Penguin – Page 13 – Fooyah

April 24 2021May 1 2021

Not From ‘Round ‘Ere

It’s in the name but there are problems with people not understanding these things and using the words incorrectly. It’s out job to point out where people go wrong. I don’t think it’s being pedantic, I think it’s making sure that language is used correctly so that meaning is clear. We have developed this vocal ability over the years and created rules so we can be specific in what we mean and the ideas we are trying to communicate. If you can’t be clear in your meaning then you need to change your words so that you are.

The Internet – the physical network of wires and optical fibres that the traffic runs through. Has been around since the early 60s when US Strategic Command wanted a computer network.

Internet Protocol – the rules that govern the movement of information around the internet.

www – world wide web – a mass of documents all linked together with “hyperlinks” creating a web of information. This has been around since the early 90s.

HTML – the language governing linking documents together on the internet, created in the early 90s.

And so onwards for many different terms that people use interchangeably when speaking about computer things but don’t really know what they are talking about. I can cope with it normally but the problem arises when there are specific issues with a piece of equipment when the difference between these terms becomes really important. Just saying it doesn’t work is not that helpful. It is the job of the support person to decode the words used by the layman and ask gentle probing questions to get to the root of the issue.

The above is a map showing where people who read this shit come from. I do suspect that most hits are not people who actually read this though. I suspect many people accidentally find this site and then don’t care because who would care about the musings of a white male from the UK. This site operates by delivering HTML to a BROWSER via the INTERNET. The HTML is created using PHP and a SQL database. Your BROWSER decodes the HTML and creates the words and images on your screen. blah blah.

April 19 2021April 19 2021

Finally Somewhere Else

I actually drove out of the county of Kent for the first time since last August recently. I didn’t go far, only across the Thames to Essex but it felt like a whole new place. I think I’ve been separated from Essex for long enough now that I don’t really have any urges of “home” when I go there. I do look around the village and think it’s very pretty but all around it’s changed so much with building and “improvements” that it’s not the Essex of my childhood anymore and I don’t feel that romanticism. I did go for a walk with the family and we went to some lovely local reservoir lake things. It was pretty and the sun was shining.

As much as I’ve labelled that picture as my homeland curiously I didn’t even know these lakes existed for all the time I lived in the village. I had never explored them as a child. Doesn’t really matter. It just adds to the alienness of wandering around somewhere so familiar and yet so different.

As a slight contrast I did find this work of art on a walk around the lake area near me in Kent. I have to say it is stunning. I’m not entirely sure about any of it though. I’m a republican and couldn’t care less about what happens with the royal family. It does appear that this picture has likened Kate to the virgin mother of Jesus and quite literally sanctified her in image. It’s such a strange sight and one of conflicting impressions.

I'm Just Not Really Sure What — I’m Just Not Really Sure What

Does this image mean it was paid for by arch royalists? If so then I’m not sure why the person in the image isn’t part of that bloodline – I guess the child is [?] assuming it’s actually one of Kate and William’s children. I honestly don’t know. I also feel that the people who did this are particularly on the right of politics as that is what I mostly associate that particular colouring of cloth in the background. This image has me conflicted in many many ways.

Heading just a few miles from the graffiti we see other iconography in the local friars. Now, it turns out that the monastery near where I live isn’t a monastery it’s actually a friary. It also turns out there’s a difference. Let’s make this clear here. Monks are selfish twats who give their lives over to serving and praying to god. Friars are less selfish twats who give their lives over to serving god while at the same time being allowed out to do things in the community. So, friars are the better of the two wastes of time. I guess anything which has use to the community is better than a thing which does not.

This image has another mother and child in a system which allowed rape, slavery and murder of the right people. Is Mary crying in this image? Perhaps she’s upset at the lack of consent for her pregnancy – which makes god a rapist. If you look at the bottom images on the front of the alter it looks like there is a snake climbing a crucifix which I suppose I understand and then there is also a badly drawn T-Rex with a halo! I know it’s a sheep but it’s much more fun to think of it as a terrible lizard. Damn, I wish I had looked more closely at this when I was there. Perhaps I’ll pop back for another look soon.

April 16 2021April 16 2021

O-AZ

Yesterday I had the first part of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine against the SARS-Cov-2 virus. I was expecting to feel rough today but so far I do not. It’s been around twenty four hours and all good at the moment, perhaps later today will be rough as fuck. I’ve read and heard on podcasts about people’s reaction to the vaccine and so I’m curious to see how I react. The most important thing is to get vaccinated and help reduce my reaction to getting Covid.

There are some things we don’t yet know about any of the vaccines. What we do know is that they don’t stop you getting Covid-19 but they do minimise your reaction to it. It’s highly likely you won’t be hospitalised if you get the real virus. We don’t know if vaccinated and infected people are still contagious and we don’t know how long the vaccine lasts and we don’t know if it helps you recover from all the Covid variants. But we do know it stops you being hospitalised if you catch Covid. So, while we don’t have the data yet on various aspects of the vaccine we do know it lowers your chances of dying from the virus. Seems a good idea to get vaccinated because your chances of dying of something else while waiting to be vaccinated are higher than the chances of you dying from the adverse reactions to the vaccine.

