25th December 2007.
I've just looked at the ingredients on the baked potatoes pack. I would have thought it fairly straight forward that baked potatoes would just be potatoes and, perhaps, some oil (especially if they were par-cooked). However, Potatoes are only 93%. Sunflower oil accounts for 3.5% which is okay because they would have been cooked in oil anyway, The problem is that that only adds up to 96.5%. The rest is flour, starch, salt and two types of sugar. Sugar? Why is sugar in a savory preparation? What are they trying to hide? The par-cooked food we get frozen is rubbish. Ther are many vegetables that are to be steamed or boiled that are just the veg - no additives so why can't potatoes be like this?
25th December 2007.
It's been a long time since I last added to this blog. A good friend of mine was found unconscious and not breathing and spent the next three days in intensive care. Fortunately, their health is back to normal now - I feared that this was going to turn into a replay of what happened to Wilf Hey last year (He phoned me in December and told me not to phone him back because the hospital phones were such a deliberate rip-off. As a result, that was the last time I talked to him). Let's hope that this incident was a one-off.
29th November 2007.
Derby Playhouse closed its doors today at roughly 3:00 pm. I'd just gone there to meet the wife and found myself locked out with some reporters from the local paper. After a while, the BBC cameraman/reporter turned up as well. If it has closed, it is a shame, not just because I have many fond memories of the place, but because it is a purpose built facility that the council should be looking after. Instead, the council are pouring money into the hideous Quad building that nobody likes and takes up a well-used bit of valuable green space that was in the city centre. Let's hope that this isn't the end for the Derby Playhouse.
4th November 2007.
It's ten past midnight. I went to let the cats out at midnight and although we had been having fireworks going off all last night (Saturday 3rd November) there were a lot of loud bangs all of a sudden and I noticed that from the very rough direction of East Midlands Airport (which is between five and ten miles away), there was a bright light taking off. It twinkled in exactly the same way as landing lights do on take off although the colour was more of a yellowey pink than the usual bright white but it seemed to be climbing very early and quickly.
I know where the usual flight path takes aeroplanes - remember that I'm just observing from one point and so only have angles to go on and not distances and speeds.
Then, it seemed to swerve and then get back onto its original path which seemed to have an elevation of around 40 to 50 degrees above horizontal.
Then, I noticed that it didn't have any anti-collision lights on it.
It seemed to get to an altitude and then stay at that altitude and it went past, with the light getting fainter - as it would with forward facing landing lights but it didn't make any sound of its own.
Swerving - no sound - no anti-collision lights - steep climb - odd colour for lights.
Then, there were more bangs and another one went up - this was maybe two minutes after the first one. I thought that they might be cargo plannes - these take off together like that and with it being midnight, it seemed plausible although the lack of any sound countered that one - cargo planes usually make a lot of noise on take off.
There seemed to be a strong link with the explosions though.
Overall, I got the impression that these were not cargo planes. I also think that they were not UFOs in the ET sense. I got the impression that they were small hot air balloons, probably being set off on their brief journeys all of maybe half a mile or so away. There are plenty of festivals at this time of the year and I think that they were related to one of these.
Time to go to bed now.
1st November 2007.
The Westfield Eagle Centre extension is open now, so what about the rest of Derby?
Marks and Spencer has moved from the buildings at the Corn Market and the bottom of St Peter's Street and Debenhams has moved from Victoria Street as shown in the photograph on the right. There are a number of other shops (Lush and so on) that have made this move as well but these two are the main ones.
So, what is to become of these buildings? I have memories of being taken by my mother around Ranby's as this Debenhams shop used to be called in the 1960s, as I'm sure many people will have. There has been a shop here for years (you can tell by the architecture).
So, what will it become? The city council seem to be hell-bent on making sure that we are on those television programmes where inner-city drunk and violence problems form entertainment for the masses. So, how about a night club? I'm sure they will think of something. It might be that they are saving Duckworth Square to merge with the Debenhams site to make a large, seven-storey-high complex with casinos and bars, along with offices that the town so clearly needs.
1st November 2007.
The day started off nice and clear (over our house, any way) and I noticed that a high con-trail was casting a shadow, looking rather reminiscent of the dark lines that appeared in the photographs in a horror film (you remember the incident with the lightening conductor).
The line (running from top-right to bottom-left) is the shadow cast on a thin layer of haze, by a higher aeroplane's condensation trail (a little bit on which you can still see in the top-right of the image). It is not that obvious so, having taken a picture of it, I put it on the computer and increased the contrast to see what was there.
Here, you can see the shadow clearer.
Even though there is very little of it left - so little that you cannot see the trail directly, you can still see its shadow.
This image uses edge detection to show where the shadow is and you can see a second shadow, indicating a second layer - now that you can see that, you can see it slightly in the second image.
So, apart from being an interesting picture that reveals that there are two haze layers there at that time, we can conclude from it that: even when you cannot see a contrail directly from the light it reflects, it still reflects enough light to cast a shadow. So, if we can't see them, to what extent are they disguising global warming?
1st November 2007.
Nearly 1GB of ram with only two programs loaded. This is that 2GB 64-bit machine running Vista again. Ho hum.
29th October 2007.
We recently received the new Yellow Pages so, being environmentally aware and today being recycle day, I found last year's yellow pages to put it in with the paper for recycling.
This is last year's (2006-07) and, as you can see, like an increasing number of people today, we never needed it - we use the Internet to find phone numbers and addresses (it is easier and quicker).
At 36mm thick and with 1270 pages, it is a completely redundant artefact from the last millenium. They can get advertising revenue by circulating it to everybody with a telephone but if very few people even get as far as opening it, they are not earning that revenue and they are using paper pulp for something that is a waste.
They can make the document from renewable forest if they want but by doing so, they are putting pressure on the pulp industry to find extra pulp - that could go into books and teaching resources instead.
