Neil Hopcroft

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.

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I never did write up my trip to Venturefest in Oxford, did I?

A final fling for Powermagic, well, for the moment at least. I booked into a travel lodge at the bottom of the hill by the Cowley works junction of the ring road….this isn’t going to be a fun way to wake up on Monday morning, is it? In the event it wasn’t that unpleasant – I wonder howcome theres always so much traffic when I’m trying to drive that section of the road?

The first thing I noticed about the conference itself was the selection of cars, with two distinct types, the ten year old bangers and the new-model Mercs and Beamers. Everyone is either desperately in need of money or has more than they sensibly know what to do with.

There were two marquees in the car park of Unipart, the parts arm of the Cowley plant, and some presentations being made in their conference facilities. The exhibition in the tents was made of two halves, some ‘permanent’ stands, those there for the whole two days, and some constantly changing minor exhibits. The majority of stands were trying to bribe people to stay nearby by offering sweets or nicer coffee than the caterers (which wasn’t much of a challenge).

A lot of the stands were peopled by the bright young things from their respective offices, bringing cute young girls along to a fair largely populated with old rich guys and aspiring entrepeneurs seems somehow cynical but probably does the job. Grandi was in his element.

There were a series of presentation tracks, too. We went along to a number of talks by hopeful companies seeking finance. It was interesting to see the different presentation styles, and different reactions to their unrealistic financial forecasts. Some had much stronger stories than others, all were crazy ideas in their own ways, but highlights of idiocy included floating petal houses and flirtomatic.

My general feel from the two days was that there is plenty of finance looking for opportunities and a scarcity of appropriate investments for a lot of people. It has also made me believe more strongly that the way to succeed in this world is to have a self funded business expanding from profit – venture and angel finance is useful for a certain subset of businesses for which the window of opportunity is near enough that a for-profit approach won’t allow them to move quick enough (many tech companies fall into this subset) but it is so expensive.

Typing ‘Brazil’ and ‘Pi’ into Liveplasma pretty much draws a picture of my favorite films. Thats pretty impressive for a search engine.

Diamond fiction

Pixelroller – another kind of decorator (eye-safe)

Armchair handstands, among others

“This thing allows you to record your own clever message that plays when someone pulls the toilet paper.”

“Wanted: 30 chinamen and a zeppelin for elaborate practical joke”

And one for sushidog – These are the guys I was talking about the other day.

It used to be that whenever I started a new job one of my grandparents died. That was quite depressing. But recently fate has been getting more ambitious – I started my last permanent job in August 2001 and I’ve only been at my latest job for a few weeks. I’m just hoping they put the bins back on the stations now that they’ve developed bombs that don’t need to be planted in bins.

I was pleased by the concern shown by some of my friends in Japan, but it struck me as slightly odd, too…they regularly have earthquakes there, if part of a city is brought to a halt by a quake a good chunk of the citizens in the local area /will/ be directly affected by it. It would cause a much more pervasive destruction, within which it is reasonable to make sure those you know are OK. And, without wishing to trivialise the situation, yesterdays events weren’t a great deal more than another day of tube timetabling problems for most of the people affected.

Any London based people who feel they would like to get away for a few days in the country, let me know.

Theres a helluva good lightning storm going on outside at the moment….oddly just a constant rumble of thunder accompanying it, no rain, few loud cracks, its just like someone turned up the A14 a bit. And put the sun on ‘strobe’. The rain’ll be here soon.

In the meantime, here’s some zombie dogs.

Todays car boot fair trip yielded a brief chat with lark_ascending, two board games and more fruit than I can realistically process before the mould sets in.

One of the boardgames is so unusual the internet has never heard of it – The Bay City Rollers On Tour, the game. The closest I could find is KISS on tour, which looks like a later game based around the same kind of idea. I /think/ this was a good find, but I’m not sure yet. Gameplay-wise it looks pretty crude, but how could I resist?

Anyone about tomorrow night for an impromtu fruit salad and Bay City Rollers gig?

Rover get the decorators in.
(watch your eyes – this is what would happen if Masa-sans friends were let loose with a 200-series)