Halloween

I hate halloween.

You may have read previous blog entries and decided that I am an opinionated idiot with a superiority complex who moans a lot - and you'd be right - but a killjoy I am not. Christmas? Love it. I'll complain about the cost, sure, but everybody does. At least those without wads of cash stuffing their mattress. Easter? Bring on the chocolate.

But halloween? No thanks. A few years ago I did like it. There was an organised trick-or-treat for all the kids on the road and they all went together and then we all had hot dogs afterwards. It was great for the kids. But the families who organised such things have all moved away and the street has lost some of its neighbourly feel. I suppose I could take it upon myself to attempt to organise another one, but frankly I can't be bothered. I'm not one for organising community events. There's not so many kids now, anyway.

A couple of years ago I tried taking Jess trick-or-treating. After a few houses we gave up because it just wasn't fun. Our neighbour gave us something, as did one lady across the road. Our next-door-but-one neighbour slammed the door in Jessica's face. The other next-door-but-one neighbour didn't answer the door but came running after us when they realised it was us. The indian family next door to them gave us something. But there was no enjoyment in it so we went home.

I don't mind innocent little kids coming round, accompanied by their parents, all dressed up and having a good time. I'll happily give them something (note to self: Buy some sweets on the way home tonight!) but there should be an official age limit or something. After about 11, i.e. from high school onwards, it should be forbidden. There's nothing worse than opening the door to find two teenage boys, their only attempt at dressing up being a mask - which is really only there to hide their face so you can't identify them - who then essentially demand goods with menances. For some reason they think it's acceptable that, should you refuse to provide them with free food, they can throw eggs at your windows or your car, or worse. Given the scum that lives in the council estate near us, you feel you have no choice but to give in and give them something for fear that in the dead of night your car windows will rearrange themselves into lots more pieces than they were in before. I'm sure if I went into a shop carrying a knife, for example, and demanded a free chocolate bar I would be arrested. I don't see the difference.

Last year, though, the worst was by the parade of shops. I foolishly decided to go around the corner and buy a pizza. When I rounded the corner I was met by a kind of eggy version of Beirut. There were hordes of teenagers hurling eggs and flour at each other. Shops were covered, cars were covered. The cash machine was covered. I had to side-step two flying eggs and did get dripped on by one egg that has exploded onto a sign that I walked under. It took ages for the street to get cleaned up properly. Halloween has degenerated into an excuse for serious anti-social behaviour. But what would the police do? If somebody throws an egg at my house or my car, it is criminal damage. If they throw it at me, it is assault. They are also guilty of intimidation. But if I try and get them nicked, I'll get laughed off.

Let the little kids have their fun, but We need a greater police presence on halloween to stop this behaviour.

Green and mean

I fear this is going to be a long entry, as I've just read an article about plans to start levying a "Green Tax". Nothing riles me more than the global warming evangelists. Today it is trendy to persecute and raise taxes under the auspices of it being "for the environment". This is nonsense. The only reason is to get more and more tax from us, and of course nobody can complain if it's for the environment, right?

Motorists have long been targeted. Crippling fuel duties, and now road taxes based on vehicle emissions. Company car tax is based on emissions. High- profile people, who must have some modicum of intelligence somewhere, target 4x4 owners because they are an easy target. A couple of years or so ago in the States there was an advertisement depicting 4x4 drivers to be supporters of terrorism. I can only presume that the petrol companies monitored what sort of vehicle was filling up and made sure that the profits from 4x4 drivers was sent straight to Mr Bin Laden, and the profits from all other sorts of vehicles was sent back to do whatever else the oil firms do with their billions. Strange idea to send out. Surely by default then we are all supporting terrorism, just some support it about 10% less than others, so that's Ok.

I don't own a 4x4. I used to, and guess what? It was actually the most fuel-efficient vehicle I've ever owned, as it was a diesel. It was also a practical, comfortable car. Where is the problem? The ridiculous banding of road taxes was designed to hit 4x4 owners but ended up hitting "sensible" saloon cars as well. Anyway, I no longer have my 4x4. Instead I have a saloon and a 7-seater MPV. The MPV is not very fuel efficient, and therefore attracts high tax and high fuel-duty. But this vehicle has countless times saved us from taking two cars on a journey, which would have been far more polluting. Obviously I get no discount for this.

Now they are talking about taxing air travel (more than they already do). On the face of it, it seems sound logic; aircraft produce far more emissions than cars do and must be punished. But this would have bad consequences for all of us. It would limit global movements and probably cause closures and job losses in the industry. Not a good thing, but hey, it's for the environment, right? I like the fact bandied around by the airline people: Cows produce more carbon monoxide than planes. So lets get rid of the cows. Or at least tax them.