I can only speak for my own copy of the Yellow Pages but; what a waste.
28th October 2007.
This is Panjabi Yahoo.
You can see that they have put some effort into it.
They've taken the trouble to work out what 'Yahoo!' is in Gurmukhi script (the letters that Indian Punjabi is written in) and, as you can see, 'Yahoo Toolbar' has come out reasonably well.
This isn't just Roman-Gurmukhi transliterations though. It is in Punjabi. On the bottom line, between 'Yahoo' and 'Mail' is written 'Mayrah Yahoo!' which means 'My Yahoo!' in Punjabi.
So, we've got a page that has pretty much everything apart from 'Yahoo! India' written in Gurmukhi. Having established this, we might well ask; 'What is Citibank doing with an advert there?'
When we look at it, it becomes clear that it isn't written in Gurmikhi. Citibank needs to check that it is sending out the right advertising image to the right pages (or at least somebody has to).
Just to check that it wasn't a fluke, I pressed refresh and another advert using the same script appeared.
And again.
And again.
The next time, it was in English.
Back to non-Gurmukhi/non-English.
And so on.
26th October 2007.
Firefox updated itself today and gave me an option.
I could install a spell checker so that none of those annoying little typographical errors end up being included in any emails or other data that is sent from it.
Isn't that helpful.
Going off slightly on a tangent - but you'll see the point:
- The Post (the Royal Mail in England) was an English invention. As a result, British stamps don't have to have the name of the country on them, whereas everybdy else has to.
- The Internet was an American invention therefore you don't have to have .us (or similar) at the end of .com, .net or .org (and so on) domain names whereas everywhere else has to.
Back to the story...
So, when I looked down the list of versions of English, I expected to see 'American English' and 'English' amongst the different versions of English available. Instead, I found that there is something called 'British English'. So, one of two things have happened:
- There is a recognition that in Britain there are many dialects of English and that they have some sort of representation here and, for some reason, the 'Americanised English' file was either not available as a download or was part of the default installation; or,
- Somebody thinks that American English is the real English and British English is some parochial version that is so far removed from real English that it needs its own dictionary.
I think that the latter is more likely.
As an English speaker (as opposed to an American-English speaker), I am constantly apauled by the wilful destruction of the language by the Americans. Is it somewhere written into the constitution that they should, at all conceivable moments alter the English language? I once came across a website that had so many split inifinitives in it that I was moved to email the website owner. His defence was that the New York Times said that it was all right to do so. Is this the 'New York Times' in England (you know, where 'British English' is spoken) or is it the one that is in New York in the USA? I'll give you a clue - there is no New York Times in England. I hardly think that an American business is any sort of authority on how English should be spoken or written. Let's leave thing up to Oxford University, shall we? (Oxford in England, that is.)
12th October 2007.
There seemed to be rather a lot of cars parked on double yellow lines outside the new Eagle Centre (Westfield) in Derby today.
This is so selfish.
There are other vehicles to get past and pedestrians who would like a clear curb so that they can cross the road where it is convenient for them - not somewhere that has somehow managed to escape being obstructed by selfishly parked cars.
There's never a car thief around when you need one
5th October 2007.
Task manager stopped responding. Is Microsoft Windows suitable for a production environment?
26th September 2007.
The main construction of the Westfield extention to Derby's Eagle centre is coming to a close and the construction companies need somewhere to park their cherry pickers.
What better place could there be than the carpart opposite?
Without any registration numbers, they can't even be fined.
(By the way, the car park at this point is on a slope - the picture doesn't need straightening, look at the lamp posts.)
Well, this looks like something wrong. One of them has broken this bow and it has landed on top of a council-owned bus shelter.
It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of it other than the bow being removed.
26th September 2007.
Display Driver stopped responding and has recovered. Mmm. The message says; 'Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered'. Only a little bit more specific there and, it wasn't as though I hadn't noticed. What next? A message that pops up to tell me that the mouse has moved?
These messages disappear after a short while so it isn't as though it would still be there if I had gone away and come back after a few minutes.
22nd September 2007.
Vista is such a pretty thing although persoanlly, I don't know anybody who truly likes it (the people I know have all used previous versions of Windows although, to be fair, apparently Vista is liked by those that have never used a computer before).
The machine in the screenshot has 2GB of memory to go at and all that is running, apart from the six windows in the task bar (you should note that one of those is the Windows dialogue box you can see), is AVG antivirus and the OOo quickstart.
So, with a cavernous 2GB of memory to go at, occupied only by a nice lean browser (no plug-ins), two copies of Windows Explorer, Paint (without any image in it) and NotePad, it decided that there was not enough space left. I had been running Yod'm (Yet anOther Deskop Manager) 3D desktop (runs a bit like Beryl on UNIX for those that are familiar with it) but that wasn't loaded at the time.
So, mainly out of morbid curiosity, I took up the challenge to close programs and all that was left at the end was Notepad. That's useful. You can run a text editor in 640kB of memory in DOS but that is not comparing like with like - Vista has pretty window decorations that you can see through.
Incidentally, my son managed to crash Vista on this machine (the one in the screenshot, not the one that I'e editing this page on) using Notepad. So, maybe leaving NotePad running isn't that trivial at all on a Vista machine.
22nd September 2007.
It's cold and damp , with a hint of fog. Could this be Autumn proper? The leaves have been falling off some of the trees for a couple of weeks now although many of the other trees and bushes seem quite content at the moment.
21st September 2007.
Another fly-over, this time a Spitfire. At around a quarter to seven, I heard a plane that sounded quite like a Cessna (you know, some dentist flying off for a weekend break) and it flew off at a bit of an unusual angle (you get to know where aeroplanes tend to fly) and then, it opened up its throttle and it turned into the unmistakeable sound of a Spitfire.
Then, it came back, tanking along pretty quickly at, I would estimate, between 1,000 and 2,000 feet.
Next, it flew over us and around a few times before disappearing at around 7pm (BST).
