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| Sunday, July 5th, 2009 | | 3:43 pm |
Narrow escape!
I was thinking of going to Chester Zoo today, to experiment with my new DSLR camera, but decided to listen to the Wimbledom mens' final instead. Now I've just heard on the radio that the zoo's been closed and 5,000 people evacuated because the chimps have escaped from their island! I might have got some good pictures of them! :) Current Mood:  cheerful | | Saturday, May 16th, 2009 | | 7:25 pm |
It seemed a good idea at the time...
I've been chatting with my brother about our mothers' legacy to us. Back in the early 90s she was worried that she might end up in a nursing home and have to sell her house to pay the bills, so in December 1994 she transferred ownership of the house to us, though continued to live in it rent-free, of course. Fast-forward 12 years or so, so we were past the seven-year threshold for Inheritance Tax to claw back the transfer, and she eventually passed away as previously noted in this blog, but since she'd still been living in the house we had to include its value in the Inheritance Tax return anyway. Fortunately the total value of her estate was a lot less than the IHT threshold, so there'd have been no Inheritance Tax to pay anyway. The threshold was a lot lower, and closer to the value of the house, back in the early 90s. However, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and of course we'll eventually get a Capital Gains Tax bill on the increase in value of the house from 1994 to 2008, (though at least there'll be less tax to pay because of the decline in value of the house in the last year we owned it!). My brother's been talking to his accountant (since I only pay PAYE I've never needed such a person) and it looks like we'll each be lumbered with a bill of a bit more than £6500, which at least is a bit of a relief - I'd thought it might have been closer to £10K. So the moral of the story is, you'll always pick the wrong option when you arrange your finances! No doubt if she hadn't transferred the ownership, Mam would have ended up in a home and had to sell up - it just goes to show you can never predict the future. And that, unlike certain MPs, we're not afraid of paying our CGT... To get over the depression, my brother and sister-in-law are off to Kraków on holiday all next week :) Current Mood: resigned | | Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 | | 6:52 pm |
Amazing Fan movie
I've just been watching "The Hunt for Gollum", a fan-made 40-minute online movie, and I have to say I'm most impressed at the ability of this group of fans to achieve the look and feel of the Peter Jackson trilogy - and apparently on a £3,000 budget. They found a pretty convincing Viggo Mortensen look-alike to play Strider, and how on (Middle) Earth did they manage such a good Gollum? I must admit that at one stage the Nazgul's horse struck me as being a bit pony-ish, but there's some very convincing orcs (I liked how Strider managed to skewer a couple of them to a tree :) ). Highly recommended. Current Mood: impressed | | Saturday, March 14th, 2009 | | 8:46 pm |
| | Saturday, February 28th, 2009 | | 9:23 pm |
This has all happened before, and will happen again
Watching Sky News tonight, I'm struck with a strong sense of deja vu or, as Battlestar Galactica has it, "this has all happened before, and will happen again". It's about the banking crisis. Apparently the government are planning to use Northern Rock, which they own, as a "mortgage bank", NatWest/RBS as a "small business bank", and to set up an "investment bank" and a "savings bank" which they may give to the Post Office to run. Am I alone in remembering the old Post Office Savings Bank which became the Girobank in 1969, and was then sold off to Alliance & Leicester? One does have to wonder whether the Post Office actually has the expertise to run a bank, just as it's not possible to now resurrect British Rail as the experienced staff have now dispersed, retired, or died. I get the impression that the clock is being turned back to the 50s and 60s when things were generally better run - financial institutions, at any rate. Hopefully the banking industry will be run responsibly until about the 2070s or 2080s, when people who remember the current debacle will have died off, just as the industry didn't go crazy until people who remembered the 30s had disappeared. I am, however, incensed at how tens of billions of public money is getting thrown to pull irresponsibly-placed banking chestnuts out of the fire, and the people who put the chestnuts there are retiring with massive pensions. If only governments had actually allowed some of these idiots to go to the wall, it would have been a salutary lesson, but of course too many innocents would have suffered with the guilty. A thoroughly unsatisfactory situation all round. Current Mood:  discontent | | 9:04 pm |
Speed's not all it's cracked up to be...
