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I’ve said goodbye to too many good people today.
People who worked hard, went that extra mile to make sure things were delivered on time and who put up with me and laughed with me.
People who I hope find happiness and success in whatever they do next…
“I thought the little people were just for throwing around ?”, said K as we watched three children throw bolas towards the ceiling of the Royal Albert Hall before they somersaulted across the floor, changed places and then caught the bolas before they hit the floor.
There’s no doubt that Cirque du Soleil’s production of Varekai is a very impressive show. It’s a production that they have toured now for five years and is in London until 17th February.
Try to catch it - not just for the dwarf throwing…
Analysis: One-third of iPhones sold to unlock
“Based upon figures released by Apple and its iPhone partner companies, then analyzed by iLounge, up to 35% of iPhones sold to date may have been purchased with the intent to unlock. According to Apple, slightly over 3.7 million of the handsets were sold in 2007, while its primary service partner AT&T today announced that it ended the year with “just at or slightly under 2 million iPhone customers.” Additionally, though the phone’s European carriers O2, Orange, and T-Mobile have not released official iPhone sales figures, estimates place their unit sales at or below the low end of their targets, suggesting that cumulative European sales now total 300,000-400,000, for a liberal estimate of 2.4 million.”
“Even if all of these customers kept their iPhones locked to these carriers, this number would leave around 1.3 million iPhones unaccounted for—approximately 35% of total iPhone sales in 2007.”
Is Apple creating a rock for it’s own back in years to come by insisting that all iPhones are locked to a single carrier ?
Users who ‘unlock’ iPhone a source of worry for Apple analysts - MarketWatch
“Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein Research said in a report Monday that unlocking could help Apple reach its goal of selling 10 million units this year. However, he added that unlocked phones hurt the performance of the company’s iPhone business, since they generate no recurring carrier payments.”
“For every 1 million iPhone units unlocked, Apple forgoes $300 million to $400 million in future revenue and profit, Sacconaghi wrote in his report.”
People will continue to Jailbreak their iPhones so that they can use them on other carriers. It even seems that those early Jailbreakers who reduced their expensive phones to bricks as a result of tampering with Apple’s locked down devices can now revive their phones with the latest software update to them.
Me ? I’d wait for the next release of the hardware due to be available this year and I would defineately unlock it. Let’s hope that Apple has the money to continue development of this device and that it doesn’t go the same way as the Newton …
Then again ….
Documentation definition by The Linux Information Project
“Documentation is any communicable material that is used to describe, explain or instruct regarding some attributes of an object, system or procedure, such as its parts, assembly, installation, maintenance and use.
Benefits of Good Documentation
Good documentation can serve several very important functions with regard to computer software (i.e., operating systems, application programs, library functions, etc.). One is that it can make it easier to use and thereby save users time, frustration and money.”
As we suffer from frustration, need to save time and love to save money that’s how come I’m working on documentation, how we “do” it, what we do and ways in which we can do it better.
It’s definitely here. The sun is warmer, the snowdrops are in flower and as we walk from the pub back to the car the sky is blue and high.
Summer can’t be far away …
All day long I seem to have been channeling Mike Reid.
I blame it on the van we hired today.
“Remember it’s long wheel base so allow more room on corners. And it’s 2.8 meters high. You’re not going anywhere with a height restriction are you ?”, said the man behind the desk.
Up until now hiring a van for a day had been easy.
Turn up. Present driving licence which is, according to the hire form, twenty two years old and looks like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Pay money. Collect keys.
Obviously my face was looking a little concerned at all these new restrictions. “It will fit under a petrol station awning”, he said helpfully. I wondered about the local dump, the yellow bar and warning sign.
Fortunately driving the van proved not to be an issue and I spent all my time telling K to look out of the window and over the hedgerows as new fields, houses and gardens revealed themselves to us from our newly elevated position.
The only problem I seem to have had is talking all Cockerney and shouting “Oi Oi” at passing fellow van drivers.
Leaving it out !
“Twenty-five people were arrested in dawn raids yesterday as police tried to shut down a gang which trafficked children from Romania and forced them to steal and rob on the streets of London.
