Dear Santa.
If good old saintnick makes a stop at my house this year, all I want for christmas is a 1920’s Plus Fours Routefinder.
I’d rather have one of these than a tomtom any day 
A word on Paperwork.
Top tip for surviving Office Life
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Number 1
At the point where collection, analysis and presentation of metrics and statistics takes priority over the actions or process those measures were put in place to monitor, it is time to get the hell out.
If you find yourself in this situation, I’m affraid you may have found yourself in a bureaucracy with little hope of ever achieving anything worthwhile. You now have limited time to escape the hell before permanent damage to your mental health is done.
Meltdown or Long Overdue Correction?
I seem to remember not too long ago we were in the grips of a panic over fuel prices.
Remember that?
Well, now it seems that this global economic meltdown has started to have an effect at the pumps :
Cheapest petrol stations within 5 miles of “AB11″ for Unleaded :
———————————————
Station: Morrison’s Aberdeen
Address: West North Street, Aberdeen, AB24 5AR
Brand : Morrison’s
Distance: 1.34
Price : 94.9p
Updated: 26-10-2008
———————————————
I like to think of current economic problems as a long overdue correction instead of a meltdown.
Admit it. Fuel, Food and Housing have reached insane prices in recent years and months. Property prices in some areas doubled and even trebled in value over only a couple of years while earnings have certainly not followed suit.
The wider crisis is largely down to reckless lending and unregulated banking practices, but I think that the huge increase in amateur property development aka “The Beeney Brigade” has a great deal to do with the untenable state of the housing market in the UK.
With a huge increase in the number of amateur property developers gabbing up the affordable homes and re-selling at luxury home prices, less and less cheap property became available. This constant development of property and more people owning multiple homes has pushed prices higher and higher, great if you are already a homeowner but bad bad news if you were looking to get on the ladder as you found the bottom rung was moved way out of your reach.
So now fuel prices are looking sane again and property prices are certainly going to plateau or even decrease for a while. Maybe this will help to close the gap between the inflated prices and what people can actually afford, no bad thing in my book.
Sorry of you happen to have mortgaged yourself to hilt and back in order to buy a couple of flats, paint them beige and then cream tens of thousands of pounds in profits for your minor effort, I guess that bubble has just burst.
Predicitons
Mark My Words:
Based on the ten minutes of emmerdale i watched at 4am, and the cheeseball “Community choir saves church by entering competition” storyline. I can predict that the Christmas top ten 2008 will include a record form the emmerdale cast singing in a choir. Possibly some sort of daniel o’donnell-esque 50s rock n roll medly. Sounds horrific.
Joy.
Testing 2 4 6 8
Testing out an embeded video plyer so I can host some files myself, especially vids which were hosted on crappy services.
The player works pretty well and has a good fullscreen toggle too.
Test Video, Hosted on my domain to ensure reliable playback of vids I like.
Government Funded Rescue Packages….
In truth, I thought the bailouts were a pretty sound idea. Lets hope we dont have to wait too long for the shitstorm to pass……
Meet the newest member of the Cooper Clan
Meet my Neice, Beth Cooper, The newest member of the Cooper Clan born on Saturday morning
She is a happy little bundle of joy!
Road Dahl - The Chocolate Revolution
I have had an insatiable sweet tooth ever since I was a kid, and also an obsessive streak a mile wide, I absoloutley love useless lists of frivolous facts, they are fascinating. I remember wathcing Road Dahl on the TV many years ago, talking about the history of many of my favourite chocolate bars, I was amased at just how much there is to know about the history of the humble chocolate and surprised to find out how many of the best selling chocolates today were invented within such a short time in the 20’s and 30’s. Chocolate, Facts and Dates, Hoggs heaven!
Anyway, I found a transcript of the piece, hope you enjoy
The following article first appeared in the September 7, 1997 issue of Sunday Magazine.
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The joys of milk flakes, chew bars and energy balls are the stuff of dreams
Roald Dahl.
Today, chocolate-guzzling begins when a child is about five and goes on until the guzzler is 12. After which, with the advent of puberty, there is a gradual decline in consumption.
Things were different when I was young. I grew up in the 20s and the chocolate revolution had not begun. There were very few delicious chocolate bars to tempt us. That’s why sweet shops were called sweet shops and not chocolate shops.
When I was young, there was Cadbury’s Bournville and Dairy Milk. There was the Dairy Milk Flake (the only great invention so far) and Whipped Cream Walnut, and there were also four different flavours of chocolate-coated Marshmallow Bar (vanilla, coffee, rose, lemon).
Consequently, we were much more inclined to spent our money on sweets and toffees or on sherbet-suckers, gobstoppers, liquorice bootlaces and aniseed balls - we did not mind that the liquorice was made from rats’ blood and the sherbet from sawdust. They were cheap and to us, they tasted good.
Then came the revolution and the entire world of chocolate was suddenly turned upside down in the space of seven glorious years. Here is a summary of what happened.
• 1876: Chocolate was first used by the Spaniards, Italians and French in the early 17th century but only as a drink.Then, in 1876, a Swiss chap called Peters mixed chocolate powder with sugar and condensed milk and made a solid bar. Chocolate as we know it was invented.
• 1905: Cadbury got in on the act and began production of milk bars, starting with Dairy Milk.