One little fact that has been mentioned in passing is that the UK is responsible for 2% of the worlds energy use. Frankly, that ain't a lot. If we reduce our energy usage by, say 20% - which is a lot - the total world energy consumption will fall by 20% of 2% which is 0.4%. This is nothing. If we use standard number rounding rules, this is 0%. Energy consumption in the UK is not going to increase much, either. It is countries like China and India that are going to increase their consumption and emissions by huge amounts over the next fifty years. By that time, our 2% will probably be down to 1% or 0.5% of the world total. Bearing this in mind, we could shut down our power stations, park up our cars and close all industry for good (basically the Labour Party manifesto, then), return to the bronze age and it would make absolutely no difference whatsoever to the world. So tell me how taxing us even more will help? It won't. It's all about the money.

The final point I'm going to make here is that man-made global warming is not a fact - it is a theory. Scientists have been known to have incorrect theories in the past, you know. The earth is flat and the sun revolves around us, for starters. Oh, and there's nothing smaller than an atom. There is no accurate long-term data to point to man's activities causing climate change (as it is now known as). What we do know is that the climate on earth has changed many times over the millennia. This has had nothing to do with man. If we are not causing it, we are also powerless to stop it. Our influence is not that great.

Climate change zealots will rubbish this. But answer one question: The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago, without the invention of the motor car or the power station. How did the earth warm up then?

Smoke and Mirrors

I'm back, and it seems that the world has gone even more bonkers than it was when I left it a few days ago (Ok, technically I was on a programming course in London, but I didn't buy a newspaper or watch the news so essentially I existed in a kind of news limbo where the only relevant information was that pertaining to Coldfusion syntax).

It appears that the NHS wants to stop treating people who smoke. Or the government wants the NHS to stop treating people who smoke. Whatever. The grounds for this seem obvious, and even admirable. Smokers are more likely to be unhealthy, and it's obviously of their own choosing, so why should be bother to treat them in preferance to the nice, healthy person next on the waiting list?

Well, as somebody who enjoys the occasional cigarette or twenty throughout the week, I'll tell you exactly why:

1. Discriminating on account of lifestyle is dangerous. You can certainly argue that the smokers ailment is self-inflicted, but what about somebody who breaks his leg playing football on a Sunday? Or somebody who hammers a nail through their finger whilst doing DIY? Or somebody who crashes a car because they drove a little fast? Or somebody who was drunk and fell over and cut their head? Or those who have high cholesterol because they ate to many fried breakfasts? I could continue like this, but I think you get the point. If we stop treating those who have injuries or other ailments that could have been avoided we would have to turn away half the patients. I suspect this would be greeted with delight from the NHS management, however.

2. Tax. Smokers pay a lot of tax. Cigarettes are cheap to make (a packet in Kuala Lumpur last time I was there, for example, cost under £1, compared to over £5 here. Interestingly "duty-free" cigarettes are still very expensive here. £25 for 200 in the shop at Heathrow, or £5 on the plane. This goes to show that the "duty" tax is only a triffling part). Now bear in mind that the Malaysian government does also charge tax, and you can see that our government must rake in well over £4 on the sale of each packet. Lets say that 5 million people each purchase a packet of cigarettes each day. I've no idea if this is accurate or not, but frankly I don't have the time to do the research right now, so it'll do. 5 million times £4 is, obviously, £20 million. Per day. Multiply this out by the year and we get over £7 billion. Even if I'm out by 50% and only 2.5 million buy a packet per day (easily possible in a population of over 60 million) then it's still over £3.5 billion. This sum, added to NHS coffers, would rather help cover the cost, don't you think?

3. National Insurance. We all pay it (well, those of us who bother to work do) and this entitles us to treatment on the NHS. No more needs to be said on this point.

4. Death. If smokers die younger this is great news for the pensions system, which is a huge drain on state resources and will only get worse with an aging population. Less people around, means less pensions payments to make.

5. The Hippocratic Oath. I can't say I've ever actually studied the text of the oath taken by doctors, but I'm reasonably sure it doesn't include words to the effect of "pandering to the whims of penny-pinching senior NHS management and government ministers, and refusing to treat people they don't think are deserving of it." Rather, I'm sure it includes a promise to treat any and all to the best of their abilities, regardless of circumstances.

