Yesterday, in a moment of glory, I nearly threw away all that I am working for with my kids, house etc to get re-involved in broadband. It only took a minor announcement from the DTI (DataBase ERRor as they are now called) about an indie review to think it would be worth getting involved again.
Luckily, my brain has regained some sort of equilibrium and we are back on track.
It's RALLY time.
The VW was here tonight, with my name on the windows, (minus an 'i') and it turns out the first rally of our Endurance Rally Championship is not this weekend but next. YES! This time in a fortnight we will be standing in a bar in Plymouth (with any luck) celebrating the end of the first rally we have partaken in this season. ie the second ever!!!
I cannot wait.
I have even tried to watch the promo Youtube video that South Hams Motor Club have on their site, but of course it must be too far to send it to Cumbria. Can't see it. (Bloody useless thing that they call broadband in this country - still not working. Note to self: do not get distracted.)
It might be a good thing actually, as after my driver has been here tonight, all I can think of is RALLY!
I cannot wait. And having something to live for has actually managed to ram it home that life is for living.
I've wasted well over 10 years of my life pushing for broadband in this god forsaken country, and now I am 40, it really is time to get on with the things in life that pay back. Not financially, obviously, but in FUN. And if there was anything that would ever put a big smile on your face it would be Endurance Rallying.
And I am desperately proud to be involved in the Endurance Rallying World. What a brilliant bunch of people they are.
Live a little. Whatever you want to do, whether it's paragliding - I know a man for that! or rallying, or horse riding or whatever, take the day off work and JFDI!!!
Sunday 24 February 2008
Saturday 23 February 2008
Give and Take
I have to admit to being rather taken with Freecycle. It keeps many useful items away from the national and local landfill lunacy which seems unstoppable, and you get to meet some great people.
However, it is making me wonder whether people are naturally 'givers', 'takers, or whether you can be both?
If you look at the archives, some names never ever occur in Offered, only Wanted, and vice versa.
I had to ask whether anyone had something/ a particular item today, and I had to think about it first. How important is this item that I go public and ask for it? What would I do with it if I get it? Do I really want to put myself out as begging for this item, or loan of it, or should I just bite the bullet and spend over £200 to get one? That was sort of the deciding factor. I couldn't afford one if I wanted, and having looked on Ebay, I am never really going to find one at a price I can afford.
(I know you want to know, so it's an overlocking machine. I bought a jumper from Guru in Darlington, and it doesn't fit. Even if I eat 20 cakes a day for the rest of my life, and grow 4ft taller it is never going to fit, but I love it. It's a South American real wool multi-coloured jumper and all I need to do is take it in with an overlocking machine. This jumper was my annual buy of a new item of clothing for me and it cost £30, which is a bloody fortune, and more than most of the rest of my wardrobe is worth.
The fact it didn't fit was absolutely irrelevant as it was the jumper I wanted, and still want, and will want every day of its life. However, if it fit, it would stop everyone else wingeing about the fact it's too big! And I would actually be happier if it fit me, not some 8ft gorilla in the Andes. Having been there, I can't possibly imagine who they knit it for! And yes, I did try putting it in the washing machine on a hot wash, and through the tumble dryer, and it is still gloriously too big!)
However, my trawl through the Freecycle archives did reveal that there are people on there who (seem to) just want, and people on there who offer. There are very few people who offer and want and give away items better, or better condition, than those they want.
So, tonight, I am wondering. Even in the fab world of Freecycle, is our grabbing, greedy culture still at work? Or do people find when they go to collect an item from a Freecycler that you come away with far more than you expected, and you end up giving these new friends items you don't need but they do?
Is the value of the network hidden?
Because the value I have had from Freecycle so far is far and away beyond what I had expected from an initial advert. The good feeling from giving is actually quadrupled when the person you are giving to suddenly gives something back, unexpectedly. Whether that is a glass of home brew, a promise of some apples later in the year, or 10 mins meeting their kids and a whole new family in your community, that giving from then, unasked for and unexpected, adds the hidden value of the network.
If you could capitalise on it, IMHO, you would break it, because you would break huamn nature. But if you could bottle it, pwoo-ee! I think you'd have something. Watch out for my next ads on Ebay!
Joking aside, I think the real value of networks is in the hidden intricacies of such networks, the little asides that human nature can add. And I think this ties in to my Mechanical Turk post on the Web PR blog yesterday. In a mechanised world, there will always be the 'human touch' that adds a spark, an incandescence, a passion to everything.
And long may it reign!
Let them take, let them give, let me meet the ones who have what I need, and take away what I don't. The trusted and untrustworthy, The friendly, the needy. And Pan, give me an overlocking machine so I can enjoy my jumper to the full!
However, it is making me wonder whether people are naturally 'givers', 'takers, or whether you can be both?
If you look at the archives, some names never ever occur in Offered, only Wanted, and vice versa.
I had to ask whether anyone had something/ a particular item today, and I had to think about it first. How important is this item that I go public and ask for it? What would I do with it if I get it? Do I really want to put myself out as begging for this item, or loan of it, or should I just bite the bullet and spend over £200 to get one? That was sort of the deciding factor. I couldn't afford one if I wanted, and having looked on Ebay, I am never really going to find one at a price I can afford.
(I know you want to know, so it's an overlocking machine. I bought a jumper from Guru in Darlington, and it doesn't fit. Even if I eat 20 cakes a day for the rest of my life, and grow 4ft taller it is never going to fit, but I love it. It's a South American real wool multi-coloured jumper and all I need to do is take it in with an overlocking machine. This jumper was my annual buy of a new item of clothing for me and it cost £30, which is a bloody fortune, and more than most of the rest of my wardrobe is worth.
The fact it didn't fit was absolutely irrelevant as it was the jumper I wanted, and still want, and will want every day of its life. However, if it fit, it would stop everyone else wingeing about the fact it's too big! And I would actually be happier if it fit me, not some 8ft gorilla in the Andes. Having been there, I can't possibly imagine who they knit it for! And yes, I did try putting it in the washing machine on a hot wash, and through the tumble dryer, and it is still gloriously too big!)
However, my trawl through the Freecycle archives did reveal that there are people on there who (seem to) just want, and people on there who offer. There are very few people who offer and want and give away items better, or better condition, than those they want.
So, tonight, I am wondering. Even in the fab world of Freecycle, is our grabbing, greedy culture still at work? Or do people find when they go to collect an item from a Freecycler that you come away with far more than you expected, and you end up giving these new friends items you don't need but they do?
Is the value of the network hidden?
Because the value I have had from Freecycle so far is far and away beyond what I had expected from an initial advert. The good feeling from giving is actually quadrupled when the person you are giving to suddenly gives something back, unexpectedly. Whether that is a glass of home brew, a promise of some apples later in the year, or 10 mins meeting their kids and a whole new family in your community, that giving from then, unasked for and unexpected, adds the hidden value of the network.
If you could capitalise on it, IMHO, you would break it, because you would break huamn nature. But if you could bottle it, pwoo-ee! I think you'd have something. Watch out for my next ads on Ebay!
Joking aside, I think the real value of networks is in the hidden intricacies of such networks, the little asides that human nature can add. And I think this ties in to my Mechanical Turk post on the Web PR blog yesterday. In a mechanised world, there will always be the 'human touch' that adds a spark, an incandescence, a passion to everything.
And long may it reign!
Let them take, let them give, let me meet the ones who have what I need, and take away what I don't. The trusted and untrustworthy, The friendly, the needy. And Pan, give me an overlocking machine so I can enjoy my jumper to the full!
Thursday 21 February 2008
Smart Meters
If you could join up all the dots about me, apart from being one helluva mess, you would notice that the wireless issue crops up over and over again. Not necessarily from a telecoms or technical point of view, but more from a communication point of view.
And smart meters are one area where I just cannot understand what is going on, nor why our utilities etc companies don't get together and get on top of the issues.
What are the issues?
OK, from a utility company POV, there is a need to:
1) Be able to easily access the meters and read them for water, electrickery etc without needing to knock on each house door or business premises
2) Be able to spot leakages or wastage easily - whether this be a burst pipe in a school or a household using more than they can afford to pay for
The easiest way to deal with both of these is to have the meters reporting back in to "HQ". And the easiest way to do that is via wireless, or fibre, or "fiwi". It would not be so great to have a meter plugged in to a telephone line as the amount of spare copper is limited, and the meter does not need to report back constantly so the copper would be underused. As a scarce resource, this is not ideal.
(However, if you were to stop using copper between the street cabs and the homes/businesses for voice and data, it might be a damned good use of the copper rather than pull it out the ground and flog it into a lucrative, profitable marketplace. But that is another discussion!)
For homes and businesses, it would be good if the meter could inform them if they were using above average of the utility compared to say comparable businesses in the region, or their neighbours. This might encourage them to cut down on usage and hence reduce their bills.
There is additionally a major problem in the UKl over this stuff called "broadband". The truth of the matter is that we just don't have it. Not compared to places like Korea, Sweden, Italy, Estonia and even Outer Mongolia. And until someone finds a way of getting the owners of the infrastructure to work together using existing resource eg fibre optics, wireless masts, street cabs and exchanges etc, it is highly likely to stay that way. Particularly for the non honey pot type areas, like most of Britain. Look on a map and see how much green there is? No cities or big urbanisations? That's where there is sod all broadband at all.
