Category Archives: Ramblings

Sustainable Christmas

Right. Here is my Christmas Rant. I am going to go through this at length and I am setting out my thoughts. I am not trying to set out a polemic or start a pointless argument. If you would like to comment, please do me the courtesy of respecting my point of view rather than using the facile and well-trodden path of shouting Scrooge or Bah Humbug. I have come to these downbeat conclusions over a number of years, and I don’t think well-timed visits from men in nighties is going to change my mind much.

Those of you who know me will know I’m not a big fan of organised Christmas activity. There are parts of it that are wonderful. Who wouldn’t like an excuse for a big festive dinner and a bit of a drink, a chance to shut ourselves up with our loved ones and pets for a day, and whirlwind of catching up with our friends and neighbours for a few seasonal parties? I don’t mind putting cards in the post. I even have been known to write a round-robin, and it’s nice hearing back from people telling us what their years have been like.

There are parts that are bleak and dark for me. Gift-giving is one such. I extend this to birthdays too. It would be wonderful if we could have a brief exchange of meaningful gifts – things we have bought for each other because they will make our lives easier or better or happier. Things we know will be appreciated. But I bet most presents most people receive this year won’t fit those categories. They will receive presents that say “I spent a lot of money on you” or that say “I was tearing round the shops at the last minute and this was the last thing on the shelves that even vaguely matches your personality.” I know I have given gifts just like this.

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Brain tumour

Well, that’s gonna have grabbed the attention of all the RSSers, innit. I don’t have one, to be clear from the outset.

But I do have a headache I’ve had for nine days now.

I’ve had the headache on working days and weekends. Days I’ve had a drink and sober days. Days working with computers, days not working computers. I’ve even had it on the day when I didn’t have coffee for breakfast. I only found this out because I ran out of coffee, it’s not like I chose not to have coffee.

I don’t always have it first thing in the morning, but it comes back in the afternoons, and is always there by bedtime.

It’s unlikely to be a brain tumour, and is more likely attributable to stress, caffeine, lifestyle or diet.

It’s not the worst headache I’ve ever had, nor is it even slightly debilitating. It’s just annoying.

But I’ve still being roleplaying conversations with the doctor whilst driving home at the dead of night.

“You have a malignant, inoperable brain tumour, Mr Foster.”

(Play it cool, play it cool)

“Oh, really? Never mind.”

My concerns would be: will it hurt? How much care will I need? How long have I got

And crucially, will I be bed-bound or can I quickly cancel the kitchen plans and spend the money buggering off on the holiday of a lifetime?

An eventful dinner

Last night, both of us got in from various different things at gone 11pm, me from work, himself from a panto, having not yet eaten.

So, something fast and nutritious was required. I almost had an omelette, but couldn’t be arsed to clear enough space in the kitchen to chop an onion. We settled for beans and scrambled eggs on toast. Can’t go wrong with that?

Our cats have very strong associations between tins being opened and getting fed, even though we feed them almost exclusively on dry biscuit out of a two kilo sack. The tins we open most often are tomatoes, beans and olives, none of which the cats will eat (I’ve tried!). I suppose the occasional tin of tuna makes it worth their while winding themselves around our legs whenever they hear a ringpull or a can opener.

So, two slices in the toaster, tin of beans decanted to a mug and microwaved (we have hundreds of mugs but only fifteen bowls, so the chances of there being a clean mug are higher than the chances of there being a clean bowl – roll on the dishwasher) and two eggs scrambled in one of the remaining non-stick saucepans.

In under five minutes, dinner is ready.

P likes the smell, so I divvy up the eggs and leave some in the pan for him, get another tin of beans and let him reuse the beany mug, and go and sit down to watch the awful Katherine Tate show when P shouts “Alex, help!”

Now I am often rude about P’s cooking skills, but somehow this time, he’s managed to set fire to the toaster. Which takes the biscuit.

It’s quite a serious fire, too, flames leaping out of the toaster. By the time I’ve managed to set down my dinner and get out of the chair, he’s managed to open the two back doors (no mean feat, what with misfitting locks) and I clear recycling bottles away from the toaster. He grabs it, unplugs it and takes it out to the patio.

After he sets it down, flames continue to lick out of the toast slots for about 10 minutes. Peering in from above, it does look like the orange and blue flames are coming from actual pieces of burnt toast in the bottom of the machine. I had no idea that discarded toast fragments contained such a vital source of energy. There’s the answer to Britain’s generating requirements: door-to-door collections of toaster debris.

P still eats the piece of toast that was in the toaster.

And I now have an excuse to replace the toaster as well as the decades-old-kettle that no longer switches itself off. I can have new ones to go in my new kitchen.

