay £25-£40 an hour to have somebody sit on what was the 1 free treadmill in the whole gym (see selfish cunts above)  next to them and talk about their weekend.  It would also be nice if personal trainers could take some notice of the thousand and one banners put up asking people to put equipment back after they've finished with it but then again that may distract them from the smug feeling of being better than everybody else in the gym.  Being a personal trainer in a gym is the same as owning it, fact.

Myth: Large Modern Changing Rooms Full Of Friendly Banter

Reality: The website shows the ample benches, clothes hooks/hangers and lockers.  Clean showers and freshly painted walls.  It is a little known fact however that it has been scientifically proven that gym changing rooms deteriorate quicker than any other room known to man.  The first thing that hits you is the smell, the smell of people who consider a diet made up of 80% whey protein to be healthy.  If it's so good for you why the fuck does the entire area smell like horses ass?  The good news is that the waiting time for a shower is usually minimal due to the fact that everybody under the age of 25 refuses point black to have a shower.  This is countered by the 60+ generation who happily walk around bollacky naked before toweling their ass in front of your face.  Ying and Yang.  The real problem arises when you come out of the shower to discover that one of the selfish cunts has decided to appropriate 12 yards of bench and 42 hooks for their post workout clothes layout.  This leaves you with the option of trying to balance all your clothes on the one hook whilst you get dressed in what is basically the centre of an arena of men/women looking at the floor.  Fortunately the gym changing room is an area where no words are spoken unless you are best of friends outside of the gym, even then conversation is to be limited to how hard your workout was, how it's better now that it's over and how you're not looking forward to tomorrow.

You might wonder then why I still go?  The simple answer is because once you get past the initial shock and awe of dealing with it you learn to laugh at it.  There are few things funnier than seeing 2 selfish cunts have a stare off over gym real-estate or even better watching somebody else just like me finally losing their temper and just dumping the "this is reserved" pile on the floor or taking one of the extra 5 sets of dumb-bells from under the persons nose.  It's getting over that initial hump that is the difference between being able to tolerate going to the gym and not.  What I usually suggest to people is to join a class if they can, they'll soon realise there are plenty of people on their level or if you're really unsure but are determined to stick it out then a personal trainer can help you feel much more at home.  Just do me a favour though.... if you do use one please ask them to put equipment back when they're finished.

Tight

We seem to be having another run of "you're tight" in our house at the moment.  It's always the same this time of year and usually kicks off over the heating because I prefer it low but the girls like to bake in the heat.  I know for a fact that I'm not the only fella that gets this shit and I know some have it a lot worse.  You have my sympathy.

Anyway with me being such a tight wad I decided to have a quick look at what I've spent playing happy families over just the last 4 years.  Where better place to start than with the mortgage. Or lack of it.  I spent my entire retirement/pension fund paying it off and having a load of other work done on the house.  Altogether a decent 6 figure sum.  Just for the record I drive a 12 year old Ford Fiesta and look like a tramp!  The end result of this is more slush money for everybody else each month to spend on clothes, save for holidays and generally bathe in the essence of my generosity.  Nice.

On top of that there is the "fun time" spending.  The money that goes on hobbies, past times and generally anything that anybody in the house enjoys.  Doing some rough calculations and they do only have to be rough because the numbers are so far apart but I've easily spent more on holidays in the past 4 years than I've spent in total on myself in the past 20 years.  I don't really enjoy holidays, can take em or leave em.  Let that sink in. I have personally (not including the money we've spent as a couple) spent more on keeping everybody else happy in 4 years than I've spent on keeping myself happy in 20 years.  Tight fucker...  In addition things like TV is considered one of my hobbies and over that time I could count any contribution towards any electrical goods in the house on 0 fingers.  We do have a well funded joint account but shit like that definitely comes out of my pocket as did the majority of the utility bills for a long time but I had to bring an end to that.  Tight fucker.

Of course all these things could be relative so it's only fair to look at earnings as well, obviously if I'm making the big bucks that it would only make sense that I'm the one splashing the cash.  Except that if you average earnings out over 13 years of marriage there just about fuck all between it.  The only difference is Tight Wad McSkin Flint here saved money to then spend it all on house and family shit like the truly selfish tight cunt that he is.