And this is where smart meters come in. The EU regulated on smart meters to be introduced in 2007, but it seems the Brits haven't quite noticed that piece of regulation yet. Or those utility companies who can put prices up and annoucne £500 million profits a couple of weeks later are jittery about the potential cost.
Now, imagine if every home and business needed its utility meters replacing. We have electricity and water only, but others have gas too. That would be three new smart meters, all dishing out a wireless signal to be picked up either very locally (eg over Bluetooth or similar) by meter readers who didn't have to get out of their vehicles and just needed to kerb crawl to get a reading, or they would be connected into a larger wireless cloud and feed their data back to a data centre or similar for the utility companies. Latest figures have these costing the consumer, not the utility company, at around £180. Yeah right. I don't think so.
There are however issues with smart meters as they are currently espoused. eg one per utility company.
Firstly, the wireless interference between my three utility metres, next door's, and the rest of my neighbours could be a major issue. Secondly, a ton of people would come out of the woodwork saying they now have a permanent headache, or chilblains year round or something because of the wireless and thirdly, it would cost shedloads of dosh, not just to install said meters but also for the data costs and installing wireless equipment to cover the nation with a wireless cloud.
And therein lies the rub. United Utilities, who deal with our water, also own a telecoms company. It used to be called Your Communications, and is now owned and run by Thus and Kingston Communications. So, these electrickery companies are not foreigners to telco games. Apparently, the top wire on all those enormous pylons you see across the country is a fibre optic telco data cable. Even the water companies have dabbled in the telco markets, and you only need look at the furore around H2) and their plan to stick fibre optic down sewers to see that the water companies are in there too.
The problem with communications infrastructure in our country is that no-one seems to be joining the dots. As wireless needs to become more ubiquitous, the mobile oeprators extend their 3G etc networks to bring data coverage, the telcos faff around, generally, with the likes of The Cloud hotspots, (and stealing the term "wireless broadband" so everyone assumes it is that new box BT has just given them and no more), the utility companies just merge with one another, and the odd telco etc, but no-one is joining the dots.
I am going to try to.
1)The need for broadband speed, accessible and affordable and available to all, everywhere in the UK, and fast as hell. Yes... 1Gbps symmetrical, ta.
2) Supposed scarcity of bandwidth whilst we have unused resource in dark fibre lying all over the country and data costs approaching zero
3) Compliance with EU regulation on smart meters
4)The success of wifi mesh networks
5) The fact that the majority of mobile calls are made in the cell the call orginates from or a neighbouring one
Right, let's put this together.
Into my house, you put a smart meter, that measures electricity, gas and water consumption. On that smart meter is a small wireless antenna. The meter can both transmit and receive information. That meter meshes with the meter in my neighbours' houses, and his with the next house and all others it can see, creating a resilient mesh network throughout our village primarily. In our street cabinet (which I happen to know is one 802.11b 8db antenna hop from most of the houses in the village, and 2 from the top of the village), is another meshbox, and some kit to convert from wireless to fibre.
Every smart meter acts as an access point not just for the utility companies but also to provide internet access. Should you wish to have multiple resilience, the local copper sub-loop can provide back ups. However, should this be needed eg if there was a nuclear magnetic pulse which knocked out the wireless, any survivors of the nuclear bomb could expect reduced internet download and upload speeds for a while over the VDSL link. (If the street cabinet were affected by thermo nuclear activity, they'd be back on ADSL which round here is absolutely appalling. But perhaps that would be the last thing anyone would be concerned about....?)
The upgrade programme on the horizon would then obviously focus on fibre in the core network eg between exchanges, (which is mostly done), and then fibre from the exchanges to the street cabinets. Obviously, this would be best piloted in rural areas first on the principle of disturbing the least amount of people at a time. And on the understanding that the EU or Gummint, or some such body would fund the innovative pilot of FTTcabinet roll out. (Innovative in the UK only, most other countries are already implementing FTTH.) Many of the utility companies may find that they actually own conduit in the vicinity of the proposed rural areas, as well as dark fibre, and decide to avoid the exchanges and street cabs entirely. A simple wayleave payment to impoverished farmers and some backhanders to the planners would no doubt see new utility-owned street cabs replacements and alternative exchanges springing up where cows, sheep and pigs once dwelt. This would no doubt be lucrative for farmers and count as 'farm diversity' and be applauded by the planning authorities too.
There would also have to be subsidies for the smart meters, and a compensation plan for the lunatics who think that wifi (or whichver lump of spectrum was used) is going to damage their health. (There may prove to be some mileage in moving them all up to the Outer Hebrides to live under and work on the windmills needed to power London's exorbitant energy requirements. Potentially the whoomp whoomp of the windmills would drive them truly insane.)
The amount of bandwidth required to transfer data to and from the smart meters
could be charged at exactly the same rate as it currently costs in environmental damage and economics to send out troops of meter readers in vans around the nation. The utility companies would need to buy bandwidth from someone, which presumably will be BT and/or Branson, so that would cut them into the pie and not leave them moaning about their lack of involvement in such an important project - even if it is in rural areas firstly.
However, the local transmission of data would cost the utility companies very little as they own the pipes, and they could retrain a few of the meter readers to maintain the networks. Over the last 20 years or so, it has become apparent that UK Gummint has a policy to keep down the unemployed numbers by taking as many on as possible as civil servants so the Gummint could start a whole new department called "Wireless, Access and Communications Complaints Organisation" - the WACCOs for short who deal with everyone who thinks wireless makes them nauseous or affects their appetite.
Right, so we have a wireless mesh access point smart meter in every home, fibre to at the very least the street cabs and exchanges, a wireless cloud over most of the country, EU regulatory compliance, data being fed from the meters to the utility companies, telcos and utility companies using (up to now) untapped and unused resources such as dark fibre), every home with at the very least a 100Mbps symmetrical wireless connection out to the Net with a VDSL failover on the copper, or the copper being ripped out and flogged on the open market at way more than anyone could ever have dared dream (this also stops it being nicked).
What else? A burgeoning knowledge economy etc in rural areas, geeks from towns travelling out to rural hotspots ie most of the countryside to get a decent connection, which would hopefully encourage the train companies to put on a proper train service, a properly used network infrastructure, a few new people in a new Gummint department, and a lot more people in the Outer Hebrides, which will no doubt get better transport links and services to deal with them. With any luck they will start a campaign against the windmills and force London to switch off a few lights for a change instead of ruining a beautiful (if now somewhat over-populated) area of the British Isles. Plus a bunch of psychiatrists relocating to grab the gummint compensated treatment programmes to treat total eejuts.
Anyway, just a thought. Anyone fancy importaing a few smart meters that are mesh enabled and giving British Gas a call before they spend all that profit?
And smart meters are one area where I just cannot understand what is going on, nor why our utilities etc companies don't get together and get on top of the issues.
What are the issues?
OK, from a utility company POV, there is a need to:
1) Be able to easily access the meters and read them for water, electrickery etc without needing to knock on each house door or business premises
2) Be able to spot leakages or wastage easily - whether this be a burst pipe in a school or a household using more than they can afford to pay for
The easiest way to deal with both of these is to have the meters reporting back in to "HQ". And the easiest way to do that is via wireless, or fibre, or "fiwi". It would not be so great to have a meter plugged in to a telephone line as the amount of spare copper is limited, and the meter does not need to report back constantly so the copper would be underused. As a scarce resource, this is not ideal.
(However, if you were to stop using copper between the street cabs and the homes/businesses for voice and data, it might be a damned good use of the copper rather than pull it out the ground and flog it into a lucrative, profitable marketplace. But that is another discussion!)
For homes and businesses, it would be good if the meter could inform them if they were using above average of the utility compared to say comparable businesses in the region, or their neighbours. This might encourage them to cut down on usage and hence reduce their bills.
There is additionally a major problem in the UKl over this stuff called "broadband". The truth of the matter is that we just don't have it. Not compared to places like Korea, Sweden, Italy, Estonia and even Outer Mongolia. And until someone finds a way of getting the owners of the infrastructure to work together using existing resource eg fibre optics, wireless masts, street cabs and exchanges etc, it is highly likely to stay that way. Particularly for the non honey pot type areas, like most of Britain. Look on a map and see how much green there is? No cities or big urbanisations? That's where there is sod all broadband at all.
And this is where smart meters come in. The EU regulated on smart meters to be introduced in 2007, but it seems the Brits haven't quite noticed that piece of regulation yet. Or those utility companies who can put prices up and annoucne £500 million profits a couple of weeks later are jittery about the potential cost.
Now, imagine if every home and business needed its utility meters replacing. We have electricity and water only, but others have gas too. That would be three new smart meters, all dishing out a wireless signal to be picked up either very locally (eg over Bluetooth or similar) by meter readers who didn't have to get out of their vehicles and just needed to kerb crawl to get a reading, or they would be connected into a larger wireless cloud and feed their data back to a data centre or similar for the utility companies. Latest figures have these costing the consumer, not the utility company, at around £180. Yeah right. I don't think so.
There are however issues with smart meters as they are currently espoused. eg one per utility company.
Firstly, the wireless interference between my three utility metres, next door's, and the rest of my neighbours could be a major issue. Secondly, a ton of people would come out of the woodwork saying they now have a permanent headache, or chilblains year round or something because of the wireless and thirdly, it would cost shedloads of dosh, not just to install said meters but also for the data costs and installing wireless equipment to cover the nation with a wireless cloud.