Pirates of the Sodding Carribbean

I was engaged watching some sort of televisual entertainment on the haunted fishtank the other day – something which, to be  honest, I don’t do a lot of. We have a weekly date to watch Torchwood on a Sunday evening, and that’s about it.  But yesterday, I found myself watching a non-BBC channel, ITV2, I think, showing some sort of programme about Britain’s youngest parents.

Some sort of professional nanny was wandering around the house, complaining about people still being in bed at the shock hour of 8am, and making loads of comments out loud about the hygiene, and the tidiness.  I hope she never sees my house.

And then there were advertisements. Every single ad, for no matter what product, seemed to have a gratuitous reference to Pirates of the Caribbean. Why? Five ads in a row for various different shops – Asda, WHSmiths, Woolworths and the like – all went “You can buy Christmas presents – including Pirates of the Carribbean – in our shop!” Can’t people figure this sort of thing out for themselves these days?

Don’t get me started on Christmas.

Especially for Grace

Grace asked for more cat pictures. I think she’s probably gone to bed now.

P5120120

Whilst we were doing so much with cat pics yesterday (less so today) a colleague pointed out that I have far more pictures of Fudge than Smudge.

This is true. Fudge is definitely my favourite. But it’s OK, because Smudge is P’s favourite, so it all evens out.

Here’s a few other cool things Duncan taught us to do:

catsil
Silhouettes… and

… Break-outs – photos where parts of the image break out of the frame of the rest. This takes hours in Photoshop, itself an expensive programme, but is relatively straightforward in PagePlus.
cat-co

Temperature nerdism

I’m starting to follow in my father’s footsteps and taking an unhealthy interest in the weather.

So when I clocked in Lidl that they had very cheap digital in/out max/min thermometers, I jumped at the chance and bought two.

I have installed one in the office and one in my home office.

I can tell you that when I left the Chesterfield office at 23.40 this evening, it was 2.5 degrees. No wonder my car had frozen up. But with my new thermometer, I was forewarned!

At home, it’s registering 3.5 deg outside, and a whopping 20 in. I’m sure it’s not really so hot.

I now have rather a lot of thermometers.

New digital one with wired outdoor sensor in my office. Digital with wireless sensor in the sitting room (14 deg), and the sensor in the bedroom (17 deg). Alcohol thermometer over the central thermostat reads 15 and the alcohol max/min one on the lean to reads min 3 deg (which must be now or last night) and max 42 deg (which must have been in August!)

And of course there’s the one in the car, which read 1 deg in the Bingo carpark, 4 deg on the M1 and 2 deg where I parked at home.

Which is all very well.

But what I’d really like is a series of wifi thermometer sensors recording and sending info to my PC that could draw pretty graphs and alert me to problems with the heating over the internet, etc.

There do seem to be one or two things like that available, but they’re either obscenely expensive or involve lots of soldering and being practical, which is more than I can manage.

Thobut I’d love something capable of producing reports like these.

Late nite drive home

I stayed in the office longer than I should have done this evening, given that I got in before the end of Woman’s Hour, even before the start of the daily serial.

Mostly because I got distracted and started doing the Liberal Drinks artwork you see below this post.

But it did mean I got to listen to some cracking radio on the way home. The Department series came to an end. I’ve heard occasional bits of this but never really listened to. They had some amazing one liners tonight:

Lord Nelson used to be called Lord Nielson – until he lost an i

I’m like a German vegetarian: I fear the wurst!

And a silly plot, and above all it was classic British humour. I do hope it gets a repeat at a sensible time.

After that it was a series on country music, Three Chords and the Truth, with some great songs and a fair bit of irritating nattering. I never knew – I had no idea! – that “I will always love you” was written by Dolly Parton. The Whitney Houston version from The Bodyguard had its chart-topping years whilst I was forced to listen to Radio 1 on the school bus into Hereford every morning. Blimey. That takes me back. Radio 1 was about to move to FM and the AM band was about to be switched off. We didn’t even get to listen to the music uninterrupted because every eight minutes, the talent would be faded down and Simon Mayo would tell us that we needed to make arrangements to tune in to the all new Radio 1 FM. Lugg Valley were never about to put an FM capable radio in our knackered old bus.

Anyway, I think I could really get into country music. I’ve spent money I don’t have downloading Dolly Parton tracks off iTunes and it’s all I can do to stop myself singing along, annoying the neighbours and waking P.

Best of all, I’ve found a guitar site that hasn’t been yet been killed by IP lawyers, and guess what? I can play all the chords I need for Jolene!