In the mean time here’s a video taken from inside the Prius as I did a lap of the Brands Hatch GP circuit. It’s a four minute lap time, roughly, which is amusing as it should be closer to one minute forty had we been allowed to race. However, that’s not the point. I’m happy to leave my racing to playing Gran Turismo.

April 11 2021April 11 2021

Irritating But Ultimately Not Too Much Of A Problem

When I started writing album reviews the aim was to always have something to write about. I can’t always have a polemic ready to go and publish on this glorious site. I would like to be that person but I also feel that my writings or attempts to express my thoughts would be diluted if I wrote too much about society and politics etc. So I decided to write about music and rather than have me concentrate on every band in a particular order I chose to describe my relationship with each album I own in alphabetical order. This would mean that the artists are mixed up and it’s a pseudo random order for the reviews. I would normally be surprised by what I had to write about next – screw Led Zeppelin for naming their first four albums numerically but I don’t own number 3 so I guess I saved myself some work there.

When I started doing the reviews in 2013 I think I was using the order of albums on my phone and the iOS system doesn’t really include the “The” at the beginning of an album name. So the list is ordered by whatever the name of the album is subtract the “The” at the start. This makes sense and works well. At some point over the last nine years I started using the Sonos App to get the albums alphabetically. Now Sonos does not remove the “The” from the start of the album name and so somewhere my system of ordering the albums changed from one system to another.

So now I have to see what album is next on my list in the Sonos program and then check whether I have already reviewed that album and then write or not-write depending on what result I get when I search this site. See, it’s a little irritating but easy to solve and while I’m miffed at myself I’m not bothered particularly. Once this round of album reviews is over I’m going to start a new list covering the aggrotech and EBM stuff that I’ve bought since 2013 but I have searched this site and some of those have already been reviewed and some have not. So it’ll be a similar issue when that happens, if that happens. I’m not sure how many albums there are to go but I guess I’ll finish them at some point.

April 8 2021April 8 2021

Surprising Compression

Recently I went somewhere for a thing! Given the last year of lockdown and nothing really happening this was a super treat. Motorsport Vision emailed earlier in the year offering the chance to drive the GP circuit at Brands Hatch and as I considered the price to be suitable I booked a place. There were rules to follow once on the circuit but it was nice to experience the route in the sun and in my Prius. There were quite a few “showy” cars in the queue for the sightseeing but I didn’t care. I enjoyed it even though our speed never really exceeded 50 mph.

I will say that even at the pedestrian pace we were going the compression going down Paddock Hill was surprising, it also started earlier than I had expected but now that I’ve had time to reflect it makes sense that you feel negative g as you go over the top and then the onset of positive g is fast as you approach the inflexion.

This was great fun and something I’d love to do again. I should probably see what lap time I could get by driving on Gran Turismo. Unfortunately the current GT version doesn’t have a Prius so I’ll try and find something else with similar power and torque.

April 6 2021April 5 2021

Not Just Myself

I’ve been removing social media apps from my phone as I’ve found that their form of distraction from the real world wasn’t enough of a distraction and a waste of my time. I still check-in now and then just to see what is happening but I try to do that on the PC and not waste my other time staring at my phone. This is really about me trying to not get too upset at all the shit that is going on in the world. I can only just about cope with my own life at the moment and so reading about all the crap that is going on wasn’t helping. I’ve had to change my approach and be a little more selfish about the things whirling around my head.

So, I removed Twitter and Reddit from my phone. I still subscribe to Private Eye but I find I don’t read much of it as it’s all about the corruption and bullshit in the world of politics and as much as PE does really important work I can’t have all that other stuff going around in my head. So, I am trying to read more books on my kindle which I love. I’m using the Kindle app on my phone to try and read some technically dense writing about the NASA F-16XL supersonic laminar flow boundary layer investigations. I’m trying to improve my own levels of knowledge and understanding while avoiding the shit-heap of politics.

I still care of course and so balancing it all is hard. I think it’s why I like Minecraft so much. It’s a world where I have control over most things except for bloody creepers and what my kids do in the world. I’m building a beach house at the moment and I’m looking forward to the results. So, instead of me having to think about all the issues going on in the world I do this by proxy. I give money [not that much but enough] to organisations I think are doing the right thing. I put my energies into work and getting money to live and then I give some of my time and money [mostly money] to people whose values agree with mine. So, here’s who I give money to:

British Humanist Society – because if I had to describe myself it would be as a humanist or as a pastor of the Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

National Secular Society – because I don’t believe any religion has the right to be a part or have influence over laws and government.

Green Party – I used to be a part of the Liberal Democratic Party who I joined just after the Brexit vote. But since then they elected a bigot as their leader and I no longer found my values aligning with theirs. The Green Party do seem to have all the right policies. I am concerned that many people my age still think of the Green Party as a bunch of unrealistic hippies but the party values align with mine more than any other party.