Given that the NHS is only staffed by 4 doctors, 12 nurses, and 7 million managers these days, it makes a bit more sense to weed out the detritus in the headcount, stop spending fortunes on pointless things, and just get on with the job of fixing people, rather than dreaming up schemes to stop doing so.

Its lyk da bst fng eva!

You get two blogs today, you lucky people, because I'm not going to be able to do another one for a week due to being out all next week.

Now I may not exactly be a grand master of the English language - I occasionally place apostrophes in erroneous places and there is the odd infinitive that I dare to split - but on the whole my written English is fairly good, even if I do say so myself. Which I just did.

Which is why I hate text speak. Or txt spk, as the lazy vowel-averse thumb-typing youth of today would call it.

I understand the origin - I've had a mobile phone for over ten years - and I understand why you would use it on a mobile. You have a limited space for text, and entering each message is laborious, so making it more efficient by shortening words is a good thing. I suppose it's similar to shorthand in a way, and perhaps a little ingenious. I've even been known to shorten the occasional word and even - gasp! - to use numbers in words, e.g. 2nite when I'm running short on space.

But it has its place, and its place is in mobile phones. There is no such limitation in any other form of communication, except perhaps in note-taking when standard shorthand would be far more appropriate anyway. Typing tonight instead of 2nite does not take noticeably longer, so there is no need to use it when typing an email, for example.

Sometimes I see Jessica talking to her friends on MSN. Jessica isn't too bad, fortunately, but I need an interpreter to translate what her friends are writing.

We are standing at a fork in the road of the English language. Within the next twenty years or so, the sort of delightful, flowing prose you are enjoying now will exist only in the library, on the dusty bookshelves at the back that nobody goes to (yes, yes, don't say that's the best place for this blog). The children of today will now be working and the language we know and love will be degenerating rapidly. Within forty years the last of the current English teachers will be retiring, and all new children will be taught only in txt spk. Children at public schools will take lessons in Old English in the same way that Latin is taught now.

We must rise above this and stamp out this threat to our heritage. Or else our grandchildren will be reading the translated version of Hry Ptr nd da Flosfr Stn.

The scariest part is that you probably understood that last sentence.

Religious unveiling

The big story at the moment appears to be about Muslims, veils and other religious paraphernalia. So I'm going to ramble about that for a while.

The big furore seems to be that it's not Ok for Muslims to hide their faces. They have a point. 90% (or some other made-up statistic) of communication is facial, and if you have a teacher trying to impart knowledge, this is obviously a hindrance. I once took part in a corporate communication training session exercise that had me trying to draw a diagram whilst facing away from somebody else who was describing it to me. Those who read my previous feelings on Art will know that immediately I was at a slight disadvantage, but it was amazing the difference when the exercise was repeated when facing my colleague. The first attempt bore almost no relation to the diagram in question, but the second was 90% accurate. All because I could see their facial expressions.

To deny our children the right to this is unfair. But, we have to pander to religious needs also. I don't believe that most Muslim women feel demeaned by wearing a veil. It is their belief as much as that of their husbands, so no matter how we may feel, we do have to respect their views.

Now I'm not a religious man. Asking me to swear on the bible in court is as much good as asking me to swear on Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley, or Lord of the Flies or the 1996 London Telephone Directory, but even if I don't agree with the views of others, I do respect them. Well, sometimes.

Banning the veil outright is not an option, as frankly the government has no right to dictate dress code in our private lives. However, in some situations, it is appropriate to have a dress code and religion must not be allowed to overrule this. We would not expect school teachers to come in dressed in chicken costumes, or wearing mini-skirts, as these would distract from the learning experience. So therefore the veil should be banned in schools. Similarly my employer, although not forceful, expects me to dress reasonably. If I came in wearing my pyjamas I could reasonably expected to be asked to change. Same goes for driving tests and passport photos. Banning crosses or clothing that does not inhibit learning is daft. People should be able to wear items affirming their faith if they like, as long as they remember that religious dogma has no place in schools or in workplaces.

But in their private lives, which includes meetings with Jack Straw, they should be allowed to wear what they want.

Writers unblocked

A year and a half or so ago I wrote a novel. Technically I suppose it would be a short novel or a novella as it was a little short at about 48,000 words, but it could easily have been expanded.

I was quite proud of it, as were Eleanor and Jessica when I started reading it to them (we never finished, as Joe was born. I also realise they were probably rather biased!). These days I don't have the time to flesh it out and finish it. This is shame because it's quite a good story and I'd love to see it published. I'd very much like to be a full time writer but what with mortgages and children a change in career is probably unlikely to happen.

