5 minutes is all you need ...

I was researching Ignite presentations and I came across this. It doesn't need a whole lot of writing about, just watch it, it's only 5 minutes ...

When a message is this powerful, 5 minutes is all you need to make a lasting impression.

Religions are about helping people

Watching the dreadful events in Woolwich unfold, I'm saddened what people will do in the name of religion. Religions should be about helping people, not hurting people, but all too often they get twisted by the minds of men. And none are immune. I was going to give a list of religions at this point with links to their holy books where they talk about tolerance and the sanctity of life (they all do you know), and then links to the atrocities that have been committed in their name but it got too depressing :-(

Anyway for me, I think this sums it up - Anyone who kills in the name of a religion, whatever religion, betrays it utterly.

Built to last

The Disposable age

It is sad to say that we live in a disposable age. Lots of things we buy are just not built to be repaired. If it breaks you just buy a new one. Even if it doesn't break, the rate of technological change, means for a lot of things your force to replace them just to keep working.

Case in point, we had a Canon LiDE 20 flatbed scanner. When we updated Windows on our PC we discovered there were no drivers available for Windows 7 :-(. Result, we had to throw away a perfectly good, working scanner and buy a replacement simply because there were no drivers. I'm sure Canon were very happy with this, but it is most definitely not environmentally friendly.

Similarly, we a photographic printer, a Mitsubishi CP3020DE. It's a great printer, but the latest drivers you can get for it are for Windows 7 32-bit. You can't get 64-bit drivers for it and Mitsubishi are not going to produce any.  Result we have to keep a PC with Win 7 32-bit just so we can continue to use the printer, but eventually we're going to have to replace the printer.

Built to last

Thankfully some things are still built to last. Dualit toasters for one thing.

It has a wonderful, solid feel to it. Here is something that you feel has been built with some pride and the expectation that it will still be toasting bread in your kitchen in decades hence. Note the use of screws to hold the casing on. This is a) unusual in modern appliances, and b) implies something quite interesting. It implies that this object is built with the expectation that it is going to be taken apart at some point in the future. It can be repaired. It is built to last.

I'm not sure how old our is, it must be 10 or 15 years, but still going strong.

It is very difficult in our modern lifestyle not to be disposable but it is worth trying.

A bit of a break ...

A bit of a break from the last entry ....

Quick precise ...

2011 was not the best year. Work was problematic and health was very up and down. Even worse we entered no agility competitions for the whole year. Actually that's not entirely true, we did enter some we just didn't manage to make it to any of them :-(

That was the glass half empty side of the year, the glass half full side of the year, was a new horse and a new puppy :-)

Amber actually arrived at the very end of last year, but it was close enough to count as this year.

She was only 6 months old when she arrived so she's done a lot of growing ... and collecting mud :-)

Enya arrived in January and did all the things new puppies do.

She played, she slept, she chewed things, including a skirting board and a £5 note, and she wrapped her owner round her little claw :-)

Now the great thing about years, is you get a brand new one every year, so now we have 2012 and it's already off to a good start. It's January, the days are getting longer and we already have snowdrops up at the stables ...

So bring on 2012 .....

Muddy Dogs .... or Dog anyway

We try to be good dog owners and take our dogs for walks three times a day. Morning, lunchtime & evening. The lunchtime walk is more in the manner of a gentle leg-stretch combined with a check of the horses to make sure they're OK and still in the right field. It has to be fitted into a lunch hour so there's not too much slack time to cope with the unexpected ...

Like what happens when your 8 month old collie loses her tennis ball in the stream. Not the clean part of course, the swamp-like part. It's a very good swamp like part, complete with raised duck boards to stop you disappearing up to the arm pits in mud. The sort of swamp where you won't even be mildly surprised if an alligator slithered across the path in front of you and a bit of moss waved at you.

I foolishly watched the tennis ball float down the stream and thought that was that. I turned to go on with the walk and followed our other two dogs (the good ones). Load splash behind me. Dreading what I might see I turned around to be confronted with a collie puppy (?) enthusiastically searching for her ball, whilst chest deep in mud, not water, MUD. Deep. black, smelly mud - the real stuff.

The ball was long gone by this stage having followed the current, but collies are not to be deterred. Eventually, a long eventually with several re-visits, she was persuaded back onto the bridge.

Those paws are supposed to be white!

I'm sure it's down there somewhere ....

Once removed from the swamp the extent of the damage was accessed - was this by some miracle, a quick towel off, or was this going to be a full-blown bath?

