MYWAY - Part 2
Feb 17

According to the BBC News website in this article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7247470.stm

Smokers could be forced to pay £10 for a permit to buy tobacco if a government health advisory body gets its way.

Before we start let me just say I have never smoked so this doesn’t affect me directly, yet still I think it’s wrong. To all intents and purposes this is an extra tax on tobacco products. Smokers are taxed highly here in the UK anyway, and probably rightly so as smoking does cost a lot in healthcare to the publicly funded health service. The government can dress it up as a way to help people stop smoking, or say it’s another form of id under 16’s won’t have and will deter them from buying cigarettes. It isn’t and it won’t

What will happen is that it will open an opportunity for people who operate outside the law to supply even more cigarettes with no duty paid to people who will pay less for them than in the shop. This includes the young would be smoker who will find it easier to buy their cigarettes from the drug dealer in the street who can then offer an upsell of harder illegal drugs to get a new regular client.

My main reason for not liking this idea however is the spin being put on another stealth, backdoor tax. If the British public fall for this, the government has an open invitation to find even more things they can “licence”. We already pay for a licence to watch tv and a licence to drive, I wonder how many other “licences” would be found to be required in addition to these and a smoking licence?

Bicycle licences for those who ride push bikes? It has been touted by some people that the cyclists should pay for a numberplate style tag for their bike for “identification purposes” if they break road laws.

How long before we need a licence to walk the streets oh yeah, that’s already in the process and it’s called an ID card…

Feb 12
Stupid Cyclists
icon1 doug | icon2 Moans | icon4 02 12th, 2008| icon3No Comments »

I guess I must be in grumpy middle aged man mode today, but here is another moan. Cyclists, where do they get off thinking they have the right to hold everyone up?

Here in my home city of Milton Keynes, we have an excellent road system, and to cater for cyclists, and pedestrians an equally impressive system of pathways called “Red Routes”. The Red Routes follow the roadways where it is safe to do so, usually leaving a nice gap between the road and path, so cyclists and pedestrians can get around easily. Where the routes cross roads there are underpasses, or overpasses, keeping fleshy unprotected humans seperate from the ones in the metal cases known as cars.

Great, pedestrians and cyclists are safe, and have pathways to get where they want to, and motorists, and other traffic can go about their business at sensible speeds without having to watch out for pedestrians crossing roads and cyclists to swerve around, brilliant for everyone. Everyone except the lycra clad cyclists who seem to spend their time petitioning for more cycle paths in places there just isn’t room for them, or riding along the middle of the road avoiding the cycle paths in Milton Keynes.

Why?

The tax payer has paid for extra tarmac for your use, for your safety, yet you get your super expensive bike, and all your skin tight fabric, and insist on using the roads, and waving your fist at the motorist who just had to swerve around you into oncoming traffic as you do 15 mph on a 60mph road, 5 yards from the specially prepared surface made for you which follows the same route exactly.

I have thought about making a sign to show these stupid cyclists which has an arrow pointing to their specially set aside piece of tarmac. I haven’t done so, as I feel if they can’t work it out for themselves, the loss of their dna in the gene pool won’t actually harm humankinds evolution in the future should a lorry not have space to avoid them as they go around one of the many roundabouts the cyclist could avoid by using the Red Routes but chose not to so as to make some point no one else can understand.

Feb 12

I live in Milton Keynes, I like living in MK. There that’s out in the open now, so no going back on that. If you don’t know about Milton Keynes you may have heard about two things for which it is (in)famous concrete cows, and roundabouts. The concrete cows are a bit of a feature if you can find them, the roundabouts on the other hand are part of a brilliant design.

Having lived most of my life in London, when I first worked in MK I found the road system a bit confusing. At first it is a bit difficult, but when you know the layout is a grid, it makes for easy navigation, and easy traffic evasion. The roundabouts at each crossroads on the grid also keep traffic flowing nicely.

Now somebody has decided we should take the London example and get rid of the roundabouts in favour of traffic lights. As I said I lived and worked in and around London for many years, and sat in the long queues waiting at traffic lights. In Milton Keynes even at rush hour I can get anywhere around the city in minutes, in London it would take an hour to do a couple of miles at any time of day, all slowed down due to waiting at traffic lights.

I don’t see how someone can look at the obvious chaos of Londons traffic lights, then see the unhindered flow of traffic in MK and decide that the London congestion is the way forward. Unless the local council feel they are missing a trick by not being able to charge a congestion charge because there is none, so they need to create some congestion to make the extra revenue.

