Living in the United States, people sometimes ask me about what differences (beyond language) I see between the British and the Americans.

One of the biggest cultural differences I see, and something that I've always liked about the US, is the attitude towards success.

In short, the British are hopeless at coping with success, and ever since the end of the empire, have made a national hobby of mocking anyone who starts to show the slightest sign of it. Americans meanwhile, celebrate success, and see nothing wrong in being winners, making money, and leading the pack.

Why are the British uncomfortable with success? A friend of mine has the theory that it all goes back to the British class system. Entrepreneurs who are successful are usually middle or working class people, who've gotten where they are through hard work, rather than breeding. This, I guess, upsets The Establishment. Quite why then, the whole British population continues this prejudice against entrepreneurs doesn't make sense.

The British (for the most part) just don't understand the ease and comfort with which Americans cope with success, and see them as being a nation obsessed with money, at the expense of their souls, character, or whatever.

Does this hold the British back? Quite possibly. Look at the way Britons react to people like Richard Branson. He's a multi-millionaire entrepreneur, known on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, he's admired for his success and drive in the business world. In the UK, he's laughed at for having big teeth.

British inventor, Sir Clive Sinclair, was repeatedly mocked by the British, for his ill-fated electric car, the C5. He was repeatedly viewed as a crackpot. People seem to have forgotten the phenominal breakthroughs in personal computing that he made. He had immense success with his Sinclair computers, including the ZX81 and the Spectrum. But no, the British couldn't cope with that success, so they focused on his failures instead.

Talking of entrepreneurs, I have a small confession to make. Having poo-pooed Donald Trump's show, The Apprentice, based on seeing the trailers for it, I've since become unashamedly hooked on it. The trailers, as I mentioned before, made it look like it'd be as bad as most of the other "reality" TV shows, however, it's not. It's all about having the brains and the imagination required, to run your own business, work as a team, and succeed against the competition.

And so, I'm lead to wonder if The Apprentice - a show based on success - would make it in the UK. Many shows from the US and the UK have been re-made on the opposite side of the Atlantic (too many to list here), but given the British aversion to success and money-making, I just don't think it would work in dear old Blighty.

If they did try doing a British version of The Apprentice, I wonder which millionaire British businessman they'd have hosting it. Branson is an obvious choice, along with former ICI chairman, Jon Harvey-Jones.

Of course, really the British equivalent to Trump could be Mohamed Al Fayed - owner of Harrods, alleged crook, and father of Princess Diana's last boyfriend, before her assassination tragic accident.

They'd have to get him to host it, so that he could re-use The Donald's show catchphrase, only now spelt, "You're Fayed".

OK, just a quick note to let you know that, after a LOT of hassle, DMfM is up and running again.

Of course to the reader, it never went away, just wasn't updated.

What was supposed to be a straight-forward upgrade (from MovableType 2.5 to 2.661), ended up being a "wipe out the entire cgi-bin and start again" exercise. This was partially due to a small permissions error on my part, and partly due to the fact that the MovableType system is designed for installation by someone with their brain engaged, and not left idling in neutral, as mine was that day.

So, after all that, I should now be able to recommence DMfM output.

Just FYI, I'm having another go at upgrading DMfM to MoveableType v2.661.

This requires some major surgery on the internal workings of DMfM. As with most surgical procedures, there's a chance of death. The really bad news is that unlike having your appendix removed, I haven't been trained for seven years, prior to cutting up DMfM.

So, if I don't publish anything for a while, it's because I'm unable to, until I re-install and configure MoveableType.

It's been a fair while since I've hit the road on the great American highways. Last time, in the days before Dial M for Maxwell, it was a week-long road-trip down to Santa Fe (NM), The Grand Canyon (AZ), and Moab (UT).

This week, I have a friend visiting from the UK, and so, on days when I'm not slaving over a hot website development, we're on the road, visiting parts of Colorado, no-one who lived here, would bother to go see.

