It’s Jif lemon day, incase you don’t know this is how to make pancakes, and this is how they make jif lemons (not very exciting it has to be said).
Oh and it’s also snowing!
Today Kevin has found:
- A great (*n) aunt who saw fit to name her children Oliver, Cromwell and Wellington.
- A branch of the family who hail from Dodge City, North Wales, which was apparently neither in England nor Wales, and therefore fell under nobody’s legal responsibility.
It rather makes my Orange Lodge connections in one direction, and illegitimacy in another, pale into insignificance…
In case you’ve missed it the beeb website is having a ’season’ on public information films.
My favorite one so far, has to be SPLINK, which is an attempt at the green cross code, it actually came after stop look and listen, so why they thought SPLINK was better we will never know, and all with a quite scary Jon Pertwee.
The TV detector film, still begs the question, did those vans actually work as well as they claim,
“there’s a TV on in number five, it’s in the front room, and there watching columbo.”
and a lesson for us all, if you want to keep your ‘bird’ learn to swim.
The more observant among our huge readership may have noticed that I’ve been tweaking with the website over the last few days. It’s what I do to stave off the underlying nerdy urge to start all over again. You must understand I do like the current design, it’s nice, and as Ruth so rightly points out, it does at least have some individuality to it, it’s just my inner nerd likes nothing better then a blank piece of paper (ok a empty document), and to start all over again.
Occasionally I do start over, but more often than not I end up with something that either isn’t as good, or is so near identical as not to be worth the hassle. So to keep me happy I tinker. More often than not this just involves making a new banner and changing a few colours here and there. But this week, I’ve done a couple of font changes, I’ve decided to go for big titles, and little dates. As a way of a change. I’ve added little bits of code (because after all I’m a programmer) just to make external links have a little icon, just like wikipedia. But the biggest change is something I guess most people never see, the printed version of the site.
One of my pet hates is how most websites never print well, a good bad example is the beeb pick any story and go look at print preview, and you get a copy of the web page. Which is fine, except that’s a lot of wasted space, an even worse website for printing is it mag the register, because you end up with a page of links at the top, and even more at the bottom. All I want is the article, not the links, what use are all the links when I’m holding a piece of paper?
Well I can’t do anything about them, but I can control how printing works here, I know most people (including me) will ever print pages from this site, but I’m happy knowing if they do, they get a nice clean page, with just what they wanted to read on it*.
*if your wonder what I’m going on about, go to File -> print preview on this page, and yes it does look like the guardian.
The UK Metric Association (who knew such a thing existed?) is calling for the UK change all its road signs to metric over the next five years (shouldn’t that be 2 Kilodays?). They say converting to metric signs will help the UK “join the modern world”. I can’t wait. I’ll just drop this abacus in the stream, leave t’mill and go join t’modern world (see how, I reverted to stereotypical northern country speak there to emphesize my point?).
Well I think it would be a complete waste of money, I like my miles, I (strangely) have more of a sense of a mile than a kilometer. I know how fast 40miles an hour is, and while I know I would learn, just how fast is 112k/ph ? it’s 70 m/ph if your wondering.
I think we need an UK Imperial Association, if for nothing more than to make it a bit more interesting.
Snow
It’s a happy, upbeat Thursday today. So I though it would just pass on my days posistivity. Even when it started sleating on me on the way to work I kept positive “it must be warming up” I thought (do you put thoughts is quotations?, or do you put them in brackets like now? Or maybe you don’t put them in anything? But you want to break them out of the normal sentence structure, right? Italics. That might be an idea…..).
You often got my mother saying, “it’s to cold for snow”, so if it’s snowing it must be getting warmer.
Ruth’s Mum is getting a new PC, so we we’re going through the Dell site, pricing up and checking it all out. When we get to the Microsoft Application Software (where you add office to the price). Office Small Business is ?211.50 extra, while Office basic is ?105.75 but that doesn’t have Powerpoint, which depending on what you do can be important (I’ve seen teachers.tv they use powerpoint a lot in schools now)
“that’s OK” i said, “your a teacher, you can get the office student teacher edition” which amazon sell for ?92.99, that comes with word, excel, outlook and Powerpoint. but is that still to much money for office?
Now, I’m being a bit of a hypocrite here, because i use office. both at home and work. You see one of the benefits of working for the university, is what’s known as the campus agreement, basically as a university, it is adventagious for Microsoft to have all our students using there products so we get office very very cheep (I’m not sure what it is now, but it use to be a few pounds per PC), and staff get to use it at home for free too.
