29th December 2006.
Pretty though these Christmas lights are (in some people's eyes), they do use up a lot of juice when you have thousands of them all over the city. Has anybody ever calculated the cost to global warming that these lights make?
27th December 2006.
The garden was full of birds today as it has been on a number of occasions. I've noticed over the last month or so, that we have had up to eight doves, a dozen or so sparrows and a number of thrushes but today, instead of the usual two or four Blue Tits, on the feeders, we had eight.
22nd December 2006.
We've had freezing fog for the last couple of days. This has been because of a high pressure over the UK. However, it has been so warm recently that there is, I am told, a tree in blossom on Valley Road in Derby (this is the UK so it is the start of Winter - yesterday was the shortest day) and this rose appeared in our garden (the flower, that is - we've had the plant for some time). You can see how the freezing fog has settled on the windward side of the leaves and on the petals - making the latter translucent as the cells have been broken down by the ice forming in them.
14th December 2006.
It's late-night shopping in Derby again, and many people walk the street, looking for that bargain that justifies the shops opening that bit later (this photograph was taken before 6:00pm because we wanted to get home before it became too crowded).
You can see the Christmas lights in front of the Guildhall...
...and in front of the assembly rooms.
Just to the right of this, on the way out of the market place lies the area of land that has been cordonned off - this is going to be used for the new 'Quad' arts centre.
This is what somebody else thinks of the new design and how it will affect the City.
The sign (from 'Bluestone') says 'We regret any inconvenience caused during construction works. Work safe. Home safe'.
14th December 2006.
Bomb disposal was in Derby today.
Ho hum.
13th December 2006.
In a BT telephone kiosk, it costs 40p for the minimum cost of a phone call. For that 40p, you can have 20 minutes of local or national call (just one, up to that length).
Instead of charging us 10p for a 5 minute call as they used to, they have increased the minimum time to make it sound good in the unlikely event that you might actually need that long in one of their outdoor toilets/telephone kiosks.
Why not just charge us 5.00GBP for up to 20 minutes international/national/local calls as a minimum call? Now, that would be good value. In BT's mind anyway.
12th December 2006.
With regard to the identity of the deity being expressed in vegetables, we already know that God is C of E (see the proof of this undeniable fact in the aubergine - a miracle vegetable, 12th October 2006 below).
However, this pepper offers equally undeniable evidence that God is indeed a dentist.
The pepper was cut to make a salad (we didn't need all of it so we just cut out a segment of it) and this is the spontaeous form that it took.
Proof at last.
I wonder if a half walnut shows us what God's brain looks like?
7th December 2006.
Certainly up until this morning, when I emailed them to correct the point, the BBC was calling the explosion at the Bunsfield Oil Refinary in Hemel Hempstead (UK) which happened a year ago, 'Europe's biggest peacetime explosion'. I certainly remember reading in the Royal Society of Chemistry's magazine ('Chemistry in Britain') several decades ago about a larger one in peacetime Germany involving hundreds of tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate that killed hundreds of people and left a large crater. I looked it up on the Internet and found the BASF Oppau plant explosion in 1921 in the image on the right. This is on an entirely different scale.
From Wikipaedia: "The explosion was estimated be equivalent to about 1-2 kilotonnes of TNT and was heard as a loud bang in Munich, more than 300km away. The pressure wave ripped roofs off up to 25km away and destroyed windows even farther away. In Heidelberg (30km from Oppau), traffic was stopped by the mass of broken glass on the streets. About 80 percent of all buildings in Oppau were destroyed, leaving 6500 homeless. At ground zero a 90m by 125m crater, 19m deep, was created. According to some descriptions, only 450 tonnes exploded, out of 4500 tonnes of fertiliser stored in the warehouse."
I also remember in the Chemistry in Britain article, it saying that in order to suppress the hygroscopic effect of the ammonium nitrate, they coated the crystals in wax - this making the explosive even worse.
I think that puts Bunsfield into a more honest perspective.
25th November 2006.
This is disgusting. The British Heart Foundation has a campaign that highlights the fact that around half of the UK's children eat a packet of crisps every day and the fat intake equates to drinking 4.5 litres of vegetable oil each year. This is clealy not that healthy for children and crisps have never been seen as a health food. However, that is not the disgusting bit.
This is. We are constantly being told that drinking (cow's) milk is healthy for us and that we can get calcium from it which, as everybody knows, we need for healthy bones and so on. However, apart from the fact that only one person in 20 above the age of six months is still capable of absorbing the calcium from milk, what about all of that fat? Surely, if milk was meant to be consumed by humans, we would be able to consume it whole.
The Milk Marketting Board (now DEFRA) used to say 'Drinka pinta milka day' so just how much fat is in milk if we drink a pint of milk each day for a year? Normal full milk as around 3.6 per cent fat (although the Jersey gold top is over five per cent) so if we take a pint of 3.6 per cent and multiply it up, we get 7.5 kg per year which equates to 8.3 litres of oil or, if you want to take into account that this is naturally hardened fat and therefore is solid, you can equate it to roughly 10kg of butter.
Now, that is disgusting.
So, why is the BHF going on about the fat in crisps when people, drinking a pint of milk a day just as the government recommends, are consuming far more?
BUT, if you think that is bad, did you know that milk can legally contain up to 426,000,000 pus cells per pint (in the USA). If that doesn't make you start looking for alternatives to dairy milk then maybe you eat dog excrament for lunch.
18th November 2006.
This is the second time that this has happened to me. I hope that it is not the start of something. It costs 3.00GBP to get an 'Adult Day local Zone' ticket for the Arriva buses in Derby. I had just some loose change in my pocket - 1x1.00, 6x20p, 5x10p and 6x5p which adds up to exactly GBP3.00. I counted it out, I checked it and checked it again. I went to the bus stop and checked it again. The bus arrived, I got on and handed over the GBP3.00 to the driver. He held it in one hand, took the pound coin and a 20p and put them in his change machine. Then he looked at the rest and claimed I was 20p short. I disagreed and he counted the GBP1.80 he had in his hand and reiterated that it was 20p short. Rather than create a scene, I just paid him an extra 20p.
Whether it was stupidity, innumeracy or theft, I don't know. I have seen this once before when the same thing happened (different service, different amount).
When I got off the bus, I made a note of the details which are as follows: the route was 38; the registration number was PR52 XRJ; the bus number was 4734 and it arrived in Derby at 13:30. From the ticket, the driver was 18564 and it was journey 162, ticket 4228.
2nd November 2006.
There is a joke that as soon has the clocks go back, the central heating goes on (the reverse happening at the end of March) - not a day sooner or a day later. Well, not quite in time with the clocks going over to GMT but certainly in time with the month - the first night of November has brought us icy temperatures. This is in Farenheit.
1st November 2006.
The hole in the Eagle Centre has finally been filled in. For months, lorries and cranes have been going through the gap where you can now see rolled steel joists. Nice to know that it joined up properly (or at least as far as we can see that it did from the road).
The Eagle Centre has been getting taller and taller and now that they have bolted the multi-screen cinema part to the top of it, we can see it from the Council house.
27th October 2006.
Biometrics 2006 was held at the Queen Elizabeth Centre in central London today. In biometrics, there are a number of technologies that prevail over a period of time as they attract interest and are developed - silicon chip fingerprint readers for instance. On the right, you can see the A4Vision structured infrared light 3D facial recognition device which has not changed a great deal since last year - primarily because it works. However, there were a number of interesting innovations at this years show (no necessarily completely new but certainly of interest).
One of these was an idea that a number of us had a few years ago, for using a finger sequence instead of a PIN. This emerged at this years show as FingerPIN. Of course, this idea is not new and could be incorporated into any biometric device that allows for several 'signatures' from one person or even several fingerprints from a number of people (if a resource requried four people's fingerprints to access it then they would all need to be there (or have their prints cloned) and place their correct fingers on the device in the correct order - something that would not be suitable for a tontine >;-> ).
Over the last few years, we have seen back-of-hand vein reading devices. However, the 'PalmSecure' from Yarg Biometrics and Fujitsu reads the veins on your palm using infrared. It is essentially contactless in that you do not have to come into contact with it on order for it to identify you - this can have an advantage in a viral epedemic situation or similar circumstances. The device on the right (the box part of it - the actual detector is quite small) was developed for school children to use in a cashless school vending system and as such, is far superior to creditcard-style magnetic strip cards used in some schools the cards being susceptible to cloning.
