Coming Up For Air

Backup Grooveshark Playlist #2

2011-06-01T15:29:00.002+01:00

I just realised that if you copy a URL from the browser address bar on Grooveshark there is a # in there and if you rip this full URL the HTML does not contain the playlist.

To get around this I have written a second script that will clean the URL so that it will be identical to a Grooveshark URL link (ie one that someone sends to you or posts online).

New script;

# Pull the name of the playlist from the URL

playlistname=`echo $1 | sed "s/\// /g" | awk '{print "Grooveshark_"$5}'`

# Clean the URL and grab the HTML from the clean URL

cleanURL=`echo $1 | sed "s/#\///"`

wget -O $playlistname.html ${cleanURL}

# Now parse the HTML and extract the songs, then strip the HTML tags

awk '/Songs on Playlist/, $NF ~ /noscript/' $playlistname.html | sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;/ $playlistname

The script is executed the same as before

Back up grooveshark playlist

2011-06-01T15:03:00.002+01:00

I've made a script that will back up any Grooveshark playlist and make both a plain text and a html copy (the latter can be opened in a browser and it will be instantly loaded by grooveshark).

The commands are;

# Pull the name of the playlist from the URL

playlistname=`echo $1 | sed "s/\// /g" | awk '{print $4}'`

# Grab the HTML from the URL

wget -O $playlistname.html $1

# Now parse the HTML and extract the songs, then strip the HTML tags

awk '/Songs on Playlist/, $NF ~ /noscript/' $playlistname.html | sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;/ $playlistname

cat $playlistname

Put these commands inside a file (called for example "gsbackup.sh") and make it executable

chmod u+x gsbackup.sh

then run it with the URL of the grooveshark playlist

./gsbackup.sh http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Adam+Curtis/54597002?src=5

This should produce files Adam+Curtis and Adam+Curtis.html

To convert playlists from iTunes, Spotify and LastFm into Grooveshark I recommend the Groovylists service

Shapes Of Things

2011-04-27T22:10:00.001+01:00

On the way; Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Chrysalids. I can't find any summaries of the J G Ballad short stories so I'll do them one-by-one. I might post my to read list at some point.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.8

iPod Video on Ubuntu - gTkpod

2010-08-23T16:44:00.004+01:00

I've just finished a long round of encoding up a lot of my video files and DVDs so that I can play them on both my PS3 (via mediatomb or a USB brick) and my iPod video.

The two devices place some restrictions on which audio/video codecs they can handle and also on the range of bitrates that are accessible. I'll post my ffmpeg script next time. The main points to mention are that the video size must be 640x480 or 340x240 for the iPod (5.5g) and the audio rate must be 160k or less for both devices. I went for the xvid codec (I would prefer to have used h.264 but I had many many problems getting this to work on both devices consistently).

Anyway the coding is now done and the videos look fine on my large TV but the files aren't so big that they fill up my iPod. To transfer files onto the iPod using the Ubuntu Linux operating system I use gTkpod . I found this to be superb. Multiple iPods are not a problem.

The best feature is the repository option. One can create separate repositories to separate content for different iPods. My wife and I have a lot of overlap in our musical tastes but there is a lot of music of hers I don't want on my iPod and vice-versa. gTkpod makes this simple. We each set up our own repository and populate this with our music choices from our shared collection giving us each our own personal library.

Another good new feature of gTkpod is the ability to tag video files. This way one can divide video into Movies, TV and Music video and label season and episode Nos. Be careful here. The tags aren't embedded into the video files as metadata and so if you move the file to a different folder then your tags will be lost. That's my only criticism - I wish that tag information could be associated with a file even if it isn't embedded.

Anyway I now have The Big Bang Theory Season 1 and The Sopranos Season 3 to keep me occupied when I'm on the move.

Ubuntu One Music Store

2010-05-28T00:44:00.003+01:00

Ubuntu have launched a DRM free music store as part of their Ubuntu One cloud. I would love this to work. Alas...

Tracks cost 99p and as a quick example the new Gorillaz album is £7.99 (the same price as HMV) . Compare to good old amazon mp3 where the same tracks are 89p each or £5.49 for the lot.

It's not an option really especially since amazon mp3 works so exceptionally well with Linux. Can anyone tell me of any other benefits (apart from cloud synchronisation)?

How a railway franchise should be run

2010-05-20T14:54:00.002+01:00

Railway franchisee Grand Central is different. It is not backed by the promise of a taxpayer bailout. If the owners do not make enough money or even if they lose money they cannot pull out of the franchise. This is exactly how a franchise should work.

The big riddle here is how with all this extra risk on board do GC manage to offer lower fares than their rivals? Is this a ploy to establish market share? Or are they genuinely fair fares (sic)? They also offer no advanced booking scheme - one does not have to book a journey months ahead to get a lower fare. It is even possible to buy a ticket on the train without being made to feel like a fare dodger who is causing the aisle to be blocked by a conductor.

It all sounds too good to be true. My last post on DHL was also positive about a privatised business. 2 in one week. All we need now is the rest of the free market to work; the banks, the supermarkets, energy and water franchisees, employers etc.

God bless DHL

2010-05-18T22:38:00.003+01:00

I sold something on eBay. It was very large and I was petrified about going down to the Post Office.

Then I decided to go for a private courier. I booked it. They came to the door on the day and efficiently took the parcel away leaving me with proof of postage.

I tracked the item on their website. I knew when it had arrived and departed every distribution centre along the way. I know the exact time, to the second, that it reached my customer.

23 hours door-to-door. And it cost me just £8. Fantastic. I will never, ever use Royal Mail again for any parcel over 2kg.

This is what a privatised market should offer. I had a service I required and based on the details of this I could choose which service provider I wanted by going to https://www.parcel2go.com/

Zilla's BLW update

2010-05-08T14:15:00.003+01:00

We've been baby led weaning (BLW) with baby Zak for around 5 weeks now and I wanted to post an update and thank BLW Dad for his encouragement and BLW tips. Zak has really taken to eating solids and time has proven that we were right to take the BLW route. Although he will take the odd bit of weetabix or yoghurt from a spoon he insists on feeding himself and will try to grab the spoon for himself when we do spoon feed him. He loves all kinds of food and is happy to try anything we put in front of him, the only foods he has rejected we think had odd textures and that's why he wouldn't entertain them. He doesn't like babybel and some kinds of meat.

Last weekend we went out for our first family meal at a restaurant, with granny and grandad. Zak sat in a highchair and scoffed whatever we gave him from our plates - pieces of chicken, pizza crust, linguine, courgettes. We thoroughly enjoyed all eating together, at the same time, as a family and I was so proud to see my little guy enjoying his meal just like us. The staff at Ask were excellent and didn't bat an eyelid when Zak chucked pasta all over the floor.

Although it's turned out messier than I imagined and I seem to always be washing up or putting the dishwasher on, I'm more convinced than ever that BLW is the way to go.

Zilla's TV election

2010-05-08T13:00:00.003+01:00

The 2010 election seems to have been billed as the TV election, with leaders debates taking place for the first time in British politics and unprecedented coverage across the terrestrial and satellite 24 hour news channels. But who did the best job of covering the election for a TV audience, and who should accompany the outgoing PM into the sunset?

The good:

Gary o'Donohue - Able to explain the most complex of issues concisely and in an easy to understand manner, o'Donohue deserves a much higher profile. Relegated to breakfast time reporting only, allegedly as a result of Nick Robinson's ego, o'Donohue has nevertheless been a voice of clarity and calm for the BBC.

Michael Portillo - Once universally derided, Portillo has reinvented himself in the last couple of years into a thoughtful and intelligent political commentator. Unafraid to disagree in the politest possible way, Portillo has been excellent on This Week, as well as the other programmes on various TV networks that he has popped up on.

The Sky News election team - The Sky News team were fairly effective throughout the election month, managing to get the big stories and seemingly always in the right place at the right time, particularly during 'Bigotgate'.

David Dimbleby - pretty ubiquitous throughout the election coverage, Dimbleby brought the right tone to proceedings, serious but without taking things too seriously and unafraid to take politicians to task.

The bad:

Nick Robinson - little better than a state-funded gossip and irritating at the best of times, Robinson has spent the last month jumping up and down like a hyperactive toddler, using 50 words when 10 would have done and has been all over every BBC news bulletin like an unwelcome rash. Despite his high profile Robinson seems unable to provide viewers with any real insight into British politics.

Alistair Stewart - the host of the first leaders debate SHOUTED his way through ITV's election coverage.

ITV's 'embedded correspondents' - ITV sent a correspondent to follow each party leader around the country to little effect. They reported little of substance or importance throughout the month.

A bizarre result for our Democracy

2010-05-07T11:03:00.005+01:00

So we have a hung parliament. A large shift to the Conservatives but not large enough for them to form a government.

Conservative	36.0% ie	+3.9%
Labour	29.3% ie	-6.3%
Liberal Democrat	22.9 ie	+1.0%

The first thing that leaps out is how poor the Liberal Democrats performed. They ran a good campaign. They did very well in the leaders debates and they gained lots of extra exposure. Unfortunately, with extra exposure comes extra scrutiny. Policies such as joining the Euro and an amnesty on illegal immigrants have clearly not gone down well. It is reassuring that people have looked at policy rather than TV persona.

Another reassuring matter is the high turnout. I hope that if a hung parliament cannot be configured and we need a second ballot then the turnout will remain high. If people lose their voice because of boredom then we are all in trouble.

What is truly bizarre about the result is that a Lab/Lib coalition cannot form a government. They will need the support of Plaid Cymru and the SNP for this. In return Plaid have already asked for £0.3 billion extra to their budget. The SNP will also doubtless ask for scottish public sector workers to be partially insulated from the coming cuts. So such a coalition will be a bad result for people in England.

The regional variations are fascinating. In England as things currently stand the Conservatives have 56% of the seats (but only 40% of the vote - that's why we need PR). This means that the people of England have chosen a Conservative government. In NI, Wales and Scotland the Conservatives have only 8 seats out of 119, just 7%. The devolved regions have rejected the Tories as an English party.

This is the true cost of devolution. The people of England have had their choice rejected by regions of Britain that have their own parliament. Budget cuts will now affect the people of England much more severely. Look at the constituency map here. Look how small the devolved regions are. Look how the map is dominated by red and blue. And remember that none of this matters. That orange and green and yellow are deciding the outcome of who loses their jobs and services.

I did not want the Conservatives to win (see earlier posts). I didn't want any of the big three to win. But I didn't want this. For the good of England I'm going to swallow my ideological preferences and say that the Conservatives should be the party to form a government. They got the most votes and the most seats. It won't be so bad - the opposition will be strong enough to keep the Tories in check.

One thing is for certain. Either way Gordon Brown is finished. Only an English Prime Minister will do now for a Lib/Lab pact.

Deficit Reduction Plan for Britain

2010-05-05T10:22:00.003+01:00

Scrap IT programmes (and take the public sector over to Linux - much cheaper than Microshaft).
Scrap Trident and other hugely expensive MoD procurement programmes.
Do not sign any more private finance initiative contracts.
Stop spending money on consultants and use the civil service more.
Reduce the number of NHS managers significantly and stop NHS privatisation.
Raise taxes in every area by a small amount.
Levy the banks to provide a fund to protect us against another collapse.
Tax all migrant workers heavily to pay for the drain on our infrastructure (legal and otherwise).
Raise the minimum wage - more tax revenue, companies less likely to hire migrant workers, fewer british citizens on the dole.
Encourage a baby boom so we have a young workforce to support the ageing population.

Should save/earn us about £200 billion which pays off the deficit without a single public sector job loss.

Floola is full of bugs

2010-04-26T19:49:00.002+01:00

Cross platform Ipod manager Floola is full of bugs. It's a real shame because when I open Floola it looks like it will be perfect for me and I will finally be able to toss the old WXP box out. The options and functionality promise so much. And yet I can't delete songs. I can't delete duplicates either. It just hangs. I've tried fixing orphans and lost files.

This software came recommended in Linux Format. Boo!

Funny thing, our democracy

2010-04-26T11:09:00.002+01:00

To form a government a political party in the UK needs a large majority of seats in Parliament. Once it has this majority then the government cannot be forced into calling another general election and its MPs cannot be recalled. We are stuck with the government and their large majority means that they can do whatever they want (like go to war in Iraq). This has gone on for decades with Labour and the Conservatives taking it in turns to have a decade or more in power. Power only changes hands when the public are so sick of a party that they will do anything to see a change of government.

In this election we have a real chance to change the status quo. If there is no outright winner then the Liberal party will become very important in any coalition government. This will almost certainly mean electoral reform so that proportional representation is introduced meaning that the number of votes cast for a party will count and not the number of seats that they gain. The awful spectre of a party finishing third in the popular vote but still gaining enough seats to win the election will be removed. It will mean the end of Conservative majority government. For ever.

Just think about that. Never again will the Tories get into absolute power. The party that represents the rich and the priviliged. The party that decimated northern England in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The party that ruined our place in Europe and will further isolate us to the margins if elected this time. The Tory party that will not give precise figures in its manifesto and will not explain exactly how its 'big society' policies will work.

Party politics as a whole doesn't work. All three big parties support a free market, privatised, PFI backed, business led Britain in which the gap between rich and poor widens every year and society crumbles.

So I'll be voting tactically to stop my MP from being a Tory. I want a hung parliament. I want consensus & issue based politics (like that in Germany and many other places in the world) to take over. The end of the party whips. The end of MPs doing as they please in seats for life. The end of MPs working for lobbyists and the end of former Prime Ministers making £20 million from oil companies for taking us to war against an oil rich country.

If only....

2010-04-22T17:35:00.002+01:00

Wishlist

Scrap Trident and cancel the aircraft carrier and Eurofighter contracts
Break up the banks
Ban short selling
Tax foreign exchange transactions
Raise capital gains tax
Raise income tax for the rich while reducing it for the poor.
Set a maximum wage and give workers seats on corporate boards.
Re-nationalise the railways
Curb the power of the supermarkets and gas/electric companies.
A living pension for everyone over 80
Raise benefits in line with average earnings
Scrap tuition fees.
Abandon ID cards
Stop detaining asylum seekers
Shift sentencing away from prison and towards restorative justice

Think this is impossible? The people of Wales get this choice with Plaid.

The Leaders Debates

2010-04-17T10:31:00.002+01:00

The first ever UK television debate between the three people who hope to be prime minister was held the other night. We expected a dry, safe stage managed affair with little participation from the public. In fact it was surprisingly engaging and opened up genuine differences between the parties.

Nick Clegg was the clear winner. He spoke to the camera and to people who asked him the questions. He tried to answer the audience questions fully and he remembered the names of the people who asked the questions. Brown and Cameron seemed to be bickering amongst themselves. Out of the three parties I would choose the Lib Dems. Unfortunately I live in a Labour seat where the majority shrunk to 8000 at the last election from 20000 the time before. I need to make sure that Caroline Flint doesn't lose her seat to the Tories.