Today, we drove south for a good four hours or so, to Bent's Fort. It's located in the MSN, about 60+ east of Pueblo.

Due to the fact that the night before, certain people had had rather a lot of Chianti, and not enough sleep, a slight detour was needed, on the way down to Pueblo. The detour consisted of stopping somewhere, and consuming a cooked breakfast, and coffee.

It's an immutable fact of medicine, that the very best solution, after a night of over-indulgence with alcohol, is to plug the damage done, with a good healing layer of grease. This then, explains the immense popularity, even in these days of healthy eating, of the all-day breakfast throughout Britain. Now, whilst America doesn't quite have the nationwide, ingrained, drink-until-it's-coming-out-of-your-ears approach to a good night out, there are still, here and there, places one can get a good cooked breakfast.

Perhaps foolishly, the city was chose to pull of the highway into, for a post-drinking breakfast, was Colorado Springs. For the uninitiated, Colorado Springs, and the outlying areas, are heavily occupied by the Christian Moral Minority.. Focus on the Family has one of their compounds bases here, and the place is awash with dull looking buildings, called "Family Centers".

Such heavily Christian places, naturally frown upon such activities as drinking alcohol, pre-marital sex, or not thrashing yourself with birch twigs every morning because you're a worthless individual, that Jesus gave up his life for.

So, you can image, just now many sinful, grease-laden diners there were. Yep, almost none. In fact, the only place we found was a branch of that great American icon, Denny's.

British readers, unfamiliar with Denny's can try to imagine a chain of breakfast diners, akin to Little Chef, if the little chef's wife had left him, and he'd really let himself go, stopped shaving, and not redecorated since about 1985.

Don't get me wrong. The breakfast was excellent, the service was quick and friendly, and the end result - not feeling quite so much like death warmed up - was just what was called for.

The last time i was in a Denny's was about four years ago. Another friend from the UK was staying, and after an evening out, we decided to go get a late-night coffee. Living in surburbia as I was back then, the only place that was still open for coffee after 9pm, was Denny's. Fair enough, we though, beggars can't be choosers, and I daresay it'll be perfectly good diner coffee.

So, as we were only there for coffee, we decided to just sit at the breakfast bar, rather than take up an entire booth, in what was, a surprisingly busy diner.

Soon after we were seated, we were joined, on the two stools next to us, by two middle-aged women. We were deep in conversation, and paid no attention to them. Not until, during a lull in our conversation, I heard one of the women say to the other, "So did I tell you about when I was sentenced?"`

This meant we were compelled to glance over at them. Whilst I'm a great believer in not judging a book by its cover, one quick look had both of us agreeing that maybe moving to a booth wasn't such a bad idea. We had our own big discussion going on, and the last thing we needed was to be distracted by Tales From The Big House.

So, anyway, I'm now formulating Max's Theory of Diners. This essentially purports that diners are the last hope for mankind, in an uncertain world. They provide sustenance, shelter and in some cases, cure hangovers. They are also a great social leveller. There are times when we all need a good cooked breakfast, preferably cooked by someone else, and the diner takes us all under it's greasy wing, regardless of class, race, religion or political affiliation.

So, back to today. Someone once said that it was a sign of the Dumbing-down Of America, that more and more menus, heavily feature pictures, rather than verbose descriptions. That may or may not be the case, however, one thing is certain, after a night on the sauce, being able to point and grunt, caveman-like, at brightly lit graphics, sure does help.

It's good to know that even such long-established organisations as that headed by Dick Dastardly and Muttley, can embrace modernisation.

With that in mind, DMfM presents the superbly crafted Dick Dastardly Corporation Mission Statement.

I did three hours on-air on Thursday night last week, despite turning up to do just one. It was all in a good cause, as we were doing the winter pledge drive.

The next night, I was booked to do one hour of on-air chit-chat, urging listeners to become members, or renew their membership. I ended up running the studio board, and because the regular host (who we'll call W) and I were having such a good time, we did an extra hour of plugging the station, and then a third hour of the two of us, co-hosting.