Now that Network Rail have finally finished rebuilding Rugby station, we now have a weekend rail service on the West Coast Main Line which is actually usable (which it wasn't for virtually the whole of 2008, what with train diversions, and whole sections of the route usually decamping all the passengers onto buses). Today I went down to London for the first time since the Christmas break - we now have a 3-trains-an-hour service from Crewe, admittedly one is routed via Stoke and Northampton and calls at virtually all stations to Watford, so no-one in their right mind would take it for a journey all the way to the Smoke, but the other two are Pendolino's or SuperVoyagers which are scheduled to do the 158 miles in 1 hour 35 minutes, or 1 hr 40. By journey time, London's now not much more than 50% further away than Birmingham, though physically it's three times the distance. Going down this morning my Pendolino ex-Manchester actually arrived 7 minutes early, and thereby lies my grouse - on the old 2 hour schedule I could read all the interesting parts in a Saturday newspaper, but with the new faster timetable I'd just be throwing money away with the unread paper! :) Another nail in the coffin of British journalism... Mind you, how long this fast service will last is a bit up in the air - I was reading a few days ago of a plan to spend nearly half a billion pounds speeding trains up through Stafford so that there can be an end-to-end London to Glasgow timetable of less than four hours, which it's reckoned will draw a lot of business away from the airlines, but of course while all the construction work takes place trains won't be able to run in the meantime... and if they dig up the tracks at Stafford I wouldn't even be able to go to Birmingham instead of London... Current Mood:  thoughtful | | Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 | | 11:55 pm |
Patrick McGoohan
Sadly, Number Six's number has come up. I have the impression that I first saw The Prisoner when it was first broadcast in the late 60s - I don't think it had a consistent broadcast time on the whole ITV network, but I recall watching it early on Sunday afternoons on Granada TV - back in those days my parents would go to bed for a couple of hours nap on Sunday afternoon (and maybe something else, but what did a nine year old know...?), and I had the sole control of the TV channel selector (although, of course we only had BBC on Channel 2, and Granada on Channel 9!) between 1 and 3 p.m., so I could watch what I wanted. I loved the theme music in particular, and it's great that so many versions of it can now be easily found on YouTube. No doubt a fair bit of the storyline went over my head at that age, but I had another chance to see it in the late 70s when Anglia TV repeated it while I was at UEA in Norwich - as treasurer of the UEA student TV service which timeshifted the programme for the students' benefit, I was able to rewatch the tapes several times before we needed to reuse the tape to record the next episode. R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan, clearly more than just a number. Current Mood: contemplative | | Sunday, January 11th, 2009 | | 2:00 am |
One week survived - four more to go!
Well, I see young Mark got through this weeks' public vote on Eurovision: Your Country Needs You! - thanks to everyone who voted. I see my brother Emyr and his family made it to the studio in time - in the audience shot 90 seconds into the show the three people in white t-shirts are him, my sister-in-law Joyce, and my nephew Peter, though the BBC artfully positioned other audience members so the cameras couldn't see who the t-shirts were advising to "Vote for..."! I shall have to phone them when they've had a chance to recover, tomorrow. Current Mood: happy | | Friday, January 9th, 2009 | | 7:19 pm |
I almost hesitate to ask...
I wasn't watching much tv last weekend, so I was rather surprised when I phoned my brother tonight to discover that I have a tv star, or at least an asteroid, in my broader family. Yes, I'm referring to "Eurovision: Your Country Needs You"! I know the whole Eurovision thing is as cheesy as Cheddar Gorge, but if my readers in the UK could see their way to voting for Mark on the BBC1 show tomorrow night (1840-1945).... Mark's my brother's nephew - his mum's my sister-in-law's sister - and has actually been making a bit of a reputation for himself on stage in recent years, he was one of the leads in the Hammersmith production of High School Musical earlier this year, and he's been in the West End production of Spamalot. I'm told there's a peoplecarrier full of family making its way from north Wales to Shepherd's Bush tomorrow afternoon for the show (4 or 5 hours each way), and depending on how things go, this could become a weekly trek. Current Mood: surprised | | Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 | | 3:41 pm |
Last rush before the break...