I absolutely do not want a Conservative government. The last time our economy was in this state the Conservatives made things ten times worse by making premature cuts and putting millions into unemployment. Their policies on small government and handing back power to the people are just back door privatisation and deregulation. Deregulation and free markets don't work because human beings are selfish and greedy and will always play the system. And who is going to have time to run a school and do a full time job and look after kids?

Labour have some very interesting policies this time around but I just don't believe that any of them will be enacted. Gordon Brown appeared statesmanlike during the debate and he certainly didn't finish last. My perception was that he hammered Cameron. The problem is that Brown is a political animal. His party seems tired and decaying and corrupt.

My ideal scenario would be a Lib Dem victory and if I get the faintest whiff that they can take our constituency then I'll vote for them. The more realistic scenario is to keep the Tories out and hope for a coalition government (with Vince Cable as chancellor). To get this I'll have to vote Labour for the first time in my life. Yuck.

Party politics is still a poor system. If one party holds a large majority then all sorts of horrific laws and backstage deals get under the radar (see any issue of private eye). The three parties still offer a narrow variation on a theme. Our degree of EU membership has never been put to the public. And the system of deregulated, privatised, PFI, free market capitalism that we are forced to live under is not going to be questioned or altered in any way.

It's a real shame that voters are not being offered any great variety of choice and that people like me cannot vote for the things I want and instead have to tactically vote for the lesser of many evils.

The Wire Season 5

2010-04-14T11:20:00.003+01:00

And so we have reached the final season and we are 4/10 episodes in. The entertainment levels are higher than ever but the standards and credibility of the storyline have slipped. Just a little. It feels like they have just eased off on the throttle. We are currently in soap opera territory where every character is in jeopardy. Who will survive? The newspaper storyline feels like it was crowbarred in and there seems to be very little connect with the rest of the show so far (apart from a few scenes where McNulty meets a Sun reporter). The Burrell stuff (trying to keep spoilers out of this) and the serial killer stuff doesn't feel like a strong enough bond so far. 6 more episodes to go so we'll see how it develops. But just maybe given the journalism background of the writers this season is a little self indulgent and the cop/drugs stuff has been stretched out to provide a scaffold for their rants about newspaper cuts.

Baby led weaning

2010-03-25T10:17:00.006Z

I (Zilla) wanted to type up some thoughts on baby led weaning (BLW) in the hope that anyone coming across this might be encouraged to give it a go.

I came across baby led weaning on the internet a while ago and though that the approach would suit baby Zak to a tee, as he is a very independent minded baby. Basically, you forget all your purees and ice cube trays - provided you've waited until bubs is 6 months old and can pick things up, you cook a bit of whatever you're having for tea without sugar or salt, cut it into fist sized pieces, put it on baby's high chair tray and let them have at it.

I was undecided on whether to just take the traditional route until I saw this brilliant video of parents trying BLW for the first time (note for the easily offended: Dad has a bit of a potty mouth). Seeing that baby scoffing chunks of broccoli persuaded me that BLW was the way to go. And so far, it has been. Zak is three days in and already he's been chomping carrot, banana, digestives (naughty Granny), cucumber and broccoli. Today we're having a go at parsnip. We weren't expecting him to eat much at first and although alot of food has ended up on the floor he's been going at his food pieces with great gusto.

Unfortunately there's not alot of info out there on BLW - when I asked the local health visiting team they'd heard of it, but not much else. There is a book available, which I didn't buy, although at the start I felt like I needed some hand holding and wished that I had the book to refer to. There's a good website: http://babyledweaning.com/ and the Youtube videos of course, and that's about it.

Despite the Dept of Health guidelines there's still alot of pressure on parents to wean babies at four months and it can be tough to wait til six months when everyone around you is shovelling purees into their bubs mouths while your baby has to make do with plain old milk. But after just three days Zak has already caught up with his peers in terms of what he can eat and I'm so glad we waited. It's only a matter of weeks before he's going to be nomming entire roast dinners.

Why I'm thinking about not voting at the next UK general election

2010-03-24T23:53:00.003Z

In the UK a general election will be held soon (6th of May). We are told that this is our chance to have our say on how we are governed and that it is our civic duty to vote. In the UK there are many political parties but historically it has only ever been the Conservative Party or the Labour Party that have been elected to form a government and there are no signs that this is about to change. But what are we to do if we do not like either of these two options? This article is a discussion of why the two main political parties have become unpalatable for voters and offers some suggestions for what might be done to rescue the public trust in government and politicians which has never been at a lower ebb.
There are four main reasons why the public believe that neither Labour or the Conservatives should be elected.
1) Dissatisfaction with the behaviour of MPs/HM government.
In 2002/2003 millions of people marched on the streets of the UK to protest at government plans to invade a country that had never attacked the UK or any of its citizens, a crime of agression under international law that was opposed by the United Nations. This was in support of a country (the USA) who had been attacked by people from another country (Saudi Arabia) on whom they depend for oil. Quite what this had to do with Iraq or with the people of Britain was another matter. Lies were told and the war happened anyway. Many 100'000's of people died and the reasons we were given for going to war were shown to be a willing lie (WMDs were shown to never have existed and the evidence that they existed was shown to be very dodgy). The will of the people of Britain was ignored.
Before they were elected the Labour government published a manifesto of things that they 'promised' to do if elected. One of these was a promise to ask us if we wanted them to sign the EU treaty on our behalf. The referendum was never held and they signed the treaty anyway. Other countries such as Ireland, France and the Netherlands have held referenda and the vote has been a no in cases. In each case the referenda were re-staged again and again until the voters got so bored with voting that a yes was given. There are times when the public cannot be allowed to dictate the law and government policy - e.g. the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1960s. But the law should represent the will of those who have to be subject to it. The people of Britain have a right to choose how deep our involvement in the European Union should be. Should it be a simple cooperative effort on trading and foreign policy (to help our mutual economies and to improve our negotiating position on the world stage) or should it be a federal superstate wit a president and a constitution. The latter represents a significant change in our democratic rights and we have a right to veto it. The real reason a referendum was not held is that (a) the EU means politicians (MEPs) become much more powerful and more beuarcay means more for the political class to do and (b) big business controls the government and it wants an EU superstate with a single currency and cheap migrant labour. The democratic will of the people that they represent does not figure in the equation. Manifesto pledges should be binding and it should be clearly set out in the manifesto those circumstances under which the pledges could be broken e.g. spending on the armed forces would have to increase if there was a war. Otherwise a manifesto is just false advertising.
But there is another issue that has damaged the standing of politicians far more than the two examples given above. The expenses scandal consistently shocked the British public for most of 2009. MPs made the situation much worse by insisting that they did not break the rules. They just didn't get it. They didn't see that the things they were putting on expenses were quite clearly taking the piss. Most of the public now see all MPs as being in it only for their own gain. (An interesting question that was never raised was how far back this has been going on. We only know about the last parliament. Are there greater scandals in the mists of time. What dodgy expenses claims were made in the sleazy days of the 1990s?).
2) MPs are powerless.
They cannot represent us properly because they have no power. The deregulation and privatisation that has continued since the 1980s has left MPs with little control over the system. There are two main areas where this has reduced the power of our government and diluted our democracy;
The Credit Crunch and the banking crisis were directly caused by the deregulation introduced in the 1980s. This has cost the state billions of pounds and has cost millions of job as we enter recession. I rest my case on this issue.
National assets were sold in the 1980s. We were promised an free market and open choice as to who we paid to provide our services. A great idea. No more late letters and late trains. The Post office was opened up to competition and private companies soon moved in and cheery picked the most profitable parts (business mail). The Royal Mail was left with the loss making parts of the business (ordinary letters and the Post office). The profitable areas once subsidised the loss making areas that provide a community service. The result has been a shocking decline in a service on which we all depend with post office branches closing en masse and it being impossible to get a parcel delivered to the door (we pay to have it delivered to the door but the postman is too pushed for time to bring it on his rounds and attempt delivery so he leaves it at the sorting office where we have to go and collect it).
The railways are another good example. Tracks were ripped up by successive governments and the service declined due to lack of investment. Privatisation brought companies willing to run the profitable parts of the business (carrying passengers) but not the unprofitable parts (maintaining the tracks and the stations) which eventually fell back into state ownership. The service has not improved with all of this choice. Operating companies pull out of unprofitable contracts. Ticket prices continue to rise. And the trains are simply unpleasant to travel on. Crowding is the major problem. The train companies know which services are busy but they refuse to put on extra carriages because this costs more and reduces their profit margins. This is where the government should step in. How about a law that says that a ticket cannot be sold for a train if there is not a seat available? The number of fares that could be collected by a train operator would then be proportional to the number of carriages they provide. Simple economics. Why does no such common sense rule apply? The government are toothless and powerless.
Train tickets are offered in a bewildering variety of prices and types. There is no choice on offer except when to travel and whether to sit in first class. We cannot choose whether to travel with company A or company B based on price because no such choice exists. We often see this where there is no choice offered by the free market or where the choice is blurred. Consider mobile phone tariffs or gas/electricity tariffs. Instead of simple side by side comparison of prices we have a large range of complex tariffs. How about laws that force companies to produce directly comparable tariffs for low, medium and heavy users in each area?
Some of the practices of the gas and electricity companies have been a disgrace. Estimated bills have been a good trick. Gas and electricity meters are deliberately left unread for a long time and the reading is deliberately underestimated. When the meter is eventually read the customer needs to pay for the shortfall in units. The provider can charge at current rates for gas and/or electricity instead of asking the customer to pay the cost of the gas/electricity at the time it was used. How about legislation to define a minimum interval for reading a meter. Or compulsary investment in smart meters? Another trick is where prices do not track wholesale prices and the gas companies recklessly profiteer. How about a rule where the domestic gas price cannot be more than 5% above the wholesale price at any given time? This would have prevented the scenario that happened this winter (a particularly cold one for Britain) where the wholesale price dropped sharply just before the winter started but the providers did not drop domestic tariffs to reflect this until after the winter had ended. It is estimated that each UK household overpaid by Â£105 over this winter.
Operators are given the contract to run the service for a set number of years. They often lie to get the contract and then do/charge what they want when the have the contract. Investment simply does not occur. How about a rolling investment pot that all contract holders must contribute to? The other problem with privatisation and free markets is that monopolies can emerge if the government does not prevent this. The First company has a near monopoly on bus travel in the UK and the ticket prices that they offer and the cuts in routes they have made are simply unfair.
The other area where British political power has weakened is with the EU. As an example I pick jobs. At the start of 2009 four thousand oil refinery workers went on strike in fear for their jobs as the French oil company Total decided to subcontract an Italian firm which employs Italian and Portuguese workers to carry out maintenance at a refinery in Grimsby.
The state pays Grimsby folk unemployment benefit whilst a company employs people from the other side of europe at a slightly cheaper rate to carry out work in Grimsby. This is effectively the state increasing the profit margins of large foreign companies by paying the local workforce to do nothing. Gordon Brown came out with the empty line 'British jobs for British workers' but he didn't actually do anything because he is powerless to act under EU law.
I suggest the following rules to make a truly fair and open labour market across Europe.
A company cannot draft in migrant workers from within the EU unless the jobs in question have been made equally available to local workers. A worker cannot be paid less than the local minimum wage.
3) Bad government.
One can always find examples of mistakes made by government. For example the Home Office lost the personal details of all child benefit claimants in the UK. It also lost the files of thousands of criminals. Gordon Brown sold off part of the UK gold reserves when gold prices were at rock bottom. If he had waited we would have made Â£5billion extra.
The biggest scandal of all is in how the government is hiding the true amount of national debt. Large scale long term construction projects like schools & hospitals cost money. Lots of money. One way for MPs to get around this is to go to the private sector for finance - a PFI company builds the thing and leases it back to the government. If the cost of the building project rises then the PFI company takes all the risk. Seems sensible. Only this never happens. When costs rise the PFI they are added to the bill. The costs are also extortionate and PFI has been compared to buying a house using a credit card. Monbiot has written about this at length and it regularly features in Private Eye. The PFI scheme to run and widen the M25 for 30 years will cost £6.5 billion. To run it as is and just use the hard shoulder at busy times would cost just £478 million. MPs like PFI because they can invest massively now and they won't be around to pick up the debt which is tens (if not hundreds) of billions of £s.
4) Party Politics does not work.
What if I agree with the Tory policy on how they would reduce the unemployment figures but I agree with the labour policy on inheritance tax? Who should I vote for? Should I rank issues in order of importance to me and weigh up which party I agree with most on balance? What if both parties have the same policy on most areas and what if I disagree with this? What if my MP ignores the will of the many on an issue (how do MPs truly know what public opinion is on any particular issue anyway?) and just votes along party lines? What can I do? The truth is that the two main political parties are so similar as to render the choice meaningless. The Labour government of the last 13 years has essentially continued the free market /deregulation /privatisation policies of the Tory government that was incumbent before it for 17 years (with some extra public spending thrown in). We are told that there is a real difference between the parties now in how they would deal with the budget deficit (Labour would wait until we started to come out of recession before making public spending cuts). This is essentially a recipe for how they would clear up the mess that they have created between themselves and not a clear choice of which package of rules they would put into place to make society a place fair for all.
Party policies are now defined not by what they think is best for us all but by the demands of business. How can it be democratic for private donations to be made to political parties? How can a government make objective decisions about what is best for the country when they rely on the donations of those with vested interests to run for office in the first place? I suggest that donations to individual parties should be banned and that donations should only be allowed into a general pool which would be shared out equally amongst all parties that won more than a certain number of seats at the last election. Small parties and new parties would then share a general pool of second tier donation money in the ratio of the number of seats that they are competing for. This system is not perfect and I am certain that political donations would dry up completely if there was nothing to gain by making a donation to British politics in general.

Non-stop by Brian Aldiss

2010-03-24T12:33:00.002Z

Wow. The first novel of Brian Aldiss, one of the grand old men of British science fiction and it is superb. An accident on board a generation starship cripples the infrastructure and resets the society inside so that they forget where they are and their morals and religion are altered. The book is all about the quest of a few of the inhabitants to find out what the nature of their universe is.

There are two really impressive things about this piece. The first is how Aldiss unfolds the story. We know all along that we are inside a starship but Aldiss keeps the plot exciting and provides a good drip-drip of suspense and revelations. The ending also provides a nice surprise and a good resolution. The second impressive thing is that this is a page turner. Some SF provides enjoyment by allowing us to bathe in the details. Not here. We want to find out what happens.

The atmosphere and the characters instantly print upon the mind and the feel of the ship as the characters make their winding trek through the decks filled ponics (overgrown hydroponic plants) is perfect. One fault means I can't give a perfect score. One of the main groups of enemies are rats. This is perfectly acceptable as a plot device (it drives the tribe of Gregg into teaming up with forwards and allows the laser and the diary to be passed on) but did the rats really have to be telepathic?! Did they really have to be able to wield objects and subjugate other animals like rabbits and moths?! Rats on earth have not evolved such abilities. Another fault is that Complain never gets to meet up with his old tribe. We never get a moment where they see how he was right to question the nature of things.

