Sunday 30 May 2010

Gulf Oil spill

It's getting pretty bad isn't it ? .... I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a lot more gushing out of that pipe than is being admitted... thus far they have tried to stick a massive hat on it.... then stick a smaller hat on it... then stick a pipe down it....then pump 30,000 barrels of mud down it and then block it with golf balls and shredded car tyres ..... and now they are going to try and cut the pipe off clean and cap it.....


Here's a video of the underwater spill ... I tried linking to the BP website but the video link is down so YouTube to the rescue !!! :)

The other alternative of course is to nuke the spill ..... sounds daft ?


It might well come to that considering at 5000 feet (1 mile down) there is over 2200 lbs per square inch pressure .... which means for the oil to gush out at those depths it has to exceed 2200 lbs/sq in by a large margin to pump out the amount that it is doing.... it's not a simple problem to solve.... but it's a problem they will have to solve.... The oil field they are drilling is immense..... which is why they are attempting to drill at 1 mile down.... but it's all gone a bit Pete Tong.... methinks

Wednesday 26 May 2010

France .....

My parents "were" booked on a trip out to Caen in France, until recently when my Mother got a phone call saying that their trip had been cancelled.... I know how much she wants to visit her brother George who is buried in Bretteville-Sur-Laize War Cemetery ... he was killed on 7th June 1944 during the push for Caen he was in the Royal Armoured Corps and a member of 1st East Riding Yeomanry.... For the Normandy Landings, the East Riding Yeomanry, Royal Armoured Corps was part of 27th Armoured Brigade, supporting the 9th Infantry Brigade, a part of the 3rd British Infantry Division. An important part of their role was to provide the armoured support for 9 Infantry Brigade..... If you click on the map you'll be able to see where he landed and moved to... his division are marked in red the Germans advance and retreat in blue of the German Armour of 21 Panzer Division

So I've offered my driving skills to get them out there, nothing has been finalised yet but it's looking like it's going to happen..... I've got to admit I've always wanted to visit ... he is family after all even though I never met him but more importantly I know how important this is to my mother...... so would do all I could to get her out there....

Time to die....

There have been a fair few interesting stories in the press of late, one that particularly stood out was scientists have created artificial life, which on the surface seems quite an advance .... which it is but I have a feeling this discovery will be mercilessly exploited for profit.... The human genome was opened up for everybody to use .... this discovery smacks of profit...

But the really worrying thing is what it can be used for.... there is already talk about engineering the cells to absorb CO2 ... to make massive CO2 suckers .... the only worrying thing about that is what "if" this artificial life gets loose ? just "what if" it gets into the world and multiplies doing whatever it was designed to do.... "what if" it runs completely unchecked in the natural environment ? the effects could be an end game scenario for mankind and any life on this planet... No Co2 .... no plants.... no plants.... no oxygen...hmmmmm... Man can't even contain Pig flu let alone a synthetic bacteria/virus.....

I'm all for scientific experimentation but this recent discovery is quite frightening... no matter what safeguards the scientists say they will put in place there is always a chance it could make it into the real world.... you only have to look at the last outbreak of foot and mouth that originated in a research lab which "had" the highest standards of containment..... obviously not.....

I'm not an alarmist but more time has to be set aside testing to exhaustion before we attempt to use biological synthetic material or at least have a fail safe built into it ... much like the synthetics of "Bladerunner" which is slowly becoming science fact it seems.....

If anything is going to kill mankind.... it's not going to be how clever he is..... it's going to be his ignorance....

Tuesday 25 May 2010

Faithless

If you ever get a chance to see this band "Faithless" don't pass it by... go you'll never regret it ..... very probably the best live band you'll ever get to see.....


A nice explaination of what a light year is



It's easy when somebody says "Oh that's 4 light years away" but do you actually understand how far a light year is ? A light year is how far light can travel unimpeded in one solar year or 365 days and the common mistake is that some people think it's a measurement of time but it's not it's a measurement of distance ....

