The First of March (rabbits, rabbits) coincides with Lent so I decided to support that old minority religion, Christianity – who still think that God made Man in his own image instead of the other way around, and abstain from sugary products over the next 40 days. Ok this will probably get refined (arf arf) over a couple of days but in essence I am avoiding sweets (chocolate, chews and ice cream) and biscuits and cakes (but not fruit pie and bananas and definitely not probiotic prune yoghurt).

Kelso Races beckon and instead of throwing my money away I am using a combination of mathematics and physics to ensure my place in the Kelso list of people who are banned from on track betting. I wonder what my tic-tac name will be waved out as – on second thoughts I have a pretty good idea.

So the betting will phase out using Benfords Law, the Sporting Post, my crystal ball (Sybil), and mapping quantum states to waveforms (did that make any sense?) – so with my money on Schrödinger’s cat, provided it hasn’t been chewing on some wildfowl infested with avian flu (move over Typhoid Mary we now have H5N1 Moggy). I shall report back on what I am spending my winnings on (race cancelled due to frozen and snow covered ground).

The last remaining Nazi Enigma cyphers are being worked on – including my Ferrari laptop. Pointless but a bit of history – after all one might be a submariner shopping list.

Fuel costs, between electricity and fuel for the plane and cars, is starting to get ridiculous so I was jumping with joy to find out that the japanese have extracted gasoline from cow dung – Flora could be powering us in the future as well as fertilising her fields.

It is not often I am impressed by DIY (this is one areas in which I seriously outsource) however, I saw Pascal’s hand carved djembe drum which he is covering with the skin of a road kill badger (he told me had hankerings to be a taxidermist in his youth – I might sit on the other side of the drumming room from now on). Not sure how it will compare to my goatskin – it will be interesting to see how dead badger responds to my slap, bass and tones.

Books of this month include ‘In Cold Blood’ Capotes brilliant retelling of the awful murder of the Clutter family, and Eisners ‘Contract with God’ (the birth of the graphic novel telling of immigrant life in 30s New York). Of course I will deny reading Aldous Huxley Doors of Perception, which I understand, if I had read it, has a description of his trip on Mescaline, also described on an unaired Panorama television programme. Telepopmusik supply me with backing music for drumming and I sing along to Frou Frou.

Dark corner of the internet found whilst looking for something else in google award of this month goes to Chastity – and no I am not going to tell you what I was looking for to get there!

As well as learning Arabic I am becoming more and more enthralled with Islamic architecture, history and art. An exhibition of Muslim inventions is now repainting the image that is prevalent in the media.

Saw a stoat running along our guttering at the back of the house, that may explain the mysterious barking of our dog over the past few weeks, looks like it emerged from our roof. Light brown with a white and black tail it rippled along the guttering and then pounced on our log store roof and disappeared.

My doctor committed suicide by leaping off the cliffs near Burnmouth – a tragic death of a fine man, the only man who has had his fingers up my bottom (for the purposes of clarification that was a prostate check).

The vernal equinox strikes so Spring has Sprung – geocaching the Roxburgh/Camelot cache was a bit of a failure as eldest son gave us the wrong coordinates. However, we dined in style at the Edenwater House in Ednam – a boutique hotel for gourmands with the correct balance of elegance, fine fare and excellent wines at a decent price.

And now it appears that naked photos of us art objects are on sale in Newcastle pubs – finally my body gets the mass distribution it deserves.

ADSL finally installed in the office – naturally it took BT a week and several visits (including not having the keys to the exchange) – I am certain that the middle management of BT own shares in their competitors. Naturally the upload speed is not good and BT don’t have a performance check for uploading – only for downloading.

Mastercard Anti Fraud team queried me buying something sensible like telecomms equipment instead of the usual pattern of werewolf mask, graphic novels and a bell rock lighthouse figure from ebay – so they had to authenticate me. I suspect they have Mescaline leakage in their water as the queries included my age at my next birthday (hey that one is more difficult to work out these days) and the name of the road that leads to the road I live on (that is bizarre since I live in the middle of nowhere).

The Trinity Cottage driveway claims another victim – first Mike hits the gate, then Stuart reverses into the house, Kim reverses into the wall and now a delivery man reverses into our coal bunker (which I had previously crashed into with a skateboard) and smashing his rear light. Just Alasdair to go now.

Signed up to have a cast made of my penis – then I can make plaster cocks to send out as Xmas pressies. To find out more I ended up on Kate’s myspace site so signed onto myspace and now have a page. Google pages is in beta, no surprise there, and I have a page there too.

Penguins snow writing here

My purple Ukulele has arrived and where else to visit but a Japanese Ukulele tutorial site where I can start learning Twinkle Twinkle little Star.

The Sixth Year prom is that phase where child turns into adult – they all looked splendid in kilts and dresses (the girls) but before disappearing to the debauchery of the after-prom party the child like qualities came out as many had forgotten shoes, couldn’t get changed out of kilts etc. Still it sounds as if they are somewhat adult after the after-prom party…. great way to end a month anyway

Opening to the strains of Karl Jenkins Requiem, you know the one – the only requiem where the Dies Irae is based on a hip-hop rhythm (although Mozarts classic Requiem sadly remains unfinished, it was always going to be very unlikely that the final movement was based on a hip-hop rhythm) – this month promises much.

