This place was heading east early one morning [probably to Frankfurt] and the colour of the sky and the line of the contrails caught my eye. It looked lovely.
Wokka Over Maidstone
Then there was this Chinook. It passed right over my work place and was such a lovely sight and sound. It amazes me just how technologically amazing we are as a species. Now although I know how these things work it does seem like magic at times!
Spitfire
Finally, yesterday this Spitfire flew over my village. I keep trying to remind people that one day they will be gone and we won’t see them flying anymore. It’s a lesson I have learnt from seeing many planes in the 80s at various airshows without really appreciating just how special they all were.
Over half term I made the journey to the other end of this country to spend some time in the Lake District. While it is quite a drive the views and atmosphere are so worth it.
While in the district of Allerdale I decided to complete a few more of the Wainwrights. There are 214 fells mentioned by Alfred Wainwright in his books and I’ve got a taste for bagging some each time I go to the Lake District. My personal target is to complete the lot by the time I am 60. I’ve got 14 years to go. I need to up my rate a little but the next time I go I am planning some lovely ridge walks that should get quite a few crossed off!
On the first day I went up Walla Crag [number 204 by height].
I parked in Great Wood car park and walked up the Cat Gill route and down again via Castlerigg. It was a lovely little jaunt. Now I had a feel for it I wanted to try and get some of the lower stand-alone fells bagged. I was trying to cross off those that would mean a big detour on future longer routes so this would allow me to make as yet unplanned walks easier.
Next was Binsey [number 192 by height]. A little mound of a fell on its own to the north east of the Skiddaw range.
This was too easy. The car was parked about half way up and was really just a little stroll. The views from the top were amazing. It was a lovely warm and sunny day with visibility running at about 25km. The mist was so fine that I couldn’t see the Scottish peaks but could just see Scotland across the Solway.
Derwentwater Withies
Another day, another walk. This time up Cat Bells [number 189 by height]. I had already completed this particular fell and so wasn’t too fussed about climbing it but I had planned to meet a work friend there.
It was pretty busy at the top and plenty of people were making this their first Wainwright. I t was nice to see so many people enjoying this countryside. The views are just lovely.
Walking down Catbells and I saw this sheep just standing and staring.
The Hills Have Eyes
The next day was a rest day and I went on a narrow gauge railway and then visited Muncaster Castle. The walk back took in a short distance by the river Esk. The air was so still that the water looked like a mill pond.
River Esk
I drove back to Keswick through two mountain passes. One was Harknott pass and this is a most ridiculous road. There are hairpin bends with a gradient of 1:3. There were times I couldn’t see where the road went out the windscreen while turning because the road dropped away so fast. It was a very satisfying drive. Then, there was the Wrynose pass which wasn’t as spectacular but was still very pretty.
Another rest day followed with a lovely time doing various things together with going to watch Solo. The final walk day was spent hanging around Crummock Water after getting to the top of Rannerdale Knotts [number 210 by height] adjacent to the lake.
I’m annoyed that I forgot my hat. I don’t do well in direct sunlight, I have a lack of natural head covering, not that I’m too fussed about that, and I burn easily, even with sun lotion on [SPF 50].
Crummock Water
That was it for the week. A journey back to the South East and good broadband bandwidths beckoned the next day. It was good to get back to upload speeds in excess of 0.4Mb/s, it was needed to chuck photos into the cloud.
Sometime recently I went to a series of ranges near the coast, pointing towards France. I was fortunate enough to have a go on the long range. In the picture below the targets are at 100m. We practised out to 300m. It was excellent.
They Are There
If you look closely you can see the targets at 100m. Imagine the size of those out at 300m! I was allowed twenty five rounds and could choose when to shoot them. I had time at 100m, 200m and 300m. I needed a spotter for the first few shots as the weapon wasn’t zeroed to my hold and position. The 100m targets were easy. I took five shots at them and hit 4. I wanted to try ten rounds each at the longer distances.