And therein lies the rub. United Utilities, who deal with our water, also own a telecoms company. It used to be called Your Communications, and is now owned and run by Thus and Kingston Communications. So, these electrickery companies are not foreigners to telco games. Apparently, the top wire on all those enormous pylons you see across the country is a fibre optic telco data cable. Even the water companies have dabbled in the telco markets, and you only need look at the furore around H2) and their plan to stick fibre optic down sewers to see that the water companies are in there too.
The problem with communications infrastructure in our country is that no-one seems to be joining the dots. As wireless needs to become more ubiquitous, the mobile oeprators extend their 3G etc networks to bring data coverage, the telcos faff around, generally, with the likes of The Cloud hotspots, (and stealing the term "wireless broadband" so everyone assumes it is that new box BT has just given them and no more), the utility companies just merge with one another, and the odd telco etc, but no-one is joining the dots.
I am going to try to.
1)The need for broadband speed, accessible and affordable and available to all, everywhere in the UK, and fast as hell. Yes... 1Gbps symmetrical, ta.
2) Supposed scarcity of bandwidth whilst we have unused resource in dark fibre lying all over the country and data costs approaching zero
3) Compliance with EU regulation on smart meters
4)The success of wifi mesh networks
5) The fact that the majority of mobile calls are made in the cell the call orginates from or a neighbouring one
Right, let's put this together.
Into my house, you put a smart meter, that measures electricity, gas and water consumption. On that smart meter is a small wireless antenna. The meter can both transmit and receive information. That meter meshes with the meter in my neighbours' houses, and his with the next house and all others it can see, creating a resilient mesh network throughout our village primarily. In our street cabinet (which I happen to know is one 802.11b 8db antenna hop from most of the houses in the village, and 2 from the top of the village), is another meshbox, and some kit to convert from wireless to fibre.
Every smart meter acts as an access point not just for the utility companies but also to provide internet access. Should you wish to have multiple resilience, the local copper sub-loop can provide back ups. However, should this be needed eg if there was a nuclear magnetic pulse which knocked out the wireless, any survivors of the nuclear bomb could expect reduced internet download and upload speeds for a while over the VDSL link. (If the street cabinet were affected by thermo nuclear activity, they'd be back on ADSL which round here is absolutely appalling. But perhaps that would be the last thing anyone would be concerned about....?)
The upgrade programme on the horizon would then obviously focus on fibre in the core network eg between exchanges, (which is mostly done), and then fibre from the exchanges to the street cabinets. Obviously, this would be best piloted in rural areas first on the principle of disturbing the least amount of people at a time. And on the understanding that the EU or Gummint, or some such body would fund the innovative pilot of FTTcabinet roll out. (Innovative in the UK only, most other countries are already implementing FTTH.) Many of the utility companies may find that they actually own conduit in the vicinity of the proposed rural areas, as well as dark fibre, and decide to avoid the exchanges and street cabs entirely. A simple wayleave payment to impoverished farmers and some backhanders to the planners would no doubt see new utility-owned street cabs replacements and alternative exchanges springing up where cows, sheep and pigs once dwelt. This would no doubt be lucrative for farmers and count as 'farm diversity' and be applauded by the planning authorities too.
There would also have to be subsidies for the smart meters, and a compensation plan for the lunatics who think that wifi (or whichver lump of spectrum was used) is going to damage their health. (There may prove to be some mileage in moving them all up to the Outer Hebrides to live under and work on the windmills needed to power London's exorbitant energy requirements. Potentially the whoomp whoomp of the windmills would drive them truly insane.)
The amount of bandwidth required to transfer data to and from the smart meters
could be charged at exactly the same rate as it currently costs in environmental damage and economics to send out troops of meter readers in vans around the nation. The utility companies would need to buy bandwidth from someone, which presumably will be BT and/or Branson, so that would cut them into the pie and not leave them moaning about their lack of involvement in such an important project - even if it is in rural areas firstly.
However, the local transmission of data would cost the utility companies very little as they own the pipes, and they could retrain a few of the meter readers to maintain the networks. Over the last 20 years or so, it has become apparent that UK Gummint has a policy to keep down the unemployed numbers by taking as many on as possible as civil servants so the Gummint could start a whole new department called "Wireless, Access and Communications Complaints Organisation" - the WACCOs for short who deal with everyone who thinks wireless makes them nauseous or affects their appetite.
Right, so we have a wireless mesh access point smart meter in every home, fibre to at the very least the street cabs and exchanges, a wireless cloud over most of the country, EU regulatory compliance, data being fed from the meters to the utility companies, telcos and utility companies using (up to now) untapped and unused resources such as dark fibre), every home with at the very least a 100Mbps symmetrical wireless connection out to the Net with a VDSL failover on the copper, or the copper being ripped out and flogged on the open market at way more than anyone could ever have dared dream (this also stops it being nicked).
What else? A burgeoning knowledge economy etc in rural areas, geeks from towns travelling out to rural hotspots ie most of the countryside to get a decent connection, which would hopefully encourage the train companies to put on a proper train service, a properly used network infrastructure, a few new people in a new Gummint department, and a lot more people in the Outer Hebrides, which will no doubt get better transport links and services to deal with them. With any luck they will start a campaign against the windmills and force London to switch off a few lights for a change instead of ruining a beautiful (if now somewhat over-populated) area of the British Isles. Plus a bunch of psychiatrists relocating to grab the gummint compensated treatment programmes to treat total eejuts.
Anyway, just a thought. Anyone fancy importaing a few smart meters that are mesh enabled and giving British Gas a call before they spend all that profit?
Pay as you throw vs recycling
Once again, the Gummint's attempts to reduce the amount going to landfill are in the news. This time it is their impoverished and poorly thought out pay as you throw pilot schemes. These would have lasted 3 years, and then been evaluated to decide whther or not to introduce them on a wider, national level.
Talk about too little, too late.
Weirdly, the VT accompanying the story showed diggers etc on a landfill site moving what appeared to be tons of wood amongst the plastic bags etc. One has to wonder what wood is doing making it to a landfill in the 21st century. After all, just because London is a smokeless zone, doesn't mean that the rest of the country is. So, it could be burnt to keep a few OAPs and low income families warm. Or it could be reused, to make MDF or whatever else scrap wood can be used for.
Recently, there was an announcement about how much the blue bags that our council, Eden District, has introduced and the extra tonnage that adds per year to landfill. One would think that the cost of introducing wheelie bins would be substantially less than the cost of producing the blue bags with EDC printed on them, and the fines which are heading their way from the EU for overloading the landfill and making little attempt to reduce the amount going in to landfill.
Eden District Council is a prime example of the gross stupidity being exhibited by our councils, with our money. As I have mentioned before, our local tip used to be run by a guy called Stig. He would keep a keen eye open for what was going into the skips, and make sure that anything that could be potentially reused was rescued and put to one side. Going to the tip inevitably meant you came away with more than you took! But it was generally all useful stuff. Our Belfast sink came from there, as well as many other items that have been reused around the house, and saved us a few quid.
Now, our local tip is run by two 'bouncers' who insist that everything is put into the skips, whether it is potentially useful or not to someone else, and that nothing can be removed. At that point, I was pleased to discover Freecycle, which does allow us to clear the shed of items that are bound to be of some use to someone else and post them on our local Freecycle forum. If only more people knew about Freecycle and groups were in existence across every area of the country. Last week we acquired a washing machine from there (Thanks, Fiona!!) and it's nice to know that 1) we have saved something from landfill that functions brilliantly and 2)we haven't encouraged yet another washing machine to be built by buying a new one.
Our local recycling bank is situated about a mile out of the village, meaning that anyone wishing to dispose of bottles etc has to drive there. Gordon Bennett, how dim are these councillors? How unenvironmentally friendly is having to use petrol every time we want to recycle? Why couldn't they have put it in the village so everyone could easily access it? It's not as if we don't have plenty of places where it could have been put - pick a field!
And I keep hearing stories about recycling banks being closed because they are "too well-used". Arg! Every time I have been to any of our local recycling banks recently, they tend to be overflowing, as more and more people get into recycling as much of their household rubbish as possible. And this is the way it should be. Until the council realise that the people are willing to do all this hard graft for them, and introduce wheelie bins which they empty when they would normally collect the rubbish, we seem to be lumbered with this ludicrous situation. After all, they are going round every household anyway, so why not reduce the amount going to recycling banks by collecting it from our doorsteps in one hit?
And where are the community compost bins? I've noticed that in our blue bags each way, the thing taking up the most space is firstly plastic packaging - we now go to the butcher for most of our meat rather than the supermarket as that is the prime offender - and secondly, food waste. We do have a compost bin, if I could just find it in the chaos of belongings that have resulted from moving house 3 times in 6 months, but how many households don't, and have no garden etc to put the compost on?
Compost generates heat, and I think it is in Nottinghamshire where they have municipal compost heaps which generate heat etc for public buildings. These, as far as I recall, have been in place since the 70s so it's hardly a new idea. Secondly, compost has a resale and reuse value. Considering our local farmers are spreading human shit on the land around the village currently, (and yes, it STINKS!) if the worst came to the worst and it was given to them for free to spread on their land, at least it wouldn't be going in landfill, and it would be putting some good back into the land that grows our food.
As an island, we seem remarkably wasteful of the resources we have. Whether that is overfishing our seas, or ignoring the food that lives wild on our shores, or encouraging a culture where things are obsolete almost before they have been bought, we seem profligate with what we have, and uncaring about what we could have.