Police say that since Romania joined the EU in 2007 there has been a sharp rise in children being brought to London by modern-day “Fagin’s gangs”. Up to 200 Romanian children have been forced into crime in London and can generate up to ｣20m a year for gangs controlling them.”
That was yesterday. Today the story has changed :
BBC NEWS | England | Berkshire | Raid children back with families
“Nine Romanian children rescued after police raids against crime gangs have been reunited with their families in the UK.”
“They also said most of those involved were relatives of the children.
Earlier, a Metropolitan Police spokesman said many of the raided properties, in the Chalvey area of the town on Thursday, were “high occupancy” with large numbers of people inside.”
What a shame that this statement didn’t get the attention that the raids originally did featured as they were on the TV news with photographers from the papers taking photographs.
I wonder on what basis Commander Steve Allen, the senior officer in charge, allowed TV crews to record the police raids.
We all make mistakes but this one was a very public one to make and one made at considerable distress to the familes and children.
BBC coverage of the raid can be found here.
“Why are you dressed up ? What’s going on ?”, asked Richard as Martin opened their door to him.
Even I’m not sure but something is going on and I’m so happy to see it happening.
Fhai passed her driving test yesterday at the first attempt and drove Martin, Joanne and me back from the school with some smart new provisional plates on the car.
Martin is taking a computer course and is even armed with a USB key to save his homework on.
But he just looks so different. The tired, stressed look on his face has lifted and he’s like the Martin of old (apart from around the waist).
Perhaps it was the blue, button collared shirt - whatever it was let’s hope it continues…
K to me last night :
“Oh, you looked like a cheeky, little boy then. I had a flashback to what your Mum must have seen twenty years ago. Thirty years ago…. Forty years ago ??”
‘UK shoppers aged under 50 have so far never experienced food-price inflation.’ Essentially, throughout most Britons’ lifetimes, food has become cheaper. But, in December, the inflation rate (by the government’s preferred consumer price index, the CPI) was 2.1 per cent, while for all foods it was 5.9 per cent. ‘Habits will change, although it’s unlikely we’re going to see Soviet-style queues at empty shelves.’
“But as the situation stands today, at least a third of the world - including the populations of China, Russia and India - have government-imposed price limits on their foods.
‘That’s how it’s going, says Lang. ‘You can’t wriggle out of the facts. There are water shortages, climate change, energy price rises, population demographics, waste. We can’t go on eating meat the way we do: the economics of it just won’t add up.’
He’s not expecting food riots in Britain -yet. ‘But we’re entering a long period of restructuring, and politicians will have to get involved,’ he says. ‘For years, successive governments have got used to food prices going down. The “leave it to Tesco” policy has dominated. But that’s over. After half a century, food security is on the political agenda again.’”
Today was Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year.
True to form things were on the way down including :
Driving around the M25 tonight seems quite a novelty.
Admittedly it is a Sunday evening and the traffic is slight but it’s nice to catch up on where the roadworks are and the changes in scenery along the route.
Tomorrow K is off to Barcelona to savor the delights of petrol sausages and quails legs…
It seems that this task is never ending.
“We just need to finish it then we can have our weekends back”, K says.
We try today and I end up showered in water thanks to a valve being put on the wrong way round.
Putting it off seems a good idea and we leave closing the door on the tasks yet to be done.
It’s not that I’m very busy but it’s been a long week both in and out of work.
I’ve not been out of the house all week it seems, certainly not for a walk, and the list of things to do in my Moleskin notebook seems to grow and grow.
Next week things have to change…
Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. The order of actions every pilot follows and what probably saved everyone’s lives today.
An amazing escape and some terrific aviation.
“Chicken”, shouts the little boy in front of me, his faced pressed to the glass of the display case, “Cluck, cluck, cluck”.
“I promised him that we would go to the farm to see the animals and we are, just they look a little different”, his mother tells me putting a parcel of freshly made sausages into her bag.