At the 200m I was aiming correctly but hitting elsewhere (weapon zeroing) and so once I had my spotter I hit the target five out of the ten shots in total. I waited eagerly for the 300m targets, these were 6 second exposures.
Again, I needed spotting for the first few and then after that I hit five out of the ten shots. I am bloody impressed with this and happy. When I thought it was over I checked and I still had one round left. I waited for the target to raise and when I thought there were going to be no more I rested my position. It was at that point the target popped up and I took aim and fired the shot. I can’t remember if I hit that one.
When I spoke to the console operator afterwards he said he was watching me and waiting for me to drop my aim before putting up the last exposure so I was tricked, kinda.
It was a good day and I look forward to the next one.
Possibly the last one from the mid-year season. This is a Guardians / Avengers mix-up. I’m not sure if I know which part of the MCU this actually comes from but that doesn’t matter. It’s got Groot.
So, I’m feeling grumpy today. Just am. Not sure why. And then I go and stupidly read an article in on the BBC News website about most babies being born at 4am. You can read the article here and I’ll be taking quotations from it.
Four o’clock in the morning is the time most babies are born spontaneously in England, with the majority arriving between 01:00 and 07:00, a study shows.
So, four o’clock is the “average” of 01:00 and 07:00. Is that how they worked this out? I’m not sure. I’m probably not going to read the original paper but it does seem a strange thing to say. Assuming that spontaneous births are reasonably random the actual number arriving at 04:00 would be quite small and the variation could be little.
While planned C-section births tended to happen on weekday mornings, births after induced labours were more likely to occur around midnight.
This makes sense. C-Sections in the morning to then make sure everyone is fine during the time when the medical cover is best. Inductions probably happen at that time because they are started in the morning and it takes that long for the effects to show. These are not surprising figures and make utter sense.
It’s this next bit that turned me into a rage.
Overall, more than 70% of births took place outside regular working hours.
And
The researchers said there could be implications for staffing of midwives and doctors, with only 28% of births taking place between 09:00 and 17:00 on weekdays.
So, an event that is reasonably random is spread throughout the day? About thirty percent of births happen in a time frame covering roughly 30% of the amount of time in a day. THIS IS WHAT WE WOULD EXPECT. The working day covers 1/3 of the 24 hours in a day and the number of births in that time period is about 1/3. This sentence made me swear out loud in our staff common room earlier today, much to the ammusment of my colleagues.
In a communication still yet to be written I will explain how my lovely liberal views and attitudes towards people of “just be nice” are an outlier and not seen as the norm in these post-Brexit days. I feel left out in my own country. I feel my views, which are surely just about being nice, aren’t common.
So, what set this off? I was at a child’s party at the weekend and there was an “older” dad there. I have a feeling this was his second time around with kids and he and I chatted. There are three things that really pissed me off.
He looked around the party for a boy and said something along the lines of:
No girls here, that can’t be a bad thing.
My reaction was who the fuck are you to judge who a young child can invite to thier party? Who are you to say that girls are a bad thing. It seemed a very odd thing to say. Especially to someone you’ve only just met. I dodn’t say anything and let it move on. Had this been a friend of mine or someone I had known for a while I would have tried to dig down deeper into that comment but at the moment I won’t have a great deal to do with this person and so I left it.
The next thing he said was
I’ve got four boys, and a girl but she doesn’t count.
This was quite curious. I wondered perhaps he thought that this is the sort of thing you should say to a six foot skin head? Perhaps he was behaving in a way that he thought I would find acceptable. Once again I didn’t pull him up for this comment. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps I should have explained to this sexist man that his attitude will live on in the things that his son says as he grows up. Perhaps I should have said that it is people like him who mess up the future generation with thier stupid sexism. Perhaps this would have resulted in a heated argument. I don’t know. I let it pass. I’ve argued with enough friends and collegues to know it’s only best when you know someone.
The final thing that annoyed me wasn’t his sexism. It was his degradation of my career, my chosen employment. When asked what I did I replied “I’m a teacher”. his comment:
Well, that’s the end of that conversation then.