Still, I'd like to think that someday I'll finish my book, The Door In The Cellar and find somebody stupid enough to publish it.

I also have lots of others stories swirling around my head. I did put down plot outlines to a couple of them and even wrote the first couple of chapters to one of them, but again I've stalled. This is not because of writers block - far from it - but again from a complete lack of time.

Anyway, due to thinking about this problem I wrote a little poem. I've never written one before and I think it's quite good:

One night the writer picked up his pen
Found some blank paper and sat in his den
A hundred ideas swirling round in his brain
Before we go further I now must explain

You've heard of a thing known as writers block
But this affliction our author had not
Too many ideas, plenty stories to tell
Now he was trapped in his personal hell

He knew he had found a wonderful lode
But also his head was about to explode
To get them all down needed plenty of time
Something our author knew he could not find

So there he sat, trying to get them down
Stories of fairies and badgers and clowns
Magic and daring and unicorns, too
Oh how he wished he had just a few

But many he had sitting up in his mind
Taunting him cruelly with plotlines divine
Colourful villains alive in his head
He knew it was futile to go up to bed

Filling his pen, he started to write
And worked and worked right through the night
Night turned to morn and then the sun rose
And still the author kept on with his prose

His pen ran dry, two or three times
But stopping was not really good for this rhyme
For days he wrote and was not once fed
And then, dear reader, he slumped over dead

And there ends the story of our favourite author
Who worked a bit longer than really he oughta
His tales are forgotten, will never be read
All because he didn't go up to bed

Bin the Bin Men

An early blog today, for yet again I was held up on the way to work by the epitome of selfishness.... the bin man.

These idiots will park their huge trucks deliberately blocking the road, especially if they can see cars behind them. So many times now I've been stuck behind one that has parked in a completely inconsiderate manor when if they had parked a few feet further forward or further to the side the traffic would be able to flow freely.

This morning I had to swerve around one that had parked in the middle of the road, and then try and get past a recycling truck that had turned a corner, but rather than completely turning it and stopping at the side of the road like you might expect, it had sort of half turned it, forcing me to turn into the road on the wrong side and then put two wheels up on the grass verge to get past.

It's not like you can do anything about it either. For a start, they are in a big truck and could easily drive into you and claim it wasn't intentional. And if you give them any abuse, you'll probably get beaten up. Let's face it, bin men aren't exactly going to be the epitome of intelligence and civility.

Why-oh-why do they have to do this job between 6 and 9 in the morning? During rush hour and the school run? If they did it mid-morning then they a) wouldn't wake us up; b) we wouldn't have to rush out in our dressing gowns because we forgot to put the bins out last night; and c) we wouldn't all get held up on the way to work.

But it'll never happen, because that would be far to convenient for the rest of us. Lest you forget, it is the credo of local councils across the land to take our money and be as useless as possible.

I'm loosing my mind

I'm getting fed up with people mis-spelling losing as loosing.

The other day Jessica bought home a leaflet from a scout campsite that has a couple of years to raise £800,000 to buy the freehold of their land or the camp faces closure.

A worthy cause, but the leaflet had loosing in big, bold letters on it.

That was enough to make me decide to not give them any money.

MP3 A-OK

Today, Matthew, I'm mostly going to moan about.... MP3s.

Before the internet was discovered, kids such as myself (back when I was a kid obviously, I'm slightly older in a linear fashion now, though perhaps not mentally) used to swap music by the time-honoured process of copying a tape. This was usually done in a tape-to-tape machine, or for those without this technology, by playing on one machine and recording on a completely different one. This worked, although you often heard the dog barking and the toilet flushing as well as the music you wanted.

Despite one bought tape being shared around half a school, the world kept on spinning, record companies made loads of money and everybody was happy.

Later on, a scientitian would grow a CD in a laboratory and the musical landscape wobbled about once again. Now (well, 15 years later when CD-burners and blank media became affordable) copies could be made with no loss in quality, or at least they could be copied to tape.

This raised an interesting situation. Most cars had tape players still, yet now most music was bought on CD. So, everybody copied stuff to tape. Nobody, least of all the record companies, raised an eyebrow.

But then somebody discovered the MP3 file format, lodged in a crashed meteor. The only previous ways of storing songs on computers took up huge amounts of disk space, yet now it was tiny and without much of a loss of quality. It was also very easily copied.

