Flannel

I wrote to my new MP. Angela Smith, MP for Hillsborough, and she replied. I raised my concerns about ID cards and she replied with the usual flannel about biometrics being proven technology (but not that they are proven not to work 10% of the time) and the government being confident of getting the system right first time (just like they haven’t managed to do with every other IT system so far). So far, so nu-labour aparachtik, and not really a huge surprise by any stretch of the imagination.

You know the worst thing though, the very worst thing about this letter? Not the flannel, not the smug complacency, not the party line drafted by some faceless spin doctor somewhere.

No.

I quote -

I along with other MP’s have raised this issue …

Apart from the missing commas and the pompously split infinitive, it’s the grocer’s apostrophe. Grrrrr. Will she voting in favour of ID card’s in the house of commons tonight?

On the road ... again

Twenty five degrees and the heat haze rising off the asphalt like a demon.

I left home a little after half past seven this morning and nearly three hours later I've traveled sixteen miles. Apparently it's an overturned lorry in the road works between Sheffield and Chesterfield and the motorway is now shut whilst men in reflective jackets look at it and scratch their heads. Oh joy. I've no idea quite how you manage to turn a lorry over on a fine day in a forty mile an hour limit zone, let alone pick it up again.

Still, it is sunny, I've got air con and Tom Waites singing of a town with no cheer, which is morbidly appropriate at least. I've stopped at the services for a cheese sandwich and an iced mocha, and it occurs to me that I was stuck like this a year ago, and indeed blogged about it much as I am doing now. Is this another pattern of my life, as immutable and inevitable as the seasons of the year? Am I doomed to relive the same traffic jams like some sort of motorway based groundhog day? Perhaps the devil is in the details now? Twenty eight degrees and Tom is singing of a soldier's things as I queue to leave the services. I hear war stories of people who joined the queue at half past six and reports of slow traffic stretching back to Leeds.

Nearly twelve o'clock now and I think this jam edges out last year's, with a combination of heat and a complete lack of movement. Some drivers are sitting on the grass sunbathing, brickies with shirts off and businessmen with rolled sleeves and a cautiously loosened tie.

Nothing for it, but to turn back at junction 30 and head for home and I get there in around twenty minutes compared to the five hours or so of the outbound journey. Barmy, utterly barmy,

ID Cards

Apparently the government are considering selling your ID card details to private firms to subsidise the cost of the scheme.

Anbody still think they are a good idea?

Uncle

Tony Bannister has recently unearthed a lost episode of the Uncle TV series shown on the BBC in the 1960s. The BBC are delighted to have 'Uncle' returned to them. “We threw it away because we thought it was a load of rubbish - now we understand that it is in fact a major piece of our cultural heritage".

Here’s hoping that more clips like this one get ‘unearthed’ … :-)

Lost Uncle 

Happy Hour Again

It’s Friday night, hot and muggy, and Big Brother is on in 15 minutes – this is what you need.

Frozen Strawberry Margaritas

• Half fill a blender jug with ice cubes
• Add 3 50 ml measures of tequila
• Add 1 measure of Strawberry Schnapps (or Triple Sec)
• Add 1 measure of Grenadine Syrup
• Blend until the ice is mostly crushed
• Add half a punnet of fresh strawberries
• Blend again until smooth
• Serve with straws, drink, fall over

Cheers!

Blog survey

Watashi (I)

watashi no koto anata wa mada gokai shite iru ka mo shirenai wa ne	I guess you still don't understand me
watashi no koto anata wa ima iya na onna datte omotteru n deshoo	Even now Do you think I am a terrible girl?
soo yo watashi wa detarame de kimagure de namaiki de wagamama de zeitaku de kidoriya de usotsuki de ayafuya de iikagen	That's right! Iam irresponsible, capricious, cheeky, selfish, extravagant, affected, a liar, uncertain, and irresponsible
da kedo watashi wa yurusarechau sore wa watashi ga kawaii kara	But I get away with it because I am cute
da kedo watashi wa aisareteru sore wa watashi ga kawaii kara	But I am loved because I am cute

- Pizzicato Five

Weekending

Well, I haven’t blogged for a few days but the pictures below should help to explain where we’ve been over the weekend. Some friends of my mum and dad own an old farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales and we were lucky enough to get an invite to go up and stay for a few days. It really was like stepping into another world – the only sounds were from the moorland birds and sheep, the nearest village was five miles away, no mobile phone signal or broadband internet. The view across the valley was an ever changing panorama – the photos really don’t do justice to the quality of the light at different times of the day. The weather was in constant flux too – mist and clouds in the morning scudding down the valley and sun breaking through giving some scorching temperatures by late afternoon.

