17/08/2007 by Lee.

Police in Hampshire are taking twice weekly skateboarding lessons in an attempt to “bond” with the local youth. Do they not realise that any attempt by an adult to do something perceived as cool by kids is doomed to failure? It becomes instantly naff.  How embarrassing is it to see an older relative trying to dance at a wedding?

Once they have their new found skateboarding skills what will they do with them? Will each police car have a skateboard in the back ready for those footpath pursuits? Instead of wasting their time with skateboarding, how about learning a useful  skill such as free running or “parkour” as it is also known. This would give police the ability to leap fences, scale (and indeed descend) buildings and use all today’s street furniture to their advantage in pursuing criminals on the run. I was going to put a nice link in here so you could see it in action, but thanks to a slight technical hitch I can’t. Go to you tube and search for “Parkour” and you’ll see what I mean. Any-hoo, I digress.

The cost of these training sessions is being funded by you and me via our taxes, and I for one am not happy about it. The police do a (generally) good and difficult job, yet things like this tend to make them a bit of a laughing stock.  

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14/08/2007 by Lee.

What would we do without it? You wouldn’t be reading this for a start and life would generally be much more dull. Even the most pointless of questions can be answered in seconds. Did you know that Mr Greedy of the Mr Men has such short arms that he couldn’t possibly eat? Is his weight problem glandular rather than diet based? But there is barely a day goes by that I am not stunned by the use that people put this revolutionary technology to.

Want to know what sound a contented guinea pig makes? Click here and you can find out. Heard of cow tipping? The redkneck pursuit of getting drunk and then pushing over a cow? Why not try it online here. Not all of these are useful of course. Now shoes is another issue. We all need shoes, but we can’t all afford new ones. Help is at hand though with the growing used shoe market. Once you’ve got your new shoes you may want to consider growing a beard. You may have thought this to be a simple process of not shaving but there is much more to it than that. By a stroke of luck, you can now get beard growing advice on-line!

So you’ve grown your beard, bought some used shoes and are probably by this point barred from the house for getting a little weird. The last refuge of the opressed male is of course the garden shed. Being a competitive sex we of course feel the need to rate our shed and compare it with others. GOOD NEWS!! You can thanks to the internet! But what to do in your new shed? Plants and radio ham may seem the obvious choices but the really keen shed user goes a little further. To progress to really advanced shed use you will of course need to get some power to your shed. Whilst most of us would simpy hook it up to the mains, one American schoolboy decided to build a nuclear reactor in his shed. If I was wearing one I would take my hat off to him! Whilst cheap nuclear power may not be possible in your shed, there are other things you can do. How about building your own hovercraft for example? Surely every mans dream! Floating to the fridge on a bed of air to open a nice cold beer.

Yes, the internet can (and indeed does) provide Facebook, email and countless practical applications it’s the lunacy that I salute. A library can provide words, but it’s the comic book shop that fuels imagination.

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13/08/2007 by Lee.

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10/08/2007 by Lee.

Well, it’s been a while so indulge me.

I have a pretty major failing. It appears that my mind reading and predicting the future skills are somewhat lacking. I have come into the office today (rather than work from home) simply to attend one meeting this morning. That meeting has now been cancelled as the host  has decided to work from home! Well thanks a chuffing bunch. Presumably this was not a spur of the moment call and if the cancellation had been sent through last night I wouldn’t have got up at 5:20 this morning to come in.

Also, a new project is launching in just over 2 weeks and the first I heard of it was today. So what? you may ask. Well, it’s my job to launch these things so some advance notice would have been nice. Other people knew of it, and were obviously waiting for my amazing psychic abilities to detect its approach. Bad news on this front, I don’t have any! I have a pretty full schedule between now and then and am as likely to be able to fit this in as Bin Laden is to convert to Buddhism.

Having spent 30 minutes reducing my inbox to a size deemed acceptable by the “I.T. email & work prevention police” it has now been clogged again with presentations of ridiculous size in PowerPoint, as we all know that it’s the little graphics and animations that make the difference. Not if they take it up to 6MB they don’t! Stop it, just stop it! The inbox issue is of course made worse by the 26 zombie bites, 18 werewolf attacks, 4 sheep gifts and 3 random questions that Facebook feels needs my urgent attention.

You see to some people, Friday is about clearing the decks ready for a fresh start on Monday. For the unimaginitive that simply means forwarding on the entire contents of their inbox to other people, before pronouncing, “Oh look, I’ve got a clear inbox.” Well whoop de fucking doo for you.

Next time you go to press forward, consider the impact that will have on the recipient. Do they need it? Do they care? If not, then keep hold of it and go and discuss it with them first! 

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07/08/2007 by Lee.

Most of us have been on a plane at some point in our lives and when flying the altitude of the aircraft is generally given as x feet above sea level. The reasons for this are quite obvious when you consider that land can form high plateaus or low valleys and using the simple measure of height over the land could lead to disastorous consequences when flying from Schipol (below sea level) to Bolivia.

Tidal patterns lead to differing sea levels around the world at different times. For example around Alaska and parts of Canada the tide can lead to a change in sea level of over 50 feet. Whilst this may not sound like much, imagine trying to land a plane in bad weather and poor visibility and suddenly finding the runway 50 feet away just as you cut the power. A change in air pressure can give rise (or indeed fall) to a change in sea level of another 5 feet or so adding to the height confusion.

It’s not just aircraft that suffer from rising and falling sea levels. Mountains are also measured in height above sea level, so depending on the tide in a given part of the world could one summit attempt on Everest be said to have been higher than another? Since the last ice age, sea levels have risen by around 400 feet thereby shrinking many of our mountain ranges. Now, whilst we can safely say that they haven’t actually shrunk (other than by normal erosion and tectonic methods) the standard measure that we use indicates that they have.

So what is the standard or “mean” sea level? In short, there isn’t one. In the U.K. sea level is determined by a guage just outside Newlyn in Cornwall, yet this is over a foot different to sea level on the east coast of the island. GPS systems use a complex ellipsoid model of the Earth to work out a mean sea level, but neither of these methods can give us 100% accuracy.

So throughout the course of today, your altitude will vary depending on which method you use, and if you’re flying anywhere shortly don’t do the Amsterdam to La Paz route.

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02/08/2007 by Lee.

Those of you who know me (or have followed my spouting on this site) will probably know that I have little time for the average American. When asked why, I sometimes struggle to come up with more than the obvious reasons. They’re too loud, they’re stupid, they can’t go to war (and why go in the first place?) without inflicting casulaties on their allies. But in a rare epiphany, I have finally figured it out. The root causes of my downer on the nation. There are 2, although they are related.

1) Why do you keep telling us and yourselves that you are the best country in the world? 80% of Americans do not own a passport, so what are they basing this claim on having never left their shores?

and, more importantly

2) If someone at work comes in everyday and says, “I am the best. I am better than all of you at everything. I’m richer than you, I run my life in a manner that you aspire to, I am just the mutts nuts!” How BLOODY ANNOYING would that be? This is what the American nation does to the rest of the world. What would be the odds of the person saying this at work surviving the week without a good smack in the face? Pretty damn low I should think.

And this my loyal reader, is the the crux of my dislike.

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