What an arrogant twat this man was. How rude and sexist to someone he had never met before he was.
There are lessons here. Maybe I should start realising that the majority of the rest of the world doesn’t think like me. Also, maybe I should have called him out on his sexism and arrogance. But, that’s not quite me. I’m not the confrontational tpye of person. I also know he’s entitled to those thoughts and beliefs. It’s just that he’s wrong.
Within this communication I essentially told you that my NAS Drive had died and I was reasonably convinced I had lost my data but had a plan to get it back.
I had originally thought I could plug the hard drives into a Sata socket and the PC would be able to read them. It didn’t. This was because they were in a RAID configuration and also Linux so I would need the iOmega NAS to be able to read them.
The data recovery software did manage to find half a terabyte of data but as I explained this wasn’t formatted well and the file names were missing, because the files were RAIDed. This was my last resort really. I have spent a LOT of time arranging the files into a decent directory structure and using decent naming conventions.
Next plan was to order exactly the same enclosure as the one that died and hope I could put my disks into it and it would read them for me to copy the files over to the new NAS drive. I found one on eBay but lost that auction at the last moment because I was busy at that time and my phone didn’t notify me. I was gutted about this.
So, I ordered the next best thing. A complete iOmega NAS drive the same as the one which died. There were no more enclosures on eBay. This was costly. However, it arrived and was as described.
The tricky bit now was wondering whether it would read my existing disks with the data, try to format them or just die in the process. I decided an order of operations which minimised my chances of data loss.
Turned of new Synology NAS.
Turned on new (but not quite) iOmega NAS. Plugged it into the network and tried to communicate with it without installing the CD based software. This worked.
I then called the iOmega NAS the same thing as the dead one. It was running a lower version of firmware and this bothered me slightly. The interface was different. I then turned it off.
I installed ONE old HDD into the second hand enclosure and turned it on while connected to the network. My plan was to try and log into the device before it decided to automatically format my data-filled drive.
Nothing happened. Just some flashing lights.
Next, I tried both old HDDs in the new enclosure and hoped. Once again . . . nothing.
I was quite distressed at this moment. The new enclosure wasn’t reading the old HDD at all and I didn’t think I would get my data back. Then I had an idea. Maybe, just maybe, the old iOmega enclosure would power up? I was convinced it was the power circuitry on the board that had died. I mean there was smoke last week.
So, I thought. I’d plug the new power cable into the old box with the HDDs just slotted in to see what would happen. The fucking thing only went and started and seemed to run just fine. I have no idea what happened last time. I don’t know what the smoke was. All I had to do now was hope that the old enclosure would survive for long enough for me to get data. In all it took about three hours to transfer everything to a HDD inside the PC. Then I had to transfer everything to the new NAS drive. This was quicker as I think it has a far better read-write rate than the old box.
So, the data was restored and I now had two copies.
I had formatted a plan. The Synology is to be the main NAS and storage centre in the house. I have also installed one of the HDD from the old enclosure into the PC and it will have only NAS drive data on it. I can used an FTP program to sync that once a month or so. This way I have a separate copy of the NAS data in a useable format. The next thing will be to get a large capacity USB memory stick and create a shortcut in in the new NAS so that whenever it is inserted into the USB port the NAS will automatically back itself up.
So, ultimately what happened:
Old NAS died (?) with smoke and then refused to power up.
Synology works really well with excellent data transfer rates.
New iOmega NAS works and is currently surplus, being an older model.
The old enclosure might be serviceable.
I might have just blown the fuse in the old power supply.
Enclosures aren’t meant to die, HDDs are.
This incident has caused me over a week’s worth of stress and worry.
I hope my new backitup plan will work. I’m working on two degrees of redundancy, I might include a third with cloud storage.
I know I shouldn’t really but I have a few spare moments and thought I should share my thoughts.
I HATE THE DAILY MAIL
I’m not going to justify it. I’m not going to say much apart from moaning about this headline:
EXACTLY
Fuck the Daily Mail. EXACTLY. Really. Have you looked at the outfits and seen they are EXACTLY the same. No you haven’t you fuckers because they aren’t EXACTLY the same. Fuck You you racist piece of shit newspaper.