The moon for instance is 1 light second away from us, the sun is 8 light minutes from us... now expand that up to a light month ? The voyager space probe which was launched in 1977 is only 16 light minutes away which is roughly twice the distance from here to the Sun.... Anyway take a look at the video it explains it much better than I ever could .... fascinating stuff :)



Friday 21 May 2010

It's sweltering outside

I'm guessing summer has arrived... I've just been out on the decking behind our house (That sounds so 1990's !!) and the Sun is beating down.... I couldn't stay in it for longer than a few minutes and the air is perfectly still not a breeze can be felt... Wonderful ....and on our front lawn (we have three, front back and side) there is this fantastic carpet of daisies :)




There is something about going outside on a hot sunny day that just lifts your spirits :)

FOMO boy is coming back from Pendine today... he's spent the past week there on one of those activity holidays run by the school.... He'll probably sleep for a week once he lands back here.... I have to say when one of the kids stays away somewhere the whole dynamic of the family changes... can't quite put my finger on it but it's definitely noticeable ... ahhh yes of course.... peace and bloody quiet that's it !!! ;¬)
The fridge has had a weeks holiday and is remarkable full with his absence .... we even had a bunch of grapes last THREE whole days with him staying away .... He denies it of course.... but the evidence is written in stone now... I'm sure he's had a blast down there ..... if maybe went a little hungry ....

Anyway Andrea will be back soon with part of the tribe... so I had better find out what Freya has been destroying or drawing on with crayons.... because I can hear her singing away in the kids lounge.... that's ALWAYS a bad sign.....




Ohhh and the horses are back !!! :)

Thursday 20 May 2010

Muslim bashing

Now I'm an Atheist I don't believe there is a God of any description residing over us.... we are masters of our own destiny, decisions we make ripple out and affect our lives for the duration.. it's what forms us as human beings.. I don't believe we are being influenced by a higher being or that in fact anybody is "talking" to us or guiding us.... and the ones who say somebody is well they are suffering from a delusion on a massive scale... Life is this ... what you have now, what you live now and in the future...

There are no real solid answers as to why we are here... which is why religion has played such a big part in man's development.... it's our desire to know things and how we came about... and for some, religion answers that question ... but for others like me it doesn't even come close.... it's not even a maybe with me it's up there with fairy tales and nursery rhymes.....

That's a very condensed synopsis of what I think....

But that doesn't mean to say I disrespect what other people believe such as Christians and Muslims or any other faith.... I would defend somebodies right to believe in something with extreme vigour, just as I have the right to believe what I do.....

But I've noticed recently that anti Islamic rhetoric is on the increase what with "Draw Mohammed Day" on Facebook (which has now been deleted) .... it really saddens me that some people seem to think it's a fabulous idea to insult another persons religion under the guise of free speech... and although I'm not agreeing with the extremists on the beheading front ... I don't think this kind of thing should be allowed to propagate... although it will be hard to stop with the freedom granted by the internet....

Muslims have been demonised purely because the extremists who carried out the terrorist atrocities were Muslim or pertained to be Muslim.... The Crusaders killed thousands of Muslims during the Crusades to convert them... that doesn't make every Christian a blood thirsty killer.....and neither do a few extremist Muslims bent on terror and murder make the entire Muslim faith a culture to be afraid of because they are hell bent on decapitating western civilisation ..... It's surprising sometimes when somebody comes out with something and you realise it's anti Islamic....That seems to be popping up more and more often....

I think there is a groundswell of thought and feeling rising in this country regarding immigration and Muslims in particular and I have to admit I'm not feeling overly comfortable with it.... I can't help thinking that it's been brought about by the media and the government ... and it smacks of the beginnings of this little episode ....... little seeds planted which have germinated in the heads of the people and are now growing into uncontrollable bushes of resentment ....

This is going to end in tears and bloodshed if it carries on.... whatever happened to live and let live ?

Wednesday 19 May 2010

The fast and the furious

Well our broadband seems to be performing admirably from the Post Office, our router has remained up and stable for a couple of weeks now which is more than can be said of BT's broadband....which had a tendency to behave like flashing Christmas tree lights ...On..... Off.... On... etc.....

I am fully aware that the Post Office use BT wholesale as their supplier so technically we are still with BT only paying considerably less for the privilege....

The weather today is particularly typical of a British Summer Time here in Wales... wet.. and when it's not wet it's moist or drizzle ... we've had a few days of sunshine though so not all bad....