Saturday night we went out for a meal for Jan’s Birthday at the CB Inn in  Arkengarthdale  – not a greasy truck stop but actually a rather nice restaurant named for an 18th century lord of the manor called Charles Bathurst. The meals that we had were good on the whole, although the baby lobsters that we had were not really much more than a garnish to the sea food risotto. Still, it was spectacular to be sat outside with a drink at nine o’clock at night, when it was still light and warm enough to be comfortable wearing a tee shirt. Sheer bliss.

Even though there were some tears from just about everybody when we left to come home, I think that everybody was able to do just as they pleased for a brief while – whether it be reading a book, walking on the moors, playing silly word games, knitting, playing Drill Spirits wireless multiplayer or just sitting with a cold beer and enjoying the view.

Life doesn’t get any better than this.

Weekend over

Weekend over
Originally uploaded by neilh.

Time to go home

Sun Set
Originally uploaded by neilh.

Sun set over Swaledale

Wild West (Yorkshire)

The Wild West (Yorkshire)
Originally uploaded by neilh.

Where else can you see a shire horse tethered to a sign post on a grass verge?

swaledale 2
Originally uploaded by neilh.

swaledale 1
Originally uploaded by neilh.

The view from the back of Hunt House overlooking the Swale river

hunt house
Originally uploaded by neilh.

This is where we've just been for the weekend - a farmhouse in Swaledale, 320 years old and solid as a rock

 "I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge."

If you want to make the same pledge, please sign here – thankyou.

 

Somewhere over the rainbow ...

From Astronomy Picture of the Day

 

Weekend catchup

Saturday saw some hot, sweaty action at our monthly rapier workshop. The prof was on top form with another bunch of newbies to get stuck into, and we had lots more fun with off hand weapons – I want a pair of sais as well now. Can I? Can I? Awww, please! I promise not to ponce around pretending to be Raphael too much … The prof’s video list made an appearance as well, with Piranah Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death looking like a must see, although I wonder what the sword fighting quotient in that one is? :-)

The hall was warm again, and by the end of the day the sweat was literally pouring off me in rivulets every time I took my mask off. I was so spaced out that I managed to pick up the wrong fencing bag and had to turn around at the next motorway junction and head back to do a swap. I really wouldn’t want to inflict my sweaty fencing jacket on anyone else for a week …

I got home in time for a shower and settled down to watch Doctor Who. Wow. Best episode evar!!!! Daleks. Lotsa Daleks. Cracking stuff.

Sunday, I couldn’t move with lots of essential muscles twanging in protest, so we settled down to play some multiplayer Mechassault II : Lone Wolf. This is a big improvement on the first game, with lots more big stompy horribly beweaponed robots to play with, plus tanks, vtol aircraft, fixed turrets, and battle armour with the nifty ability to hack into an enemy mech and hijack it. If all else fails you can get out of your armour and make a run for it, and this is when the scale of these machines becomes apparent. Scary and exhilarating at the same time, and it’s on sale at play.com and amazon at the moment. Go buy.

 

 

The day today

I didn't start the day in the best frame of mind.

Ms Dogwood had a screeching fit, looking for her French vocab booklet this morning, just as we were due to leave the house. Needless to say, I'd reminded her to pack her bag the night before, but it just seems to go in one ear and out the other. I got her out of the door and into the car, and then found out that the reason for the panic was a French test today that she wanted to do some last minute mugging up on before hand. In a free and frank exchange of views I told her that the morning before the test was not the time for revision, and that she probably knew more than she thought she did in any case. I am dreading GCSEs in two years time ...