After my return from a trip to the Lake District, to be chronicled here at some point, I powered up the house. There’s quite a bit to do with IoT lights, Google Home, wireless speakers and the NAS Drive.
The NAS drive is where I have stored all my music, movies and photos for just over six years. I’ve replaced the hard disk drives once but never really thought I’d have a problem with it. So, I powered it up and went and did some stuff. When I got back to the black box I noticed there was no power light on. I checked the lead and socket power. It was all on. I pressed buttons but nothing. I then tried taking out the power lead from the box to then plug it back in. This was the second sign of trouble.
The power cable didn’t really want to leave the black box. When, after some good tugging, I got the lead out there followed a small spark, some smoke and general bad things that happen to electrical goods. Bugger.
After a quick check to see that it was definitely dead I panicked about getting the data off the HDDs. So, I ordered a USB Sata connection to join the drive to the PC. This seemed reasonable. When finally connected the PC didn’t want to read the HDD drive the drive was formatted in Linux and also had a RAID configuration. I was now starting to feel sick. The most recent photos are backed up in the cloud. But I have loads which are only on the NAS Drive. I thought I was protected because the HDD were in RAID1 configuration so the data should have been backed up in case of HDD failure.
More importantly I think was that my entire music library, along with the 100s of hours of organising it, was on the NAS. This has been a labour of love and the SONOS system uses the NAS as the music library along with iTunes [which I hate passionately].
The whole point of the RAID configuration was to make sure my data was safe. I hadn’t really considered the black box was going to be my downfall. It has died.
So, I now have some data recovery software and it has found 250GB of data but the file names are gone. I have those files transferred to the PC at the moment but my main hope is that I win a NAS enclosure the same as the one I did have. I will use this to get the data from the HDD assuming I can just plug the drives into the enclosure and it will be happy to let me read the data from them.
Reading online there are people who keep three or four copies of their data. This is something I am going to do in the future. I will have copies in the following locations:
PC
NAS Drive
Large capacity USB
Cloud
This will take a little organising but seeing as I was only at around half a terabyte on the old NAS I think I’ll be ok for a while. One of the disks I have taken out the old enclosure will be fitted into the PC and be used as the PC backup disk. I will use a USB stick plugged into the NAS to back that up and I will generally transfer stuff to the cloud as often as possible. I am currently a little sad about it all and I’m hoping that in a week’s time I’ll be fixed, up and running and generally a lot more cheery. There will be updates.
Perusing a website for a castle I noticed that they organise sleep-overs or rather not-sleep-overs in the most haunted room in the castle.
Muncaster – spooky photo
Apparently there’s a scientific team based at Muncaster Castle who investigate paranormal activities. Now, I will admit that paranormal claims should be investigated. I am happy to dismiss them out of hand but I also think that these things should be investigated. Claims of things moving noises heard should be tested. I very much doubt there will ever be any true evidence towards the existence of ghosts. Back to the team investigating Muncaster.
I can’t find anything about who they are or what they publish. Nothing. Oh well. It’s a great piece of marketing by Muncaster who charge about GBP500 for a night in the castle for six people.
I guess scientific research means a team put loads of cameras and measuring devices around the castle. I don’t think these are necessary as people claim to have felt real effects of ghosts so sensitive measurements shouldn’t be needed. The effects of ghosts should be obvious. But “researchers” look at more and more sensitive equipment which means they are more likely to be affected by noise in the measurements than anything else. This noise will be held up as evidence of tiny effects of the supernatural.
As I’m heading to the castle today I’ll let the three of you who read this know if I see anything I can’t explain.
I downloaded the T&Cs for the ghost vigil and I was amazed at point 12:
12. Please note that stories about the Tapestry Room are not fabricated or “made-up”. On occasion very strange
things seem to happen in that room at the dead of night.