All in all I think this work will stay in my mind for a good long time.

8/10

Review of Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

2010-03-22T15:13:00.002Z

I reviewed my attempt to read this some time ago and how I just gave up. Well, something kept nagging away at me and I tried again. Again I got bored by three separate character threads, long winded exposition and disparate timelines.

And then about 100 pages in it all came together. It turned into a thriller. There are some beautiful set pieces and I like the characters because he doesn't bother trying to color them in. We have people, we know what they look like and we know their motives. End of.

This is a fantastic hard SF novel with some very memorable passages and many many interesting ideas. So apologies to Mr. Reynolds for my earlier lazy review. This cold tale has made me want to continue the series and check out some of his other work.

The Wire

2009-10-09T12:55:00.002+01:00

I don't like bandwagons. I refused to vote for New Labour (and I was right). I refused to get into Oasis when all around me were losing their heads (and I was right). Everyone started going on about the Sopranos. I just couldn't be bothered. I don't like gangster films and as far as I was concerned this was just a cheap rip off for TV. Incidentally I saw Goodfellas for the first time a few weeks ago and I loved it even though it felt like a feature length special of the Sopranos set in the 1960s. Anyway I was wrong about the Sopranos. My wife and I spent nearly a year picking through it (there must be over a hundred episodes) and avoiding spoilers that would just spring up without warning in newspapers and magazines.

With spoiler avoidance in mind we decided to try out season one of the Wire. The weight of good reviews, starting off with Charlie Brooker on Screenwipe, broke the dam. From all of this positive press we knew to expect a realistic show that treats the viewers like adults with a brain and that there would be no good guys and bad guys. It was all this and more. More than any other TV show it moved me to another world. I just forgot who I was each time I watched it because I was totally immersed. I was standing next to the guys on the roof taking pictures. I was laughing as McNulty got his kids to do surveillance of drug dealers and egging Omar on as he robbed drug dealers (the best character in season 1 for me). I was nervously looking around and hoping no-one was going to get Wallace so he had a chance to go back to school and get his life together. Wallace deserved this because he looked after all the drug orphan kids in the neighbourhood and seeing that guy with the hole in his eye broke his brain. That was his only crime. Being too sensitive. And they still... Now I'm doing it. Spoiling it for anyone who hasn't seen it. I used the past the tense about Wallace there.

Spoilers are now my enemy and yours too if you're also catching up. Before I saw the end of The Wire series one I was looking at some box sets in Sainsburys and right there on the cover of season 4 was a picture that told me the outcome of season 1. I said 'bastard' out loud and a middle aged lady with a suit scowled at me but nuts to her because the season finale was ruined. What idiot put that image on the front of the box? The DVDs are silly too. To play an episode you have to go via a menu that tells you what happens in that episode. Duh. The synopsis is written in the same font as the 'play episode' text. Silly.

Why didn't I just start watching The Sopranos and The Wire and Battlestar Galactica when they first came out? Good telly, give it a go. First answer - Lost. Gave it a try and very quickly realised they were just making it up as they went along. Second answer - 24. Third answer - Heroes. I'm lying on that last one. I watched one episode and spotted the upcoming bullshit straight off. Some shows are worth the effort for at least a season or two. Like My Name is Earl which didn't jump the shark until season 3. The Big Bang Theory is still awesome and might even make it to my DVD collection. South Park is weird in that it gets better with age like wine unlike The Simpsons whose ass has turned to vinegar. Honestly that show is dead to me now. My latest experiment is East Bound and Down. Seen episode 1 and it was very funny. So I'll take the gamble and be ready to abandon ship if I see it starts to sink. I might be investing my time in a flop but this is a gamble worth taking because by being up to date I'll avoid those dreaded spoilers.

My baby son

2009-10-08T13:11:00.002+01:00

Hello blog. I've been neglecting you for a long time. The reason is that Nicola and I have been having a baby. Now he's born I have even less time to give to you. I'm a bit frazzled. There are jobs to do everywhere I look. Everything needs attention. Every time I remember a fire and put it out I spot two new ones; wash the dishes and notice that the basil plant on the window sill needs watering. Move the herb plant and notice that the kitchen window needs to be cleaned. Clean the kitchen windows and notice that the garden needs work. And on and on.

Of course none of this is getting done. I'm just enjoying spending time with my new little buddy. I should probably make a record of what I remember before it fades. You were born on tuesday at 4.08pm. On monday night we went into the hospital because mum was bleeding and we had you on the baby monitor just to be on the safe side. Mum had some practice contractions that we saw on the paper trace out. We got home after midnight (I'd been up at 7am for work in York and done two 1 hour commutes that day). We got home and had toast and hot chocolate and watched the Simpsons then fell asleep at around 1am. At 5am mums contractions started for real. By 8am they were uncomfortable. We contacted the hospital and they told us to put mum in a hot bath to see if the contractions went away. They didn't. They got worse. We got to the hospital at about 930am on a sunny day (very warm for September). Mum was still only 2cm dilated and it was early labour but we had to stay in because mum wasn't dealing well with the pain. She had a morphine injection and tried to relax. We were down on the ward and could hear other mums in early labour and families coming to visit their newborn babies. At lunchtime granny barbara called over (she works as a secretary at the hospital) and bought dad a sandwich and a coffee. We went up to see mum and granny B held her hand for a few contractions anc calmed her down. Granny B left at 1pm and we thought that the action wouldn't start until about 6pm. At 2pm mums waters broke. I took her into a bathroom and we cleaned her up and took off her wet clothes. She was now wearing some rather fetching paper undies. Mum then wanted to start pushing and we waited for a delivery room to become free.

We went upstairs in the lift. Mums morphine had worn off but she wasn't allowed any more because the was in the final stages of labour - she had to do the whole thing with only gas and air. Our delivery nurse was called Jo Brown and she was a nice lady with dreadlocks. It took 1hr40mins for you to be born. Mum went from being almost asleep with me wiping her with a cool towel and stroking her hair to being bolt upright and screaming and pushing. It was like someone flicked a switch every ten minutes. My job was to support her head and encourage her to push. After struggling with the pain earlier on she was now like a lioness. When they wanted three pushes per round of contractions she gave them four. When they said keep pushing she kept pushing and pushed harder. She was amazing and I was so proud of her.

When you were nearly out you started to get tired and so they assisted your delivery. A big fat lady doctor came in and they sucked you out. You were born with your eyes open and you went straight onto mums tummy. While they stitched up mum and passed the placenta I held you. I took off my t-shirt and we went skin to skin. I sat next to the window with you for about an hour. Then I made mum some tea and toast. Mum went in the bath and you went in your cot with your new clothes on and a little muslin bobble hat to cover up your head that was swollen from suction. Daddy told everyone the good news on his mobile phone. We all went down to the ward just in time for visitors and saw Granny B, Grandad John and Uncle Stewart. We had to leave you and mummy in overnight as a precaution and I went to your grandparents house for pork chops and chips. I got home about 10pm and fed poppy the cat and had a pint of bitter to celebrate.

That was 9 days ago. The day after we took you home when you'd had your health checks. We had visits from everyone who couldn't make it the night before. Granny Janny and Mick, Grandad Jimmy, your uncles james, george and charlie and aunty becky. So far you've been to baby club and the supermarket Granny B and Ganda Js and Grandad Jimmys. It's been a very tiring week. Difficult to get you feeding and changed and settled. But we are really enjoying it and we have both already fallen for your cheeky little face. We registered your birth on monday (it's thursday today, my 29th birthday).

Reasons for US/UK friction

2009-08-24T15:28:00.002+01:00

The new administration wanting to distance itself from the Iraq War
The NHS being smeared as part of the US medical finance reform debate
The release of the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds

Amazon.co.uk mp3 site

2009-03-07T21:50:00.003Z

The mp3 shop on amazon.co.uk is superb and it beats the pants of most of it's competitors (although I still dearly love bleep). Here's why;

It is cheap
There is no digital rights management
It is quick
There is a good selection
They have linux versions of their download assistant

Today I have been downloading some great records;

Oxygene and Equinoxe by Jean-Michel Jarre and Koyaanisqatsi by Philip Glass

I've also been searching for treasure. Two sites I really love are cosmob e lls and 36 15 moog. Both are blogs written by collectors who find rare treasure on vinal and make mp3 files available. If you like electronica and old moog and synth music it is a hoarde of precious things the likes of which cannot be found or bought anywhere. My 'free' find of the day is High Tech by CLaude Larson

Review of 'The Man In The High Castle' by Philip K. Dick

2009-03-05T12:22:00.002Z

Not the first alternative history novel but the one that defines the genre. President Truman was assassinated and the Allies lost WWII. We are in the Western half of the USA which is controlled by Japan. The Nazis, who have exterminated the whole of Africa, are exploring the solar system (but are decades behind in the develpoment of TV) and plotting to nuke the Japanese. They control the Western USA. There are many plot threads. One is about moderate groups in Germany trying to get a warning to the Japanese. The main thread has an author (living in a fortified hideout called the high castle) who has written a mirror image novel of the one we are reading; 'what if the allies had won' from the perspective of his reality. This is very different to our reality.

What I liked about the book was how Dick was not afraid to deal with the issues of racism. I like how he has the Japanese as quite moderate people (much nicer than the nazis). I like how he deals with colonialism by having some US people adopting Japanese mannerisms and speech and thought patterns and how the Japanese will buy any old forged historical relics that they think are authentic pieces of US history.

What I don't like is how he doesn't seem to address the question as to whether it is the German leaders who are evil or whether he considers there to be any redeeming qualities in the German people. The nazis just seem like cartoon nasties. The other problem with the story is that is doesn't go anywhere. Society is not changed by the man in the high castle. The ending has a big revelation which is interesting and deals with parallel universes (and alternate histories) but this is derived from the I-Ching. And this is the BIG problem with the story; PKD worked out the plot by consulting the I-Ching (the book of changes). This must have been very trendy at the time (it reminds me of the use of tarot cards in Slaughterhouse 5) but it doesn't make for a good plot. I also found it a bit boring during the story when the characters consulted the I-Ching to decide their next course of action. The bit where Julia realises that the man in the high castle used the I-Ching to write his book was also a bit self indulgent.

Overall a good book, well written but apart from some interesting ideas it doesn't go anywhere. I enjoyed some passages and found others to be a chore. It's a good sci-fi book but not in my top five.

6/10.

Millions for defense, but not one cent for survival

2009-02-13T10:43:00.003Z

Government investment in nuclear missiles : £20 billion

Government investment in hybrid/green/electric cars : £20 million

Kiss of death for the New Tintin film

2009-01-27T11:46:00.002Z

Daniel Craig has been cast as the 'villain Red Rackham' in the new Tintin movie that Spielberg is doing. Every film that Craig has been in has been a terrible flop. Oh and there is no Red Rackham in the book. He's a historical character and he and Tintin never meet. Another kiss of death for the project is that Peter Jackson will direct a sequel. Oh no. Not Peter 'self indulgently make King Kong over three hours long when the Simpsons did the movie in ten minutes' Jackson.

On the plus side Stephen Moffat is the writer. He's currently the main guy on Dr. Who but I always remember him on Coupling, one of the cleverest and funniest shows ever. Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock will be either genius or just plain wrong. Tintin himself is perversely not an important casting job. The character is an everyman, quite bland and personality free. A blank canvas for the other characters to be painted onto.

They better not screw with something as good as Tintin. I personally think it won't work. The hook was always the quality of the line drawings in the artwork and the way they moved the story and depicted the action and drama in those tiny cells. So good it inspired Andy Warhol.

Review of 'Revelation Space' by Alistair Reynold

2009-01-13T11:04:00.003Z

I tried, I really did. This novel came recommended to me. I was warned it was a bit slow. But I give up. It is advertised as a gonzo, cyberpunk space opera and it won some awards (but not the Hugo or the Nebula). I have a doctorate in physics so big concepts don't scare me but I just can't get into it. The plot is glacial and it jumps around in time. The characters are one dimensional and I have no empathy with them. The editors didn't do their job here. It's just indulgent crap. I just don't care what happens at the end so I'll be selling this book on amazon. If I want to read a novel like this I'll go for Iain M. Banks or even try Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss. In the meantime I'll be getting on with reading The Man In The High Castle by Philip K Dick. And I'll post a review of The Complete Short Stories Vol. 1 by J. G. Ballard.

Revision of Review of Slaghterhouse 5 and wardsback time

2009-01-13T10:49:00.006Z

Like a lazy journalist I didn't check my sources. Initial reports of the death toll at Dresden and Hiroshima, reported by Vonnegut were 135'000 and 71'000. In later years the estimates have been corrected to 30'000 and 135'000 respectively.

I also forgot to mention my favourite passage in the book where Billy sees a bombing raid in a movie whilst his time is running backwards;

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the rack and shipped back to the United States, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous content into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anyone ever again.

Red Dwarf did a whole episode where the crew visit a place and time where time is running backwards. A famous contemporary novel would be Time's Arrow, a 1991 Martin Amis novel . Reference [3] on this page from martinamis.com also tells us that

Other antecedents include Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carrol; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where the White Queen claims that she lives backwards in time; An Age by Brian Aldiss; Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which a man is born at the age of 70 and proceeds backward to a state of infancy; and "Mr. F is Mr. F" by J.G. Ballard. In his Afterword to Time's Arrow, Amis refers obliquely to the Dresden fire-bombing description in Slaughterhouse Five while discussing influences on his own novel.

Review of 'Slaughterhouse 5' by Kurt Vonnegut

2009-01-12T20:59:00.003Z

LISTEN: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

This book centres around the firebombing of Dresden in WWII as witnessed by the author, a US POW at the time who survived by being locked in the Slaughterhouse 5 of the title. The attack on Dresden killed 135'000 people, almost all of which were innocent civilians; by contrast the attack on Hiroshima killed 71'000. However, Vonnegut takes a different path than just explaining what he witnessed. The really innovative thing about this novel is that woven into the facts is a science fiction story told from the perspective of the lead character Billy Pilgrim. Billy does not experience time in a linear fashion. His life jumps forward and back, from future to the past. The cynic would say that Vonnegut did this to pad out the story (he almost admits as much in the intro, although this is most probably his modest attempt at admitting he couldn't remember too many details from Dresden) but it makes for an excellent way to fit the war experiences into the context of the mans life and the juxtapositions of various events in the life of Billy Pilgrim are very funny. We also learn why Vonnegut got into science fiction; 'Billy had seen the biggest massacre in European history, which was the fire bombing of Dresden... they we trying to reinvent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help. ...everything there was to know about life was in the Brother Karamazov, by Dostoevsky. But that isn't enough any more.'

