I’ve been thinking about ways to get a minimal-impact hosepipe going at Kate’s allotment. At present she has a reservoir in a water-butt that collects off the shed roof, and she dips a watering-can in there to pour on the veg patch. I figured if you could lift the water to say the height of the shed roof, it would be enough to simply siphon off water with a hose that would allow the whole allotment to be watered without returning to the reservoir. I figured the pump technology wouldn’t have to be very advanced, since it would have all day to pump the water up to the header tank.
Mark at work suggested a sealed tank with a hose trailing in the reservoir: as the sun heats it during the day, the air within expands, and bubbles out of the end of the hose. At night, as it contracts, it draws water up the hose into the higher tank. To draw off water, you would open a tap at the bottom of the tank and take the hose out of the reservoir.
I did some calculations. Using a daytime max. temperature of 10 celsius and night time minimum of 5 celsius, and an 80-litre bin, this machine would suck 1.5 litres a day to a maximum height of 1.7 metres.
I imagine Kate’s in the habit of pouring slightly more than that on her cabbages.
From time to time my brain gets stuck. It goes for little holidays and refuses to think about stuff. Doesn’t matter what the stuff is, it refuses to think about it. Parking fines, relationships, people’s birthdays (including mine), and various projects have all suffered on account of this. Today I witnessed an unsticking. Before lunch I had 100,000,000 things to do and life almost wasn’t worth bothering with. At lunch I did 3 things, and suddenly there weren’t 100,000,000 things to do any more. There were none. Weirdness.
So I bought myself a bamboo. Not sure how that’s relevant, but it’s nonetheless something cool.
Also, during the stuckness, I was having the devil of a job figuring out what to do with my car tax. The spitty is declared SORN, so now it has its MOT it’s still not llowed on the roads until it’s taxed. Being near the end of the month, the first month of tax would be mostly wasted unless I have the tax start from the 1st. But that way, I don’t get to drive it around and shake out the bugs before the weekend, and my trip to Holland in the following week.
A colleague pointed out that since the tax was free, it probably didn’t matter too much.
DOH.
There’s a figure of speech that seems to have caught on in the office lately. I think it deserves its own name, though I think strictly speaking it might count as irony (in the sense of: “the statement of the opposite of the intended meaning in order to emphasise the true meaning”)
I call it the elliptic “but”
He’s a really good technical guy … but has no clue how to deal with people
It’s a consistent way of doing it … but hopelessly inefficient
I can see your point …
etc.
To really qualify for an elliptic “but”, you must not say the “but” at all. If the listener says it, it shows you have put the point across, but it is an impure form of the communication. For the ultimate, neither party must actually say the “but”, if should just be understood, implicitly.
I decided to update the software on my iPod as it’s still not behaving. I needed to put in my “Apple ID” to download it. Not sure whether I had an Apple ID, I used my email address and guessed what password I would have used.
“Welcome Stephen (not Stephen? click here)”
Well. I have never been Stephen. I was named Steven when I was born, and have been Steve since I was about 19. So I clicked there. It logged me out again. I logged in again and looked for somewhere I could edit my profile.
But it’s not that, it’s more a question of where the hell do they get off deciding what my name is? How did they decide on that? I can well imagine typing “Steve” in a box, and it seems to me they have performed some sort of search and replace changing nicknames for longnames. Why?
Bizarre.
Having spent about a year and a half in a state of stressed anxiety about just about everything, and most of the time since I got back from Americaland with some kind of sinussy bug thing, yesterday morning I woke feeling absolutely cack. I drank some tea to try to warm myself up and nearly thew it up again. I have a pretty robust stomach: I’ve never thrown up through drinking unless you count the time I drank some weird red soft drink on a boat in Australia and was seasick.
Tracy The Cleaner at work had been feeling crook for a few days and described the same symptoms so when I got home I put on some thyme and sandalwood oil in a vapouriser. (Thyme is supposed to kill airborne bacteria and sansalwood balances the smell nicely)
Also, having finally found time to get a scanner working on my Pee Cee, I decided to scan in a few old photos:
It was extremely soothing to realise that in addition to an unpredictable hostile difficult future, I also have an immutable, rich, varied past, and that some of the friends in that past I still have today.
Hurrah!
I slept soundly for the first time in months, and woke feeling great. I don’t know whether it was the thyme or the history that did it…
http://www.ahbl.org/funny/response1.php
is supposed to be a joke but it’s actually very useful as a collation of all the pitfalls an antispam scheme.
Also
http://spamlinks.net/prevent-research.htm#verify-tech-postage
seems close to what I’m on about
I posted a quick sketch of the post below to a low-traffic mailing list that discusses ideas for the replacement of the current email system, and “The Famous Brett Watson” turned up the following interesting link.
In the delusional period between sleeping and waking, with Minster FM in one ear and a pillow in the other, I thought up this great scheme for preventing SPAM.
Emails cost you $0.50 to be delivered to a mailbox. When the recipient accepts the email, they choose whether to refund you. Your account would be monitored by a licensed host and you must operate in credit. ISPs would grant users so much credit, like $5 on signup.
Email software would allow you to make a list of senders who were automatically refunded.
Mailing lists would have to be well-funded and well-targeted. Poor people like you or I could still do mailshots, we’d just have to take longer over it. Say with a credit of $10 I can send 20 emails, then as the refunds come in, more emails can go out.
Not sure who would carry the load of administration. It could be largely automated, but someone would have to set up and monitor the accounts for abuse. Maybe the large ISPs would be able to sell it to their consumers … hmm it looks like a tough selling job though, there’s no clear angle that appeals to the disinterested consumer.
And there are bound to be unforseen technical administrative and legal obstacles.
Oh well, I said I was delusional.
This either means (a) the voices in my head are satisfied and I no longer have things I need to write down, or (b) the voices in my head are so many and varied that I can’t distinguish what any of them is saying.
I should note at least, for when I look back on this blog that last weekend involved a trip to the Forbidden Corner. And very good it was too. Unfortunately I can’t really write about it without giving away the secrets. You’ll have to go there yourself and discover them. Suffice it to say: WOW!
If you’re of my vintage, you’ll remember Knightmare on the telly where a kid would put on a helmet so s/he couldn’t see that the dungeon he was in was completely computer generated, then his/er friends would direct her/im through puzzles and past monsters etc.
This isn’t really like that at all… Well it is a bit. It’s a genuine adventure complete with mazes, underground grotto, puzzles (though not too puzzling) and mysterious doors. Having within our party a small dose of claustrophobia and a small dose of fear of heights added a small feeling of genuine jeopardy to the experience but once you’ve discovered the various parts it’s quite tame really.
Wholeheartedly recommended to right-brainers everywhere.
I don’t have anything to write today, execpt that I found an 18-month-old cinema listings mag tucked unde r the corner of my bed this morning. I think I might be finally catching up with the housework.