Bath, definitely, bath.

So lunchtime went on a little longer than expected and we have a collie who smells of Evening Primrose.

However care will have to be taken on this evening's walk, otherwise she'll be straight back in. Collies have long memories and she knows she lost a tennis ball there. What was lost, can be found .... evening if Daddy is sobbing quietly on the bridge. He'll be happy once I bring the ball back, won't he?

A New Year and A New Arrival ...

A New Year and we have a new arrival :-)

Her name is Ausdan Amber Angel and she's a 6 month old Norwegian Fjord Horse

She arrived on New Year's Eve from Wales ... fashionably late. She was supposed to be here before Christmas, but several feet of snow and then a good thick coating of ice delayed her departure. So she finally arrived the day before yesterday, a little bewildered and very unsure about her new home. However a new field of fresh grass, a bale of hay, and especially a large grey Welsh Cob/Arab mare for company (and to hid behind) she seems to be settling in. After sticking like glue to Becky (the aforementioned Welsh Cob/Arab) she's now starting to investigate fields and people and started doing little foal canters round the field. We're confidentially looking forward to her becoming a little madam .... I mean charmer :-)

Christmas Crashes and Other Tales

Another year, other Christmas. Technically it was even a White Christmas ... technically? Well it didn't actually snow on the day, but there was still plenty of white stuff still on the ground from earlier in the week.

A Christmas Dog Walk!

However it wasn't all tinsel, turkey and presents - with an absolutely immaculate sensing of timing our AV File Server (Audio Visual) decided to crash on Christmas morning. Well it didn't so much crash as die ... completely, utterly and irretrievably. I was adding some extra storage to it and this required a reboot. Everything was going smooth and by the numbers, until the server didn't restart after the reboot. Some fairly rapid and frenzied diagnoses later it was determined that its motherboard was completely kaput. For those in the know, not even beep codes. Ho hum.

Open heart surgrey on a mini-ITX server

 If it was mid-year you could get a replacement motherboard next day, however given it's Christmas and half the country is buried in snow, the earliest we can get a replacement here is Thursday :-(

For once I can feel fairly smug at this point as all the data was backuped before I started and anyway it sits on an external storage array - a Drobo (www.drobo.com).

The Drobo temporarilty sat on a desk

So the Drobo was moved from the rack to a temporary home on the office desk and hooked up to one of the desktop machines. This was renamed and re-IPed so, like Clark Kent emerging from a phone box, it's now masquerading as the AV server. Serenity, films, photos and music, has been restored to the household.

So the moral of this Christmas Tale? - Always backup your data!  This was just an annoying inconvenience for us, which ate a bit of time. It could have been much, much worse; the data on this server is all our digital photos (~50,000), music and various home movies. A thousand, thousand memories. I know you never think it will happen to you, but one day it will. PCs break, disks corrupt, CDs and DVDs fade. Remember, data isn't real until it exists in at least two places, so always, ALWAYS, have a backup.

So a final thought for Christmas - where does the rise of the mobile phone and the subsequent demise of the phone box leave Superman? Caught short and exposed? Don't let your data be ;-)

Merry Christmas!

Getting to Work

If you thought your journey to work was bad, check this out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txdv_oNq81I&feature=player_embedded

(Climber's view as an engineer goes up a 1,768ft tower)

I get goose bumps just watching it, however the major problem is:

How do you take the dogs to work ?  :-)

UPDATE: Unfortunately the video has been taken off YouTube - you can read the reason here http://www.theonlineengineer.org/TheOLEBLOG/?p=561, however if you do a search on "1768ft" or "radio tower climb" on Google you'll likely find a copy of it.

Washing Instructions

We only have three setting on our washing machine here: 40°C, the wool cycle and an incendiary 90°C. Actually it's a very nice washing machine and has a whole host of setting and dials on it, but we're simple folk here. The bedding gets washed on a very eco unfriendly and incendiary 90°C, the wollen stuff get washed on the wool setting to prevent shrinkage, and everything else gets washed on 40°C and tumbled dried*. If it doesn't survive this washing regime it's not going to survive in our household. Surprisingly, despite all the dire warnings and mulitude of symbols on the labels, virtually everything does. This includes some items that claim to be dry-clean only.

This bears out something I heard on a radio programme years ago. They were interviewing a clothing manufacturer who admitted that some of the time they put "Dry-clean only" labels on just to be on the safe side. Safe for them, but tedious and somewhat expensive for us, not to mention rather eco-unfriendly.