Starting my winter break today (no work until the 5th... yay!), I was just doing a bit of last minute shopping - well, treating myself really, since the sales seem to have started early. Caught the 1111 train from Crewe to Manchester, and despite Virgin warning that they've got "boarding controls" at Euston over the holiday period this train (probably about 0940 from Euston) wasn't in the least busy - and I'm not just saying this because I was the only person in one of the first class coaches, standard wasn't very full either. Central Manchester wasn't terribly busy for the last day before Christmas, I'd say it was just "comfortable", unlike Birmingham a few weekends ago when you could barely move for the crowds. Was a bit surprised at the number of people wearing wooly hats or even Andean Indian style hats, and generally looking like they're venturing into the Arctic. I took out the fleece lining of my jacket yesterday because I was uncomfortably warm, and didn't zip it closed at all today. I always thought I was a bit nesh, but I seem to be the epitome of hardiness in comparison to many! The weather was actually quite pleasant in Manchester - bright, with lots of blue sky with high cloud, though just a few miles from Crewe we're back into an overcast grey Christmas. Heard on the radio this morning that Zavvi's gone into administration, which is a pity - I didn't buy from them that often, but the advantage of visiting a physical CD/DVD/Blu-Ray shop is that you can browse the shelves easier than you can online, and spot something that you'd like to buy. Today they were offering 2 Blu-Ray films for £25, which is a more reasonable price than the usual Blu-Ray price, so I bought a few despite only being able to play them on one of my laptops. Back home with my last few treats in the fridge by 1440, so now to pig out in front of the tv for a few days! Merry Christmas to one and all. :) Current Mood: cheerful | | Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | | 12:35 am |
High speed travel
London to Glasgow in five minutes courtesy of the BBC. If you get off the train at the stop at 1 minute 7 seconds, you can walk to my house in about 8 minutes... The station stops are Crewe, Warrington Bank Quay, Wigan North Western, Preston, Lancaster, Oxenholme, Carlisle, and Glasgow Central. Current Mood: Dizzy | | Thursday, December 11th, 2008 | | 8:34 pm |
You don't see that every day...
I was walking home from work tonight, along Crewe's Nantwich Road (visitors may know it as the road Crewe railway station's on) when emerging from the darkness at a junction I spied a rather unusual motorbike and sidecar combination on the trailer behind a van. I was astonished to see it was no ordinary sidecar, it was a hearse, and rather tastefully turned out too. I've never seen one of those before but a quick read of the towing van told me it was the property of Motorcycle Funerals Ltd, who seem to have a small fleet of them. You don't see one of those every day. Current Mood: cheerful | | Friday, October 17th, 2008 | | 11:38 pm |
Back to politics
Just spent three and a half hours at my first Labour Party meeting in a few years, since I gafiated... After the fiasco of last May's by-election, Crewe & Nantwich Labour Party has got round to choosing its Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for the next General Election. I forgot how tediously boring these meetings can be, and I suppose I should be grateful that one of the shortlisted candidates didn't turn up, thus saving us a seven minute speech and fifteen minute Q&A session! Something over 120 people turned up at a local primary school to choose between the shortlisted candidates (in order of appearance): 1. A male ethnic minority candidate from Derby. Actually a pretty good candidate, but given the way in which Nantwich people look askance at Crewe people, and vice versa, any candidate from outside the immediate area is travelling in hope rather than expectation. 2. A male candidate, currently resident in Manchester but originally from up the road in Middlewich, with an extensive local employment history (Crewe Bus Station, the Bentley car factory, agent for Gwyneth Dunwoody in the 1992 general election, before moving on to work for the regional Labour Party and latterly National Political Officer for the shop workers' union, Usdaw). 3. A male candidate, local resident, borough councillor and councillor on the new unitary authority, and formerly at various times a member of Merton and Manchester city councils. 4. A female candidate, locally born and currently living just outside the constituency, but working in it. 5. A female ethnic minority candidate from Bradford, who didn't turn up, but hadn't withdrawn from the competition, so she stayed on the ballot... And the winner is... number 2, Dave Williams is his name, and he came second to Tamsin Dunwoody in the shortlisting for the by-election. I rather suspect Labour would have done better in the by-election if he'd been chosen, since hopefully he would have been strong enough to tell the regional/national party where to put their "Tory toffs" class-war campaign (which came in for heavy criticism tonight, as the Class War has never been of great interest to Crewe folk, who have never objected to people working hard in the local industries and earning a good salary by the time they retire). Current Mood:  tired | | Friday, September 26th, 2008 | | 5:35 pm |
Investment advice...