I swung by the house again en route to Leeds to pick up the cd that I wanted to listen to and had forgotten to pick up from the side in amongst all of the frog marching and screeching. I'm most of the way through the first part of the "Hearts in Atlantis" audio book, and it really is a most evocative tale of small town life in sixties America, and possibly one of Stephen King's better novellas with the fantastical elements nicely understated. I want to get stuck into the Dark Tower series next, as this particular story (and by all accounts most of King's oeuvre) are linked to it in some way.

I got to the office in good time, and it was very quiet with hardly anybody in - I dropped off the lcd monitor that I had collected from the Dudley office the other day, and then got stuck into writing the reports that I had been planning to do on Tuesday before my to-do list took on a life of its own. Only one minor interruption - rebuilding the balance file in the accounts system which seemed to have got out of whack somehow; and one irritation - our email server quarantined a file I sent to an external address because it contained a spreadsheet with a password on it and didn't notify me about it, but I think I've actually had a productive day on the whole.

Lunch was a walk into Leeds for sushi from Little Tokyo, listening to bonkers Japanese popsters Pizzicato Five on my palm mp3 player and enjoying the warm but somewhat overcast weather. I bought some Japanese Golden Pavilion incense from Hippypottermouse (and predictably enough the woman behind the till claimed it was her favourite one, which she always says no matter which one you choose). I browsed in Travelling Man for a bit, looking at a fencing card game that I'd played postally about fifteen years ago but manfully resisted, and then went to look in Gamestation. Pac Pix on DS - wantage! Grand Theft Auto:San Andreas - even more wantage! I'm not playing much xbox at the moment - Doom 3 really needs a darkened room for best effect - but the open endedness of GTA:SA looks fantastic, and I quite fancy being a bro' from da ghetto as a change from the rolled up pastel suited sleeves of Tommy Vercetti in Vice City.

Finally, I had a quick look at the book shelves in the Oxfam shop shop and found a sequel to one of my favourite SF novels - namely "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman, a somewhat more liberal take on the future war genre of "Starship Troopers" and an intriguing conceit of a war governed by the effects of time dilation. The sequel looks at the consequences for the veterans of the war, effectively stranded in a future society that has evolved far beyond them. Looks good.

Now, Mrs Dogwood's home and a pint at the Wharnecliffe Arms is a distinct possibility ... :-)

zen and the art of cnps

100 seen - resolve

to stop this foolish number game

then see 101

Busy cubed

Down to Brum today and still catching up on work from last week. I started the day with three things on my to-do list and by mid-day that had expanded to most of a page of my A4 notepad with two items being added for each one I’d ticked off. Most of them were niggly things, although there were some rather stupid ones with the invoicing being delayed from last week and then the accounts people rushing to catch up and making daft mistakes like duplicating a whole run of reference numbers (which my import routines caught in plenty of time).

The most irritating thing was in the afternoon though. I was just starting to think about some of the bigger tasks that I had in front of me when one of the accounts bods asked if I wouldn’t mind helping fold some invoices to get them in the post.

“Fold invoices? Why? I designed them to fit in an A4 window envelope”

“Well, we changed stationary suppliers and the A4 envelopes they sent us have the window in a different place, so we’ve got to use the smaller size ones”

“But that’s stupid. You can’t even fold them in thirds to get them to fit. It’s a complete waste of time and effort. Are you people thick or what?”

Actually, I may have just thought the last bit, but I’m sure you get the point. Working for my company sometimes feels like wrestling in jelly (and not in a good way). People will mindlessly follow time wasting procedures rather.than spend any time thinking of logical ways to tackle problems.

Still, the accident on the M1 that Sally Traffic was warning about was mostly cleared  by the time I got to junction 27, and I’m home in time to sit out in the garden with a glass of cold beer (not just any beer …) and my laptop to write this. So there you go.

Boilers, Barbecues and Bullwhips

The day got off to a bad start.

After walking the dog and returning to bed to poot for a while with a cup of tea, I thought that I’d better make a move so I went into the bathroom for a shave. I lathered my face and turned the hot tap on to rinse my blade … hmmm, it’s not getting hot, I thought. I topped up the pressure on the boiler but every attempt to get it going resulted in the burner lighting for a few seconds before going out again. Long time readers of this blog may remember the kerfuffle on Christmas Eve and this looked like the same problem, so after a fool hardy attempt to have a quick cold shower (never again!) I rang British Gas and they sorted it out within an hour. Hurrah and huzzah!