This is all a bit tongue in cheek because honestly I'd not have it any other way and in terms of wives that are easily pleased I couldn't have gotten off any easier!  On the other hand there is a tinge of seriousness to it, sometimes chicks should have a long hard look at themselves in the mirror over this money shit.

Christmas 2015 Gaming

Welcome to the Manx Lads annual post for 2016, just for a change I'm going to moan about the state of gaming by going through what I played over the Christmas break and how ultimately shit most of it turned out to be.  Lets start with the PC games:-

Witcher 3 - This is supposed to be the ultimate fantasy RPG with fan boys spending hundreds of pounds on new graphics cards just to get the most out of this game.  It does look very pretty...but it plays like an absolute dog.  The controls are clunky (collision detection is shocking) the combat has no satisfaction to it and the thousands of side missions are just the same thing repeated over and over.  Overall it is a deeply enjoyable story but just a terrible game and one which I gave up on completely after about 30 hours of game play.  Play Skyrim instead.

Fallout 4 - Didn't like this to start because it was so simple but then when I got my head around the fact that it's just a simple shooter with a few basic RPG elements I really started to enjoy it.  Unfortunately I then reached the level in the game where everything just seems very easy and I lost the will to finish the main story.  This has never happened with a Fallout game for me before.  I'm about 30 hours in to the game and now haven't touched it for a couple of weeks and am not really feeling the need to.  On the other hand the game of Fallout New Vegas I started a month before I bought this I'm still enjoying.  Figure that one out.

Struggling to come up with something that I wanted for Christmas I settled on an Xbox One, if for no other reason than a couple of the lads already have one and when push comes to shove I enjoy the more casual approach to online gaming on the Xbox than the hardcore PC gaming scene.

Halo 5 - The thing I enjoyed most about the early Halo games was the fight between 2 alien species, the rival technologies and the idea of trying to save something by being the one super weapon the humans had.  The big battles could be approached tactically and even though there was a lot of repetition in the later levels the earlier parts made up for it.  Halo 5 has lost that, the human weapons feel redundant, the scale of the worlds seems to have gone and every battle can be easily won running around shooting everything in the face.  Also to the developers, there is absolutely NO joy to be had in killing the same boss baddy over and over and over.  Talk about lazy fucking development.  Online is okay and I have a sneaky suspicion this was the main focus of the game.  I'm much happier playing through the first couple of games on the Masterchief Collection instead.

Fifa 16 - I haven't played a Fifa game in at least 10 years but this came free with the Xbox so it would have been rude not to give it a go.  I'd suggest that anybody wanting to be bored to tears with possession football could stick to watching Man Utd.  Quite why EA have though to use this as inspiration for a football game is beyond me?  The players run around like they are stuck in treacle or at the very least all carrying hamstring injuries.  It's so bastardly slow that any enjoyment ebbs from you after the first couple of minutes.  I started a league that will never ever get finished.

Elder Scrolls Online - It's like a really simplified Skyrim (which in turn is a dumbed down Oblivion) where you get the joy of having every quest you embark on ruined by a bunch of fucking muppets jumping around constantly killing re spawning enemies to level up ASAP.  Seriously never has the satisfaction of sneaking up on an over powered enemy in the hope of getting a sneak hit bonus with your bow being ruined so quickly as when **NINJAFACIAL69** jumps over your crouching body and evaporates everything in  the cavern with his level 87 fire magic.  Cunts.

Star Wars Battlefront - Now we're talking, Battlefront 2 is one of my top 5 favourite games of all time.  I must admit that I tried this first on the PC Beta but gave up after getting annihilated in every game.  I enjoy using a controller but it combined with 36 year old reactions is no match for a 13 year old with a mouse and keyboard!  Instead I got the EA pack on the Xbox which gave 10 hours of free play, 10 hours which were by far my favourite gaming over the Christmas and New Year period.  Graphically whilst nice the Xbox version doesn't even come close to the shear beauty of the PC on even medium detail levels.  Resolution, anti aliasing and texture levels all seem to have taken a big hit. Who cares though because some of the online modes are brilliant and the authenticity to a Star Wars nut is undeniable.  Not only that but the level of gamer makes the whole experience far more enjoyable to other casual gamers.  Needless to say I bought the game and continued to play it...except now it's all a bit...samey.  There is no single player to speak off and as enjoyable as the multi-player is for a quick blast it doesn't really feel like a lot for your money.  Thinking I maybe had rose tinted spectacles on remembering Battlefront 2 I decided to get it working again on the PC.  After a  little bit of messing I had it up and running.  ONE game of capture the flag in the Jedi Archives with all the different classes going at it hammer and tongs reminded of what I'd been missing.  There is no comparison, one is a game that will stand the test of time, the other is a very nice looking online demo.