On the right, you can see a finger print device from Lumidigm that leaves little to chance. It not only looks at your fingerprint (which you can spoof on a number of devices with a latex/silicone/gelatine dummy (see 'Testing Fingerprint Devices' at http://www.grosse.is-a-geek.com/pcplus/hd239sd/hd239.html)) but also looks at the vein patterns beneath - amongst other things. This uses several wavelengths, polarisations and so on and will work in normal dry conditions or in wet conditions (as in the waterfall demonstration in the photograph. This thing weighs in at around 1.8kg but it is built like a brick sh**house).
There were other things such as Cherry (the keybaord manufacturere) who already make a fingerprint/smartcard keyboard, making one that disinfacts itself (it's impregnated into the plastic). Another was using polarised light as a light source and then filtering that out so that you remove the surface-reflected light (people have been doing this with photography for years but biometrics has started to catch up with that now).
Finally, on the left, you can see a booth built so that you can get one person in it (it will accomodate someone on a wheelchair). It has a biometrics device of your choice (this one had iris recognition) and a mass sensor in the base. This was so that when a person was identified, the machine could tell (from knowing the approximate weight of the person who should be in there) if there was someone else in there as well (such as someone pointing a gun to his/her head).
I look forward to seeing you at Biometric 2007, next year - http://www.biometrics.elsevier.com/
13th October 2006.
It's Friday the 13th again. At around 6am, we heard an explosion (we never seem to get a lie-in nowadays) and though it was someone letting off fireworks. A bit later on, there was another. We then investigated and found this silver BMW parked in the unused cul-de-sac next to the local primary school (reversed into its place - now, how often do you see anybody parking a car like that?). Around 6am, it had been set alight - presumably, to eliminate any forensic evidence of what they had been up to during the night.
If BMW is reading this, take note of the fact that the fire brigade had a real problem getting under the bonnet - they eventually managed to bend a bit of one side up - enough to make sure that there was no continued risk of fire - but they couldn't open it in the normal sense of the word (see image below-left). Maybe the solution is for BMW to have some sort of fuseable link so that if fire-type temperatures were experienced by the device for long enough, the boot would unlock (not so that it flew open but just do the equivalent of someone pulling the lever insude the car - which, of course, you cannot do if the car is on fire and you are trying to put it out. We don't want the thing flying open on the motorway at speed - you can come up with something BMW).
At about 06:25, one unit from Ascot drive arrived at the scene although they had problems getting through the cars that were parked on both sides of Glengarry Way (thank you thoughful residents) and they quickly put out the fire, damping down and then leaving at roughly 06:43.
Having talked to the man in charge of the fire brigade on-scene, it turns out that the explosions are usually the black-powder charges in air bags. They have to be careful with these because they could be injured should one go off close to them when they are putting out the fire. Another source of explosions is any cylinders in the car, such as CFC engine fire extinguishers and so on. There was no body in the boot (yes, they checked, and yes, they have found them in the past).
Finally, there are some exotic materials under the bonnet. One of them is PTFE (as a liner in cables such as clutch and accelerator) and when it is in a car fire, the PTFE breaks down to form hydrofluoric acid (a solution in water of hydrogen fluoride) which can be absorbed through your skin (without causing much damage - you can get injured by this without realising it) and then it attacks your bones (it dissolves the calcium and puts it in your blood stream. This can then cause heart attack in high enough doses such as 2 per cent of the body's skin - equivalent in area to the sole of your foot). It also goes for magnesium so any organ that uses or is affected by these, such as your heart, liver kidneys and your nerves.
Isn't there an alternative to PTFE in this situation? Looking at the fact that every night, there are car thefts in the UK and these often result in fires (which are always attended by the fire brigade) is not replacing this material with something less hazardous in a fire a bit like not moving the petrol tank?
12th October 2006.
A miracle vegetable is always something of a curious claim. On the right, you can see an aubergine that has been sliced in half in preparation for a curry - it is, in fact, the only aubergine that we have ever bought. The arrangement of the seeds in these things always has an Art Nouveau look about it. The arrangement lends itself to interpretation - usually, people see evidence of their God in them (this is a free country and people are free to think what they want - I'm not offended).
However, you always have to ask yourself the question; 'why would God break his own laws of physics (especially the second law of thermodynamics) so that, out of all of the 1080 particles in the Universe, he should decide to manipulate those that make up the seeds of a purple vegetable in a supermarket in Derby so that they spell His name?' Is this a claim for the existence of deitic graffiti? (Surely, those that get caught red-handed with a spray can in their hands can claim that if their God is up to it then it is all right for them to do it.)
Any way, in this purple vegetable, you can clearly see that there is the image of the crown. The crown is, of course, worn by the head of the Church of England - would this point to the one true religion being C of E?
I think not.
Did you know that there is as much nicotine in one aubergine as there is in 40 cigarettes? Nicotine is, as we all know, more addictive than heroin. Why are there no warnings on these in supermarkets? Should aubergines be sold to people under the age of 18? Do people have a curious craving for more aubergines?
23rd September 2006.
Download ringtones from 'freearcade'? Who are they kidding? My son just tried to download a ringtone onto his mobile phone - no such digital exchange happening. So, 'freearcade' has not made a positive contribution in any way to the amount of data on his phone.
However, his balance before this event was GBP6.13 and after, it was GBP1.45 - a total of GBP4.68 has been deducted from his credit (this might seem an odd amount but at today's level of currency conversion (1 Euro = GBP0.6728), it works out to be Euro6.96). Is this taking money for a service not provided? It would appear so.
So, can we get the money back? A contract is an agreement between two parties for the benefit of both and clearly, my son has not benefited. Well, if you look briefly at their terms and conditions, unless you can provide them with a detailed listing showing that you had money taken from you by them, you cannot claim. So, where does 'pay as you go' and its equivalents fall into place in all of this? It appears from what I've been told that they can still take money off you - it is reasonable therefore that you should be able to get it back if it goes wrong, otherwise there is no equity. How do you prove that they took your money? Well, if they are a competent company, they will have accounts - they have to pay taxes and money cannot just appear from nowhere so they have this information (date, time, amount, account information including telephone number and so on). Also, this information is all on computer so they can search it (being able to do so will be part of the default system configuration so it is not as though they have to pay for any of this - it is all automatic).
So, in order to take the money from your telephone serivice provider, they are making the assertion that you have received and can use what they provide (they have a duty of care to ensure that this has happened). So, the burden of proof is on them.
If you have had a similar experience with MediaPlazza's 'freearcade' site and your phone, contact them at support@mediaplazza.com. I'm sure that they would like to hear from you. However, in the mean time, based on what I've been told by my son and what I have seen for myself, I will not be recommending that anybody visits that site and if asked for my honest opinion, I will tell them that they should avoid it.
22nd September 2006.
This is where the water from Bradshaw Way meets the water from London Road in Derby. At the moment, they are just putting some new drains in and it happened that there were several drains, each around 4" above the surface of the road - then it rained.
Did you know that in the UK, if you drive through a puddle and splash someone, you can receive a harsher punishment than if you knocked over and killed them?
Fortunately, this little old lady made it through and lived to walk another day.
14th September 2006.
I don't know if it was the weather or just coincidence but I ended up evicting over 20 of these insects during the evening.
It could have been that there was a mass hatching - it is certainly that time of the year.
It could have been that they were trying to find shelter from the rain - it certainly rained enough.
Apparently, there was a tornado in Derby and another one in Leeds - they are just the ones that I am aware of at the moment.
Did you know that the UK has more tornadoes per square mile than the USA? It is true.
Whatever it was, there were loads of them in the house and I had to put them all out side. At least the cats didn't get them.
14th September 2006.
This is Henrietta (as in 'Henrietta fly' - 'never a joke told until it is ten years old'). She took up residence outside our kitchen window a few days ago and has steadily been collecting flies and building beautiful webs. She is a Common Garden Spider.
Over a decade ago, the children's playground nearby was turned into a car park and the local gang of ne'er-do-wells decided that they were going to block the drain with a tin or something similar. Up until the 17th August this year, it remained blocked despite the efforts of us, our neighbours and the circuitous buck-passing that went on between the council, the water authority and the road authority. On that day, almost a month ago, some nice people with a power-jet drain cleaning thingy decided that they could have a go with this drain and it was cleared (maybe the can rotted away or something). Since then, it has coped amply with the rain (as you can see in the photograph on the left).
