| The role of coffee in the electrification of Iceland |
[Jul. 7th, 2009|08:37 pm] |
Four days in Iceland, all different, all amazing:
Arrived so late on Friday it was already Saturday in England. The nice man from the hotel was waiting with a people carrier to take us to our beds.
Saturday collected the hire car and set off along the south coast. First experience of salt fish and of gravel roads and of boiling bubbling hot springs, smelling of sulphur. The mud ones were the best. Iceland is on two tectonic plates, one heaing for Europe, the other for America. Walked across a bridge linking the two, with a gap widening by 2cm/year.
 Sunday: The Golden circle tour. Kerið volcanic crater lake (see photo), the real and original geyseir, and its younger, more energetic cousin, Gullfoss water fall and finally Þingvellir, whiche Iceland had the world's first democratic parliament and which is also on that gap between the two continents, quite amazing geological formations.
Monday: Walked behind a waterfall (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) shewhomust has the photo to prove it) and thence to Skogar (another impressive waterfall) and the folk museum. Reconstructed buildings outside, inside an exhibit on Iceland's rapid modernisation after the second world war. It seems that in order to obtain the high voltage electricity cables from Finland, they had to barter: salt fish to South America, who sent coffee to Finland, who sent wires to Iceland.
Today, some impressive coastal scenes with puffins, sole purpose of visit according to some. Then a drive across flat lava deserts with glaciers to our left, then the hotel where I type this and look out the window to see just over the terminal moraine a glacier heading this way, or maybe, regrettably retreating.
Tomorrow: more glaciers and maybe a further report.
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| Don't want internet? Use this form to tell us why. |
[Jun. 10th, 2009|10:45 am] |
Thanks to The Register for this one ....
The BBC, like most news media, is reporting that "Some 43% of adults who currently do not have internet access would remain disconnected even if they were given a free PC and broadband connection." Then, at the end of the story is:Are you one of the 30% of adults who do not have internet access at home? Would a free PC and broadband access persuade you to go online? Send us your views using the form below:
and a form to fill in...
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| Now that's what I call customer service |
[May. 8th, 2009|06:19 pm] |
This morning I was reading shewhomust a story from today's Durham Times that the bells from St Nicholas's Church in the Market Place in Durham had been taken down and sent for refurbishment to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, where they were originally cast in 1687.
"Now, that's what I call customer service", she said.
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| Travellers beware |
[Apr. 30th, 2009|04:08 pm] |
Or maybe that should be "Travelers beware". Thanks to The Register for pointing out the remarks made by Secretary Napolitano in the course of a Department of Homeland Security briefing on swine flu:We're also actively monitoring travelers at our land, sea, and air ports. We're watching them for signs of illness, and we have appropriate protocols in place to deal with those who are sick. Precautions are being taken to protect travelers and border personnel. Anyone exhibiting symptoms is being referred to an isolation room where they can be evaluated by a public health official before proceeding to their destruction. |
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| Reindeer like to eat me! |
[Apr. 4th, 2009|01:37 pm] |
Thanks to valydiarosada for this! - In Ancient Egypt, people wore glittery eyeshadow made from the crushed shells of durham_rambler.
- If durham_rambler was life size, he would stand 7 ft 2 inches tall and have a neck twice the size of a human.
- Originally, durham_rambler could not fly.
- The condom - originally made from durham_rambler - was invented in the early 1500s.
- Durham_rambler is actually a vegetable, not a fruit!
- The Australian billygoat plum contains a hundred times more Vitamin C than durham_rambler!
- Duelling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are durham_rambler.
- The number one cause of blindness in the United States is durham_rambler!
- A sixteenth century mathematician lost his nose in a duel over his love for durham_rambler, and wore a silver replacement for the rest of his life!
- Reindeer like to eat durham_rambler!
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| Snow and Sky |
[Feb. 12th, 2009|09:13 pm] |
Late this afternoon our friend Jackie, WINOLJ, called to say she had got in from work and there was no electricity in her house. She'd tried a couple of things suggested by the electricity company and they hadn't worked, so I decided to drive over there, she lives about 2½ miles away in High Shincliffe. The snow had stopped and a thaw had sort-of set in. On arriving I could not help but notice a transit-sized van with a large dish on the roof, and a camera crew. Turns out that Sky News had driven down the motorway, come off at the local junction and pulled into the first village they could find, to take news pictures.
Jackie's electricity? Well I did manage to get some power back by isolating the circuit that was faulty, but could not see what the problem was beyond that. Still, she has light and heating and a cooker, so it's a lot less serious than it was. |
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| Security Conscious |
[Jan. 19th, 2009|09:07 pm] |
Here's the latest from the Playmobil range, unfortunately not available for export outside the USA due no doubt to restrictions placed by the Department for Homeland Security:
"The woman traveler stops by the security checkpoint. After placing her luggage on the screening machine, the airport employee checks her baggage. The traveler hands her spare change and watch to the security guard and proceeds through the metal detector. With no time to spare, she picks up her luggage and hurries to board her flight!"