Puzzle In A Thunderstorm Productions – These guys take the piss out of religion and it is well deserved. I like their shows and so I donate money to them. Over the years they have been a source of comfort through some tough times and I align well with their values.

Extinction Rebellion – I honestly think these people are doing the right thing. The climate is going to be a disaster soon and so these people get my money because I’m not in a position to do much myself.

British Problems on Reddit has been one of my favourites over the last couple of years. Like minded people pointing out the problems about living in Britain and while it’s very much a list of first world problems it does make me smile. Recently I noticed a post [?] complaining about usage of the terms “myself” and “yourself”. The post seemed to think it was just estate agents who use the term incorrectly and I have pointed out that the educated professionals I work with [in a grammar school] mostly seem to use this incorrect construction. Things like:

“if you aren’t sure come and see Dave or myself“
“please email myself if you want more information”

It’s one of those little things that really annoys me. It sounds pretentious and is just plain wrong.

“if you aren’t sure come and see Dave or ME“
“please email ME if you want more information”

These are the grammatically correct ways of saying these sentences. Please help me change the world so that everyone speaks properly. Yes, I know the title of this communication is wrong, it’s called humour.

March 23 2021March 23 2021

The Homeland

In 1996 I did something I had never thought I would do at any point before. I moved to live south of the river. I grew up in Essex and went I went to university I lived in Knightsbridge, Fulham, Earl’s Court and Ealing. None of those places were south of the river Thames and I rarely went there. I always considered the south to be full of poorly maintained roads and areas less nice than I was used to. When I eventually got a teaching job I was happy but also somewhat full of trepidation as I had a job in Kent and I was not going to travel across the Dartford Crossing every day. So, I moved to live in Gillingham. A Medway town. A working class town full of history and pride. I’m trying to think of a nice building in Gillingham and to be honest I’m struggling. The whole area of Medway had really struggled since the closing of the dockyard in the 80s.

I lived in Gillingham for three years before a short dalliance back in Essex when I taught at a school in Brentwood which has since closed. Then I came back to Kent. I’ve been here since living in Rainham, Maidstone and now the village of Eccles. I quite like it down here. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that “home area” feeling you get when you are a kid and I also know that I don’t have that feeling when I return to the village in Essex where I grew up. I wonder if that ever returns. I think I still feel a little like an imposter. But then I’m not sure what feelings I am seeking.

How long do you have to be somewhere before you feel “at home”. I do love my little house and I really enjoy the scenery around my house but I don’t often feel “at home”. Maybe adult life is always about feeling transitory. I’ve been involved with the community so I don’t think it’s that. In the past I’ve been a trustee of a local charity and I’m currently involved with the cadets. Maybe we all feel a little lost sometimes?

The photograph I above is from Queenborough on the Isle Of Sheppey. There’s a small lump in the middle distance and that is Grain Tower Battery – a war defence platform. Then, behind that you can see the skyline of Southend. A famous coastal town in Essex. I’ve been there and I can sometimes see Southend when I go for a run. I look at it almost wistfully but also in the knowledge that I’ve only been there a few times as a person older than ten years old and have no anchorage there.

March 20 2021March 20 2021

Mid March Already

This whole lockdown thing has really messed up my internal calendar. There are times when I think it’s coming up to autumn and other times when it could be May? I have to keep looking at an electronic device to make sure I know what month it is. But then again, a bit like when we change the clocks, I’m never really sure I trust the programming on any devices until I can check with a third party official source [normally the radio].

I’ve had a mostly administration day. I’ve looked at updating computers and making sure things work properly along with setting up various cloud storage devices. It’s one of those jobs that needs doing every now and then. It’s almost fun. Also, for some reason a few of my albums within iTunes were labelled as compilations and that put them somewhere strange in the music app on my phone so I’ve been doing some admin making sure they are all correctly organised and labelled.

Friday night I didn’t fall asleep at 2000 so that was nice, being able to watch a television show all the way through!

Well, I’m sure other important stuff happened this week but I have no recollection.

March 14 2021March 14 2021

Not Sure Why – Just Do

I had a realisation a few weeks ago that I really missed wearing odd clothes and makeup. I was watching the series Umbrella Academy and the character Klaus was wearing a skirt and I thought – I want one, I want to be at a place where I can wear one. Smith and I have travelled to Germany every summer for the last few years and we’ve planned costumes and things long beforehand. There are small gigs we used to go to where people are more free to express their wants and delights, in terms of clothing and look, than they are in the dreary offices where they work. None of these things has happened for over a year now and I think a part of me is missing.

Back when I was young, and that’s quite a while ago now, there was the first ever Red Nose Day. I was in school and I want to say I was in something like the fourth or fifth year. I will check in a moment to see when it actually happened. Now I don’t recall why I decided this but I chose to wear eye shadow and paint my nails when I went to school. We must have had a non-uniform day. Why I chose to do the makeup thing I honestly have no idea. What I do remember is liking the feeling that I looked slightly different and I also liked the look of my painted nails, I think I felt more “me”. [Just looked up when the first comic relief was and it turns out to be 1988, so I was in the fifth year].

