I may not a mathematician but I know enough to be irritated by football managers and politicians exhorting us to give more than 100%. When we have given everything where is the extra 10% supposed to come from? Are we expected to steal it from someone else?

However, I did go training the other day (yes, I do some exercise from time to time) and the session ended with circuit training. Four exercises, press ups, narrow grip press ups, wide grip press ups and big dippers (a form of, can you guess? press up). I hope you can see a theme there. I did my best but wimped out a bit - but maybe I didn’t wimp out enough. Yesterday my triceps (the ones under you arm that extend it, opposite biceps that bend it) had stiffened up so much I was drinking my coffee with a straw and having to ask friends to scratch my nose for me - I just couldn’t reach it!

So, maybe I did give 110% - it was certainly more than I should have done

I’ve just bought a new mobile, I’ve never really got into mobile phones - they cost too much to do anything useful with apart from make calls. However, Tesco have an offer of 1000 club card points on every Tesco mobile phone. As 1000 points can net you £40 worth of tokens spending £15 on a phone seems a good idea. In fact I splashed out on a Samsung m150 at an enormous £25 (with 20p PAYG credit on it). I figured the extra tenner was worth paying for the camera, MP3 player, bluetooth and other goodies.

However, I can’t get the bluetooth to sync with Samsung’s PC Studio - it says try a new version but the update always fails to find the site

The bluetooth works as I’ve copied (using XP) some MP3’s on. I say “some”, with 20M memory and no support for an extra card you’re quite a lot short of a full album!

And now I can’t collect my emails. I created and tested (with OutlookExpress) an account on my server and on the phone I’ve set up a profile:

APN prepay.tescomobile.com (I thought it should be tesco-mobile but that gave DNS errors) tescowap / password 4.2.2.1 and 8.8.8.8 as DNS’s

and an account:

pop3 to my server though I can’t decide if it should be pop3.myserver.co.uk or just myserver.co.uk (OE just wants myserver.co.uk) The other thing I dither on is whether the account is mymobile@myserver.co.uk or just mymobile (OE wants mymobile@myserver.co.uk)

Anyway all I get is Email network fail.

If anyone has any hints feel free to comment. NB “buy an iphone” isn’t an acceptable comment unless you have on a low tariff PAYG for less than £25 - considering the M150 was effectively -£15 I’m not sure I want to pay £25!

I can update this, I changed the APN  to tescomobile222 and I get the same message - looks like my logon to tesco’s net is wrong…

I had a free month on Sky Songs ( http://songs.sky.com/ ) which was cool as basic membership allows download of an album a month as much streaming as you want.

With something like audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) you can record all streamed audio. I used to use Total Recorder ( http://www.highcriteria.com/) for that kind of thing but since I trashed and re-installed my PC I thought I try something new. My Total Record subscription was so old it was only valid for an ancient version (which never had a good MP3 output, I used to output to WAV and then convert later). Total Recorder was good as it lifted the commands from the sound card, audacity seems to record from the output of the sound card with a loss of quality and the added burden of having to set the sound levels right.

I used audacity to record a couple of old Christmas LP’s from vinyl. Using the latest beta I was able to use plug-ins to find silences and split albums into tracks, the labels can be exported to a text file and simply edited to correct names via cut and paste. The only short coming here was I used my laptop which doesn’t appear to have a line in socket - I used the mic which is (unsurprisingly) mono.

Of course I am not condoning stealing of copyrighted music - I think I am entitled to take a copy of my own LP’s! Recording from sky songs (or WE 7 which is free if you can tolerate the adverts) would I guess be illegal. However, it is a similar procedure to recording “pick of the pops” onto cassette (or reel to reel tape in my youth) - with the great advantage of being able to request what is played, not just waiting for Alan Freeman to get round to playing it. I doubt recording streaming audio would appeal to today’s youth as it is a bit fiddley, takes too much time and the results are less than a digitally perfect copy. You have to record in real time after you have tried a few levels and then mark out tracks and export to MP3, maybe an hour an half for a CD. Hardly the easy download - although for a single track it would be easier.

Oh, well holidays are over. I expect plenty of you have been back at work for ages / got no break at all / … but for many of us today is the first day back - deep joy.

For those of you who don’t understand the reference here’s a link to the joke and it even has an explanation!

http://www.proz.com/kudoz/English/other/3621722-back_on_your_head.html

(In my version the rooms only vary in the depth of the sewage.)

As an aside I thought this was the name of an album (complete with sewage illustration) by the groundhogs but google hasn’t found it - have I got that wrong?