"Nothing but the rain"
I broke a cardinal rule today. Car windscreen wipers should ALWAYS be left at the “off” position when the car is turned off. I didn’t do that today!
The only time it is ok to keep the wipers in an “on” position is if you are driving a Le Mans prototype car or similar endurance car.
The latest Robinson’s Juice promotion involves handing over some profit to transform playgrounds around the country.
Transform your patch
Here’s what it says on the back of a large juice bottle:
Sometimes people get caught up on this sort of thing and don’t think about the numbers involved.
Let’s consider a small playground of size 6 metres by 4 metres, which might just be enough for a set of swings. To pay for the transformation of this mediocre patch of land Robinson’s would have to sell 600 x 400 = 240 000 bottles of juice. SERIOUSLY?
If Robinson’s sell nearly a quarter of a million bottles then they would have to cough up for the transformation of a patch on land into some swings and soft surface. I reckon this conversion would cost about £6000 (a severe guess but probably about right) and this represents a cost per bottle of 2.5p and given a profit margin of, say 40%, this means Robinson’s are laughing all the way to the shareholders’ meeting.
Essentially this is an ingenious piece of marketing and I think they should be congratulated. Well done Robinson’s. It looks like they are doing wonders for the community but in reality they are doing little.
A similar scam, sorry marketing ploy, was run by Pampers when they said that for each pack of nappies sold they would donate a single vaccination to UNICEF. This is marketing at its worst. Trying to make companies seem like they care when in reality they are just doing it to make more money (the basics of capitalism I know!).
If these companies were truly serious about changing playgrounds or helping vaccinate the world they would publish something along the following lines:
We have decided to turn ALL profits for one year over to XXXX charity so that they are able to further our combined missions to improve the health and well-being of the children of this fragile Earth.
If a company did volunteer ALL the profits from one product line then I would happily buy them over another but when it’s just part of the marketing campaign then be cynical.
Here is a snap shot of the skies above Essex on the Easter Monday of 2012. You might find this interesting, you might not. I don’t care.
The picture is a screen grab from the iPhone Flight Finder app.
It’s a still evening in Kent.
In the still of the night.
My lovely router (a D-Link) started to drop connections and act a little bit funny. I put this down to overheating as I had lost the little rubber feet upon which it was meant to stand. This may or may not have been the cause for its miss-behaviour but that was my diagnosis. So I needed another router and reluctantly I went to the back cupboard and got the free router I received from Talk Talk when I signed up with them. It looks pretty grotty and has a huge Talk Talk logo on the front panel.
So I un-plugged the old lovely router and held my breath. Would the new one work? I plugged it in and turned it on, an on-switch is a luxury. Lights flashed and there wasn’t a whirring sound, the connection light blinked and flashed and went green.
I plugged in, logged in to the router and had a look at the settings. It didn’t look like I could change the SSID! Arrghhh. I don’t want my wireless network to be called Talk-Talk8654. I left it.
Later I loaded the router admin page on the iPhone and suddenly there was a settings page for me to play with. I think there was a refresh issue with the PC browser that meant the settings didn’t show. I have now changed the SSID and am a happy bunny.
I know Talk Talk are slammed in public relations but I have to say I have had an excellent service from them! Please remember that anecdote isn’t evidence!
In the year 2010, summer, we went to France again. See the 2008 holiday here.
Friday 30 July – Travel from Kent to Tours. It was very hot.
Saturday 31 July – Travel from Tours to gite near Sainte-Foy-La-Grande. It was very hot and also as the first (ish) day of August it was chaos with all the Parisiens driving down to the south of France.
Now after this I don’t really have a breakdown of the things we did. We went to lots of places. The weather cooled to about 22-23 Celcius for the rest of the holiday. I didn’t have internet access. Son #1 was hot but very well behaved. He didn’t like the pizza we bought at restaurants and so didn’t eat a great deal.
View Larger Map
Places we visited
And lots of other stuff. I don’t think I wrote it down somewhere! I ate plenty of cheese and baguette and drank plenty of local wine. I also spent quite a bit of time driving on the PSP playing GT Mobile. I was hoping to increase my garage ready for the release of GT5.
On the last night at the gite, Friday 13th August, son #1 slipped and hit his head on the table in the lounge. He cut a big gash in his eye and so we went to the hospital. WW looked after him as I wasn’t allowed in to the room. He had three stitches and looked very sorry for himself!
We left on Saturday the 14th August and headed back to the same hotel in Tours. I like Tours. It’s a lovely town. On the Sunday we headed back to the UK, it rained.
