This one time I noticed that everything I was eating that day was tasting very bitter.

It started with breakfast. My cereal with fruit and yoghurt on top was tasting bitter. At lunchtime, my sandwhiches tasted bitter. That night, my dinner tasted bitter (even though it was chicken cooked the way I always cook it). I had a few lollies and chocolate too and even they tasted bitter!

Something was very wrong.

What had happened to my sense of taste?

Did I have a tumor that was pressing on the the parietal lobe in my brain (the part that controls taste and smell)?

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. My wife was eating the same foods as me and she said they didn’t taste bitter to her.

The next day, the same thing happened.

This was terrible. I like my food (especially chocolate), and this phenomenon was depressing. Was that it for my life? Was this permanent?

I didn’t know what to do.

I turned to Google (why visit a doctor when Google can help me diagnose my problem faster than a doctor can?). I searched for “why does all food taste bitter to me?” and found lots of people asking the same question.

Many of these discussions talked about “Pine Mouth”. I had never heard of this before.

Pine Mouth is where a small proportion of Pine Nuts from China can cause a bitter, metallic taste in your mouth 2 days after eating them, and the sensation can last up to 2 weeks.

Wikipedia: Pine Mouth from Pine Nuts

And then it hit me. I had eaten a hand full of left-over pine nuts 2 days ago!!

It’s not something I’ve done before, but at the time I had thought nothing of it.

Unfortunately there is no treatment so I had to put up with the strong bitter taste for a week. In the second week the sensation gradually disappeared.

It was such a horrible experience, I now avoid Pine Nuts at all costs.

If you are reading this because all food tastes bitter to you and you don’t know why, now you know you are not alone. I’m sorry there is no treatment, but in about a week you’ll start feeling better.

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This one time I was driving towards town in a 70kph zone one sunny morning. I was just rounding a gradual right hand bend when a beat-up red car coming from the other direction crossed over the centre line. It smashed into the rear right hand side door of a small grey/blue car travelling in my lane, which was ahead of me by about 30m at the time. Bits of glass from the lights and a part of the bumper of the red car fell off and scattered across the road.

The grey/blue car came to a stop in the middle of the lane, as did I, but the collision barely slowed the red car down, in fact, it crossed back to it’s side of the road and sped off!

I couldn’t believe it! The driver didn’t even stop to check if the other driver was ok!

Because the collision wasn’t too severe (a head on would have been quite bad) I decided to abandon the victim too. I wasn’t going to let this guy get away with a hit and run so I spun the car around and went after him.

He turned off several times into side streets trying to shake me. But his car was a piece of junk and one wheel was jambed up against a crumpled wheel well so it certainly wasn’t a high speed pursuit. I was beeping my horn and flashing my lights to let him know I wasn’t going anywhere. We ended up in a very quiet suburb when he finally pulled over.

I didn’t have a cellphone on me so I suddenly felt very alone.

I got out, as did he, and we talked. He told me he’d been at a party all night, had been drinking heavily and had only had a few hours sleep before deciding to drive home this morning. He had fallen asleep at the wheel when he had hit the other car. And one point he said “if it wasn’t for you, I’d be long gone by now”. Which worried me.

And I told him that his only option was to go and hand himself in to the police station near by and I wasn’t leaving until I witnessed him do exactly that. I assured him that the police would go easy on him because he had taken responsibility for his actions.

After about an hour of talking (including some very long silences), he finally agreed. We got into our cars, and as bits of tire and more bumper fell off his car, we drove another 4km to the nearest police station. He parked outside it and I parked further away and watched him go inside before I drove straight home.

When I got home I looked up the phone number for that police station and called. I asked “Did ‘John Smith’ just hand himself in?” After a short pause the officer said “yes” and I immediately hung up, satisfied.

And that’s the end of the story. The police didn’t trace my phone call and give me an award, the guy didn’t hunt me down and beat me up, and I didn’t try and find out what happened to him.