In the images, you can see its unique wing design and as it flew directly over us.
On the 14thJuly this year, a Lancaster bomber (also powered by Merlins) flew over and if you look at last year's blog, you can see that on the 14thJuly (what is special about that date) another odd plane flew over.
21st September 2007.
It's the first day of Autumn and although there is the joke that once Autumn comes along (or in some versions, a month with a letter 'R' in it), the central heating boilers all get switched on and people start wearing winter clothes, it has actually become quite cold. Whilst this is clearly coincidence, it is worthy of note.
Just to clear up on that, later on in the afternoon, it has become hot enough again to wear shorts. I wonder what tomorrow will be like.
7th September 2007.
Again, there was an outage on NTL no DNS, or web traffic. The Pingu ping program that I use as a simple and lightweight way of monitoring (click here to see it in PC Plus SuperDisc issue 234 if you want a copy of your own - look at HelpDesk Extra). The first failed ping was at 05:15BST and the last was 11:00BST. All back to normal now though.
3rd September 2007.
As I said on the 3rd August 2007, writing a Kakuro generator is quite a job and can take months working part time. Like 3rd August 2007, somebody has downloaded the Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles along with a few other bits (2782 files) between 09:56:44 BST (8:56:44 GMT) and 10:54:07 BST (9:54:07 GMT), from the Czech Republic at IP address 212.80.64.118[
host wsc.tgnet.cz.
inetnum: 212.80.64.116 - 212.80.64.119
netname: WSCNET
descr: WinSoft Company, s.r.o., Olomouc].
Again, this was 1.6 year's worth of Sudoku and Kakuro problems from this server, clogging the connection and denying others its use - in contravention of the acceptible use policy. This is the second time that this has happened (see 3rd August 2007). So, again, if there is a publisher out there who has just had an offer of a book with a Sudoku or Kakuro a day, or, if there is a publisher who has just asked someone to provide such a quantity of puzzles, then remember that this is where they might well have originated and that if they did, I own the copyright on them.
22nd August 2007.
I went downstairs this morning and found that our new monitor had a bug on it.
To be fair, it is not a bug but a moth. The wet summer we have had has meant that there haven't been as many as normal (leave a window open and you can usually find at least three species that are new to science fluttering around your kitchen).
22nd August 2007.
We were in one of these remaindered shops and found this delightful little toy.
Although it claimed on the box that it was a model of some character called 'Frodo', it is clearly a model of our new priminister Gordon Brown. So, this is what he was up to when we all thought that he was on holiday.
22nd August 2007.
Ahh. To be a kitten.
We were, unfortunately, only baby-sitting this one for a friend.
22nd August 2007.
I have never seen this before. To be quite honest, it never even occured to me that something like this happened for these plants - they are usually just bits of other plants that have been chopped off and then allowed to grow. The humble pond weed in our water butt is in flower.
Like water lillies (but only around 1cm across), the flowers work their way to the surface and then flower. Whilst they are underwater, the partially opened flower has a bubble of gas (presumably oxygen as this is logical - the rest of the plant produces oxygen from cracking water photosynthetically) that seems to be what keeps it upright.
11th August 2007.
First, catch your rabbit, is, apparently, something that was not said at the beginning of a recipe for rabbit pie.
However, whilst we are not making rabbit pie, or doing anything that might harm a rabbit, when you let one out in your garden, you do need to catch it.
If you go up to a rabbit and lean forward with outreaching arms, it just runs away. You can do this for hours. However, I've found a way that reinforces the rabbit's sense of importance. All you need to do is get your camera and lay down on the ground. Keep on taking shots but getting closer and closer. Eventually, you will be close enough to tickle it behind the ears and then hold it down whilst you get a good grip on it, pick it up and then put it in its cage.
5th August 2007.
Our ISP had a network outage between 10:10 GMT and 12:40 GMT so apologies to anybody who couldn't get to the site or any other site on this server between those times.
3rd August 2007.
Writing a Kakuro generator is quite a job and can take months working part time. It needs an understanding of logic, programming and how the puzzle works. So, this morning, between 10:32:34 BST (9:32:34 GMT) and 11:03:49 BST (10:03:49 GMT), somebody in Holland at IP address 217.120.161.161[
host co349109-b.almel1.ov.home.nl
inetnum: 217.120.160.0 - 217.120.161.255
netname: ATHOME-BENELUX-ASSEN-14
descr: @Home Benelux Assen Headend block]
downloaded all 1.6 year's worth of Sudoku and Kakuro problems from this server (slurping 2728 hits worth and clogging the connection, denying others its use - in contravention of the acceptible use policy). I haven't the faintest idea why someone would like to download so many puzzles but that is certainly more than you can do manually in that time. Various suggestions have been made so, if there is a publisher out there who has just had an offer of a book with a Sudoku or Kakuro a day, or, if there is a publisher who has just asked someone to provide such a quantity of puzzles, then remember that this is where they might well have originated and that if they did, I own the copyright on them.
Alternatively, if somebody has downloaded the image files so that they can process them to retrieve the numbers from those images so that they can pretend that they have built a puzzle producing program (possibly as part of a university course - to the lecturer, ask them to use their 'program' to produce some more), they are just as guilty of theft. Of course, it might be completely innocent but if I thought that it was reasonably likely that it was innocent, I wouldn't be writing this.
1st August 2007.
I was taking some pictures of the bees on the Mallow plant, the one on the right being fairly typical. Our mallow plant is one of those intermediate pink colours but the flowers vary from a darkish pink to almost white.
On the left, though, is one peculiar flower. Mallow flowers have only five petals. The one here has two pink petals, two white petals and one that is clearly half of each. The odd thing about it is that the line between the pink half and the white half is so distinct that it looks unreal (it is though). I susupect that the petals must get their pigmentation instructions from two places on the base of each petal. I'm sure that there must be a basis for a thesis there for someone doing a biology degree.