I've just finished re-installing a Sony VGN-CR31S laptop .... it's a bit of a beast, with 2MB Ram and a Dual core Intel CPU with 160GB of storage thrown in... it flies... but it hasn't been a smooth transition from Windows Vista to Windows XP... it originally came installed with Windows Vista Home and with me being utterly against anything Vista on any computer I decided to reformat it and install Windows XP...

You can imagine my horror when I browsed to the Sony website and found that Sony don't supply Windows XP drivers for this laptop it was purely designed for Windows Vista .... so the only way I could make it work under Windows XP was to track down the Vendor ID and Device ID in System/Details then make note of their PCI device numbers then go to the PCI device database bash all the hex numbers in and see who made it then dig around their websites for some generic driver that loads under XP....

Luckily I got everything working perfectly including the Sony Motion Eye webcam built into the lid of the laptop, the only thing I couldn't get to work was the Soft Modem made by Conexant Systems.... but who uses modems these days ???

There is a huge difference between running Vista on this laptop and XP .... XP simply flies on it, whereas bloatware Vista crawled along... I did initially load Ubuntu 10.04 on it and everything was identified and loaded automatically even the motion eye webcam made by Ricoh.... but the laptop isn't mine otherwise it would be running Linux .... No I'm reinstalling it for a friend and he insisted on Windows XP which is what he has installed on his other laptop.... So he got it :) .... although he doesn't know how much work it took to get it usable !!!! ... and yes it's a pink laptop.... he got it back from his ex girlfriend... my advice is if you're ever going to buy your girlfriend a laptop at least make sure it's one in bloke colours.....

Nothing much else to report here at Chez Brabrook, life is a bit slow these days ....

Wednesday 12 May 2010

The big bang and a bit of a laugh

There is a white dwarf star which in astronomical terms is close to blowing itself to bits in a type 1a supernova explosion which is one of the most brutal events in the Solar System

it lies in the southern constellation of Pyxis and is approximately 3260 light years away.... you wouldn't think that a star so distant could if it goes Supernova destroy life on earth.... but it can

it would release massive amounts of Gamma radiation the most energetic type of radiation in the Solar System.. basically these highly energetic photons have the ability to to completely destroy the Earth's ozone layer and also any other life form that may exist at the time... the total energy output that will hit us is estimated at "about" 1000 solar flares worth but all at the same time.... one of the first effects of this bathing in Gamma radiation is not that we will all turn into the incredible hulk but that it will produce massive amounts of Nitrous Oxide in the atmosphere which in essence will completely halt the production of Ozone.... it will all be a bit of a laugh as well because Nitrous Oxide is laughing gas... so if everybody starts laughing suddenly the world is going to end :)

The star is thought to be much larger than first observed... if that is the case then the star could already be on the path to the Chandrasekhar Limit, this is the point at which the core of the star collapses and we get a massive explosion.. the type 1a supernova is the biggest bang there is in the universe as we know it... it will briefly outshine entire galaxies... but relax the scientists predict it won't go bang just yet.... we have about 10 million years before that happens... give or take a few million years.....

Monday 10 May 2010

Crash Gordon has resigned...Yayyyy

Oh happy days.... well sort of he's going in September or before hopefully .... This is of course a cynical plan for his party to remain in power... you would have to be firing on 3 brain cells if you thought he was purely doing the "honourable" thing... even in defeat they slither around for advantage.... and now it's just a case of who offers the biggest carrot to the Liberals....

He knows the Liberals won't do business with him personally and he also knows the country voted him out.... but to be honest even if the Liberals do side with Labour it will end in disaster as it will with the Conservatives.... I think the most likely alliance will be with the Conservatives.... but if the Liberals do side with Labour who lets face it will sell their own grandmothers to gain a majority and remain clinging onto power....

it's not going to be pretty... This is politics at its very worst....

I think the large majority of this country is sick of New Labour.... (Old Labour now) ....They are a spent force and a government which is fresh out of ideas and new laws to pass..... Tony Blair must be glad he left when he did.... he knew this was coming....

It wouldn't surprise me if there isn't another general election at some point so the Conservatives can gain a majority and jettison the Liberals and dance to their own tune instead of some other party....

