Know the game “Fortunately Unfortunately”? Here’s a quick example:

Fortunately my wife and I are relatively healthy people who don’t get ill often.  Unfortunately Ellie and Samuel both got colds a few weeks back.  Fortunately I didn’t get it.  Unfortunately I got one a week later.  Fortunately Ellie and Samuel both made steady recovery.  Unfortunately I didn’t.  Fortunately I work from home and run my own business, so I didn’t have to use up any sick leave.  Unfortunately I still had to take a couple of days off work because the cold was that bad.  Fortunately I tend to recover from colds fairly quickly, and without the aid of medication.  Unfortunately on this occasion I was forced to take a barrage of pills to try to combat the symptoms.  Fortunately they have been working and my cold is now nearly gone.  Unfortunately I am still left with a bit of a sniffle and a rather heavy cough.

There, that was fun.

So yes, the cold is now thankfully on its way out, which is good because I really don’t like being ill.  I’m not the sort of person to admit defeat, and I definitely don’t accept the concept of the so-called “Man Flu”.  Still, the pills have been useful, if only to help me sleep.  In fact, during a phone call home my mum recommended that I take some multivitamins, just in case that helped.  So we went to Tesco and had a look at the range.  I was quite surprised at what I found on the shelf.

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Now, I’m not normally one to talk about politics.  I usually have absolutely no interest in such things, and I tend to be of the opinion that life will continue regardless of which party is elected.  Strange, then, that this year should feel so different.  Politics has been ‘the thing’ to talk about – on the train, in the car, round the dinner table, on the internet, no doubt even at the bottom of the sea.  I’ve taken more of an interest in the elections this year than any other year.  And all because of the Lib-Dems.

Our current election process works on the basis of a ‘first past the post’ process of vote counting, which works best when there are two main parties to choose between.  In the past, it’s been a two-party system, with Labour and Conservative battling against each other for people’s attention.  Sure, there have been other parties in there too, but they’ve gone mostly unnoticed.  Until this year, when Britain took the decision to host distinctly American-style Prime Ministerial Debates, and invited Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg to join in the foray.  Suddenly the Lib-Dems rose to prominence, got people’s attention, and made it look like all three parties were level-pegging.

At that point, a hung parliament was almost guaranteed.  With three parties equally popular, no one party can have a majority, and the ‘first past the post’ election system fails.

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Life is full of stages.  History, experience, science and society have, through their own varied means and with very little co-operation, dictated to us how our lives should develop and when each milestone should be reached.  In the case of babies, these stages are closely packed, and a by-the-book baby can be expected to learn new things and reach new levels of ability according to a tried and tested timetable.  Throughout childhood, those milestones get further apart, but they’re still there, telling us how intelligent we should be, how our maturity should show itself, and so on.  The preset stages don’t finish at the dawn of adulthood, of course – we have achievements to attain here too, like owning a car, buying insurance, taking out a mortgage, attending jury duty, voting in the elections, paying into a pension, even retiring.  All these things are expected of us, not necessarily in a particular order, especially later in life, but we are each of us judged by what everyone else reckons we “ought to be doing by now”.

And then there are those of us who tear the rule books into pieces and feed the bits to the next door neighbour’s dog.

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My friend Phill recently bought a new mobile phone.  Apparently it’s shiny.  Last Christmas I bought my wife a new mobile phone.  It too is shiny.  My own mobile phone, on the other hand, was shiny and new in 2005, and is now considerably less shiny than it used to be thanks to my keys rubbing a lot of the silver off the bottom of the casing.  No wonder, then, that I felt a few pangs of jealousy this week.

Unfortunately I just can’t justify buying myself a new phone, since my Motorola L6 does actually work fine.  So rather than get depressed about the situation I decided to have another go at revitalising my phone and getting the most out of it.  A little research got me Opera Mini 4.2, which is a sleek and feature-filled web browser for my phone.  Not only is it infinitely nicer to look at and use than the built-in one, it’s also miles faster thanks to a proxy compression that Opera provides – basically every web page my phone requests is sent via the Opear server, compressed until it’s tiny and then sent to my phone, which speeds up download times considerably.  The result is that my phone is now capable of checking e-mails and looking at web pages without a century passing between pages.

Then I started downloading yet more stuff.   (more…)

Even if you’ve caught only a few minutes of news on TV today it will have been pretty much impossible to miss today’s big news.  America elected Barack Obama as their next President, beating John McCain by a significant margin.  In fact, so big is this news that it dominates the headlines here in the UK too.  It’s as if the American President is our America President too.

I have been interested to note a certain level of bias in our news.  Now, I know politically-minded critics will say that no media is totally unbiased, but some are more likely to express opinions than others.  For instance, I am not at all surprised when Channel 4 or even ITV shows a report that is clearly in favour of one candidate over the other, but I was more surprised when the mighty BBC fell into the same trap.  I’m not at all interested in politics, and yet the media reports were such that I know plenty about Obama and next to nothing about McCain.  It’s as if this country has been told that Obama was the right person to win, and we’ve all just accepted it without realising it.  Everyone’s really pleased that Obama won, implying that we wouldn’t have been quite so overjoyed with the alternative outcome.