The crap attitude in council chambers about dealing with the problems is, I suspect, national. And extends clearly into Westminster. I think that if we dealt with the lights off issue I posted about yesterday, (did I hit publish?!), and the compost and recycling, we'd make far more of an impact than any of the other supposedly good ideas that come out of either Westminster or Brussels to make a difference to waste on this part of our planet.
Why is it so difficult? If some councils can run scrap stores, and give every household and business a wheelie bin (some are divided into 2 or 3 partitions for different recyclable materials), and sort out composting, then why can't that be adopted nationally? It apparently only takes 30 days of doing something each day for it to become a habit, so how long really would it take to retrain this nation to reuse, reduce and recycle??
Talk about too little, too late.
Weirdly, the VT accompanying the story showed diggers etc on a landfill site moving what appeared to be tons of wood amongst the plastic bags etc. One has to wonder what wood is doing making it to a landfill in the 21st century. After all, just because London is a smokeless zone, doesn't mean that the rest of the country is. So, it could be burnt to keep a few OAPs and low income families warm. Or it could be reused, to make MDF or whatever else scrap wood can be used for.
Recently, there was an announcement about how much the blue bags that our council, Eden District, has introduced and the extra tonnage that adds per year to landfill. One would think that the cost of introducing wheelie bins would be substantially less than the cost of producing the blue bags with EDC printed on them, and the fines which are heading their way from the EU for overloading the landfill and making little attempt to reduce the amount going in to landfill.
Eden District Council is a prime example of the gross stupidity being exhibited by our councils, with our money. As I have mentioned before, our local tip used to be run by a guy called Stig. He would keep a keen eye open for what was going into the skips, and make sure that anything that could be potentially reused was rescued and put to one side. Going to the tip inevitably meant you came away with more than you took! But it was generally all useful stuff. Our Belfast sink came from there, as well as many other items that have been reused around the house, and saved us a few quid.
Now, our local tip is run by two 'bouncers' who insist that everything is put into the skips, whether it is potentially useful or not to someone else, and that nothing can be removed. At that point, I was pleased to discover Freecycle, which does allow us to clear the shed of items that are bound to be of some use to someone else and post them on our local Freecycle forum. If only more people knew about Freecycle and groups were in existence across every area of the country. Last week we acquired a washing machine from there (Thanks, Fiona!!) and it's nice to know that 1) we have saved something from landfill that functions brilliantly and 2)we haven't encouraged yet another washing machine to be built by buying a new one.
Our local recycling bank is situated about a mile out of the village, meaning that anyone wishing to dispose of bottles etc has to drive there. Gordon Bennett, how dim are these councillors? How unenvironmentally friendly is having to use petrol every time we want to recycle? Why couldn't they have put it in the village so everyone could easily access it? It's not as if we don't have plenty of places where it could have been put - pick a field!
And I keep hearing stories about recycling banks being closed because they are "too well-used". Arg! Every time I have been to any of our local recycling banks recently, they tend to be overflowing, as more and more people get into recycling as much of their household rubbish as possible. And this is the way it should be. Until the council realise that the people are willing to do all this hard graft for them, and introduce wheelie bins which they empty when they would normally collect the rubbish, we seem to be lumbered with this ludicrous situation. After all, they are going round every household anyway, so why not reduce the amount going to recycling banks by collecting it from our doorsteps in one hit?
And where are the community compost bins? I've noticed that in our blue bags each way, the thing taking up the most space is firstly plastic packaging - we now go to the butcher for most of our meat rather than the supermarket as that is the prime offender - and secondly, food waste. We do have a compost bin, if I could just find it in the chaos of belongings that have resulted from moving house 3 times in 6 months, but how many households don't, and have no garden etc to put the compost on?
Compost generates heat, and I think it is in Nottinghamshire where they have municipal compost heaps which generate heat etc for public buildings. These, as far as I recall, have been in place since the 70s so it's hardly a new idea. Secondly, compost has a resale and reuse value. Considering our local farmers are spreading human shit on the land around the village currently, (and yes, it STINKS!) if the worst came to the worst and it was given to them for free to spread on their land, at least it wouldn't be going in landfill, and it would be putting some good back into the land that grows our food.
As an island, we seem remarkably wasteful of the resources we have. Whether that is overfishing our seas, or ignoring the food that lives wild on our shores, or encouraging a culture where things are obsolete almost before they have been bought, we seem profligate with what we have, and uncaring about what we could have.
The crap attitude in council chambers about dealing with the problems is, I suspect, national. And extends clearly into Westminster. I think that if we dealt with the lights off issue I posted about yesterday, (did I hit publish?!), and the compost and recycling, we'd make far more of an impact than any of the other supposedly good ideas that come out of either Westminster or Brussels to make a difference to waste on this part of our planet.
Why is it so difficult? If some councils can run scrap stores, and give every household and business a wheelie bin (some are divided into 2 or 3 partitions for different recyclable materials), and sort out composting, then why can't that be adopted nationally? It apparently only takes 30 days of doing something each day for it to become a habit, so how long really would it take to retrain this nation to reuse, reduce and recycle??
Wednesday 20 February 2008
Monday 18 February 2008
Fluoride in water
Did you know that fluoridation of water was first explored and implemented by the Nazi gestapo? They used fluroide in the water, seemingly, in the concentration camps to keep the inmates quieter.
The UK Government is proposing to introduce fluoridation far more widely than across the UK currently - are you living in an area that has fluoridation eg Birmingham or Newcastle? Check here
Despite the fact that there is little scientific evidence to back the claims that this will reduce dental caries problems significantly, and historical evidence showing that it can actually have a negative impact, the UK gummint seem determined to go ahead. There are other issues such as the fact that fluoride is of most use when used topically ie swilled around the mouth and spat out, than when it is ingested. Which, of course, would be the result if all drinking water were to have fluoride added. Fluoride is also a toxin so the impact of adding it to a nation's drinking water needs further discussion. Not least by those who will be most affected by such a move. Yet there seems to be very little information available to the electorate from the gummint.
Once again, the nanny state we live in is making decisions that will affect the whole populace and giving us very little choice in the matter. If, for instance, dental problems are most profilic in areas where poverty is also an issue, then surely one way to deal with it would be by firstly ensuring that all such areas have a glut of dentists, including dentists in schools as we had until they were cut by a previous gummint (like we had nit nurses), so that any such teeth problems were caught early on. Additionally, the lack of decent nutritonal education (not helped by removing domestic science etc from schools) means that many children are growing up completely unaware of what they ought to be eating.
The supermarkets also price 'good food' far higher than crap processed food full of salt, sugar, fats etc, thereby putting it out of the reach of the most impoverished. Additionally, the cheapest drinks are not bottled water or real fruit juices, but fizzy drinks full of artifical sweeteners etc which are most definitely not good for your teeth nor health. And because our country is now so full of people, there is little space to encourage allotments etc where even the poorest of the poor could grow wholesome food to supplement their meagre incomes.
I could go on and on about all the different positive policies that could be put in place to begin to attack the reasons for poverty, and supposedly hence dental caries, in this country.
However, one can only guess at the cost for putting in a nationwide fluoridation scheme. And if that fluoride is also put into water in Middle England, where many people do not have dental problems, we are not just wasting money but potentially putting people's health at risk.
Why not issue bottles of fluoride to those who most need it? Teach them to swill their mouths out, and not swallow, and target those who most need it with some one to one advice about nutrition, tooth cleaning, etc. There potentially is about to be yet another generation of parents giving their kids coca cola or similar in their drinks bottles, which is by far one of the most efficient ways to trash your kids teeth.
Educate the masses. Target those who most need this treatment. Encourage people to become dentists and use their dentists. Stop feeding kids crap in schools. Force the supermarkets to bring decent food to affordable prices 9without ripping off the producers and farmers). Get a few celebrities and nutritionists to give those who shop in supermarkets 7 recipes for the week and a full shopping list to suit their budgets. The major religions, like Islam and Judaism, offer support to their followers by advising what to eat and what not to eat, what should be eaten together, and what should not. It is not some foppery, but actually teaches nutrition and common sense.
Our gummint should keep its hands off our drinking water. If it wants to help prevent dental caries etc, then it needs to focus on which of the policies implemented over the last couple of decades have allowed this to happen. And take a long hard look at what they allow food producers and supermarkets to get away with.
The UK Government is proposing to introduce fluoridation far more widely than across the UK currently - are you living in an area that has fluoridation eg Birmingham or Newcastle? Check here
Despite the fact that there is little scientific evidence to back the claims that this will reduce dental caries problems significantly, and historical evidence showing that it can actually have a negative impact, the UK gummint seem determined to go ahead. There are other issues such as the fact that fluoride is of most use when used topically ie swilled around the mouth and spat out, than when it is ingested. Which, of course, would be the result if all drinking water were to have fluoride added. Fluoride is also a toxin so the impact of adding it to a nation's drinking water needs further discussion. Not least by those who will be most affected by such a move. Yet there seems to be very little information available to the electorate from the gummint.
Once again, the nanny state we live in is making decisions that will affect the whole populace and giving us very little choice in the matter. If, for instance, dental problems are most profilic in areas where poverty is also an issue, then surely one way to deal with it would be by firstly ensuring that all such areas have a glut of dentists, including dentists in schools as we had until they were cut by a previous gummint (like we had nit nurses), so that any such teeth problems were caught early on. Additionally, the lack of decent nutritonal education (not helped by removing domestic science etc from schools) means that many children are growing up completely unaware of what they ought to be eating.