Whoever gets in I hope they do a better job than the previous Government but that's unlikely they are all full of bullshit and promises before they get in power but it soon fades and tarnishes once they have it....

I'm not a Liberal, Conservative or Labour supporter and the other parties don't matter very much ... I vote purely on whether I think the party who is in power deserves to remain in power.... if they don't deserve it then I vote for the party which I think will do a better job....I've voted Liberal, Labour and Conservative in the past.... They are all a useless bunch of hypocrites who get nothing done and just waste public money... so it's a matter for me to vote for the best of a bad bunch... Which is a sorry state of affairs....

Party politics has sort of met in the middle now.... there isn't much difference between a Conservative or Labour Government and you very probably couldn't slide a Rizla paper between their policies... different in name only .... give with one hand take with another.... They just do it differently .... same net result.....less money in our pockets more in the government coffers.....and nothing to show for it at the end of it....



If I could leave this country I would .... in a flash

Anyway Gordon don't bang your head on the way out of Number 10..... you buffoon

Sunday 9 May 2010

I think it's going to be a lovely day today :)

Freya got us up at stupid o'clock this morning I think she likes the idea of being able to get out of bed by herself in the morning.... I went downstairs to let the dog out so she could do her ablutions... walking her really isn't an option where we live.... the back road we live on is sometimes inhabited by the freshly passed driving test idiot... or more commonly called the greater spotted 17 year old who think they can drive with the same skill as a formula one driver and there are too many curves and bumps to take a dog for a walk plus there isn't any footpath so it's the field for Roxy safest option really .....

Anyway I got outside and immediately felt the warmth of the sun on me.... it was nice :) maybe .... just maybe..... summer is on the way !

On a slightly different note the day after the general election I was elated that Crash Gordon pulled fewer votes than the conservatives but only because I want rid of the blithering buffoon... I wouldn't have cared who got in (bar the BNP of course) as long as it wasn't Gordo .... and yes I did vote ...

All that remains now is that Crash Gordon is removed from power and office as soon as is physically possible and consigned to the back benches and eventually fade into obscurity on the after dinner speakers circuit.

Single-handedly (with a little help from Tony) he has brought this country to it's knees... albeit helped by the conservatives after they deregulated the banks when they were last in power....

Politicians have a knack of ruining countries these days .... and it doesn't seem to matter which party they stand for... but that's what you get when politicians think more about themselves than what they've been elected for... to serve the people...

Good riddance Mr Brown and don't bump your head on the way out of Number 10

Tuesday 4 May 2010

Post Office Broadband

So far so good.... The free wifi router they sent us (Zyxel P660HW-T1 V3) works a treat and it syncs at just over 3Mbits/sec which is a tad more than the BT Homehub at 2.2Mbits/sec.... I've actually been using the Post Office wifi router for over a week now on the old connection and it improved that... basically we are on the same length of copper wire to the same exchange probably plugged into the same patch panel on the same DSLAM unit ... the only difference is we are paying a lot less for it @ £25 a month including line rental and home phone.... BT was £37 before they started adding phone costs, Anytime @ £16 odd and then what it cost for the broadband !!!

We have made a major saving .... lets hope the service is as bad or better ;¬)

Our Broadband was only off for about 3 hours in total but it sprang into life just as the kids bus dropped them off ... it must have known that my step daughters life would be over if she couldn't login when she got home.....

bandwidth restrictions have been lifted they can youtube themselves to death from now on.....

Oh and for those of you interested in protecting your kids and limiting what they can and can't see/do online...... I would recommend installing OpenDNS on your kids computer.... you can filter out lots of bad stuff and if they try to open bad stuff it will simply put a page up on their browser saying whatever you want it to say to them.... it has tons of categories and it allows you to block individual websites.... so if your teenagers were spending too much time on Facebook for instance you could simply block access to it... Ohhh and best of all its FREE and very easy to setup !!! if you set it on your router and password protect your router your darling teenagers cannot bypass it....bombproof....

and seeing as downloading music is now a criminal offence I've already blocked person to person file sharing via OpenDNS, so ANY P2P software such as torrents or frostwire or limewire or any other kind of "wire" or gnutella ......simply do not work any more.... It could save you a hefty legal bill in this police state we live in called the United Kingdom !!!

