PhobosAnomaly

Awesome. I am - at best, out of the loop in entertainment news: and at worst, culturally retarded - so I was sat at LCY with a colleague and he was pointing out famous chefs, golfers, public figures every five minutes.

I was still trying to figure out how anyone affords either to eat or drink at the airport without being on business expenses.

For celeb-spotting and transit links: London City Airport. It's nice being able to check your bags and fuck off into Stratford for a few hours. It's super expensive though.

For a chill experience: London Southend Airport. Not in London, but loads of seating, decent views across the tarmac, and loooaaads of room.

For getting lost: Washington Dulles. Christ that place was designed by Stevie Wonder in a house fire. The sheer number of destinations is wonderous though fair play, a great place to feel like a tiny cog in a huge machine.

Edinburgh is a banger. Great support for families, spacious, and generally chill - decent transport links too.

The departures lounge is starting to sprawl with retail now though, but can't have everything I suppose.

I'm not planning on a burial, but those biodegradable cardboard coffins look pretty awesome, and they're (comparatively) cheap as fuck too.

My plan is to get cremated - but it would be great to either sneak in some petrol into the casket, or pay the funeral directors to go for a two minute walk while someone packs my casket with fireworks or other low-explosive compounds.

At best, it'll put on one last show - and at worst it'll give the crematorium staff member a hell of a shock.

All you had to do, was pick a damn distro CJ.

what about now bruv?

déja vu intensifies

On the topic of sharpeners, those battery powered pressure sharpeners are satisfying as fuck. They're shit and invariably snap the nib, but they're the sharpening equivalent of shoving a Q-tip in your ear and having a good rake about.

Or if you're all about the procrastination, spending a few minutes every lesson at the classroom sharpener like this one brings back the nostalgia:

Every day's a school day.

In fairness, it's nothing short of sheer voodoo what they managed to do with the simple copper loop. As usual though, it was the rural communities that felt the pinch (and the gains) more than most though.

Yeah, people using mobile phones to contact businesses wasn't really a thing, partly because mobile usage was still taking off when I was in the biz, but mainly because calls to freephone numbers weren't actually free (or included in package minutes) at the time.

The chances of it being the filter were stupidly low, and I don't think I ever had a case of the filter being at fault - but it was one of those potential issues that would make a customer look stupid (and £120 lighter) if BT tipped up and declared it a customer equipment fault.

In newer homes (at the time), there were NTE faceplates that had a filter built it, with individual ports for telephone and for data telephony cables. They didn't last long though. Maybe they were stupidly expensive in comparison, maybe BT could see the fibre future and stopped producing them.

When I did tech support for a UK telecoms firm, that was the easy way to fuck off an awkward customer with any kind of connectivity problem - stability, speed, whatever. Generally, people's routers were connected to the same NTE as the landline.

"So what we're going to do, is replace the ADSL filter, see if it's a gubbed filter, it's a nice cheap and easy fix. Can you remove the filter from the wall socket please?"

click

Beautiful.

2009 just called and Armani Code is still a banger.

Jean Paul Gaultier is subjectively top quality too. His Fleur de Male is perhaps the best fragrance I've ever had.

That said, I'm still happy with Davidoff Cool Water so I'm hardly a modern fragrance critic.