Mark Szeliga Szolkowski's Blog

I went to a wedding recently, held at my old athletics club, where the food was completely vegetarian. Now, I don't have a problem with that since both the bride and groom are both vegetarian. My problems stem from the fact that:

• The food was not made from real vegetarians


• I had to walk half a mile to the nearest burger joint


• The bride, groom, and most of their guests proceeded to subject me and my brand new coat to a most disgusting bout of passive smoking for the rest of the evening

Go figure.

And see here!!!

I haven't been running for eight weeks due to a cold that I haven't been able to shake, and partly through apathy and lethargy.

I went this morning though for a steady four miles with a guy who hasn't run for six weeks due to shin splints (bah, the tart - lack of calf stretching more like!). Lovely morning for it - blue skies, tad frosty, great.

My right knee as usually has been very sore, especially this evening - but nothing that two Ibuprofen and a set of Bud's couldn't sort out.

One of the main reasons for my knee being so sore is spending all yesterday on it re-routing power cables in the now-accessible loft (due to the work done on both bathrooms). I had to re-route the cables so that I could board the loft - there's hardly anything up there, but there's a ton of space for toys belonging to kids who won't tidy their rooms...

The next step will be to insulate and plasterboard the inside of the roof tiles, but that will have to wait until I can walk again without pharmaceutical and homebrewing aids.

This afternoon, we went to John Leigh park in Altrincham - the scene of several muddy and painful Saturday mornings for St Bede's cross country team in the 1980's. It's amazing how much flatter it looks these days...

See here: 25th July 2005

and here: 17th March 2006

The last Lemsip I had was too hot.

This time, in the interests of saving my mouth and some time, I added some extra cold water to the kettle before switching it on. I didn't have a thermometer, but I swear it was just as hot as before.

To add insult to injury, I reckon it even took longer to boil as well. Go figure.

I first remember him as the character Voltan in "Hawk the Slayer", although it was good to see him in City Slickers too.

Here'a an article on the BBC web site.

Here are some YouTube links:

• "Hawk The Slayer" intro


• Battle clip from the Abbey

R-K: You can stop asking me now.

Some of the lads at school were asking about how to do this, so I have had a dig around and remembered how to do it. The problem is that the registry key is not even there by default, so there is nothing to change - that is why I could not find it at first!

1. Run regedit.exe


2. Locate registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer


3. Create a new key called AltColor, of type REG_BINARY, with a data value that is the hex value of the colour you want with trailing 00 in the format: RR GG BB 00 (Red, Green, Blue)



For example, FF 00 00 00 for red or 00 FF 00 00 for green.

Note that it looks like Explorer only reads this value once, so if you want to change the colour again, you will need to use Task Manager to kill and relaunch the explorer.exe process.