Bigfoot stabilized video in an animated gif shows bigfoot looking more and more like an extra from a monster movie.

First flight of the year was over the Borders stalking Stuart’s various girlfriends houses. The visibility was poor being hit by an anticyclonic gloom – high pressure area which normally brings good weather but in this case kept fog and clouds down in an inversion layer.

Stuart was on the Knockhill skid pan and we got a shot at being thrown around and using the clutch to control the skid. After that it was time for beer and watching the Scots beat the French at rugby (they keep winning when I watch them so I should do it more often) albeit it nailbiting in the last 10 minutes.

Squirrel appeared on The Weakest Link, victimising the one legged old lady and was ejected by an Irish doctor who didn’t take kindly to her trying to vote him off in the first round. She didn’t know the surname of Britains greatest engineer Isambard Kingdom – which is of course Brunel (you mean there is more than one?) – although worringly she knew the correct name of a Sugababes single.

Taking the chance to learn Arabic which will let me decrypt the CIA Reward page – although the CIA for kids is worth a wander around. Kim is meanwhile locked into Sudoku puzzles for reasons which escape me.

The sold out Goldfrapp concert at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh tortured its audience with an appalling head wobbling student support band, backed by some wanky art student videos (hidden by the bands shadows most of the time and which thankfully crashed at one point) for an excrutiating hour before the sultry vixen burst on stage to give a colourful performance (albeit with flesh not being one of the colours as the GoldFrapplettes were not on display). Great concert none the less.

I decided to organise my self this year by outsourcing as much as possible in that Web 2 way – so my photos are on Flickr, my mail at Gmail and now my calendar is at CalendarHub – although I have kept my calendar private to make my assassins lives more difficult.

Chinas First Emperor has the Great Wall of China built, constructed the terracota army at Xian and believed that the island of the Immortals was protected by giant fish (since whales are mammals it was possibly giant haddock that swam around the island) and he went off with a giant crossbow to deal with them – perhaps his mercury diet had something to do with this.

An evening out skittling at the ice rink in Kelso – two wooden alleys with heavy ball which are projected at lethal speeds down the alley with children running for their lives and then returning cautiously to pick up the skittles. The notice said ten people per team for maximum enjoyment and it was right, the beer helped with the enjoyment but not with the accuracy nor my gout.

The last two times in 20 years I watched Scotland play rugby against England they won, and now I settle down with beer and cheer and they win the Calcutta Cup at Murrayfield with a superb display against the Troll army – perhaps they should just get me a private box for their games to ensure success!

A microlighting gal, who used to fly from East Fortune, is counting black rhinos in Zimbabwe – this is starting to get a much easier job due to the appalling rate of profitable poaching. Viagra has displaced the world requirement for powdered rhino horn and tiger penis, but arabs are still demanding rhino horns for daggers. Zoos or dehorning look to be the desperate solution to species survival – on the bright side they don’t suffer from Avian Flu destined to wipe out 50% of african protein from their diet – one can only hope they don’t start eating black rhino. Please don’t confuse this with the yoga nasal cleansing rhino horn.

After various outages and glitches with leased lines and PRi lines BT started February with a scorcher – complete outage (which their automatic monitoring equipment caught as an alarm and their snoozing engineers ignored). Our clients noticed within 45 milliseconds and were on the phone to us.

After trying various reporting numbers (which seem to have changed since we reported last – as in last week) I finally got hold of my account manager who gave me another number (which was the wrong one too but thankfully the guy on that line had been woken up and gave me the correct ISP Repair line – wooppee I could finally speak to a person about a major outage. Especially since the last outage saw an engineer finally coming down to the remote exchange without the likely parts and was just going off his shift so they had to send someone else in from 40 miles away who would definitely have the correct part – I reckoned that he must have walked as the line wasn’t actually repaired until the morning.

He gave me the fault number and said that that number came from a test which verified there was a fault – so it could be quickly dealt with – great I thought. Hours later this wasn’t so great – each hourly keep-the-sucker-up-to-date-with-our-lies BT phone call, which started with optimism, was starting to grind me down – well we haven’t allocated an engineer to the job yet (this is 4 hours into the fault) and they have some medieval set of procedures (probably based on some Masonic ritual) which more or less guaranteed that whatever language or tone I was using wasn’t going to see this job escalated.

Five hours in – no engineer – surely they are not actually training one from scratch or have they outsourced this to India too – although the neandrathal I spoke to on the last BT call (well they gave up calling me on the hour every hour as promised) was a triumph of genetic engineering, in case you wondered what happened to the Silverfin drug – its in a British Telecom worker.

The engineer arrived and within 5 minutes had the line working which he then took down for testing (lets make sure it works this time test) 7 hours into the fault and we had Internet access again. BT called back and in an unguarded moment admitted that they had botched up the job before.

I used to say that the reason that we paid well over the odds for our telecoms was that it was reliable (natch) and that if there was a problem then this was repaired very quickly as local engineers were on the scene quickly. Now we are ripping our leased lines out and using bonded DSL to speak to our colocation site with dire threats to local exchange users about the exchange being monitored for PSP file transfers and movie downloads, and advising them that the only safe way to surf is with images off, to maximise my contention rate.