It also enables Vonnegut to bring in some of his worldviews. Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens who take him to live in a zoo on their home planet where he has to have sex with a fellow abductee, a famous movie star. The aliens experience time all at once with no past or future and their perspective helps Billy overcome his own being unstuck in time. 'when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it's very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed always will exist' ... 'the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.' We also get 'it is a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor' .. 'their [the American poor] most destructive untruth is that it is easy for an American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.' Vonnegut was a good friend of socialist historian Howard Zinn.

His second main philosophy is that there is no free will. People aren't evil or bad, just tied to events. This makes for a very even handed, non judgmental anti war story; he isn't blaming anyone he just reports the absurd surreal situations he finds himself in (using soap made from human fat [see Fight Club] and emerging from his bombing refuge to find the streets still hot and what seem like little logs lying around that turn out to be the people caught in the firestorm)
. This book is bitter, moving, warm, easy to read and very, very funny. Kurt Vonnegut died very recently and it then became apparent how influential he had been upon many (notably filmaker Michael Moore). So it goes.

'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom always to tell the difference.'

9/10

Review of 'Dune' by Frank Herbert

2009-01-04T02:04:00.002Z

Just finished reading Dune by Frank Hebert and I must say it has been very enjoyable. I was always put off reading it by the bad reviews the film always gets and it just didn't seem like my cup of tea. But I was sucked in by the good quality of the prose and the way the story is elegantly unfolded. Frank Herbert has a way of using the lightest of touches to describe an awful lot of content.

All the way through the book I was expecting a huge battle between the Fremen army and the Imperial forces as a grand finale. In fact the ending does involve a battle and even a final duel between Paul and Feud Rautha and all the loose ends are tied up but this occupies very few pages.

Now I have finished it I have realised what the story is really about; how a people must coexist with an environment of they are to tame it. The other big aspect of the story is personal development and awareness of and sensitivity to the motives of others. It has made me think more and more about being subtle in my dealings with people and holding things back until I'm certain it's to my advantage to reveal them openly.

The main character is very likeable. He's a scrawny kid who gradually accumulates powerful but subtle abilities over a number of years of personal growth as he becomes the Kwisatch Haderach. Not a super hero who one day acquires magical powers. Paul is aware of himself and able to identify his strengths and his limitations, a skill that all of us need to become balanced adults.

Council response to my noisy neighbours complaint

2008-09-04T14:45:00.001+01:00

Response from Doncaster council about my noise complaint. Needless to say, they went to the wrong address. They seem to know where my address is when it's time to send the council tax bill. Also notice the poor grammar.

"I am contacting you with regard to your recent email relating to our response to your complaint.

The night time noise patrol service operates between 21.00 hours and 03.00 hours every Friday and Saturday evening with the exception of the Christmas period. The service is staffed my means of and Environmental Health Practitioner and an Enforcement Officer working together. As the night progresses complaints steadily build up and the calls are dealt with in the order that they came in. This unfortunately builds a delay into our response time. In order that we can be more effective we do ask the complainant to contact us back if the noise nuisance has stopped.

With regard to your specific complaint, I can advise you that I have spoken to the officers on duty that night and read the report logs for that night.

It would appear that the first discrepancy was with the address they had been given by the Police. The address given was ****. Quite some time was lost looking for this particular location. It was eventually assumed to be !!!!. The Duty Officer did attend at 01.35 hours and reported the situation as all quiet at that time.

I feel there is some confusion over the your comment that the Council would be contacting you the following day to update you with the events of the night. Where a client request further contact this can be arranged but it would usually be the following week not the day after as this would be a none working day.

In order to deal with a problem it usually necessary for the Duty Officer to visit the complainant's property to assess the noise nuisance. The officer did attempt to contact you but they assumed on the night that you had gone to bed as the music had stopped.

In conclusion I apologise for any inconvenience this situation has caused you and hope that we can be of service to you in the future."

Noisy neighbours

2008-09-01T12:13:00.001+01:00

On the Saturday night of the bank holiday weekend we had a serious noise problem. Our neighbours across the way erected an immense gazebo in their garden, hired a DJ and started blasting dance music out from 6.30 pm on two speakers which I'm certain were illegal to use in a residential area. With my doors and windows shut and the TV on I couldn't escape the noise. After an hour I went round to ask them to turn down the volume just a little. About 20 houses look onto the noisy neighbours garden and several of our other neighbours had the same idea to complain. Unfortunately, the problem household couldn't hear their own doorbell.

Next step was to call the police. The dispatcher was very helpful and sympathetic. She explained that dealing with noise issues no longer fell under the police remit even if this constituted a breach of the peace (that's right, even if a crime had been committed). I was told that the council environmental health department would deal with it. I was told that someone would be sent out tonight and that I would be interviewed the next day, at the very least by telephone. I was very grateful when the police dispatcher offered to call this through on my behalf.

At 11.30 pm I got a call from a surly lady at the council. I explained to her that my neighbours were having a rave party in the garden and that everyone around was fed up. When she discovered that it was a one off incident and not a recurrent problem her interest in helping me vanished. She was mocking as she said someone would be out eventually and that they'd call me tomorrow and explain what action they had taken. In the meantime I was asked to call back if they switched the noise off because they were very busy.

At 1.30 am, with a pounding headache after seven hours of constant noise and with nowhere else to go to escape, I abandoned ship and went to see the Tinsley cooling towers demolition. When I returned at 4.30 am the music was still at full volume. The council had not been out. I fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion. The next day I was not interviewed or contacted in any way by the council.

My question is; what does a person have to do to get help from the authorities when such a blatant breach of the peace is occuring? And why did the council (who are funded to discharge this responsibility) do nothing at all to help myself and the people nearby who pay thousands and thousands of pounds in council tax each year?

Poppy

2008-08-28T21:20:00.004+01:00

Meet our new favourite girl!

I'll post more about Poppy and her story in the next couple of days.
Nic xx

Live long and prosper

2008-07-30T09:25:00.004+01:00

I'm having a bit of a clear out. Eating 5 a day, drinking lots of water. Choosing the better food option when things are available. I eat fresh home cooked food anyway and I've virtually given up on alcohol all together. Small changes.

I even thought about taking more exercise. Until I read this. I'm supposed to do five hours of exercise a week. I'd be happy to take a 30 minute stroll a few times a week, do a bit of gardening and play on my nintendo wii. But this means I need to go mad. It's the single most offputting piece of health advice ever put across. It says if you want to maintain weight you're in for it and forget it if you want to permanently lose weight.

Say I live for another 40 years. This means I need to spend 87 days solid doing exercise. That's a quarter of a year or 0.6 % of my remaining life. I know what you'll say; the benefits far outweigh the effort. I'll live far extra than 87 days, I'll have healthier later years (apart from the hip replacement I'll need from running) and I might even enjoy exercise and feel happier and more energetic. But the thought of pulling on my running shoes on those dark cold winter evenings or coming out of the swimming baths when it's blowing an ice cold gale or jumping out of the car on a sweltering hot day to go back out running makes me depressed.

Harriet Harman

2008-06-26T10:44:00.002+01:00

The equality minister Harriet Harman is planning to make it legal to discriminate against people in a job interview. If you are a white male and you are up against a woman or a person from an ethnic minority of equal ability then it will be perfectly legal for them to turn you down because of your gender or the colour of your skin. This is grossly unfair on the person being denied a job. In all situations the best person for the job should be chosen. It is never the case that there are two candidates of identical ability that can't be distinguished after a second interview.

Harriet Harman declared that she was the best person to be deputy PM because she was a woman. It certainly wasn't because she was the best person for the job. She has been a disaster in parliament and has long been considered as an over promoted New Labour appparatchik who agrees with whatever the party line is. Harman became "the politician we all love to hate" during her tenure as social security minister when she carried through widely unpopular lone parent cuts affecting mostly women. She sent her kids to a selective school far away from her constituency. Her voting record is; voted no to a transparent Parliament, voted for introducing ID cards, voted for introducing foundation hospitals, voted for introducing student top-up fees, voted for Labour's anti-terrorism laws and 42 days, VOTED FOR THE IRAQ WAR, voted against investigating the Iraq war, voted for replacing Trident (cost £20bn). In 1990 Harman co-authored a report entitled "The Family Way". It criticised the family unit and mothers who stay at home. In particular it questioned whether men were an asset to families at all and whether "the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion". Critics such as Erin Pizzey described such statements as a "staggering attack on men and their role in modern life". She wore a stab vest to walk around the streets of her constituency. She accepted illegal donations to her campaign to become deputy pm. In 2003 Harman was fined £400 and banned from driving for seven days after being convicted of driving at 99 mph (159 km/h) on a motorway, 29 mph (47 km/h) above the speed limit.

Energy Costs

2008-06-25T15:15:00.002+01:00

The cost of cleaning up after the last generation of nuclear power plants could rise as high as £73bn. This has to be paid by the taxpayer. The next generation of nuclear power plants has already been approved. The government has decided our future is nuclear.

The cost of completing the national grid so it runs all the way from Scotland to Southern England and then onto France is about £4bn, which includes wind farms in Scotland. The idea is we could be a net exporter of energy within a generation. Britain is blessed with amazing wind and wave energy resources. We also have a commitment to cut our greenhouse gases and increase the proportion of our energy from renewable sources. That process has started but most serious proposals are stuck in the planning process and very few make it through.

Here is my plan;

1) Approve a mix of big and small projects
2) Streamline the planning process and be biased toward green energy schemes
3) Add incentives for communities that host wind farms
4) Allow any user to sell energy back to the grid at a fair price; feed in tariffs

Above all just do SOMETHING and do it NOW. The Germans are far in front of us

Margaret Thatcher

2008-06-12T12:35:00.005+01:00

As a person who grew up in a Yorkshire mining region in the 1980s my natural inclination is to hate Thatcherism because of the misery it caused for me personally and for many many others. However, the recent spate of programmes on TV has made me rethink. Here are one two interesting articles that offer opposing views.

The balance seems to be that although she made some calamitous mistakes and our entry into the Falklands war looks like downright evil political opportunism with hindsight, her economic and social reforms were a bitter pill that did transform the country into a lean mean modern machine. This is why New Labour didn't drop any of her major policies. It is also why in the space of one generation I went from being destined to work in a coal mine to taking a place at University and earning a PhD.

Motoring gripes

2008-06-10T11:17:00.003+01:00

Manchester is thinking about congestion charging and the government is smiling on it. Businesses are up in arms and there is much debate. The M60 motorway is to be included in the plans. I vehemently disagree with this idea. Why should I be charged to drive past Manchester on my way to somewhere else? How else am I supposed to get to Liverpool or Warrington (which I have to do occasionally)? OK, tax those going into Manc but not those who are using one of the key motorway routes in the north of England. The idea seems to be half baked. With a looming recession and motoring costs hitting the roof the last thing we need is more tax on motorists. Trying to price us off the road is not fair for two reasons; 1) those who are poor should not be prevented from travelling on certain routes 2) People have to use the road. When I drive to Warrington to do my experiments the boot is full of scientific kit. I can't take that on a train! Also, with the housing market being batsh*t crazy people can't afford to live near where they work and even if they can the jobs market is so short term people don't stay living near their workplace for long.

Motoring gripe number two; speeding. The number one killer in the world is traffic - car crashes, people being run over and particularly pollution. Cars that are speeding produce more pollution and are more likely to collide with something or someone and the effects of that collision are more serious. So why aren't all vehicles fitted with speed limiters? These would prevent a vehicle from reaching more than a certain top speed. Some vehicles already have them fitted by law and with some small investment in infrastructure all vehicles could be fitted with a speed limiter that could sense the local speed limit and restrain the speed of the car. I can't think of a single good argument against the idea except for the initial costs. The benefits would be immense. Even for motorists. Fewer traffic jams caused by vehicles doing gas/brake cycles and causing phantom jams. And just think about pulling out at a junction. To leave my housing estate I have to pull onto a road with a 30 mph speed limit. Except the vehicles are just dropping down from 40 mph (ie doing 50 mph) and I can't get out. Of course, the real reason we don't have speed limiters for all vehicles is the motoring lobby. A £60'000 car would be no different to a fiat punto except for a few more creature comforts and a bit more acceleration (but with a flat top speed to aim for who cares?). There is no way the oil lobby and the motoring lobby would take it. And their voice is far more powerful than that of the millions who die each year on the roads.

Grand Theft Auto IV

2008-05-28T16:27:00.002+01:00

Much has been written about the 'seminal masterpiece' computer game grand theft auto iv which has just been released. In this game a person plays the role of a criminal in a virtual city. One of the key attractions of the game is its 'sandbox' gameplay; if you choose you can ignore the missions and just hang out in the city. You can watch TV, eat chicken ignore stop signs and red lights. You can also go on a murderous rampage with a baseball bat or fill innocent bystanders with lead. Defenders of this say that it is just tongue in cheek fun and a bit of stress relief. Any sane person can distinguish the game from reality. Why should we all be denied access to something fun just because there are a few vulnerable and suggestive people out there?

Which is exactly the same argument the pro-gun lobby make in the USA.

New Orleans vs Sichuan

2008-05-17T10:27:00.001+01:00

The chinese government, with its appaling human rights record, has done more to help the victims of the Sichuan earthquake than the US government did to help the victims of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. It might be that the Olympics and the world spotlight have forced China to act but the fact that China has acted so swiftly and that New Orleans is still in pieces should surely put Bush to shame. But it doesn't seem to have.

Microsoft and children in the developing world

2008-05-16T13:14:00.004+01:00

The makers of the $100 laptop designed to give thousands of kids from the developing world access to a vital learning tool have announced that the Microsoft Windows XP operating system will now be supplied with the laptop alongside the free (and in my experience, far superior) Linux operating system. Users will be able to choose which operating system they want to use just after they switch on the laptop. The cost of the laptop has risen to $188 because the company involved can't demand that a country order a minimum number of laptops. With Windows XP the cost of the laptop has risen by a further $10 to $198, double the initial cost which means half as many kids will get their laptop. The project has also suffered delays because it has taken 1 year to adapt Windows XP to go on the machine. Even so the user interface doesn't work on Windows XP and the networking software that lets users talk to one another and share data also doesn't work. Scandal and shame.

Why are they letting big business in to profit from such a beautiful and altruistic NOT-FOR-PROFIT scheme? Because the users want it. The number of orders placed since Windows XP was made available has increased. I wonder how much pressure was placed on the governments of the countries placing orders. Of course, we all know that MS aren't in this because of education. They want to make sure their operating system and their software becomes dominant in the new markets in the developing world. This situation is akin to the companies who distribute free powdered milk to mothers in the developing world and then stop the free samples when the mothers natural milk dries up, forcing them to pay for the milk. Microsoft will raise a generation of children on Windows and then when they are adults they will be forced to use it and pay for it (out of familiarity, the same reason Windows is till dominant everywhere else), instead of taking advantages of all the goodness of FREE open source software.