Google

Kathryn asks

Have you done something to Google? Put your name in – the first 5 entries all relate to you!

To be fair, that’s googling in the UK — if you google in the US, it’s just the top three that are me, and then there’s a jazz musician in New York, and some sort of sportsman, and a few other people with the same name as me.

But it’s true, Google seems to hold me in very high esteem. It’s not something I’ve deliberately done. Getting a little involved with a blogging community through libdemblogs and occasional links from people with very high traffic, like Guido and Iain Dale certainly help on the page rank front.

WordPress is also excellent at putting my things under Google’s nose, not least because everything I write shows up under multiple different URLs – this post will be under http://www.alexfoster.me.uk for a day or two, then will be found at all three of http://www.alexfoster.me.uk/categories/general and categories/tech and categories/ramblings for a while, before being relegated to http://www.alexfoster.me.uk/2006/08 and so on.

But Google is erratic — look at Will Howell’s experience a few weeks ago. As far as I’m concerned, one of the links for me – the http://www.niles.org.uk links – now point to web space I am not actively using and am still thinking up for a long term use for; I’m not sure where Google get the description line for this domain, but how do I change it if my personal circumstances change?

The thing that really gets me, though, is looking through my referrer logs to find out how people get to my website. (I use MyBlogLog.com to sort out the technical stuff for me.) And Google send almost a hundred people every day with various different criteria.

Some of them are things I have written about, like Black Rod’s Garden Entrance, the “boom boom bah” music in Dead Like Me, and roasted tomato soup. Thank goodness someone explained what the regular daily hits for “niles crazy” were about. Some of them are projects I am definitely involved in like librivox and libdemblogs. (I get tens of hits from both every day, and there’s a fair bit of reciprocal linking from other people involved in both going on too.)

Some of the people who end up here must be really disappointed. The following are just a few search terms from just the last twenty-four hours, and the page here the searcher ended up at

I’m going to stop there, not because I’ve run out of Google search terms but because WordPress is going to put itself into loops sending me pingbacks for that little lot. The point is – people have ended up on my blog and not found what they were looking for. I hope they enjoyed what they got instead.

Final thought goes to the person who got here by googling “help me, i’m starving” last year – I already wrote about that here.

Further boring traffic stories

It wasn’t quite pelting it down today, but the programme I was listening to whilst stuck in all-but stationary traffic on the M1 this afternoon was about various global efforts to beat drought.  Dew ponds in the South East.  Tenerife schemes to use greenhouse (real greenhouses, not metaphorical “greenhouse effect” greenhouses) heat to evapourate sea water to remove the salt and give pure water. A scheme to put 50 robot-piloted boats on the seas of the world making artificial clouds to combat the greenhouse effect.

Have we actually had a drought anywhere other than the South East?  We had quite a long period without rain, but my garden never got to the cracked earth stage I remember from childhood.  We’ve not had a hosepipe ban up here as far as I am aware.  And we’ve had rather a lot of rain in the last few days.  Our waterbutt, which, due to a diy failure, only collects the rain that falls directly into it through its gaping open top, is half full.  If it had actually been collecting roof rain it would unquestionably be full.  And that’s without us even having to divert our bathwater.  Mind you, the sort of torrential rain we’ve been having in fits and starts over the last few days is not the sort of rain that helps replenish water stocks.  When it falls too fast, too hard, it just slips off the top of the soil and contributes to pluvial flooding.
And another thing.  Thames Water, the wrath of whose customers is falling on them for not  repairing their pipes fast enough – when we went down to London to see the Queen, I was amused to see that Thames Water were coming into some flack in the Evening Standard for, erm, repairing their pipes.  The line the paper was taking was, wasn’t it awful that the evil water company were daring to close MAJOR London thoroughfares MERELY to dig up and repair century-old mains water pipes.  A somewhat inconsistent line to take when in previous days the company was being roasted for allowing a vast percentage of its water to escape its pipes into the ground (where, of course, it actually helps top up London’s parched water table.)

Random wibble.

Lib Dem theme from YouTube

New diary entry from Lord Bonkers.

Somewhat surreal afternoon driving up the M1 in tipping rain with spray everywhere listening to Radio 4 programme talking about skin problems brought on by sunlight.  Just as the motorway slowed to standstill, with rain slewing down on every front, the automatic wipers spurred into a frenzy, Barbara Myers and Dr Tony Bewley were just getting going on what sun creams are best.
Polymorphic light eruption is the name of one of the diseases, but it could be so much more!

Off home shortly, listening to the middle east debate starting at 9pm.  It seems to have bumped Adam Hart Davis’s Engineering Solutions off the schedule.