So anyway, a couple of minor incidents occurred.

After the first hour, all the phone answering volunteers went home, leaving just the phone supervisor (who we'll call S) who offered to stay and answer the phones for the extra hour of "pledge-rapping".

W and I are just chatting away about the record we've just played, when ear-piercing alarms suddenly go off. Despite the fact that we were wearing headphones, and were right up to the mics, the alarm klaxon was so loud.

Barely able to hear myself, I managed to put some music on and say, "let's have some more music, whilst we sort this out". I hit a button, which plays the same album we've just played, and I kill the mics.

They sorted out the alarm, which had recently been "improved", and I faded the record, come back with, "...and that was the Wayne Shorter Quartet, with lead horn played by Brinks Security." I then explain to the listeners what was going on, and that we were all safe.

It turned out S had pushed the wrong door, and set it off.

I then urge listeners to call in:

a) with a pledge
b) to give S a really hard time about setting the alarm off.

I wish we'd been taping that, because I'd love to hear how it all sounded over the airwaves

I did tell listeners that it was a testament to our professionalism that neither of us swore, such was the loudness of the sirens (about 10 times louder than the previous system)

So we got over that and carried on.

Incident 2

At about 11.35pm, someone arrived at the front door of the building, wanting to come in.

Unable to figure out how to operate the intercom phone to talk to the guy, I let him in the first (of three) security doors, unseen. The first camera is able to see people once they're inside the first door. The second security door is, it turns out, unlocked. Deep joy.

The guy is about 6'5", dark features, and moving with a purpose. Before we know it, he's at the third door, upstairs, impatiently pressing the buzzer.

W figures out how to talk to him via the intercom, without letting him in. His story, is that he's a friend of the guy (we'll call K) who's on-air at midnight, and he just got robbed and has no money, and needs $20 to get home. Yeah, I'm thinking, that Light Rail is so expensive (actually, it's a wonder it isn't more expensive, given the number of people it's (allegedly) killed).

W and I talk about it, and decide he can wait in the lobby, until K arrives. So, W goes to tell him this, presses the WRONG button, and lets the creep into the station

Let's just say, that given our location (Five-Points, at close to midnight), W had some concerns about this, so I tell her to go lock the studio door. The guy comes around and is looking for people. It ends up with him banging on the sound-proof glass of the studio's internal windows, á la Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and asking to come into the on-air studio. You can imagine what we thought of that idea. We tell him he can't come in, as we're on-air. We tell him to go sit down and wait for K, so he does, and seems quite placid

The really tricky bit during all this, was W and I making sure we sounded just fine, and not at all concerned for our safety, whilst we're talking on-air.

Eventually, true to form, K arrives at 0.0000024 seconds to midnight. I'm already covering for him not being ready to start his show at midnight, with a tasty slice of Tony Monaco (very funky jazz organist).

Mr Creepy comes in with K, and whilst turning out not to be the axe-weilding mass murderer, we may have considered him being, is nonetheless, a bit creepy. He continues to give us his sob-story.

W and I tidy up after our show and go do all the post pledge paperwork.
Creepy Guy spends the time hanging around us, asking if WE can spare $20 to help him. We state that we can't.

He starts asking for a ride home, where his grandmother can give us a cheque for $25 for our trouble. Again we decline.

Anyway, we end up going back to the on-air studio to tell K he has to deal with his friend,. K says "just ignore him, but DON'T give him a lift, or money. W and I discuss our exit plan, and it turns out the guy had snuck up behind us, and was listening in just around the corner. He makes some comment about "you don't have to whisper about me".

So we just inform him, as politely as possible, that whilst we're sure he's a deeply lovely human being, we'd both feel less creeped out, giving Dick Cheney a lift home, than taking him across town.

We exit the station briskly, only to be assailed on the way out by a middle-aged white guy, surrounded by security guards, clutching his chest,, and asking for $20 to help his vast oil-related corporation. Needless to say, we declined to give him a lift home too.