I have been buying up CDs of all my records or tapes over the last year or so. Everytime I think I have finished I get a snippet of another song in my head and off I go and search Amazon and EBay. A list of bands that I could consider slightly embarassing to admit liking are below. I haven’t bought Hysteria by Def Leppard yet as I can’t find it cheap enough!
If it gets you emotionally then that’s what you like! The best piece of music will send a shiver down your spine.
Here’s the list of bands in my 80s playlist:
For a complete list of music on my iPhone look at this page.
This week I shall be mostly trying to avoid the Super Bowl result. I recorded it last night but will take a few days to watch it.
Kids, you see. They don’t get it. Gone are the days of missing lectures because I stayed up until x o’clock watching the Super Bowl and getting a bit drunk. Now I have kids I have the issue that they don’t seem to want to get out of bed late or have a lazy day. They always wake up by 06:30 and just rush, rush all day. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
So I’ll be watching the NFL final game over a few nights, trying to make the next play before falling asleep and getting up with the kids. I guess it beats my college days of not really seeing past the first quarter while playing Chase The Ace and making far too much noise in the hall’s tv room!
So, the snow that had been forecast for about a week has arrived. There’s about 8cm in the garden but it’s not good for snowballs. Looking forward to taking number one son out later. Probably do some sledging.
First thing on the news was the chaos that the snow brought! Now, we generally have about 2 or 3 days of snow a year. There’s no reason for us to be used to it and no reason for everything to work once it does snow. Other countries are more organised because they have weeks or months with snow on the ground and have to live with it. We don’t, so there!
It has taken a long time but I think it is now the time to relegate BMW drivers from the much coveted top spot of the Charts of Arrogance. They have been surpassed by a more irritating and rude bunch of gits. I speak, of course, of Range Rover drivers.
This collection of people who drive the huge, gas guzzling, aero-dynamically inefficient, four wheel drive vehicles are quickly turning out to be a bunch of BMWankers.
It used to be that BMW drivers failed to realise that their car had indicators or that to drive too close to another car was dangerous. Everyone knew that if there was a car doing dangerous stuff (and it wasn’t a Citroen Saxo driven by a baseball cap wearing, pierced youth) then it was going to be a BMW. Their reputation was awful. If you were being cut up on a motorway, or cut up at a junction or a car just braked infront of you and turned without warning then it was a BMW. It was just their right to do that.
Now, I find (spot the confirmation bias) that it is Range Rover drivers who do all the nasty stuff on the roads and endanger my life. They don’t indicate. They pull infront of you. They drive too close to you. They are the NEW and CROWNED arrogant arses of the tarmac. Whether it is the height that these drivers have to sit or just the money they must have to own one of these behemoths they really don’t seem to care about any other drivers. Roadcraft to them is just doing what you want, selfishly ignoring the safety of the rest of us.
What would the roads be like if everyone drove Range Rovers? Perhaps, because BMWs are rather ubiquitous and affordable it means that they have regressed back to the norm? Or it could be an economic thing. The type of person who thought that BMWs were cool and nice 15 years ago has now morphed into the type of middle aged man who thinks that owning a Range Rover means that they “own” the road and the right to endanger my safety. If they really used these cars for off-road and risked their own safety then good for them. But, they don’t.
I would like to appeal to these drivers’ sense of community and social responsibility in an attempt to make them see the error of their ways but it is clear they have none. So I won’t.
A long time ago in a college not that far from London, pretty much in the middle actually, there were a bunch of students in their first year at University. “Let’s enter the Field Cup”, someone suggested. “OK”, was the response.
The Field Cup was essentially a pub crawl for teams with challenges and forfeits in each pub. We were rookies and unfortunately for the older entrants we were doing quite well. We had taken some loot and even a Hall Of Residence Warden to the final judgement but, because we were up against a group of girls from the CGCU, we were docked just enough points to ensure we came second. Good try for a bunch of Fresher’s though!
We were in one pub, possibly The Queen’s Arms, and our challenge was to sing on the karaoke machine. Chrissy was lead vocals on “Let It Be” by The Beatles and we were backing singers. However, for some reason we were wearing our socks on our hands! That must have been a forfeit somewhere but precise details elude me, 20 years later. The precise details probably eluded me the next day too. We shall all remember Karl’s backing vocal calls of “socks on hands” to the rest of the pub! Hilarious!
You had to be there, really.
Now I’ll admit that picking on a children’s book and film is pretty poor but then perhaps the producers of these should make sure that their science is consistent. I am happy for books and tv shows to make changes to a rule of physics and then follow the consequences. For instance, The Octonauts seem to have no need of decompression when they do their deep dives, they also have open water in the Octopod which means the whole pod is pressurised, this, technologically is possible but very hard.