There are some later events which made me think about the whole makeup thing a little more. I dressed in drag at a show performed by cadets at RAF Coningsby in the summer of 1988 and I had some makeup on. I remember the eyeliner didn’t really wash off easily and I got some funny looks in the JRM the next morning. I can remember going out to pubs in Bishop’s Stortford in my late teens and early twenties when I was already wearing eyeliner [badly I would say because I am terrible at putting it on]. Most of my friends were just accepting and didn’t care. Which was nice. I enjoyed wearing this stuff and as much as I didn’t have these terms I do think I felt more me when doing that.

Skip forward a long way and the rediscovery of wearing makeup occurs with attendance at the M’era Luna festival and going to Club AC a couple of times. The smaller gigs that Smith and I have attended also help as many dress up and a lot of the time the gigs run into the Slimelight club. I went through a phase of wearing nail varnish each week and while I stopped that while my kids grow up and go through school it is something I think I will return to. I just like it. One of my favourite things is when Smith and I are in the Eurotunnel waiting to get to the continent and I put on my black nail varnish. It feels like coming home once that stuff is on. Yes, I know that psychologically it’s linked to being “out” or seeing bands or having a great weekend away at a festival but I think I genuinely do miss wearing it and would like to wear it all the time.

Fancy Dress For Fun But Wanting To do It All The Time

So, I love the look and feel of makeup, I really feel at home surrounded by freaks and geeks when at a gig or festival. Walking up the stairs at Electrowerkz and entering the main venue to the sights and sounds of a gig and people just being who they are and accepting it – this feels like home and there’s a calmness that descends on me, a feeling of belonging. We are all people of contrast and the flip side to me is that I also really enjoy being part of something super restrictive about clothing and rules – RAFAC. I can dress up in uniform and I do it well, I do it to look smart and I do it to show the dedication I have to the organisation. I can spend time away on RAF bases or spend time at the RAF Club and still feel at home. So, I suppose part of me is constantly rebelling and trying to be subversive while another part of me loves being in the establishment. Perhaps I secretly like the feeling of being in the establishment but also having that other rebellious part to me. I’m quite open about how I dress and my outfits. I think it takes a few people by surprise and some just write it off as “dress up” but I honestly feel as though it’s more than that. It’s a part of me.

I am fortunate to live in a time when most people don’t care about these things. I am lucky to be able to live in a society where you can dress like this and attend your events and most people aren’t that worried about it. There are social rules that are broadly tolerant. It must be very difficult to want to dress up or wear make up or do things that are considered subversive by the country’s leaders and you don’t have the freedom to be what you are. It is such a shame that some people will judge and be disapproving, unaccepting, scared or even violent towards those who are different. I imagine the newspapers and societal need for shaming others for their behaviour when I remember the sort of thing where “MP caught wearing women’s clothes” or kink shaming would regularly make the headlines and there would be scandal. I don’t think that society has moved on from that particularly. People’s lives are judged by a set of rules which don’t fit all. Imagine a cabinet member being discovered to live within a threesome. A lot of people would lose their shit. For me the question would be – are they all consenting and are they all happy? If that was the case then I care not. It feels that society expects its leaders and people of prominence to behave like the “perfect ideal”, which doesn’t exist, but we grow up hearing so much about mum+dad+family that a lot of people struggle to be accepting of anything else.

Just think about the hoo-hah that occurs when a Hollywood celeb announces that their sexuality is not hetero. We have lots of news articles and the world seems to be up in arms for a short while. Many people seem obsessed with who puts what body part into whom and where. I would hope that one day we reach the point where you don’t have to “come out” because no-one gives a shit. You be as you want to be and we don’t care. That is a place I would like to live.

March 13 2021March 13 2021

That Was A Week, That Was

Absolutely bloody shattered. That’s how I ended this week. Last night, Friday, I ate food and then tried to watch a film. Fell asleep at 2000 on the sofa and then went to bed at 2230 when I woke up. I’ve not even really had the hardest of jobs in the organisation. There are others who are running the testing centre and track and trace and all that and all I have to do is our core business of teaching. Knackering. But also nice to be able to see faces again. Kinda.

I bought a new cafetiere and it came with a coffee grinder so I’ve been grinding coffee beans and testing that type of coffee out. It’s fun, I guess, but not sure if it’s worth it. Especially as I bastardise my coffee with sugar and milk. I then decided to get a filter coffee machine instead of a new kettle. My kettle looks worn out but a bit of descaling has meant it still works fine so I can live with it for a while longer. The coffee machine has a timer and so I can set everything ready in the evening and come down to fresh coffee when I wake up every work day. I will say that having everything done when I walk through the kitchen is a sheer delight.

My home boiler, hot water and heating, has issues and I can’t let the heating work automatically. This has been like this for two months now. I pay money for a boiler fixing service and my initial appointment was to be about four weeks after I initially called them, and while that seemed a long time to me I had to remind myself this is Covid and my system still works to an extent. Then they cancelled that appointment because – reasons and pushed it back to mid March. Now the service company have cancelled that and pushed it to beginning of April. I will have been waiting approximately four months for something to be fixed with a house that is mostly cold. This isn’t the sort of service I pay for. Screw them.