If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1000 worth of Carlsberg beer one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on these statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle. | | Sunday, September 7th, 2008 | | 12:32 am |
New toy
As I was going out to work on Friday morning I noticed something peeping out from the inner flap of my letterbox which I hadn't seen the previous evening. It turned out to be a DHL failed delivery notice - I was a bit surprised as I'd had an email on Wednesday from Waterstones that my new Sony Reader had been despatched, expect delivery in 3-5 days (since I'm a cheapskate, and didn't pay for next day delivery!). Some cursing that they used DHL rather than good old Royal Mail - when I have to collect from RM, the delivery office is only 10 minutes' walk from my house; DHL's depot is in Fenton, Stoke on Trent, about 15 miles away, and of course they don't deliver on Saturday... So, this morning awake at the obscenely early hour of 7.30 a.m. (I like to recover my weekly sleep deficit at weekends...) to catch the 08.07 train to Stoke with a minute to spare; half hour slow train ride to Stoke, then a 12 minute walk to the DHL depot - mood not improved because the rain was p***ing down in the North Midlands, a quick production of my passport for ID, and I'm back to Stoke station in good time to catch the 9.20 back to Crewe. Home by 10.00, and time for breakfast (no later than I would have had it if I'd stayed in bed as usual), the the fun of unpacking my new toy - a Sony PRS-505 ebook reader. First impressions is of a nice paperback-sized tan covered unit, about half the thickness of the recent book I bought about Sir Francis Walsingham. Nice large "e-ink" screen covering most of the face of the reader, ten numbered keys running down the side, which are used to select menu options off the screen, also "page forward" and "page back" keys (hold down to advance 10 pages), below the screen are another page forward/back control, button to cycle the text size between small/medium/large, a bookmark button, a four-arrows wheel and "enter" key for navigation, and the all-important "menu" ("back") button. Along the top edge is the power switch and sockets for Sony Duo and SD memory cards, along the bottom edge is the USB socket, DC power socket (optional extra if you want to charge it faster than via USB), headphone socket and volume control (if you're playing MP3's, though personally I've got better use for the unit's memory!). The rather intimidating "quick-start" guide says to connect the Reader to your PC to charge the battery when you're first setting it up. This takes several hours, and in the meantime you can't do anything else with the reader. Fortunately, it gave me plenty of time to install the necessary software to use the reader on my PC, and to re-download all the books I've bought from Baen Books since 1999, this time in Sony format instead of MS Reader. The nice thing about Baen Books is they've never subscribed to any nonsense about DRM, so it was no problem to get new versions of books I'd already bought. This was also true for most of the books I'd bought from Fictionwise.com, but there was considerable cursing on discovering about a dozen of my books are DRM'd (spit!) and I can't get them in Sony format (or pdf either, which the reader can make use of). The quicker DRM dies, the better. Anyway, I've currently got about 160 books loaded up on the reader, and I'm very impressed with its performance so far; as soon as I can figure out how to get rid of the audio and picture samples that are included on the unit as new, I'll hopefully get a little more space in the memory. Current Mood: happy | | Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 | | 11:08 pm |
Spending a small fortune
My supply of daily contact lenses was running out last week, so I contacted my opticians to make sure they'd get the next 3 months' supply in before I used my last. Unfortunately they noticed it was a while since my last eye tests, and insisted that I have a sight test and contact lens test before they give me my new supply, so I'm temporarily using my old spectacles to see the world (which is a nuisance when it's raining, as it so often does this summer). I dislike switching from contact lenses to specs, because until my eyes get used to them, I always see the world as slightly curved, and last time I had to use my specs I misjudged the stairs in my house, slipped three steps from the bottom and landed awkwardly, breaking my leg just above the ankle. So I've been a bit wary these last few days! Anyway, to the opticians today for the sight test (contact lens test next Tuesday). When I think of the opticians when I got my first pair of glasses back when I was 10 (they realised I couldn't read the blackboard in primary school), I'm amazed at how opthalmology has advanced in the last 39 years - old Mr Banton never took photos of my retinas back then. I'm also amazed at the prices - we decided it was time for me to get a new pair of specs with varifocal lenses, since my existing specs have served me well since 1991 but they do tend to make me look rather like Dennis Taylor at the 1985 World Snooker Championship; so I'm spending some of my inheritance - £117 for the frame and £226 for the lenses (ouch!), not forgetting £36 for the actual test... Current Mood: contemplative | | Saturday, July 26th, 2008 | | 1:58 am |
Policemen are looking younger....
