42

42 is the "the answer to life the universe and everything", the atomic number of molybdenum, the angle in degrees for which a rainbow appears, the number of minutes taken to fall through the earth. It is found repeated 3 times at place 242,422 in pi.

This is the first day of the next week of my life and each will be spent dwelling on the significance, the wonder and doom associated with the the number 42. Now, despite the sunshine, the quiet house, the fresh day, the week long holiday taken in anticipation of this event I kind of prefer the number 41.

Cornwall trip

There are few things as alluring as high cliffs and the Cornwall coast has some fine specimens. This year, for Christmas, we hired a cottage within comfortable walking distance of sea cliffs. We knew it would be cold but, ensconced within an old cottage, with log fire the weather was entirely enjoyable.

Within the ruins of a castle on the Tintagel Headland. This was captioned "family, ruins, rainbow" but Stephen pointed out that with a quick scan, ignoring the punctuation, it parsed badly.

The weather was conducive to rainbows - where ever we looked one would be arcing across the sky.

Ah - a respectable cliff, if it can't kill you then it is not a cliff ...

On Christmas eve we released as batch of 10 Chinese Laterns from the cliff edge, the conditions were perfect and the floated upwards looking not unlike a distress flare. Fortunately we had alerted the coast guard before hand.

Upwards until they flickered out and returned to earth.

A most enjoyable trip. It has been a rather hectic year, work wise, and thus we travelled less this year than we have for a long time. Resolution for 2010 - "work life balance, work life balance, work life balance ....."

Keeping the faith in vitamin c

Recently Annalise brought home some vitamin c solvable tables from college. These were handled out with the intent to help protect the staff from colds.

Linus Pauling's made the claim in 1970 that taking large doses could both protect against colds and reduce their severity. The direct benefits of vitamin c supplements for this purpose have long since been discredited however the credibility of the Nobel Prize winning Linus Pauling has meant that this myth has largely persisted 40 years later.

Numerous controlled studies have shown that that those taking a placebo have feared no worse that those taking vitamin c supplements with regards the common cold. Despite the fact that there is so much evidence against vitamin c why does the false promise of efficacy still persist? There is large industry that makes a great deal of money out of vitamin c and it is in their interests to maintain the link between vitamin c supplements and healthy living.

I suspect that there is placebo effect at the college that may work to it's benefit. Those believing in the efficacy of the vitamin c and taking the tablets may be less likely to "give in" to cold symptoms and stay at home than those not taking the tablets, even though both groups suffer equally.

Even so, isn't it time we focuses on scientific methods of prevention like hand washing and general hygiene rather than advocating quack remedies like vitamin c.

IPhone catastrophe

Last night, while reaching for my tooth-brush my IPhone slid from my jacket pocket. It fell, bouncing off the toilet seat, swirled twice around the toilet bowl before settling beneath the water. It sat there glowing as though trying to hang onto life for as long as it took for me to draw a breath, scream and yank it out.

My immediate impulse was to switch it off but the off button had no effect. Slowly but surely my beloved phone lost more and more functionality. First the touch screen failed, followed by the volume buttons, wifi, and then 3G until finally it started a repeated cycle of rebooting. The battery, that a few minutes previously showed as requiring a recharge, now showed as half charged - a sure sign of a major cognitive malfunction.

It sucks to have waived the extra insurance. The phone is now incubating in a bowl of rice in the airing cupboard. If not dead, it is certainly comatose. I am resisting the urge to charge it in order to check on its cognitive function as I fear that this would precipitate a terminal short.

Here's the dilemma - Apple will replace it with re-furbished one for £146 - ouch! But as there is a postal strike now this requires a trip to the Apple store.

Usually this is a straight forward task but how is this possible without a working IPhone? Without the ability to check train schedules and departure platforms on the move, without the ability to plot optimal tube routes based on current tube delays, without the ability to access google maps and get route directions from the station to the store, without the ability listen to a podcast on the 75 minute trip, without the ability to call and text to summon up loved ones, to snap a picture of a quirky scene, to twitter or facebook my movements, to read and send email and browse breaking news stories or even to perform a Doppler frequency analysis of the noise of a passing train to determine the combined speeds...

No, venturing to the apple store without an IPhone would be like returning to a Victorian England with printed train timetables, asking directions, making conversation with a fellow travellers and being oblivious of all that occurs over the horizon until it is recorded on dead trees.

Pity the Victorians - how did they cope? I need to check on that that phone .....

