I just watched the entire Barack Obama acceptance speech and I was riveted to my TV. One of the finest speeches I've ever had the privilege of watching/listening-to. Being a foreigner, I cannot vote in November but I certainly wish I could as it was incredibly inspiring and motivating.

As you may recall, I received a ticket back in April for going a little over the speed limit.

I paid my fine, spent my Saturday at 'Defensive Driving School', and learned a valuable lesson. Really, I did. In hindsight though, not necessarily a lesson that would permanently stay with me as I appear to have developed quite the lead foot of late.

This morning I get pulled over before I even get on the Freeway. There's a traffic zone near my house that for some reason suddenly goes from 45 to 25. Of course I was still doing 45 when my local neighborhood traffic cop pointed the radar gun at me.

Luckily the cop is in an extremely good mood. Tells me that if I was doing 1 mile an hour more over the speed limit he would have arrested me, put me in jail, and have my car towed. Gulp.

He gives me back my license, registration and with that all American smile, tells me to have a nice day. "I can go?" I ask. "Yes Mr Spencer, and please slow down".

When I first found out about thetelly.net I was incredibly interested and rather excited. British expats are their target audience and in a nutshell, they provide a service that allows you to record & watch British TV while you're overseas.

It's an interesting concept. They keep a Slingbox and PVR in their data center in the UK. You install SlingPlayer on your PC and you can communicate with the Slingbox/PVR and tell it what you want to record & watch. All the physical recording takes place in the UK.

Sounds lovely so what's not to like? Well for one, the price. It would cost me $809.93 to setup and then $129.35 a month to subscribe. Gulp. I'm also a little concerned about how reliable the service is. The testimonials all sound great and all but I'm still a little dubious.

To be honest I also feel a little leery about handing over that much money to a company I know nothing about. Not only that but in order to get full value for money I'd have to be immersed in TV. It would be all TV, all the time. Not only do I not have time for that, feeling like I *had* to watch just to get my money's worth would quickly get irritating.

Shame really as I love the idea, just wish it was a little cheaper. Will be keeping my eye on the company though to see if the rates change over time. For now though, there is a somewhat cheaper alternative ;-)

Over the years I've been in some truly awful public toilets ranging from creepy-stare old men, port-a-loos at concerts, to holes in the ground. Let me just say then, that there is one public toilet that wasn't actually a horror fest. No, this one was private, and was "just clean". The public toilet in Paris.

Of course, I couldn't figure out how to get in the bloody thing. An old French lady using some rather impressive body language let me know that she was bursting and really should go in front of me. So, sure, I let her. She came out but the button didn't go green and I couldn't figure out how to get in. Same lady came back to me and in perfect English explained that after every use, the toilet cleaned and disinfected itself and I'd have to wait a couple of minutes before the button would go green again.

She was right, the cleanest smelling public toilet ever. These toilets should be standard issue the world over.

• Pints of Moose Drool at Gallagers on Friday night, yum. Under the weather on Saturday morning, not so much.

• Recovery lunch at PF Chang's on Saturday though for the win I feel.

• Dear co worker, if you must send a 4 hour multi-user chat session to our entire segment in an email, you could have, you know, warned us all beforehand. Just sayin'.

• As a public service announcement, let me assure you that under no circumstances should you ever watch The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor. You're welcome.

• For sheer comedic value, try to retrieve a file from your backup drive, and then realize backup drive is dead. Yay, backups! Old backup drive thrown through window, brand spanking new backup drive capturing full backup as we speak...

Via Wire to the ear, a short film about Paul Mawhinney's lifetime pursuit of collecting records. He has a million albums and a million singles worth approx $50 million.

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

I found it a little sad that he's spent the better part of his life collecting these and he thinks that no one cares. Personally I think it's the coolest thing I've ever seen. But then again, I'm a music addict.

We were talking at lunch today about how we lose track of some bands after they decide to change musical direction. I could think of three examples of bands whose early work, for me, far exceeded their later offerings.

INXS. Shabooh Shoobah, The Swing, and Listen Like Thieves are among my favorite albums. Very new wavey with synths having a prominent place in their sound. In short, my cup of tea. Then they released Kick which had a "rockier" sound, went onto sell sixty bajillion albums and turned them into stadium rockers overnight. I didn't really like Kick to be honest and it was the last INXS album that I bought. I did go see them at Wembley Arena when they toured the X album purely in the hope they'd play some of their older stuff. I don't remember now if they actually did.

Simple Minds. Over the years Simple Minds have produced 14 studio albums, the first 7 of which were really bloody good. My favorites being Empires And Dance, Sons And Fascination/Sister Feelings Call, and New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84). Once Upon A Time, while still good, was far more mainstream than their previous offerings and was the album that made them into stadium rockers. Their next album is where it all went downhill for me. I did actually buy Street Fighting Years but regretted doing so on the very first listen. It was the last Minds album I bought.

U2. My two favorite U2 albums are The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. The Joshua Tree was an odd album for me though as I didn't like any of the songs they released as singles. For me, the standout tracks were Bullet The Blue Sky, Red Hill Mining Town, and One Tree Hill. Their big change album was Achtung Baby which I tolerated but hardly ever found myself replaying. Then U2 seemed to lose the plot entirely and released two very sub par albums Zooropa and Pop. Zooropa was the last U2 album I bought.