But what has intrigued me most is the different approach the Americans have in their elections. (more…)

Today was a first for me. I spent more than £20 on a tank of petrol. For most people I suspect £20 is hardly anything, but my little Mini has a tiny tank and a range of only about 200 miles. But so far I’ve been looking at an average of £15-18 to fill up. Today the price of petrol was £1.14 a litre. I can remember when it was half that.

It’s a sobering thought that all the environmentalists’ warnings are finally coming true. I remember being told in a Biology lesson once that we would run out of fossil fuels by 2040, and I can remember thinking “ah well, that’s years off, someone will find a solution by then.” So far, no one has. If things progress in the same direction, we’re in for a tough time of it over the next few years. Oil is becoming increasingly hard to find, putting prices up both for businesses and individuals. 2040 may seem like a long way off, but the effects of the fuel crisis are beginning to be felt now.

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I’ve just received a bill from British Gas.  We’re on paperless billing, so it’s all done online.  I logged into their web site, checked the bill, and noticed that the bill was based on an estimate rather than a direct meter reading.  So I took a reading from our meter, fed it into their web site, and the web site told me that because the reading I had given was lower than their estimate I would have to phone them to confirm it.  At this point I began to wonder whether I was going to have the same problems I’d had with BT.

After a few minutes in the queue (incidentally, I was impressed to note that they told me how long I was likely to be in the queue) I was put through to an operator, who was British, and who dealt with the information swiftly and effectively, updating the information on my account there and then.  I then had the option of either paying the bill on the phone, or doing it online immediately.  I chose to pay on the phone, and all was perfectly straightforward.  After the phone call I checked online, and the details had already been updated.

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Sunday it was supposed to rain.  At least, that’s what the weather report said on Thursday.  By the time it got to Sunday morning the MET office had revised its decision and said that it wasn’t going to rain.  But it was going to be grey and misty and cloudy and miserable.  And it was.  In the morning.  By the afternoon we were enjoying glorious sunshine.

And it was on this day that I went with Colchester Mini Club to the Manningtree High School Classic Vehicle Show.  Not restricted to just Minis, there were cars of all sorts in attendance, all (or at least most) shined up and tidied to be on show.  Photos of the event are in my new Picasa album.

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Yesterday, without warning, ‘one’ railways suddenly ceased to exist. In its place are platforms decked out with “National Express East Anglia” logos and posters, and trains in a new livery. Overnight, it seems, the company was taken over, everything changed, and no one seems to know what’s going on. In fact, so new is this news that I’ve only been able to find one article telling me about the takeover. One’s web site no longer exists, but redirects to one of the many* National Express web sites.

This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, and I don’t expect much to change other than the words on the signage. After all, when ‘one’ took over from Great Eastern very little actually happened – the livery changed on the outside, but the trains were exactly the same on the inside. I think the only thing ‘one’ actually did was put prices up and convince us all that having their trains go slower would speed things up (the idea does work in theory, in that less time is spent sitting in stations, but it does seem a little backwards). However, I think the most frustrating thing about ‘one’ was the name – it’s so pretentious and odd-sounding. “One welcomes you to this train”. Why thank you, good train driver, one is most grateful for the welcome.

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Back in December I picked up the telephone to call someone, only to find that we had been disconnected.  The cause, apparently, was that there was an outstanding balance on our account, and the line had been cut off because of it.  We could receive calls and use the internet, but not dial out.  This all stemmed from an issue we had had paying our previous bill, which we ended up paying in two lots because they wouldn’t let us set up a direct debit.  The BT system clearly got confused, seeing two payments, and refunded the second one.  There was no indication that this was a problem, and I presumed from that that I would be able to pay the remainder with the next bill.  I was wrong.

There was nothing on the BT web site when I logged in saying that the line had been stopped, nor that the outstanding balance was a problem.  I nevertheless paid the outstanding £22 immediately, and expected to be reconnected within 24 hours, as per the recorded message we get directed to when trying to dial out.  No such luck.  It’s now the second week in January, and we’re still not connected.  The money has been paid, it’s on my bank statement, and it registers on my BT account too that there is no outstanding balance.  But the line is still blocked.  A strongly worded letter was sent back in December, on the day we were cut off, but I have yet to receive any correspondence from them in return.

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This weekend saw my friend Anne-Marie‘s Christmas play ‘While You Were Sleeping’ performed at her home church in Bexleyheath.  This has been a regular gig for several years, and I’ve helped out the past few years with graphics and posters and suchlike.  This year I was asked to design posters, put the programmes together, and design some newspapers.  Yes, that’s right, newspapers.