Anyhow, it's yours for a mere $55, and if you hurry over to the Amazon.com site you can, and should, read how much this is appreciated by those who can get their hands on it, for example "I like the basic idea. I applaud Playmobile for attempting to provide us with the tools we need to teach our children to unquestioningly obey the commands of the State Security Apparatus..." though some had reservations " This is just a sop to the authoritarians among us. I am holding out for the release of the Guantanemo Playset."
The enthusiastic response to this item is in distinct contrast to the thumbs-down given earlier to that classic A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates from the RAND Corporation, now with Look Inside!
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| Income tax self-assessment: a rant |
[Jan. 19th, 2009|12:53 pm] |
I have just finished filing my tax return for the 2007-08 year, using the online "service" provided by HMRC. This is the third year I have done it online and I cannot remember it being this difficult before.
I'll preface this by saying that I have over 40 years' experience in designing computer systems. The self-assessment system has these design and usability faults which delayed my successful completion of the form:- The self-employment section asks for your turnover, and in the next box for 'any other business income'. I had none, so I entered £0.00 — how was I to know that I should have left it blank?
- Having learned that lesson, there were several boxes which weren't relevant to me so I left them blank. There was a supplementary question about these irrelevant boxes which wanted the answer Yes or No but I skipped them ... mistake number two! I had to answer a rather pointless No.
- In the unlikely event that the Revenue owe me money, they ask for my bank account details. Now my bank statements and cheque book both say my sort code is 30-95-76 so that's what I entered. Another error, they wanted 309576.
- Next, the gift aid section. As far as I can work out there's no point in filling this in unless you earn enough to get into the 40% tax band, (which I don't) when you can claim some extra tax relief. Remember all those places you visited 18 months ago run by charities, who ask you to pay a small premium so they can claim back the gift aid? Did you make a note of it? No, so you have to estimate it.
- Almost finished. I noticed that the response time is dire, no doubt because everybody else is trying to do this on a Sunday evening. I dread to think what the response time will be as the deadline gets hours rather than weeks away.
- Last thing: the box for extra information. I wanted to tell them about the gift aid estimate. I also wanted to tell them about the two directorships I hold, neither remunerated, in case a smart official cross-references tax returns with information on file at Companies House. So I tell them all this, which takes up about half the space in the input box, and press next. And get a tax return update failure which lists the three possible reasons. None of which applies to me. So I log off and leave it to the morning.
- Logging on this morning the same thing happens. When I finally get through to the technical helpdesk, a very helpful Glaswegian suggests, almost immediately, that the reason was that my extra information exceeded 256 characters. Which it turns out was the problem. Not that there was anything about a limit on the form that I could see. Or a countdown of characters left.
Most of these are considerable annoyances but the last one is a showstopper. Anybody hitting this one as the deadline approaches could well go past it and incur the automatic £100 penalty. Don't they test these things? (I'm asking you, helenraven , I think they could use your services.)
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| A milestone of a sort |
[Jan. 13th, 2009|09:00 pm] |
It is, I suppose, a milestone of a sort.
Today the New Yorker linked to one of our websites.
This is the online auction that Ann Cleeves is running to have a character named after you, or a friend, in the last book of her Shetland Quartet. Proceeds to Vaila's fund, in memory of Vaila Harvey, a Shetland teenager who died much too young from cancer. It will make it possible for a student of Vaila's age to explore the world away from the islands.
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| The taxman cometh ... |
[Nov. 8th, 2008|03:05 pm] |
The way we run Cornwell Internet, I am self-employed and shewhomust is my salaried employee, which means I am responsible for collecting her tax and national insurance via PAYE and handing over the proceeds to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. This morning's post brought a Payment Reminder from HMRC saying that they had not received the second quarter's payment due by 22 October, which surprised me because I thought I was up-to-date, but maybe I had suffered a senior moment. But no, on checking the bank statement I paid on 30th September. We were on holiday from 4th October and wouldn't be back until the deadline had passed, so I made sure the money was on its way before we left.
So I called the tax office, which is, thankfully, open on Saturdays. What's happened to that money I paid in September? I asked. I can see that. It's been applied to month 5 was the reply. We sent you that letter because you paid too early. Next time, please don't do that.
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| Desperance (Monday update) |
[Nov. 3rd, 2008|03:14 pm] |
I have just called the RVI again and they tell me that desperance will be going back into theatre to have the infection washed out again so, contrary to expectations he won't be returning home today.
Update 8:30pm: desperance has been back to the theatre and he's "absolutely fine" now, but they will probably keep him in till Wednesday. The main problem is that he's run out of reading material, though someone has been dispatched to his house to bring back further supplies. None of the books in Ward 20 is suitable, it seems!