The supermarkets also price 'good food' far higher than crap processed food full of salt, sugar, fats etc, thereby putting it out of the reach of the most impoverished. Additionally, the cheapest drinks are not bottled water or real fruit juices, but fizzy drinks full of artifical sweeteners etc which are most definitely not good for your teeth nor health. And because our country is now so full of people, there is little space to encourage allotments etc where even the poorest of the poor could grow wholesome food to supplement their meagre incomes.
I could go on and on about all the different positive policies that could be put in place to begin to attack the reasons for poverty, and supposedly hence dental caries, in this country.
However, one can only guess at the cost for putting in a nationwide fluoridation scheme. And if that fluoride is also put into water in Middle England, where many people do not have dental problems, we are not just wasting money but potentially putting people's health at risk.
Why not issue bottles of fluoride to those who most need it? Teach them to swill their mouths out, and not swallow, and target those who most need it with some one to one advice about nutrition, tooth cleaning, etc. There potentially is about to be yet another generation of parents giving their kids coca cola or similar in their drinks bottles, which is by far one of the most efficient ways to trash your kids teeth.
Educate the masses. Target those who most need this treatment. Encourage people to become dentists and use their dentists. Stop feeding kids crap in schools. Force the supermarkets to bring decent food to affordable prices 9without ripping off the producers and farmers). Get a few celebrities and nutritionists to give those who shop in supermarkets 7 recipes for the week and a full shopping list to suit their budgets. The major religions, like Islam and Judaism, offer support to their followers by advising what to eat and what not to eat, what should be eaten together, and what should not. It is not some foppery, but actually teaches nutrition and common sense.
Our gummint should keep its hands off our drinking water. If it wants to help prevent dental caries etc, then it needs to focus on which of the policies implemented over the last couple of decades have allowed this to happen. And take a long hard look at what they allow food producers and supermarkets to get away with.
Tuesday 12 February 2008
B loody T hieves
Just seen an announcement that BT intend to up the cost of evening calls from 4.5p an hour to 1.5p a minute from 1st April 2008. That's a 1900% increase. And no, I suspect it is not an April fool but it ought to be. And who knows what it will mean for those, like my neighbour, who are reliant on the PCB (phone box) for their telephone calls.
BT's income from calls has been reducing steadily as more people use mobiles, VoIP, email etc to communicate. But this increase is ludicrous. Completely unjustifiable. It costs no more to make a phone call daytime, evening or weekend for 1 sec or an hour because the entire process is automated. BT do not have people plugging in your call at a switchboard any more. Where voice only is being transmitted, there is no additional data cost for BT to bear.
So, what this is about is screwing those who probably can least afford it to no doubt help fund their balls up of a 21st Century Network switchover.
It is more than time that subloop unbundling took place and we could all decide whether we want to replace our lump of ancient and eroded copper to the street cabinet with fibre, and who we buy our telephone services from - if anyone. I'd much rather be using VoIP. And as they are migrating to an all IP core network with 21CN all of these voice calls will be VoIP. Possibly the most expensive VoIP in the world if these charges stand.
BT's income from calls has been reducing steadily as more people use mobiles, VoIP, email etc to communicate. But this increase is ludicrous. Completely unjustifiable. It costs no more to make a phone call daytime, evening or weekend for 1 sec or an hour because the entire process is automated. BT do not have people plugging in your call at a switchboard any more. Where voice only is being transmitted, there is no additional data cost for BT to bear.
So, what this is about is screwing those who probably can least afford it to no doubt help fund their balls up of a 21st Century Network switchover.
It is more than time that subloop unbundling took place and we could all decide whether we want to replace our lump of ancient and eroded copper to the street cabinet with fibre, and who we buy our telephone services from - if anyone. I'd much rather be using VoIP. And as they are migrating to an all IP core network with 21CN all of these voice calls will be VoIP. Possibly the most expensive VoIP in the world if these charges stand.
Post office closures
Today is the day another round of rural Post offices will face closure. The Post Office is scrapping 2500 outlets around the country. This is a severe blow to many rural communities. For Adam Crozier et al who probably don't live anywhere near a rural community, it must be hard to understand just what difference a local Post office makes. Especially when the local bus service is so impoverished it is hard to get even to the next village and back in less than a couple of hours.
I don't think our Post Office is under threat in this round, but rumour in the village has it that the shop is once again under threat, which of course houses the Post Office. Feel I should mobilise the sprogs during half term to poster the village or something - though the likelihood of them getting out of bed before lunchtime is almost zero.
How on earth do we stop essential services in rural areas being closed down? How do you encourage people to shop locally? Or prevent large corporates from slashing the smaller 'outlets' etc, when they are quite easily supported by the larger ones? I know it is all about profits and shareholders, and to me that will continue to be obscene, particularly when it relates to schools, council services, essential services etc.
Recently, I went to Darlington, and needed to get money from the Post Office to finance the latest "wants" of the sprogs. The queue was huge. We waited over half an hour to get served. Presumably everyone in that queue was in the same situation as myself - there was nowhere else to go to get the service they required - be it posting a parcel, getting money from a PO account etc. And this lack of competition in the majority of PO services, this monopoly, has given them leeway to make such cuts as they are today, which have such a phenomenal impact on rural communities - there is nowhere else to go locally to get those services. Sadly, the growth of competition in other services eg who you use for letters and parcels, has shown the failings in the PO to do even the basics well, and so has led to decreased profits.
Going back to how you encourage people to shop locally, it seems to be a modern mindset. Convenience shopping in some numbskull supermarket, 20 miles away because it saves time is surely the most common excuse. The environmental idiocy of this alone beggars belief, let alone the economics. And not jsut the economics for a household budget, but the impact these supermarkets have on farmers etc, which then, in rural areas, affects those who are your neighbours, friends, etc.
Our shop has, of course, a limited choice of items because of space restrictions. However, firstly, you can walk to it so no need to use the car, secondly, if you ask the shop to get something in eg a crate of pomegranate juice, they will, and thirdly, if your bill comes to £20.01, they don't demand the 1p off you. But, people still decide to get in the car and drive to another town and spend the money with a large corporation who often make only minor attempts to improve the local economy. (I think the Co-op is a slightly different fish in that game, but not by that much).
Although the number of rights we have has increased, we haven't introduced RESPONSIBILITY with those rights. So, in my village of approx 400 people, I could probably ask all of them whose responsibility is reporting the broken street light on the corner (flickering now for well over a week), or whose responsiblity is it to use the village amenities such as the village hall etc so they remain open in years to come, whose responsibility is it to ensure that houses in the village are sold to young families so we keep our primary school for another generation, whose responsibility is it that the bus shelter is kept clean and swept of leaves, whose responsiblity is it to make sure the gypsies behave themselves when they are here, or to be friendly to them so they feel a responsiblity to act like responsible citizens and not trash the green .....etc. Would any of them feel that it is their responsibility?
This brings me to whose responsibility is the WELL BEING of our community?
To me, it should fall firmly on each and every one of our shoulders - those of us who live here. In any community, not just ours, surely the responsibility for wellbeing should not fall solely to the council - parish, district or county - or the police, or some quango at the Regional Development Agency. The problem lies in the fact that those mentioned above meddle so thoroughly in our lives (mainly because so many people are employed in the civil service to do precisely that), in so many areas, that we just leave them to it. Assuming in some naive, old fashioned way, that they must know what they are doing. After all, public sector employees get massive wages, compared to our local average wage, a job for life, and a nice fat pension. So, they must be employed on some sort of criteria that they have the expertise for the job. But they don't. They can't understand how my community works unless they live here, can they?
Broadbrush decisions made at County Council level cannot possibly work in both Carlisle and some tiny rural Cumbrian hamlet. Cuts to public spending, or large corporate spending, are always going to affect the smaller communities, shops etc because they are the ones who bring in least profit, and where less people will shout about the problems such cuts cause. And where a large number of citizens or consumers are likely to be affected eg on a national level, we see the government and corporates employing stealth tactics. And as a nation we are remarkably inept at noticing what is going on (mainly due to the media's perverse approach to telling us news), and doing something about it.
Anyway, I'm off to the shop. There's bound to be something I can buy today which will just help add a few pennies to the balance sheet to keep the shop open. After all, it's my responsiblity to the long-term wellbeing of this community I live in to ensure there is a shop there for others in the future. Oh, and then I'll report that street light.....
I don't think our Post Office is under threat in this round, but rumour in the village has it that the shop is once again under threat, which of course houses the Post Office. Feel I should mobilise the sprogs during half term to poster the village or something - though the likelihood of them getting out of bed before lunchtime is almost zero.
How on earth do we stop essential services in rural areas being closed down? How do you encourage people to shop locally? Or prevent large corporates from slashing the smaller 'outlets' etc, when they are quite easily supported by the larger ones? I know it is all about profits and shareholders, and to me that will continue to be obscene, particularly when it relates to schools, council services, essential services etc.
Recently, I went to Darlington, and needed to get money from the Post Office to finance the latest "wants" of the sprogs. The queue was huge. We waited over half an hour to get served. Presumably everyone in that queue was in the same situation as myself - there was nowhere else to go to get the service they required - be it posting a parcel, getting money from a PO account etc. And this lack of competition in the majority of PO services, this monopoly, has given them leeway to make such cuts as they are today, which have such a phenomenal impact on rural communities - there is nowhere else to go locally to get those services. Sadly, the growth of competition in other services eg who you use for letters and parcels, has shown the failings in the PO to do even the basics well, and so has led to decreased profits.