Hopefully in 2016 developers will get their asses in gear and try to find that balance of gameplay, graphics and most importantly fun.  And on that note, Happy New Year!

First Impressions Of Windows 10

I like it, it's the best thing that Microsoft have done in the last 10 years so well done to them.  On all the machines I've installed it on it's ran at least as fast as the Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 that it has replaced.  That is all except boot time which seems to be a little slower but certainly not enough to matter.   I even went to town looking at resource usage on my main work PC and it uses a little less memory which is always good.  All my own software runs fine completely unaltered, all the way back to some rather dodgy Win32 Delphi applications.

Overall then a solid 8/9 out of 10...almost unheard of for a first attempt from Microsoft.  If they can just nail down the Explorer reliability and fix a few bugs when a system comes out of sleep mode (there are still issues with networked drives that seem to have persisted from earlier Windows versions) then I'll be giving it a 10.

Destiny Review

As a FPS with a story it is nowhere near as good as Halo, it's not even on the same planet.  Bungie clearly used up all their good ideas the first time around and Destiny sort of feels like the dregs that were left over.  It's got the same religion meets technology meets end of the world vibe but without ever being remotely interesting or funny.  Even if you ignore how boring the story is and just treat it as a value for money exercise you're not going to be happy...most expensive game ever?  How come it took me about 10 hours to play it through from start to end, and that included a shit load of extra optional (very repetitive) missions?  I reached level 21 in that time, enough to make the final battle a walk in the park. I suppose if I would have been trying I could have finished the story in about 5-6 hours.

So that's the single player sorted, what about the multiplayer RPG elements?  I've done quite a few Strikes and played a few hours in the crucible, neither are great.  The competitive multiplayer is basic head down, charge around with a shotgun dying every few seconds fair.  This is the only way to win.  If you try and play tactically some cunt will teleport on top of you and shoot you in the face with their shotgun.  There is no fucking way that this game will get a cult online following, I'd be amazed if people are still playing this in 12 months.  You level up to level 18/19/20 to stand a chance then you charge around like a headless chicken hoping to get a couple of kills for every death, there are no tactics.  This is matched by the type of player as well, you will get fed up hearing"fucking owned".  Not that I'm bitching because I'm bad at it, I'm not and I've won my fair share of games.  It's just that it is not fun.  As for the RPG?  It's a bit like Borderlands but much worse.  One class is far too strong and that sorts out any hopes of a WoW experience.  In simpler terms it is to Mass Effect what Asteroids is to Elite. 

The best bit about the game is the novelty value in seeing other real people jumping around on your same mission map.  It is only a novelty though and it soon gets fucking annoying when somebody is hanging around mining XP on a part of the map where you are trying to follow the story.  For example my final story mission was made a lot easier because somebody decided they were just going to hang around killing these bad ass monsters every time they respawned meaning I could walk through unchallenged

In short, as a FPS it has a dull story, poor weapon variety and as much as they've borrowed all their old Halo ideas none of the new bits are as good.  In terms of a FPS/RPG it just doesn't compare to Borderlands 2 and the fun that can be had working co-op in that.  Looking at it as an overall space adventure gaming experience whoever decided to compare it to Mass Effect needs their head read.  Overall it's not as good as Halo, Borderlands or Mass Effect.  The good news is that it helped me make my mind up which console I was going to buy and even better, I only took out a 1 month subscription on the Play Station network.

OR as somebody else put it...

Total Waste Of A Day

Today was supposed to be the day that things got back to normal after being injured with a cracked rib for a couple of weeks.  Right over the best time of the year on the island as well!  The plan was for an early easing myself back in gym session then to catch up on some of the admin work I've ignored.  That was until the postman arrived just as I was leaving the house with my new HDMI switch box.  Queue many hours of messing about.

Problem was that I've got a PC hooked up to the main TV, I'm using it as a console replacement because I don't want to splash the money on a PS4 or Xbox One but would still like to play any new games I like the look off.  Honestly the price of console games is getting beyond a joke as well.  Part of the expectation of that living room gaming multi media experience thing is having surround sound?  On a console that is just a case of connecting an optical cable to your surround sound system or setting it up to pass surround sound down the HDMI, but such is life that the PC is not quite so simple.