30th July 2007.
Unsolicited business telephone calls are one thing but to an ex-directory (unlisted) number? This is the telephone equivalent of Spam - the call was a recorded message. The interesting thing about it is that our number is not listed so there is a paper-trail between the telephone company and the company that made the call on which at one stage, somebody has committed an offence against the Data Protection Act. So, for anybody that wants to block these incoming calls, they originate from 08447739922 and mine came in at 13:42BST - put that in your telephone number blacklist.
21st July 2007.
DWICA Carnival day in Derby today and, like the last few weeks or so, it was raining. However, this didn't stop anybody from enjoying it.
Many years ago, I went to the Notting Hiil carnival in London with my wife. It rained then as well. Back then it was the days when the police consistently under-reported the number of people turning up but things have changed.
The music was loud - even louder than those dreadful little cars that have bass rhythms booming out of them at traffic lights.
Here, they had generators on the floats and you could hear all of the music - fron a long, long way away.
19th July 2007.
This morning, at around 8am, it was announced that there was no water in Nottingham because Mapperley reservoir was empty and nobody seemed to know where it had gone. We carried on with the photo shoot regardless.
There were a number of theories as to the absence of any water and these included:
- Mapperly water pumping station had been attacked by terrorists - this being confirmed because forensics had found traces of Horlicks in the donkey; and,
- A UFO had taken the water because it needed it for fuel.
You would have thought that something like a reservoir would have a low-level alarm and that someone was monitoring it - even remotely.
18th July 2007.
Today, we were doing a photo-shoot at Nottingham Trent University (the graduation photographs) and, as the road signs in Nottimgham are pretty rubbish, we ended up virtually circumnavigating the city centre and somehow, ending up on the A52 travelling southwards from the exit we wanted. We finally ended up on the road to Ratcliffe-on-Soar powerstation. However, before we got there, we went past this block of flats.
Normally, in a city, you have larger buildings in the city centre and, as you get awa from the centre, the only tall buildings might be the odd group of tower blocks like the ones you see in Glasgow for instance. However, Nottingham is different.
In Nottingham, you have green fields with semi-detatched housing and then, a tower block on its own - standing out like a pork pie at a bar mitzvah. I took this shot when we were stuck in one of the traffic jams (it took 2 hours to get from Nottingham city centre to Derby - all of 15 miles). It was in the shadow of a cloud and had this halo of white clouds around it (thanks to parallax) and, no, they are not added in afterwards, or even moved - they were where you see them.
14th July 2007.
This is why I always try to keep my camera ready. It was around seven minutes to two when I heard a sound like a heavy bomber and, sure enough, over the trees came a Lancaster Bomber - on its own - turning a gentle right.
3rd July 2007.
Not only was June the wettest on record, but we've just had a hail storm. Okay, so it wasn't golf-ball sized lumps of ice killing people but there was so much of it (nationwide, it turns out) that it looked like snow.
Here, you can see it close-up. It also destroyed the roof of our little plastic greenhouse.
26th June 2007.
Back in 2001, I was in Derby when the river was really high - it came to within around 10" (25cm) of the top of the steps of the river gardens in Derby (that is to say, within 10" of the path). This was said to be a very rare event.
A few years later, I pointed out, in a letter to the Derby Evening Telegraph, insurers would be unlikely to insure a business that set itself up in the proposed Riverlights development because of the risk of flooding and, for some reason, everyone seemed to pull out of the project and without any companies wanting to move into such a building, it collapsed.
Yesterday, and really but to a lesser extent the last week or two, it has been raining, raining a lot with areas of Sheffield being flooded and people losing their lives.
The water that ended up in Sheffield fell just a little bit to the north of the (Derbyshire) Derwent river's catchment area but plenty did fall into the Derwent basin. If the storm had been just 20 miles further south, we would have had a lot more than we finally got.
Yesterday, the Environment Agency site posted a 'Flood Watch' warning for the lower Derwent (including Derby). Today, we went into Derby and had a look at the river for ourselves - the plug of water had made its way into the lower Derwent area.
River Garden Steps. These are the steps along the river gardens. Just under six years ago, the water was only around four inches higher than this. You can see from the rubbish that the water has been over the tread on the top step and also, you can see the 'tide mark' on the rectangular pillars.
A
The Wier. Up to the life belt is the river bank, a gentle slope and on the other side is the Derwent. Underneath that, somewhere, is a wier. There is no significant drop in the river level over the wier with this amount of water going along the river.
B
Riverside Path. This is the path that goes along side the river (image taken from the road bridge). The water on the path is at the same level as the river which is on the right of the wall.
C
Exeter Bridge. Here is the Exeter bridge (looking towards the river gardens) and as you can see, there isn't much space for a log to go through without clobbering the bridge itself - there were plenty of such logs.
D
One thing we noticed was that logs and other floating debris was that they accumulate at threes, where the tree's runk pokes out of the water. This puts a lot of strain on a tree and when a tonne or so of log hits it a 5m/s or so, somtimes something will give.
Silk Mill. These are the hand railings up at the Silk Mill.
E
These images are all of the centre of Derby - you can see their references on the map I've drawn. Floods elsewhere are a lot worse and, if things were slightly different regarding the location of the storm they would have been worse here. The city council needs to think about the location of its trendy new buildings. The old Aslin bus station was built on a concrete slab that was supported by gravel - there are a number of streams that run underneath it. When they build the Riverlights project, they will have to make sure that the ground that they use has been secured otherwise bits of it will sink into the gravel faster than other bits.
So, this is all about Derby being lucky - this time - sort of.
A once in 20 year rain storm, every five years or so. I wonder when the next one will be. Will it be in another 20 years, five years or next weekend?
21st June 2007.
The shortest day. Even though England is as far north as Canada, we have a nice warm climate. However, one thing about being so far north is that the summer nights never really get completely dark. This picture was taken at 23:38BST (22:38GMT) and you can see just how light the sky is where you can see it through the clouds.