This was today. You can see that the water level in our back garden was almost up the the top of the concrete drain surround for our kitchen sink. Last time it rained really heavily, it actually submerged this concrete by around 1 inch but this time it wasn't that bad. However, it struck me that for this amount of water to build up in our back garden - an average depth over the lawn of around 2 inches and over this bit of around 4 inches - the drain must be blocked. Again.
This is after the storm, in the car park. The drain is directly under the centre of the photograph. You can see, in the middle of the photograph, a small indentation in the surface of the water. This is like the vortex you get when you pull the plug out in a sink full of water. However, here, it is a car park full of water. How it became this blocked again is anybody's guess until they unblock it again. Still, we've had exactly 4 weeks of rain without floods in the garden - except that the weather has been generally hot with only occasional showers.
Just in case you were concerned about Henrietta, she hid under the brickwork at the top of the window.
This is the underpass to the local primary school. The city council refuse to put school zig-zag and other road markings on the road because the pupils can use this underpass - they claim that it has only ever flooded once. Well, I've seen it flood a few times so that isn't strictly true. The water is around a foot deep so it's over the top of those little sandals and the reading book bags might get a little damp as well. When will the council do something about this?
13th September 2006.
Another hole in the ground starts to appear as Derby's City-Scrape department continues in its quest for the destruction of Derby's assets - or at least those that the public use.
The bus station (a) has been disused for almost 11 months although it was only knocked down a few months ago and now waits for the developer to wait, and wait for the roadworks to finish (you would have thought that they could ask before commiting to this because we could have used this facility last Winter). Duckworth Square (b) has also been knocked down and awaits someone to do something with it.
Now, the green area in front of the coucil house (c) that is used by many people every day has started to be closed down to the public. Originally this garden was supposed to be hotel - the area was cleared and a hole dug for the foundations and then the project collapsed, resulting in this garden which is very popular as a meeting place and somewhere green to relax in the city centre.
This 'development' is for the 'Quad' arts centre and the design that is to be used there is one that has been rejected by the people of the city of Derby. The council had a public consultation event where they allowed the public to view and comment on the designs that the council had received from various architects. I went to that and they were all really bad. It was as though the council knew that they were bad and knowing that only a bad one could be chosen, they deligated that responsibility (and therefore the resulting complaints) to the public. When people realise that it looks really bad, the council will be able to say; 'Well, you chose it'. But what a choice.
Just in case you were wondering, there are many other 'holes in the ground' (that is to say developments that the council has allowed to start that have resulted in us not being able to access some area or other but remain undeveloped). The old court house/police station is one that springs to mind. The new(1960s) police station is another - these are both riverside developments along the line as the Rivershadows project that is supposed to provide us with a bus station. As an exception, the extension to the Eagle Centre is going all right.
8th September 2006.
The Roborovski hamsters have done it again and this time with style. Today, they have broken/worn out both wheels. The one that is attached to the green structure at the far end (the place where they sleep) is actually a replacement already - they broke the original one earlier on in the year.
8th September 2006.
I went to fill in my voting registration online at the DCC web site http://www.derby.gov.uk/ to complete the voting register info and found that it is out of action which, I am now told, is something that my wife knew.
However, the message (at http://www.derby.gov.uk/DCCCMS/errors/ error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/DCCCMS/SiteCMS/ Templates/index.htm) that tells you that it is out of action has to come from the web server or at least 'a' web server. So, if you shorten the URL to
http://www.derby.gov.uk/DCCCMS/ you get the message in the screen shot snippet below which states that it is 'Derby CMS Partnership - Site Authentication - 2 of 2'.
So, how is it that just by typing in a URL, anybody on the planet is able to bypass step one of the Derby City Council web site authentication process? Getting through this second step (a bit of social engineering perhaps) will allow edit access to the DCC web site - maybe this is what has already happened which might explain why it is down in the first place.
If you look at the Document Information for the page, you can see that it is from a 'Microsoft-IIS/6.0' (which therefore runs on Windows of all things - in a production environment. Why?) - the security on and stability of these servers is well know as particularly bad in the security industry.
So, why is DCC trusting our voting details to such a bad server? Why aren't they using the Industry standard Apache web server on a Linux or UNIX system? I don't want my voting details given away to anybody who knows somebody who knows somebody who hacked into it.
7th September 2006.
Some sick person who goes by the name of Jill Greenberg has been taking photographs of children that she has made cry - apparently for around 5 minutes, although it is clear that they have been crying for a while from the length of the tear trails.
It's not just my opinion that this is all a bit sick either - teachers that I know are also of that opinion. I just wonder how long it is going to take the children to get over this totally unnecessary trauma. A child crying in the playground or the classroom is sorted out as soon as they are noticed, not left for five minutes and photographed - even if it is with a Mamiya RB67 (a really good extended medium format camera).
So, she did it to her own child and that makes it all right? Huh? If she had taken a slice of her own child's liver, fried it in onions and ate it with some fava beans and served with a nice chianti, that would have been all right as well, would it? Huh?
5th September 2006.
Another school fire although this one was caught in time. At around 5:40 pm, smoke was detected in the office area of Grampian Primary School on Grampian Way Derby and two Derbyshire Fire Brigade units attended. Headmaster Chris Perkins said that the smoke was confined to the office area of the school and with appropriate ventilation, the school should be open on tomorrow on time for the beginning of term as planned. Parents are advised to tune into BBC Radio Derby and RAM FM for any further news.
Mr Perkins had stayed around 10 minutes later than he wanted to after school (an inset (training) day for the teachers) but in doing so, detected the smoke and raised the alarm.
UPDATE: (6th September 2006) It turns out that the fire was caused by a fan which had clearly not been switched on during the summer holidays. The school opens as usual tomorrow (Thursday) so the kids ended up missing one day.
31st August 2006.
Just when you though that that was it as far as the bugs were concerned, I find another type on the lavender.
These are around 3mm shorter than the green shield bugs and are hairier. Their colouring of purple with black and white makes them quite distictive.
I wonder if these are the ones that eat garden pests. There are still young green shield bug nymphs around (the later hatchlings) so there is a bit of time for more of these to appear.
(In the image on the right, it seems that: the one on the left is Pentatomidae Palomena Prasina (which we all know as the Common Green Shield Bug); and the one on the right is Pentatimodae Dolycoris Baccarum (which is apparently the Sloe Bug - there must be some sloes around here).)
30th August 2006.
There's always one. Today, we decided that we were going to collect the last of the apples from the tree and so with a bit of reaching and finally a strategic shake here and there, they all came down - except for this one. No amount of shaking would bring it down - it's just not playing the game. Well, I've got news for it - I'm going to prune the tree heavily in a few days time and it's coming down then. Barring unforseen circumstances or course, such as asteroid impact.
29th August 2006.
Green Shield Bugs. I've just put together the photographs I've taken of Green Shield bugs this year and put them on a page of their own. Click here to go there.
25th August 2006.
Come home to a real fire - buy a laptop with a Sony battery. Well, now, Apple is following Dell by recalling Lion (Lithium Ion) laptop batteries that have been made by Sony and, guess what - Sony's share price has dropped even more. Dell recalled 4.1million batteries and Apple has announced that it is recalling 1.8million batteries. With last year's Sony Rootkit Virus resulting from DRM-gone-mad and now this, I wonder what they are going to do next. The odd thing is (if there is only one) that these batteries date from 1st April 2004 to 18th July 2006.
19th August 2006.
Here's something that's dead neat on Windows Vista. We all know that the Microsoft people are bad at English (to the extent whereby they try to push English off into some obscure category by calling it 'British English' instead of having it as 'English' and having a category for that peculiar version of English that the North Americans speak called 'US English' or 'Canadian English' and then we wonder why people in the US think that the Americans invented English).
Any way, we've all become so used to the egregious English in their dialogue box interfaces (yes, that is 'dialogue' with the 'ue' - just look at the GIMP localisation, they can get it right (image on the right) so why can't a large, rich corporation?) that most of us don't notice it any more (and then we ask questions like; 'Why can't our children spell or use grammar any more?').
 If you've installed Windows Vista Beta 2 and right-clicked on the screen and then clicked on 'Personalize'[sic], you will see what I mean. |
 On the second item down in the pane on the right, you can see that it talks of 'Visual Appearance'. What sort of appearance exists that isn't visual as far as the average computer user is concerned? This sort of tautology might be all right with the 'US English' that they speak in Redmond but for the rest of the world... |
 So, click on 'Visual Appearance' and you get the 'Appearance Settings' dialogue box. Note that this is not called the 'Visual Appearance Settings' dialogue box. Click on the 'Effects' button and... |
 ...you will get the 'Effects' dialogue box. All you have to do is uncheck the 'Tautologismization' check box and... |
 ...all is right with the world. |
Oh Joy.