There is a really long shitty story here but the short version is that there are only 2 ways of getting surround sound in your games on a PC.  1. Buy a sound card that supports on the fly Dolby Digital encoding.  You can then use optical to connect this to your sound system (in essence this is what the consoles do)  2.  Have a sound system that has a HDMI input/output so you can connect directly from your graphics card.*

What I discovered today after fuckknows how many hours of messing about and the expense of buying all sorts of extra wires and crap is that people lie and shit don't work.  You can watch movies etc from your PC with full surround sound because the sound is already encoded when it is chucked down the HDMI, for me this meant getting a splitter (what the postman delivered today) to seperate the sound out and pass it on to the sound system (which only has optical  inputs, no HDMI).  BUT no matter what you're not going to get a game to work with surround sound this way.  You either buy a sound card to encode it and send it via an optical cable or you buy a sound system that can handle the raw information via HDMI.  No about of buggering about or smart asses on internet forums is going to alter that reality.

As for the Realtek powered optical output that most PC's have these days, it's not worth a wank for anything other than stereo sound  Why do they even bother?

And that has been my whole day, trying to get something to work which people say should work which in reality can never work.  I hate computers.

* This is what really pisses me off.  Just about all modern TV's have muliple HDMI inputs and a way of connecting to a surround sound system but yet hardly any pass on the surround sound, just about all downscale the sound to stereo.  What is the point in this passthrough if it doesn't work?  If TV's behaved like people thought then your TV could be the hub for all this and the world would be a much nicer place with far fewer wires, remotes and people throwing things around their living room when stuff don't work.

Bluewave Update

Well where do I start with this one?  Enough to say my time with Bluewave has finished and I'll not be having anything more to do with them.

The variation in service for the first week was enormous, ranging from 0.5Mb to 35Mb downloads depending on the time of day.  But to be in with a realistic chance of 30Mb+ you needed to be using it after midnight.  A daytime average I suppose was in the region of 15Mb.  I raised a high priority support ticket about the slow speeds (when it hit less than 1Mb, 20th March) but to this day it hasn't received a reply.  Check out this bad boy:-

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3384379640

Then the service stopped altogether, engineers visited and replaced the dish and moved its location.  It always had a perfect line of sight to the antenna.  On testing with the engineers there and seeing a mighty 6Mb download I was advised it will take a while to optimise.  Fair enough.  It never did "optimise".

What followed was a connection that was fast enough when nobody else used their connection but at the times of the day when you needed it was extremely up and down.  Pings ranging from 40ms to 190ms.  Downloads from 2Mb to 20Mb.  Trying to watch any type of streaming on a weekend evening was impossible.  Of course these connections have a contention ration of 50:1, the same as everybody else but the variation in performance is extreme to say the least. 

I tried and tried to get some answers, resorting to e-mailing the boss directly and then when the speedtests proved the point being passed on to somebody else, but with days between responses in the end I gave up and called it a day.  What says it all to me is being asked to provide Speedtest results, providing them and then being told that Speedtests aren't an accurate measure of their network. Whilst at the same time they use Speedtest results on their Facebook page to market their service.  I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions on that one. :)

From a purely technical side of things I've used a lot of 50:1 contention ratio internet connections in my time but I've never used one as bad for fluctuation in performance as Bluewave.

Overall 3/10 unless you're a house wife that only uses the internet for Facebook because then it's probably greeeaaatttt.

Bluewave IOM Review

Let me start by saying I'm not the first of the lads to sign up for Bluewave broadband so I'm hoping that the other fella will chip in here at some point as well, but this is my point of view on it.

We had the Bluewave Ultraband (40Mb) home broadband installed very recently having previously been on a Wi-Manx VDSL (40Mb) connection, technically speaking we still have access to both but only for a little while.  The Bluewave installation was as quick and easy as you like, the engineer was here for about an hour and with a crystal clear view of the antenna everything went very smoothly.  I know people have asked about the router you get, we got a TP-Link 840N (Link Here) but more on that later.  One thing that could have been pointed out was the default username and password for the router but perhaps they assume people won't be interested?  It only took a few seconds to find it on the bottom of the router and I quickly altered the SSID, username, password and WLAN security key.

