How do you handle phone calls from telemarketers?
Dully. I use caller display and let the answerphone pick up those I don't recognise. But I think we may be on a no-call list, we have had very few such calls.
Ever get away with saying somebody else did it?
Many times. That's what younger brothers are for, isn't it?
What gameshow or reality show would you kick butt on?
I'd
like another go at University Challenge, and I've been on a number of
other ones already (my copy of Encarta came from one of them, and a
cheque for a small amount of money), but Who Wants To Be A Millionaire
is the biggie and I could so do it. :-)
What is your browser's default home page set to?
Submitted by Kelev T. Cat.
Dully, it's Google. But the portal, not the plain search page. From there I have 90% of the things I need when I'm working - currency conversions, Wikipedia searches, news headlines, IMDB searches, gmail, driving directions, and a search engine. And I can play Bejeweled when I'm bored.
I also always have open tabs for LJ, LibraryThing, gmail (again), and
either Yahoo Mail or one of my 'timewasters' (Neopets, Vox, OEDILF).
What was the last wedding you went to? Were you in the wedding?
"In the wedding" is not a phrase I would use. Very American. Anyway,
the last wedding I went to was that of DH's first cousin, last May. It
was in Edinburgh, as the bride and groom both live there (I think her
parents are from further west, the groom grew up on Mallaig), so most
family travelled to be there. It gave us a good excuse for a weekend in
the city (which we repeated in November), and I got my birthday
presents a day early, as it was my birthday on the Monday. The bride
looked lovely - all brides do, of course, but she was really blooming;
all the Scots (and some non-Scots) wore kilts, the tables at the
reception had the names of Scottish islands, which meant most people
couldn't pronounce them...
We nearly had to cancel as smallclanger had been exposed to chickenpox not long before, but it all worked out in the end.
Ooooh, purple text. I like this. One could have a lot of fun.
Is it me or have they introduced more new features every time I look?
Teal? I like this green. SmallClanger is a link to a person.
This is called Insatiable in the UK,
and has a slightly more appealing cover. It's a strange book - veering
between utterly disgusting and completely fascinating. I never dreamed
there was so much politics involved in eating contests. I can't
stop reading it even when it's making me feel physically ill. And I'm
amused to see Stephen King's The Body (aka Stand by Me) referenced so often.
What is your current computer desktop image? Let's see it!
What's your mobile phone's ringtone? What made you pick it?
Little Red Monkey for family and close friends; Light My Fire for less close friends; Road to Nowhere
for unidentified callers/those not in my phone book. All 'tones' rather
than actual songs - I find phones with music on more distracting than
useful and wouldn't be able to spot mine in a hurry, I think. Before I
had a phone that could play tunes at all I only ever had it set to
'ring ring', like a landline. I picked LRM because DH figured it out
for his phone, which has a ring tone composer, and ported it to mine;
it was (still is?) smallclanger's favourite song. LMF is one of my
favourite Doors intros, and was available for download when I had
credits for two free downloads from some site or other; RTN was the
other and I love the song - I should listen to more Talking Heads,
really, I like them a lot but I never get around to listening to any.
If you could get someone in your life to start a blog, who would it be and why?
My 83 year old grandpa. Apart from being my only remaining grandparent, he's had a fascinating life and is a pretty good writer as far as I can tell. He's written some memoirs but I can't convince him to remove all the aerospace stuff and just submit them to a publisher as a travel/childhood memoir - I'm sure they'd sell that way, but he's very set on including the 'birth of an airline' material.
He was born in Egypt, grew up in Malta, Kenya, Abyssinia (Ethiopia),
Italy, England, Tunisia, Iraq, Morocco - you name it if it's above the
Sahara in Africa he's probably lived there for a while, as he also
travelled widely as an adult, right up into his late 30s, after which
the family settled in England and Italy. He and his father lived the
colonial cliche before the war (houseboys and drinks on the verandah,
that kind of thing - their houseboy was named Millwall after the
football team), ran a safe house for spies during WWII, did the 'Ice
Cold In Alex' run for real under similar circumstances, crashed planes
on purpose (for military intelligence/subterfuge purposes), had a price
put on their heads by Mussolini, and so on. All before he reached the
age of 21 - he was only just 22 when the war ended. Then he went
to work for what would become Pan-Am, then BOAC/the infant British
Airways, and went all around the world with them, inventing new
procedures, computer systems, all the things one new airline could crib
from another slightly older one, as things started to become more
streamlined internationally. He retired in 1980, in his 50s, and then
went back to work at 70, bored with retirement and wanting a new
challenge - so he became head of an aerospace computing department,
learning a lot of new techniques and computer languages in the process.
He retired again at 80, just in time to become a great-grandparent
which he enjoys, although we don't get to see him that often. He still
has grandchildren under the age of 10, and was always great fun when I
was growing up. In my teens he was the only relative on that side of
the family I actively wanted to talk to in any given year...