So now it's practically a hanging offence to share music. If you download a song from Itunes, it only plays in Itunes or on your Ipod. It also costs 79p per track, which is very expensive considering there are no manufacturing, packaging or distribution costs involved. You can't play it in your car or on your home hi-fi. This is why I will never install Itunes or buy an Ipod (I have a far superior, and cheaper MP3 player instead). CDs often now come with copy protection so you can't rip them or copy them.

Record companies quote diminishing profits and say that music-sharing is going to cause a collapse of the economy, and that Madonna may be forced to take a shelf-stacking job in Tesco. But this is rubbish because CD sales are just as high as before.

I, like most people, still buy CDs of bands they like, but might experiment a bit with downloads of unknown artists. Yes, the music may not have been paid for, but it simply wouldn't have been purchased in the first place. Like when Microsoft say that piracy of MS Office costs them a fortune. If the people who had a pirate copy were forced to pay £300 for it, they simply wouldn't and would seek a cheaper alternative, so the figures are meaningless.

There was a really good finishing point to all this, but I can't remember it now.

Sunglasses

A while ago I lost my sunglasses. I was very sad because they were a nice pair of "Oakley" ones. I put the Oakley in the quotes because they were actually fake and brought from Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur on our last trip there. So not only were they nice, they were also a souvenier from a great holiday. I was very upset to have lost them.

They were in the back of the pushchair, which got put in the back of the car. A couple of days later I noticed them in the back of the car but didn't take them out, as I was wearing a different paid and didn't need them. A couple of days after that I went to retrieve them, only they weren't there.

We then went on holiday to Cornwall and I had to take the pair of sunglasses (these ones were purchased from Cairns. As you may guess I tend to forget to take sunglasses on holiday, resulting in the purchase of a new pair everytime I go abroad). Whilst we were on holiday I decided to search the back of the car again. I even looked under the seats, but they were nowhere to be found (the glasses, not the seats). I presumed they had fallen out of the car at some point.

Fast-forward a few weeks, and Vicky brings me a new pair of "Oakleys" from KL. I love them, as does Jessica. Ele doesn't like them so much, so she decided to search the car again, with no luck.

We then drove off to Sutton. When I opened the boot to retrieve the pushchair (incidentally NOT the same pushchair the sunglasses had been in), they they were, sitting there in plain view, mocking me. All very strange. I can only think they were threatened by the arrival of a new pair of sunglasses and so decided to make themselves known again.

Speaking of my new sunglasses, which are covered in a fairly reflective coating, I noticed that if I look in my rearview mirror whilst driving, I can see the reflection of the front of my glasses reflected again into the mirror. The double-reflection cancels out any reversing of the image and therefore I can see the road ahead in the reflection of the reflection of my sunglasses, if you see what I mean.

This is a really strange optical illusion, especially as when things pass out of my peripheral vision, they are just entering it in the relection of the reflection, meaning I'm passing things I've already passed. I spent a long time driving along like this before realising it wasn't particularly safe.

Like yesterday, I think I may be causing death and destruction behind me again.

Education, Education, Education

Recently, we've been visiting the local Comprehensives, in a quest to find the best school for Jessica to attend next year.

This is a new thing for me, and for Eleanor, too. I went to a 400 year old grammar school and she spent her schooling partly in South Africa, and partly in Zimbabwe being taught by nuns. As a result I know nothing about the variety of subjets they seem to teach at Comprehensives, and Eleanor is good at shooting people and then repenting about it.

When I went to school, the subjects were obvious. These days there seem to be subjects such as Textiles and Humanities. What the hell are these? The kids can choose from approximately 400 million different subjects to study. I suspect this is why the GCSE passes are rising every year, because half of the subjects are stupid. How do you fail Drama, for example? I've discovered a good indicator on actual results is that they list results with English and Maths included in a seperate column, because this figure is always lower. 11% lower in the case of the school last night. I don't like this, as in my opinion they are the two most important subjects and should always be included, especially as they are compulsory.

One subject that always irritated me, to go off on a slight tangent here, was Art. I was absolutely no good at it. I can't draw a straight line with a ruler. I am officially the worst artist in the history of mankind. Yet, I was made to do Art. Why? What possible benefit did I get from this? It did nothing to prepare me for the outside world. I didn't learn anything. The time would have been far better spent studying some other subject, but I had to take it. I was also rubbish at CDT (Woodwork), but at least this had a practical application in later life (an Ikea furniture building class would have been even better). But Art? If you have an aptitude for it, fine. But don't flog a dead horse in trying to get me to do it.