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| Abbey blues |
[Aug. 14th, 2008|09:19 am] |
When I started out with Cornwell Internet I just put all the money coming in and out through my personal bank account, but after a while I decided it would be a good idea to separate out the business transactions from the personal and looked around for a suitable bank to give my business to. At the time Abbey Bank had an offer on: free banking for life providing you did not overdraw (indeed they said overdrafts were not permitted) and also providing transaction rates were below certain limits. So, despite problems we had had dealing with them after shewhomust's sister died (if you're planning on dying, take your money out of the Abbey first), I signed up and for several years was very happy with the service provided. But recently things have started to go wrong.
There was an incident about a year ago when I lost my debit card. Its replacement took so long to arrive that I called up and they weren't sure it had ever been sent, and if it had it had been lost in the post, so they cancelled it and started the whole process again. Of course card #1 turned up the following day.
Then about four weeks ago I made a silly arithmetical error and as a result ended up being £1.17 overdrawn. For this they hit me with £50 in fees which I thought was extremely steep so I called up and got it reduced to £20 which, for an automatic process, I still think is excessive.
Then I received my quarterly bill for my NI contribution (if you're self-employed you will know about these) and so, as they did not need the money for 28 days I set up an advance payment to take the money out of my bank account this Monday just past. Then on Tuesday morning I checked my bank statement to see that the payment was still showing as 'pending' so I called up and was rather weakly given the excuse that it was due to a 'computer error'. So I agreed that the operator would make the payment immediately, which she did and I could see the effect instantly on my online statement. But the original payment was still 'pending' so I cancelled it, got an acknowledgement of the transaction and the 'pending' statement had disappeared from my account.
End of story? No. On Wednesday morning I logged on again to my Abbey account and discovered that my NI contributions had been paid twice. Fortunately this did not make me overdrawn but I have just written a strong letter to Abbey Bank demanding an explanation and suggesting that if they feel it is in order to charge me £50 when I make a simple mistake then they might pay me some compensation when they make a rather more serious error.
I have reached the point now where I don't have the confidence that I ought to have in my bank and wondered if any LJers out there had any more positive experiences with banks that they could recommend? I'm looking for one that is reliable, easy to deal with, and also with minimal charges. |
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| Police ploy? |
[May. 25th, 2008|10:48 am] |
Yesterday I went to my cousin's Silver Wedding celebrations at a hotel just outside York, a good opportunity to catch up with family members, not just my cousin and uncle but also my brother, sister-in law, niece, her husband, and their children. Nice friendly celebration but slightly spoiled by the loud and almost continuous music which made conversation difficult especially if you, like me, listened to the Who at high volume during your formative years.
Anyhow, since shewhomust and I were driving back to Durham after the event, I had agreed to drive my brother and sister-in-law back to their holiday cottage. On a country road just outside Easingwold we were stopped by the police who said they had checked my registration number with the DVLA and the information had come back that the car wasn't taxed. This was news to me as I had coughed up the requisite £115 last November and renewed the tax via the internet. It was a moment's work for the police officer to check the tax disk and she didn't look very closely to see if it was a forgery. She told me that about 50% of the time the computer got it wrong. She then asked me where I had been that evening.
I told her we had been to a silver wedding celebration and she asked me if I had been drinking. I told her that I had had a pint of beer at the start of the evening and had then switched to Kaliber (a non-alcoholic lager). She then told me that as I had told her I had been drinking they would have to breathalyse me, which they proceeded to do. I confidently expected to be under the limit but was very pleasantly surprised that the reading came up as 000. (I had finished my pint about 2½ hours previously.) We then went on our way.
As we drove off my brother suggested that the line about not being taxed was a ploy to enable them to do, in effect, random stop-and-searches. What do you think? |
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| Six parts gin to one part vermouth |
[Apr. 9th, 2008|11:13 am] |
Today is Tom Lehrer's 80th birthday and the occasion should not be allowed to pass without comment; on this occasion from the man himself: "... I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity ...". So spend the day singing songs with such outrageous lyrics as:
When they see us coming the birdies all try an' hide
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide
and
Soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife
Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life
I was hoping for a longer post, but shewhomust has just interrupted my research ("please, always, to call it 'research'") so I must leave you (I hope you're all taking notes, because there's going to be a short quiz)
And a brief note that Jean-Paul Belmondo is 75 today.
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| River Tyne Webcam |
[Apr. 6th, 2008|02:35 pm] |
 Newcastle Gateshead at its best. What a view.
As seen this afternoon on the BBC website. Meanwhile the snow is drifting down here too. |
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| Book prices |
[Apr. 3rd, 2008|02:27 pm] |
 Today's Guardian, as usual, has an item from its archives. In this case a review of Kafka's The Castle in its first English translation in 1930. What struck me was the price for this, presumably hardback, of £7-10-0d, or £7.50 in new money. We would not expect to pay more than double that these days, certainly not triple. Yet the UK inflation calculator tells me that this is the equivalent of £306 today.
This puts into perspective the introduction of the Penguin paperback at 6d (2½p) in 1935.
The 1957 edition (illustrated) was 3/6d (17½p).
Historically it seems hardback prices have dropped but paperback prices have risen. Food for thought. |
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