Author: Criss Crimz

Avatar Tea ‘n’ Tabasco

At last! Raise a bowl of coffee in celebration: “A Folk History of Dublin”, the official ceremonial record of our historic visit to Ireland, is now online.

It’s one of our biggest-ever efforts, running to an impressive 82 pages of words, drawings and stupid ideas, including…

  • Ian’s breakfast journey
  • Danny and Michael go to New York City
  • The red hot spiky baton of anger
  • Plinth people and façade folk
  • The now-legendary Kev’s Reality Flowchart
  • Mr Bread Adjacent Eggs
  • The angels smiling on Kev’s plan

The later pages of this document will be a particular surprise to Kev, who left the country before they were finished.

All of this collected wisdom and artistry is now yours to enjoy in the Books section of the Beans, along with our other sacred texts.

Avatar WFH

My job isn’t one you can do from home, so while the rest of the world has spent the last few years abandoning the office, I’ve still been turning up in person like some sort of mug.

The other day I had the opportunity to spend a day working from home, and grabbed it with both hands. I had lots of project work to do and none of it required me to be in the building: I had some training videos that needed voiceovers recording, I had documentation to write and I had some development work to do on some internal web tools I wrote. So on Friday I fired up a work laptop at home and got stuck in.

A hero of economic activity hard at work in his home office

Not only did I get more sleep and avoid the time and cost of about 3½ hours of commuting, I also got loads done. Here is a summary of how I spent my ten hour shift.

ActivityDuration
Attend morning meeting for WFH staff through my phone because the laptop wasn’t logged in yet0h 30m
Struggle to get the work laptop to connect to my home wifi and talk to IT support about proxy settings0h 45m
Check emails0h 10m
Make coffee, get distracted by arrival of post0h 10m
Open training slides in Powerpoint, set up USB microphone and headphones, test setup, get distracted and read news articles on the Guardian website1h
Do Guardian Quick Crossword #169720h 15m
Start recording voiceover, discover time limit on Powerpoint recordings, search for alternative screen recording software, install on work laptop0h 25m
Dog arrives in room, play with dog0h 30m
See message on phone, reply to message, see notification on Reddit, scroll through Reddit0h 20m
Break for lunch1h
Unlock laptop, set Teams status to “available”; toilet break0h 10m
Start recording voiceover with new software, get lost on complex slide animation twenty minutes in, discover there is no edit feature, resign self to having to start recording again, become despondent about project, make tea, look at phone again for a bit1h 30m
Let dog out for a wee, throw ball for dog which gets dog excited, dog spends extended period of time on very wet lawn, dog runs back inside and through house with muddy paws. Clean dog’s paws. Clean kitchen, dining room and hallway floors with Dettol wipes0h 45m
See email from team leader asking how day is going, redraft reply eight times, eventually just say it’s going well thanks0h 15m
Notice office-hours staff will be leaving work in 15 minutes, write email asking complex question about SQL database backups for web app that I need to work on, send email slightly too late for it to be seen or dealt with before Monday0h 30m
Rehearse complex slide animation that tripped me up before, change animation after rehearsal, fail to rehearse new animation sequence0h 30m
Make tea, get distracted by dog, play with dog0h 30m
Start recording voiceover, get lost on changed animation sequence twenty minutes in, plough on anyway since interest in project is now waning, continue to end of recording0h 40m
Discover freeware screen recording software has recorded in some random format to some place in the cloud, attempt to download and convert this to something useful0h 20m
Send email to team leaders shared inbox about something unrelated to today’s work to prove I am still online at the end of my shift0h 5m
Log off0h 5m

Avatar Everybody has a house now

We have reached a momentous landmark in the life and times of the Beans Massive, which is that all of us – every single Bean – now owns a house.

To commemorate this occasion, I have had three beautiful portraits specially commissioned, that each recreate the atmosphere and excitement on the day we moved in to our houses.

Please enjoy these fine works of art. If you would like the original to frame and hang over your fireplace, get in touch and we can discuss terms.

Read More: Everybody has a house now »

Avatar What smells do bugs dislike?

The other day I was on our usual route through the woods, taking the dog for a walk. Strapped to the side of an otherwise innocent tree, I found something that hadn’t been there the day before, and which hasn’t been seen since. Someone had posted a question in the woods.

The question is “what smells do bugs dislike?”

I didn’t know the answer to this so I had to do some research. Here are my findings.