This is almost Trumpian in its language and use of quotation marks. Does the castle renege on its part of the contract if these stories are not true?
A while back I looked at a BBC News page about the Great Wall Of China. Actually it’s not a news item, it’s more a magazine piece with no bearing on the current world. You tend to see lots of those these days. Anyway back to the point. In our current civilisation we have all these marvellous cultural treasures dotted around the world:
Great Wall Of China
Egyptian Pyramids
Stonehenge [great?]
Colosseum
Taj Mahal
Chichen Itza
We, as a modern “sophisticated” tribe, look at these buildings in wonder and awe. We think they are entirely fascinating. But I suggest a change to this. Most ancient economies and quite a few modern economies and powerful nations were built on slavery. They were built on possession of humans and treating humans like shit.
These buildings and modern economies should have some sort of statistic applied to them to reflect the pain and cost of human misery that went into their creation.
The Great Wall Of China
20% of the country’s population was forced to build it. Many people died during its construction, due to the heavy work, a short time deadline and difficult conditions
The first result on the web doesn’t even mention numbers. The next result:
While the great wall was in construction over 1 million people died in the making of the wall
There seems to be a great number of results in a search that also use the “more than 1 million” people died making the Great Wall. Some sites don’t mention slaves some do. Some sites mention “population forced to . . . .”, well that sounds like slavery to me. Add into all this the human misery associated with such a large scale project and relocation and the Wall seems an awful lot less glamorous and even fucking ugly. Perhaps it should be renamed the Great Wall Of Death.
Egyptian Pyramids
I have read through a number of pages and I can only find reference to 10,000 workers who may or may not have been slaves. Whether there were deaths or how many there were due to construction is unknown. Records weren’t kept. I suspect that industrial working practices weren’t that great so deaths would probably have been common. We should rename them The Great Pyramids Of Oppression.
Stonehenge
This monument was honestly included as a giggle. Although impressive it’s not as impressive as the others in terms of age, size and deaths. This is another artefact for which deaths in production can’t easily be counted. These are to be renamed the Stones Of Speculation.
An estimated 100,000 prisoners were bought back to Rome as slaves after the Jewish War. Vespasian had a limitless work force. In the building of the Colosseum the slaves undertook the manual labor such as working in the quarries at Tivoli where the travertine was quarried.
There are no references to numbers of deaths or the emotional cost and general distress to the workers. Obviously the Colosseum is now considered a magnificent monument to the Roman Empire but the human cost in creating this probably doesn’t justify the rapture we hold it in now. Let’s rename this building the Arena Of Death.
Taj Mahal
That wondrous white stone mausoleum in India was built within written historic times and there is plenty known about its construction. But there’s not a lot on the Wikipedia page about how many workers there were and how many died. There’s a single answer on Yahoo which states 22,000 people worked on the building and thousands perished. This sounds within the levels of plausibility. We could legitimately rename this one Monument To Sadness.
Chichen Itza
This city in Central America has many buildings and is impressive and a symbol that should ruin the natural superiority that the Europeans believe they have. I can’t find any details on people dying while it was in production or who built it, but apparently it was unlikely to be slaves. The city was used by the europeans to collect slaves though. This place should be known as External Factors Will Kill Your Empire.
These great endeavours of human achievement probably wouldn’t have existed if those in charge at the time had given a shit about the welfare of the workers. It’s pretty similar to these days where the little person has so much to overcome in the face of the repression of their rights.
So people fully understand the place these monuments have in our society they should all be forced to have numbers after their names showing the human cost. These numbers should be placed after everything so we cna get a true measure of what our society does.
After hearing from plenty of people that Infinity War was really good I thought I should go and see it. Even when I have said “I don’t like superhero movies anymore” they still seemed insistent that this film was worth it. So I went to Rochester to see Infinity War. The tide was waning but still quite high at 19:00 last night.
Rochester
Once I came out of the film I rated it on IMDB, as is my custom. I had to think a while because I was thinking about what single number could offer my sum total of thoughts and sometimes that’s a hard thing to do. There’s a communication somewhere about what these numbers mean.
