mini-moan: does not scan.

All upholstered furniture manufactured after 1950 must have a manufacturers label permanently attached which shows compliance with the The Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988.

 Yes, you read that correctly all furniture manufactured after 1950 must have a manufacturer fitted label stating compliance with regulations introduced in 1988. So unless you are Doctor Who or happen to have a flux capacitor lying around, you can't legally sell any furniture manufactured between 1950 and 1988.

I've previously mentioned the British legal system is weird, and this certainly proves it.

technology: curse you

I'm pretty traditional in my daily life, 99% of my media consumption comes from the good old fashioned satellite dish the type of satellite dish your grandparents would have had, none of this new fangled internet that all the kids are using these days.
But there are some web only shows that I enjoy to watch and I often visit The Escapist for shows such as LoadingReadyRun, The Big Picture with MovieBob and of course Zero Punctuation. As much as I enjoy much of the content on The Escapist something has always bugged me about using the site and that is because when you view a video in full-screen the mouse cursor doesn't hide, it just sits there glaring at you like a petulant child. So you sit there delicately trying to position the mouse cursor at the far right side of the screen so it doesn't distract you, but you can always see a little white line peering out from the edge of the screen as to say "I'm always watching, you can't get get rid of me that easily". I've never seen the reasoning behind keeping the cursor on the screen, nearly every other site has learned that after 5 seconds you should hide the mouse cursor because it just annoys the :censored: out of people watching the video.

And now Youtube are at it, many of the new HTML5 videos suffer from 'cursor incursion', along with a stupid dialog that asks 'Do you want to allow watching this video in fullscreen'. Of course I fecking well do, that's why I hit the Fullscreen button. Why would I want to watch it in a 5" box and not the entire 46" screen I have available. It's not like I can do something else while watching the video such as filling in my tax return or writing a blog post about how annoying watching online videos can be.
Then Youtube really starts to pee me off when it has forgotten to show an advert, it's amazing how many adverts you now get on Youtube, so it then gets stuck and forces you to refresh the page so you then see the advert it previously forgot to show you.

This was originally going to be a mini-moan, but by the time I got to the end of the first paragraph I had released so much bile, so brace yourself a full moan is coming - Hoooowwwwlllll.

And those bloody expandables you get on websites such as The Escapist. Things that fly out of the video player and fill the entirety of your screen like that creepy little girl in the ring who lunges out of the TV. They scare the bejeebus out of me.

And everytime you watch a Youtube video you have to close a damned banner advert, and then often another one shows up, and another, so you miss the first minute of the video just closing banners. And Blip.tv is worse, they show up in random parts of the screen and just wont die no matter how many you close, and just when you think you've won, 3 minutes later another will pop-up. It's like playing an endless game of whack-a-mole.

And videos that have advert breaks in the middle piss me right off, you can always tell because the timer bar at the bottom of the video has little lines so as to say 'Hah, you know what's going to happen when you reach this point, I'm going to try and sell you crap'. And often they put an advert about 1 minute before the video ends knowing that by that point you aren't going to leave.

It seems like a backwards step, with HD PVRs and massive screen TVs or projectors we evolved our media consumption to a point where we could see our favourite shows in glorious quality without the interruption of adverts, and now I'm watching a pixelated mess with unskippable adverts that annoy me with stupid dialogs and banners. Progress, it's not what it's cracked up to be.

daily life: follow the signs

It's thirsty work being a sign.

Over the course of the last few days I've seen more and more signs that just make no sense. Signs are pretty expensive to produce so you'd think more care and attention would go into the wording of them before sending them off to print. On the positive side they make for entertaining reading when you are bored and stuck in a traffic jam.

Today, while waiting 20 minutes to get into the tip (I certainly know how to show someone a good time), I saw these entertaining signs.

'The Origin of all waste delivered in commercial vehicles and trailers will be checked' - How are they going to do that then? Does every item of waste have a unique barcode on it indicating where the waste was produced? Will they sit the waste on a chair in the middle of a dark room and shine a bright light in it's face until it confesses it's true origin?

If you weigh 3501Kg your not coming in, and I don't care who your father is. They've probably got one of those people that can guess your weight standing by the gate at all times.

mini-moan: look mum, no hands.

Something very odd has happened to the post delivery, for some reason the posties have shed their trusty Royal Mail bikes in favour of Royal Mail prams. Obviously Royal Mail are trying to show how much they care for your post by treating it like a precious little baby.
The only other theory I have is they've all become jealous of Postman Pat flying around in his helicopter and decided to trade their bikes up their bikes in an attempt to look more 'rad'.

Do you like my secret filming skills? I used to do all the Fake Sheikh filming for The Mirror, sadly the work from that gig has dried up now.

mini-moan: interrupt handler

You may have noticed that I've now got a new logo for the mini-moans. The old one just didn't work as well as I thought it would, but I'm still not sure about this one either as it's rather meh.

But on with the post.

I watch a fair whack of TV, I guess having no friends or social life of any kind means you have to fill the void and mask the crushing loneliness some how. I can put up with adverts on TV because we live in a capitalist society and things aren't free (maybe in the 24th Century Gene). But what I can't stand are adverts that abruptly start often mid sentence during some important dialogue or during an exciting action scene, most of the time when the adverts end you find a few seconds of the show is lost and now you have no idea what happened while you were subjected to an advert for Vagisil, is intimate feminine itching really that much of an issue?

I'll stop now before this becomes a full blown moan.

mini-moan: the bottom of the ocean is the safest place to be

Channel 4's documentary series Dispatches is tackling a big topic this week with Dispatches: Why ships sink.

I'll tell you why ships sink, because they fill up with water which means the mass of the ship increases and it is no longer able to displace enough water to remain buoyant. See, I've managed to save 1 hour of your life by removing the need for you to watch that episode of Dispatches.

Next week I'll explain the mystery of 'Why do you always find something in the last place you look'.

mini-moan: three from the top and two from the middle please carol

I'm a man that's easily annoyed, and there's one sure way to annoy me, squeezing the toothpaste tube from the middle. I just don't understand why anybody would do that, it makes no sense. Not only does it make it harder to get all the toothpaste out of the tube, but what advantage does it give you? I get so annoyed when I have to spend 5 minutes correcting a toothpaste tube that's been squeezed from the middle. I'm staying at mums for a few days and she is a perpetual tube middle squeezerer, there's just no changing that. It seems odd because my Dad was so emphatic about squeezing from the bottom and obviously taught me well (I know what your thinking and you have a dirty mind), you'd have thought the practice would have rubbed off on her. But it didn't :(

So to any of you out there that are unable to use a tube properly, for my own sanity get one of the tubey pump thingies so I don't have nightmares about all the lumpy and misshapen toothpaste tubes lying on the shelves of medicine cabinets or in glasses by the sink.