I got a new mobile phone a while back and while it’s the same brand as I normally get it still feels new. Which is nice. Normally I get a new phone, you transfer all your data and you look at it and go “Oh, works the same then” which is exactly what you expect when devices run the same OS. This one feels and looks different somehow and that’s even after one month of owning it! Oh, I also upgraded my sim only contract and now I have 160GB of data a month. I use around 5GB. So, I’m going to have to see if I can max this out. Time to start downloading films and streaming lots of video. There was only one time in my past when I think I went over my data allowance and that was at Linton when I was trying to stream an F1 race.

I also had a bad headache this week and woke at 0200 in pain and not able to get back to sleep. I had to get up and take pills in the night, which I can’t remember ever having to do in the past. Fortunately the pain had gone by the morning and I was able to head in to work. But trying to sleep and having thoughts running through about how to organise work and cadets when you aren’t going to be there is not nice. I think I need to change one of my life rules. If I think I might take some tablets then I should take them there and then. Don’t wait to see if it gets better. Just get those drugs into my system. I have a similar successful rule about work. If I think I’m not sure I can make it to work because I feel ill then that is when you don’t go in to work. That particular rule doesn’t always work because there are other social pressures when working in my sector.

Minecraft Bedrock ran an update which also included a server update so it was a nice distraction to put the updated server on my PC. It’s not a hard job but there’s a list of things that need to be done correctly to make sure everything works properly. Which it does and so I got a nice sense of satisfaction from that. I did have a small panic when the ray tracing didn’t seem to work on the PC but it did after a short wait and so thankfully I don’t have to investigate why. I quite enjoy fixing PC things but sometimes the time involved can be quite high. Things are generally fixed either within fifteen minutes or three hours.

I hate selling stuff on eBay. I recently went through a cupboard and found some old tech items and thought I would either throw them away or sell them. So, I decided to sell them on eBay. I wasn’t sure how much I’d get but it seemed more responsible than just chucking them out. Once tech items sell I’m always worried they decided to stop working in transit and arrive broken. I would never knowingly sell something that doesn’t work [unless I labelled that clearly]. So, once things are posted I have a week of background stress until I get my positive feedback. One item I sold I accidentally labelled it as the wrong model and so that is coming back to me which is perfectly fair because that’s my mistake. I’m happy to correct that. The other item the buyer wanted to return because “it didn’t work”. Now, he had already messaged me asking for the software download and how to get the item working. This indicated to me that he didn’t understand the tech side of things. Then he wanted to return it saying it didn’t work. I messaged him asking if he had followed a detailed list of steps to get it working on his system and I haven’t heard back at all. I suspect he was hoping it was plug and play and I also suspect he was connecting it directly to his PC and not to his router. There are many things it could be and I’m not his personal tech support. So his request to return was denied.

Time to get out for a run and burn off the calories of my take-out last night.

March 6 2021March 6 2021

The Good, The Bad and The Whoops!

Below I have arranged some screenshots from me playing X-Plane. I’m not really going to give any commentary. I should be writing a summary of this week of lockdown here but I genuinely am not sure what I can say without breaking my own website rules.

February 28 2021February 28 2021

Exploring The Curves

I headed out in the glorious sun yesterday afternoon for a bike ride. My intention was to not climb any hills which limits the routes I can take given that the village is almost at river level – although I’m not at future risk of future flooding due to sea level rise unlike most of the new houses being built on flood plains in this country. I decided to investigate a riverside path which looked iffy. The were definitely marsh conditions but it is the other-side of the river to my normal running routes. I didn’t know how far I was going to go but I headed out to Brooklands Lake and found my way from there.

The footpath would have been better on foot. There were times when I had to get off the bike to avoid diving into the river and also a number of trees over which I had to decided either to climb over or go under. I felt like I was exploring and it was good fun. I may have ended up with bleeding legs and hands from the thorns but I didn’t care. Along the way I found three pillboxes built in the second world war much like the one along the Medway from last year.

The first pillbox was a surprise to me as I’d never been that way before and now I’m tempted to chronicle all along the lower Medway – even though that’s been done on other pages. Holborough Marshes was a surprisingly nice place with the sounds of running water and a lovely calmness. Apart from the motorbike racing up and down behind the river defences. I’m never sure what I think about bikers off roading around the villages. Part of me gets annoyed as they shouldn’t be doing it, but the other side of me thinks that as long as they are out of people’s way then it’s up to them. I guess the overarching societal decision is they are wrong and should go to specific places to enjoy their sport, there are tracks around here where they could go. It’s like those wankers who dump rubbish in places around our gorgeous countryside, they don’t think the rules apply to them or they don’t want to pay for the proper disposal.

This one at Brooklands Lake was rather a surprise and I didn’t expect to find anymore pillboxes as I travelled further up the Medway towards Allington. I apologise that the photographs aren’t that great but I have two excuses. Firstly I’m using a new camera app and getting used to how it works and secondly, I had polarising sunglasses on [which I didn’t remove] and that messes with what I can see on the screen.

