Anyone who spends a little of their precious time each day reading Twitter or navigating their way through the blogosphere will be well aware by now of the trend towards user uploaded photos on the internet. It’s been a feature of blogging ever since the invention of broadband, but it’s perhaps more recently, with the arrival of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter etc, that the trend has become more mainstream. After all, these sites exist purely on user generated content, and each one treats photo sharing as a core part of its operation.

As someone who has owned a digital camera since before any one of these sites had even been dreamt up, I’m very much in favour of the practice. Yet, if you look at any of my web content you’ll be pretty quick to notice how rarely I contribute any photos myself. Try as I might to be an active photographer, every time I come to share my photos with the internet, I find there are simply too many barriers in the way. The main one, quite simply, is the amount of effort I have to go through to actually complete the process.

Twitter users among you will, no doubt, be familiar with services like Twitpic, which make it easy for users to upload their photos and include them in their tweets. I don’t know what percentage of Tweets include links to photos, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something like 25%, thanks largely to the popularity of the iPhone, and other high end smart phones as the Twitter platforms of choice. It’s a very easy thing to do. I know this because I have used Twitterrific to upload a photo stored on my iPod Touch, and it only took a few seconds. Unfortunately my iPod doesn’t have a camera, and the only photos I can share using it are those that have already been copied across from my computer.

This means that if I want to share a photo of something I can see using Twitterrific, I must take the photo with my mobile or digital camera, copy it onto the computer, sync the iPod with the computer and then post the photo as a Tweet. A quick, hassle free process that I can do anywhere in the world (as long as “anywhere” is my home office) in perhaps just 15 or 20 minutes. By comparison, if I had an iPhone I could take the picture on that and upload it then and there, from anywhere with a phone signal in as little as 15 or 20 seconds. I’m not actually sure it would be possible to upload a photo using my Nokia 2630, and if it were the data rate would probably take several quid out of my credit every time I tried it.

The same situation occurs for Facebook and Flickr, both of which allow iPhone users to instantly upload a picture they’ve just taken, but which have no such facility for the camera-less iPod, and this is why I’ve yet to engage in the real-time photo posting culture that has sprung up in recent years.

Ah but! I hear you cry, Why don’t you upload photos on the computer, like the rest of us non-iPhone-owning types? Well, here, Ladies and Gentlemen, I must confess an element of laziness. No, no, not so much laziness, as lack of time. You see, proper uploading and archiving of photos is such a demanding business these days. Once upon a time you just stuck them on the internet with names like pc98382901.jpg or pic0047.gif, but not anymore. You have to name them, you have to provide descriptions, you have to tag them, tag people, decide on the order of photos in the album. And if you are anything like me and take a dozen photos where one would do simply to make sure that you get the best possible angle and lighting and facial expressions, you have to spend half your life deciding which of 37 almost identical photos is the absolute best one to be shown to friends and family alike.

It has got so bad these days, with so many sites expecting so much of you that I’m simply unable to upload photos at a rate of more than 20 an hour. Which when you’ve taken 200 photos at a party, of which 80 are worth keeping, is a serious time commitment. It used to be a commitment that I was willing to make, but recently I find myself slipping terribly. If Flickr is to be believed then I’ve not taken any photos since the snow in February, and according to Facebook, L and I don’t take a camera out with us anymore, which is very much not the case.

If you are wondering what has brought on this rant – as it seems to have become – I’ve just plugged my camera into the computer to copy the photos on it (I don’t have a card reader for my computer, which just adds to the level of hassle involved in the whole blasted business) thinking that I would find 5 or 10 photos from the last few days. Instead I find there is over 150 shots awaiting me. Photos that are months old. Photos I’ve never ever looked at. Photos I hardly remember taking. Time and time again I’ve taken my camera with me on trips out at weekends and in the evenings and every single time I’ve returned home and not even thought to look through them and see if they are any good.

I am incapable of deleting photos at all. Duplicates, blurs, hideous mistakes, they all stay. I think it’s because I’m anal. I don’t like to delete them on the camera, even though the delete button is nice and big and convenient, because you can’t really be sure on that little screen whether a photo is good or bad, and I won’t delete them on the computer, because when they are imported they get numbered, and I can’t stand the idea of there being gaps in the number sequence, even if I’ll probably never notice it again. It’s really stupid, I know it is, but I just can’t do it. So what if I no longer have 3 photos of me looking naff in Edinburgh? It shouldn’t matter at all, and yet somehow I can’t stand the idea that I’m deleting a part of my memory, no matter how trivial.

The result of this particular element of insanity is that I currently have 12,893 photos on my computer.

Perhaps progress is about making small steps rather than big ones. After all, I managed to semi-sort my Documents folder the other day and that hasn’t been cleared out for years. I think my first aim should be to delete duplicate photos, even if I leave all the others. That way I’m not actually losing anything. And maybe, just maybe, if I can start to get on top of the photos on my computer, I can start sharing a few on here, at long last.

Bodmin Moor 17th October 2009

As if to illustrate my point, it has taken me half an hour of messing about to insert this picture for you.

Ok, I just glanced back at the post I wrote the other day with the details of my change of feed URL. Unfortunately I wrote it down wrong, because I’m a bit thick.

It should have been: http://markglover.co.uk/blog/feed/

Sorry about that!

Job Centre Sign

This blog has always been a mixture of diary and wider commentary, and such is the case with this post.

I moved to Plymouth a little over a month ago without any job to come to. I actually left a job in order to come here – one that I’d found without any effort at all on my part – and I rather assumed that despite the recession I’d have a pretty easy time of finding work. After all, why shouldn’t I be able to just walk into a job? I have a degree in a part of the country where many people don’t; I have work experience in several different industries and am above average when it comes to working a computer. I sat myself down in the sunshine outside Starbucks, logged onto the internet and started applying for any job that took my fancy.

