Good stuff (and some less good)

Yes folks its bouquets and brickbats again.  unusually there will be more bouquets than brickbats this time.

The first bouquet goes to Howard and Meaghan Stacey.  They run a heating and cooling business from Yass and turned up at our place as agreed and installed a nice air conditioner and heater for us.  Howard had previously visited and advised on our hydronic heating system.  Getting someone to do these jobs has been a major headache for me for 2 years as the locals can't be bothered turning up.

A second bouquet goes to Albrecht Discounts.  Who dis? you ask.  Take the first two letters of each and you get ALDI the great discount store.  This week they had leaf blower/vacuums on special ($49) so I went and acquired one to clean our gutters,  (This was following advice from the late Floggo: I'd give him a bouquet too, but he asked for no flowers and the Cancer Council got a cheque instead.)  This device did a stunning job of cleaning the dead leaves and twigs off bits of roof.  It also generated a whole lotta mulch.

All I am now waiting for is for them to get their NSW liquor license!  Then they will be a perfect store!

Enough already.  If I mention Telstra you KNOW a brickbat is coming!  About 1330 today a mate called on my mobile saying he'd tried the landline and not got through.  By the time we'd finished our conversation the landline didn't work in or out and the internet connection had died.  We had to go out and got about 200m up the road there was a Telstra truck with a couple of guys fiddling with a Telstra dalek.   They had good reasons for doing so, and that is why our system had collapsed.  BUT WHY DIDN'T THEY WARN US?  The answer to this question is simple: they are from Telstra.

A further brickbat gets launched - like Monty Python's sneer - in the general direction of  France.  The need for the brickbat is illustrated in the following graphic.
The high spikes above 15 page views per hour by and large come from France.  They went on for about 2 weeks with somewhat over 120 views per day from that country.  This would have covered every post on the blog about 3 times so wasn't just someone slowly reading the entire blog - not even very slowly reading!!  I will probably never know what was going on - and it seems to have stopped now (I hope).  Presumably someone had a script to scan the blogsphere and it got 'stuck' on my site by accident.  Moron.  Trou du cul!  The hope was too soon: they are back again.

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