Author: Dan Q

Troma Night is on as normal tonight, so, if you’re not going to The May Ball (who’s web site, I maintain, should allow web-based ticket purchases as I suggested last year), come along! It’ll probably only be a “two-film” night, as a number of us are celebrating Sundeep‘s birthday tomorrow with a walk up Snowdon, and it’ll be a long enough day without having only a few hours sleep, to boot.

Turnout should be medium-to-low: we expect a dozen people, maximum, so there shouldn’t be any fight for seats. For those who enjoy Dr. Who we’ll be kicking off at Adam‘s at 7:15pm, and Troma Night itself will start at The Place at 8pm, as usual.

In other news, Claire and I are going to have to move house… again! We’re not yet sure where to and when we’ll be moving, but we’re hoping to move early in June, if possible. If anybody has any great ideas for a themed Troma Night for the last ever one in The Place, we’re open to suggestions.

EDIT: As several people have quite rightly informed me, Adam is working until late: Dr. Who will be shown wherever-you-can-get-it. We’re going to try to sort it out in The Place, but no promises yet: check with me on the RockMonkey ChatRoom or by phone for updates.

EDIT: And Dr. Who is at 7pm, not 7:15pm, tonight. Ho hum.

Statto‘s written a piece on solar energy and the energy crisis in general. I almost commented on it, but then I decided I had enough to say to justify my own blog entry. As I see it, here’s the plan to cope with Earth’s immediate energy needs:

1. Use existing nuclear facilities – possibly new ones, too, while nuclear fuel can be found and while we can find places to bury all the waste (here’s a tip: Finland) – and, if necessary, start burning again the copious quantities of coal we’ve got just lying around while we suss out what to do next.
2. Suss out what to do next.

Easy. I don’t know why anybody kicks up such a fuss about this whole energy crisis thing!

But more seriously; unless we can crack nuclear fusion… or we find an economical way to get nuclear fuel from elsewhere in the solar system, we’re going to have to find some sensible way of making lots of power quickly, and within our lifetimes. Here are some of the promising alternatives from the top of my head:

• Geothermal energy is environmentally friendly but hideously uneconomic. The idea is that you dig a big two big holes and connect them at the bottom, then drop water down one of them where it boils and comes up the other one. Bingo: free hot water. It’s rarely hot enough to be useful turning turbines, so it’s basically a supply of free heat. Not so good. If we dug a deep enough pit we could probably make lots of electricity just from the heat of the Earth; but if we had the means to dig pits that deep within sensible economic constraints we’d probably have the resources to come up with something better anyway.
• Wind farms are getting better, but aren’t great. They don’t make a lot of power, but designs are improving all the time. For some reason, people – particularly in rural areas – complain that the windmills are unsightly (I think they look fab!) or noisy (I’ve stood directly under them at full-tilt and they’re almost silent, in my experience), but if we started doing more local electricity generation I’m sure they’d prefer windmills to pylons. We do need better designs for them, though, if we’re going to make a sensible future out of those.
• Solar power – at least under this atmosphere, as Statto talked about – is way out… perhaps if we could strip the atmosphere and live in little bubble cities, we’d be okay… That said, I’ve seen some fun and ambitious ideas to make solar panels better. My favourite of these is the following: stratolites! Stratolites are super-large helium balloons that float near the edge of space. Up there, the atmosphere isn’t such a problem (and, if they’re high enough, neither is wind), so just cover a few thousand stratolites with solar panels, and service them using robotic balloons. NASA’s doing some interesting work with high-altitude balloons (with not much success, yet), and they’re already a dab hand with solar panels: I’ll bet they could produce a usable prototype within a few years if they put their minds to it, and it’s certainly less far-fetched than using satellites for the same purpose. The minor issue is in getting the generated electricity back down here where it can be of some use, and I suggest that either long carbon nanotube wires (which might, sadly, be too heavy for the balloons, not to mention a hazard to aircraft) or “beaming” the power down in the form of microwaves (which will have the added advantage of supplying free pre-cooked poultry to nearby households) are the way forwards. In any case, meaningful solar power is a long way away.
• Bioenergy’s an option, of course, which also helps to counter the problems with our diminishing non-renewable resources like fossil fuels. Basically, it comes in two forms: you either take something alive and burn it, or you take something alive and make a slave of it. Neither is typically popular with freaky lefty vegan types, but they could always keep their lights turned off. The former option has seen some success in trials, where sugar was converted to ethanol and then combusted, which may be considered a waste of perfectly good alcohol. In the end, this is just a glorified way of producing solar energy by using plants as solar cells, which is superior in many ways to manufactured ones as plants are able to make more of themselves. The second bioenergy option has been used for centuries in non-electrical ways: can you imagine how much energy we could save if we hooked up our homes’ power supplies to little hamster wheels and let rodents do the work in exchange for food. The conversations could be interesting, too: “I’m going to put the kettle on, dearie: would you go and prod the gerbils, please?”
• Build a perpetual motion machine. After all, the laws of thermodynamics are just asking to be broken. The most interesting attempts to build these have actually succeeded… by cheating… but they cheated in interesting ways. Cox’s timepiece was a clock, built in the 1760s, that never required winding, because it drew power from the changes in atmospheric pressure. Nanomachines built on this and similar principles could theoretically supply all the energy that small devices could ever need: imagine if your mobile phone kept itself charged by changes in air pressure, eletrostatic charges, and – in case of emergency – miniscule inductors that produced a charge when you shook the phone, in a similar way to those everlasting torches. Of course, these aren’t strictly perpetual motion machines: they’re “stealing” energy from other sources, but if they’re only stealing energy from otherwise useless or renewable sources, then that’s a big step forward. In the same way as some new electric trains use “regenerative braking”, putting power back into the power lines through their pantographs as they slow down, all electrical systems could be designed to conserve and “steal” energy as they saw fit, using far less energy than they otherwise might.