So when i say office is expensive use something else, i am of-couse not doing that myself. that’s because office is the best ‘office’ suite you can get, and if you’re getting it for nothing or nearly nothing then there’s no competition but if you are paying ‘full wack’, then is it worth it?
So what are your alternatives ?
Lotus SmartSuite, if you can buy it, it’s quite cheep, and older versions do occasionally pop up on the front of computer mags, but at best you’ll end up with quite an old set of software tools, that won’t work all that well, and not work for anyone else*.
Star Office, this is office by Sun. it’s much closer to office than Lotus, and still cheaper than office, at ?41.97 from amazon, you can save yourself a lot of money, but to be honest, no one can tell me why as a home user it’s better to pay for this than just download…
Open Office:, this is the free open source version of star office, but as I’ve said if we are looking at home use the differences between open and star office, should mean you don’t have to buy star office.
There are more wacky alternatives to office, you could just use Microsoft Works, which comes free with most computers, but there is a reason for that. You could even ditch installing software altogether and use web tools, writley is an on line word processor, where you can import and export documents, work with others on line and publish to the web. it’s not quite an office killer, but it quite nice to use.
If it was me
If it was my money (and again i get office for free so who am i to tell you?) i would use open office, it’s free, close enough to office not to be officenive and most importantly it opens Microsoft files.
Most people tell you it’s one of there first words, and once they’ve learnt it, it’s all they say, but up until now Daisy hasn’t being saying no. We’ve been putting it down to our super parenting style, and the fact we don’t say no a lot to Daisy, when Daisy is destroying the house we are much more inclined to say… “Why don’t you play with X instead?” which on the whole works.
Yesterday Daisy discovered the power of No, more precisely she discovered how cool it is to shake your head at people. I fear it’s all downhill from here.
As promised some pictures from my walk today..
The City center in miniature, the light bits are not built yet(paradise street)
Anglican cathedral
the Purple lamb banana.
Nice little walk around town for lunch, although it is still much, much colder than it looks out the window.
I took a walk down the to the Liverpool Echo and Daily Post building, because they’ve got a big model of Liverpool city centre on show in the atrium, it’s 5m * 4m and it is very impressive. I’ve taken some photies (because I have a habit of carrying my camera with me), and I’ll put one or two up here later (because I don’t carry the camera lead).
On my way back, dodging the road works, I got some nice piccies of the superlambbanana, all purple this time. I think it’s the council colours and not Fathers4Justice, but only because of the little 08 logo on the tail (unless Fathers4Justice have become an official partner).
This week I will be mostly coding.
Work is a funny thing at the moment, I have a huge workload lined up, infact we have already pushed some things into next year. However because of budgets, hardware, and consultants, I’m currently in a little bit of a lull: we’re planning to change quite significantly how our Virtual Learning Environment (blackboard) integrates with our student system (oss), but before we can do that we have to get the new servers to run the new version. We are also getting our student system (oss again) to work better with our domain (Active Directory) but that is being done in conjunction with a consultant, who is in and out all the time, doing other things.
This coupled with a budgetary issues slowing other projects down (we are just working out what to spend our money on), means that I have taken it upon myself to rewrite some code this week. It’s not critical that it be redone, after all everything is currently working, but it’s a bit slow and the error messages aren’t great. I am usually a great believer in “if it ain’t broken…”, but I’ll probably not get a chance to look at this code* for another 18 months, So if I don’t do it now, I’ll just have to live with the slow naff messages, and that might drive me a bit mad.
*code, programming stuff that makes the computer do what you want; or a close approximation. For a real nerdy example of some code, take a look at these, maps of old atari game code. they’re quite cool.
New week’s resolution: Less ‘weighty’ posts.
posted on Monday, February 20, 2006 by Kevin in [Insight]I’m worried that it’s all got a bit to weighty in the blog recently. Not weighty in-terms of issues, after all we still post about family trees, and silly news, but most of the posts seem quite significant, gone are all the totally insignificant posts about my breakfast, what colour my socks are (OK we never posted these things).
In hindsight, I think it was the email mailing list bit that made me all self-conscious. Somehow knowing that what I type was going to arrive in people’s email made me feel more responsible, I hate all the email clutter I get, I’m not to keen on all those ‘have you seen this silly thing’ office email I get, (although it should be noted people who only do this sparingly do often find very cool things; Chris) so the idea that I would in effect be sending emails saying, look my socks are blue today,was a bit offensive.