Happy, happy timeshifted birthday eve

Tis the eve of my timeshifted birthday.  Plans have been laid, presents perhaps bought and wrapped.

Plans include; an early morning alarm, perhaps 5am because birthdays are precious and should be maximised, a sumptious breakfast, presents, rollercoasters, lunch, rollercoasters, play with presents, evening drinks followed by 9:30pm romantic dinner date, play with presents and then wind down the day in preparation for the birthday boxing day.

Why timeshifted? Because my tentative travel date to India is the day before my biological birthday and a birthday without family and presents and food isn't really a birthday at all.

Fire, Fire! Laptop computer catches fire

Stephen unplugged his laptop charger to bring it down stairs for Annalise to use. When he returned to his room 20 seconds later he heard a pop and a fizzing sound. When he opened the door smoke was coming from the computer sitting on the corner of his bed and this had filled the room.

When I got there 5 seconds later it was well on fire and the flames were about 30cm high as was the bedding. I grabbed it by the corner and carried it outside to the driveway. There it burnt until we poured a bowl of water over it. The bed also required water thrown over it and then a wet towel thrown over the mattress. The smoke was horrible. One of the battery cells had fallen out of computer and we scraped this into a bowl of water before taking this outside.






I called PC World's The Tech Guys to report the fire, We have two other laptops of the same make. This is a E Systems 4213 laptop. All three were bought 8 Dec 2007 making them exactly one month out of their 12 month warranty period. They refused to cover it, assess the safety of the other two computers or have anything to do with the incident.



Shame on you PC World. It is one thing for a device to stop working outside of its warranty period but quite another for it to self destruct by bursting into flame. We are very lucky that we were not asleep or out at the time. Oddly while our smoke detectors go off frequently due to burning toast or bacon they were never triggered by the battery smoke.

A video collage of the last week

Places my camera has been over the last week.

Stephen's Birthday

The entire world always seems celebrate Stephen's birthday. I think it helps that it is on the 1st January.

This year we spent the day in London at the Foyles bookstore, lunch and then checking one of Stephen's university options - Kings College.

Foyles is, in their own modest words, "Europe’s largest bookshop* with 5 floors and more than 200,000 titles in stock plus a wide range of gifts and stationery, printed music and second-hand and rare books, as well Ray’s Jazz Music and Books, the Cafe and a Gallery and events space".



I think Stephen has been correcting a few things on the wikipedia page for Kings College London because he was able to quote the most arcane facts about the college. Ah well each to our own ....

Twilight

So not only did Emily get a copy of the book Twilight for Christmas, along with the second book for her birthday, but today we all went to see the movie.

An now I see this

What have we done?

Her birthday was completed by watching another teenage angst movie

Happy birthday Emily.

Walk on Colley Hill

We fled the shopping mall today and headed up to Colley Hill. The hat was a new purchase - my ears have been getting cold in the sub zero temperatures.

From Drop Box

Boxing day excursion

Annalise and I decided to leave the kids with the Wii fit, left over turkey and plentiful supply of books in order to find some sea. We switched off the nav system and drove almost, but not quite, randomly but tracking towards the midday sun low in the southern sky, knowing that ultimately we would hit the English channel but not caring where or when.

We had a ambling drive, a lazy stroll and frequent stolen meditative moments when sheltered from the wind but exposed to the relative warmth of the sun.

boxingday-08

Sickness

On Wednesday afternoon, around 3:47pm (approximately), I got sick. Sore throat, high temperature and head-ache. It wasn't the lunch-time soup it was something far more sinister.

I stayed home on Thursday and then Friday - much sleeping, some showering and some reading. Today I feel a little more human - seems I'll pull through.

Annalise feels I have been a little obsessive about radio control flying lately, she may be right as much of the time while in bed I drifted in and out of sleep having numerous hypnopompic hallucinations. These involved fruitless attempts to calculate if a propeller with diameter 10 " and 6" pitch with a rotation speed of 11150 RPM provides a faster maximum speed than one of 11" diameter and 5" pitch rotating at about 10500 RPM. Also which has the lower tip speed and hence is quieter.

No I wouldn't describe myself as obsessed.

This afternoon I did venture out to the flying field. Although the wind was strong (15mph) at least it was straight onto the runway. I took of, flew and landed the CAP 21 after a couple of flight of the Travel Air. It is a big relief that not only does it fly but that I can fly it myself and better yet enjoy flying it.

GuyFawkes weekend

We had my nephew and niece spent the week-end with us.

Some pictures from this week-end.