Sainsburys beware

2008-05-14T10:14:00.004+01:00

The UK supermarket Sainsburys has reported a 28% increase in its profits this year. Now, I know they are one of the big nasty supermarket chains but I'm quite pleased about this. I was, for many years a Tesco customer partly out of laziness and partly because of the clubcard. But I got fed up of sub-standard fruit and veg and awful meat (see my post from almost a year ago). So I switched to Sainsburys. I travelled the extra few miles to their store and paid a few pence extra and got less of a reward for my loyalty (nectar points aren't as valuable as clubcard points). It was worth it for the better food. And I'm delighted and surprised that lots of other people have made the switch in a time when food prices have been rising fast. Sainsburys concentrate mainly on food but they have decided to reinvest the profits in the non-food side of the business. Boo. Concentrate on maintaining the quality of your food and you will maintain your profit margins (and your customers). Tesco took their eye off the ball and started selling crap food a year and a half ago so they could concentrate on their USA operations and their non-food lines and look what happened. I said it a year ago for Tesco and I'll repeat it again today; Sainsburys beware.

Apropos of not much really...

2008-05-13T22:01:00.003+01:00

The Popular project (over on Freaky Trigger), which is reviewing all UK number 1 singles in order, is on great form at the moment. It's just hit September 1976, with the number 1 in question being Dancing Queen which has earned a big fat 10 out of 10.

I like Dancing Queen, but I like Chiquitita better. It's a song that stops and then starts again, which are always ace, and it features Bjorn playing the piano with great gusto. I have no idea what it's about but it sounds sad, in a kind of European melodramatic way (see also Fernando). So here's a lovely snowy video for it.

Niczilla xx

Carbon footprint of football matches

2008-04-22T12:25:00.003+01:00

It's music festival season and there has been much comment about the carbon footprint of such events. Many tens of thousands of people travelling many miles to attend surely do create a lot of CO2 (and pollution, which seems to have been pushed down the pecking order of things to worry about by greenhouse gases). Events like glastonbury have made a certain number of tickets available only to those who travel there by bus. Bands like Radiohead are only playing at venues with good public transport links.

All very good. But... The last round of premier league football matches was attended by about 365'000 people. There are 38 such rounds in a season which adds up to just under 14 million people per year attending matches. The Championship (the second most highly attended football league in the world) gets about 5 million attendees a year if last weekend is anything to go by (bear in mind it is end of season which attracts more fans but weigh this against declining attendance figures across football). A lot of football fans don't travel far to the match but some fans travel a long way (Man Utd fans). Even so, we are talking a good proportion of 20 million people are travelling to football matches each year. This must dwarf the music festivals in terms of CO2 generated.

Favourite poll result of the week; 15% of Americans think Barak Obama is a muslim.

Medicine balance of the sexes

2008-04-04T08:58:00.003+01:00

There are more women than men graduating medical school. Is this a problem? Radio 4 debated this question this morning.

A male doctor made the point that there should be equal numbers of male and female doctors available to fit with patient choice and general equality. To satisfy this need one has to train 3 female doctors for every 2 male doctors. This is because female doctors retire earlier, work fewer hours and require maternity leave. Surely this logic requires more female doctors to be trained in a ratio 3:2?

A female doctor said 'it isn't true you get three times more work out of male doctors' which shows she didn't understand the point made by her colleague. Her final sentence is my quote for the day;

11% of female clinical academics are women

Could Have Been Worse

2008-04-02T12:18:00.025+01:00

EMI are to release a Best of Radiohead on June 2 as revenge for the band ditching the record company. The tracklisting and artwork have just landed;

Single album;|||||||||||||||||||Double album; single album plus extra CD

Just||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||Airbag
Paranoid Android|||||||||||||||I Might Be Wrong
Karma Police|||||||||||||||||||Go To Sleep
Creep|||||||||||||||||||||||||||Let Down
No Surprises|||||||||||||||||||Planet Telex
High and Dry||||||||||||||||||Exit Music (For A Film)
My Iron Lung||||||||||||||||||The National Anthem
There There|||||||||||||||||||Knives Out
Lucky|||||||||||||||||||||||||||Talk Show Host
Fake Plastic Trees|||||||||||||You
Idioteque||||||||||||||||||||||Anyone Can Play Guitar
2+2=5||||||||||||||||||||||||||How To Disappear Completely
The Bends|||||||||||||||||||||True Love Waits
Pyramid Song
Street Spirit (Fade Out)
Everything In Its Right Place

I can't really argue with the track list but the running order produces some very odd transitions. Also, 'How To Dissappear' should be on CD 1 because it is one of the top 5 Radiohead songs. Other than that this makes a reasonable introduction to RH. The problem is they are an album band and you can't really cut and shut the albums to get the 'best bits'.

Anyway, as a long time fan I won't buy this album because it is just EMI being greedy. I can make my own RH greatest hits playlist on my ipod and change this every couple months. What the fans really want is a b-sides collection or a boxed set. Now that would be something exciting. Almost exciting as seing them live (again) at the end of June this year (3 months to go!).

Say No to 42 days

2008-04-01T21:09:00.003+01:00

The latest great idea from the Government to stop terrorism is to make it legal to hold people and question them repeatedly for 42 days without charge - without even telling them why they are being held. The Equality and Human Rights Commission says it goes against human rights law and may breach the Race Relations Act, while Geoffrey Dear, former chief constable of West Midlands Police and HM inspector of constabulary says passing the law will be a PR coup for Al Qaeda

The Rachel from North London blog explains all this better than I can, so please have a read of her thoughts on this and then go to http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/notadaylonger/ and sign the petition against 42 Days which a)threatens our civil rights and b) won't do the slightest bit of good in 'the war against terror'anyway. Please take a minute to sign, not because I asked and not because a load of bloggers are going on about it, but because it's the right thing to do.
Niczilla xx

Doncaster Quality Bus Corridor

2008-03-19T09:39:00.003Z

Doncaster is currently having a quality bus corridor fitted on two approaches into the town centre. On one of these approaches a dual carriageway is being reduced to one lane and this Sunday (normally a quiet day) I encountered very bad traffic. Of course this will all be worth it if traffic levels are reduced and everyone uses the bus. I asked the mayors office what the traffic reduction and bus passenger increases they were hoping for and how much the scheme would cost. They said

I would advise that the major scheme business case that secured funding of £15.3 million from the Department of Transport, is based upon achieving a 5% increase in bus patronage in the opening year, and an annual increase of 1.5% thereafter.

That's it. £15 million to increase bus passenger levels by just 5% and no targets for traffic reduction. 5% more people using the bus will cut congestion a bit but the bus lanes themselves will create much more congestion than they ease.

I would also like to know if taxi cabs are to be allowed to use the bus lanes. A taxi is a private commercial vehicle and they should not be allowed to use the priority traffic lights to the delay of everyone else. This is where the main congestion comes from; the priority lights. Each time a vehicle passes down the bus lane toward the lights the main body of traffic is halted. In the town centre we have priority lights which cause chaos. We also have priority bus lanes into the bus station which the buses do not use because people prefer to be dropped off in the town centre. However, we haven't been able to gauge the effects of the priority lights in the new bus corridor yet because the buses are not running in any numbers. Why? Because they haven't built the park and ride yet.

You heard me correct. We have bus lanes built and empty because they haven't built the park and ride yet. Why didn't they build it first?

In the peaceful eye of the storm (for now)

2008-03-10T11:48:00.002Z

Democracy 0 MPs 1 (2)?

2008-03-05T12:12:00.004Z

Today is a crucial day for Democracy in the UK. Parliament is to debate the EU treaty. The people of Britain want a referendum. The government know that the outcome of the referendum would be that the people would reject the treaty (as part of a wider rejection of EU authority over British citizens and the subsequent dilution of our democratic rights). So the government has rejected the idea of a referendum even though they were elected on the promise (in their manifesto) that the people would be granted a referendum. They claim that the treay now isn't the same treaty on which the referendum promise was made which is complete hogwash. Those who redrafted the treaty themselves admit this. It all boils down to the simple fact that the pro-Europe stance of parliament is completely out of touch with the feelings of the people. We are being denied our say because the government believe we lack enough knowledge of the situation to be involved in the decision making.

The simple fact is that we don't want to be ruled over by mainland Europe. We fought in two wars to prevent European integration. Europe as a trade zone is a great idea. Europe sticking together in its dealings with the superpowers makes sense. But a federal Europe with a single currency and a central law making and governmental institution is too far. The politicians want to go all the way. Why? An increase in government and bureaucracy (and in power and budgets) is what they want. Government bureaucrats measure their success by the size of their workforce and budgets. Anyway. Please parliament let us decide. You ignored millions of us over the pre-Iraq war protests and we were right. We couldn't vote the government out of power to protest this because the alternatives were the Tories (no way) or the Lib Dems (not a serious proposition). Another failure of party politics (see earlier post). Don't let this be the second time in recent years that the overwhelming will of the people has been brushed aside. I could be wrong. A referendum could reveal public opinion to be in favour of Europe. Either way. Give us our say.

Traffic hell (again and again)

2008-02-21T18:31:00.003Z

This morning I had an important appointment to keep (a timeslot booked on a microscope at the York nanocentre). My usual commute takes 45 minutes. An hour and twenty minutes before I had to be there I checked the traffic news; my normal motorway route was down to one lane and the queues were already 7 miles long. I was immediately filled with panic that I was going to be late. With an hour and ten minutes to go I set off along an alternative route that was shorter by distance but on smaller, lower speed limit roads. I arrived twenty minutes late and lost a quarter of my microscope time. This is the second time this week that the A1 motorway has gone down. Today was not as bad as monday but the delays still caused a 12 mile tailback and 2 hour delays for those determined to plough through.

There are simply too many vehicles on the roads. People cannot live near where they work because of the nature of the housing and jobs market. A couple who live in Doncaster might individually have jobs in Leeds and Sheffield and their home is a halfway point. Homes are expensive too and difficult to sell so people can't always live in their choice location. The authorities don't make things easier. There seem to be very few contingency plans for when one of the motorways in Yorkshire goes down. The diversions don't seem to work. One day in 2005 the M1 was closed so they diverted onto the A1 which got blocked by an accident and then the last escape route, the M18, was blocked by an accident. The resulting jams I will never forget.

So in a week like this what do we need? What we don't need is Doncaster council conducting a traffic census on one of the approach roads that feeds the A1 motorway and central Doncaster itself. They forced the road to one lane and slowed this down as they called people over to get a sample of travelling habits. Result; tailbacks for miles and miles and miles back into South Yorkshire. Idiots. Not a good idea to make the rush hour worse, especially considering the commuting hell that this week has brought.

Criminally underrated albums

2008-02-20T10:37:00.002Z

1. Monster (R.E.M.)
2. One Hot Minute (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
3. Hail To The Thief (Radiohead)
4. John Wesley Harding (Bob Dylan)
5. Fables Of The Reconstruction (R.E.M.)

Thank you

2008-02-18T12:05:00.002Z

This morning my 45 minute commute to work took 3 hours. The A1 motorway was closed due to a bad accident and the knock on effects on surrounding motorways caused 20 mile tailbacks. There was no indication that the motorway was closed ahead until I hit the wall of traffic. If I'd known I wouldn't have got on the motorway and would have gone the long way round. The local TV news didn't even carry the warning which is most unlike them. Given that the accident happened in the early hours which gave plenty of time for the services to get organised I'm a bit miffed.

I queued for about 20 miles along country back roads to go around to join another motorway. In the small villages we passed through there were no police marshalling people through. In fact lots of small stretches of roadworks caused even worse bottlenecks. The workmen could have just put a road plate over the holes in the road and shut down their roadworks for the day (I know this because I used to do roadworks). The traffic light sequences weren't changed either. So in the one direction you had a half mile queue made up of local traffic and in the other direction a 20 mile queue of thousands and thousands of stranded drivers. Why isn't there a traffic flow contingency for such days. When one motorway in south yorkshire is hit the whole road network goes down. Grrr.

FA Premier League Abroad

2008-02-13T12:02:00.003Z

The Football authorities here in England are considering the idea of staging some extra league games abroad. The fundamental flaw with this is that some teams would have to play each other three times instead of the usual twice. This undermines the whole idea to such an extent that the plans must be shelved. The league table should be a completely objective measure of how a team performs over an entire season. In a cup competition there can be anomalies where a team can get a lucky goal or a strange refereeing decision. But in the league these random blips get ironed out. Everyone plays everyone else home and away and the best team on average tops the table. If extra fixtures were added then the integrity of the league would be comprimised; some teams might have to play more matches against difficult sides and others might get lots of easy games.

The second argument against this idea is that it isn't fair to the fans. A Sunderland season ticket holder would not be able to attend a match versus Fulham in Los Angeles. Their team would be taken away from them just to make money. And that is the big motivation here; money. And because money is the motivation the fixtures that get scheduled abroad might magically turn out to be Man Utd vs Chelsea or Liverpool vs Arsenal rather than Fulham versus Sunderland. In the same way that the Manchester derby was magically scheduled on top of the 50 anniversay commemorations for the Munich air disaster.

File sharers banned from internet

2008-02-12T18:58:00.001Z

The UK government is considering the idea of banning anyone from the internet who is found to be downloading copyrighted music or films. Here's why people download torrents;

1) Music in the mid 1990s was ridiculously expensive £15 for a CD album. It is no coincidence that file sharing developed as a response to these ridiculous prices.
2) VHS/DVDs/BLU-RAY video formats are a rip-off and always have been. I don't need expensive packaging for my movie. I don't need a format that changes every 10 years forcing me to rebuy everything. I just need the data stream. I should be able to download a film for £1.
3) The cost of legal downloads is just plain wrong. iTunes rips off UK customers mercilessly.
4) Choice online and in the shops is thin. I struggle to find some records that I could find on the high street a few years back.
5) HMV stop being a music retailer and went for DVDs and went for the pile em high sell em cheap greatest hits market.

The plan to ban people from the internet won't work. The government can't even enforce the driving ban properly. And drivers need a license. HM government have a fundamental misunderstanding of how file sharing works anyway. They seem to think people are swapping whole files like they did a decade ago. Nowadays each file is broken into pieces so small they can't be detected as illegal or not. How could they tell the difference between me downloading a fragment of a copyrighted song or me downloading a fragment of an mp3 file from an unsigned band that they uploaded for free? They could try and attack the infrastructure by killing the websites that host the torrent files but this would be a minor inconvenience and the torrent sites are doing nothing illegal because they are just hosting information and not copyrighted material. The last word comes from the internet service providers association

Internet providers are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope

And they also don't want their best customers taken away.

The blog is back!

2008-02-12T18:55:00.001Z

Regular updates from now on since I've now got myself organised after Japan.