So, that’s my thoughts – the impractical ramblings of a software engineer. How do you think we have to fix the upcoming energy crisis?

I’m currently working on a volunteer-run programming project and I just received a very unusual bug report from one of the test team. Not to bore you; but the project allows multiple users to log on to a web-based system and manage various details about themselves – their name, date of birth, gender, etc. – on a kind-of profile page.

Here’s the gist of the bug report:

Bug Report #124: Site has transgender issues

I just made myself male. I have permission to do this.

Surgery is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Then, I changed my nickname.

Now, I look like I’m female, despite my not touching my gender.

Maybe you shouldn’t have changed your nickname to “Dorothy.”

It seems if you’re saved as Male, you’re recognised as Female.

If you’re Female, you’re seen to be Unspecified.

Only if you’re in the Ukranian women’s shot-put team.

A few weeks ago I ordered a Logitech MX1000 laser mouse. It’s a nice mouse – chunky for my big hands, laser rather than LED for significantly higher resolution, wireless because it’s fun (but using a frequency that makes it as responsive as any other USB mouse), charges in a cradle. It’s even got a couple of really cool features like a hardware battery indicator.

Plus, I needed a new mouse. My last optical mouse umm… fell apart… during a particularly aggressive Unreal Tournament 2004 deathmatch.

Because it was my first order with the company I ordered it from, they insisted it must be delivered to my registered card address. Well, that’s not a problem – it was over the Easter break and so Claire would be there to receive it. The carrier was Initial City-Link. Okay; still no problem.

And somehow, they missed us. Perhaps Claire was out (or still in bed) when they called, but in any case, the delivery was missed and a calling card was left. I was instructed to call a phone number to arrange redelivery or collection.

This was Thursday 13th April. On Sunday, we were to begin our grand tour of the UK. And it was a bank holiday weekend (for Easter). When would I get my mouse?

I called the number on the card and was greeted by an automatic voice that prompted me to enter my consignment number – found on the card – into the system. It then gave me three options:

1. Arrange redelivery. Hmm. That’s not necessarily an option: I’d be away for a week, and the card said that they’d only hold the parcel for five working days… so… yes, redelivery would be good, but only if they’d still have the parcel when I got back, which depended entirely on which of the bank holiday weekend days they were working. I needed more information.
2. Arrange collection. Their collection centre for this region is in Newtown: about an hour’s drive away. Collection would certainly get me my mouse quicker. Gareth would be driving down through Newtown on Friday, but again – they might be closed. And we could potentially drive through it on Sunday.
3. Arrange a ringback. A-ha! A chance to speak to a human and have them fix the problem. Excellent. I pressed the button to arrange for them to call me back and waited.

Some hours later, they hadn’t called me back and, concerned about the fast-approaching bank holiday weekend and my subsequent absence from the delivery address, I tried to call back. This time, when I entered my consignment number into the automated service, a voice said, “You have already made a choice. Goodbye.” Great. So, what? I just have to wait?

