(This has been moved from my website – I thought today would be a suitable day to put this entry here).

Being the romantic sort, I bought the wife a new bag and a new belt for Valentines day.

The hoover works a treat now!

My wife runs a Rainbow unit, which is the very youngest branch of Girl Guiding. Every week I help out and I am also a registered Unit Helper: literally a proud card-carrying member of Girl Guiding UK.

We’re now fully into the swing of the Christmas crafts, and today has seen me preparing this week’s craft: a reindeer tree decoration made from two clothes pegs. Thought I would blog about this to share the various Christmas activity ideas we’re doing at the minute. Here’s what you need:

• Two wooden clothes pegs
• One small pom-pom
• Two small stick-on goggle-eyes
• Red foam
• Green foam
• A length of red ribbon, about 4mm wide, 20cm long
• Strong glue (I used UniBond “No More Nails” from a cartridge gun)
• Regular paper glue (such as Pritt-Stick)

Take one of the wooden pegs apart and discard the spring. Using the strong glue, stick the two halves together using their flattest surfaces, with about 1cm of the ribbon glued between the two halves of the peg at the widest end. Take another peg apart and glue the other end of the ribbon into it in the same way. Wait until the glue is dried (No More Nails claims 24 hours) and then stick the two pegs together. Make sure you don’t get the ribbon twisted and you should end up with something like the following (I did 10 of these yesterday and today).

We do that stage, rather than the girls, for several reasons:

1. it can require some precision to get a usable base to do a finished decoration
2. we don’t want 5-year-olds messing around with No More Nails
3. it takes ages to do

The basic shape is now there, with the nose being the pointy end and the antlers being where the ribbon is joined. Once that’s all dried, you’re onto the really fun part of decorating it! Everything from here should stick on OK with just standard paper glue.

The red pom-pom is his nose, and the eyes are fairly obvious: stick them at about the same height as the first notch away from the nose. For a small amount of Christmas-themed decoration, cut out two holly leaves from the green foam, and punch out a couple of dots of the red foam for berries. Arrange that in a suitably-artistic fashion and you should end up with something like the following:

Next time – CD snowflakes!!

After Si complained that version 1.0 didn’t fully utilise the CPU to its full warming potential, I’ve released version 2.0 of my pie-warming application. If he’d only read the section in the original blog entry which stated:

Version 2 will automatically detect how many CPU cores you have
and use all of them for optimum pie-warming capabilities.

He has a much-nicer-than-mine ThinkPad T60p, which has an Intel dual-core CPU. Sometimes I wonder why I bother writing user documentation.

You can download version 2.0 from here.

Well it’s now 6 weeks to Christmas and you’re probably starting to wonder what to buy for those people who have everything. Well I have something that is both practical and free!

There’s a whole raft of novelty USB gadgets knocking about at this time of year, from a USB Fridge to a USB Cup Warmer, but these things all cost money. What I have for all your Christmas present woes is the magical Mince Pie Warmer application. Simply place your mince pie next to the CPU cooling outlet of your laptop, download and run this app (no install needed!), and hey presto, your mince pie will be warmed to something slightly above room temperature. During the heating of the pie, your laptop battery may diminish, and other applications may feel sluggish as it does use 100% of the CPU to achieve the necessary heat output.

I must admit that I have succumbed to commercial pressures and hurried out a version 1 application in order to catch the Christmas rush. Version 2 will automatically detect how many CPU cores you have and use all of them for optimum pie-warming capabilities.

Just click here to download my mince pie warmer application.

I have a Labrador retriever. I was buying a large bag of Winalot at Tesco and was in line to checkout. A woman behind asked if I had a dog? On impulse and thinking it was a stupid question, I told her no and that I was starting the Winalot Diet again.

I added that I probably shouldn’t because I had ended up in hospital last time, but because I’d lost 50 pounds before I awoke in an intensive care ward, with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms, I was willing to try it again.

I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your trouser pockets with Winalot nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry and that the food is nutritionally complete, so I was going to try it again.

I have to mention here that practically everyone in the queue was by now enthralled with my story.

Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me. I told her no. I’d been sitting in the street licking my balls and a car hit me.

(originally found in the Sunderland AFC forums)