Where’s my map of Europe?
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Monthly Archives: February 2007
What’s in your attic?
As I’m on a snowy theme I thought I’d share this one.
I’ve noticed on the odd occasion we get a bit of snow in Britain that when you observe people’s roofs, irrespective of the direction they face, some seem to have the snow on them melt faster than others.
I’d be interested in a scientific explanation of this phenomena. However, here’s my thinking. I’m hazarding a guess that those with lot’s of insulation would have their snow melt slower. I’m guessing this on the basis that more insulation equals less heat lost through the roof and therefore transferred to the snow to melt it.
An example being my roof where there’s still not sign of melting even though some people in the street have lost a lot of theirs already. I know my attic is packed to the rafters (no pun intended) with insulation and hopefully I don’t lose a lot of heat.
However I didn’t quite understand this as a theory because you tend to find the snow melting quicker on more modern houses which one would assume should be better insulated.
The only theory I could come up with to explain this was differing roofing material. Mine are slate and slate doesn’t tend to hold heat very well whereas a lot of newer houses have concrete tiles and if memory serves me correctly concrete isn’t a bad retainer of heat, once it’s warmed up of course.
Anyway, those are my mad musings of the day.
Let it snow….
I’m not a miserable git like Bob Piper (not yet anyway) but I happen to love snow. Today I loved it even more. The bus was on time, I got to where I wanted to quicker than normal and with the exception of the little bastards on the Wren’s Nest Estate in Dudley pelting the bus with snowballs and finding it highly amusing to roll a massive snowball and leave it in the middle of the road for traffic to have to dodge it was by and by a bloody nice day.
I won’t lament at how piss poor pathetic we are as a country at dealing with a bit of the white stuff, or that I used to live in a country where it snows for six months of the year where they seem to not have to much of a problem opening schools and generally getting about but it is quite amusing to see British people trying to cope with snow.
So what have we learned today? Well, forget all these daft road charging schemes, increasing petrol duties and road tax. No, if we really want to solve congestion and the pollution it creates, simply install bloody big snow making machines everywhere and close all the schools. Easy really.
Another day, another ‘independent’ thinktank
After the likes of Guido and Iain Dale sought to try an infer that the Smith Institute was some kind of Labour front operation they’ve been shown to be a little on the hasty side to try and smear others, or in the typical fashion of the playground bully, they can dish it out but can’t take it.
I don’t have to reinterate the points made by the excellent article by Unity exposing the Policy Exchange thinktank and the amazing coincidence of it’s directors to a said Iain Dale and Nicholas Boles but I thought I’d have another little look around and bugger me if I didn’t come up with this one.
The Henry Jackson Society. Here’s what they say about themselves:
The Henry Jackson Society is a non-profit and non-partisan organisation that seeks to promote the following principles: that liberal democracy should be spread across the world; that as the world
MY first troll
Yep, I’d like to welcome my first troll. Mr Paul D Harper and no, not a Tory either, which probably is worse as I’ve been banging on about netiquette and the bad practices of certain Tory bloggers.
I say that because whatever anyone might think of me, yes I am partisan, but I’m also fair and as much as I detest these piss poor net antics from the twats on the other side, I have no desire to allow them to take place on my site or have my own name besmirched by such practices.
So, this once I’ll let it go and not publish who you actually are, especially as you’re a friend and if you have something sensible to add because you often do then please do it under your own name – remember, openness and honesty get brownie points.
Oh and if you are going to try this sort of thing, at least be clever enough not to post stuff from your fucking workplace.
An excellent example of public awareness broadcasting
Public service broadcasts often get it in the neck for being a bit on the crap side and in many cases this isn’t unjustified. The latest one on the dangers of drinking excessively is quite good, and of course the classic that scared the shit out of my generation was the AIDS advert from the 80′s, still as ominous to watch now as it was then.
That’s why I’d like to share this little one with you. It’s a German advert about the dangers of the internet. OK, it’s all in German but often it isn’t the words that are spoken that convey the message but the imagery used. It’s cleverness is the seamingly normal context in which it is set and is well worth a shufty.
As a parent it makes you think about how and when I would consider it appropriate to introduce my own son to the wonders of the net. It’s not one of those subjects you can seek advice from your own parents about as it simply wasn’t there when I was that young.
For me I’m pretty much of the opinion that to try and insulate children from all threats and dangers in life is a fruitless and ultimately impossible task.
The best that one can hope for is to prepare them by being honest, discussing the issues openly and as much as we might teach our kids the Green Cross Code (is it still called that these days) to keep them safe on the streets, we should do the same for other areas of potential danger.
I for one will be passing on my own techie knowledge so that to use a slightly innapropriate phrase, he will go in to the situation all tooled up and if needs be, be able to defend himself when it comes to the net. The problem is however, that although I have those skills, very few parents will and that’s why I like this advert, it gets the message across and as I believe this is an initiative funded by the EU in relation to The Safer Internet Programme it’s backed up by quite a bit of advice and resources for parents.
In closing, I’ll show my ignorance. I don’t watch much British television so I’d be interested if either this advert has been dubbed into English and used here, which if it hasn’t it really should be or if we’ve done a similar awareness campaign and what was our adverts like?