Anyway, these days there are computers in every room, along with interactive whiteboards. We had blackboards and a single computer room filled with BBC Micros. Yet my school managed a 100% pass rate at 5 or more A-C grades. It still does this, but I don't know if it has all this modern technology or not. The point is, that it can't make much difference really because we all managed to become educated before computers. It's just that now it costs a fortune in equipment whereas before all was needed was a piece of chalk and a board eraser to throw at misbehaving pupils (incidentally, when did pupils become students?).

One school we visited (currently our favourite) is now a specialist Computing & Mathamatics school. All schools have to have a specialism now, because they get more money from the government. Being the software engineer that I am, I wandered into the ICT (as they call Computing these days) suite and engaged the head of ICT in conversation. I wanted to know if they did any programming. He said they do a bit in Year 12 (Sixth form to thee and me) if they want. This suprised me a bit - as they specialise in Computing I expected compulsory programming classes or something. But apparantly there isn't really a Computer Science GCSE or A-Level anymore, but rather some weird qualifications instead that I've never heard of. It all seems to be geared towards using computers, i.e. you get good at MS Word and Excel but when asked what a stack or a heap or a FIFO buffer is you'll have no idea. And you won't get the 10 people in the world who understand binary joke, which is just saddening.

I favour a return to old-fashioned teaching methods. I may be a person whose livelihood depends on computers, but I say toss them out! Tear down the interactive whiteboards and replace with a good-old blackboard and chalk. Remove the useless subjects and replace with extra Maths or English lessons. And elocution lessons. If I hear Humanities pronounced youmani'eez again I shall throttle the child that said it. Along with those who pronounce a th in the middle of a word as a v and a trailing l as a w, i.e. toogever and schoow instead of together and school.

With the money saved on equipment, perhaps we could invest more in the actual teachers.

I see crashed people

I seem to possess the power of the second sight.

This morning I dropped off the car at the dealer for them to fix the following:

1 - Electric mirrors not adjusting or folding
2 - Intermittent "Pssshhhht" noise when revving over 4000Rpm.
3 - Broken Steering Lock
4 - Broken Trim in the boot.

They did fix the mirrors but that's it. They claimed to have fixed the steering lock, but they lied, and the trim is on order now. I made the mistake of saying the "Pssshhhht" noise was intermittent, so obviously it didn't occur whilst they had the car.

They supplied me with a battered small white car, in which they had mistakenly installed the engine from a blender. Come to think of it, we couldn't find the base for our blender at the weekend, so I bet that's where they got it from. They had also put the indicators and window wiper controls on the wrong side, so that every time I flicked the wipers on, which was often, as it was raining, traffic behind me screeched and swerved as my indicators came on. This probably explained why the car was so battered.

On the way to pick up the sort-of-fixed car at lunchtime, I got stuck in a jam. The cause was a broken down van but just after that is a junction that was continually being blocked by cars crossing it coming from my right. Well, technically they weren't crossing it, but rather blocking my way by virtue of being so brain-dead they thought that blocking a major A-road whilst they queued was a good thing to do.

I thought to myself that's dangerous, there'll be an accident there before long.

So I wasn't in the least bit suprised that my second sight had come good, as on my way back after retrieving my car there was indeed an accident. It involved a Corsa and a Saxo. Therefore it's a good chance they were both chavs (certainly one was, as he was wearing a baseball cap) and thus the outcome is two less chav-mobiles on the road, which is a good result all round.

I just hope it wasn't caused by me indicating by mistake.

Nuclear Family

So, North Korea have worked out how to make a nuclear bomb, and Georgie Porgie Nuke-Em And Die Bush doesn't like it.

Now I understand that North Korea is not a particularly friendly country, and that it's run by a communist dictator with a severe case of Short Man Syndrome, but I can't help but think why shouldn't they have one?

The US has got them. We've got them. A few other countries have got them. Why shouldn't North Korea have them too? The guy running the place may be a bit mad but surely he has the right to defend his own country? (I'm talking about North Korea, not the US in that last sentance, but I'll understand if you were confused).

It seems the UN doesn't like anyone who gained their nuclear arsenal after the Cold War. It's too late to join the club now boys, just stand in the corner whilst we point our missiles at you and there's nothing you can do about it, mwaaa haaa haa haaaa.

North Korea is not going to use it. It knows that if it were to do so, it'd be raining nuclear fire in North Korea-town within about 10 minutes and that it'd be wiped out completely. It's all about political posturing. North Korea gets one basically because it will wind up the US. It also then has a decent weapon to hand should the US decide that, on balance, it's better if they run North Korea, not Mr Short Man.

