Product Testing

As a guy, I find that the bathroom products I own do not relate to what I use.

You see, a safe gift for a man, for birthdays or Christmas (or indeed any other festival which involves giving presents) is "The Shower Gel Box Set".

The Shower Gel Box Set, which for me is often from Lynx, will include shower gel, a can of deodorant, but then often one other item, like shaving gel or after shave balm (never both - I presume they think that I'm either happy to use shaving gel and not both with after shave, or shave my bare dry rough face and use after shave balm to reduce the resulting redness).

Now my shaving regime, which is haphazard at best, generally involves a dry face, an electric razor, and then finishing up with a manual razor to pick off any stray hairs that the electric razor missed.  This is complemented by the occasional use of tweezers, because whilst the two razors do keep on top of 29,999 of the 30,000 hairs on my face, there will be one that somehow evades both trimmers, and in a matter of hours grows to about four inches long.  I sometimes wonder if my chin, becoming bored with the traditional beard, puts all of its effort into just one hair.

So as a result I tend to use up shower gel a lot quicker than I use shaving gels.  I decided to do some research, by been undertaking a number of tests of various bathroom products.

I decided to try showering and using the various products below instead of shower gel.  Mainly I chose to do this because I had run out of shower gel, but I felt that the research would be worthwhile regardless.

Test one - shampoo.  Well, of course shampoo was fine.  Anyone who uses the little shampoo/conditioners and shower gels in hotels know that they can quite happily swap one for the other and see no difference whatsoever.

Test two - Johnson's Top to Toe Baby Bath.  Basically bubble bath, but can be rubbed on children also.  Again, absolutely fine, you wouldn't notice any difference from normal shower gel except it doesn't contain lavender or volcanic rocks.

Test three - Facial Wash.  Again, absolutely fine.  We're essentially talking about shower gel for your face after all, which the last time I checked was made out of skin, just like the rest of the stuff covering your body.

Now it gets slightly more interesting...

Test four - shaving gel.  Absolutely fine!  Yes, shaving gel, perfectly fine for showering with.  Slightly thicker than shower gel, but nothing shocking.

Test five - after shave balm.  Again, absolutely fine, very similar to the shaving gel, slightly thicker than shower gel but no problem.

Test six - hair gel.  I was expecting this one to be dreadful - it was okay!  And the traces left in my hair helped to make it look slightly more exciting than usual.

Test seven - hand cream (not the Norwegian one in the photo, I should say) - this was the only one that wasn't ideal.  It stuck to my skin, moisturising it by creating a barrier between my skin and the shower (which to be quite honest I always thought could perhaps help with moisture deprivation) and took a bit of effort to get rid of.

So in summary, almost anything in your bathroom cabinet you can shower with.

Although perhaps not mouthwash.

New video is out - if you want to watch my forehead while I cook a meal, go and watch :)

New Video plus a Certificate

I've just uploaded a new video which I'll come to, but first I'll just mention the certificate...

I wasn't going to mention this in my blog, because it's a little bit too much of blowing my own trumpet even for me, but thinking about it I realised that as a everyday life blogger it's hard enough to come up with stuff to blog about without limiting myself even more.

So yes, I was fortunate enough to win an award Friday night, and I am really pleased, especially with it being from the G4C awards - G4C is something that I've been a supporter of for many years, if you're not familiar with it it's a construction best practice initiative looking to help those new entrants to the construction industry gain the skills and knowledge needed to become the future leaders of the industry.  It's a great cause, and more can be found out about it at www.g4c.org.uk

I'm also ecstatic to report that my construction experience is expanding, because today I replaced the handle on the kitchen window after the old one snapped, and didn't take 2 minutes to do.  Next I'll be laying bricks and learning what "mastic" is.

And in other news, I have just uploaded a video, if for no other reason than to emphasise my amateurness, I've done a remake of "Oh Carolina" by Shaggy.  It's called "Oh Banana" and discusses my love for the yellow fruit.  Enjoy.

Car Advert

I keep getting this advert appear on my Twitter feed for the all-new Jaguar.  It looks like an awesome car, but I get distracted by it's name...

Yeah, I'm a twelve year old boy, I can't help but swap two letters over and say "P-Face" to myself and giggle.

