Category: Personal

As Matt said, there’s an open mic night at The Angel, tonight at 8pm, £2 on the door. In the past, these open mic nights have been variable, with some really good performances and some less good ones, but the audience demonstrates it’s Aberystwyth spirit and is welcoming to pretty much anybody.

So, I’m going to pick up the microphone, and, this time – as I’ve been given about eight hours notice rather than the eight minutes I got last time – I ought to be able to rustle up a couple of “knock knock” jokes in advance, so I don’t just have to rip off everybody else‘s material in a methodical manner.

Want to see some of Aberystwyth’s upcoming comedy talent? And me? See you at The Angel.

Ahoy there, mateys. Troma Night tonight will be kicking off simultaneously at Adam‘s and at The Place at 7pm sharp for Doctor Who, and then reconvening at The Place for the rest of the evening.

If you’re not coming along for Doctor Who, then try at least not to turn up at half-past seven, just as the Doctor will be legging it from the cybermen, or you’re likely to be glared at most severely. By 7:30 you’ll have already missed your chance for a coveted spot on the couch, anyway.

I’ve no idea what we’ll watch. Paul‘s got at least one Troma flick we haven’t seen, as well as a mammoth collection of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 I’d love to make a dent in. And I’ve got a copy of Howling VI: The Freaks, who’s 3.7 star rating on the IMDB gives it’s fans the right to call it the “best sequel” to the original Howling. That should be sufficiently dire.

As far as good movies are concerned, I’m open to suggestions.

Just over a month ago, sick of the interest rates, I paid off my NatWest credit card by going into the Aberystwyth branch and saying “how much money do I have to give you to have you cut up this card and never bother me about it again?” I paid three-hundred-and-something pounds, direct from my bank account, then had the lady behind the counter cut up the card. There we are, done.

This morning I received a letter from NatWest Credit Card Services indicating that I’d missed a payment. I called them up to complain, and was told that the branch must have made a mistake in calculating the sum I owed them, because my account was labelled as being active and I still owed forty quid.

Then they said that it must, therefore, be their fault – the mistake of the branch that had mis-advised me (they took my word on the conversation I’d had in the branch) – and closed my account, dropping the remaining debt.

While it’s obvious that this was the correct thing for them to do – it was, indeed, their mistake that had caused the problem – I was impressed that they behaved in this way. They are, in the end, a bank, and over the years we’ve become used to banks screwing us over with ludicrous charges, seemingly just for the fun of it. Meanwhile, NatWest have consistently provided me with excellent customer support and an attitude of genuinely trusting me as a customer.

Bravo, NatWest. I have no problem with continuing to recommend you as a bank.

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?