With everything secure I could test the wireless signal around the house, performance was...ok.  Not a very technical review I know.  Put it this was it was better than a typical Netgear ADSL router, better than my old TP-Link ADSL router, not as good as my Billion and not near the standard of the FritzBox.  I'm fussy about wireless, it's why most of the big stuff in the house is wired now.  Was it good enough?  Just about in our 3 bed semi, I wouldn't want to rely on it if I was in a big town house, certainly not without a repeater.  So I did the easiest thing which was to replace it with the Fritzbox (quick note - even though Bluewave say you can't use their service with an ADSL/VDSL router most modern routers have the ability to set one of the LAN ports as a WAN port, on the Fritzbox this takes about a minute to do - handy if you are thinking of moving from Wi-Manx VDSL).  With the Fritzbox in place I could get a full signal throughout the whole house/garden.

Next came the issue of speed and this is where things got a bit complicated.  Initial tests at 3-5pm were not great.  Ping on Bluewave - average around 45ms, average on Wi-Manx VDSL around 18-20ms.  Download on Bluewave - average around 15Mb/s (lowest 7Mb/s), average on Wi-Manx VDSL around 37Mb/s (lowest 37Mb/s).  Upload on Bluewave - average around 3.5Mb, average on Wi-Manx VDSL around 2Mb/s.  I should say that I was not expecting Bluewave to be as fast as the wired VDSL service and I was happy to lose some of the download for a faster upload and the considerable cost savings.  But I wasn't expecting such a massive drop in performance so that led me to try again at a quiet time of the day.  I thought this shouldn't have much effect seeing as how Bluewave advertise the capacity of their network and not being left wanting for more speed, even at peak times!  So I tried it again at 7am, here's the results:-

Bluewave Ping Average - 33ms
Bluewave Download Average - 25Mb/s (lowest 21Mb/s)
Bluewave Upload Average - 4.5Mb/s

Wi-Manx Ping Average - 18ms
Wi-Manx Download Average - 37Mb/s (lowest 37Mb/s)
Wi-Manx Upload Average - 2Mb/s

That is within the accpetable limit for what I set myself for Bluewave, like I said I wasn't expecting it to be as fast as the Wi-Manx VDSL service.  This leaves me with a problem, at first glance there appears to be significant contention with the Bluewave service (as of right now 9am'ish  it's really up and down all over the place, 1 second it is OK - http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3383171274 the next it is poor - http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3383173201 ...then this at  9:10 - http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3383190744 ).  To be honest I'm not sure if it's 100% contention or something more atmospheric but either way it's very much up and down a lot and it does coincide with the busiest times of the day.  I'm hoping the other lad with it can chip in on that?

Just to prove that all these SpeedTest results were meaningful I also tried a load test on the connection thanks to some iPlayer HD content, 1080p Youtube videos, a HD stream of the United game last night and a couple of Steam downloads.  The speed really is as variable as what is being made out in the Speedtests and several times it had a fit and stopped various streams altogether.  Looking at the throughput on the Fritzbox it was showing a steady load of around 18Mb/s + the variable rates for the downloads and this was too much for the connection to maintain at 7-9pm.  This leaves the question of will I stick with it?

If I was a big online games player then the answer is no.  The difference in the ping plus the fluctuations in bandwidth would be just too anoying.  But I'm not a big gamer.  If I was cutting edge and spending half my life looking for dodgy streams then I'd give it a miss as well.  But we are just an average household with a few tablets, a couple of PC's and a Youview box.  Under normal circumstances it should hold up fine, nothing like as quick (or with the spare capacity) as what we were used to as Wi-Manx but good enough considering the massive savings, appox £20 a month.  So we'll be staying with Bluewave and just hoping that the variation settles down over time as the network matures, I'll do a follow up once we've got a couple of weeks of use out of it.

PS Just to add that none of the testing was done in a completely controlled environment.  I did however plugin directly to the router for all Speedtests and only granted WLAN access to what was needed for testing.  All automatic updates were turned off.  The Fritzbox had zero throughput at all time when I wasn't testing so I made it as accurate as I could.

PPS Just at add that it's now been rock steady at 30Mb/s download for the past 20 minutes.    

Some Deep And Meaningful Thoughts About The IT Industry

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. 

 

Hangover Day 5

Head still banging.  Somebody just fucking shoot me.