21st June 2007.
This is the bird feeder on our miniature apple tree. It hangs around five feet (~1.5m) above the ground and the snails love it. They climb all of the way up the trunk, along the branches and across to the feeder. Here, they have scaled a leaf to get onto the top of it (either that or they jumped) but I have also seen them underneath the top of the bamboo wind chimes. There were no nearby leaves or braches there and maybe they did jump to that one.
20th June 2007.
New Zealand is how close? This is so bad and has been around for ages but I've just got around to taking a picture of it. If you imagine the distance from the bottom of the bay at the top, the one that looks a little bit like The Wash; to the top of the long bay at the bottom (remembering that this is in fact an enormous continent so maybe 'bay' isn't quite the right word but you know what I mean), then that is roughly the distance between the east coast of Australia and New Zealand.
20th June 2007.
This is the new screen in Derby. On its first night, it failed and all of the opera-loving middle classes of Derby had to watch a substitute screen that had been brought in as a temprary replacement. It rained, of course, but that was a small price to pay for watching opera outside in the late spring.
19th June 2007.
In the early afternoon, I got a call from outside to have a look at something in the sky.
Above, there was a very thin layer of ice several miles up but around the sun, there was a rainbow, or perhaps I should say 'icebow'.
This looked similar to the rings you often get around the moon in the middle of the night and I have seen thin slices of this bow during the day when the sun is low, as in the photograph on the right which was taken just a few days ago.
Here, on the right, you can see the top image enhanced so that you can see what we saw with our naked eyes - three rings.
On the right, you can see how the rings were arranged.
- Ring A has the sun at the centre of it and is by far the brightest of them.
- Ring B is not smaller than the others - they are all the same size. It is not a flare in the lens or some other in-camera optical effect, we saw this with our own eyes. It is actually off centre relative to ring A and therefore doesn't have direct sun light as a source. Why is it like this? I don't know. It could be from a relflection of something but what and where? Note that the centres of rings A, B and C are not aligned.
- Ring C had its centre directly above us and at the centre, was a bright dot, around the same size as the pink one in the diagram part of the image. It might we be that there are similar dots in the centres of the other two rings but the sun obscured them if they were there.
As far as I can tell, these rings are formed by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, falling steadily and whilst they are doing that, they lay horizontally (any that aren't, will fall faster until they are horizontal). The 15 degree or so ring is caused by the dispersion of light, in pretty much the same way as happens in a rainbow or in the rings we get that form around the moon. This still doesn't answer why rings B and C should be present.
As far as I can make out, the only thing that is special about ring C (the one that is directly above) is that we are directly below it and somehow, the light from the observer is special (it could be due to light from the observer being reflected up and back down again or, something to do with the fact that the ice crystals fall horizontally).
So, what is special about ring B? Why is there this extra ring, offset from the first one? Is there something on the ground that is reflecting light up? Does the light have to come from above (like the sun)? If so, how did rings B and C form?
18th June 2007.
This is the river just outside the Derby Evening Telegraph offices in Derby. I really have no idea why the idiots who throw these life belts into the river think that they are helping anybody. It is a waste of money and potentially lethal.
13th June 2007.
Our neighbour found a chysalis when she was moveing some stones in her rockery. That is when she found this Elephant Hawk Moth.
You can tell from the state of its wings that it is still pumping them up to their full size - later in the afternoon, it had achieved this and flew off.
Note here that its eyes - the bit that looks like a stuffed olive - seems to follow you around. This is because it is a compound eye and the darker bit is where light goes through a little lens and down each little conical pathway to its light sensors. This gives the impression that it is following you around but it is just a light effect.
10th June 2007.
We've just had a child's party here and now that they've all gone, I've just noticed a tiny Smarties pack - the sort you get at children's parties. On it is the letter 'r'. I susupect that you can 'collect' them so that with the right ones, you can spell out the word 'smarties' (or even 'Smarties' if there is an uppercase 'S'). So, I wonder, just how many obscene words you can make from the letters 'aeimrst' or even sentences.
Don't email me with your results as I'm not going to put them on this website.
8th June 2007.
This logo is just plain bad. It looks like a badly laid out tangram. After a while of studying it, you can make out that it is supposed to be the numbers 2 0 1 2 - I presume that this is obvious if you have been working on nothing else for the last few months but to the unsuspecting audience, that is not the case. Even the advert has given people epileptic seizures and parts of it have been banned.
It does incorporate the five Olympic rings so we know what it is supposed to be about but I think that we need to go deeper than that if we are to come up with an Olympic logo. So, in the true spirit of satire, here goes...
We all know that the Olympics is supposed to be free from performance enhancing drug - this makes if fair and that is quite right. However, the way it is implemented appears, from the layman's point of view, to be a little odd. Many times, people have had their record breaking gold medals taken from them because some dope testing has revealed that they have some drug running around their system.
However, zero tollerance of drug taking is not the same as zero levels of drugs in the body. To demonstrate the point, one example could be alcohol. If you detect any alcohol in the blood, does it mean that the person is an alcoholic? Alcohol is found in the blood of practicing alcoholics but it is also present in the blood of someone who has just eaten some bread. Yes, not every molecule of alcohol evaporates from the dough as it cooks. So, what proof of mens rae do they need for other substances? Is finding the components of cannabis in their body evidence of canabis smoking or just standing at a bus stop whilst someone else in the queue has a joint? What about cold remidies and other things? It would be easy to plant some drug on the food or drink of a competitor so that they show up positive so where do they draw the line? Scientifically speaking, the people who take away the medals/records of athletes are a joke. They are able to claim a chain of evidence when no such chain exists.
So, with this in mind, I suggest that the following steroid-based logo should be the logo for the 2012 London Olympics. It has the colours of the five rings and the oxidation state allows for double bonds in the steroid structure where the rings in the original would interlock.