In other news, I finally got around to doing a new video, I'm really pleased, particularly because it's one of my parody adverts, which I love to make, but hardly ever have ideas.  Do check it out :)

Star Trek 50th Anniversary

It's Star Trek's 50th anniversary today!

Star Trek was one of my favourite shows and big interests when I was growing up.  I even painted a huge control board, based on information from the Next Generation Technical Manual, so that I could pretend to be controlling the Enterprise (Enterprise-D for those fellow fans, TNG was always my favourite)

Ooh, there's a Deep Space 9 technical manual...

I don't know why I liked Star Trek so much, but the characters were cool (there was even an android on the bridge!), the ship did all kinds of great stuff, and the special effects looked amazing (at the time, anyway).

Anyway, I had an idea a little while back to start a series of videos looking at some of my favourite games (mainly computer but maybe a couple of tabletop or mobile games also), and it seems to make perfect sense to start it off today with a look at Star Trek: Birth of the Federation. Enjoy :)

Mister Greygun

I got some mail today - well technically I didn't, it's actually for Mike Greygun, whoever he is.

It's an awesome surname though. "Greygun" - makes you think of a mercenary for hire, he doesn't care if he's fighting for a cause or for chaos, as long as there's enough coin to be had, Greygun will be on the scene. Or maybe he's a gnarled old cop, ready to dish out justice on the mean streets.

Speaking of creating characters, did you ever take part in Fighting Fantasy, or other Choose Your Own Adventure books?  Or maybe you're a D&D or RPG player (maybe even the worldwide phenomenon known as World of Warcraft, which started me off blogging many years ago!)

The YouTube Adventure is for you.  Head over to my first video where I'm outlining the plan - a character put together by the YouTube community will explore the land of Kinban, starting in the village of Thorn, and travelling north to reach the Citadel of Rett.  In the Citadel you must tackle the evil King Zir, who is tormenting the land.  You'll get to decide at each stage of the adventure how your character is going to act.  Go watch the video now, and make sure you get a comment in quick, the next video will be mid-week next week!

Summer 2016 call for guest bloggers!

We set up a swimming pool in the back garden - very nice, although I'm not too sure about the warning logos...

The one on the left appears to be "Look at people in water with big left arms" whilst the one on the right is "Don't walk away from people praying"?!?

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to write about today - I'm after a few guest blog posts to fill the gaps during an upcoming summer holiday, so if you might be interested, feel free to get in touch :)

In other news, we made a couple of videos today, one of me testing my wife on phrases from the Urban Dictionary, and one where she gets her own back, testing me on cross stitch trivia.  Please feel free to check both out!

No Toast

My wife has just put our son to bed, and had the below conversation.  For information, we used up the last of the bread earlier for sandwiches, but (apparently unknown to him) I went to the garage and bought a loaf.

Son: We've got no toast.
My Wife: Yes, there's toast, daddy bought some bread
Son: But there's no toast tomorrow.
My Wife: Yes, we have bread, you put it in the toaster and you make toast.
Son: But there's no toast tomorrow.
My Wife: Yes, daddy bought bread.
Son (sadly): There's no toast Monday. No toast on Tuesday-
My Wife: Yes there is darling! Daddy. Bought. Bread.

I'm kinda excited to see what happens tomorrow when I try to make him some toast for breakfast while he insists that we can't have any.

Here is the bread.  It exists.

Not that I care - it's Fathers Day, I got candy pizza :)

All the calories of real pizza, but without those nasty vitamins.

And to celebrate Fathers Day, I made a video of dad jokes - and if you think these are bad, you should have seen the ones that I didn't include :)

The Farmers Market

Near us, a Farmers Market takes place once a month, selling all kinds of fruit, vegetables, exotic meats (ostrich, anyone), cake, low fat sausages and so on.  After popping in to see my parents (who are busy bottling home made alcohol - see my mum's blog), I decided to swing by the market to see if it was still on - I knew that it was due to finish early afternoon, but thought I might pick up a bargain going towards the end of the day.

No such luck.

Turning up at 1pm (and the market was due to last until 1pm) half of the stalls were already packed up whilst the other half, in the drizzle, desperately loaded vans and lorries as quickly as they could, seemingly to allow them to get the vehicle started and run over any remaining potential customers before they too left.

To make the visit worthwhile, I went to the toilet at the site, and then went and got a cheeseburger (yes, I washed my hands between the two events).  I looked around for sauce to put on the cheeseburger, I couldn't see any but did notice a table behind two bikers that were stood next to the stand.