I’ll do the same thing all over again if I get the chance, because it’s the right thing to do.

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This one time I couldn’t access the Google products that I use all day, every day:

• Gmail
  • I have 14 email addresses piped into my Gmail account
• Google Search
  • This is the bedrock of my existence!
• Google Analytics
  • I look after 40+ websites and couldn’t access any data
• Google Docs
• Google Adwords
• Google Adsense
• Picasa Web Albums
• Google Maps
• YouTube

It all started 2 weeks ago when I got a static IP address from Telecom (for free as part of the 40GB Total Home package).  Almost immediately I noticed that I couldn’t access YouTube, but this didn’t ring alarm bells because I thought it was just a bug or they had high traffic at that moment. But when I couldn’t access my Gmail account a week later, that’s when I got really worried.  And then when I noticed I couldn’t access anything else owned by Google I spotted the pattern.

I couldn’t access any of these Google services but other websites in NZ and overseas worked fine.

It was so bad that if I visited a website that used Google Maps, I couldn’t see the map but I could see the rest of the website.

I couldn’t run my business. Email is my core function. It is how I communicate.

I was cut off.

Alone.

I tried clearing browser cache, tried 3 different browsers: Firefox, IE, Chrome. All with no improvement.

After 3 days of waiting for the problem to disappear on it’s own, I conducted a few Google searches via my iPhone (I turned off WiFi so I was using Vodafone 3G) and I began to suspect that my static IP address was the problem.

After a 60 minute phonecall with Telecom (on a Sunday) with 3 different people (2 in Malaysia + 1 New Zealander) who all suggested clearing the cache and trying different browsers, the last one agreed that a black-listed static IP address was probably the problem. He told me to go to www.telecom.co.nz/staticip to request a new one. I did so.

12 hours later I got an email regarding the request that asked “have you tried a different browser?”.

… *cough*

aaarrrrghhhhh!!!!

Yes, that made me furious.

But I held my temper and simply replied “yes, of course I have. Please change my static IP address immediately.”

4 more hours later, it was done. I was assigned a new IP address and all Google’s services are available to me again, hooray!

Why did Google block my IP address in the first place?

Perhaps the computer assigned my first IP address was used for automated Google searches or spamming and was black listed by Google? Perhaps my computer is infected with Malware and automated searches were being conducted without me being aware of it? I don’t know.

Will Google block my IP address again?

I bloody hope not. But if it does, I know what to do next: I’ll go to http://www.telecom.co.nz/staticip and request yet another one.

What have I learned from this?

This experience has reminded me just how dependent I am, and my business is, on Google’s free products/services.

Perhaps I should purchase a single Google share (about US$520 each at the moment), so at least I can justify my sense of entitlement.

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This one time my best mate Scott Newton and I spotted a fantastic Term Deposit rate at the bank.

• Interest rate: 6%
• Minimum investment: $600
• Term: 6 months
• = Profit: $36!

We could not resist!

We were poor high school students at the time but we scrounged the cash together and we each made our deposits.

We were so proud of ourselves and our sound financial decision making, that we celebrated by spending our $36 profit immediately.

We both bought some clothes and a nice lunch.

6 lean months later we were dismayed to find only $618 back in our accounts!

“Only $18 profit? Surely the bank has made a mistake?! We spent twice that amount to celebrate!” we cried.

But then we realised the error in our calculation. We had forgotten to divide the profit by 2 because of the interest rate being annual, and the term being only 6 months. Oops.

This was a harsh lesson for Scott and he somewhat overcompensated for the mistake by becoming an Accountant and now a Chief Financial Officer.

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This one time my best mate Scott Newton and I raided all the rubbish bins within a 4 block radius of a “Camalco Cash-For-Cans” machine.

The year was 1988 and this “Camalco Cash-For-Cans” vending machine stood outside the BP station at 1275 Amohau Street, Rotorua (the BP station is no longer there).