Probably the best evaluation of Labour Students I’ve ever read.
From the Birmingham Labour Students Blog comes this comment from George Edwards:
“What I do remember though circa mid to late 1990s was a bunch of tory type students and airhead careerists suddenly realising they were about to lose their influence, and coming across to us in the hope of establishing themselves as mp
I hate Internet Explorer
I have wasted a sum total of an hour and a half of my life trying to sort out a problem that anyone who looks at this site probably wasn’t aware of.
Each headline of my blog posts appeared differently in Internet Explorer compared to Firefox (which amount to a combined total of about 98% of visitors with almost equal share between them).
In Firefox they looked right, exactly how I would want them so for Firefox viewers everything was spot on. However, for some reason the dipsticks at Microsoft seem to have programmed their web browser to define ‘
In addition to this, after a chat with a very nice guy called Howard who thought that I had too many categories for which I completley agree with him so I’ve re-indexed the whole structure of the blog.
Something for all the Open Sourcers and Mac users alike
Hat tip to Tom Watson for this one.
The BBC is doing a consultation exercise on its new ‘On Demand Services’ where it poses a question:
A very long post – Part I
When I originally started this post about a fortnight ago I intended to come back to it but haven’t. Partly due to other things taking up my time and equally a sheer bit of laziness. I had thought it best to write the whole post in one go mindful of the possibility of meandering off the point if I were to split it up. However I’ve decided that if I am to ever finish it then I’m going to have to do it in smaller bitesize chunks. So here’s the first part.
Another of those, I’ve been meaning to write this for a while but didn’t get round to it and this time there’s a bloody good reason. This one’s a biggy.
So to just do a little overview, we’ll be covering:
The Environment
Climate Change
Inequality
Economics
Tax
Trade
Energy policy
National security
The EU
Foreign policy
Recycling
and last but not least, Bulgarian made childrens wooden toy trains.
So where to begin on this one? OK, we’ve had the news that there’s only two European countries that are well on the way to meeting their obligations under the Kyoto agreement on the reduction of carbon emissions. These are Sweden and our own little plucky island. Good news of course, after years of being called the ‘dirty man’ of Europe we’re now up there with the moral high ground when it comes to the environment and we can patronise the others for not being as committed to saving the planet as us consciencous Brits.
However, and I’m sure regular readers will know my style by now that there is always an ‘however’ waiting to pounce at inopportune moments. Are we really so squeaky clean as this news portrays us?
My inspiration for this article comes from no less a source than Gordon Brown. While the Penguin’s were away in Germany over Christmas and New Year, I was admittedly, starved of my regular dose of news, at least in a language that I speak fluently. However, a brief 15 minutes of catching CNN brought a statement from Gordon Brown in the House of Commons for which I have no clue what debate it was but the pertenent statement he made was that 75% of toys coming into the UK for the Christmas just gone were from China.
As I had nothing else to do at the time this got me thinking and the threads of this post are very much the deliberations that passed through my mind. Britain is importing 75% of the toys that were presumably purchased last Christmas from China alone. This does not include those imports from other countries that send us the toys our children play with. So I pondered on the point of what toys my 11 month old son plays with at present. Before he was born, from certain branches of my family we received various items, mainly clothes and ‘hand-me-downs’ but also some toys. These toys were of the plastic or fabric variety that befits a newborn and at that time I noticed that virtually without exception they all had ‘made in China’ somewhere on them.
This led me into a bit of nostalgic patriotism of why aren’t things made in this country anymore which is often easy to slip into. My own childhood was dominated by Corgi and Dinky cars, Hornby Railways and Scalectrix, all made in Britain. I then realised that actually, it wasn’t, if they did play a part in my childhood play habits, then they were all completely overshadowed by Lego. I had absolutely shitloads of the stuff (although this might have been helped by winning a national Lego building championship when I was four and getting lots of sets as a prize). Lego however isn’t a product of our little island, it’s native land is Denmark and is produced both there and in Switzerland. At school there were deep rivalries between the Lego kids of which for some reason I became the ringleader and the Playmobil kids another toy that I believe is native to Germany.
Enough of my childhood, back to the main issue. Increasingly we find that the toys our children play with are not made in this country or even in near neighbours across the channel. They are manufactured on the other side of the planet and shipped over to us to indulge our consumeristic needs.
As the first year of my sons life is nearing its close I have taken stock of the toys that have accumilated over the time. It is interesting to note that they fall into two distinct categories. Those purchased in the UK which as far as I’m aware, with no exception were all made in countries other than the UK and primarily in China except the Duplo Lego which we already know where that’s from and those toys sent from Germany which on the whole were all manufactured in Germany apart from a plastic aeroplane with some strange writing that I’m assuming is Polish.
Now when I was in Germany I did some price comparisons which I alluded to in a previous post on the relative cost of Windows XP in Germany compared to the UK. I also looked into the price of childrens toys in the local store and compared them to comparable products that are available here or those that we had already purchased.
First up is those plastic cup things that you can either stack one way to build a large tower or the other way where they fit into each other. The ones we got from the Early Learning Centre cost