17th August 2006.
This is interesting... The story goes along the lines of: someone in the UK took some footage using an infrared camera (night-vision - the ones with the IR LEDs as a light source), sent it of to MI6 (I would have thought that MI5 would have been more appropriate but there you go) who then sent it or some stills from it off to the FBI and it ended up (as the source for this) as six stills on a virus infected computer which was sent off to some data recovery people who apparently thought that this was too important to keep from the general public.
Any way, these are the six images (the fourth one is a blow-up of the third). Click the mouse on any of the thumbnails and it will appear in the main window.
So, there you have it. If you want to look at the video, go to http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6295641198174571593&q=ufo
16th August 2006.
I've just installed Microsoft Vista (Beta 2). The kids aren't too happy with it, even considering the fact that it is only betaware at the moment. They do use Windows (XP) and they also use Linux and occassionally OpenBSD and Solaris so it is not as though they have a narrow view of operating systems. Without any prompting from me or anybody else, they made the following comments:
- 'Is this really the one up [from XP]? I thought that it was some retarded version';
- 'So, are they seriously going to sell that for money?'; and,
- 'Can we go back to Linux now, dad?'.
Well, that sorted that out then. Just in case you wondered, they are not too impressed with Mac OS X either.
24th July 2006.
Take AIM and look again. I've just noticed that the AOL Instant Messenger icon is, under some circumstances, animated. You can see on the right the two images that alternate. The first is the little man running; and, the second is the little man sitting down on the loo - possibly looking relieved which is why he was running in the first place. Maybe this is a warning from AOL that sitting at your computer on AOL Instant Messenger for too long can make you forget about the requirements of your bodily functions.
20th July 2006.
The next phase becomes reality as the idiots take over the job of smashing up our heritage. It has become a one way trip now - there is no going back. The new bus station (if there is any part of the design that you could call a 'bus station' other than a strip down one side that appears to have been added as an afterthought) had better be a good one.
30th June 2006.
One thousand million bytes have been sent out by the server for this website in one calendar month. This is the first time this has happened on this virtual host. If it was IBM or if it was Microsoft's Windows-bug pages, I would have expected that in a day but this is just a little site.
28th June 2006.
What is Reader's Digest playing at? I've just opened the door to a delivery woman handing over a parcel that was marked as requiring an adult signature. That made me suspicious. It also said that the bill was enclosed. It was addressed to my daughter so I asked her what it was and did she want it? It turns out that the genuine Reader's Digest competition (you know the one, where they genuinely hand over large quantities of money to just about anybody who has gone through their repetitious epistolic exchange) sends a form with a tick box offering some DIY book. She didn't tick the box that asks for it to be sent, so the package was returned unsigned for, unopened and unwanted.
I imagine that many people will just sign for many things that arrive by courier and then have real problems returning them, getting billed for things that they didn't want and so on. I hope that Reader's Digest isn't one of those companies, otherwise the Internet world will be able to read all about their future gaffs on these pages.
It even begs the question; 'where did they get her name from, in the first place?'
'No publicity is bad publicity'? Not if it involves this sort of activity.
Reader's Digest? Could try harder.
24th June 2006.
They've started knocking down Derby's Art Deco bus station.
Fools.
24th June 2006.
In the garden, I had a look around and managed to find some green shield bug nymphs at slightly more advanced stages of development. I liberated the hatchlings and they seemed quite happy.
Some of the images of the nymphs are on the right, along with two of the hatchlings. I know that the ones on the left are in their first skins as they were only one day old when I took the photos. The other two stages you can see here seem to be the following two - I didn't find any that appeared older than this.
I'll keep an eye out for them.
23rd June 2006.
The shoes are back in town or, perhaps more accurately, the idiots.
I suppose that in these days of clever youth, where people say 'L33T' insteady of 'elite', maybe we should just call them '1D10T5'.
23rd June 2006.
These green eggs appeared on a bed spread after it had been hung out to dry a few days ago. There were around 10 to 15 or so and they are around 1mm in diameter (white marker). The insect had laid them had done so in the same way that a butterfly or moth would do as they were laid in a triangular/hexagonal pattern.
I took them off the bed spread and put them in a jar with a leaf from a nearby plant (an apple tree) so that the caterpillars (which is what I was expecting to hatch out) would probably have something to eat.
Today, they hatched out into what at first glance looked like baby spiders - remember that these are only around 1mm across and are quite difficult to make out - such as counting legs and so on. However, having photographed them, they appear to be little insects (they have six legs) but insects don't go from egg to adult in one go.
These, it turns out, are the nymphs of green shield bugs (the one on the left was photographed in the doorway of our house just a few days ago) of which there are quite a few in the garden. Apparently, whilst many shield bugs live on caterpillars, green shield bugs live on plant sap so putting the leaf in could well have been the right thing to do (unless they are fussy and apple sap is not their thing).
You can see from the main picture that they are only small and also that the empty egg shells have a little black lambda on them (or a 'Y' if you look at them from the other side).
The markings are an orange/brown, cream and black.
22nd June 2006.
This peculiar ladybird appeared in our garden today - I've never seen one like this before. To me, it looks like some sort of mutant - a sort of erythritic ladybird. Its size is typically small (we tend to get two sizes: large (around 8mm long) and small (around 5mm long)) at around 5mm in length.
Update: thanks to Bill Grange - Keeper of Natural History at Derby Museum and Art Gallery - this has been identified as a Ten-Spot ladybird.
15th June 2006.
I've never seen ants walking sideways before so this was a first - those in the picture are travelling upwards, not to the right. Ants are usually quite sure-footed but on this surface they are not.
This is aluminium foil, shiney side out, stuck to the apple tree with pertroleum jelly (the foil is left clean so there is little if anything to hold onto). The ants don't like the jelly and they find it very difficult to climb the aluminium foil. In fact, most of them come to almost a complete stop - hanging on by one leg, feeling around, trying to make the others stick to the surface. Some of them do make it so this is not a complete solution but it does slow them down (as individuals).
8th June 2006.
Just been looking at the web stats and, it turns out that on the 6-6-6, 666 IP addresses visited this site (yes, really).
Mmm.
I'm sure that somebody, somewhere will want to read something that isn't there into that.
If you want to see the original Webalizer image, click on the image on the right. It was saved from the 20:04 run so the last (8-6-6) bar will have grown if you look at the current stats on the stats page..
6th June 2006.
Today's date is 6-6-6 and, for all of those people who think that something important and negative should happen today (like the end of the world), nothing like that has happened so far that I am aware of (on a global scale any way). On the Today Programme (BBC Radio 4), there was an interview with a man who was 110 so he has lived through two of these (06/06/1906 and 06/06/2006) and he's all right. The doom merchants need to get out a little bit more, I think.
1st June 2006.
Silver Spoon brand has a sugar product that is effectively royal icing in a pack. If you read the ingredients, you will see that it has egg in it. Well, I suppose that is all right for people who are too lazy to add their own egg. However, it appears that the makers of Silver Spoon are too lazy themselve - too lazy to clean out their factory properly.
If you look at their normal icing sugar, it states that it may contain eggs although eggs aren't mentioned in the ingredients - in other words, it is a potential contaminent. If only they could be bothered to do the job properly and clean out their production facilities. I don't normally buy Silver Spoon so I couldn't say how long this has been going on for but it pays to know.
27th May 2006.
I've put some new Roborovski hampster pictures on my wallpapers pages. Just look at Roborovski-2 to see them.
13th May 2006.
A new tower crane was being assembled today at the new extension to the Eagle Centre in Derby. This one makes five in all. With people on it, you can see just how big they really are. I always wondered how they built these cranes (you use a tower crane to build one? Maybe not). Now I know.
12th May 2006.
Bridge Abseilling is back now that the weather is warmer again. This is from a nice little bridge over the A38 in Derby, near Markeaton park. It is one of those with wheel chair access so it is basically a big ramp on both sides. This makes it really safe because you can try out things on a short drop of only a metre or so if you want to - it is a bit late to find that something won't hold your weight when you have started a 10m descent.
6th May 2006.