Tokyo day twenty seven

2008-01-31T11:18:00.000Z

Captains log, stardate 20080131. The final blog entry from Tokyo. Today was busy because I had lots of things to sort out at work. After work we went to Sugamo to a temple. In the bottom picture you can see Nicola pouring water over the statue. She then ran her hand over the statue to clean it. The idea is if you have a problem then washing the statue in this way will wash away the problem. Then we went to Shinjuku for a farewell tempura meal with Takane. This is seafood and vegetables fried in light batter with dips. It was delicious. We had fried shrimp, fried mushrooms, fried fish, fried eel (which was very tender and delicous). The one part I was not so sure about was fried flower bud (I kid you not!). This was very bitter and even some Japanese don't like this; a bit like marmite in dividing opinion. We rounded off a very nice meal with some miso soup with mini clams in. Now we have to pack and tidy the apartment and the Liverpool vs West Ham game is on TV. Anyway, we'll be very sad to leave Tokyo but very happy to get home to see our friends and family.

Tokyo day twentysomething

2008-01-28T18:30:00.000Z

So here I am. It`s 3.30 am and I`m doing a shift in the lab with another 4.5 hours to go. I sit and read my book and occasionally glance up to make sure that the beam of atoms that we are sending at the surface is still strong enough. On a screen is a picture showing the atoms that we`ve collected that have bounced off the surface. Every 2 hours there`s a whoosh and a whirr as the detector moves along a bit to collect the atoms that have gone off in a slightly different direction. I don`t have much to do. I might have to flick a few switches and turn a few nobs. I`m reading the new Charlie Brooker book; a collection of his newspaper articles. My brain can only hand short stories and can only think about one subject for a few paragraphs. My day started at 8am. In the afternoon I had a `break` which involved Nicola and I in a mad three hour round trip across the Tokyo Megapolis to buy some souvenirs from Harajuku. Yesterday we got up early and trudged around for hours looking at Mt. Fuji. I`m knackered. Despite all this I wouldn`t want to be anywhere else right now. Because we`re getting data, which is why I`m here, and because I have a bag of mini doughnuts and a Royal Milk Tea from the vending machine.

Tokyo day twenty three

2008-01-27T13:02:00.000Z

Today we travelled on a bullet train to see Mt. Fuji. The trains were absolutely gobsmackingly amazing. Probably the highlight of the trip for me. Clean, cheap, efficient and VERY VERY fast (see the video from inside). We set off from Tokyo at about 10.23am and the 90.8 miles journey to shin-fuji (the shinkansen station at the city of Fuji) took 75 minutes. For the nerds it was an 300 series (top speed 168mph). We tried to travel on the N700 (the fastest train in the world, top speed 186mph and it goes around corners at 158mph) but didn't time it right. For a video of one of these in action check out these 1 2 amazing youtube videos taken by people with a lot of time and patience. The trains carry a lot of passengers but they run every 20 minutes and each train has 16 carriages (see second video of train leaving). The inside of the train was clean, spacious, comfortable. It was a bit like being on an aeroplane. We got more legroom than in business class on Japan Airlines. On the back of every seat was a helpful guide as to where everything was (even down to litter bins). Question is, why can't we have trains like this in the UK?

We were lucky enough to get a glimpse of Mt. Fuji. This is only possible at certain times of the year (cold days mainly) and only then early in the day. As we got closer to Fuji the clouds and mist built up and by the time we got to fuji city we could only just see the top. You can see Nic in front of Fuji at our closest approach in the photo. I kind of wish we had set off earlier but we did get up at 7.30 am (on a sunday) and we were very lucky to see what we did. The mountain itself is very beautiful and awe inspiring. It seems very tranquil sat there in the sky. It looks like the land has been squeezed into a point in the sky. It's easy to see why it inspires such devotion and has long been a symbol of Japan. It seems almost spiritual. All day I could barely take my eyes off it and I just wanted to get closer, closer. I can understand what makes people want to climb it. Nic even said she wanted to have a go.

Sorry if the video quality is bad. YouTube has messed it up. Even though a post from the other day using a video from the same camera with the same settings looked fine.

Tokyo day twenty

2008-01-24T04:43:00.000Z

Apologies for the lack of updates so far this week, which is due to a combination of internet problems and the fact that we haven't done much of interest. Chris is back in the lab working hard to get some results and the weather has been awful so I haven't ventured out much. Above is how the RIKEN campus looked yesterday after heavy snowfall all over the greater Tokyo area. We've also had rain, and today gale force winds have hit the area.

Instead I've decided to stay in the warm and catch up with the Japanese music charts via an excellent TV show called 'u la la'. It isn't in English but that doesn't matter. The show is hosted by an excellent presenter called Shelly (presenters at home could learn alot from her) who discusses the music charts and has J-Pop stars on as guests. Today's guests were a boy band who sounded alot like the B-Sharps, Homer Simpson's barbershop quartet. Shelly then calls a shop assistant in the Shibuya HMV via video phone to talk about what's hot today - he says that today people are buying the 2008 Grammy compilation with Kanye West and the Amy Winehouse album.

What's surpising about J-Pop is that alot of it is actually quite dull, especially the boy bands. Exile are the most popular boy band this week and sound just like Westlife, and let's be clear about this - this is not a good thing. The other surprising thing is the massive popularity of Radiohead over here, who are top of the single and album charts right now and are the soundtrack in shops, restaurants and bars all over the city. The best thing about Tokyo Top10 though was Misia, who probably compares most to Gwen Stefani - thanks to the wonders of teh interwebs you can view her amazing 'Royal Chocolate Flush' video right here:

Tokyo day seventeen

2008-01-21T05:57:00.000Z

Off to the Shibuya district of Tokyo today to do a bit of people watching. Shibuya is a magnet for Tokyo teens and as such is lots of fun with loads going on. We left the metro station and immediately came face to face with the Hachiko crossing, the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world - the video above demonstrates how busy it can get (and bear in mind this is a very cold Sunday in January - imagine what it must be like in warmer weather when more people are out and about).

We strolled up Center Gai, where Tokyo fashion victims come to pose and show off and popped into HMV to browse their selection of English language magazines before wandering ro und the huge Tokyu Hands homeware store. There are apparently three main teen trends in Tokyo: Center Guys - who seem to have copied Jon Bon Jovi :( , Hime Gal - who are all huge sunglasses, designer dresses and dyed hair with Paris Hilton as a role model and Gothloli - a strange mix of victorian dresses, lace cuffs, hair bobbles and soft toys worn by girls from the suburbs. We also visited the Shibuya ranKing ranQueen store but disaster! They were out of F Cup Cookies and all other types of cookie too.

Chris has been pining for curry ever since he arrived and so we went to what our guidebook bills as the best curry restaurant in Tokyo, Dhaba India in posh Marunouchi. Not wanting to take chances with curry in another country we played it safe and ordered two of the mildest dishes on the menu - butter chicken and creamy lamb curry. While the lamb worked out fine the chicken had been marinated in nitric acid and served in lava sprinkled with gautemalan insanity pepper ie V HOT. But for all that it was fairly authentic curry restaurant and full of happy locals.

Chris additional: I just want to add a bit more about the curry (in case any of my curry loving friends are reading: - Luke I'm thinking of you here esp.). The curry house had several Indian diners in it (a good sign), the chicken contained bones (never experienced that before), the naan bread was very doughy and gooey in the middle but they had Kingfisher beer (Nic preferred the Japanese sapporo brand). It was southern Indian so the choice was quite limited in terms of the variety of curry and rice. The dishes themselves were nice (butter chicken was a bit over spiced) but the portions were too small. Overall, very nice but the best curry house in the best city in the world for food was not half as good as the excellent takeaway curry in my local village (Massala Express in Edlington).

Tokyo day sixteen

2008-01-19T12:51:00.001Z

Today we went to the harbour area at Odaiba. We went to the Fuji TV studios and saw TV shows being made. Other things we did

* Rode on a monorail
* Stood in a 1200 tonne ball 25 floors up
* Seen a huge replica of the Statue of Liberty
* Eaten in a Japanese McDonalds ("shakka shakka chicken!")
* Been to a replica 1960's Japanese street
* Went to the emerging science museum (Chris says; "ace, they had a nanotechnology bit, which is what I do at work")
* Stood inside a neutrino detector (for finding tiny subatomic particles)
* Had an infra-red heat scan of our faces (see picture)
* Seen the autograph of Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon
* Had my picture taken with the car from Back to the Future
* Been to the largest car showroom in the WORLD
* Had a ride in a driverless car (look, no hands)

Tokyo day fourteen

2008-01-17T13:04:00.001Z

Today we went down to Roppongi, which has traditionally been the sleazy part of town where all the bars and strip joints are. A few years back a massive development was made which is several skyscrapers with offices, residential apartments, shops (very, very expensive ones), an art museum, a garden and loads of other stuff all in one place. This was designed by Jasper Conran. We went to the big tower (middle picture) and paid about £7 each to up to floor 52 in an express elevator. Here there is a 360 observatory that gives the most stunning views of Tokyo. I was gobsmacked. The sheer size and scale of Tokyo is hard to convey. It makes London look like nothing. As far as the eye can see in all directions. In the distance I saw some black clouds on the horizon. Nic then pointed out that they were mountains. Mt Fuji is HUGE. Even from 60 miles away it looms over all of Tokyo. I have some pictures of it on the horizon but they have a bit of haze and anyway we're travelling on the bullet train out to a place nearer to Fuji on Saturday so I'll have some better pictures by then.

For an extra £7 we got to go up onto this platform where a lady took a picture of us with a wide angle camera. The top picture shows this. The red and white thing is the Tokyo tower. We went over and paid another £7 to go up to the viewing deck here. The views aren't as stunning but a nice panoramic view of nightime Tokyo was to be had. The worst bit had a glass floor. Not good for my vertigo. We stopped off for an Italian meal. I had a large order of spag bog, cheesecake and beer. Nic asked for clams and tomato cream sauce pasta but she got octopus and chili sauce with some clams on! She also got earl grey tea with milk in! Poor Nic. The chocolate cake made up for it. Both meals combined cost £15. Tokyo is very good value for money and the food is amazing. Anyway, we're both shattered now.

Tokyo day thirteen

2008-01-17T12:56:00.000Z

Today we stayed around the apartment and relaxed to recharge our batteries. I took Nic to the subsidised canteen at RIKEN around the corner. We each had a main dish, a bowl of rice and pickled veg, a bowl of miso soup, a dessert and green tea with free refills for about £2 each. We then had a stroll in the sunshine and stopped off for a lazy coffee. Nic had an attack of the jetlag and spent most of the afternoon on the sofa asleep. We went up to the supermarket in the evening where Nic bought an apple that was almost as big as her head for £1 (see picture). At home I cooked a nice steak, with cauliflower and potatoes with gravy and a glass of red wine. Delicious.

Tokyo day twelve

2008-01-15T10:38:00.000Z

Today we got to do a couple of things that not many people from the west have done, even those who have visited Japan. Our host Takane first arranged for us to visit a genuine noodle bar in a neighbourhood just outside of central Tokyo where tourists never go. It was a tiny shack with a couple of tables and some seats at a bar where locals go to sluuurrrp their noodles (and slurp they do). Takane helped us order and Chris had udon noodles with tempura vegetables and shrimp in a soy broth, I had the same but with chicken tempura and we all tried two different types of sake. My chicken tempura was yum, really light and tasty with a proper broth.

This evening we were honoured to be invited to the RIKEN tea ceremony club where we joined their tea ceremony practice. The ladies very kindly lent me a kimono, which you can see in the picture above. It's an elegant outfit but much more complicated (and uncomfortable) than it looks; it has about 5 layers, loads of ties and panels and it took two ladies more than 20 minutes to make me presentable. The tea ceremony is thousands of years old and very exact so the ladies attend each week to learn from an experienced teacher. All the tools used have significance and a special powdered green tea called matcha is used. However for all the ceremonial stuff the ceremony isn't hugely serious and is a great excuse for the ladies to have a good chat and a laugh together. Things we have learned today:
* chicken tempura kicks KFC ALL OVER
* Kimonos are very hard work but I still want one to wear round Donny town centre
* Those of you who thought I would chuck green tea down someone elses 500,000 yen kimono were WRONG WRONG WRONG!!! Thank God.

Tokyo day eleven

2008-01-15T00:40:00.000Z

It was a bank holiday in Japan today so we decided to join the crowds at the Asakusa Kannon temple which is Tokyo's oldest temple and was packed with people and atmosphere. To get to the temple you have to walk up a shopping street about 200 metres long with shops selling everything from ice cream to lucky cat statues to second hand kimonos. There is a thing making smoke that people were waving on themselves as it is supposed to heal or prevent illness and we chucked 5 yen coins into the shrine which is good luck. We then decided to go to Shinjuku to look at all the neon lights as it got dark and see what was going on. If you've ever seen footage of Japanese commuters being shoved onto packed trains by guards wearing white gloves - that's Shinjuku station and pictures of neon lit Tokyo are usually Shinjuku too. There's a giant Tower records in Shinjuku which had a live band playing and any CD you could think of to buy. We went and had a look around Takashimaya Times Square which is another huge department store complex, we stopped off for matcha green tea and coffee with whipped cream and to admire the view of Shinjuku from the top floor before going back to Tobu in Ikebukuro because Chris really, really wanted some spaghetti. On the way back we found a mini branch of the ranKing ranQueen department store in Shinjuku station - this is a shop where every product in the store is part of a top 3, 5 or 10 list according to popularity, from chocolate bars to hair perfume(!). We'll come back to ranKing ranQueen later as we're planning to visit the bigger store in Shibuya another day, but we mention it here because the number 1 cookie this week (rankings are updated every week) are F Cup Cookies as heard on Radio 1, which promise to increase your bust size if you eat them every day. Not sure if they work on boys!