Feb 10
Cinema Adverts
icon1 doug | icon2 Moans | icon4 02 10th, 2008| icon3No Comments »

Last night my wife and I went to the cinema to see “Sweeny Todd” with Johnny Depp, which was a very good film if you can stand a musical and loads of gore (we both could). What can I moan about then?

Adverts. I don’t mean the trailers for new films, although they did drag on a bit too long too, but the everyday adverts we see on TV each time we choose a commercial channel. Now I can understand that a commercial tv channel needs to show ads, that’s how they pay for their programs to be made. The cinema is a different matter.

I just paid for me and my wife to get in here. I paid over the normal price for popcorn, drinks and some maltesers, way over the price. Then they have the bare faced cheek to show back to back ads for what seemed like an hour before showing the film.

Maybe it’s a rose tinted look back in nostalgia, but cinema used to show different, sometimes more entertaining ads than the TV. Last night I watched the same ads I could have seen in between re-runs of a 70’s sitcom on UK Gold.

I simply resent the fact that a £20 + trip to the cinema had me watching adverts. Then the cinemas complain about audience figures dropping, it’s no wonder when you are forced to sit through so many adverts before the film can begin. And I’ve noticed hiring the DVD of a film later still has you watching ads, come on people I’ve paid to see a film, not be enticed to buy the latest offering from Ford et al.

Come on cinema owners, Cut the ads or you’re going to keep losing viewers in your cinemas.

Feb 7

We’ve all had a go at making balloon animals (usually a crappy looking sausage dog) or if not at least seen an “entertainer” making balloon giraffes, dogs and swans. My daughter even won a balloon interpretation of Wile e Coyotes nemesis and preferred meal the Roadrunner. But they don’t even come close to the collection of balloon sculptures showing at funforever.net.
It includes a fairground, and many recognisable characters made from balloons. Go take a look, they are great if somewhat poppable works of art.

Feb 4

During one of my bored periods, I decided to build a PC in something different than a boring beige case. As I had a non working Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and had just found out about Mini ITX all in one pc boards, I decided to see if the two would fit together.
I ordered a 800mhz Mini ITX board online, and while I waited for it to arrive I took out the innards of the NES. Even with the innards removed the NES case looked small. I was going to have to use all the smallest bits I could to make it fit.

I went back online and ordered a power supply kit for the Mini ITX board which would plug straight in the power socket, and needed just a laptop power supply to power it, which was also available. I used Ebay to source a laptop hard drive and cd drive and appropriate adaptors.

Unfortunately I didn’t photograph the build up, so lets just say it was a very tight fit, but fit it did. I had a working PC inside a Nintendo NES case.

The Nes PC on the desktop

The picture below shows the rear of the NES PC showing the sockets, the mini ITX incorporates a graphics card, sound and USB ports as well as TV-out and serial and parallel ports. All I had to add was memory to the board.
The rear of the Nes PC showing connection sockets

The cartridge slot was an ideal place for the cd drive, under which I also mounted the hard drive. With the slot cover closed you’d be hard pushed to see it was a pc, but open the cover and you have the laptop cd rom drive available.
NES PC Showing the cd drive tray under the cartridge slot cover

So that’s the NES PC which boredom spawned, it is running Linux and I am using it to learn how Linux works when I have time between bouts of boredom ;)

Feb 3

I don’t know where he finds them, but my dad seems to find some real fun and silly stuff on his travels. Then of course it has to be tried out. The latest was this hot air balloon “toy” which should inflate and rise using a hair dryer which my daughter kindly loaned us (until it broke). Here are some short clips of us attempting to launch the hot air balloon.

Then we had hot air balloon attempt number 2 with the hair dryer repaired…

Dec 23
Boredom
icon1 doug | icon2 Boredom | icon4 12 23rd, 2007| icon3No Comments »

Boredom

Boredom can lead to some wonderful ways to waste time. With the advent of the net we can all waste time surfing to see how other people are wasting their time. While doing that I found this post on a blog concerning a Toothbrush Robot which is quite easy to make, and a great waste of time.

From time to time we will return to boredom and the ways we see people relieving it.

Dec 19

I just love the way they’ve played with this classic cutesy cartoon and turned it into something with attitude. Listen to the lyrics closely they’re classic too.

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