This pillbox was in quite a nice position with some open ground towards the river. I remember thinking it would be a nice picnic spot. There were other spots which were quite nice but I saw the remains of around two tents and some air mattresses and the usual human detritus. This was a shame as it ruined the area. I do think sometimes that I should become a litter picker and collect this trash but time is the limiting factor there.

Overall this was a lovely cycling route, thorns excluded and somewhere I think I could run possibly one day if I can get my distances up to 18km or so. I’ve recently been running around 15km and found it quite good although my feet hurt. I’m going to try some new inserts in my trainers.

February 26 2021February 26 2021

Somehow Not The Same

Until recently I owned a Bodum Cafetière and it worked fine. I mean it’s just a French Press coffee maker and there’s not a lot that it could do wrong. As an aside I just went over to the Bodum website to see if I could grab a picture of what the cafetière looked like and it turns out there are far more variations on these devices than I thought possible, what a rabbit hole! Then one day while washing the cafetière the glass cracked. I’m not sure how and I didn’t hear anything but it broke. Now, I like my morning coffee and so I wanted to get another French press as soon as I could.

Imagine me now walking down the “home stuff” aisle in Sainsbury’s and I spot a cafetière. It’s not made by Bodum and is branded as Sainsbury’s. Should be OK I tell myself, there’s not a lot you can do wrong with a device like this, and if I’m being honest they seem far more expensive than need be. So, I bought the Sainsbury’s cafetière.

That turns out to have been a mistake. Apparently not all French presses are the same. With this new one there is no way to remove the glass from the surround and so I can’t clean the outside of the glass properly. The gaps between the surround and the glass mean that stuff gets in-between and looks horrible from the inside of the cafetière. I guess that’s liveable with but then the bigger issue is that the lid design has less rim and does not align well so when pouring the coffee it regularly spills down the side of the cafetière and ends up on the kitchen counter.

When this leakage of the nectar first occurred I could hear something in the recesses of my brain from before, when I owned a not-Bodum and it just wasn’t as good. I had flashbacks to another time thinking that I should have spent the extra on the Bodum because the one I bought at half the price was shit.

So, the moral is sometimes the better brands are better.

Oh, and I ‘m still searching for a decent can opener. The latest one works, as in it opens cans, but I’ve got cuts on my fingers because it uses the outside of the rim rather than the safer inside part. Ho hum.

February 23 2021February 23 2021

Somewhere Else

It’s almost a year since I went somewhere else. If I look back over my journeys since March 2020 I can recall visiting my parents twice, I think in the summer when we were allowed to visit people in gardens. I went to the white cliffs at Dover in early September I think. I had a walk along the river Medway sometime recently. And that is it. I’ve not been to anywhere vaguely military for a year. I’ve not seen friends and colleagues for about a year. I did return to work Sept through to Dec and saw those people then and it was nice. But I haven’t been somewhere else for a long time. All of a sudden I am very aware this is a modern world problem and that I am quite lucky in reality. No-one I know has died from this virus and I have a home which is somewhere palatable to be. There are plenty out there who have no idea how to feed their families or how to keep a roof over their head.

I am looking forward to being somewhere else. Just to experience other things. The mental aspects of constantly doing the same things and not being able to improve or learn new things has taken a toll. I guess I’ve been doing gaming videos in a bad way over on my YouTube channel and that was quite fun but not the same as actually being outside somewhere else. I haven’t used my camera for quite a while and I think I should. Maybe I need to start doing still life compositions? I don’t know. I guess I could do some sort of project to make sure my camera still works!

I’m not sure that the current moves by the government are the right ones. I’m not in charge and I’m sure they’ve got their reasons I just don’t think public health is at the top of their list. I also worry about the ability of these people to absorb technical and nuanced information about the ‘rona and how it affects us all. The covid recovery group are cunts. I guess we always knew there were a lot in that party but this group have clearly defined themselves as such.

I’m going somewhere else today. I’m looking forward to seeing other things. But I also know from the other times I have been to this “somewhere else” that after about thirty minutes it feels normal. I’m actually looking forward to being somewhere with jet noise and the smell of fuel. Hopefully that will happen later this year.

February 20 2021February 20 2021

Even The Kitchen Sink

I’ve decided that the life of things in a house is around ten years. Things apparently wear out after that length of time or at least the high use things do. Given my hatred of decorating in now comes to the point in the house when I need to make some decisions and get myself prepared to reboot the rooms. I recently noticed that my kitchen sink was dripping water into the void underneath and I found it was the tap causing the issues. The tap was also rusted to the sink quite completely. This necessitated a new sink and tap which I was OK with. I found a sink that was the same size so that hopefully removed the necessity to cut the counter top and with luck the waste pipes would line up well to avoid plumbing issues.