Going back to how you encourage people to shop locally, it seems to be a modern mindset. Convenience shopping in some numbskull supermarket, 20 miles away because it saves time is surely the most common excuse. The environmental idiocy of this alone beggars belief, let alone the economics. And not jsut the economics for a household budget, but the impact these supermarkets have on farmers etc, which then, in rural areas, affects those who are your neighbours, friends, etc.
Our shop has, of course, a limited choice of items because of space restrictions. However, firstly, you can walk to it so no need to use the car, secondly, if you ask the shop to get something in eg a crate of pomegranate juice, they will, and thirdly, if your bill comes to £20.01, they don't demand the 1p off you. But, people still decide to get in the car and drive to another town and spend the money with a large corporation who often make only minor attempts to improve the local economy. (I think the Co-op is a slightly different fish in that game, but not by that much).
Although the number of rights we have has increased, we haven't introduced RESPONSIBILITY with those rights. So, in my village of approx 400 people, I could probably ask all of them whose responsibility is reporting the broken street light on the corner (flickering now for well over a week), or whose responsiblity is it to use the village amenities such as the village hall etc so they remain open in years to come, whose responsibility is it to ensure that houses in the village are sold to young families so we keep our primary school for another generation, whose responsibility is it that the bus shelter is kept clean and swept of leaves, whose responsiblity is it to make sure the gypsies behave themselves when they are here, or to be friendly to them so they feel a responsiblity to act like responsible citizens and not trash the green .....etc. Would any of them feel that it is their responsibility?
This brings me to whose responsibility is the WELL BEING of our community?
To me, it should fall firmly on each and every one of our shoulders - those of us who live here. In any community, not just ours, surely the responsibility for wellbeing should not fall solely to the council - parish, district or county - or the police, or some quango at the Regional Development Agency. The problem lies in the fact that those mentioned above meddle so thoroughly in our lives (mainly because so many people are employed in the civil service to do precisely that), in so many areas, that we just leave them to it. Assuming in some naive, old fashioned way, that they must know what they are doing. After all, public sector employees get massive wages, compared to our local average wage, a job for life, and a nice fat pension. So, they must be employed on some sort of criteria that they have the expertise for the job. But they don't. They can't understand how my community works unless they live here, can they?
Broadbrush decisions made at County Council level cannot possibly work in both Carlisle and some tiny rural Cumbrian hamlet. Cuts to public spending, or large corporate spending, are always going to affect the smaller communities, shops etc because they are the ones who bring in least profit, and where less people will shout about the problems such cuts cause. And where a large number of citizens or consumers are likely to be affected eg on a national level, we see the government and corporates employing stealth tactics. And as a nation we are remarkably inept at noticing what is going on (mainly due to the media's perverse approach to telling us news), and doing something about it.
Anyway, I'm off to the shop. There's bound to be something I can buy today which will just help add a few pennies to the balance sheet to keep the shop open. After all, it's my responsiblity to the long-term wellbeing of this community I live in to ensure there is a shop there for others in the future. Oh, and then I'll report that street light.....
Monday 11 February 2008
Half Term woes
It's worsened as the day has gone on, and the sun has gone down. Now it appears that we are at the start of a sleepover. The house suddenly appears full of people who hopefully aren't planning to spend the night, but who have just dropped round for the crack. These village jungle drums are far too efficient.
Think I may adopt my aunt's habit and ring the speaking clock so that at six o'clock precisely, the wine bottle is opened. 25 mins to go. Why does no-one warn you that sex leads to teenagers?
Think I may adopt my aunt's habit and ring the speaking clock so that at six o'clock precisely, the wine bottle is opened. 25 mins to go. Why does no-one warn you that sex leads to teenagers?
half term
Day 3 of half term and luckily the sun has come out. This has meant that the girls stand to survive another day without perforated ear drums from me shouting at them, or just plain murder. Mainly because they are outside persecuting the ducks in the stream. However, this has led to demands for a dinghy to row up and down the beck. Required because their inflatable armchairs were burst the last time they tried this trick of canoeing to Carlisle. Sadly, they didn't make it downstream that far.
I hate half term. If I could afford boarding school, there they would find themselves. Not that I don't enjoy my kids' company, but I have to admit that when I am trying to work, which I am, I enjoy their company msot when they are asleep.
It seems though, that in order to make the most of their late night sojourns on to Youtube etc now they have laptops, I'm going to have to radically alter my body clock so that I get up at 6am and get almost a full day's work in before they even wake up. That is asking a lot of a body which at times is almost completely 12 hours out of sync with that particular timetable!
And, having done some research into my displacement activity of getting the keywords "womble porn" and my blog higher up Google, I may need to try a different search term. It is likely that no-one ever searches on Anti-terrorist caterpillars so I'm going to see whether I can list number one on such an unlikely key phrase. It's either that or "irradiated radishes" - for which I have very minor competition from some academic papers. So, womble porn has gone, and all the very odd late night thoughts about turning womble porn into some kind of revenue stream!
Time to exercise my vocal chords as child 1 is shouting at me.....
I hate half term. If I could afford boarding school, there they would find themselves. Not that I don't enjoy my kids' company, but I have to admit that when I am trying to work, which I am, I enjoy their company msot when they are asleep.
It seems though, that in order to make the most of their late night sojourns on to Youtube etc now they have laptops, I'm going to have to radically alter my body clock so that I get up at 6am and get almost a full day's work in before they even wake up. That is asking a lot of a body which at times is almost completely 12 hours out of sync with that particular timetable!
And, having done some research into my displacement activity of getting the keywords "womble porn" and my blog higher up Google, I may need to try a different search term. It is likely that no-one ever searches on Anti-terrorist caterpillars so I'm going to see whether I can list number one on such an unlikely key phrase. It's either that or "irradiated radishes" - for which I have very minor competition from some academic papers. So, womble porn has gone, and all the very odd late night thoughts about turning womble porn into some kind of revenue stream!
Time to exercise my vocal chords as child 1 is shouting at me.....
Sunday 10 February 2008
Support Freecycle
Until the school get their act together, I'll support Freecycle in their fundraising bid. So, type your search term in the box and help raise money for Freecycle. The search engine is powered by Ask so you get good results. And raise money for charity.
Freecycle and strapped schools
The last few weeks seem to have seen a deluge of letters from school asking for voluntary and involuntary contributions to the school funds. Firstly, I thought this was what we paid taxes for - to pay for the education of our kids. Secondly, what have Labour been doing with the education budget if our local schools are operating with such major deficits? And thirdly, why the hell can't the school exhibit a tiny bit of ingenuity when demanding money from parents?
This week I have discovered the joys of freecycle, and been reminded of what the average human is capable of thinking up when local councils etc degenerate into landfill lunacy. I went to our local tip today to get rid of real rubbish, and saw inside the skips an absolute mountain of stuff that doesn't belong in landfill. But, we are no longer allowed to take things of use to us, now the council have booted out our beloved Stig. He used to gather together all that was useful and we were allowed to take it away to reduce, reuse or recycle. Now, the two 'bouncers' who guard the skips prevent you from reducing the amount going to landfill. Hence the joy of Freecycle which allows you to post unwanted items, or seek items you need, all for free.
On looking back through the archives I spot a post saying that you can help fundraise for Freecycle using everyclick.com which pays money to the charity of your choice as you use the search engine.
So, why can't our local schools implement this type of fundraising idea? Not only that but maybe create a directory of local businesses to encourage parents, pupils and staff to shop locally? This would surely be an ideal 6th form project, showing them how to approach businesses to ask them to advertise in the directory, create the directory on paper and/or on the web, run accounts for the directory, promote it, encourage local people to use it etc. Tried suggesting this to the school as an alternative to "Every parent must give a tenner to make up the shortage in school funds" letter which they just emailed and sent to us via the sprogs.
That's another thing that is pissing me off. Reduce the amount of paper and admin by emailing letters, rather than printing them - don't do both. All that would seem to have done is create a whole new job for the admin staff who now have to email AND print the letters out.
This week I have discovered the joys of freecycle, and been reminded of what the average human is capable of thinking up when local councils etc degenerate into landfill lunacy. I went to our local tip today to get rid of real rubbish, and saw inside the skips an absolute mountain of stuff that doesn't belong in landfill. But, we are no longer allowed to take things of use to us, now the council have booted out our beloved Stig. He used to gather together all that was useful and we were allowed to take it away to reduce, reuse or recycle. Now, the two 'bouncers' who guard the skips prevent you from reducing the amount going to landfill. Hence the joy of Freecycle which allows you to post unwanted items, or seek items you need, all for free.
On looking back through the archives I spot a post saying that you can help fundraise for Freecycle using everyclick.com which pays money to the charity of your choice as you use the search engine.
So, why can't our local schools implement this type of fundraising idea? Not only that but maybe create a directory of local businesses to encourage parents, pupils and staff to shop locally? This would surely be an ideal 6th form project, showing them how to approach businesses to ask them to advertise in the directory, create the directory on paper and/or on the web, run accounts for the directory, promote it, encourage local people to use it etc. Tried suggesting this to the school as an alternative to "Every parent must give a tenner to make up the shortage in school funds" letter which they just emailed and sent to us via the sprogs.
That's another thing that is pissing me off. Reduce the amount of paper and admin by emailing letters, rather than printing them - don't do both. All that would seem to have done is create a whole new job for the admin staff who now have to email AND print the letters out.