Now, everybody can read that, know what it represents and take with the required pinch of salt, the decisions from those officious employees that like to extrapolate a life of drug taking from a molecule or two.
10th May 2007.
You'd hardly notice this, would you? Westfield's idea of a cinema, just added to the top of the design of the new Westfield Centre - the shopping centre formerly known as the 'Eagle Centre'. Literally just bolted on top.
Totally unobtrusive - you wouldn't know it was there, now, would you?
On the left, you can see what it looked like on 29th January 2007 taken from Friar Gate.
I don't know what the fuss is about.
It is not as though it spoils the skyline or anything, does it?
27th April 2007.
Looks like the grille on the outside of the Eagle Centre extension is supposed to be like that. The whole thing just doesn't fit in with the rest of the building and looks as though it could have been done a lot better. I cannot recall seeing that part of the building on any artist's impression, prior to building it and looking at the various images I have seen sice, there is no sight of it. It is needed because behind it, there is a road way and having such a large area that just lets through air is necessary. However, they could have done a better job. You can see in the picture on the right that the fine detail goes right up to the edge so clearly, this is supposed to be viewed by the public. Oh well - I hope that people learn from this.
19th April 2007.
We're getting new bus shelters along Grampian way so now, arguably, we have as good a set of facilities as Derby's bus station (which is second only to Ashbourne's). However, one thing that we don't have are the new GPS controlled signs that give a reasonable prediction of when the next bus will be coming along. The image on the right is of a stop on the Allestree route that Trent has had installed for over 2 years. Some Arriva routes in Derby do have them - the route has a two digit number and so has the time (in minutes). However, you might speculate that the reason we don't have these yet is that the time in minutes is limited to only two digits.
The 38 service is supposed to be a ten minutes service during normal (that is to say, not the early morning and not after six) times. However, around 2:30pm to 4:00pm during weekdays, during school term time, you are lucky to get a bus running more than once an hour (the service goes a bit flakey at the beginning of that time and it takes a while for it to get back to 'normal' again). I have known of people waiting for 1h10m for a bus on the 38 route within this time period.
So, for us to get these GPS-enabled bus signs, we need to have a special one that has four digits for the time so it can be displayed in 'H:MM' format.
Maybe that's why they haven't bothered yet - it would be too revealing for them to display it like this or too costly to have a part of the display that only ever shows a colon.
15th April 2007.
Vista uses the HSV colour model with its users. Quite often, HSV is considered too complicated (I really don't know why) but here, in Vista, it is used to select the window colour. Right-click on the desktop somewhere, select 'Personalize' [sic] and then select 'Window Color [sic] and Appearance'. You might have to click on the 'Show color mixer' down arrow to make it appear but there it is.
Here it is in detail. Look at the colours, especially what it calls 'Brightness'.
This is the change colour dialogue box that you get when you want to change colour in The GIMP. You can see that it displays HSV in addition to RGB and will allow you to edit the colour using both sets of controls.
And here it is in detail. This is using the same values that the Vista selector used and you can see that they are the same.
Vista using HSV. Where's that bar of chocolate?
14th April 2007.
They've found the obesity gene. Whilst this might sound like an excuse to go out and buy a bar of chocolate, it does raise an interesting issue.
We all know that it is wrong to say that somebody cannot go somewhere or do something because they are black - this is known as being racist (okay, so we all know that and don't need it explaining to us - or, at least you would thing so, wouldn't you?). In fact, it is wrong to discriminate against somebody because of any genetic differences. (In my book, you can complain to somebody about things that they have decided over themselves but not things that they have not: taste in art, food, football teams are okay to argue about / take the mickey out of and so on but genetic makeup is effectively like racism). Let's put that seed of a thought to one side for a moment.
There was a case recently where somebody was refused a knee operation by a health authority in the UK because their Body Mass Index (BMI) was over 30. The obesity gene does what it says on the label - it increases the chance of somebody having a BMI over 30.
So, bringing in the second paragraph, how would we feel if some health authority said; 'You can't have that knee operation because you are black'? It would be all over the papers - imagine things like 'RACIST LHA REFUSES BLACKS KNEE OP' and so on. The colour of your skin is genetic and so is obesity (as we now know). Refusing health care on the grounds of BMI, therefore, is no longer socially acceptable.
Isn't it time that these health authorities are shown up for the prejudiced organisations that they really are?
Name them and shame them.
2nd April 2007.
We've just had a phone call from somebody who stated who they claimed to be so fast that, as was probably intended, I couldn't remember who it was. Of course, this was one of those unsolicited business calls and it was a recording so, no interaction there. He asked that if I was a BT (British Telecom) customer, I should press '5'. And that was it. If this is BT, then it is wasting a lot of money. The reason I say that is that we are ex-directory: our telephone number appears nowhere in telephone listings except to the emergency services - should we ever need to contact them. So, for someone not connected with the emergency services to have a list that includes out telephone number, somebody needs to have commited an offence against the computer mis-use act, data protection act and so on. Or, they could just be ringing every number in a war-dialer style attack, trying to find out who is gullable enough to send data the other way (by pressing '5') to somebody that they can't even talk to, let alone know or trust. I 1471ed it and the call details were as follows (UK numbers): 0871 950 1187 called at 13:48 BST (12:48GMT/UTC).
30th March 2007.
Once again, the balloon man is back. If this one is anything like the others - and there is no reason to suppose that he is in any way different - the large red balloon that you see is the only one he has. The ones that he is selling to the general public are in fact only around half of the size (if that) of the large one. People buy a balloon to blow up later and when they get it home, it is nothing like as large. Years ago, I used to work as Derby's pavement artist and virtually every time that one of these characters had been selling these things, for several days afterwards, we would be hearing complaints about them and how they had ripped off the public. I'm sure that trading standards would be interested in them, both: to see that they have a proper Derby license to trade (a Sheffield one is no good); and, to make sure that the balloons that are being sold are being represented accurately before the purchase.