The old sink also had a fresh water tap that I had removed and so it was possibly time to rejig it anyway. All the limescale is me just not having cleaned the sink for a while but there is a lot around the tap and it leaked into the basin but also through into the pipe system. The limescale in this area of the country is pretty harsh and things die after a short time. A friend bought one of those clear kettles to see the water boiling but every week it would need descaling, it’s best not to be able to see these things.

Kitchen Sink - Halfway — Kitchen Sink – Halfway

This level of piping is quite frustrating I think. Most of it isn’t used anymore. I used to have a water softener but after a while I noticed that it wasn’t plumbed in correctly so I removed it. There are also spare pipes for cold water access to the bathroom as the hot water pipes to the bathroom were replaced a few years ago. I kind of know what all the pipes do and the ones that aren’t needed are clearly shut off. Oh, and two stop-cocks because apparently you need one before the water meter.

The new sink fitted snugly and that pleased me. There would be less hassle and no cutting of the counter top. The waste pipe could be aligned with a tiny amount of force so officially I have a pre-stressed pipe system, but that stress is low. I did have to cut some of the support wood to get the sink screwed in properly but I’ve been gluing that back and have a plan to secure it more. The new sink feels smaller but I don’t have a huge amount of washing up to do.

Overall this all went well and I will have to start planning the next thing in the house which needs sorting. There’s also the loft and I’ll have to tidy and sort that at some point.

February 19 2021February 19 2021

Clean Up

I’m just about to start writing this communication and I have realised the irony involved, however, I shall continue and ignore the double standards I so clearly employ.

As I come out of a two day migraine which was probably required by my body to make me do nothing I have realised a few things. I guess what I mean is that there are a number of things that I knew separately but I have only very recently put them all together to come to a conclusion, which I suspect is that actual definition of how a realisation works.

I’ve been spending time trying to change my behaviour for the improvement of my mental health. I have times when the weight of the world rests on my shoulders and I need to learn that there are some things I can do very little about. So, I have stopped obsessing with the news and feeling anger at all the terrible things that are happening. I have removed the Twitter app from my phone and I even deleted two of my Twitter accounts. I’m toying with the idea of deleting the final remaining account but I’m not sure about that yet. I’m failing at overcoming the “sunk Cost” fallacy where I feel that the Twitter account contains details of my life and I’ve put effort into it. However, I don’t look at my historical tweets often and I only check that place once a week or so, primarily to see if Pom has been in touch. The grander idea behind all of this Twitter removal is that no-one else cares what I think. Literally. People might be curious to see my reactions to things but the truth is no-one cares. Chucking ideas and thoughts onto Twitter doesn’t change the world and more than likely won’t change anyone’s mind about anything. It just allows me to join the faux outrage at whatever thing I should be outraged about.

Twitter used to be a place where I kept in touch with friends. But nearly all of them are now connected via WhatsApp! which is problematic in itself but that’s for another time. Oh, I learnt recently that the developers of WhatsApp! came up with the name first and then tried to work out what the app would do. So, the opinions and thoughts of people I genuinely care about are accessible to me via other methods that web based social media. I don’t expect I can change any of their minds about things, we’ve all known each other for too long to know our own thoughts on issues but if I want intelligent conversation then I can chat to them on the messaging app. I don’t need to have Twitter to chat to the few people within my “circle of trust”. By that I mean those people whom I consider to be absolute trustworthy friends. I’m fortunate to have people I trust implicitly and the only downside to those groups is that we aren’t physically close enough to meet up once a month to get wasted.

I’ve been clearing out my email inbox and I have removed all the email subscriptions that I just “mark as read” without even reading them. Why should I get those emails if I don’t care about the content? Am I worried I might miss out on something that I want? Probably but maybe I should wait for the natural processes rather than be pushed into buying something because the marketing department thinks I should. It’s curious that outdoor clothing shops keep sending me emails telling me that this new jacket is great or these shoes are brilliant but I’m expecting my current jacket and shoes to last twenty years. Why would I want to know about more of them?

I’ve cleared out all the cookies within my browsers. This is so that I can refuse all the tracking cookies that come along with visiting most sites. I don’t really want advertisers to know what other things I have looked at. I’ve also been over to turn off the custom advertising that Google wants me to use and while I was doing that I have set a time limit on the browsing data that Google keeps on me. So, this means that I’ve got things in my history in case I need to find them but also anything older than 18 months goes away. If I haven’t looked at something for a year and a half then the chances are I don’t need to keep it in my history.

I’ve deleted the Reddit app from my phone. I found I was spending around thirty minutes a day browsing through Reddit and none of it really added to my life experience. Most of what I looked at was aircraft and things designed to kill other people. I’m having a bit of a break and trying to use my time more productively. Which, I guess, also includes writing this stuff which is read by approximately three people. I found that most of the time I could avoid looking at Reddit but once I opened the app that was at least twenty minutes gone and maybe more if I didn’t keep an eye on the time. It would be a better use of my time if I read Scientific American instead.