One final thing - we've done alot of riding around on the Tokyo Metro today and the Japan Rail (JR) trains have little TV's in the carriages which show adverts. One of these is '1 Minute English' presented by Berlitz, but instead of teaching phrases that might be useful in the UK such as 'Burger and chips please' or 'I have food poisoning. Which way to the hospital?' they're all business based, like 'appointment' and 'the report will be on your desk first thing in the morning'. Things we have learned today:

* Apparently Nic looks quite Russian
* You have tea before or after a meal, not with it, silly sausage!
* The Japanese love their boy bands
* F Cup Cookies really do exist and weren't made up by some idiot DJ

Tokyo day ten

2008-01-15T00:36:00.000Z

Off to the Imperial Palace today to show Nic what it's like - it's in a lovely park but you can't see much of the palace itself cos the emperor doesn't like nosy commoners looking in apparently, so it's surrounded by massive trees, as well as the moat and walls that have been there since the year dot. After that we went to a big department store near the palace called Daimaru, but it turned out that Daimaru is the equivalent of Selfridges ie a bit snooty and v expensive. So we got the train back to Ikebukuro, and went to the Tobu department store which is much more Debenhams. We had a Vietnamese set meal that only cost £6 including a drink. Nic had a rice porridge set and came with a big bowl of soup, rice porridge (savoury rice pudding with chicken, much nicer than it sounds) and a giant spring roll stuffed with veggies and prawns - Chris got the same with chicken vietnamese curry rather than porridge. Things we have learned today:

* The Japanese Royal Family don't have the same money grabbing instinct as our own - the Imperial Palace would have been opened up for expensive tours a long time ago had it been in Britain
* Heston Blumenthal was right all along about savoury porridge
* Japanese TV's are bilingual! ( though only for some shows like the news - the game shows remain gloriously incomprehensible)
* Tony the Tiger speaks Japanese
* Japanese 'jam' donuts aren't made from jam :(

Tokyo day nine

2008-01-15T00:24:00.000Z

All those stories about jet lagged westerners wandering the streets of Tokyo in a daze in the middle of the night are true - I (Nic) am writing this at 4 in the morning, unable to sleep yet unable to do anything vaguely useful either. After a 24 hour train/plane/train journey I finally arrived in Tokyo, exhausted but pleased to be here. Although I didn't get a plushy upgrade to business class it was a good flight. All we wanted to eat this evening was a dirty burger so we went to Wendy's in Niramasu, the next suburb along from where we are staying in West Tokyo. Things we have learned today:

* Japan Airlines kicks British Airways' ass
* Carrying a big suitcase is much easier on the Tokyo Metro than on the London Underground
* Wendy's in Japan is just as nice as in the US
* Teenagers are stoopid wherever in the world you go
* Everything in Tokyo is 'kawaii' - from the cute cartoons of immigration officials at the airport to the lovely tunes played on the trains to tell you that the doors are closing

Tokyo day eight

2008-01-15T00:16:00.000Z

Today was a marathon day. We vented the system ready to remove the manipulator. The engineers arrived at about 1pm and it wasn't until 1am that we had the manipulator back in, pumped down and the bakeout on. I had a headache and went in search of some aspirin from a vending machine and got locked out. What do you do? No-one is around and the guards just point and laugh when you try and explain your predicament through the medium of mime. I got back in by throwing stones at the lab windows to rouse attention!

Anyway, the headache got much worse and spread all down my spinal cord. It made my eyes bulge like they were ready to pop with a big pressure burst. I couldn't get any aspirin at 7-11 so I decided to sleep it off. Big mistake. I spent all night sat propped up in bed staring at the wall. It was too painful to put my head down on the pillow, too painful to watch tv, too painful to think. Finally dropped off for three hours at about 8am. Not the best day since I arrived and not ideal preparation for a six hour round trip across central Tokyo and out to Narita airport to meet Nicola, the cavalry.

Tokyo day seven

2008-01-10T13:42:00.000Z

A very frustrating day. We cleaned the sample by smashing atoms into it and knocking all the dirt off then we baked it with some heat then we cleaned the LEED (used to check if the sample has made a crystal) then we cleaned the holmium source and then... at 7pm it broke. One of the wires on the manipulator inside the chamber has snapped and someone is coming to fix it tomorrow. This means letting air into the chamber, after we spent two weeks cleaning the inside of the chamber from the last time air was let in. D'oh.

I'm eating pizza which I burnt. This was after I realised my lasagne was only for the microwave (which I don't have) after the container melted in the oven. It really has been one of those days. On that note, every system that I've worked with since I started this job has broken and needed the manipulator out. That's 3/3 in less than a year. Beginning to think I'm cursed.

Tokyo day six

2008-01-09T23:41:00.000Z

We had a good day in the lab playing with the atom beam to make sure it was OK. This is done by bouncing atoms off our dirty surface into the detector. We moved the beam side to side and up and down to see what positions the surface was at (if we went too far the left or right with the beam, or too far up and down we got no atoms scattered back off the surface cos they missed it.) From this we could work out where the middle of the sample is. There was one worrying moment where the manipulator wouldn't move the sample around as we told it to but that was due to a small problem in some of the electronics. We soon fixed that one.

Steve is going in the morning. We just had his farewell meal which was EXQUISITE. It was a few villages away on the To Me. The couple who run it have had a restaurant in Ikebukuro for many years and are now retired. They keep a small restaurant as a hobby and because they are used to company each evening. We had about ten courses. The first was raw beef and carrot and broccoli. The veggies were cold and marinated in something very interesting. The beef was seared on the outside to clean it and then sliced thin and was delicious. We had soup courses and another beef course (this time with well cooked, slightly more gristly beef and more veggies). A course with baked rice balls was very nice. They are made into a triangular fishcake shape and baked for a bit then dipped in soy and baked some more. The one course I didn't like so much was set custard with bits of chicken in it and mint and orange on top. We had about 4 types of sake; hot, cold, clear and creamy with rice floating in it. All in a very elaborate and well served ritual order. Anyway, this meal was great. On the way back (about 9.30 pm) there were loads of people returning from work and kids just getting in from school.

Tokyo day five

2008-01-08T11:17:00.000Z

Today we cycled through the peacefull neighbourhoods of Tokyo to the temple at Jouranji. There is a giant Buddha here. The place is very beautiful and very tranquil in a way that I couldn't really express in words. The bottom picture shows things that people want help with that they have written down. One of them had a name and loads of love hearts so I guess that person was wishing that a certain person would fall in love with them. After leaving the temple we had some sorbu noodles at a nearby place which were delicious. A great day.

Tokyo day four

2008-01-07T11:25:00.000Z

I'm very tired today because I was up at 6am. I pottered round for a bit then had toast and coffee (pronounced cohee in japanese) and cereals. I bought the wrong milk and it had yoghurt in it but meh. Japanese TV is mad.

I went into the lab at 10am and we spent the day degassing the germanium sample we will be looking at.

The big surprise was the food on campus;

Lunch; tonkatsu (battered fried pork) with rice and curry (little pickled peppers in the rice which made it taste AMAZING and english mustard with the tonkatsu), miso soup and green tea all for, wait for it... £2.

Dinner; Udon noodles with seaweed and some other veggies and tofu with green tea... £1!!

Called at the supermarket for some butter and proper milk and now I'm drinking beer and about to watch some red dwarf.

So ends my domestic diary for today.

Tokyo day three

2008-01-06T21:28:00.000Z

Today was a quiet day. I got up early (because of the jetlag) and went for a 7am breakfast at Denny's. This cost £2.40 and was sausage, bacon (more like thin ham), scrambled eggs, lettuce with dressing, a slice of extra thick toast with cream butter and jam and free coffee refills.

I hung around the apartment all day doing some work and reading and doing a bit of consolidating. Later I went to the local district of downtown Tokyo (Ikebukuro) with Steve (my boss who is here for the week). We decided to go western and we found an Italian place on floor 11 of the Tobu department store. I had spaghetti bolognese, Asahi beer and vanilla ice cream for about £9.

Later I got the phone working and spoke to my wife for the first time since I got here which was brilliant. Nicola doesn't arrive until next Saturday so she's missing out on all the fun. I don't have any pictures of the food or the bright neon lights from today because my camera ran out of batteries in Ikebukuro before the first picture was taken. Note to self; take some spare batteries in future.

Tokyo day two

2008-01-05T23:13:00.000Z

Today I got up at 4.30am to go to the large fish market at Tsukiji. We wandered around the hectic market looking at stalls with all sorts of weird and wonderful wriggling seafood and vegetables as men on little motorised trolleys whizzed around picking up shopping lists for restaurants. Then we went for the freshest sushi in the world. I had squid, sea urchin, octopus and some other things (!). The sashimi was the best part and the tuna was divine. The top picture is of the queue outside the small sushi restaurant.

Then we wandered across downtown Tokyo and to the Imperial Palace. The second photo is me posing here. After that we went to Asakusa (asak-sa) to the west of Tokyo where there is a temple and some shrines. This was EXTREMELY busy. It was bright and colourful and there were many shops selling souvenirs and sweets. The gate has a huge red lantern which you can see in the picture. In the temple itself I threw a 10 Yen piece over the head of the crowd into a big tub to bring luck in our experiments. Then we went home just as the midday sun was up. From 5pm I slept for 12 hours and then had an early 6am breakfast at Denny's. £2.40 for eggs, bacon, sausage, lettuce and dressing (!) with two slices of extra thick toast with cream butter and strawberry jam and free coffee refills. Yum.

Tokyo Day One

2008-01-04T15:15:00.000Z

Dear All,

Got to Japan OK. Total journey time was about 24 hours but Japan Airlines gave me a free upgrade to business class which meant; fasttracking through security so no queue whatsoever, a private lounge with a mini bar in which to wait for the flight and, on the flight, a bucket seat that turned into a bed and loads of nice free food and entertainment. Not too shabby. Anyway, Japan is great. It's just like the song 'pac-man' by Aphex Twin. Here's a picture of me eating some ramen noodles earlier this evening. You can see the effects of the travelling; my hair needed a wash which it has now duly got.

Defence Spending

2007-11-09T09:52:00.000Z

The armed forces are woefully underfunded. The living conditions for some army families are a disgrace. So it makes people very angry when the government spends £33 million on asylum centres that were never built. That's right. It cost £33 million pounds for the government to even just think about building such centres, such as the one at Bicester. Think about how many army homes could have been rebuilt with £33 million. And think what we could do with the £20 billion that the Trident nuclear 'deterrent' will cost.

In other news Tesco has launched its US operations. The stores are called 'fresh and easy'. They chickened out on using 'Tesco' because if the venture fails they don't want to taint their name. What I find ironic is that their selling point is cheap fresh food for home cooking. Tesco UK are lousy for fresh food. In my experience their fruit, veg and meat is terrible quality.

The Lie

2007-11-01T16:49:00.000Z

Bush claims there should be no emission restrictions because China and India would reject the idea outright.

But China and India accept mandatory cuts, they just disagree with everyone else how the system should work.

Lonely Planet

2007-10-30T15:44:00.000Z

The US government used the 'Lonely Planet' tourist guidebook as a source of information prior to the invasion of Iraq. That's right, the average browser in WH Smith would be as well informed as the US armed forces and intelligence. I suppose the soldiers would know where the best pubs and restaurants were but as for roads and water supplies.... they weren't exactly covered.

It reminds me of the episode of Red Dwarf where the computer Holly thinks the crew are losing faith in him so he tricks them into thinking he gets his information about space from the Ladybird Book of Space. And then along comes the backup computer Queeg who is much more efficient but ultimately makes the life of the crew harder so they want Holly back. I guess the moral of the story is people are prepared to accept second best as long as it makes things easier for them.

Highjinks at our wedding reception

2007-10-29T11:52:00.001Z

Profound apologies...

2007-10-25T13:01:00.000+01:00

...for the lack of recent content. In four weeks I have to go to Warrington to do three weeks of experiments. As soon as I get back we have a visitor from Japan who is going to do two weeks of difficult experiments with us. So in the next four weeks I have to prepare for all of this. The problems we had with our equipment earlier in the summer have set us back quite a bit and it is a race against time to get things up and running and tested before all the key experiments start.

And after all this I get the Christmas break... followed by a month in Japan doing experiments. Phew!

P.P.S. On top of all this I just got married and we have a reception in the UK coming this weekend which takes a bit of planning.

Married in the USA

2007-10-15T18:13:00.000+01:00

So I've been away for two weeks to get married in the USA. Radiohead chose the two weeks I had no internet access to release their album online. First impressions; bland and uninnovative.

On the plane back I saw the movie 'Heaven Almighty'. This is a sequel to 'Bruce Almighty' and besides being a crap movie it is scarily right wing religious. It basically brings the Noahs ark fable to today. There is no questioning of the tale or of religion in general. When hollywood makes huge brainwashing propaganda pieces like this which contain no balance or irony then I have to fear for all those people in America who aren't given space to think for themselves by their culture.

Things about the USA which annoy;

* A lack of lane discipline is a recipe for traffic chaos
* Lawyers who drum up business on TV
* Everyone uses their mobile while driving
* Cars don't need to be that big and should have cleaner exhausts
* Religion on TV with no balance or questioning
* Biased TV (Fox especially). Gor bless the BBC
* Tips and sales tax - can't you just add these to the ticket price?
* The coins are too similar

Things I love;

* The food
* The low prices
* Most people are polite and welcoming
* Things just seem to work, like the the way the theme parks are run
* Free refills

Jose Mourinho

2007-09-20T10:31:00.000+01:00

Chelsea football club manager Jose Mourinho has left the club. It's not a surprise. He was not allowed to run the club the way he wanted. He could not choose who to buy and, more importantly, who not to buy. Good luck to him. He was fun and a likeable and capable manager.

On the other hand this is superb news for fans of Chelsea F.C. (I don't support Chelsea). Mourinho is more suited to getting smaller clubs with average players to gel as a team and punch above their weight. His style of grinding results out didn't suit a team full of superstars. If I was Abramovich I would want to spend my money on a team of galacticos. A bit like Real Madrid from a few seasons back. They might not consistently win as much but they would be much better to watch. Which is what Chelsea are for Abramovich; entertainment.

The future for the club looks bright. They are in a far better position than in the bad old days of Ken Bates etc. And that is solely down to Abramovich and not Mourinho. It will be interesting to see who they get in to manage them and if they now go on to build a team around Ronaldinho and Shevchenko. Chelsea should be a team of galacticos. With Mourinho gone they might now go on to become this. Better to lose in style.

Migration Impacts Forum

2007-09-19T11:21:00.000+01:00

Cambridgeshire police force has an £800'000 bill for translation services. It has to deal with 83'000 legal migrants (that are known about) and more than 100 languages. The immigrant population carry knives and drink drive back in their home countries so they think it is OK to do it here. This has put a massive burden on local public services.

This is just one example of the problems caused by the vast numbers of migrants into the UK. We are told that the UK economy is propped up by such workers. I'm pretty certain that the tax and council tax they pay (if they pay it at all in certain cases) does not cover the extra costs imposed upon schools and hospitals and the police.

What is the solution? A lot of the problems are caused by social differences. Like the Polish drivers in South Yorkshire who think it is OK to park on a roundabout while they retrieve something from the boot of their car. There are some incidents where the people bring problems from their own culture. Like the group of somalis who attacked an ambulance in Bristol in which a man dying of stab wounds was being treated. They dragged a paramedic out by her hair. This went unreported nationally for some reason (see my earlier posts about the liberal BBC). These violent somalis should have been deported to their civil war ravaged country. Maybe once they were back there they would realise how easy it would have been to stay in quiet peaceful Britain, a country where public services are in place to look after anyone. Even stab victims from within a violent immigrant population.

The government solution is to "set up the Migrant Impacts Forum so public services can help shape our tough points system which is introduced in around 150 days time." Yes, that's right. The government is going to invite everyone around for a chat. What about charging some of the factory owners and gang leaders to contribute to some of the costs their slave labour workforce imposes on society? How about immediate deportation (at their own expense, they managed to get here so they should be able to manage to get back) for anyone who commits a serious crime or a series of small ones? And before I get labelled as a Daily Mail reader I do have lots of friends who make up the law abiding immigrant population and who do contribute to society (in some cases more than I do).