26th March 2007.
There's going to be a programme on the TV about the new A380 AirBus but why bother with the TV when you can look outside your window, as I just did, and see the real thing for yourself?
The new AirBus was due to call at East Midlands Airport this moring at around 11:00am (BST) and we saw it around half an hour later when it flew over our house at around 2000 feet.
I learned of this just as it passed by the window so I grabbed my camera, went outside and waited for it to come out of the haze again.
The top two shots are of it flying around (they never come back as close again, do they?).
The bottom shot is of it flying away.
18th March 2007.
Just as the HP Sauce factory in this country closes, with the last bottle coming off the production line yesterday, HP have a new advertisement on the television. The tag is that HP is 'the sauce of weekend pleasure'. Although it is ironic that this happens just as the factory closes, it is annoying that they have spelled source as 'sauce'. It has taken years for people to get over the application of science being presented as the 'appliance of science' (thank you Zanussi). Now, we can look forward to having source spelled incorrectly all of the time.
17th March 2007.
As the new shopping centre is being built, various parts of the outside get covered in different ways. This part was quite irregular and then it had a metal frame put around it and now, it has a stretched wire mesh on it. Are they going to put UV lamps behind it and put 50,000 Volts across it so that it acts as a gigantic insect killer (although this size, it could be used for catching birds as large as swans with the right bate)?
You can see the springs that hold the mesh taught here. The wire mesh itself has been left - along with the springs - and there doesn't look as though there are any current plans to surround it with some sort of frame (to cover these springs) or cover it with some other surface - maybe with this as a support. One thing that I noticed was that as I was waiting for the bus (which has a stop fairly close to this) and it was quite windy, it appeared that the wire was singing - making a noise similar to when you get a piece of flexible pipe and whirl it around your head. This is on the widward side of the building and therefore will catch the prevailing wind. Is the singing wire-sided building an intended feature of this (if it turns out that it is this)? I think we should be told.
2nd March 2007.
An update on the fuel problem: Whilst Tesco indicated that it had found that there was nothing at all wrong with the fuel, it has come to light that although the fuel companies have their own mixtures/recipes for fuel, the supermarkets have their own. It appears that silicone - an anti-foaming agent added to the fuel - is at too high a concetration and when it gets into the engine, is screwing up the oxygen sensor. The oxygen sensor normally has quite a long life span and so garages don't keep a lot of them in stock. As a result, many of them have already ran out and cars are standing, waiting in the forecourts. Drivers are being urged to keep a note of when and where they fill up with petrol. In these litigious times, I am surprised that nobody has uttered the phrases 'public liability' or 'duty of care'. Still, these are early days.
28th February 2007.
Could this be the latest terrorist attack? Clearly, there would be companies that would benefit from the petrol pumps at Tesco's and Morrison's falling silent - all of the other supermarkets that supply Petrol for instance. However, the fact that cars appear to be failing after purchasing petrol bought at these two supermarkets might be more of a pointer towards supplier incompetence rather than sabotage - the rule 'blame it on incompetence rather than intent' might seem to be more appropriate in this case. Still, makes you think twice before you go and fill up at the pumps, doesn't it.
21st February 2007.
I'm not saying that it is unusually hot or anything, but, I was waiting at the bus stop when a honey bee flew across the road and settled on the yellow paintwork for a couple of minutes before flying off again. We've had snow twice this winter - each time delivering less than an inch of snow. Only 30 years ago, we would have at least a fortnight of snow sometime in the winter. Maybe, in 30 years time, it'll be hot enough for us to wear shorts all of the way through the winter.
3rd February 2007.
So, we have Aisan H5N1 bird-flu infected chickens in the UK, in sheds. As the care for these chickens involves no direct exposure to the outside environment, this means that they could only have been exposed to the pathogen by something other than the 'wild bird' route. In other words, there is no reason to go around killing wild birds (for the moment).
As far as I know, it is DEFRA that is responsible for the conditions that the birds are kept under and also they are ultimately responsible for regulating the types of materials (food, bedding and so on) that the chickens come into contact with. Of course, chickens with bird flu are a biohazard and nobody wants to be associated with that so maybe it is time for DEFRA to change its logo. Maybe we can have tee-shirts made with this on?
29th January 2007.
As I was walking back into Derby, I noticed that they had finished this buiding. The logo on it looked surprisingly familiar.
Below is the design rotated, squashed and flipped. I wonder if the designer was a Star Trek fan.
29th January 2007.
I went into Derby to hand in and pay my tax return and I couldn't help but notice that they were dismantling one of the tower cranes on the new Eagle Centre extension. 
Of course, the only way to build/dismantle one of these cranes is with a bigger crane and this was it (the little man on top of the tower crane stump is on the far left of the larger image). Those weights on the bottom of the platform are 10 tonnes for the larger ones and 5 tonnes for the smaller ones.
So, how does the driver know what he is doing?
Clearly, they use radios but he also uses a camera to get a better look.
This is a view along one of those steel rods that go from the large 'outriggers' to the centre at the top of the hydraulic section.
You can see that even though it is solid, it still forms a catenary.
10th January 2007.
Once again, they are going on about BMI. Can't they get it into their thick heads that Body Mass Index is just a lazy insurance company's way of labelling people as fat and doesn't actually relate to reality in any reliable way? Let's just look at what it is and an example of how those little 'fat' meters fail to work.
BMI is just a ratio of mass to height squared. In effect, it says that people should have a given weight range (18 to 25) for their height. This sounds reasonable until you actually start looking at it. In effect, it means that anything above this is fat (plus a small proportion that heavier people need in order to move their mass around during the day). So, where does this put people who carry extra weight as muscle? In its simplistic way, it assumes that it is fat. As a result, anybody with a BMI above 30 is labelled as obese whether they carry excess mussle or fat.