Making my way around the bikers (who almost seemed to be deliberately adjusting their standing positions to extend the amount of distance I would have to traverse to make it to the sauce), I picked up the mustard.  The mustard bottle at first refused to dispense anything, but then reluctantly squeezed out a farting noise akin to a elderly Yorkshire Terrier that had eaten sprouts.  Eventually it dribbled a stain of mustard onto the burger, and I accepted that this was as good as it was going to get, and retired to my car to escape the light rain and demolish the burger.

In other news, I've been playing with GIFs.

GIFs allow you to put up little animations (like the above), and are really useful to include in tweets to engage viewers, I got the idea from a recent "HootChat" run by Hootsuite - Hootsuite provide a really useful website where you can schedule tweets and the like, which I use because it means that I can promote my stuff when I'm at work etc, but they also do a great deal for helping people promote their stuff, through blog posts and HootChats on Twitter.  The last one was on the use of video (and a lot around GIFs like the above, but also full videos) and was really interesting.  Anyway, check out http://giphy.com/ , it lets you make GIFs.

Finally, I made a new video today.  It's some middle class whinges about life, essentially first world problems.  I hope to raise a smile or two :)

Dressing Up

Road barrier pretending to be a shark.  Perhaps it's off to a fancy dress party.

For those interested (and even if you're not), I have two bits of news:

Firstly, I've got an interview tomorrow for teaching social media - fingers crossed!

Secondly, this is my 499th blog post - it's taken me a long time, but finally I'm nearly at that 500 post landmark.  To celebrate, expect a special post from me in a day or two.  Suggestions on how to celebrate are welcomed.

Finally, I got a new video out the other day for the first time in far too long - so, if you'd like to see a documentary about the plight of Easter bunnies, here you go!

Google is trying to help

Working on a story, I wanted to find a good location accessible across the world, and so turned to Google.

Got halfway through typing "easiest place in the world to get to" when Google leapt into life suggesting what I wanted.

Thanks Google - but not this time...

In other news, here's a video of me attempting to drink three beers infused with chilli, while playing FIFA 16, with some Baileys as a backup if it just got too bad. Don't worry, it's heavily edited!

Laugh and be Disappointed

Have you ever wanted to laugh, and then feel disappointed in yourself?

Apparently this video makes you do that - it's a Dirty Dancing pun.  I'm not sure if there's a big demand of people wanting to feel disappointed in themselves, but here it is.  It's had quite a few views (for a video of mine at any rate)

Another video is on its way, detailing my struggles with a set of chilli infused beers...

Also, I got a tweet the other day about one of my travelling books - the book, last seen below:

This would be the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland

The book in question (#tbook10, aka the tenth travelling book) has been picked up in Dublin and is on its way to Amsterdam.  I do love to hear about the books and that they're still moving, my fear is that all of the books are lost or just sat on a bookshelf somewhere, and none of them are going to make their way home - hearing about them gives me a bit of hope that maybe they are still going around, I'm just not seeing them on the Internet :)

Christmas Tag

I saw this tag blog on Styleaked (great blog Charlotte) and thought it was a great idea so while it's still the Christmas period I decided to have a go.

1. What is your favourite Christmas film?

I'd have to say Scrooge with Alastair Sim - it's something of a tradition that sometime at Christmas I watch this film (I think this year is the first I can remember when I haven't seen it), Alastair Sim does a great job at being Scrooge.  The one with Patrick Stewart is very good too but I have to say that I've not seen this one bettered.

2. Have you ever had a white Christmas?

Not as far as I can remember although it's probably happened, I do remember one winter in the 1980s (1986/7 maybe) when we had loads of snow and it hung around for ages but I've no idea if it was Christmas or not.  Snow seems to come more in January/February nowadays (climate change I guess...)

3. Where do you usually spend your holiday?

Christmas morning is spent seeing family, and then back home for the afternoon for dinner (and a beer!)

4. What is your favourite Christmas song?

The one that comes to mind is "Driving Home for Christmas" by Chris Rea.  I remember in particular listening to that one Christmas Eve, driving along Clive Sullivan Way back home after work.

5. Do you open any presents on Christmas Eve?

No!  I'm quite a stickler for presents being opened on Christmas Day, not before.