Anyway, you may have noticed (and probably wonder what’s happened if you use to get them) that the email bit has gone. This is in preparation for putting some type of filter on Daisy’s blog so in theory I shouldn’t be worrying about that any more.
So my new weeks resolution, less significance in the blog; you might see this as a bad thing, after all surely it’s all going to be drivel, well yes, but it’s useful, social historical drivel. Just look back at august 2004, quite a few ‘low value’ posts, but they flesh out my life, looking at them I can get a better picture of what I did then than I can from last months posts.
For the record, I have those black Asda socks with the coloured heels; Ruth pairs them together correctly, because and I quote “I love you more than those other wives, who make there husbands were them odd”.
The other news of yesterday, was that I’m pretty sure Daisy used a sentence. It wasn’t quite a real sentence, technically - it lacked a verb, unless an impied verb is sufficient. Nevertheless, she very distinctly pointed at me, and said “Mummy there!”, as if expressing a surprise discovery. It may well have been a surprise discovery, actually, since she’d just come out of the living room, and seen me. In any case, it was accompanied by pointing at where I was, rather than where I ought to be, so I’m interpreting it as an observation, rather than an instruction.
I love understanding her - I get a real kick out of it. We don’t always like what we say to each other, but we CAN communicate.
Not Daisy, you understand - me.
I’ve joined the ranks of the hippy baby-wearers, which one could argue is missing the boat rather, considering she’s over sixteen months old.
I always rather saw myself as a baby-wearer, to be honest, and I did it a bit, but with a nice, modern “baby-carrier” rather than an old-fashioned sling, and she seemed to out-grow it far too quickly. It’s only now, as she’s actually walking, that I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to revisit the concept.
She can walk, of course, but she’s still very little, and there are plenty of times when I need to hold her, either to keep her pinned in one place, or because she’s gotten too tired and started falling over lots. Or because I need to DO things, and she’s having a Scream When Mummy Leaves The Room phase. I regularly carry her upstairs on one hip, with a basket of laundry on the other, and it doesn’t really work very well.
Well, yesterday, I managed to make an old-fashioned baby sling out of a bed sheet, as per these instructions (it’s a long page, look around half-way down), and I am absolutely delighted. It spreads her weight so much more evenly than holding her onto my hip with my arm, and I’m slightly stunned as to how stable and secure she seems - and when I get it wrong, she feels unsteady, and makes her insecurity known in no uncertain terms. And the great thing is that it cost me nothing - I had a flat double sheet in the airing cupboard, and I used that.
Of course, once you start using the web to research baby-wearing (and what an appalling expression!), you discover that you’ve tripped into a world of extended breast-feeding, co-sleeping, “attachment parenting” (and again I say, what an appalling expression!) hippies, with whom I really don’t see myself identifying particularly. But I shall fight for my right to nick their ideas without wearing their dodgy clothes, massive glasses, and greasy hair.
(Warning: this post contains Kevin maths… So it’s almost certainly way of the mark)
Energy, and how we (as in, the consumers) are all to blame, has been in the news this week; I’m skipping for a moment the fact that it’s them (the big companies) who make the TV’s, that use more power in standby… Instead, I got all obsessed about light bulbs. I read a piece on the Beeb about banning light bulbs (the traditional ones, not all light bulbs the world - it would be quite dark, then), and I subsequently followed this up by looking at banthebulb.org (a bit of a disappointing website; will the fact it looks naff affect the message? I fear it might). It’s a good basic idea: either ban those bulbs, or if that is too scary for Government, then put a tax on them.
Some of the figures where very interesting, if with a bit of an American bias: replacing 3 light bulbs in every U.S. home with energy saving ones would save the equivalent of 11 power stations.
At this point I got all obsessed: how many light bulbs does it take to replace a UK power station?
Hurray!
Well it turns out that’s hard to answer. The energy saving bit isn’t too hard (maths bit coming up! All via Google).
One 60 W light bulb on for one hour, uses 0.06 Kilowatt hours.
If we say this light is on for 5 hours a day, every day (not outrageous for a hall/bedroom light), we get 109.5 Kilowatt hours a year. The equivalent for an 12 watt energy saving bulb comes in at 21.9 kilowatt hours, which is a saving of 87.6 kilowatt hours per bulb. Which apparently (although I couldn’t get a straight answer) is around ?7 a year saving.