'Clearing the way for the future' is what the sign says. Of course: lowering the developer's deposit from GBP5,000,000 to GBP2,000,000; and, insisting that there is no need to make sure that there are any tenants before knocking it down are more to do with a bridge burning exercise than progress. The City Council is just making certain that nobody can renovate the existing Art Deco bus station. Threats from morons parroting the council's dogma have driven away the rooftop protest. What is Derby becoming? Before long, we'll find our city in one of those programmes about inner-city drunks.
By the way, the white and blue lines signify the expected level of water when the Derwent floods - the rowing club will be all right.
2nd May 2006.
The front page of the Derby evening Telegraph had the headline 'Graffiti Spree Costs this 'Zero' GBP1,400' but I think that that is a little harsh. Okay, so it is easy to label every dyssocial sociopathy case a 'zero' but that is not a disease - it is just a personality type. It is, to some extent, up to the council to make sure that these types have an environment that is appropriate for them - in this case, it would probably be one where the opportunity to do graffiti was not there and also, where the local kids, regardless of actual physical age, respected their environment.
So, can this happen? Well, it appears that the council can get it right some times because in Sinfin, on the corner of Grampian Way and Swallowdale Road, there is an area with a football/basket ball court and a wall with a mural on every section. This was done years ago and the local kids - who used to mess up the place before this was done - helped and it has not been graffitied since. This wall now tells us about unity and tollerance - and so on. Now, people from all over the world, no matter where they come from, can identify with the ideals in this mural. Unless they come from Denmark, of course.
25th April 2006.
It's InfoSecurity 2006 time again. I'm not going to go into it in any detail here because if you are interested, you can read my show report in issue 244 of PC Plus magazine. However, one thing that doesn't have a place in the show report are these stereograms. The one above is a stereo pair that you view just by crossing your eyes so that the images overlap.
If you click on the one above, you will see a 1024x768-sized image that you can use as a wallpaper if you are really inclined to do so. You will need red-green or red-cyan glasses to view this one.
13th April 2006.
It's not Friday the 13th but I could have been forgiven for thinking that it was. I was half way through editing a text file (this one actually) when my monitor went; 'Pop'. I saved the file ([Ctrl][S]), closed the window ([Alt][F4]) and ended up editing the file on a Windows machine using Putty (SSH Client) and VIM (text editor). As I use this system for work and the damage appears to be permenant, I had to go out and buy a new one. Now, I have a lovely TFT panel. The old one (a cathode ray tube) was an IBM 6540 G42 which I have used virtually continually for the last 81/2 years. By 'continually', I mean switched on all of the time (it did have the power saving facilities activated so it spent a fair time in standby, it was just plugged in and on all of the time as it was needed in an instant at any time of any day.
13th April 2006.
We have the beginnings of a mass-hatching. Some of the elongated little black dots have now eaten their way out of their eggs and are hanging about freely (I would have said 'swimming freely' but they just sit there). I have seen some of them moving but only slowly. They aren't particularly into swimming around yet - just apparently sitting glued to the side, possibly eating algae.
12th April 2006.
The Mac OS X Aqua interface is, without question, one of the prettier interfaces that computers have seen in recent years - but let's not confuse the elegance of the interface with what goes on underneath (I'm not saying either way). Some people ask what could have inspired its designer to come up with such an interface? Well, today, I think I found out just what it was that led to this design - the experience that sowed the seed of a design gem.
I had just opened the lid on our toilet and there it was - pictured left - our toilet bowl. Compare it with the Aqua interface and judge for yourself if that is where the idea came from. The blue colouring is from one of those blue blocks that you drop in the cistern.
So, I decided that I could have a go at making - what shall we call it? - the 'Eau' interface.
- shrink down the image of the toilet bowl;
- put a black line around it;
- add a highlight to the top of it so that it looks rounded;
- make the option button version by giving it a 1:1 aspect ratio and putting a dot in the middle;
- make a tab label from it by making it wider and putting some text in there (seeing is believing?); and,
- making the slider control by using the perspective control to shrink the bottom half.
On the left, you can see the final results in situ. It is clear from this that you can glean inspiration from anywhere - including going for a leak.
9th April 2006.
The frog spawn have pretty much all grown tails of sorts. Here you can see that they have a sort of head end, a tail end and the bit in the middle has a swelling which I would assume is the internal yolk sac. Soon, we need to get some weed for them to cling on to when they break out of their eggs.
7th April 2006.
The mystery of the boarded up bus station has been partially solved in that the council clearly want us to think about something other than what they have done to our bus station. Here we can see two vandals playing 'peel the poster'. The coucil has painted the boarding grey - somewhere between battle ship grey and slate grey - with a wiggly blue and white line around a foot off ground level and put jolly little motifs along this. These include someone taking their dog for a walk (hope they collect it up and dispose of it responsibly afterwards), some wildfowl flying (no doubt bringing bird flu in) and someone rowing a boat (which, looking at the height of the wiggly blue line, is what they will be doing when the river floods all over this new development).
In addition to these, there are jolly little photos (see picture for one of them - do they really think that we won't notice that there is a bus station behind these - maybe they have already tried it out on the councillors and found that they couldn't tell that there was one) with slogans such as 'World class [sic] creativity', 'Enjoy the moment' (presumably whilst the bus station is still standing), 'A bold future' and 'Life in the centre'. What message are they trying to convey? The only world-class creativity we have seen is from the council who are desparate to get hold of a developer with the resources to knock down the bus station before they find any tennants.
7th April 2006.
Roborovski hamsters get up to a number of peculiar things but here we can see that they will attempt to run three-in-a-wheel. They are actually quite good at this and will keep it up for maybe 10 to 20 seconds - being able to keep up two-in-a-wheel for a minute or so. One thing I noticed about these is that when they go into the wheel, they jump into it so that they land half way up the side. Now, I know why. When there is already a hamster in there, jumping is the only way that they can get going: wheel in motion; jump and start running.
6th April 2006.
The frog spawn is developing with many of the little black eggs becoming elongated like this. Unfortunately, there are some that are going grey. Still, those that are developing seem to be doing so nortmally at the moment.
5th April 2006.
This is not some Arctic frozen land, this is the inside of our freezer. Like many people, we put of doing this job for as long as possible but today was the day and we recovered around 4.5 litres of water (formerly ice) from the freezer compartment.
So, here's a maths/physics question (don't try this out yourself): Johnny has a hair drier plugged into a Residual Current circuit breaker (RCD) and is blowing the hot air into the freezer compartment - the air that comes out of the compartment is at room temperature (as is the air that goes into the hair drier). The bottom of the compartment has a little plastic attachment allowing him to collect the water that runs out of the freezer, into a cup. The ice inside the freezer has become warm enough to be on the verge of melting (ie, it is at 0C but still solid). It takes 220 seconds to melt one pint of water's-worth of ice. What is the power output of the hair drier?
4th April 2006.
Apologies (again), same as below (28/3/2006 and 1/4/2006) - this time, from 03:47UTC to 08:51UTC and my new IP address is 82.17.105.69.
1st April 2006.
Apologies (again), same as below (28/3/2006) - this time, from 06:07UTC to 08:24UTC.
31st March 2006.
The Riverlights project (plan to destroy the last remaining Art Deco bus station in England) has found a new backer apparently. This one is - according to the Derby Evening Telegraph - well-resourced enough to be able to knock down the existing bus station and continue developing the site without first having found any tennants for the bingo halls and pubs that are to populate it. Even if they do let their future business tennants know that the area is a flood risk and being next to a river, there are vermin problems; and, they let their housing tennants know that they will suffer from the levels of pollution that are inappropriate to housing or hotels, there will be noise from the bars that will be in the place and that the bus station is part of the complex along with all of the security, noise and pollution hazards that are implied with that, will they still be able to make it succeed? Or will it be dead in the water like the last developer that tried to make it work?
One problem that I see in how to interpret this is: why has a company been set up (apparently called 'Riverlights') to do all of the building/management and so on. If the Riverlights project were to fold then this new company would just disappear into the aether, leaving the developer's current company alone. Surely, if the new company that is to do the development is really confident, wouldn't they just do it as themselves? If they really were confident, they would know that there would be no significant risk to the company that they currently run. My opinion of this is that they have no confidence in the development.