When I'm starting to feel old and decrepit, it's nice to think that I was challenged by a conductor on a train yesterday because he thought I was too young to be travelling on a retired staff pass :) It's the big 5-0 for me in just over a month, but I've already had a "retired" pass for the last six and a half years - you get them as a result of having been made redundant after working for the railways in a sufficiently senior grade for more than 20 years, rather than because of age; I was 43 when I got mine, and technically I suppose a 36 year old could qualify for one, though it would be fairly unlikely. Anyway, cross fingers, the reason I was on a train today was because I'd had to go back to the ancestral homeland to sign the contracts on the sale of my mothers' house, and hopefully the contracts will get exchanged on Monday so we should finally get our hands on some money! Don't believe any press reports that house prices have only fallen about 5% - I think that's in asking prices, we had to discount 13% off last summers' valuation to make this sale, and even then at the last minute the cheeky sods demanded another £2000 off to go through with the sale. We finally gave them another £1500, and at least the estate agent's knocking £250 of his fees as well, to help the sale go through - he wasn't too happy that three other sales fell through last Thursday, so I suppose he needs the income too... I never thought I'd feel sorry for an estate agent... Current Mood: relieved | | Sunday, June 8th, 2008 | | 7:28 pm |
| | 2:48 am |
Idiot football commentators
Well, the Euro 2008 championship has finally arrived, with the first matches last night. I wasn't too bothered who won the match between Switzerland and the Czech Republic, but I must confess I was being driven to distraction by John Motson and his sidekick, whose name escapes me, continually mangling the names of the players - mostly Czech ones, but surely even Motson knows enough French to realise that Ludovic Magnin's surname isn't pronounced "MAG-NIN"?? Will someone please tell him that the Czech captain Tomáš Ujfaluši's surname isn't pronounced "oodj-fal-oosi" but something like "ooee-fal-ooshi", and the Czech goalscorer Vaclav Svěrkoš isn't "Vak-lav Svur-koss", but "Vats-lav Svi-er-kosh"? The Czech language isn't that difficult to get the hang of pronouncing (once you've conquered the surname of Antonín Dvořák you've got the toughest sound), even if like me you're clueless of the grammar. Or preferably just shoot him and put us all out of our misery! :) Current Mood: exasperated | | 2:19 am |
The dangers of machine or dictionary translation
I was meaning to comment several months ago about this, but a visit to Birmingham today jogged my memory. The Pallisades Shopping Centre in Birmingham, which forms the roof of New Street Station, has got a number of panels wishing its' shoppers "Welcome", and "Thank you" and (by the payphones, so I suppose sponsored by a telecom company) "Hello" in many languages. My own linguistic abilities managed to check out commoner translations like "Bienvenue", "Wilkommen", "Welkom", even "Vitejte", but I barely managed to avoid bursting out laughing when I saw "Croesawu"! The languages are ordered in English alphabetical order of their name, so as it appears near the end I suppose it's supposed to be Welsh, but, oh dear, it shows all the signs of someone having used a dictionary inexpertly. Croesawu is actually the infinitive, "to welcome" - I thought everybody knew that a simple welcome is "Croeso" as on the signs you find on virtually all roads that cross the border. At least they managed to say "thank you" properly - "diolch", but when I got round to the phones there was a panel with the only word which appears to be Welsh being "Dweud". I had to check all the other languages I know to figure out what they were trying to say - "hello", apparently. "Dweud" means "to say" or just "say", and I must confess I'm at a loss as to how they managed to get things so badly wrong. If they actually wanted to say "hello" in Welsh, what's wrong with "helo", "hylo" (depending on your accent), or informally "s'mae"? This reminded me of a blog entry I saw some months ago. Apparently there's a combination of symbols in Chinese which means something innocuous in the retail industry, like "customer service" or something. Unfortunately, it has a subsidiary meaning, "f**k", and back in the 1990s the most popular Chinese-to-English electronic translator of the time would give this as the primary meaning, with the result that if you go shopping in China in shops with English translations of signs, you are quite likely to find the f-word! Current Mood: amused |
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