The play’s theme revolved around a late night news team in Bethlehem, looking in vain for some hot story to cover, and in their efforts completely missed the birth of Christ because it was too ‘ordinary’ and ‘unspectacular’.  The title ‘While You Were Sleeping’ is actually taken from a song by Casting Crowns by the same name, which is a very poignant song about missing the truth of Christmas in all the hype and busyness of the season.  It was a fantastic play, with some hilarious scenes and in-jokes that only a few of us really got.

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This week saw Pope Benedict announce that to celebrate 150 years since the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl in Lourdes pilgrims traveling to the town could claim time off from Purgatory.  This has caused widespread confusion and opposition amongst Protestants, who both denounce the authority of the Pope and don’t generally believe in Purgatory either.  This is a can of worms unlike any that’s been seen in recent years, and may take a while to settle.

Now, I’m no Biblical scholar, but I do have some thoughts I would like to share on this topic, exploring the nature of forgiveness, sin, Purgatory, judgement, hell and heaven.  Not necessarily in that order.

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I recently had the pleasure of watching The Queen, the 2006 film starring Helen Mirren, which had been very kindly sent to us by Amazon as part of their film rental service (which is hideously unpredictable, but that’s another story).  In concept it is dangerously true to life, showing those awesome and awful events surrounding the death of Princess Diana.  The danger is that not only were those events so dear to the public’s heart and such a tragedy for so many people who had never met her, but that the film revolved around real people, most of whom are still alive today.  To represent these real people in a way that is revealing, convincing, yet not overly comical, is a challenge few would take on.  Needless to say, I thoroughly approved of the film, its concept, and its delivery, and if we hadn’t had to post the DVD back to Amazon I would have enjoyed watching it again.

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While having breakfast this morning I happened to glance across the room at our new telephone.  We recently bought a set of cordless phones with some wedding money, and have set one up downstairs in the lounge and the other in the office upstairs.  They look pretty neat.  Except that the one downstairs appeared to be switched off.  Odd, I thought, I don’t remember switching it off.  Upon closer inspection I discovered that not only was it very definitely off but it wouldn’t switch on again either.  A distinctly iffy smell was detectable too, and when I took the cover off the back to get to the batteries I discovered that one of the rechargeable AAA batteries had exploded.  Not good. (more…)

In my Bible study this morning my commentary was expounding on part of Hebrews that talks about Jesus as our High Priest, and how Christ suffered to be able to perfectly sympathise with our suffering, and in so doing more completely comfort us.  He was completely human, experienced the same challenges, the same temptations, the same sort of sufferings, and because of that we can draw nearer to God.

I’m not so sure I agree.  At least, not in full.

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This, rather than me sharing something amazing with the world, is actually more of a rant / feature request.  I have just spent some time searching the interweb for a contacts address book application that displays all my contacts on a map, allowing you to see graphically where everyone is.  Sure, there are plugins and stuff that allow me to click someone’s address and have a map pop up showing where that one person lives, but it would be really fascinating to just show a map of where everyone is, all at the same time.  So far, no one seems to have done this.  Maybe it’s just that I’m the only person who might possibly find this interesting or at all useful, but I’d have thought what with the Google Maps API available someone would have done this by now!  Surely it can’t be all that difficult, especially since you can overlay custom content onto a Google Map.  Is it really that much of a stretch to ask for someone to embed a Google Map into an address book application and link it into the addresses stored for people?  If anyone has found anything that matches my hazy description, do let me know!  Even if I don’t end up using it, it would be interesting to know if something like this exists.

Of course, the obvious solution is that I actually sit down and write the application myself, but that involves programming, and I swore never to do that again after I finished my degree…

Most of the science I learned at school was reasonably straightforward – I understood it and accepted it, and most of the time remembered it too. Except for potential energy, which never made any sense whatsoever. In fact, I recently told a teacher friend of mine why potential energy doesn’t work, and he couldn’t counter my argument. The following is therefore my thought process in trying to understand and/or disprove potential energy, and may or may not actually include anything scientific.

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Sorry, but this rant really has to be voiced now and not left to stew, otherwise it will ingrain itself on my brain forever and I’ll never be rid of it. And I don’t like rants following me around, it’s somewhat disconcerting. So if you don’t like rants, read no further. You have been warned.

Right, today I got some post. Three letters in fact. Nothing unusual about that, except that on first inspection all three envelopes looked identical. That’s odd, I thought, why would my bank be sending me three letters all at once? It was only when I opened them that it twigged what had happened. They were letters informing me of a change to the interest rate on my savings accounts. But rather than sending one letter to the owner of the accounts, they had sent one for each account, regardless of the address! Not only a waste of paper but a waste of ink and postage too. And no doubt there was an innocent computer involved too, using valuable processor time and inconveniencing a significant number of electrons, all to no purpose.

Ok, not the end of the world, but still.

Rant over.