Next, let's look at what really turned out to be an experiment - but first, some background. Most people would assume that an alcohol thermometer measures temperature. However, it does not. It works by containing a certain amount of alcohol within a glass container - the glass being designed so that any expansion of the alcohol makes its surface travel along a glass capilliary tube, making it easy to see how it has expanded. In order to get a temperature reading from it, the surface position is noted at at least two standard temperatures (depending upon the intended use for the thermometer). Once this has been done and various other surface positions interpolated, we can infer that a given surface position represents a particular temperature - this process being called 'calibration'. It still doesn't measure temperature but it gives a fair approximation of it. In fact, if you look closely at the position of the alcohol surface when you put it in a hot liquid, you will see that it goes down to start with. This is because the glass of the bulb expands with the heat before the alcohol inside it does thus proving that we are still only measuring the displacement of a liquid surface and not measuring temperature directly.
So, what about these electronic fat measuring devices? If you notice, they input your height and weight into these and one of the readings they give out is the BMI. Suposedly, they measure your fat but do they? Just what can you measure when you pass a small electric current through somebody? Well, anybody who has ever played around with the resistance function on a multimeter will know that that is what they can measure. This varies according to how hard you squeeze, how damp your hands are and so on. On the fat meters, they have what appears to be two electodes on each hand - this could be used to take into account the surface conductivity of the subject.
So, if it can take surface resistance into account, surely, it can measure conductivity in a semi-meaningful way. Well, it should be able to. However, what has this got to do with measuring fat? Fat doesn't conduct electricity - it is an insulator so, like temperature with our alcohol thermometer, we can't measure it directly. So what can we measure with conductivity? How is it affected? Well, if you remember back to physics, the thinnest parts have the highest voltage drop and these are your wrists. It certainly cannot measure anything related to your abdomen unless it uses high frequencies and radio frequency resonnance in which case, your clothes and anything conductive close to where you are standing would make a difference (surely, something as complicated and temperamental as that wouldn't be in an end-user device like a fat meter). In other words, not only can conductivity (or resistance) not measure fat directly, passing an electric current through someone's arms cannot determine the conductivity of somebody's abdomen. I suggest that it is more likely that instead of breaking the laws of physics, the numbers that are typed in are used to work out the BMI and also an assumption of the proportion of fat someone with a given BMI and height will have.
So, what about the experiment? Well, my weight is fairly stable and a year and a bit ago, I knew that my weight was 98kg - I weigh myself every day. I encountered somebody doing a promotion for some fitness thing and she measured my percentage fat using one of these fat meters. About six months ago, our scales broke and we got some new ones. However, these placed me at 103kg instead of the 98kg that it had been the previous day. Over the next month or two, I took my weight back down to 98kg on the new scales so effectively, I weighed 5kg less and was carrying nearly 5kg less fat (remember the extra muscle requried to move the extra fat around - probably weighed 0.25kg?). Then, a few months after this, I encountered another one of these promotions, complete with fat meter. So, I told her 98kg and my height hadn't changed. The result was exactly the same - even though I was carrying effectively five per cent less fat. So, what can we conclude about the fat meter? It doesn't measure fat. Why? Because it cannot. It cannot even infer the amount of fat on someone - otherwise, why would you need to type in height and weight?
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2nd January 2007.
This afternoon, a good and close friend of mine, Wilf Hey, died in hospital following a gradual deterioration of his health.
 I first got to know Wilf in 1992 when he was the Cover Disk Editor for PC plus magazine - he had written to me, letting me know that he would like to put my Mah Jong game simulator on the cover disk (back then, it was a 5.25" and a 3.5" diskette holding a total of 1.2 and 1.44MB respectively). We talked and found that we had a lot of interests in common. He liked science fiction and loved logic problems.
Later on, he did his Perry Mason act when completely debunking a company's computer evidence, using the company's own written evidence to demonstrate each and every one of the company's witnesses as liars - Wilf had previously carried out an investigation at the Cabinet Office so, unlike the company's computer consultant, Wilf did know what he was talking about.
Since then, he introduced me to computer security journalism and together, we wrote for Computer Wire's Data Security Tools Bulletin, Secure Computing magazine (doing reviews of books software and hardware) and four years ago, we started writing for the PC Plus HelpDesk section - this month, he was still writing Wilf's Programmer's Workshop and had written its equivalent for the magazine for over 200 issues, making him the longest standing contributor.
For those that didn't know him, you've probably heard of some of the things that he has done or had a hand in:
- He was one of the developers of the UPC bar code that you see on virtually all goods bought in shops;
- He was one of the inventers of a computer programming langauge called RPG (Report Program Generator) when he was working for IBM - although it was invented in the 1960s, it has evolved and is currently RPG IV (or 'ILE RPG'); and,
- He was the person who came up with 'Garbage in: garbage out' or GIGO. When I did computer studies in 1974, I was taught this - I never dreamed that I would end up working with the very person who invented it.
Wilf, it has been a pleasure knowing you and working with you.
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1st January 2007.
As usual, the year started off with a bang or two - well, thousands actually.
This year, I remembered to record it. Unlike bonfire night (5th November), everybody waits until new year actually starts before letting off their fireworks - although, having said that, this year, the weather was so bad that people were letting off theirs in the gaps between the torrential rain. However, come midnight and there is no rain (although it was quite windy). So, I recorded the sound for you to listen to should you be reading this in June or whenever and can't quite remember what it sounds like when it happens.
Click here for the WAV file (319,292 bytes) or here for the Ogg Vorbis file (119,416 bytes) so that you can listen to that peculiar - almost bubbling - sound. (I would have included an MP3 file as well but the sound quality is so bad with MP3 that it wasn't worth it.)
So, another year - another tax return. I wonder if Derby will start to get something that looks as though it might be a bus station this year? Maybe that is being too optimistic.