Wednesday 6 February 2008
How to complain to corporates
The dogbomb complaints letters - without a doubt one of the most amusing forum threads I have read in a while.(I know, I must get out more...;o)
Daughter 2 has been trying to start a campaign to bring back the foil wrapper on Kit kats. Who could have imagined that someone could approach Kit Kat on this issue in such a manner as post 55? (Have emailed to sleeping sprog to inspire her during half term!)
After a lengthy conversation yesterday about money being the new god, and the control that corporates have over our lives, this has lightened the load a little about how to deal with them.
Daughter 2 has been trying to start a campaign to bring back the foil wrapper on Kit kats. Who could have imagined that someone could approach Kit Kat on this issue in such a manner as post 55? (Have emailed to sleeping sprog to inspire her during half term!)
After a lengthy conversation yesterday about money being the new god, and the control that corporates have over our lives, this has lightened the load a little about how to deal with them.
Tuesday 5 February 2008
Giving up carbon for Lent
On Radio 2 this afternoon, Chris Evans had a Bishop on saying that we should give up carbon for Lent. I take it this means that my attempts at cookery may have to be somewhat more carefully prepared for the next 40 days, and that perhaps even a new toaster may be in order.
Out of interest, why can't anyone produce a toaster that doesn't cremate one side, or one corner, and leave the rest uncooked? We are doing a fantastic job of warming the planet apparently, so how come we can't evenly toast a single slice of bread? Or one into which a standard slice of bread fits? Can't the bread makers and toaster peeps get together on size of slice? (If anyone knows a good toaster, please recommend one. Preferably one of those old ones which did 4 slices, and had a little wind up timer on the side - they always worked fine).
Anyway, back to the carbon thing. Read an article today about a call to ban patio heaters patio heaters on El Reg. The EU noodles have been sitting in some over-heated, super-lit office in Brussels again pondering how to reduce the carbon footprint of the population of the EU. It seems to me that several of the suggestions made in the comments would have more of an impact on the carbon emissions than turning a few patio heaters off and sending us poor smokers to hospital with hypothermia or pneumonia to add to our woes.
So, here would be my list of things to do to reduce carbon emissions.
1) Tell all Brussels bureaucrats that their expense allowance now includes one flight per year to Brussels and the rest is going to be spent on FTTH across the whole of EU so the buggers can teleconference instead of going on jaunts. As I understand it, FTTx kit is far more energy efficient than DSL kit, or a Boeing 737.
2) Turn off lights in every single unoccupied building and room in the country/world. Especially Govt and commercial ones. Last time I passed the DTi building in London, at 6am in the morning, it looked like the proverbial Xmas tree. In New York, London, Paris etc none of the kids have ever seen the night sky - they have no chance with all those lux deafening the stars.
3) Put over every single street light a metal reflector so the light is reflected downwards. On top of the reflector put a small solar panel. I've seen these in the Canaries, and they work a treat. Not only can you reduce the wattage of the lightbulb required, but the things produce energy to supplement the electricity needed to light streets at 4am.
4) Turn streetlights off after midnight. If we build nightvision into mobile phone cameras, everyone could use those instead. Or eat more carrots if they insist on walking around in the middle of the night.
5) Allow adults to make decisions about smoking. In Spain, when the smoking ban was introduced, it took 4 days for ashtrays to be re-introduced inside bars and pubs, and not much longer to repeal the law and change it so the proprietor of the establishment could decide for him/herself what was best for his business and customers. Why? Because the Spanish (and others), unlike the Brits, don't take nanny state-ism lying down. Most bars over a certain size have more than enough room for a smoking and non-smoking area. Our local pub does and prior to the smoking ban, it was working just fine with the non-smokers in the lounge. However, now, as most of the locals are smokers, we have one or two forlorn non-smokers sitting in the bar alone, whilst everyone else is socialising outside. Next to the patio heater.
Britain is so busy trying to regulate everything and control everyone, we have ceased to teach youngsters (and dim adults) about the responsibility for their actions, and consequences of doing things wrong. Not wrong as in passing a speed camera 4 miles above the speed limit, or skiving school/work occasionally, but wrong as in knifing people, not respecting their elders, causing criminal damage, kicking shit out of people when they've had one too many etc.
Let them climb trees and fall out of them, let them play conkers, let them be kids, so they can learn to be decent adults. And let the adults work out for themselves what is right and correct behaviour for human beings.
Currently, IMHO, the UK deserves nominating for a reverse Darwin award as we seem to be doing a remarkably good job of removing certain people from the gene pool - the good guys. Those who go to try to break up a fight, stop criminal damage being caused by yobs etc and get kicked, knifed, murdered etc. The kids who don't want to join a gang. Those who speak out about Govt insanity and die in suspicious circumstances in woods. We penalise the honourable members of our society, who refuse to pay poll tax for nuclear weapons, and then let off a joyrider who kills someone with a conditional discharge.
No wonder so many people are voting with their feet and leaving this country. You don't see the French or Spanish emigrating in droves. They are in it for the long-term, and fight for the idiocies of politicians who don't live in the real world to be stopped. The British have put up with this domination for 500 years longer than many other nations (since 1066 or thereabouts) and the stiff upper lip needs to start wavering a little.
So, yes, turn your lights off. And every CEO, MP etc should be held personally responsible for any energy wastage in their business premises, and their constituency. Not just through Lent but from now on. What about a flickr site where you can post photos of any building with the lights left on, and the location, name of business, council etc and name and shame the buggers. They are wasting far more than us average human beans, posting to blogs about womble porn and keeping warm whilst we smoke with patio heaters.
Out of interest, why can't anyone produce a toaster that doesn't cremate one side, or one corner, and leave the rest uncooked? We are doing a fantastic job of warming the planet apparently, so how come we can't evenly toast a single slice of bread? Or one into which a standard slice of bread fits? Can't the bread makers and toaster peeps get together on size of slice? (If anyone knows a good toaster, please recommend one. Preferably one of those old ones which did 4 slices, and had a little wind up timer on the side - they always worked fine).
Anyway, back to the carbon thing. Read an article today about a call to ban patio heaters patio heaters on El Reg. The EU noodles have been sitting in some over-heated, super-lit office in Brussels again pondering how to reduce the carbon footprint of the population of the EU. It seems to me that several of the suggestions made in the comments would have more of an impact on the carbon emissions than turning a few patio heaters off and sending us poor smokers to hospital with hypothermia or pneumonia to add to our woes.
So, here would be my list of things to do to reduce carbon emissions.
1) Tell all Brussels bureaucrats that their expense allowance now includes one flight per year to Brussels and the rest is going to be spent on FTTH across the whole of EU so the buggers can teleconference instead of going on jaunts. As I understand it, FTTx kit is far more energy efficient than DSL kit, or a Boeing 737.
2) Turn off lights in every single unoccupied building and room in the country/world. Especially Govt and commercial ones. Last time I passed the DTi building in London, at 6am in the morning, it looked like the proverbial Xmas tree. In New York, London, Paris etc none of the kids have ever seen the night sky - they have no chance with all those lux deafening the stars.
3) Put over every single street light a metal reflector so the light is reflected downwards. On top of the reflector put a small solar panel. I've seen these in the Canaries, and they work a treat. Not only can you reduce the wattage of the lightbulb required, but the things produce energy to supplement the electricity needed to light streets at 4am.
4) Turn streetlights off after midnight. If we build nightvision into mobile phone cameras, everyone could use those instead. Or eat more carrots if they insist on walking around in the middle of the night.
5) Allow adults to make decisions about smoking. In Spain, when the smoking ban was introduced, it took 4 days for ashtrays to be re-introduced inside bars and pubs, and not much longer to repeal the law and change it so the proprietor of the establishment could decide for him/herself what was best for his business and customers. Why? Because the Spanish (and others), unlike the Brits, don't take nanny state-ism lying down. Most bars over a certain size have more than enough room for a smoking and non-smoking area. Our local pub does and prior to the smoking ban, it was working just fine with the non-smokers in the lounge. However, now, as most of the locals are smokers, we have one or two forlorn non-smokers sitting in the bar alone, whilst everyone else is socialising outside. Next to the patio heater.
Britain is so busy trying to regulate everything and control everyone, we have ceased to teach youngsters (and dim adults) about the responsibility for their actions, and consequences of doing things wrong. Not wrong as in passing a speed camera 4 miles above the speed limit, or skiving school/work occasionally, but wrong as in knifing people, not respecting their elders, causing criminal damage, kicking shit out of people when they've had one too many etc.
Let them climb trees and fall out of them, let them play conkers, let them be kids, so they can learn to be decent adults. And let the adults work out for themselves what is right and correct behaviour for human beings.
Currently, IMHO, the UK deserves nominating for a reverse Darwin award as we seem to be doing a remarkably good job of removing certain people from the gene pool - the good guys. Those who go to try to break up a fight, stop criminal damage being caused by yobs etc and get kicked, knifed, murdered etc. The kids who don't want to join a gang. Those who speak out about Govt insanity and die in suspicious circumstances in woods. We penalise the honourable members of our society, who refuse to pay poll tax for nuclear weapons, and then let off a joyrider who kills someone with a conditional discharge.
No wonder so many people are voting with their feet and leaving this country. You don't see the French or Spanish emigrating in droves. They are in it for the long-term, and fight for the idiocies of politicians who don't live in the real world to be stopped. The British have put up with this domination for 500 years longer than many other nations (since 1066 or thereabouts) and the stiff upper lip needs to start wavering a little.