We were running late for the fencing fun day and just before we set off we got a phone call. Bad news – the church that we were planning to use was unavailable due to a mix up with the keys. Good news – we were all going to Kat, Rachel and Luisa’s house to play instead. Hurrah and huzzah again!

What a fantastic day it was too. In between a useful eight position parry drill with an offhand weapon to parry and some excellent free play, some whips made a mysterious appearance. Ranging from some marvelously supple small snakeskin whips up to some real monsters, we all got cracking. Rachel and Luisa even donned masks and jackets for a whip fight, before concluding that it was bloody painful and not to be attempted again without some more substantial protective clothing. Using a whip as an offhand weapon could be very interesting though – eat your leathery heart out Indiana Jones!

Luisa did sterling work on the barbecue and supplied everybody with burgers, sausages, roast veggies, beans and all manner of comestible goodies, and then a glass of some of Rachel’s rose apple wine to wash it down. Yum.

The day was rounded off nicely with a cigar by the fire pit before driving home to a glass of beer by the chiminea.

Bliss!

 

lego mini me
Originally uploaded by neilh.

From this reasonably clever site

Jolly Holidays

A whole week off, and no posts. What have I been doing exactly?

Well, for starters I’ve picked up Mr Driller : Drill Spirits again. I was initially disappointed with this game, thinking that it wasn’t hugely different to Mr Driller 2, apart from slightly better music and graphics. I’d reckoned without the Dristone mode though – this removes the time pressure of your oxygen continuously decreasing and instead takes 1 point off for each block drilled. Secondly, there are gems to collect that give you a variety of power-ups from barriers to protect you from falling blocks to destroying all blocks of a particular colour, and others in between. It turns the game from being an action/puzzler into a much more strategic sort of puzzle game, where you really have to think carefully about the route that you take to make the best use of your resources and the effect that different falling blocks will have on the layout of the board. Stunningly addictive and highly recommended.

Next, we’ve been playing a Dungeons and Dragons boardgame, picked up cheap for £10 from TK Max, and worth it for a nice set of dungeon floor plans alone. The mechanics of the game have been streamlined, although the rule set is not particularly well written possibly making it a bit tricky for the intended beginner audience – it’s certainly not a patch on the basic rules starter set that we got for christmas. Having said that, the dice based combat (with different colour dice doing differing amounts of damage) works well, and the cards for monsters and treasure are good. Again, worth buying if you see it cheap, although the plastic miniatures included are a bit rubbish.

Wednesday was a rainy day, so that was spent watching the DVD of Lemony Snickett’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Deliciously dark, and achingly funny in places with a minimal amount of schmaltz. Jim Carrey is a hoot as the villainous Count Olaf, although some of his best stuff is only seen in the ‘orphaned scenes’ section of the special features. This is destined to become a goth classic, I think, along with Edward Scissorhands and Nightmare Before Christmas.

Thursday was Chesterfield market, and you’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy – stalls laden with tat, junk, gew gaws, old books, power tools, military memorabilia, framed photographs of Barnsley Town Council from 1959, porcelain pigs, knock off dvds, old boots and one or two kosher antiques. Absolutely wonderful, and it kept us all amused for a couple of hours, before a well deserved pub lunch with Rachel and Lina.

Thursday was also the day the vacuum cleaner exploded. Well, maybe not quite that dramatic, but the power cord has been wonky for a while with the motor cutting out at irregular intervals. I’d just finished doing the bedroom carpets, when there was a loud crack and a shower of sparks from where the cord goes into the switch. Eeeep. I unplugged it cautiously and left it well alone, and I suppose we’ll have to go and buy a new one.

Today, I’ve had a couple of work things to catch up on, even though I’m supposedly still on holiday. Most irritating was a request to convert a sales spreadsheet to the current version – “It’s not showing the drop down boxes on the second tab, so maybe I’m using an old version” Well, yes, that’s why it says version 5.01 with a release date of December 2003 instead of version 6.08  you dozy moo. I’ve sent her the notes for updating it herself, but whether she’ll actually bother with them is another case entirely.

Ok, that’s me caught up, so I suppose I’d better go and put the washing out …