Another point is that they don't seem to have changed the building design. We are still left with some nine-story monstrocity that just doesn't fit in with our city. The bright lights on the top of it (the thing that seemed to sway the council last time) will project light upwards into controlled airspace. Also, this is at least the third design. If you were running an architecture business, you wouldn't think 'well, let's just give them some rubbish and if they reject that, we'll try harder next time' would you? The first design was clearly their best effort. The second design wasn't good enough to be the first one that they showed us and the third one was not good enough to make the first two. Derby still has a third-rate design for its new bus station. It clearly needs handing over to someone who can come up with the goods the first time.
I think that the new company is going to build this thing in full knowledge that if it folds, they can just cut and run. If it is a success, they win. If it is a failure, they don't lose - the people of the city of Derby lose instead.
Mind you, if you look at the real impact of knocking down the bus station, if they just start this mindless task, the people of the city of Derby will lose any way
30th March 2006.
Frog spawn is what we found today as we walked to the shops. On the sloping footpath, just a hundred yards or so from where we live, we found a large splodge of spawn. It had dust, leaves and twigs stuck to it and looked pretty messed up - there wasn't even any sort of contaier nearby that they could have been carried in - so, instead of just ignoring it and walking on, leaving it to die, we did something about it and gathered it up. It turned out that there was around 2 litres of it in all, once we had scraped it off the footpath.
We took it home and while I washed the bits out of it with some rain water that had collected in the garden, my wife phoned some of the local schools. So, now, we have some frog spawn as do some of the schools and if I managed to get it off the path before it all died, we might well have some tadpoles soon between us. If they do hatch out, they can go in front of the hamstercam and you can all watch them develop - they are in a clear tank in more rain water at the moment.
The question is: what was 2 litres of frog spawn doing abandoned on a public footpath on a dry day in March?
At least the whole world will have the opportunity to see them develop and when they are mature enough, they will be released along with thousands of other amphibians from schools all over the country later on in the year. I hope we got to them early enough.
30th March 2006.
I made an interesting discovery about Roborovski hamsters. If you look at the Mouse images on the Wallpapers link, you will see that 1. there aren't many of them and 2. of those there are, some have the mouse (Aphy) ducking. This is because when the camera takes a flash picture, it gives a few small bursts of light before it takes the final picture. The mouse takes evasive action by ducking. With Roborovski hamsters, they freeze - or at least, that is what I suspected they did as they always take good images (if they happen to be in the right place to start with).
Today, I confirmed - albeit by accident - that they do freeze. There was one of them (let's call her 'Robo' - I don't know if it was Roberta, Robin or Robina) in the wheel running at super-luminal velocities when I took her picture with the camera. She froze and by the time the camera had taken the real picture, she had done about a third of a revolution. At the end of it, she had done two complete revolutions, standing still in the wheel as it rotated. I laughed until I stopped. This shows two things: 1, how fast they run; and, 2, how little they weigh when compared to a plastic wheel.
28th March 2006.
Apologies to anybody who tried to access this site between 01:54UTC and 09:48UTC Apparently, there is some work going on with NTL in the Derby area and this was put forward as a reason why my IP address has changed. Instead of the old 81.96.255.23, I'm now on 82.24.135.28 (I'm not giving anything away here as you can find this out anywhere even if you are not a UNIX user by looking on the Internet using DNS tools). I only found out about it this morning so we were effectively off-line between 01:54UTC and 09:48UTC. Now, it is all hunky-dory although the engineering works continue. I'll check again every morning so that if it does happen again, any outage will be minimal and you can all see the Roborovski HamsterCam, HelpDesk SuperDisc archives and your Kakuro and Sudoku puzzles. BTW, I've also put up a new Kakuro Big-Un for your enjoyment.
24th March 2006.
Derby City Council or whoever is responsible (I would assume that it is Derby City Council as the company that is responsible for the development is in deep financial problems) has put up wooden boarding all of the way around Derby's Art Deco Bus Station. This, of course, obsures the mess that they have allowed the station to get into since they denied the public access to the facility last year. So, why have they done this? We can only speculate but it could be that the council is trying to cover up their egregious conduct with this matter. Many times, people have written in to the local paper stating that the RiverLights (or perhaps that should be 'RiverShadows'): is a poor design; will block off the light to what will remain of the river gardens; will destroy the current Art Deco bus station (the last in the country); the new buiding is of an inferior design (this is the third design and none of them have been any good - this one is apparently 9 storey tall and is on the south side of the river); has caused the regular bus users to be forced into tiny bus shelters; and, so on. By covering up the bus station with boarding, are they hoping that we will forget that it is there? It wouldn't surprise me if the next step the council would take was to organise an unfortunate fire. Do we really think that little of our council? Maybe.
22nd March 2006.
Sinfin Community School was in flames tonight with 12 pumps and 75 firemen as well as 7 officers at the scene, mainly from Derbyshire but including two units from Staffordshire. In addition, there was a special, high volume pump from Buxton.
The fire started around 6pm and by 6:15, there was a plume of smoke that stretched several miles across the fields on the south side of Derby. By 10:15, most of the fire was out and units were beginning to pack up and return to their stations.
The fire appeared centred around the middle area of the school with the academic block - which is separated from the rest of the school by long corridors - apparently unaffected by the fire although smoke damage is inevitable. 23 classrooms were damaged in the fire.
The smoke was quite black to start with, indicating aromatics such as bitumen roof covering or aromatics in school labs. Later on, the smoke started to separate into two plumes - one still black but the other whiter, suggesting different fuels and that the fire brigade was beginning to have some effect on the blaze.
Sometimes when smoke is greyer, it is due to water vapour condensing out indicating a higher hydrogen content or water from the fire brigade.
In ASDA, just across the road and down wind of the fire, the air smelled slightly of bitumen.
Police had blocked off the roads and were only letting through local traffic and services. There were several ambulances on scene and tomorrow will tell what has happened if not a likely cause - that process could take weeks.
Several people reported hearing a bang or an explosion when it started so it could have been a build up of flammable vapour - possibly in a science lab. This doesn't appear to be a case of arson and there are no reports of casualties.
Pictures taken at 18:32, 18:34 and 19:18 respectively
18th March 2006.
It's the Outdoor show at Birmingham's NEC. This year, it was held in halls 1, 2 and 3 so there wasn't such a long walk from Birmingham International Station.
The OS stand was giving away full sized OS maps on good quality paper so if you live in Southampton or visit London, you have a good resource. The quality was so good that many people didn't think that they were free but they were - its what you would expect as it was their show.
As you might expect, there were plenty of activities represented there including some water sports in two large tanks. On the right, you can see a diving class
and on the left, in an enormous tank, various water surface activities - if I specified a few of them, I would miss out the others so I'll leave you to fill in the gaps yourself.
One aspect of the show was the way that we look after and interact with the environment - this being reflected in a number of the stands including the Environment agency which was giving away pencils, each made from one plastic vending cup. You don't have to go off to Australia, the Bahamas or the Indian ocean to see sea anenomes like this as British waters have their own.
There was also plenty of innovation including the Quechua 2 and 3 second tents that you literally throw and it has opened before it hits the ground, although the flattened pack is still quite large at around 3 feet in diameter and I would not say is suitable for carrying on your back in windy conditions as you might end up taking off or going under a lorry. The 2 second tent was at last year's exhibition but the three second tent offers more space - the price is right as well if it suits your needs.
This torch 'Lumatic shake torch' stores energy from tipping it from side to side. The magnet (keep it away from mechanical watches) passes through a coil (two on the larger version) and the resulting electricity stored, ready for use by the LED. This produces a bright-blue light and whilst it is not as bright as an SA80, if you are in the middle of nowhere or down a cave, it is quite ample. I don't know if it is rated with an IP rating or Ex but is is okay for camping and so on as you need never buy a battery for it. IP and Ex ratings tend to be written all over torches that have them so I would assume that it has not got one.
There was no shortage of climbing walls of various sorts. The one on the left is the Light Infantry's and the one on the right is a bouldering wall that Planet Fear were using to give bouldering tutorials on - this one is the children's session at 5pm with my son climbing on it.
Towards the end of the day, things started to go the way many exhibitions I have been to go.
Here, we have the scouts stand where a pair of Scouts build up a stack of crates without falling off. These two managed to get to the limit of 16 crates - a limit imposed by the size of their stand. Let's hope for a bigger one next year.
No exhibition would be complete without food and even white bread was considered healthy as long as the filling was smothered in olive oil.
The Food standards agency was set up close to two fast-food stands (not the one in the photograph on the right).