So, yes, turn your lights off. And every CEO, MP etc should be held personally responsible for any energy wastage in their business premises, and their constituency. Not just through Lent but from now on. What about a flickr site where you can post photos of any building with the lights left on, and the location, name of business, council etc and name and shame the buggers. They are wasting far more than us average human beans, posting to blogs about womble porn and keeping warm whilst we smoke with patio heaters.
Monday 4 February 2008
My famileee of eee pcs
I now have three Asus EEE PCs. It's not that I'm greedy or anything. Number 1 - a surprise present from a work colleague and friend, got trashed by a drunken eejut (I think he was enveeeous of the time I was spending with my eee). However, I think with the addition of a small monitor and some gaffer tape, it may be rescuable, so I am considering turning it into an Internet radio for the kitchen. Number 2 is a 2G - a way infeeerior model bought as a replacement, which sort of added insult to injureee, and number 3 was bought as a replacement for number 1 - another 4G.
They are my babeees. I am definitely involved in an eeefair, and I snapped up the 4G on eeeebay and it had an 8Gb memory card thrown in which has turned out to be the biz. I had debated buying an external hard drive but that sort of knackers the portability of the thing.
Enough poor EEE puns meeethinks.
The wifi is pretty canny, picking up signals where a variety of other devices (several mobiles, PCs and even the Mac Mini on occasion) seem to fail.
Now the girls want one to replace their laptops (given as presents at Xmas) because the glamour of those palled the moment the EEE came into their lives. Well, my life as I tend not to allow them near it except to play the Penguin game, or to watch TV in bed with me on it.
I have a couple of issues with it, but these are generally solved by moving onto either a PC in the office or the Mac Mini. However, one of them I am definitely going to have to solve soon. I have a very nice roll up keyboard from the Ipaq days, which is a doddle to type on, whereas the EEE keyboard does quite frequently catch me out. Thing is, the roll up keyboard has a mini USB connector. So, today's task is to find a convertor so I can plug the neat keyboard into the EEE. It also has the benefit of easily fitting into a pocket which means I can keep my space requirements and weight down.
The second problem which is going to take longer to solve is to learn something I am desperately need to know more about if I want the most out of my eee. And that's using the terminal window properly for Linux. Up to now, I have needed to learn very few commands: ping, ipconfig /all and a couple of others being the limit really! So, my personal project to do when I'm not working (see previous post about womble porn etc!) is to learn something useful about terminal commands instead of drifting round the Net looking at sites of interest but not much use!
In fact, a month and a bit late, I think that can be my New Year's resolution for 2008. Better add it to backpack or I'll never remember it tomorrow, let alone for the rest of the year!
If you are as disorganised as I tend to be, with an ever-growing problem of amnesia, and a huge pile of lists on my desk so I don't overlook any work, Backpack is pretty useful. And it emails you when you have a deadline to do something, which is proving fantastically useful in the middle of multiple campaigns etc, as well as an increasingly hectic social life, not mine, the kids.
Oh yes, and Guy helped me set up a great little window timer on the EEE that pops up every 15 mins and asks, "What are you doing?" and then enters your reply in a text file so you can look back and see how little you achieved today. Well, it doesn't yet pop up every 15 mins as I need to work out the 'cron' bit or remind Guy to pass on his notes for eeejuts about cron! Back to Backpack for another reminder on that.
I love the Mac Mini but every time I go anywhere, I have to take that stupid bulky power pack, and the convertors for the monitor I am likely to find at the other end, and I usually take keyboard and mouse as many people don't have spare USB keyboards etc knocking around their office or kitchen.
The other thing about the EEE of course is that if you take it to a client to work on whilst you are there, the first half hour is generally taken up with Oohs and Aahs etc as they fondle it all over, and then another however long trying to find someone who actually has one in stock. (Use the EEE stock checker and save yourself losing work time and pay!)
They are my babeees. I am definitely involved in an eeefair, and I snapped up the 4G on eeeebay and it had an 8Gb memory card thrown in which has turned out to be the biz. I had debated buying an external hard drive but that sort of knackers the portability of the thing.
Enough poor EEE puns meeethinks.
The wifi is pretty canny, picking up signals where a variety of other devices (several mobiles, PCs and even the Mac Mini on occasion) seem to fail.
Now the girls want one to replace their laptops (given as presents at Xmas) because the glamour of those palled the moment the EEE came into their lives. Well, my life as I tend not to allow them near it except to play the Penguin game, or to watch TV in bed with me on it.
I have a couple of issues with it, but these are generally solved by moving onto either a PC in the office or the Mac Mini. However, one of them I am definitely going to have to solve soon. I have a very nice roll up keyboard from the Ipaq days, which is a doddle to type on, whereas the EEE keyboard does quite frequently catch me out. Thing is, the roll up keyboard has a mini USB connector. So, today's task is to find a convertor so I can plug the neat keyboard into the EEE. It also has the benefit of easily fitting into a pocket which means I can keep my space requirements and weight down.
The second problem which is going to take longer to solve is to learn something I am desperately need to know more about if I want the most out of my eee. And that's using the terminal window properly for Linux. Up to now, I have needed to learn very few commands: ping, ipconfig /all and a couple of others being the limit really! So, my personal project to do when I'm not working (see previous post about womble porn etc!) is to learn something useful about terminal commands instead of drifting round the Net looking at sites of interest but not much use!
In fact, a month and a bit late, I think that can be my New Year's resolution for 2008. Better add it to backpack or I'll never remember it tomorrow, let alone for the rest of the year!
If you are as disorganised as I tend to be, with an ever-growing problem of amnesia, and a huge pile of lists on my desk so I don't overlook any work, Backpack is pretty useful. And it emails you when you have a deadline to do something, which is proving fantastically useful in the middle of multiple campaigns etc, as well as an increasingly hectic social life, not mine, the kids.
Oh yes, and Guy helped me set up a great little window timer on the EEE that pops up every 15 mins and asks, "What are you doing?" and then enters your reply in a text file so you can look back and see how little you achieved today. Well, it doesn't yet pop up every 15 mins as I need to work out the 'cron' bit or remind Guy to pass on his notes for eeejuts about cron! Back to Backpack for another reminder on that.
I love the Mac Mini but every time I go anywhere, I have to take that stupid bulky power pack, and the convertors for the monitor I am likely to find at the other end, and I usually take keyboard and mouse as many people don't have spare USB keyboards etc knocking around their office or kitchen.
The other thing about the EEE of course is that if you take it to a client to work on whilst you are there, the first half hour is generally taken up with Oohs and Aahs etc as they fondle it all over, and then another however long trying to find someone who actually has one in stock. (Use the EEE stock checker and save yourself losing work time and pay!)
Womble Porn
Isn't it strange that you promise you are going to get some work done in the evening, and then spend hours on sites that have no relation whatsoever to work you need to do, and include the top search site for the term 'womble porn'?
I have been thinking about this search term over the last half hour or so and decided that it could only occur on a site which also mentions Dave Gorman. However, Jeremy Clarkson recently used the term 'motorway wombles' to describe the police who drive up and down and whose job appears to be to close the motorway or slow traffic down. I am still pondering on the purpose of motorway wombles and why we pay them.
As an owner of a handmade Wellington Womble, I am wondering whether there is any mileage in a series of porn wombles, or even virtual porn wombles as a method of generating income? After all, porn sites make money. They make the most money on the Net and maybe we could start a trend for hard to find porn wombles on Ebay?
This site with womble porn mentioned on it, is the site of a guy who used to work for the BBC (nice to see they don't just employ staid newsreaders with our money), who raised the money for his iPod by asking 500 people to donate 50p each, and who at one point held the Guinness World record for getting around all 275 tube stations in the fastest time. Geofftech for anyone else who is trying to avoid work, and needs to see why anyone would even consider putting the term 'womble porn' on their site/blog.
A marginally pointless post, but I am trying an experiment. How much effort do I need to put in to get the No 1 listing on Google for 'womble porn'. I'm hoping that it won't take much effort as an SEO expert, but I do know that starting a new blog is not all that is required. I will try and list my efforts over the next few days and see how fast I can move this blog up the rankings.
I have been thinking about this search term over the last half hour or so and decided that it could only occur on a site which also mentions Dave Gorman. However, Jeremy Clarkson recently used the term 'motorway wombles' to describe the police who drive up and down and whose job appears to be to close the motorway or slow traffic down. I am still pondering on the purpose of motorway wombles and why we pay them.
As an owner of a handmade Wellington Womble, I am wondering whether there is any mileage in a series of porn wombles, or even virtual porn wombles as a method of generating income? After all, porn sites make money. They make the most money on the Net and maybe we could start a trend for hard to find porn wombles on Ebay?
This site with womble porn mentioned on it, is the site of a guy who used to work for the BBC (nice to see they don't just employ staid newsreaders with our money), who raised the money for his iPod by asking 500 people to donate 50p each, and who at one point held the Guinness World record for getting around all 275 tube stations in the fastest time. Geofftech for anyone else who is trying to avoid work, and needs to see why anyone would even consider putting the term 'womble porn' on their site/blog.
A marginally pointless post, but I am trying an experiment. How much effort do I need to put in to get the No 1 listing on Google for 'womble porn'. I'm hoping that it won't take much effort as an SEO expert, but I do know that starting a new blog is not all that is required. I will try and list my efforts over the next few days and see how fast I can move this blog up the rankings.
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