The reason that I am here is that it’s Wednesday and this is chicken day at the farm shop. “We process them in the morning so they are fresh”, said Roger the butcher, a man who smiled through me struggling to estimate how many ounces or grams I needed, stuck forever as I am between imperial and metric, and who didn’t worry that he was bringing reality crashing into people’s shopping. These things I’m going to cook were alive a few hours ago this morning.
In support of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Chicken Out campaign we’re trying the meat from the local farm shop. Chicken, venison and sausages. Cluck, cluck, cluck.
A few days ago this story appeared :
BBC NEWS | UK | Parted-at-birth twins ‘married’
A pair of twins who were adopted by separate families as babies got married without knowing they were brother and sister, a peer told the House of Lords.
A court annulled the British couple’s union after they discovered their true relationship, Lord Alton said.
The peer - who heard of the case from a judge who was involved - said the twins felt an “inevitable attraction”.
Now that the tabloid headlines have died down some questions are being asked :
Assuming your brain is still functioning like the well-oiled piece of precision engineering it is, your response would, I trust, be: “That’s a wind-up if ever I heard one. Think about it for a minute - you mean these two meet by accident, discover not only that they were both adopted but were born on exactly the same day in exactly the same town, and still never pause to wonder whether they might be related? Pull the other one. What did it say on their birth certificates?”
Whilst over at Heresy Corner The Heresiarch has an interesting analysis of the story and the care and research that news organisations paid it and makes the following point :
Heresy Corner: Lord Alton’s Tall Story
Surely, though, they should have treated it with an ounce of scepticism. The story hangs by a single thread, the credibility of Lord Alton himself, and his claim, which he quickly retreated from, to have spoken to the judge involved. Is the mere fact that he is a member of the house of lords enough to verify a tale that has all the hallmarks of an urban myth? Has no attempt been made to find an independent source?
Not that it matters now. The story made it onto the top read and top mailed articles on the BBC News site, it was all over the tabloids, it ran without question and now has become an urban myth. Another example of fine journalism …
If you are a polar bear, feel a little warmer and are reading this I have an apology to make to you.
Most of the lights in my house are now energy saving ones, apart from the halogen spotlights in the kitchen. For some time now I have been planning to replace these with low energy LED bulbs.
The technical blurb says, “1 Watt of power in use, average usage life of 50,000 hours”.
Amazing, environmentally friendly and cheap to run !
The reality is one end of the kitchen so dark I need the fridge door open to see anything.
Tomorrow I’m off out to stock up on halogen bulbs…
Thanks to the Julian calendar we all had another chance to enjoy New Year in London all over again today at the Winter Festival or celebration of the Russian Old New Year.
As it’s traditional to drink champagne at celebrations K and I headed over to Selfridges to enjoy a glass of Veuve Cliquot in their champagne bar.
S Novym Godom!
It seems ages since I got my SLR camera out.
Before Christmas I was struggling with the dust it seems to collect and bought a Giottos GTAA 1900/1901 Rocket and in all the time that’s gone by I haven’t been able to try it out and take some pictures.
I try to carry a camera where ever I go and there’s some advice on why this important over at Digital Photography School.
Those unexpected “Kodak moments” are great to stumble across but I need to go out and hunt down some pictures soon…
“Are you getting married ?”, Richard asked K as they arrived for Boys Night tonight.
It shows just how things have moved on from the early days of a shy lad and a Dad who wanted him to get a little more familiar with computers and the Internet.
Now talk of cats and makeup mingles with the music talk…
As we pull into the terminus I gaze out of the window and watch the people in the train next to mine.
From my Ipod the Esbjörn Svensson Trio’s “Behind The Yashmak” starts quietly. I watch the people sleeping or reading in their carriages as both trains cross the points. There’s that split second when you expect the carriages to touch before we move alongside each other, the rain streaking along the windows.
I watch the train slide past mine, gazing in for a few seconds on these people’s lives and wondering what their day will bring. Office workers, couples heading off on holiday, people traveling to see family slide past my eyes.
The train stops and I walk across the station concourse, the music loud in my eyes, the tempo of the music fast pushing my stride along.
Sometimes it seems as if I’m watching life as a film, isolated from the everyday sounds with my own soundtrack playing just for me.