On the FSA stand was a leaflet with a photograph of two sausages - one that looked lightly cooked and one that you could write with - the question being which was safe to eat? Clearly this was a trick question as no sausage is safe to eat.
On the subject of health, there was a stand concerned with Tic-Bourne-Encephalitis with a disturbing video of a tic attaching itself to a jogger. The tic smells the runner as he approaches and gets ready to jump. You can imagine the rest. Clearly, the moral of the story is 'only run into the wind'.
Apart from exhibitions, the NEC is famous for its ridiculously overpriced drinks machines. Here, you can see that a small Coke is GBP1.40, only around GBP1.00 over the odds. Overall though, it was a good day out and I would recommend going next year.
17th March 2006.
It's St Patrick's Day today so everything has an Irish connection. I have seen too many 'fcuk' tee shirts to have any sort of sympathy for the French Connection - especially as it appears that they just took 'fcuk' from a tee shirt that the band the Family Cat had years ago. Any way, forget the French Connection - this is the Irish Correction. Pure parody. 'Feic' is a real word so nobody can claim that it belongs to anybody as an exclusive trade name. It is Gaelic for 'Look!' (as in pointing at something that you want everybody to see and shouting; 'Look.') On the right, you can see the design for my tee shirt. So, the French connection can 'feic-off' (to quote many people) - we don't care for their sort any more. See the Cnut (as in King Cnut) website for an interesting tale.
10th March 2006.
Whilst my Kakuro program will produce normal-sized Kakuro puzzles automatically on a daily basis - each with a different, computer-generated, symmetrical mask - I have written it so that it can also produce Kakuro puzzles of an arbitrary size (the mecahnism for finding a unique set of numbers that goes in the puzzle is still used though as this would take too long for a computer programmer to have to do by hand). This is how I did the 2x2 and other puzzles for the Kakuro Trivia page and the 5x5 puzzle for the Kakuro Tutorial page. One interesting property of this is that I can produce Kakuro puzzles that are as large as you can practically get on a page (A4 or Letter) and still have cells big enough to work with. As the masks are designed by hand, they can be of arbitrary form so to start off with, I designed one that was just random(ish) to see that I could do it in a reasonable time (the program produced it in around 10 minutes, on a 600MHz machine, using Perl) and then I decided to try a symmetrical one with an interesting geometrical patter (again, 24x34 cells but this time produced in just 5 minutes and 39 seconds. So much for computers not being able to create them.
8th March 2006.
The other week, our Roborovski hamster Peanuts died of old age. We now have three female Roborovski hamsters and like all Robos, they all look pretty much the same (especially when you consider that they move so fast that you can never really have a good look at them). There was the problem of names - a problem that still hasn't been sorted out. There were a number of suggestions but I came up with an idea that hasn't really caught on (they still haven't got names) that, we could call them 'Robin', 'Robina' and 'Roberta'. All of these names can be contracted to 'Robo' and so when someone asks; 'Which one is that?' and you say 'Robo,' you know that you are right. At the moment, they are known collectively as 'The three 'R's'.
4th March 2006.
I know that the people who make signs like this have a difficult job but this sign imposes a few tests on the person who is given the task of deciding who to clamp (as opposed to who's car). A reductio ad absurdum (which any sign or notice must be able to withstand) quickly shows that it is unenforcable rubbish.
- First of all, it specifies that the target for clamping has to be a 'customer' of some sort so, if you park your car here and you don't buy a thing in Derby during that visit, you cannot be clamped.
- Next, it is worth noting that the customer has to be the person who parked the vehicle.
- The third condition that you have to satify in order to be eligable for clamping is that you have to leave the retail park on foot. So, if you use a mobility scooter, you are all right. But, that shows up an interesting effect. If you are on a mobility scooter, you will, to any reasonable person, have some sort of disability. People not leaving the retail park on a mobility scooter will be descriminated against - on the grounds of disability. Now, discriminating against people on the grounds of disability is an offence under the Disability Discrimination Act. So, is Westfield discriminating against people on the grounds of disability? This sign, in my opinion, seems to make them so.
- Next, if you look at the careful wording of this sign, you will see that the subject of the sentence is the customer. It is they - not their cars - that will be clamped. So, if a customer is clamped, what does the clamp look like? It is like an animal trap? Have these clamps been tested to ensure that they do not put the wearer at risk? What if there is a fire? What if the customer does not speak English? Are the people who clamp the customers trained for all of these eventualities?
- When do they clamp someone? Is it when they come back to the car park so that the guards can prove that they have been a customer (as opposed to somebody who has not paid for any goods or services)? Do they trail people all over the centre of Derby waiting for them to buy something?
- Signs like these are usually enforcable as part of the contract that is entered into when someone uses a car park. What if the people enforcing the clamping operation misread this carefully worded sign and clamped a car instead?
- If they clamped someone, thinking that they were a customer and they turned out not to be, would that be classed as kidnapping or something similar?
Derby City Council is ultimately responsible for what retailers and associated workers get up to. Do they know that this is going on? If you have had your car clamped in this car park - instead of you - this sign is worth looking at because nowhere on it does it suggest that cars and other vehicles can be clamped. It is not even implied.
3rd March 2006.
If you want your shadow lighting up then this is the place to come - Derby market place. After 8 pm, if you stand inside the framework boundary to this area, a shadow will be cast and a moving image will appear inside it. That is what all of those projectors and lights are about. Aparently, the cost of the hardware runs well into six figures. I think I prefer the man sweeping up the leaves outside the Nottingham Playouse in an artistic way. At least that would have only cost a tiny fraction of what this lot did. And who is going to want to go into Derby after 8pm anyway? After 8, there are loads of drunks roaming around because Derby City Council wants there to be lots of bars and cassinos. Whilst I'm in favour of arts projects in the city, this is taking it a bit too far - just imagine how many adult education classes and similar community arts projects could be set in motion and, more importantly, kept going, for the price of this little waste of time. What does it look like when it is doing something? I don't know because I for one, am not going to go into Derby after 8pm unless it is a necessity and this thing isn't.
25th February 2006.
Derby Bus Station's caravan is still there. Despite a few people suggesting that it is dangerous, barring a hurricane, it should be all right. Keep up the good work. The City Council is still in denial of any idea that the Riverlights has run aground before it has had any affect other than cordoning off the bus station so that the rate payers cannot use it.
21st February 2006.
To the Kakuro pages, I've added a tutorial because I can't find a decent one on the Internet - the ones I have seen don't really explain just what you do, they just have examples and let you get on with it. So, rather than have some sort of mystical explanation, I thought that it would be better to provide a way of starting off with Kakuro problems so that more people can do them.
18th February 2006.
Ratcliffe-On-Soar Power Station is the cause of this little weather system. Every so often, the air is still enough and at the right temperature and humidity for this to happen. This was taken close to sunset and, apart from the frightening effects on global carbon dioxide emissions, it quite picturesque. We've got to do something about this type of thing such as making sure our homes are better insulated and so on.
16th February 2006.
This is a Kakuro - the thinking person's Sudoku. The good people at Nikoli suggest that these puzzles cannot be created by computers. Well, that sounded like a challenge to me.
So, I have spend the last month or so - more off than on - putting together a little computer program - written in Perl - that will produce a new puzzle every day. Maybe the claim that they cannot be made by computers is an understanding that they haven't got access to any programmers that are good enough to write such a program - I don't know (it might be just an advertising puff). Personally, I think that they have been mis-informed about the meaning of 'NP Complete'.
Any way, assuming that the problem was: maths that a six-year-old could do; and, a bit of logic, then I could write a program that could produce them. Sure enough, the first one was produced today. So, for the claim that they cannot be done by a computer - it's a bit like aliens landing on the White House lawn - it only needs to happen once. The kakuro that you see here was the first.
So, anybody for something a bit nore advanced than a Sudoku? Click on the 'Daily Kakuro' link in the menu on the left.
11th February 2006.
Our new bird feeder has been getting some attention at last. We've seen sparrows, blue tits, long-tailed tits, bull finches and all sorts on it. There is a gang of sparrows that comes around several times a day. A nice alternative to work.
2nd February 2006.
We walked into Derby and found this asbestos sheeting lying at the side of the road. We went to the environmental health department but they said that as it was on the highway, it was the highways department's problem - not theirs. They even told us how to get there (which we did). They could have telephoned. Aren't these people trained how to use anything? (telephones?)
2nd February 2006.