Ritual

2007-09-14T14:33:00.000+01:00

"I've been fascinated by the recent spate of books casting doubt on religious faith, as if religion meant believing six impossible things before breakfast. Well, religion is a matter of holding certain beliefs, but that's not the only or even the most important thing about it. Religion is also about ritual; and ritual is about taking certain beliefs and making them real in the way we behave."

Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks, Radio 4, Thought for the Day, 12 September 2007

In India a proposed shipping canal that will provide a continuous navigable sea route around the Indian peninsula has been held up. The canal may disturb or destroy a natural bridge formed by rocks and stones that Hindus beleieve was built by the god Ram and an army of monkeys. A report into the potential damage questioned the existence of the god in the first place and now the whole project has descended into uproar and argument. Presumably this bridge was built by a thousand monkeys with a thousand JCB diggers?

Electron beam heater

2007-09-13T14:42:00.000+01:00

For the past two weeks I've been painstakingly rebuilding an electron beam heater. It's used to heat up materials that you can't pass current through. It works by dumping hot electrons onto the object. This all sounds very fancy but in reality it's just been fiddly. Like threading four needles at once in the dark. With an oncoming wind. Now it's fixed and you can see our material glowing hot in the chamber. We put the samples in the chamber so that we can pump all the air away and keep our samples clean. This particular chamber houses a scanning tunneling microscope, used to produce a topographic map of the electronic envelope surrounding the surface atoms - it takes a 'picture' of the atoms if you like. See my earlier post for an example of what it does.

Party Politics

2007-09-12T23:32:00.000+01:00

"People became eclectic in their choice of stances on individual issues as they were in their choice of morning newspaper, building up a portfolio of attitudes which defied simple categorisation." All Must Have Prizes, Melanie Phillips.

Party politics is no longer valid. In the past the two parties had clear constituencies; Labour stood for the working class and fair treatment for all. The Conservatives were for supporting those who worked hard for themselves and prospered under their own steam. Labour and Conservatives, do-gooders and moralisers. The face of Britain has now changed beyond all recognition and the old battle lines have dissapeared. Voting Labour does not mean getting an ideologically consistent package of ideas in the way it used to.

What frustrates me is that I agree with party x on some issues and with party y on other issues but I do not agree with any party on all issues. How should I vote? Prioritise issues? We now have the ridiculous situation where most people don't vote and the ones that do vote get mostly ignored. Iraq stirred up a huge well of public opinion which was ignored. The party political system is the number one enemy of democracy in British politics today.

How can this be fixed? Get rid of political parties. For each issue (schools, prisons, police, NHS, immigration, economy etc) vote for one person every three years based on their proposed policies for each particular aspect of their department. If they fail, boot them out. A bit like the mayor of London. Local MPs could then be responsible for making sure the head of each major department did their job according to the especial preferences of their local constituency. Party and personality politics have destroyed democracy in this country and the electorate have switched off, bored and disillusioned by Thatcherite "tough medicine" and the squandered promise and spin of New Labour.

US foreign policy

2007-09-11T12:23:00.000+01:00

"We have to fight the terrorists over there, so we don't have to fight them over here" George Bush

That's right. If you have to make an omelette it might as well be with Iraqi eggs. The defence of the success of the the troop surge in the US congress has pretty much said 'it's bad for Iraqis but it's the best thing for the safety of US citizens'. On the radio yesterday a former US diplomat was asked why they support Pakistani military dictator Colonel Musharraf. His answer was that the safety of US citizens was more important than the democratic rights of the Pakistani people. Cue the longest pause ever heard on the pm programme as presenter Eddie Mair was shocked into silence by the abrupt answer.

Radiohead LP7

2007-09-09T10:47:00.001+01:00

For those of us who wait with baited breath for the next Radiohead album there is some good news. The latest album has been officially confirmed as completed, 4 years after the last one. Quite why it took so long will emerge in pre-release interviews, I assume. The new album probably won't be released until next year. Exactly when is anyones guess. The band have fulfilled their contract with EMI and they now have to negotiate with potential suitors to see which record company will give them the best all round deal. Then there is the marketing. Early next year is the earliest optimistic estimate for a release. Boo.

On a lighter note, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and the BBC composer in residence has done another film score. The last one, for the film Bodysong, was amazing. I'm really looking forward to seeing 'There will be blood'. Question is do I listen to the score first and then see how the film fits to it or do I watch the film first and have the music forever associated with the images on screen? It's a tough one, fit the music to my imagination or listen to it with the intended visual accompaniment?

Schools PFI

2007-09-06T12:52:00.000+01:00

A programme to spend £45bn on rebuilding many schools took its first major step today. A new state of the art school has just opened in Bristol and it looks stunning. It came in on time and on budget. Other PFI initiatives across the public sector haven't worked so well. Like the classic case of the two hospitals in Coventry that needed refurbishing at a cost of £30 million pounds. To attract PFI money this plan was scrapped and a single new hospital was built at a final cost of £410 million pounds. The NHS trust is now in debt and owes the private sector partners loads of money. So Coventry swapped two hospitals for one that has less money and less beds and nurses and doctors for a total saving of -£380 million. By the same scale up of costs the schools rebuilding programme will cost £615bn, a debt that will have to be paid in future generations. Gordon Brown loves PFI because he doesn't have to raise taxes to get public service investment andhe passes the debt forward to a time when he won't be in power. Read Captive State by George Monbiot or talk to anyone who works for a privatised company or a joint venture or PFI initiative and share in the horror of what is to happen to our schools.

Darkness Falls

2007-09-03T11:13:00.000+01:00

This weekend I watched a few episodes from season 1 of the X-Files for the first time since I was a young teenager. One episode caught my eye. Mulder and Scully go into the woods to investigate the dissappearance of some loggers. It turns out the loggers cut down some really old trees in which there were some dormant insects, a bit like small fireflies. These attacked the loggers, drained them of all usefull bodily fluids and cocooned them. Except not during daytime or under lights. It turns out that the bugs don't work under light. Cue tense scenes in the log cabin with the petrol for the generator running low. One thing struck me when I rewatched this episode; why didn't they just light a fire? When they made a run for it why not carry burning logs? They were in a forest full of wood, why not use some of it? I also listened to a 1992 interview with Douglas Adams this weekend. He said he didn't like the fact that the rational skeptic was always derided on the X-Files and always turned out to be wrong. I still love the show but some of the conpiracy episodes now look just dumb. The standalone episodes were great, movie quality, well written and filmed and these are the ones that will endure. Even Darkness Falls.

YouTube

2007-08-31T23:42:00.000+01:00

Is it just me or has YouTube got really slow and boring?

Academic Literature

2007-08-30T10:10:00.000+01:00

Science is a collective effort in which we build on and expand the work of others. One of the most fundamental steps in the scientific process is the literature survey. If a scientist has an idea for an experiment or a theory they go and check all the published scientific work to see if anyone else has tried it. Keeping up with the literature is crucial because it can generate new ideas for work; so-and-so has some evidence for this but they need more proof using a different type of experiment or 'I wonder if they measured this or that'. Having access to the body of scientific journals is, therefore, crucial. In the olden days paper copies of each volume of all the journals would be kept in the library or academics would send off for copies of articles the library didn't have.

Now things have changed. The library here at York is getting rid of a lot of its journal volumes. They don't need the space. York has just had a second huge library built next to the existing one. They claim it is because no one loans the journals out. This is ridiculous. Of course no-one borrows the journals. They just photocopy the one article they need then put it back on the shelf. But why is this a problem? Aren't the journals available online now I hear you ask? No. We only have access to articles from 1995 in some of the main journals. We here in the surface science department only have access to articles in the journal Surface Science from the last 12 years even though there are important articles in that journal from way back. OK we have paper copies in the library but the process of thinning out resources means that for some articles there is no overlap and we have to send away for copies. This used to be free. Now they are to charge £2 per article. That's £2 of public money for a photocopy of a few A4 pages. The upshot of all this is that academics might be tempted to stick with the journals they have easy access to . Hard to obtain articles will only be brought in when the author is certain of their use. Important work or ideas might be ignored or not noticed and the well could dry up.

Lee Hughes

2007-08-29T15:57:00.000+01:00

Football player Lee Hughes killed a man and severely injured another in an RTA in which he was drunk and driving recklessly. In court he showed no remorse and behaved with total arrogance. After 3 years in prison he is now out and has immediately been signed to play for Oldham athletic. How has he been able to stay football sharp whilst in jail? Should he have been allowed to continue his football career upon release? Should the inevitable abuse he will suffer from away fans be quietly applauded or has the guy been punished enough? The question is the same one that we had to think about when the guy who stabbed Phillip Lawrence was released earlier this month; did the punishment fit the crime and should the offender be granted their full rights as a free man upon release? For starters Lee Hughes should have a lifetime driving ban. And a percentage of his earnings should go to his victims and their families. He should also be allowed to continue his football career.

In other motoring news a banned driver who led police on a high speed pursuit risking lives was caught and the judge gave him.... a driving ban. Sigh.

My iPod and Linux

2007-08-28T12:31:00.000+01:00

This weekend I had a go at getting my iPod working under my Ubuntu Linux OS. The first problem was that I couldn't write or delete anything on the ipod, even as root. So I had to visit my brother to use his Windows XP laptop to wipe the ipod and reset it to factory settings. This helped with the write problems.

So far so good. Next I tried to write my music library to the ipod via the Amarok interface I use (which is, for every other use, superb). The files write OK but only in short batches. If I try and write more than, say, 10gb then something falls over and the whole thing crashes. The files are present on the ipod but the contents database isn't there (Amarok must write this after it writes the music files). The end result is that the music is there but the ipod clickwheel menu system doesn't show it as present. I need to read into this a bit more. My current workaround is to use Amarok to manage my music collection and gtkpod to do all the to and fro business with the ipod. Not ideal.

This is how things are with Linux in my experience. Lots of fiddling around to get things working. I don't mind this though because a) everything is free and b) when things do get working they are superb in terms of reliability and functionality. However, I must admit that at times this weekend I've felt like buying a Mac.

Crime Crazy

2007-08-24T10:04:00.000+01:00

The whole of the UK is frothing at the mouth at the moment about crime. An 11 year old boy was shot in the back of the neck whilst playing football and he sadly later died from the loss of blood. This horrible tragedy is another item in the catalogue of shootings, stabbings, school fights filmed and put on YouTube and the general antisocial behaviour that seems to plague our consequence free liberal society.

The left have come out with the usual watering down arguments. August is a slow news month because the politicians are on holiday like everyone else. The Guardian said that this slow news effect is why we always hear about youth crime in August. Erm. No. It's because the kids are off schools that they can be the victims/perpertrators of crime.

The right have suggested National Service for all those who do not find work on leaving school, hard labour in prison, punishment for parents of unruly kids, removal of financial incentives in the welfare system that make a single mother better off than a couple who stay together to raise their children, a 2 year time limit on benefits for unemployment, tougher hands on policing/regular patrols and on and on.

The one person who has made sensible comment is Ian Duncan Smith, former head of the Conservative party. He said a many facetted approach is needed. Identifying problem families early and giving parenting support together with tough methods in crime fighting. Carrot and strong stick.

I worry that the media, by making it look like crime is the norm, encourage more crime and copycat crime. The broken window theory. If a house has a broken window already why not smash a second one? And why weren't the street gangs filmed in Liverpool yesterday wielding machetes for the camera arrested? Why was a TV film crew stoned as they drove past without the police intervening? The final insult came from the home secretary who said all this was OK because it is happening in a few tightly controlled areas - ie poor areas. But this isn't true. There have been many innocent middle class victims in recent months. Like Rhys Jones.

Emigration

2007-08-23T09:31:00.001+01:00

Last year nearly 200'000 British citizens officially emgrated, a record number. The main causes are attributed to;

Expensive housing
Fears over crime
Cost of living
Lack of jobs outside service industries
Poor weather

I can understand all of these reasons apart from the last one. This summer has been cold and wet but people emigrating last year didn't know this. Methinks there has been a bit of editorialising there. In general, the past few winters have been mild and the past few summers quite pleasant.

Learco Chindamo

2007-08-21T12:11:00.000+01:00

The man who murdered a school headmaster outside the school gates when he was 15 years old is about to be released from prison after serving 12 years. Learco Chindamo is an Italian citizen who moved here when he was 4 years old. There are now calls to deport him upon his release. Learco does not speak Italian and all of his family live in this country. I do not think he should be deported. What would be the purpose of this? Further punishment? I accept that we should not send out the signal that one way to gain UK citizenship is to murder a UK citizen. But this man has served his punishment and is now, by all accounts, rehabilitated and making a positive contribution to society by educating children who might get involved in gang/knife crime. If we believe he is still a risk to the public we should not release him from prison and we certainly shouldn't send him to Italy. What Learco Chindamo did was truly evil, but we can't just sweep him under the carpet now he has been through our legal system. From the sort of comments I have heard in the papers and on the web I think some people would prefer that we had executed Learco for his crime and got him out of the way.

We Don't Need No Education

2007-08-20T09:36:00.000+01:00

Professor Dylan Wiliam, an expert on exams and testing from the Institute of Education, has suggested that GCSE students (14-16 years old) are being taught in a mechanical, parrot fashion way just that material that will help them pass the test and maintain the position of the school in the league tables. He suggests that pupils should be taught to think and critically analyse just as much as they are loaded up with acquired knowledge. I agree with this is the sense that league tables should be scrapped. If a school is failing miserably then the government, which has access to the figures in private, could step in.

Professor Guy Claxton from the University of Bristol goes one step further. He suggests that 'everyone knows that the kind of performance required is about accurate retention and regurgitation. But the demand for those skills is now pretty low in the marketplace.' He suggests children should be taught how to use their initiative and ask 'good questions', skills which will be more useful to employers.

There are two issues here. The first is whether school should act to prepare children for work. If we are to mentally fatten children up for the marketplace like this then why not do it properly; teach them how to use powerpoint, how to fill in expenses claim forms, how to handle factory floor banter and how to stay awake on the production line. It is the birthright of every person to spend their formative years learning about themselves and the wider world around them. They need space to breathe and grow. They should not be prepared to be an employee.

Now the second issue. Critical analysis skills are important and so is initiative but knowledge and experience come first. In science we spend many years learning to speak the language before we attempt to debate with the native speakers. Many years spent learning all the key principles of Physics have not been to waste. Later in my undergraduate and doctoral years I have learned to critically evaluate the scientific literature and to judge whether an experiment presents a fair and accurate test or not. Only the latter was taught to me at GCSE level (in a very dilute form) and the former would have been beyond my reach.

I feel that the same must be true of other subjects. How can a history student write an essay on the role of women in the second world war without first learning all the important facts about that conflict? The best history lessons at school were the ones where I was told a fascinating story and we later went on to look at all the sources of evidence to support or refute that story. The worst lessons were where studied the theories of primary, secondary and tertiary evidence and then applied these to some small corner of history without a feeling for the events and the time.