For some reason, the story of the Gruffalo’s Child has really piqued my criticism micro-chip. I’m happy for a creature called the gruffalo and I’m happy with talking animals and I can cope with an intelligent mouse. One, tiny scene has really bugged me though. Towards the end of the Gruffalo’s Child, SPOILER ALERT, the mouse climbs a tree and uses his huge shadow from the moonlight to scare the gruffalo child into thinking that there is a huge mouse who eats gruffalo. This size of shadow is impossible. The moon is so far away that any shadow on the ground will be, effectively, lifesize and so the size of the actual mouse. Perhaps, if the gruffalo child understood some basic physics it would have stayed in the wood and eaten the cocky mouse.
The diagram shows how the distance of the object from light source and the distance to the image are important in determining the size of the image. The mouse is so far from the moon’s light it will not be able to make a bigger shadow.
The above diagram shows that if the light source (A) is far from and object (circle BC) then the shadow thrown (circle DE) is small. Whereas, if the light source (A1) is close the object (circle B1C1) then the shadow is large (circle D1F). My original drawing is below:
I have since had some criticism from the USA about this post and I have included the text of the email here:
Dear Sir
I refer to your fooyah posting of January 9th, concerning the shadow-casting abilities of an intelligent mouse. I wish to point out that shadow up-scaling would be possible if the light rays reflected by the moon were partially obscured or reflected (perhaps by some dense foliage) thereby creating a quasi point source of illumination. The point source’s proximity to the subject mouse could then produce an enlarged, not to say terrifying, shadow.
Just saying.
I have to agree and I replied saying that before I wrote this post I had thought about water droplets focusing the moon’s light to create a light source close to the mouse. I’d then forgotten this side of the argument. In fact a frozen, pure, droplet that had grown in size with succesive layers of water freezing on it without boundary layers (one continuous freeze whilst growing) could create a lens that would allow for the size of the mouse’s shadow. Diagram to follow if I can be bothered.
Sorry Andreas, it is a funny name. Even when it’s pronounced Vank.
Picture courtesy of Eurosport. Does that get me off legal infringements?
Today I come in praise of the humble Tunnock’s Tea Cake.
I have decided it is probably the perfect dessert. For me food must be chewy (soup is a no no) and have a range of textures. A dessert should be sweet, contain chocolate and satisfy the cravings after savoury food.
The Tunnock’s Tea Cake combines marshmallow, biscuit and chocolate. It is also mouth sized and so eatable whole. The textures are perfect. Just enough crunch and chew to make the whole experience uniquely fulfilling. The fact that it can be chomped whole makes it better and gets over the occasional problem of flakes of chocolate dropping from the tea cake as you bite into it. Of course, quite brilliantly it can be eaten as part of a calorie controlled diet and is low in radioactive particles and high in energy (food marketing is pure BS).
The world should give thanks (in a secular way just like Obama on Thanksgiving) for the Tunnock’s Tea Cake. It’s exactly what made Britain Great!
Clicked on a google news link to Telegraph website article about diets from the BMJ. Advert is brilliant.
Took this picture during a dog walk (there’s a surprise). The colour of the leaves was gorgeous but probably not captured without decent filter or image editing software (which I don’t use).
I had mentioned to WW that I really wanted some time playing GT5 this holiday with the steering wheel. I may have said:
If I don’t get to play GT5 this holiday it will have been a failure!
This means no kids or anyone for about 2 hours. The time was set. Monday afternoon. Number one son would be in nursery and WW and son #2 would be seeing friends so I had about 4 hours when I could play uninterrupted!
I needed to complete around 10 online races to get the money and just because they are there to complete. The four hours would be pushing it but I reckoned that without lunch I could have done it.
So I set up the PS3 with steering wheel and pressed play.
GT server down for routine maintenance 12 to 4pm
Arrgggghhh. The only races I could do offline was a World Championship and I didn’t want to spend the time and effort and have to save mid-championship.
I shut down GT5 and played Rock Band. The original save file is copy protected and so I had to start from scratch. Definitely didn’t do the easy or medium – straight to hard.
So far the holiday has been a failure. Going to try tonight.
It’s a nice one.
Fog and sunrise in Kent
This will probably come as a bit of a surprise but I have been really impressed with Talk Talk. I know that they have most complaints out of the media providers bt I haven’t had any issues.
Download speeds in the evening used to be crippling. It just wasn’t worth trying to download any large files and almost not worth browsing the internet. However, since moving to Talk Talk our evening download speeds have really improved. What I do not know is whether that is down to Talk Talk or some other changes that have been made with the infrastructure in our area. The thing is I can’t be bothered to see which it is.
Now I’m looking forward to downloading iOS5 this evening and getting my iPhone up to date.