I looked on the company’s web site and found another phone number and called it. After a bit of hassle, the woman on the other end of the phone told me I needed to call the Newtown branch to get the information I needed, and she gave me their number. For the rest of the day, at half-hour intervals, I tried to call, but it was always engaged. Eventually, I called back the woman at the head office and insisted that they held me. They told me that they were closed Sundays, Saturday afternoons, and the Friday, Monday, and Tuesday of the Easter weekend. I did the maths – that meant, they’d hold my parcel until the day after I’d return to Aber. She confirmed this. Excellent. All I had to do was to call the Newtown depot while I was in Scotland and arrange redelivery.

Needless to say, I never receieved my callback.

On Wednesday, I whipped the “we tried to deliver…” card from my wallet and phoned the number. I’d forgotten to bring with me the number for the Newtown depot – I only had the automated voice number – but I could have found internet access to get back the number had it been necessary. I was surprised, though, that when I entered my consignment number I wasn’t told “You have already made a choice. Goodbye.” Instead, I was told “We tried to redeliver, and you still weren’t there. You’ll now need to collect it yourself or have the sender pay for redelivery.”

What? Well of course I wasn’t there: I’m elsewhere. I called to tell you that the previous week, asked you to call me back – which you didn’t – called a few other numbers – most of which were perpetually engaged – and was eventually promised by somebody that it would all be fine. Now they’re saying that they won’t deliver it at all?

On Friday I was in Preston, with a stable internet connection and telephone signal, so I tired again. I called the main office number and found myself in a queue. I waited in the queue for about seven or eight minutes before it cut me off.

This was the last straw. I did a little bit of exploring of the web site to find some e-mail addresses and wrote a particularly snotty complaint, detailing all of the events above, to one. I’d try to call again on Monday, I reasoned. It turns out that saying that you intend to “make every effort to avoid using your incompetent company ever again” gets through to people.
On Monday, I actually receieved a phone call from them. They apologised profusely, and, after a bit of complaining that now it wasn’t Easter break I couldn’t so easily have somebody sign for parcels on weekdays, had them agree to redeliver on Saturday 29th. A little complaining finally gets a result.

I’ll let you know how the mouse is when I finally get it.

[spb_message color=”alert-success” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]Update: the mouse turned out to be the best mouse I’d ever owned, and I was a little sad when I had to replace it.[/spb_message]

On Thursday afternoon, Claire and I went river bugging in Scotland. I can’t even find a Wikipedia article on it, it’s so little-known as an activity, but apparently it’s gaining popularity in New Zealand (presumably a direct result of access to white water rapids and a suitable level of insanity amongst the general population).

The activity first appeared, I’m told, when somebody using a floating “fishing chair” was whipped away by the current in his unanchored personal boat. The bugs we were using didn’t look far from this – inflatable armchairs that left your feet dangling in the water and let you either sit upright or lie right back (in the traditional lazy angler position – although I was distressed by the lack of a beer holder integrated into the chair). The river had only just defrosted the previous week from a particularly long winter, so we put on two wetsuits each (ever tried to squeeze into a wetsuit when you’re already wearing one?), and activity which, for my sister, Becky, seemed to take up most of the day. We wore wetsuit gloves with webbed fingers to act as “paddles”, and propelled ourselves through the water (whether aboard our bug or not) by paddling and kicking furiously against the clinging of our double-wetsuit constriction.

The photogapher managed to take some fantastic pictures, some of which I’ll share with you here (you can see the rest too, if you like). Just click on a picture to see a larger version.

As you can see, it’s a particularly wild ride. Despite Claire’s difficulties with some of the other activities (descriptions to follow!), she excelled at river bugging, even managing to stay upright after going over the largest of the waterfalls we paddled over, a feat nobody else managed. That said, she was too small to carry her bug up a hill. Bless.

It’s worth a go. The number of places you can do it in the UK can be counted on one hand, and if you enjoy it, two hours isn’t really long enough to do it justice (on the other hand, if you decide that you don’t, it’s perhaps a bit long for a taster session).

In other news, the script that’s being used to provide the funky image slideshow effects if you click on one of the images, above, on my blog, is Lightbox, and it is pretty cool, isn’t it? If you’re reading my blog through a newsreader, Abnib or, worse yet, Livejournal, you won’t see any of the effects. Try reading in the original context.