I would like to remove or close my Facebook account. But I can’t really. There are two communities I belong to who only seem to use FB. First the 360 Radar bunch use FB as their main way of sending information out to people who contribute. So if there is an update that needs to be completed I need to have access to that information. Also, my friends within the CCF all are on FB and if I want to get in touch with them then I need to maintain that access. I only check my account once a week and that is within a browser that is used only for that. The browser also has add-ons to remove tracking. This way I hope to minimise the information that FB can gather about me, although I suspect I would be rather surprised at what they do have.

I’ve also turned off the Google Advertising customisation options. I can’t quite remember what URL is used to do this but you can access this in your Google account settings. This way, I will no longer see adverts aimed specifically at me. I will just see general adverts. I can cope with that. If I want to buy or spend money on something new then I would like to leave the choices to my own flawed thinking modes rather than relying on someone else to point me in their direction. Yes, I know this whole argument is flawed but it feels good to lower the amount of tracking information that these very large companies keep about me.

Interestingly there is, of course, the problem that this website contains an awful lot of information about me. You can find my interests, purchases, bands, travel and political ideas. But this is a site that I control and the information you see is just the information I want you to see. It is very rare for me to delete a communication and if I adjust them then my policy is to try and make sure that those changes are clear and open. This site also runs counter to the convention that no-one else cares about what I think or feel about the many issues I have written about. Again that is true. But as I say on the homepage, this site is about me and how I think. It’s got nothing to do with looking for approval. I know people don’t care what I think. But for me, this is my diary, sort of.

February 15 2021February 14 2021

My Happy Zone

Yes, I know I shouldn’t be this obsessed and my mental health would be better if I didn’t beat myself up like this but I am happiest when my mass satisfies the following inequality:

80<= M < 82.5

The units in this are kg. I think that 82.5kg is equivalent to 13 stone. This seems a reasonable target to maintain. In 2011 I was 95kg when I weighed myself, which was once. From 2012 to 2014 I hovered around the 82kg mark and was mostly happy with that. I seemed to add an average of 1kg each summer holiday and that I will put down to excessive alcohol ingestion in Germany! By the end of 2016 I was hitting 88kg and kept telling myself that I was happy with that but I don’t think I was. I know I eat a lot when I am unhappy or stressed or just mentally fucked. While that small amount of enjoyment may be justified the larger scale of things means I am more unhappy at the gaining mass situation that the short term happy gains of stuffing my face. Since 2016 I’ve tried at times to lose the mass and kinda struggled down to 85kg which I could accept.

At the beginning of 2020 I was somewhere around the 88kg mark again. Then we were hit with the lockdown and while I was exercising I was eating a lot and I filed that excess under the “strange times it’s ok to eat” section of my brain. I was also drinking some beer each day. I think I was still physically fit but I was getting heavier. My running became much more effort and I couldn’t run up the Downs without walking some of the way. I went for a run with Smith and I felt embarrassed at how often I needed to stop whereas he didn’t and I think that sunk home that I needed a goal and to lose weight.

I started recording my food and exercise properly and also measuring my mass. Whilst I’m not obsessive about it I do try to be honest and record what I eat. It’s the only way I can lose mass. If I’m in the mood to not record stuff, then that means I’m eating too much. Which in turn mostly means I’m unhappy which causes me to eat which makes me unhappy etc. I will say that losing mass is one of the hardest things I have ever done and it’s not like it’s just a case of stopping eating. At the most basic level it is exactly that, just stop eating. But if it was that easy then people wouldn’t be fat and the world would be healthy. There are a huge number of psychological, social and financial factors which affect people’s ability to lose weight. It’s not a simple thing. There is also a tendency for society to blame those who are fat for their fatness. Again, it’s not that simple.

When I’m happy I can control what I eat and I can exercise and maintain a healthy weight. When I am unhappy I eat a lot, care less about myself and generally put on mass which, in turn, makes me unhappier. This is a hard thing to do. I have learnt over the last ten years how to manage my emotions a little and how to cope through tough times. I consider the current times [lockdown, Covid, not having been anywhere for about a year] as tough times. The stresses on society and the stresses I feel make me more happy that I’ve managed to maintain my mass. I’m currently still trying to shift the two kilograms I added at Xmas and I will. But it’s a slow process and requires me to run. When losing mass I know that once I hit around 85kg the dieting along won’t help much and I need to burn that fat off by exercise. So, I maintain my food intake and I convert the fat into carbon dioxide. As I get fitter my body becomes more efficient at using energy and so annoyingly I have to exercise more to convert the same amount of hydrocarbons. This is why I’ve tried running up the Downs from river level!

Would I be happier ignoring my mass? Do I put too much pressure on myself regarding this single factor and do I deny happiness by eating sensibly [and quite boringly at times]? I do not know. If I am not obsessive about my mass then I will eat too much. I will put on weight and there will be health effects – heartburn etc. Also, certain uniform items for my cadet career will become either too tight or not fit at all and I am not buying another set of mess dress. So, I sigh. I plan my food out. I exercise. I tell myself I’m good at 81kg and I have the control over my impulses. I have pride in my mass. Losing mass is bloody hard work and maintain it is . . . . manageable. Mind you, I still order a kebab every now and then and I eat a packet of biscuits sometimes.