The best bit though is that North Korea has said that they will enter talks to remove nuclear weapons only if the US does the same. Let's see the answer to that, Georgie-boy.

Famous!

I'm famous! A published author!

Well, I got a letter printed printed in the Daily Express today, the point of which was pretty much the subject of my last blog entry, concerning rubbish being charged by weight, when volume would be more appropriate.

Always nice to see one's name in print. Provided it's not in the obituaries. Then again, you'd probably not see that, unless my theories on no life after death turn out to be wrong.

It's a step up from my tirade against the stupidity of a certain local councillor in the local Guardian I suppose. I presume the next step will be a weekly column in a national newspaper, followed by the editorship of the Times and then soon not even Mr Murdoch (the businessman, not the A-Team guy) will be able to control me! World domination will be mine! It's about time, I've waited long enough.

I can't buy a fridge

It's not that I don't want to, I do. It's not that I can't find anywhere to buy one, I can.

I just can't bring myself to actually do it.

Last night, Jessica accidentally knocked over a glass full of raspberry juice that had been sitting on the top shelf for a week or so. Naturally, it covered everything in a purple stickyness. We started pulling the stuff out, and realised that our fridge is disgusting. I mean, really gross. Students would be embarrassed. We bought it off the people we bought the house from as we didn't have one and it seemed easier and cheaper, so I've no idea how old it is or if it has ever been cleaned properly. Plus the bulb has blown.

Anyway, we decided in the spur of the moment to go to Comet and buy a new one. Three traffic jams and 2 miles later, we arrived. We looked around and it came down to a choice of two. One for £459 which was nice, and one almost identical which had vacuum sealable compartments for £499. I've no idea what I'd do with a vacuum sealable compartment but it sounds good. It also had a large LED dislpay on the front. I'm a sucker for LED displays on appliances. They speak to me at some primal level. I have to have them.

But, I just couldn't bring myself to part with the money. I mean, we don't actually have the money so it would've been credit-carded, and I just couldn't bring myself to spend £500 we don't have. This is quite unusual for me as I'm normally quiet happy to do that. And it's also at least the third time I've nearly brought a new fridge but shied away at the last moment.

I don't know why, because I really want one. I suspect the reason might be because I really want one of those American-style ones with double-doors and water dispensers and ice-makers but I can't fit one of those into the kitchen. It's like going to the car showroom to buy a Bentley but realising it won't fit in your garage so you buy a Ford Escort instead.

One day, I will own a new fridge. Honest.

Complete rubbish

No I'm not describing this blog, although that would also certainly be apt.

Rather, I'm talking about the latest hair-brained scheme to get more money out of us. Now that it's getting hard to increase council tax by 500% every year, the councils need other ways of getting extra funds from us to pay for the Midget Lesbian Muslim Punk-Rockers Knitting Group.

The way they want to do this is to install an identifying chip into our bins so that they can be weighed, and then us billed according to how much rubbish we throw away. This is so monumentally stupid on so many levels that I'm having trouble restraining from just bashing the keyboard extremely hard in a random fashion just to DGHOJ AWROJSOTJSDOJSDOR ER FOGJFGOJZOGJS$T VJKFSDIO;GJ890P UTH3489TA'PRJK

Ok, I couldn't help it. I feel better now, so lets look at how dumb these people are:

1 - Everybody will fly tip. Or put waste in their neighbours bins. Or swap the chips with the widow at No. 23 who has almost no rubbish. People will end up guarding their bins with shotguns so that they are not over-charged.
2 - We are not responsible for the weight ourselves. If we buy something, it's not our fault that it weighs a lot.
3 - The whole damn point is that we are running out of landfill sites. Charging by WEIGHT won't make any difference to this, as the ground doesn't reject rubbish for being heavy. It's VOLUME that matters here. Of course, charging per volume is not at all easy, as each household's bin would have to be emptied, that batch of waste compacted and then measured.

What would be a better idea would be to cut the funding for the Midget Lesbian Muslim Punk-Rockers Knitting Group and instead give us a rebate (yes, Mr Councilman, it is a word. Look it up in the dictionary) based on how much we recycle. You can even do it on weight if you want, although that might make people buy everything in glass jars.

But what we need to do is solve the landfill problem. Obviously our growing populating is causing more and more waste. The reason our population is increasing so much is because of immigration from abroad. Now, given that our tiny island is full of Romanians and Moldovans, and Romania and Moldova are now more or less empty, we should ship our rubbish there. They must have plenty of available landfill space and not much to put in it, as most of their population lives here. A perfect solution, I'm sure you'll agree.