There are two versions of this review. The first, tldr, is below:
Whatever.
The second is more subtle but will make a mild attempt to expand on my thoughts in the tldr version:
The first ten minutes had me confused that I was watching the wrong movie. It started with a fight off world straight away and I was a little lost. After that the pattern was
Have a scene with a few quips.
Have a big fight.
Repeat.
Thanos seems to have a rather Malthusian view of the universe and I have to say I agree with him. I would go further than halving the population though because EXPONENTIAL GROWTH. He sets out with a good plan.
The glove is just a glove.
About three of the male characters had beards and I COULDN’T tell them apart. I think that one is on me, I really struggle with faces sometimes.
Is one of the stones the All Spark from the Transformers movies? Have I spelt that correctly?
I don’t think nano-tech works the way the film shows it happening.
Were the dog things from Resident Evil??
Bashing people into buildings is really important.
Also, this film shows us that hitting people is important and fighting is the solution to everything.
I could have quite happily left this movie as I didn’t care about anything in it.
I spent a few delightful hours at Brands Hatch over the weekend to watch the Blancpain GT Series Sprint Races. I do like this type of car. I think I have grown out of F1, it’s not that interesting and full of masses of bullshit. I prefer the “honesty” of GT and Le Mans Prototype type racing. This closed-wheel racing seems more fun and spectacular. I know these cars don’t really bear much more than a passing resemblance to their road-going cousins but I like the look, sound and overall racing of these vehicles.
Audi R8 LMS
The first part of the WEEKEND OF NOISE was a trip to Norwich for Thrashersaurus. This was the second part of the weekend and my ears were still ringing from seeing Xentrix play the Brickmakers.
The day started with a free pitwalk and a chance to get close to the cars and drivers. Hence the above picture.
Anyway, the first race watched was the GT 4 European Series with many cars on the grid it was pretty good but there was a number of safety car periods and this stifled the racing somewhat, but it did mean there was a good lot of close racing.
I did like the KTM cars which had a lovely rear end.
After that was the first of the sprint races for the GT series and the hour of racing included a pitstop and driver change. It was an impressive sight and good fun to watch. The weather was perfect, lovely and sunny. You know it’s summer when the circuit commentators are reminding spectators to put on plenty of sunscreen.
The beginning of the race was a rolling start and I captured it here:
As I watched the race from the Brabham Straight I got to see the podium celebrations:
Final Podium
It was a good day with plenty of noise and ice cream.
Audio R8 LMS GT4
It’s very nice being back at Brands Hatch. It’s the place I spend an awful lot of 2004 and 2005, almost every Sunday. Not sure I could have that commitment again but a couple of times a year seems a good start.
Just because I can, I decided to have a go racing a similar race to the GT series on Gran Turismo and, just because I like most of you, I have uploaded that replay on to YouTube. Enjoy (or not).
With the lovely weather on Saturday I decided to join friends at a pub in Norwich. It’s quite a way to go, it took two and a half hours to get there I think although the traffic along the M11 was pretty slow all the way. Why Norwich? Well, it’s not for nostalgia’s sake. I’m pretty certain the last time I was there was in 1989 for an afternoon while I attended cadet camp at RAF Swanton Morley. I remember seeing the cathedral and then having a pizza in a restaurant on a hill with some other cadets. I think Swanton Morley wasn’t really set up for an influx of eighty cadets and we felt starved!
I travelled to Norwich to attend THRASHERSAURUS at the Brickmakers pub somewhere in the Anglian city. I just followed the Sat Nav, I didn’t really know where I was going, although I had checked out parking and the local area using Google Maps, that seems the sensible thing to do.
It seems quite obvious to me but Thrashersaurus is a thrash metal festival for local bands and a few more well known ones on the UK scene. I could only be there for the Saturday and Xentrix were headlining. They are a band I have known about for about 25 years and I even own some of their stuff!