Putting aside the whole chicken issue for a moment (and only for a moment) I’d like to pass along this word about Easter.
Easter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The calculations for the date of Easter are somewhat complicated. In the Western Church, Easter has not fallen on the earliest of the 35 possible dates, March 22, since 1818, and will not do so again until 2285. It will, however, fall on March 23 in 2008, but will not do so again until 2160. Easter last fell on the latest possible date, April 25, in 1943 and will next fall on that date in 2038. However, it will fall on April 24, just one day before this latest possible date, in 2011.
The cycle of Easter dates repeats after exactly 5,700,000 years, with April 19 being the most common date, happening 220,400 times, or 3.9% compared to a mean for all dates of 162,857 times, or 2.9%.
“It will, however, fall on March 23 in 2008” there is NO need then to be selling Easter egg and hot cross buns in the second week of January.
I like coffee.
Not just instant but ground coffee, and different roasts as well.
At home I can drink a fair few cups of coffee in a day and have a small cafetiere which serves me well. But there’s a part of me that would like a coffee machine.
Perhaps it is the memory of Lorenzo at the helm of his pink expresso maker at the New Piccadilly Cafe which makes me yearn for a Gaggia but I know in my heart that I wouldn’t get the use from it.
I am considering one of the coffee pod machines like a Senso but the number of systems, all of which use different pods and offer different flavours makes the wars between betamax and VHS or Blu-ray and HD seem easy to understand.
I’m off to make a very large expresso and try to make sense of it all…
Back to work today and the usual round of reading, sorting and replying to emails and trying to work out what has gone on why you were out of the office eating mince pies and unwrapping presents.
Tonight I watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall start his TV campaign Chicken Out which is aiming to change our attitude towards intensive chicken farming.
There can’t be many people who aren’t aware at least of the “highlights” of a battery chicken’s life but seeing just how many birds are packed into a square metre of floorspace and the lack of light and care that they get was a revelation to me.
I think from next week I will try to the local farm shop and free range chicken. If you feel the same, want to support the campaign or find your local farm shop then head over to Chicken Out.
Writing the Personal Statement - The OWL at Purdue
The personal statement, your opportunity to sell yourself in the application process, generally falls into one of two categories:
1. The general, comprehensive personal statement:
This allows you maximum freedom in terms of what you write and is the type of statement often prepared for standard medical or law school application forms.
2. The response to very specific questions:
Often, business and graduate school applications ask specific questions, and your statement should respond specifically to the question being asked. Some business school applications favor multiple essays, typically asking for responses to three or more questions.
But what if you don’t know what you want to do and, therefore, cannot write your statement ?
That’s the problem facing Sophie and that’s the reason we spent so long in the kitchen today wondering if Rakin felt this way when he started…
I seem to have had this cough for ages.
Since before Christmas every morning has been welcomed with a fit of coughing and side-holding.
While I’m happy that we have avoided the Novovirus sweeping the country I am getting fed up with the cough.
I guess it is one of the downfalls of not working in an office. I don’t gradually build up any immunity to whatever bug is doing the rounds and when I get them they stay for ages.
Perhaps more Green Ginger Wine will help…
2007 was quite a busy year for this weblog.
We received 11,340 hits which is more than the year before. OK that’s not an enormous amount but to all intents and purposes this is just an average blog.
Some of the best searches (and best spellings) that found their way here are :
“2006, 2005…”
It is clear to me that the War on Clutter has bypassed K’s house as I check the use by date and throw another tin into the plastic bag on the floor.
“I have put three years of bank statements in order”, says K as I open another cupboard to reveal a small paper mountain.
I think we may need to buy a shredder …
Check out the BBC’s list of 100 Things We Didn’t Know Last Year
Today was either the last Christmas of 2007 or the first of 2008 depending on your view.
K and I went over to Karen’s for the last Christmas of the season, a long lazy afternoon / evening of champagne, presents, cooking adventures (making home made soured cream) and wondering why the largest Scalextric track ever didn’t work.
After all the recent turmoils it was really nice to Karen, Lizi and Alex happy and settled and surrounded by loads of people who care for them.
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