I hate councils.

Bah.

Estimating

One of our objectives at work is to improve our estimating skills. By this I don't mean "there are 2,547 beans in that jar" I mean software development time estimating.

Previously this was easy as I just said "two weeks" to every request. A month for a big job. But now they want to stop really big projects overrunning by months and months, and so we have to track each step of the project and log the reasons for any delay, such as "Complexity misunderstood, Working on other projects, Waiting For Other People, Holiday, Change in Scope". These can alternatively be written as "Didn't Bother Researching It Properly,Fixing Somebody Else's Mistakes In Another Project, Reliant On Dumb People, Running Away So Somebody Else Does The Tricky Bit, To Be Expected".

The thinking is that by learning where the delays are, we can build those into the estimates of when we'll be done. So whilst we think something will take 10 days to do, it'll actually take us 13 days, because of interruptions, delays etc. Therefore the effort and the delivery date will not match. 5 working days of effort does not mean you'll deliver in 5 working days.

So for my latest project I estimated 9 days of effort. I was then advised to build in a couple of extra days, especially as I was likely to be doing something else for a day or two. No problem, I add a couple. I'm also then told that over-estimating is as bad as under-estimating. Three days into the project, and frankly, I could have it done by lunchtime if I wanted to. But then I'm not supposed to finish it until the 16th of October, according to my planning sheet. If I finish early, I'll look bad for estimating too high (which I had a suspicion I had done anyway). Especially as I'd have done a 9-day project in 3 days which is WAY off.

So, this is the really, really clever bit, and where the whole system falls down. ALL of my projects will ALWAYS be perfectly on time, making me the best estimator EVER (with a bit of margin built-in to make it realistic). How will I do this? Simple. I'll always over-estimate, but then work really slowly when it looks like I'll finish a week early. This will also allow me to write blogs and waste time. So each task that I've put down a day to do, that is actually taking me about 15 minutes, will still be stretched out to a day. Now I have to wonder what to do with the remaining 7 hours of today...

Greetings

I've already got a blog. Now I've got another one. Does that make me greedy? Well, I don't care.

The other blog is the "family" blog (The Drinkall Times). This one is for me to moan, point out the stupidity of the world and my general superiority, witty and informed political comments, amusing anecdotes, and to generally write interesting things. Well, maybe. I suspect I'll mostly moan. Hopefully I'll update this one more than once per week or once per fortnight like I do with the other one.

Here's one to start with. The M25 and it's fabulous warning systems. Last night, driving to Heathrow, I was closing up on J11 when I see a sign stating "J12 - J17 Congestion". This is to be expected, as it was 17:15. I closed up on J12 with trepidation and my right foot hovering over the brake pedal. But nothing. J12 passed in a blur and I closed up on J13. The signs were still insisting there were the sorts of traffic jams that would require me to leave my car and strike forth on foot to find nourishment and water. But as I passed J13, this is what I saw, taken with my trusty Sony Ericsson K800i:



Not a lot, you'll agree. There was eventually some traffic, a bit before J15 though.

In the event, I got to Heathrow really early. I was relying on the M25 to slow me down, but no, there was hardly anything. Ditto the M4. Ditto the Heathrow approach road, despite the roadworks there. And so I had to pay £10 to park the car for 2-and-a-bit hours. Bargain. Had the M25 lived up to its promises, I'd have been stuck there for an extra hour and my parking would have been cheaper. See, I can even moan about NOT being stuck in traffic. That's how good I am.

When I was there I snuck out for a crafty fag to pass the time. I followed the "Smoking Area" signs, which lead me to a door outside. I chuckled merrily at this, as a memory came flooding back about how I had thought leading you outside to a "Smoking Area" was quite funny. But I was wrong! Now there are big signs saying "THIS IS NOT THE SMOKING AREA! THE SMOKING AREA IS DOWN THIS WAY A BIT AND THROUGH THAT DOOR ON THE LEFT. DO NOT SMOKE HERE OR YOU WILL BE TAKEN AWAY IN HANDCUFFS AND QUESTIONED LIKE THE TERRORIST YOU ARE!"

Or something like that. But everyone was smoking there anyway. I presume in the morning one guy lights up, then someone else comes out and thinks well, if he's doing it, I'll do it and so it goes on in perpetuity. I didn't check the actual "Smoking Area" but I bet nobody was in it. There was even a guy with one of those dustpans on long handles sweeping up the butts as soon as they had been stamped out. I guess the airport are fighting a losing battle.