The principle was simple. You placed a aluminium can into the slot, closed the door, listened to the crushing noice, and then the prize wheel would spin just like on a pokkie’s machine in a Casino.

You could either win:

1. Nothing
2. A can of Coke
3. A Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar
4. Or a small bag of plain Bluebird chips

But the thing is, we were winning something every 4 cans!

No wonder the machine was in place for only a few months – they must have been losing money hand over fist.

That’s why we spent most of our weekends fishing coke cans and beer cans out of rubbish bins and dumpsters behind bars.

Yes we got dirty, yes we got old beer on our shoes, but we ate like kings!

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This one time I left my car door open overnight and the battery went flat. When the AA came and started it for me in the morning he told me my battery was old and needed replacing that day.

The previous year I had taken an old car battery to the metal recylers I knew that they were worth about $5 each, and just a week previous I had noticed a really big old car battery under the house left here by the previous owner.

I went to the dump the next day, and what do you know, there were 2 more car batteries sitting right beside the pit!  So I put them in the car and took them home (one leaked a bit of acid and burnt a whole in the concrete in my garage).

I now had 4 batteries – about $20 worth!

With a smug look on my face, I drove to work the next day with the batteries in the back of the car, and took them in during my lunch break.

How much did I get?

$8.

Not $8 each. $8 total!

Despite the increase in lead price over the last few years (driven by an increase in demand for motorbikes and cars  in China), the metal recyclers had decided to decrease their payout.

$20 is a decent bit of cash, but $8 was an insult for all the time and effort I had put into this project.

Next time, I will just bury my old car battery in the garden.

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This one time when I was 13 years old, my uncle let me drive his 1984 Isuzu 4 ton truck in his citrus orchard.

That was a mistake on his part.

I misjudged my approach on a corner and completely flattened one of his orange trees.

Oops.

He had a good laugh though.

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This one time I thought it would be fun if I climbed inside a locker at The Geyserland Hotel in Rotorua.

There was barely enough room for me. I basically had to contort to fit in there.

The locking mechanism was completely exposed, I was confident there would be no problem opening it once I got inside.

I crammed myself in there and closed the door, and peaked out through the tiny vent and felt very proud of myself.

After a few moments I decided I had enough and tried to turn the latch.

It wouldn’t budge!

To my dismay it became evident that it wouldn’t move without the key!

I started to panic.  It got hot in there very quickly and since I was half way between sitting and standing it was terribly uncomfortable.

I started yelling for help but no-one came.

I kept screaming until someone finally came running in.

It took him a while to find out where I was.

“In here! In here!” I was yelling.

“Where? Where?” he yelled back and I could see him running around the room.

He found my locker at last and tried the handle but it wouldn’t move.

“Where’s the key?” he asked.

“Here” I sobbed and tried to poke the key with it’s huge keyring through the tiny ventilation slots, but it wouldn’t fit.

“I’ll go and get a manager with a master key!”

“Hurry!” I yelled as he left.

Finally a manager came to let me out. I was drenched in sweat, shaking and whimpering, but I survived.

I’ve been mildly claustrophobic ever since.

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This one time at school camp in a hut on Mount Tongariro, 2 mates and I thought it would be good fun to light our farts.

One mate announced he was ready and got into position with just his undies on.

My job was to hold the lighter in position, but I got too close and burnt a hole in his undies and singed his nut sack.

He howled in pain while we howled with laughter.

Good times.

Want to see some video footage of people lighting their farts?

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This one time I got so fed up with the high prices in the neighbourhood supermarket (Woolworths), that I abandoned my half-full shopping trolley in the middle of an isle and drove 10km to the nearest Pak ‘n’ Save instead.

I ended up saving about $15, but spent $4 extra in petrol and 25 minutes commuting.

But I just hate being ripped off, no matter what the cost.

I wonder how long it took for the Woolworths staff to decide that the trolley was abandoned and I wasn’t coming back?

Maybe they checked all the freezers just in case it belonged to an old lady who had fallen into one and couldn’t get out?

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