Stroll in the park, making most of the sunny weather.

I had to throw Sophie into this bracken in order to get this one



On Saturday evening we went to the bonfire and fireworks display in a nearby village of Brockham.


During the torch-lit parade, We felt quite a mob.



The Bonfire, what a bizarre custom burning someone like this.





And the fireworks display itself





And finally some shots of the flying field, I love the light when the sun is so low in sky. Today I did my first spins although the mist cover before the sun came out along with the predominantly white model caused me to loose track of the plane on a few occasions.



Wonderful week-end, even got some painting done of the loft.

Terracotta Army

With the tiling complete on the loft and a lick of paint applied I cleaned the brushes and spent Saturday afternoon flying my radio controlled plane. The wind was to little to strong for comfort and trying to land in a cross wind tends to focus the mind with visions of wrecked model. It was however immensely enjoyable though now that I have enough confident at attempt various aerobatic maneuvers.

It is currently pouring with rain - doesn't augur well for cycling to work tomorrow. Monday is my no "no park" day so no option but to cycle and with the loss of daylight savings it is sure to be dark when I leave work. Rain is bad, cold is bad, windy is bad, dark is bad - all four together is horrible.

Today we went to see the exhibition on the Terracotta Army at the British Museum. Sophie took a friend along and they spent the morning following various activities in the Ancient Egypt section. The Terracotta Army exhibit itself was very impressive. It includes a dozen or so the soldiers placed above the reading room of the museum. We did leave wondering why the Chinese haven't opened the tomb itself, or if indeed they have but what they found was ... well nothing.

Old friends

This weekend we met up with some old friends we haven't seen in a long time.

We traveled down to Devon early Sunday morning and stopped to stretch next to Stonehenge.



We stayed here, in a beautiful cottage with Sheep grazing outside.





This is as heated as the Croquet got - makes a change from the Rugby on Saturday night.


Yes they can rip your stomach out



We went on walks during which small children learnt that gum boot fill with water when walking in deep water.


It was a really enjoyable weekend.

Black Sheep

Annalise and I went to see two movies last week, in addition to the vagina monologues. The first was "Black Sheep" - a New Zealand movie with mutant sheep. Think "Shaun of the Dead" but replace the zombies with sheep. I have always suspected that Sheep could turn bad and savage people.

The second movie was Ratatouille - this was supposed to be a family outing but both Stephen and Emily bailed on us. It was nice watching Sophie enjoy it and seeing Paris again - even if it was through the eyes and nose of a rat.

This weekend

I laid zero tiles although I did do some painting and skirting fitting. Why is it the the tiles look the best in the one orientation requiring the most cutting ?
Bled a little due to sawed finger.
Flew one new radio controlled plane.

Landed above plane a little roughly requiring a later 5 minute patch-up

Spent several hours at the beach

Found a tennis ball

Lost a tennis ball



Soaked up some sun



Had a lazy lunch in a beautiful cottage built AD 1536.

Watched some rugby, yes finally watched some TV.

The rest of the weekend's pictures here

Further evidence for lack of testosterone

On Sunday Annalise and I visited the bridge where Winnie the Pooh played Pooh sticks.

This is the bridge

No I felt no desire to race, let along win, by dropping said Pooh sticks in slow moving current - how sad is that.

Has anything happened in the last two months?

On July 02 I posted about how we had lost TV reception with the erection of scaffolding behind our house. Well the enforced experiment is coming to an end. This Thursday the scaffolding will be removed and once again our satellite dish will have an un-obscured line of sight with the appropriate geo-synchronous satellite.

This will be almost exactly two months without seeing a single TV picture. Has anything happened in the world in these last two months?

It brings to mind the movie Goodbye Lenin

Now should the kids be re-introduced to the medium slowly, can they overdose on it or will they even notice if I don't tell them?

This weekend I ......

1. Terrified myself by flying a video camera in my airplane. The model was out of trim and required all my skill to get it down in one piece. The video makes me airsick to watch. I will try again next weekend as I think I know now what went wrong.

2. Finally signed up to facebook. It was fear that if I didn't I'll be ostracized and placed on an ice-flow to die a slow and lonely death.

3. Resisted spending any money, despite incredible temptation, at a model air show I went to today.

4. Did some work on my bike to ensure it was ready for next week. I noticed that my tyres are very worn, checked my cycle computer and estimate that I have ridden about 3700 km in the last 18 months.

5. Washed the car

6. Got the car dirty again by driving it in dirt.