• 1920: The first speciality chocolate bar, the Dairy Milk Flake, was invented. This was a milestone, the first time any manufacturer had seriously played with chocolate in their inventing rooms.
• 1928: Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bar popped up on the scene.
From 1930 to 1937 virtually all the great classic chocolate bars were invented and they are still on the best seller list.
• 1930: Frys invented the Crunchie.
• 1932: Mars appeared. In Chicago, a man whose name was Mr Mars, owned a small factory that had been making the Milky Way bar for a number of years. In fact, he had invented it himself.
When his son, Forrest, finished his education as an industrial engineer at yale, his dad said to him: “Son, there ain’t room for two of us in this little business of mine.” So, he gave him US$5,000 (RM 13,500) and the recipe for Milky Way.
The younger Mars made his way to Slough in England, intent on making a “chew bar”, so he placed a strip of soft caramel on top and then coated it with chocolate. But it is not easy to make chocolate stick to caramel, as Cadbury discovered when, some time later, it made the Curly Wurly. The chocolate kept flaking off. Parents complained that it went all over the carpet, and the Curly Wurlys were withdrawn.
But Forrest Mars had the secret, and the Mars Bar was born. It swept the world, the first ever chewy bar. And very soon 600 million were being eaten every year in England alone. That is 10 per year per person.
• 1933: Black Magic appeared in boxes and, for some reason, it is still a best seller.
• 1935: The wonderful Aero was introduced.
• 1936: Don’t forget Forrest Mars. In spite of the phenomenal success of his Mars Bar, he continued experimenting in his laboratory. He took a pea-sized pellet of dough flavored with malted milk and exploded it inside a vacuum. Then he coated the result with sweet milk chocolate, and hey presto, another classic beauty was born! At first, Forrest Mars gave these the charming name of Energy Balls but this made the public smile, so he changed the name to Maltesers.
At the time of writing, Forrest Mars is very much alive. His business is now enormous but has remained a family-run concern, so Forrest is not answerable to any stockholders.
He is, therefore, free to run things as he likes, and the way he likes is to treat his employees as one big happy family.Everyone shares in the profits - the employees can get a rise every four weeks provided sales have gone up in that period.
• 1937: Another golden year - Kit Kats, Rolos and Smarties were invented. Some 10,000 million Smarties are gobbled up every year in the UK alone. This includes the eight a day (four after lunch, four after supper) that our dog Chopper consumes.
So there you have it. In music, the equivalent would be the golden age of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. In painting, it was the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance and the advent of the Impressionism at the end of the 19th century; in literature, Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens.
Cadbury’s, after an enormous amount of market research, found out that what the public liked was not a sharp minty or sugary flavour, but something bland, almost tasteless. It learned this by studying the success of Heinz Baked Beans. So it invented a bland, tasteless bar, which was actually two bars. The company called it the Double Decker which sold more than 160 million.
But this was nothing compared with the sales of the blandest and most disgusting thing of all, the Creme Egg. Between Christmas and Easter, Cadbury sells 350 million of these fondant-filled horrors. I won’t eat them. Nobody I know eats them. But somebody obviously does, by the bucketful.
The most luxurious chocolate-makers in the world are Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly. The fifth floor is redolent with delicious smells. Everything is made by hand. Fondant centres are blobbed by hand into soft holes pressed into trayes of loose starch, allowing a natural set of 24 hours. The chocolates are all dipped by hand.
For the record, I am not overly fond of chocolate-flavoured foods such as chocolate cake and chocolate ice-cream. I prefer my chocolate straight.
Moooooon.
Aberdeen was treated to a very bright full moon this evening, very nice.
Of course, the locals have all gone crazy, howling and screaming in the streets etc etc……
Also.
Samsung phones are a whole bunch of bullshit. They are pretty and very fashionable but, alas, they just do not last.
The screen died on my U600 a matter of weeks after the waranty expired, I was tired and grumpy and mighty pissed that I’d be sepnding cash on a phone again so soon. Anger, resentment, claw hammer. this was the result:
U600 + Claw Hammer = Stress Relief
Communicating Time and Date infromation.
Martin’s Pet Annoyances. (edited edition)
Consider a situation where an engineer in the UK needs to work on a system in isolation; he arranges a downtime for “6 O’clock on Tuesday” by email with a colleague in the US. At “6 O’clock on Tuesday” the engineer takes the system offline and alarm bells start ringing! The system had not been isolated and now there is the potential for a serious outage and even a safety incident.
What happened?
Was that “6 O’clock” in the morning or at night? What time zone are we talking about? Was that this Tuesday or next?
It seems that “6 O’clock on Tuesday” is way too vague!!
Surprisingly, it’s not uncommon to see people getting themselves into a bit of a mess when trying to communicate date and time, especially when you start to factor in international timezones and daylight savings.
Someitmes I can spend a fair portion of my day trying to decipher information like this:
“12pm or 12am”
“24:00”
“630”
“23:00”
“6 O’Clock”
“01/02/08”
So I’m on a bit of a cruisade to get people communicating this stuff well, here is pretty unambiguous example:
Tuesday 07 October 2008 - 0600 Hrs (BST)
That’s better. Wherever you are in the world, you should be able to make sense of this without too much difficulty, It pretty simple. the problem is that I don’t think it will be long before we suffer a major outage of some sort because an engineer could not communicate the time clearly.