So, I kept notes as the day progressed and now I present them to you. They aren’t comprehensive but they give a flavour of what I thought. The venue was better than I had expected. The two stages were a good size and the clientele were your pretty standard metal heads; all there for a good time and pretty friendly.
Uridium – pretty good, well structured metal songs, like a faster Saxon.
Uridium – Thrashersaurus
Crawlblind – on the main stage. Shouty metal/thrash. Whatever.
Crawlblind – Thrashersaurus
Clownsmasheverything – on the B2 stage. Not thrash. Seemed like fast late 80s rock to me. 10 seconds of really heavy riff that was great.
Vendetta – main stage. Shouty but not growly. A band of short fat men. Reasonably good. Singer running up and down in front of stage.
Soulborn – main stage. Shouty vocals. Ok. Some good riffs. Only on guitarist. Some off-beat cymbal action. Nice one. Singer forgot his guitar apparently.
Psython – B2. Wailing vocals. Speed metal. From Rotherham?
Killer Hurts – Main Stage. Less technical than Testament but that style. Very 80s style thrash. Ok for what it is. Song : Blunt Force Trauma: Hilarious.
Lifer – B2. From South Wales apparently. Down tuned guitars very heavy slow riffs. Song: Words Of The Wise. Best so far.
Shrapnel – main stage. After a brief sit down went and saw last 20 mins. Quality fast thrash. Early Metallica sounds, but not quite as good and possibly 30 years too late.
Shrapnel – Thrashersaurus
Dinner time.
Reprisal – B2. Fast. Heavy noise. Not that impressive.
Incinery – main stage. Bit shit. Snare drum sounded really bad. Too much constant drumming, not enough variation. Sat down.
Forgotten Remains – B2 from Chesterfield apparently. Shouty growly vocals, no idea what he’s saying. Fast and loud, no real subtlety to it! Played The Trooper last, speeded up.
Xentrix – main stage. What I’ve been waiting for. Tight, thrash metal. Very well executed.
Xentrix – Thrashersaurus
All this finished at 23:15 and after some goodbyes I had to drive back to Kent to ensure I could take part in the second part of The Weekend Of Noise”.
It doesn’t take much effort to be helpful or kind. In fact it’s probably easier to be kind than be horrible or a bit neither way. I’ve taken to saying “you’re welcome” when someone thanks me for something I’ve done. It seems more nice than saying “no problem” or “no worried”. “You’re welcome” actually makes it seem like you’ve gone more out of your way to help and are happy to have done that.
I returned home to this:
Blocked
From whatever time the binmen came along my street and then returned my bin to the edge of my property and blocked the path with my gate people would have to walk around the gate or down the road to get past.
To be honest a lot of people walk down the roads in the little area where I live because in the other streets people park their cars on the pavement. It’s rather annoying and something we all put up with. Parking on the pavement isn’t necessary as the roads are JUST wide enough for cars on either side and a lane in the middle.
The binmen of today weren’t that considerate. I leave the bin inside the boundary of the fence and make sure the gate is closed so people can use the path. Obviously the binmen today didn’t want to make life easier for others.
Sometimes the bin is placed inside the fenced area so this isn’t a moan that will occur every Friday but today was the worst it has been. Other places they leave bins is everywhere in the street along the road causing an inconvenience for anyone wanting to park or find their own bin. Not that we own them.
Having looked recently at the energy I use in the house and while driving I thought I’d turn my attention to not-real things. Specifically my racing life within the game Gran Turismo Sport.
Pink Collection
Here is a collection of my pink cars taken in Hawaii. I like the photo mode in the game but it’s not the be all and end all for me. I have seen some people comment that the car editing and photomode tend to be their favourite parts but not me. I like racing the cars and the other aspects of the game are incidental.
There’s a page of achievements that encourages you to play more:
Achievements GT
The row of pink is lacking as that is online racing and it’s quite unlikely I’ll get those filled up. Unless I find “that one race” I won’t get many pole positions, I need to find “that one race” and play it over and over.
So, the achievements page will give actual figures and from that I can work out my average speed and fuel consumption.