there is a way of selectively blocking one individual computer but allowing other computers free access to the internet .....if you're interested in how to do it I'll be happy to tell you how via email

Anyway stuff to do :)


Ubuntu 10.04 has arrived (Lucid Lynx)

And I have to say they have surpassed everything they have ever done before.... it worked right out of the box... Bar one minor problem that a normal user wouldn't encounter, I have a non standard master boot record on my pc and Ubuntu got a bit confused as to where to put the grub boot loader... It got it wrong and put it on my second drive which contains the MBR and appears as drive C: when booting but changes to drive D: after booting... suffice to say there is method in my madness... but Ubuntu couldn't figure it out... but then again neither does Windows XP or the other two operating systems I have on my PC, so it's hardly a fault of Ubuntu 10.04....

That said it has an incredibly fast almost lightning like boot up, I turned it on ,turned my back and voilĂ  there it was... I actually had to restart it again because I didn't believe it had initialised properly... But no... on my PC it takes just under 10 seconds from cold to a working system, ready to do whatever you require... Which makes Windows XP look like a geriatric slug in comparison with it's 50 odd seconds...it even knocks Mac OSX into a cocked hat...

My iPod was recognised immediately and you can add playlists to it and music...Brilliant !!

It also recognised everything I have stuffed into my computer including my Edimax wifi card (RT61) and my Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 which on previous incantations of Ubuntu would invariably not be there and would require some jiggery pokery to get them working correctly... It even prompted me to download and install the proprietary Nvidia driver when I wanted to enable the visual effects such as wobbly windows and 3D support...

It's not gone unnoticed by a few how remarkably similar some of the GUI is like Snow Leopard or Mac OSX... it's not a rip off of that venerable GUI but there are bits of it that make you think .... hmmmm that's familiar but I guess most operating systems are guilty of adopting a good idea or two not mentioning any names of course (cough VISTA...cough...Windows 7...cough...Snow..Cough...Leopard) so let the good ideas freely be adopted we all benefit...

Lucid Lynx can get better and no doubt it will.... This last release has seen a lot of work go into it's development and hassle free installation... No operating system is EVER perfect they all have flaws but I'm liking Lucid Lynx it's quality and astounding speed should make the likes of Microsoft and Apple think long and hard about where they are going and if indeed they are being left behind ..... there is after all only so much bang you can get for your buck and Ubuntu is FREE !!!

All I can say is try it and see for yourself... there is a link on the right of my blog go there download burn your ISO CD and boot off the CD... it won't touch your existing PC unless you tell it to... have a play with it and see what it can do.... although obviously you won't get the blinding speed running it from your CD/DVD player but you'll get a good idea :)

I don't often rave about operating systems so when you see that I actually do ....they are actually VERY good :)

Saturday 1 May 2010

Freya gets her "big girl" bed....

Freya's first sleep in her new big girls bed..... yes we've finally taken down the cot and put in her IKEA expandable bed.... although I don't think she'll be using it when she is eighteen but you never know.... it was surprisingly easy to put up unlike most self assembly furniture and we didn't have any screws left over either so that's always a bonus...

She is growing up so quickly her speech is amazing, some of the things she comes out with just has us in stitches of laughter, her grammar is appalling but her meaning is spot on.... "My do it" being her favourite or "My helping" but I think she's getting her head around it because I've caught her using "I" quite a few times now..... either way you'd have to get up early to catch Freya out, what she lacks in speech she makes up for in getting her point across quite clearly .... speaking of which we will have our first Freya gets out of bed at the crack of crow poo and quite probably wakes us up before the alarm goes off... OR we find her dragging a tired and over buttered warm bit of bread upstairs after having made toast in the toaster... I'm just hoping she doesn't make us tea or coffee the result could be disastrous !!!

but she might just stay in bed, you know like liberated battery hens, where they won't move very far from where they are placed because they couldn't when they were in their cages..... I'm betting that doesn't last very long with Freya.... she'll be off with the TV on Cbeebies blasting out.....with toast in one hand, cup of juice in the other..... lording it in the lounge..... ask me tomorrow if I'm wrong..... The next thing will be "Gack Gacks" being replaced with boring "biscuits" .... They grow up so quickly.....