6. Can you name all of Santa's reindeer?

Um - Rudolph, Blitzen, Flitzen, Lightning, Bing, Zipper, Dancer, Prancer?

No, I can't.

7. What holiday traditions are you looking forward to most this year?

Just having some time to watch TV, read books, play games and stuff.  It's always nice to have some downtime.

8. Is your tree real or fake?

Fake!

9. Be honest. Do you prefer giving or receiving gifts?

I don't think that I could enjoy receiving gifts at Christmas if I hadn't been generous giving them also, so I can't really choose.  Sorry!

10. What would be your dream place to visit in the festive season?

That's tough - I always want to be close to home with my family, but there are places that I'd like to visit.  The German Christmas Markets have always sounded appealing, and I'd be really interested once to see what Christmas is like in Australia, when it's really hot and sunny instead of freezing cold!

11. Do you make New Years Resolutions and do you stick to them?

Not as a rule (although I have this year - see my video!) and the reason that I don't normally is because I don't stick to them.  I seem to recall reading somewhere that you're less likely to actually do something if you write it down, or tell people that you're going to do it, because in your mind these actions kind of feel like you've started doing the thing, and so can put it off.  I'd rather secretly achieve the thing that I want to do, and then announce it as a fait accompli.

That was good fun!  Anyone reading this is free to have a go at the Christmas tag, if you do let me know in the comments that you've done it and where!

Before I go - as I say, I have a new video about my new years resolution (spoiler - it's not to learn how to swim.  Or cycle.), feel free to check it out!  If I don't blog tomorrow happy new year!

Mice

I don't like mice.

Actually, that's not true.  I'm perfectly happy with mice, depending on the situation.  In a field?  Fine.  I'd fully expect to see a mouse in a field, or peeping around a tree in a forest.  Basically, in a natural environment, I expect to see small furry things. I am down with that.

And, I'm also okay with mice as pets.  You have a cute pet mouse in a cage or some such thing?  No problem at all, sonny Jim!  I bet that they're quite cute things to stroke and pet and stuff,

What I'm not okay with is the wild variety of mice, inside my house.

Mice are a common issue where we live, we're close enough to a railway line and a good chunk of grass (this would be a "footgolf" course aka a mashup of football and golf, quite good fun actually) for mice to thrive, and periodically they venture into the houses nearby, for food, shelter, and to terrify humans.

And I really don't like them.  It's ridiculous - there is pretty much nothing that a mouse can do to me.  I certainly don't want them in the house (spreading bugs and stuff), but all it takes is for me to hear one of them scratching around, or - even worse - see one dash across from one side of the room to the other, for me to jump around shouting at them, as though the sheer power of shouting will make every mouse in a five mile radius say "Hey, you know what?  That field was a far better place to live than the dry, warm building full of food. Let's go!"

In other news, I've won a cake (more details likely to follow in a future blog), and I've made a video giving 5 tips for guys (entirely applicable to females also) ahead of Christmas.  It's getting close now and if you haven't done the things in the video yet then I'd recommend cracking on.

Food Thermos = Nose Warmer

This is a food thermos.  My wife got it because it keeps large quantities of food warm (like soup - I'm sure it'd keep a pie warm but getting it out might be a little tricky), but I've discovered that it's also great for a coffee on a cold night, because you can fit your nose inside it to keep warm.

Also, because it's so huge, you can fill it up with coffee at the start of the evening (maybe a liqueur one - have to consult the liqueur coffee decision tree) and it'll keep you going until bedtime.  At which point you can't sleep because you've chugged a pint and a half of coffee.

By the way, I made a video about queue jumping.  Is it always wrong?  Watch and decide.

The Rogue Christmas Jumper

I don't really have much to blog about - my wife is away so I took the opportunity to wear a Christmas jumper.  I'm eating jelly with cake decorations sprinkled on it too.  Crazy times!

One thing though - I have just published a new video... MEAD OFF.  In which I drank mead.

Cheers!

Being Creative

Today is a good day.