GT Sport TimeGT Sport Distance
So, my average speed is 96 miles per hour. Given that some tracks are quite twisty I think that’s a pretty good speed. Even more so that I have spent the time to complete all the licence tests and every track experience. I do tend to race in group 3 or 4 cars as I find them the most fun.
GT Sport Fuel
I have used 8,567 litres of fuel within the game to race 9,242 miles. So, I’ve done that maths and that gives:
4.86 miles per gallon
I have no idea how this fits with real racing cars. We can have an estimate I think. Current F1 cars have a tank that can hold 100kg of fuel which is about 125 litres. F1 race distance is mandated at at least 305km. I’ll do the maths for you again and the fuel consumption turns out to be around:
6.8 miles per gallon
I guess that this all seems reasonable. A high fuel consumption within the game that matches the real life is probably closely worked into the game and I’m happy with the figures the game has produced.
I don’t like the use of miles per gallon as we should, by all rights, in this country use the standard of litres per 100km as the rest of the EU does but people don’t really want to change, especially those old weirdos in power and the media.
A few communications ago I wrote about the energy consumption of different cars. I thought I would try and give some perspective to this. Now, I haven’t done the mathematics at this point and so will be writing this as I go. I don’t know what the results are going to be.
My car, Bora Horza Gobuchul, uses 50 kWh of energy, roughly, every 100 km I drive. Given that my insurers believe I drive about 10,000 miles per year that’s a grand total of:
8000 kWh per year
Let’s see how much this costs in fuel alone. 10,000 miles is about 200 gallons of petrol, which gives, at prices of £1.20 per litre, £1,080 per year on fuel alone.
I have a small Victorian house. While it is small it has poor thermal efficiency. It has brick-thick walls with no cavity insulation and is draughty. I do have a chimney balloon in one of the chimneys and the other is boarded up. The bathroom and kitchen stick out the back and are cold all year.
A Year’s Energy
I use gas for heating, hot water and hob cooking. I use electricity for some heating and then appliances and light. As the graph above shows I used 10.5 MWh of energy in the house last year [assuming the meters are correctly calibrated]. This cost me £840 for the year.
So, loosely speaking, the amount of energy I have used to transport me and a 1.5 tonne car around is about 30% more than that I’ve used to live in my home. Considering the time I spend in the car is minimal compared to my house this seems a poor deal. Granted, my car moves around relative to the Earth but this just goes to show how much energy is needed for transportation.
The costs turn up the following figures for comparison:
House £0.08 per kWh
Car £0.135 per kWh
I think it’s time to start voting Green. We also need to start a massive system to change societies need for personal, inefficient transport. There needs to be a cultural change and it needs to start now. It’ll take 20 years to change behaviours and it’s quite likely already too late.
I made it to the South Foreland Lighthouse yesterday in weather that can be described as atmospheric [as can all weather, literally]. There was sun, rain and some haze. France could be seen at times but not all the time. I don’t have a picture here of the light house so you’ll have to imagine what it’s like but the tour was interesting and, once again, I find myself amazed at how ingenious we humans are.
St Margaret’s Bay
The lighthouse was built to warn seafarers of the dangers of Goodwin Sands where over a thousand ships lay wrecked. It is also the first place that an international radio transmission was made, by Marconi, of course.
Dover Harbour
The light turns by the use of food to human energy turned into potential gravitational energy. A large mass is raised by hand and the energy contained within that turns the 3 tonne light system as it drops. The lighting system floats on a tub of mercury, this reduces the drag to manageable proportions. Remarkable.
There is a tea house and also a cottage attached to the lighthouse. The guide mentioned that the place was quiet and normally they are very busy and the lighthouse is packed.
Essentials
Being here made me realise just how busy the Dover Straights are and how much traffic moves through the port.
Count Them
And so, as we prepare to leave the EU, this fine town of Dover voted OUT but will find itself fucked over as our incompetent Government fails to secure the best deal for the security and economy of this country.
Also, I managed to get this far without mentioning Nazis.
