• Am I going to spend the day glued to my screen or am I going to walk up the hill to the Car Boot Sale? I walked up the hill. It was sunny but a bitter cold wind was blowing for this time of year.

    I was hoping to find an old-fashioned oil can – my wife is planning for the flower festival – She is doing The Wizard of Oz and we’re looking for props. No oil cans, but lots of old faces in the crowd and so much stuff!

    It must have become a right of passage for young teens. They look round their bedroom and realise that they are drowning in teddies and beanies and other soft toys. “Hey!” they say to mum, “I can sell this at a carboot, make some money and tidy my room at the same time!”

    There is a certain kind of stall that repeats itself. An old pasting table bends and groans under the weight of fluffy stuff and old PC games that no one wants to play anymore. The kids are bored and huddled in the back of the car while embarrassed parents try to hustle up a sale. I’m sure they all stop off at the tip on the way home dump the whole load in the skip.

    Of course there are lots of younger kids there, who buy the odd cd or dvd or even a fluffy ted. As they get to teenhood they will remember, the lights will go on in their heads and they will yell down the stairs, “Mum! I wanna sell all this crap in my room. Can we do a carboot sale?” They will spend all week tidying and sorting and dreaming of riches, only to join the endless line of those that came before.

    Meanwhile, I did get a couple of nice plants.

  • My Brother has been nagging on at me for a while about XAMPP. “Wassat?” you ask. It’s a brilliant bit of software that I got working on my mac this morning that installs an Apache server, Mysql for a database and PHP which lets you do cool stuff with databases on the web. It works on PC and linux too.

    But this is not on the web. It is a local web server for web development, which means I can try out lots of stuff on my computer and not screw up my website in the meantime. I mananged to set all this up before. It took me the best part of a day and everything stopped working when I upgraded to Mac OsX Snow Leopard. I couldn’t be bothered to work out what to do.

    But This morning, I went over to www.apachefriends.org, downloaded the package and I was up and running in about two minutes – amazing! Ten minutes later, I’d worked out what was going on and had a new install of the Joomla! content management system running locally on my desktop. How brilliant is that?! Well, it is. Fiddling about with a live website on line can be quite dangerous. Yesterday, I wanted to see how permissions worked for registered users. Before I knew it, I’d lost a whole menu. I had to spend half an hour rebuilding it. Much better to experiment on a local site that can be trashed and rebuilt at will.

    I am not a programmer nor a techy, but with something this simple, I’ll be happy and confident to learn through making mistakes on a site that isn’t live or critical and that no one else can see.

  • When I was young, a real treat was Callard and Bowsers Butterscotch, which came in a cardboard box with oblong tablets of butterscotch wrapped in silver paper.

    But now we Have Werther’s Original instead. Since their insipid, but hugely sucessful adverts with grandad giving his grandson Werther’s Original, Just like his Grandad gave him, I’ve not seen Callard and Bosers again.

    Meanwhile I got a taste for them. I only ever have them in the car, I like them on long journeys.

    The trouble with a succesful pruduct is that maufacturers get bored amkeing them and think they can extend the brand – this is kllnown as line extension. Its often successful for a short while but ultimately weakens the original brand.

    So Can you get Werther’s Original any more? Well,it seeems not. You cvan get the soft version and the caramel version and msoft butter centres and chocolate whips and evrything else that you can imagine, but can you find ORUIGINAL Werther’s Original? No!

    I wonder if you can still get Callard and Bowser? No, It seems they were sold to Wrigley and the Butterscotch has been discontinued.

    Werthers were made in Germany and go back to 1903 named Werthers Echte after the village they came from. Grandpa never gave them to his grandson and he never got them from his grandad. It was a marketing spiel when Stork took the product worldwide in the 1090s. Believe nothing – mourn the passing of Callard and Bowser. Now mourn the passing of Echte Werther’s Original.