Now the tricky bit is how much power does a power station produce?
Booo!
The answer is not as simple as you may think. For example Longannet power station in Scotland is rated at 2,304 MW, which should produce 20,183 GWh (Giga Watt hours) of power per year, except it doesn’t because that would mean running the plant at full power all year, and it would probably blow up (or break down lots). So in fact Longannet power station produces around 10,417 GWh of power a year. This discrepancy is true for most forms of power - that’s why the number of wind turbines required to replace a power station varies massively, depending on whom you ask.
Still with this number of 10,417 GWh, how many light bulbs is that? Well it’s 118,915,535 which is around 2 light bulbs per person in the UK. Which is a lot really, but wait… Longannet power station is massive, it’s the second largest coal power station in the country. Is there a smaller one we can replace?
Power stations I can find figures for (it’s quite hard)
- Cockenzie power station. In 2000-2001 it produced 3563 GWh of electricity. That would only take 40,673,516 light bulbs!
- Closer to home, in the year 2000 Fiddlers Ferry, produced 7,300 GWh of power (which was 2.3% of the UK’s power needs) which, assuming I’ve got my sums right, equates to 83.3 million light bulbs.
My plan, that will never get of the ground, is the campaign to replace a power station with light bulbs. Simple really; if everyone in the UK replaced one light bulb in their home with an energy saving one, we could replace a power station. Based on the 2001 census figure of 24,479,439 households in the UK, we could save 2144 GWh of electricity a year, which isn’t quite any of the power stations I’ve found so far, but most of them are big, so if the figures were more readily available, I’m sure I could find a power station somewhere in the UK that we could replace with light bulbs.
[update]
I’ve found a report, that states,”Replacing the four most highly-used bulbs, in fixtures identified as suitable, would save around 200 kWh”. If that was done in all 24,479,439 UK households; we could save 4,895.8 GWh of electricity, which is more than is produced by Cockenzie power station.
I know we’ve gloated on about Daisy’s sleeping patterns before, but this latest family illness just made me realize it all again, We are so lucky that Daisy sleeps!
She even brushes her own teeth
Basically, 99% of the time, Daisy goes to bed with no fuss, at 7pm and then doesn’t wake up until around 8am the next morning, at which time, she chunners to her self and her three bed toys (Samantha the pink rabbit, fidu the dog, and pink the pink thing), until sometime around 8:30-9.00 when Ruth gets her up for breakfast.
I’ve long gone by this time, because I’m up and out the house by 7.15, but that sort of proves the point of how lucky we are. I get up stomp around (it’s very very quiet stomping) for 45 minutes and then go out, and daisy is still asleep! Daisy has virtually no impact on our sleeping patterns at all. Other than she tires us out chasing her around the house all day.
There’s nothing quite like the entire family being knocked out by a bug at the same time. This week we all got a nasty little tummy bug, which resulted in us all evacuating our stomachs, and then mooching around for the rest of the week, all feeble like.
Daisy got it first, and then me and Ruth a day or two later, which given how the sick part only lasted for around 6 hours much better than it could have been. Daisy also took it all a lot better than I did. I am fairly convinced I am one of the noisyest people in the world when I’m being sick. I do a full set pre sick moans, and then a lot of post sick, arghhhs. Still daisy slept through my rough patch so I can’t have been all that bad (or it she was so tired from the bug, she might have slept through anything).
The family tree continues to grow. We now have 198 names in our family tree. And we can go back eight generations from Daisy in at least two directions.
The internet rocks for this, at first I can be hard to find the information but once you’ve got the right places you can (and do) spend all night looking through names, and working it all out. So much so, that when we’ve been looking for software to put the tree into (currently we’re using genesreunited) one feature a few of them have is an alarm to tell you to go to bed.
Today. I took the next step, and actually went to the library, and looked at parish records on microfilm, valuable lesson of the day? When you know you’ve written down the information you need to find, make sure you then take that piece of paper with you to the library.
All wasn’t lost, I at least have gotten over the first hurdle and spoken to people and used the machines, so the fear factor isn’t stopping me anymore. Next time I will take all the right information.
It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had any nice pics of Daisy, so here you go - more of a thoughtful one than a smiley one, but she’s still pretty, so that’s OK.
You know how the media are always looking for more ‘understandable’ ways to explain complex science to the masses, most commonly things are either the size of Wales, or the size of Texas. So they lapped up yesterday’s quote from the navy about their new war ship.