Perhaps we should have a "Dry-clean-ish" label and a "Dry-clean-only-and-we-really-really-do-mean-it" label.

*Not always, depends on the weather.

Harvest Time

We were out walking the dogs and the farmers were hard at work getting the harvest in before the rains arrived again. The sunset made everything wonderfully spectacular.

It's moments like this that you just can't buy ...

The Working Week

A colleague on a project I worked on drew this many years ago - it's still completely true !

Hygienic Insanity

Caution: Touching life may be damaging to your child's health.

We were on a local farm over the weekend and they had a section where kids (both large and small) could go and see the farm animals. Not touch, you understand, just see. It was most definitely was NOT a petting section. There were signs asking you not to touch the animals and dispensers of handwash everywhere so you could sanitize yourself immediately if you felt any countrysde had touched you. What tipped this over the edge into the realms of insanity was the fact that all the animal enclosures were double fenced so you couldn't physically get within 3 feet of any animal, and they still had handwash dispensers right there by the fence.

Please wash your hands after touching life

I realise the E.coli outbreak at Godstone's Farm (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10311808) caused a lot of heartache, but this is going over the top. What kind of children are we going to raise? If children are never exposed to germs, they never build up any resistance to them. I'm not suggesting being stupid about this, but a little bit of common sense and handwashing goes a long way. I'm not blaming the farm for this insanity - undoubtedly they are worried about being sued if anyone falls ill after a visit.

When we're out walking the dogs we get a lot of parents & children asking if they can stroke the dogs. Perhaps we should start carrying Health & Safety disclaimers and ask people to sign them before allowing them to stroke the dogs .... or not. We'll let a little sanity and dog stroking exist in our corner of the world :-)

Interestingly, you can clinically prove that children raised with pets are two things. 1) Healthier and; 2) more mentally stable than children who are not. I suspect they're they're also happier, but that one's a personal opinion. The healthier is very simply - they get exposed to more bugs through their interactions with their pets and that makes their immune systems more robust and better able to repel the nasty bugs. The mentally stable is also easy. Firstly pets give you unconditional love with no strings attached, secondly if you tell your dog a secret in strictest confidence, it will most definitely NOT go and tell every other dog in the class (sadly people are not so reliable).

Caution: NOT stroking dogs may be damaging to your child's health :-)

Celebrating Mediocrity

This came from a discussion with a friend about how some people cannot cope with losing nowadays. They don't want to work any harder, they just want to win. The problem is some elements of the government and society are trying give people their wish and make this happen.

There's a great bit in The Incredibles film where they talk about this. They use the phrase "celebrate mediocrity" which about sums it up.

Helen: I can't believe you don't want to go to your own son's graduation.
Bob: It's not a graduation. He is moving from the 4th grade to the 5th grade.
Helen: It's a ceremony!
Bob: It's psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional... 

If you turn everyone into a winner then no one is a winner. You devalue the whole concept of winning. Perhaps the problem is we don't teach people how to compete anymore. Winning is good, but that doesn't make failing to win bad. You just have to fail with style. From another Pixar film - Toy Story - at the end Buzz Lightyear says "This isn't flying. This is falling with style!" If you fail with style then perhaps in reality you win.

Spookly enough they were kinda talking about this on the radio this morning. The A level results are out this morning and a lot of people are going to be disappointed about not getting a place at university because of the cutbacks. Someone raised the very valid point that part of this has been caused by the government trying to send everyone to university. It used to be very competitive to get a place at university, then they went through the phase when it seemed as if they were trying to send everyone in the country to university. Very commendable, but it's not going to make everyone brighter. It's politically incorrect to say this but some people are brighter than others. You send the bright ones to university, you don't send the others. Raise the bar again. Make going to university something to be desired, to be worked for, to be earned and if that means only the top 10% go (as it used to be) then so be it.

BUT the point most people miss is this doesn't make people who go to university better, just different. Who's the best out of a Noble prize winning physicist and a Australian Aborigine? That depends if your in CERN or the middle of the Australian outback. If it's the middle of the Australian outback I know which one I'd rather be with, and it's not the one wearing the lab coat. So by all means help people to reach their maximum potential, whatever that potential is, just don't assume it's gonna be the same for everyone.

So your challenge for today is go out and give something a try, give it your best shot ... and if you fail with style your still a winner as far as I'm concerned :-)