  • Ladybirds dislike the smell of marmalade.
  • Daddy Long Legs actively avoid the odour of pigs and pig manure.
  • Butterflies mostly agree that fried onions are heinous, except the Cabbage White which doesn’t mind fried onions but can’t bear the smell of them raw.
  • The flat-backed millipede has a deep-rooted hatred of leather gloves.
  • Grasshoppers find the smell of pineapple nauseating.
  • Bumblebees, honey bees and mason bees all share a mild distaste for the smell of bacon.
  • Caddisflies are enraged by the stench of meths.
  • Red-headed cardinal beetles can smell hot custard a mile off and it turns their stomachs.
  • Cockchafer beetles have enough to worry about and didn’t respond to my survey.

Avatar Timer.exe

Here is a gift for you at the end of August.

Sometimes you have a rummage around to find something and you turn up another thing entirely. Recently I was looking through some old CDs I’d burned in the 2000s with backups and old pictures on them to find something, and found a little file I’d forgotten about. 

In about 2000, when I was supposed to be revising for my A-levels, there was a part of my revision where, for some reason, I needed to do something in a certain amount of time. I could do that by looking at a clock, but what would be much more productive, I decided, was halting all work on revision while I coded a small Windows application to count seconds and minutes. I am happy to embrace the very obvious fact that this says a huge amount about the person I was aged 16.

This was a terrible use of my time, and plainly an afternoon spent procrastinating instead of revising, and the program has only grown less relevant with the passage of time as smartphones have given us all sophisticated stopwatches with lap timers and other features in our pockets at all times. 

Still, the nice thing about it is that, 24 years on, it still works perfectly on any Windows PC, so if you need to time something in a very feature-limited and inconvenient way, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Timer.exe

Avatar Nicknamenews

Approximately one billion years ago, when he briefly ran his own website that heavily featured the letter Q, our very own Ian Mac Mac Mac Mac McIver published a list of all the names by which he was regularly known, and for a man still in his late teens the list was hugely impressive.

I never thought of myself as a chap with a lot of nicknames (a term indicating a familiar name for a person that is not their official or legal designation, and which is short for the more descriptive “Nicholas Name”), but recently a series of new ones were bestowed upon me (thank you Bex and Zeb), with promises that they would all be used, and it caused me to count up how many I have now accrued.

Please enjoy this potentially exhaustive, and certainly exhausting, list of the nicknames that can be used to address me. If you can remember any others then please do chuck them at the comments section.

From family and related areas

  • Kipper
  • Kissifer
  • Pififer
  • Christopheles

From school

  • Marshall
  • Monobrow
  • Christopheles J. Bartholomew
  • Mackshall

From friends of various denominations

  • Captain Numbers
  • James
  • Topher
  • Virginia Woolf (not used very often)
  • Criss Crimz
  • Crich5156

From work

  • Chris B
  • Crispy
  • Chuckles
  • Charlie Chuckles

Newly added this week and now available for use

  • Chris Army Knife
  • A Swing and a Chris
  • Chrispy Kreme
  • Chrismas Cake
  • Going the Christance
  • Long Christance Relationship
  • Chris Congeniality
  • Chrisalis
  • Chris from a Rose
  • French Chrissing in the USA
  • The Chrisard of Oz
  • The Ipchris File
  • No More Christer Nice Guy
  • The Long Chris Goodnight
  • Christal Maze
  • Chris and chips
  • Chrission Impossible
  • Chrississippi
  • We Built Chris City on Rock and Roll

Avatar Tile Saga: dénouement

Time to wrap up this saga. The tiling is complete, at least until I get round to starting the other bit of tiling around the worktop at the other side of the utility room.

Here’s the epilogue, expressed in short form because life is short:

  • Grouting is great. Tiling was a pain in the backside but I could spend a lot of time grouting. It’s not difficult and the results are instantly gratifying. Slopping grout into all the gaps covers a multitude of sins, instantly makes your tiles look good, and ten minutes later you wipe off the excess with a damp sponge and the job is done. All DIY should be like this.
  • Silicone sealant can mack right off. I’ve dabbled in this before, and hated it. Now I’ve done it more extensively to finish this tiling job and I hate it even more.
  • I haven’t yet sealed one side where the tiles meet the back wall of the room, because I put super gentle non-peel expensive Frog Tape on the wall to protect it from the grout and when I carefully peeled it off according to the instructions the super gentle non-peel expensive Frog Tape took all the paint off the wall, which I only painted a couple of months ago. So now I have to repaint that part before I can put a line of sealant there.

Now I get to move on to another job, and commence Raised Bed and Gravel Path Saga. Watch out for this year’s longest and most self-pitying read, coming to a Beans near you this autumn.