I wonder if I should go back and get the albums that I initially dismissed from these bands as maybe there are some hidden gems there after all. Maybe now that enough time has passed I would have a new appreciation for them. I've heard U2's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is actually quite good.

If Usain Bolt hadn't celebrated early and started to slow down in the final few feet, I've no doubt he would have broken the world record by even more. The race wasn't even close and whichever way you look at it, 9.69 seconds is insanely good.

I'm also wondering, now that the Michael Phelps show is over with, whether NBC's ratings will plummet as a result. I would imagine there are a lot of casual Olympic viewers who watched just to see him and really don't care about any of the other sports. Will be interesting to see a comparison of this coming week's ratings compared with last week.

And as remarkable as Paris was during the day, it's not called the city of lights for nothing and I loved the experience of Paris at night.

Dusk arrives and lights begin to slowly come on.

One of the most relaxing things about Paris is how laid back everyone is as they sit in cafes watching the world go by, even in the evening.

We were going to the Louvre the next day, so hopped off the metro the night before to see if we could find it.

I loved the Louvre in lights. Photos don't really do it justice.

Seeing the city beacon as we travelled back down the Seine was rather cool.

As was standing underneath the Eiffel Tower. I was so surprised at how many people were at the base of the tower.

Paris was a remarkable city and the day and a half I spent there was in no way long enough to appreciate everything.

I loved just walking down random streets to enjoy whatever bars & cafes were there.

Traveling down the Seine revealed some rather lovely views of Notre Dame.

Going to the top of which resulted in some rather nice views of Paris.

I could have probably spent all day at the Louvre but just really had to rush through it.

People loved to push and shove to get close enough for a photo of the Mona Lisa.

Including me ;-)

Jon Henley attempts the Michael Phelps diet of 12,000 calories a day. Fails.

"It just smells so horrible," says the photographer, helpfully, as we survey the table before us. On it are a large bowl of porridge; three doorstep-sized sandwiches of white bread, butter, fried egg, fried onion, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise; a five-egg omelette tastefully garnished with parsley; three slices of French toast liberally sprinkled with sugar; three pancakes topped with chocolate chips; and two large cups of coffee. That's breakfast. Yummy.

Next to it is lunch, which consists of 1lb (that's a very large bowl) of pasta with tomato sauce; two large ham-and-cheese sandwiches with more lettuce, tomato and don't forget the mayo; plus four bottles of a proprietary high-energy sports drink that always makes me burp. For dinner, it's another pound of pasta, a large cheese-and-tomato pizza, and another four bottles of the same proprietary high-energy sports drink that always makes me burp. "You poor thing," says the photographer, generously. "I so don't envy you."

A scientific look at the effects of drinking while driving. Karts of course ;-)

While I can't comment on Mario Kart, I do have first hand experience of having my arse handed to me while attempting to "play" Wii boxing after coming back from a real ale festival. Good times.

From Charles de Gaulle Airport, getting into Paris couldn't be easier. Just take the RER into the city center and you have access to the rest of the metro.

Of course, you have to actually get your tickets first and these machines are friendly enough once you understand what it is you're buying. One ticket is good to get you to wherever you want to go. Leave a station though, and you have to buy another one. So I just bought a carnet which comprises 10 tickets. In the day and a half I was there, between walking and catching the metro, I still had one left over. Not bad value actually at only 11.40 euros

I absolutely loved taking the metro as often as I could. I had the misfortune of being in Paris on the most humid day in the history of the planet though. Even with the windows down in the train, there was no air and everyone was just soaked by the time they got off.

Depending on what part of the city you were in, the metro station signs were just slightly different. In the center of the city, this was the most common.

Venture a little further afield, and things change a little.

I love these signs.

Shame we didn't actually find the bloody catacombs at Denfert-Rochereau. Sipping a beverage took priority before moving on.

The only thing that really caught me out on my first metro ride was the fact that depending on what line you're on, the doors to the train don't automatically open when you get to a station. You have to fumble with a metal knob like lever on the door. Obviously I stood there like a twat waiting for the door to open before an impatient Parisian schooled me in the ways of the metro while cursing at me in French. I just grinned.

One thing that really caught my attention when back in England was the sense of being watched by big brother wherever you turned. On my first day back I walked down to my local park where I used to play & take the family dog for a walk when I was a kid. Was a little surprised to find this.

What was even more creepy was that the camera rotated around to watch people. I'm assuming the speakers were to inform the citizens how to behave and what to think.

Of course it's all done under the guise of being for our "own protection", whatever that means. There are so many of these cameras all over the place that I think people are either suffering from outrage fatigue, don't care, don't know how many times a day they're filmed, or simply don't think there's anything they can do about it. Which I don't suppose there really is. I can't imagine a change in government will result in all cameras being pulled so what else can they do, except move.

Really creepy though.

Last night, as they do, a black widow spider decided to spin a web right outside my front door. The little poisonous bugger was about 2 inches with a little red belly and could be easily seen from my window. Taunting me if you will. 10 mins later after a quick drive down to Walgreens to pick up some spider killer doom spray, it was taunting me no more.

Humans 1 - Spiders 0