Neil Hopcroft

I, for one, welcome our new powered-exoskeleton geriatric overlords

“Decomposing grassboxes, Carnage, blood and gore, Satanistic lawnmowers, Craving for more”

NSK are releasing Trans Slovenia Express Vol 2, featuring Laibach covering one of their own songs in the style of Kraftwerk and the Internationally Famous (in Belgium) Anne Clark. Among others. Looking forward to a return to the happy days of my Slovenian Techno phase.

I’m in the room at the top corner of the 70s concrete building stood atop one of the few hills in Norwich – our view covers the city centre, giving us a perfect vista for spotting fires in the city. There are six of us there, my boss, Simon, and a co-worker, Teresa, have already shown something of an enthusiasm about firemen. We’re setting up a new system for the council, collecting data and importing into the new database. Very occasionally we’ll get a call, mostly they’re from database support people returning calls made by the team leader.

One day, I don’t even remember what day it was, I take a call from a guy with a heavy Irish accent – “Theres a bomb”, he said, “lots of people are going to lose their lives”. This is not something I’d ever been trained for, but I knew that you were supposed to keep them talking. I don’t know that you can ever really deal with these kinds of things well, even if you’re trained for it. Its not like its something you get to practice much.

So I try to keep him talking. And while I am doing that I write the word ‘bomb’ in big letters on the jotter pad next to the phone to show to someone else in the room. My mind isn’t enough on what he is saying to remember it all, those words above are all I can remember now. He hangs up.

I’m shaking, and I try to explain to Simon what just happened. He calls the police, who come and evacuate the building – we share it with Norwich Union (I think, since I used to take great pleasure in walking in with a Legal and General umbrella, its the small things that make life interesting).

Outside, once they’ve made sure the building is safe, I talk to the police who take a statement from me. Not that I’ve really got much to say. We file back in, life goes on.

The next day I find out that seven or eight other council and utility buildings in the city had similar calls, nothing suspicious was found in any of them.

“T’anks to Mr. Bush”

“I don’t know why we need to tolerate the cheap artwork of a gadfly with a world view that is so offensive to a majority of the people”…couldn’t’ve said it better myself, but I’m not sure the works of Bush are within the realm of what we classically consider ‘art’, and its not that cheap.

I’m surprised theres enough data for them to say that “Start the riot” by Atari Teenage Riot is an unsafe song….thats gotta go on the ‘must have’ list.

This follows on from a conversation I was having at the weekend…the details of which will remain undisclosed to protect the guilty.

Oh, and, beermat: The infinite cat project starts here

“The blaze engulfed a car, burnt one building and scorched the giant teapot itself“

Theres a History of the interceptor and a lego version[0] but thats not what I’m wanting to talk about…I’m worried. I’ve been reading some things lately about whats happening in the world and thinking about them and they are worrying me.

Firstly, I don’t know whether anyone else has heard about the possibilities of power cuts over the upcoming winter? Basically the natural gas supply has been shrinking for a while now and its looking likely there isn’t going to be enough to feed our homes and power stations with the gas we want to use. Of course, this might just be scaremongering to push the future contract prices up but if the supply has been dwindling then maybe it doesn’t happen this year, maybe not next, but sooner or later it will happen. How are we, those of us who dwell in these rabbit hutches, going to cope without heat?

Then there was some American dude talking about hybrid cars, and how they’re actually not an environmental play but rather a performance enhancement. Now I’m not sure thats true – one of the most significant things about hybrids is the ability to use regenerative braking, turning your speed back into electricity when you’re slowing down. Right now they’re not very efficient but if you can reclaim half that energy you’re going to be getting a decent improvement over a normal friction braking system (theres also an observation that the regenerative brakes won’t suffer performance problems when heavily used, since they don’t heat up in the same way – though some of the non-regenerative electrical brake systems will have different properties under heavy usage, though I suspect they get better at stopping you rather than worse).

So this drove me to thinking about a couple of other questions – the energy cost of making a new car is around 1/3 the total lifetime energy cost, is this still true for hybrids? If so, this suggests that it is more efficient to continue using existing cars for longer rather than encourage a switch sooner. Though there are other factors to take into account – pollution and safety among others.

Next the SUV secondary market in the States is crashing, they’re starting to notice petrol prices rising and switching to cheaper-to-run cars.

Then I was thinking about slavery. There is a lot of racial tension remaining in this world, largely generated by what was the slave culture many years ago. And I wondered how some of the people in places we currently consider ‘sources of cheap labour’ will view their position in the world in, say, 100 years time. Are we creating another timebomb?

Finally, there seems to be a lot religious tension around at the moment, I don’t remember it being so prevalent when I was younger. So, has my view of it changed? Or are some of the things going on in the world at the moment being framed in terms of religious tension, when before they were described in other ways?

[0] And the ATeam, and cthulu

Sim skin (temporarily down, but worth a look when its back…)

pi – Four Parts in A Harmonic Minor (3:14 long, no less)

Prime time

Vat-grown beef

“Over 85% of Aries owners have a fixed address”

“The internet is not the sole basis upon which you can determine existence. It sounds simple but people are starting to forget. If it doesn’t have a website, that doesn’t make something low quality. If you can’t Google your blind date, that doesn’t make them a freak. If one website says something about anything, it’s more than likely pure invention and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Checking your sources does not mean finding another website that says the same. Fiction is self-perpetuating.”

“For decades London thrived as a busy crossroads for terror”…and I’m not going to mention that Americans funded a good chunk of the terror we’ve hosted in London…I just hope this is not the general feeling of people over the pond, that its just a few select headlines pulled totally out of context. Any of our cousins from across the water care to comment?

No, not me, its a book review….

Subtitled “The curse of the single girl” this book follows the story of the author through her descent from ordinary girl to desperate ‘still single’ black sheep of the family suffering a drought.

I was intrigued by this book, since it seemed to have a certain resonance with my ‘still single’ status, and I wondered if it could offer any insight into my own situation. She touches on subjects like internet dating, where she met a guy who seemed perfectly eloquent and charming online but turned out to be a bumbling buffoon in real life, and speed dating in the form of starting out with coffee dates where you’d only have to endure each others company for 20 minutes if it really was wrong.

Her description of wondering if this prospect is a streak-breaker was a little unnervingly close to my own feelings given such situations, often the answer is a resounding no – if I’ve waited this long its worth waiting a little longer for the *right* person.

With her unique family and continuous attempts to run away from herself there is an endearing quality to her writing, you feel like you’re being brought up to speed to join her council of advisors.

A very readable book, funny in points but in a car-crash kind of way, you can see things are going to go horribly wrong you just don’t know how. It probably won’t appeal to everyone, but anyone out there who has turned ‘still single’ should make an effort to read it – I think its helped me understand a bit more, whether I can do anything useful with that understanding is another question.