This is our water butt. You might be able to tell that it was cold last night. For a winter that has delivered us snow falls that only look like heavy frosts, the large crystals here (around 10 inches long) show that it was consistently cold over a long period
27th January 2006.
This is Pickford's House and, as it is a museum, Derby's whacky Council has decided that it is going to be open only to block bookings made in advance. This flies in the face of current policy which allows such museums to open every day. Clearly, so as to allow more people to visit the proposed bars and restaurants that are suggested for the stupid RiverShadows project, they are closing down all potentailly competing venues so that bored tourists end up there instead of finding out about our heritige.
On the way back, I discovered that Derby City Council has a department that is dedicated in its entirity to the deportation to Australia of convicts. The 'Transportation' [sic] department apparently handles these criminals although why Derby should be doing this I don't know. It is clear that we are not talking about 'transport' because the word 'transportation' has only one meaning: sending convicts to Australia.
21st January 2006.
British Telecom is experimenting with new technology again. Here, we can see the communication system behind their latest telephone boxes - a piece of string. This is a little like those experiments you do in junior school where you have a couple of baked beans tins with a piece of string between them so that one pupil shouts into their tin and the other listens. This shot was taken on a new installation before the money-grabber has been installed. The piece of string is clearly visible. I wonder if hemp twine produces a better signal than polythene string. Mmm. No telling what they will come up with next. A pigeon-post telegram service perhaps?
20th January 2006.
Ho hum. It's quite windy today and in Derby, the tower cranes have all been shut down. When they are shut down they all point downwind like this.
How do they know when to shut them down? If you look at the image on the right, you can see the three little cups of the anemometer.
This produces an objective value for the wind speed. They park them up so that they present as little aspect to the wind as possible and that is pretty much all that they can do.
Inside, it was fairly peaceful. Here, you can see a dark-tiled circle outside sainsbury's at Copecastle Square in the Eagle Centre. When they first updated the centre, they knocked a hole in the floor, down to the car park and here, they built a dome.
This circle is directly under that dome and if you stand right in the centre of it, you are at the focal point of an interesting effect. If you stand there and make a noise, it is all bounced right back at you and it is most peculiar.
Shortly after this was built, they erected a cafeteria there so the only place you could hear this was if you worked for the cafe. That cafe had a smoking area (really - in a food preparation area) and made a mockery of the Eagle Centre's no-smoking policy. Now, it has gone and when it comes back, there will - I am assured - be no more smoking. Meanwhile, come and enjoy this peculair sound effect.
13th January 2006.
It's Friday the thirteenth and what a day for a discovery. I, like many other people that have an InkJet printer, like to try to keep control of its ink usage. I normally try to do this by using a paper that does not feed very well (although this turns into a pain whenever I need to print out a long document for editing) as doing so discourages others from using the printer. It's a little like aversion therapy.
In my search for 'ill-feeding paper', I have tried many brands and found that some papers that you pay a lot for will hardly ever feed properly and you have to stand there, nursing the printer through a print run. Any way, I found that ASDA's Smart-Price multi-purpose paper feeds rather well. It also has a nice, thick feel about it. With Hewlett Packard's pigment-based black, it doesn't bleed or run either. Nice one - and cheap.
7th January 2006.
The bus station again. Taking into account the council cock-up that has occured so far and also taking into account the fact that it looks as though Metro Holst isn't able to finish this thing off, I honestly think that they should re-open the bus station.
Clearly, the councillors who are delaying the re-opening are those that travel everywhere in cars.
6th January 2006.
A new shop is in town. This is just what Derby needs. Sound Bites is a new, vegetarian shop, opposite the court house, near to the ill-fated bus station development.
This isn't one of those honey and yoghurt-coated whey-protein body-building shops though, this is a true, total-vegetarian shop - a vegan shop. For the first time, vegans who aren't alergic to nuts and haven't got insulin problems can buy without having to look at the labels of products they have never seen before. There is everything here except Provamel Desert (apparently, Provamel have stopped making it and they refuse to sell the other stuff (a sort of vegan custard) because it has too much sugar in it).
It is a good place to go if you know someone who is a vegan but not sure what to buy for them. However, the icing on the cake (so to speak) is that there is a small cafe at the back of the shop. Nice one.
6th January 2006.
That new bus station thing just doesn't seem top be going right at all. I can't say that I'm sorry that it still hasn't found a single business that is stupid enough to want to establish itself in a known flood area with polution problems. Now, it is in financial problems and another developer has to be found. I'm glad they didn't knock down the Art Deco station because if the whole thing falls through, we still have a bus station that works ('if it ain't broke, don't mend it' is taking on a new meaning with the Riverlights project having financial problems).
And still, nobody knows why we are all standing outside the bus station, under little shelters that can't protect more than half a dozen people or so - and we have been doing this for around two months whilst the bus station has just been standing there. Something isn't right.
3rd January 2006.
It's the time of year when people start looking at how much they ate over the Christmas/new year festivals and perhaps calculating their Body-Mass Index (BMI) and wondering what they could do to make it all better. Without trying to sound too smug, I took the precaution of measuring my weight at a 'standard time of the week' and found that I have not gained more than half a kilogramme (that is within experimental error when you look at our scales)...
If you measure your weight several times a day for a week, you will see that it fluctuates quite a bit and the concept of 'losing a pound' demonstrates itself as being a rather rediculous concept. However, if you weigh yourself at a particular time of the week, this can be used as a vague reference if you have a weekly cycle of work/leisure and so on as you will have been likely to have eaten and expelled as much as you normally do at that time of the week.
Any way, I carry a fair amount of muscle (although not a rediculous amount) and that is not taken into account when calculating a BMI - it is all counted as fat. BMI is your weight (in kg) divided by the square of your height (in metres). BMI, if I remember right, was a product of the insurance industry where they found that overall, if you have a BMI of between 18 and 25, you will live longer. BMI is a bit suspect as it fails to take into account many factors including: what proportion of someone's body is muscle; and, what sort of bone structure they have. If you are an ectomorph (skinny, thin frame) then having a BMI of 25 will make you look a lot fatter than someone with a larger frame (mesomorph) with the same index. Still, you can't blame the insurance industry - they couldn't access any meaningful data when they came up with the formula.
So, I thought it would be fun to calculate Arnold Schwarzenegger's BMI. Nobody in their right mind is going to argue that when he was at his peak (winning countless Mr Universe and Mr Olympia awards) he was obese. So, his vital stats (as far as the rather simplistic insurance industry is concerned) were: Height - 6' 2" (1.88m); and, Weight - 235lbs (106.3kg). This gives us a BMI of 30.1 which the insurance industry classes as obese. I don't: I class the insurance industry as inept.
1st January 2006.
It all started with a bang that just kept on going and going. For around half an hour or so - a peculiar, almost bubbling/rippling noise as explosions happened all over the city.
No new year resolutions - I don't want to disappoint myself by setting myslef up to fail. Last year, I did give up chocolate from early in November to Christmas eve so, when I say; 'I'm not addicted to chocolate: I can pack it in any time I like,' they know that I'm telling the truth.
just in case you hadn't noticed, I've just started a new blog page as well. To see the last one - 2005 - just click here.
Here's a closer look (corrected for perspective but it is from the same source image as this panorama). It appears to be one of East Midlands Demolition Limited's signs about health and safety requirements for people working on the site. Anybody not conforming to these requirements is (as I understand it) committing an offence under the Health and Safety at Work Act. Everybody on this site should be wearing: safety boots; a helmet; and, a 'hi-vis' jacket.
In the top-right picture on the left, the man in the blue top is the lorry driver.
This aeroplane flew over at around 14:25 BST. By the time we had cottoned on to the fact that this was no ordinary aeroplane, picked up the camera, switched it on and got into the back garden, it had got this far away. Despite its appearance, it isn't a small one - it is one of those early 20th century passenger aeroplanes that preceded the Douglas DC3 (Dakota).
In a conversation with the neighbour that owns this plant, she said that it was supposed to smell of rotting flesh but it didn't.
So it rained and, that might just be the end of summer - not that I would want to be too cynical.
I didn't have a white, louvred box to put my max/min thermometer in so I thought that it would be intersting to but the thermometer directly in the sun. On Sunday (2nd July), it went up to 48C (yes, that is not a typo, forty eight celsius).
Global-Warming Bush's Kyoto legacy continues to be an issue. The BBC weather website predicts that we will have a temperature of 30C this afternoon (for those outside the UK, remember that the UK is further north than the USA-Canada border). A good day for staying in.
