Here’s a replay of a recent online race I took part in on Gran Tursimo. I qualified third and then managed to win.
It was a good race although nothing too strenuous. It’s best to qualify as high as possible because there’s normally a massive shunt-scene at the first corner if you are lower down. My general method for online racing is to try and steer clear of other cars and take a wider line in corners if there are cars around me. There have been many times that I have been driving well and then some wanker punts me off! He gets a slow down penalty of 4 seconds and I end up at the back of the field. I hate that!
A few weeks ago when I was in the Lake District I would occasionally look at 360Radar to see what was flying close by. I found it curious that there was quite a lack of aircraft flying compared to Kent, where I live normally. Now, the south east does have the three London main airports and most air traffic heading to the continent. Have a look at the two following views and decide for yourself. Both are the same area of land and they are taken within a minute of each other. I think the difference is striking.
Lake District Air TrafficKent Air Traffic
Of course, this communication could be entitled:
There’s a lot more planes where there’s a lot more airports
I recently had my electricity and gas meters upgraded to “smart” meters. They aren’t that smart. All they do is upload my meter reading to the utility company at regular intervals along with this information being displayed on a screen. I look at the screen now and then but I do think that eventually I will turn it off. I know roughly how much I spend each day and it’s not really a surprise.
May Energy kWh
This graph shows the energy use each day with the lower darker bar being electricity and the light blue being gas. I have a gas boiler for water and heating along with a gas hob. The oven is electric. This can be translated into costs [at current market rates]:
May Energy Costs
At the end of May I went away for a while and I normally try to shut-down most of the energy using devices in the house. The physical process can take about 5 minutes walking around the house making sure that everything is shut down in the correct order.
If you look at the last week of May you can see low and consistent energy costs. Although no gas was used in this time period the monetary costs is the standing charge that I pay for the privilege of having a gas supply.
Minimum Running
My daily energy use in a house that is mostly turned off is 2kWh. This accounts for the following items:
Fridge
Microwave clock
Oven clock
Modem / Router
ADS-B aircraft tracker in the loft
Alarm clock
That extension lead orange light
It is taking a while for my head to get around this bizarre and stupid unit the kWh. But here goes:
My house’s power usage at baseline is 83 Watts. A human during the normal day runs at about 100 Watts [as does a 100W incandescent light bulb]. Over the course of the day this ends up being 7.2 MJ. My house needs to consume about the same amount of food as a human to run at its lowest power consumption levels.
Wolfram Alpha has some lovely comparisons for energy usage, so 2 kWh is the same as:
≈ 1.7 × energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT ( 1 kilogram of TNT )
≈ 0.57 × average electrical energy required by an Apple iPhone 5 per year (≈ 1.3×10^7 J )
And my favourite is:
Relativistic mass m from E = mc^2: 80 ng (nanograms)
When I next go away it would be interesting to see how low I could get the consumption. To be fair, I could just turn the electricity off at the mains. But the only thing I could still power down is the ADS-B receiver and I like to keep that going because I can log into it from around the world.
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.
Last night I went to see the latest Jurassic Park film. I travelled to the Cineworld Cinema in Rochester. The tide was low, I could see the whole mud back. The place looked quite picturesque in the dimming sun. As is my custom I rated this film on the IMDB site and you should read the rating system within this communcation.
Do you know what? I just tried to settle down and watch this film and enjoy it. Yes, it was terrible. The plot was shocking. The script was poor and everyone can outrun a volcano. They did get Jeff Goldbloom in for a couple of shots in the studio but they left the action to the younger actors. I just tried to enojy it as an action film and not be too picky.
There must be some form a rule that indicates that sequels are really bad, except for the Godfather and I haven’t seen those movies. This is film number 5 is the series and it was as you would expect for the fifth film in a series when there is only one plot.
Was it film four when they designed a new type of dinosaur? It wasn’t long before the capitialist pigs would take that dinosaur and then try to create an army with them. There was a lot wrong with this film. But I suspended an awful lot of disbelief and managed my best to enjoy the experience.
I remember seeing the first film in Harlow and it was an utter rush. Spielberg did an amazing job creating a world where dinosaurs exist. The original film made me so excited and scared I loved it. Unfortunately for kids these days they get to follow it up with tripe.
Oh, why were there kids under the age of 10 in the cinema when it’s a film that finished at 21:45?
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.