The day started by clearing out a good chunk of our garage, which over the past five years has gathered all kinds of wonderful knick-knacks, which are far too lovely to throw away yet not actually nice enough to keep anywhere better than an unheated concrete floored brick box with a leaky roof.  As a reward we went to Pave for lunch (one of my favourite pubs) which was nice, this afternoon my son blew his homework out of the water spending ages on it (again, good to see), the Tesco delivery arrived with beer in it (yay!), and I've just uploaded two new videos to YouTube.  I've also scheduled a load of tweets on Hootsuite - something which I do far too rarely - and I'm obviously writing this blog too.

Being creative is tricky - it's easy to come up with something like "I don't have the inspiration" or "I can't think of anything to blog about right now" (and sometimes I honestly feel like these are true) but what it really comes down to is "I don't feel like it".

To do it right I think you have to treat it as a job - for me, it's about expecting myself to churn out 3+ blog posts and 1+ video a week, of at least a reasonable quality.  Of course, I often fail to meet this, which is purely because I'm not disciplined enough.  That said, it is a hobby (and unless my advertising revenues increase by a factor of a thousand - or more - that isn't going to change any time soon!) so I'm not going to be too hard on myself.

And I have done a video - it's a quick look at new game Prison Architect, where you manage a prison.  Interesting, fun, dark, and surprisingly emotional.

So, as I say, it's a good day today.  I might even push on and try to write an extra post or two so I've got something ready for next week.

One last thing - Adele Archer kindly put up a guest post of mine today, which has a little test for people to see how well they can infer information about someone.  Have a go and drop a line in the comments.

Must go - it's beer time!

Windows 10 struggles

I wasn't going to blog about this.  I blogged about Windows 10 and Google Chrome the other day, and today I was going to write about something else entirely.

And then I hit a snag.

You see, today I was going to edit a little video to go on my long-suffering and neglected YouTube channel.  But to do that, I would need to actually play videos on my computer.

And, presumably after installing updates yesterday, Windows 10 now does not play videos, and has also totally lost the ability to play sound.

I expect this to be fixed fairly quickly - I hope that it is, anyway - as there doesn't appear to be any obvious solutions from a search on the net.  I do use a reasonably fancy headset, and there is a possibility that using a different one might work.  Still, it's a bit annoying, and it's rare that I use the latest version of a Windows operating system, but because of Microsoft's free upgrade offer, I decided to take the leap (which I'm now regretting).

Good news is that the latest version of Google Chrome Canary (a "bleeding-edge" version of Google Chrome) is working okay on my computer so at least I'm using a web browser that I'm comfortable with.

Oh - and go watch my new video, DRINKYBANG.  It's not quite MEATYBANG or even VEGGIEBANG, but I do get to pass out with a Russian doll.

Integral Pen Drives are TOUGH

I found a pen drive earlier.

Thanks to Jeremy for the spam post on my blog yesterday, I particularly liked the Good Old Fashioned American Spam!

In other news, my latest video, VEGGIEBANG, is live.  It hasn't quite set the world afire as MEATYBANG did, but I hold out hope.

Do You Like Meat?

So, I made a new video last week - let me ask you,do you still eat solid meat?!?

No longer.

Meet MEATYBANG!!

Apart from managing the miss the top of my head off the video, it's not too bad, and I hope to spawn a series of spin-offs - CRUNCHYBANG for iced liquid food, VEGGIEBANG for Vegetarians, and perhaps even SECRET VEGGIEBANG which looks like VEGGIEBANG but actually has meat in it.

In other news, Alyson Shane kindly featured the Travelling Book Project on her blog, talking about how the project was crowdfunded.

I've had a great response from people with guest blog posts which I'm lining up to go out in June, thank you to everyone that has responded.  If you'd like to perhaps get a post on here, let me know!

TableTop Day 2015 is coming!

TableTop Day 2015 is coming!

As can (just about) be seen from the fairly blurry photo of my calendar, International TableTop Day is on Saturday the 11th of April 2015.  Make sure you free up the day to play games, be they board or card, with your friends and family - or perhaps go to an event at a local games shop.  Keep an eye on http://www.tabletopday.com/ and remember - play more games!

I'd love to hear if you're planning to take part what games you're going to play.  On my shortlist is Cards Against Humanity and Munchkin - I have the special TableTop expansion for Cards Against Humanity in return for helping to fund season 3 of TableTop, hence:

And in other news, I made a fortune telling video of predictions for 2015 - if you'd like to see the fortune told in response to my fiancee asking "Am I going to get pregnant in 2015" skip along to 11:32. Fortunately she found it funny.