A little over a month later, I am still unemployed, and have learnt a few things about job hunting and what the job market is like during a recession, when you’re a very long way from London.

The first thing I’ve learnt is that there is no big business down here. None. Although Plymouth is the 15th biggest city in the country by population, it has achieved this feat in spite of the job market, not because of it. People do not come to Plymouth to work. They come here to retire, or to do a bit of shopping in they live somewhere more rural, but not to work, and definitely not to relocate their business. There are two reasons for this; two factors that shape the size, affluence, diversity and scope of the city. The first is the time it takes to get here from London, which on the train is usually around four hours. The second is the lack of other business centres in the area. Why are these factors important? I’ll tell you.

The majority of cities in this country – indeed, the majority of regions – thrive because they are easily accessible from the capital. If you locate your business in Reading, Bristol, Cardiff or Birmingham you will often find that your customers are not living in your neighbourhood, and are most likely to be living in London. Not a problem, you say, I shall come to London to see you. So you hop in the car or onto the train and 2 hours later you are in the big city. Fine, no problem there. Your business can go on not being based in London and your customers may not even realise.

But supposing your city of choice isn’t within two hours of London? Well, why not form your own micro economy? The likes of Manchester and Liverpool, which are a long way from London – or indeed Edinburgh, which is even further – get around this unfortunate handicap by turning themselves into business centres. They get together and help each other to become so big that if you set up your business there, you will be constantly surrounded by customers, and will never need to look – or travel – to the capital for your company to survive.

And that, my friends, is why Plymouth is an awful place to find work. Not only is it so far from London that even the specially timetabled “fast” trains to the city take a whopping three hours to get there, but there aren’t even any other cities near by with which Plymouth can form a micro economy and attract business that way. After all, the nearest – dare one say, only – settlement of any notable size in the whole South West with which Plymouth could do business is Exeter, a full hour’s travel away. And no, before you ask, I don’t mean an hour in the Bristol to Bath on the bus 12 miles in rush hour sense, I mean the hour of driving along a dual carriageway at 70 sense. And because Devon has the hilly landscape that it has, even the high speed trains spend most of the time stuck at 60 or less, as they wind, snake like, round every peak and valley in the county. After Exeter, which itself isn’t known for its massive, beating business heart, the next nearest city is, sadly, Bristol, and as mentioned above, that is too close to London for it to ever worry about doing trade with anyone else.

I think the lesson about the business situation really hit home for me when I got an email from my dad listing some PC repair companies to try talking to. When I phoned them up, each and every one told me that their only concern at the moment is staying afloat, never mind being so swamped with work that they must expand their workforce to cope. I mean, what sort of a city has so little business that even a computer repair man can’t find work?!

The next lesson I learnt is that people don’t give a toss about CVs. I started, as most would, by applying for jobs over the internet, using many of the countless job sites that have sprung up in recent years. The idea behind them is that you see a job being advertised and you apply for it, which sends your CV and cover letter straight to the employer and they get back to you to tell you if you have been selected for interview or not. Let me tell you this right now, so you can be in no doubt whatsoever:

It is BOLLOCKS

First of all, no one who is actually in a position to decide to employ anyone has ever looked at these sites, or would ever consider using their services. Not one. The hundreds of thousands of job adverts posted on these sites have never ever been put their by the employers themselves. What happens is this:

1. The company in question decides to employ a recruitment agency to short list some candidates.
2. The recruitment agency, being keen to get their name out, post details of the job on hundreds of different job websites with a link for CVs to be emailed to them. Each advert shows the name of the recruitment agency, not the employer.
3. They then ignore the hundreds or thousands of CVs sent to them, whilst drawing up a list of candidates from the pool of workers they’ve interviewed face to face and know more about that a CV could ever say.
4. They give the list to the company who is hiring, never mentioning to anyone the thousands of CVs that weren’t even checked.

And that is it. I don’t even want to think about how many times I applied for dream jobs that would sort out all my problems only to never hear back from any of them.

The fact is there is only one way to get a job, even on a low salary, and that is to go and see people face to face. As crap as that is, and God knows I’d be the first to advocate getting a job without ever leaving the comfort of your computer chair if it worked, employers will never even look at your CV unless they already know who you are. And I have that on pretty good authority. After all, both my parents hire and fire. They both have the power to pull someone out of the dustbin of unemployment, shake the dust off them and give them a job. And both of them automatically delete any emails they receive containing a CV unless they have already met, or at least spoken to, the person sending it.

Gloomy as all this may sound, my hopes of finding a job – and so being spared from the awful clutches of bankruptcy - are higher now than at any point during this thoroughly depressing and stressful month. This week I went in person to two separate agencies, one temping, the other recruitment, and at both I was able to speak to someone about what I’m looking to do and they told me it is doable. I had been resigning myself to applying for part time work in Primark out of shear desperation, but they said I don’t have to. There is real work out there, and they will help me find it.

At the same time, I’ve spoken to two separate people about gaining professional IT qualifications. I’ll have to teach myself the knowledge and pay to become certified, but when I’m done, I shall have a fighting chance of getting through to those employers for whom a degree isn’t enough.

The recession has been long and hard, and looks set to stay that way for many months and years to come, but if I keep making the effort and keep jumping through those hoops, than perhaps I won’t have to keep being unemployed.

If you are reading this (and I hope you are) you may have noticed that I’ve changed the URL of the blog. Previously it was a standalone site hosted at http://ignorminious.co.uk, where it has been residing for over three years, but in an effort to bring it in-line with my main website, http://markglover.co.uk you can now find it at http://markglover.co.uk/blog.

If you receive the blog via RSS, you will hopefully continue to receive updates as normal, but to be on the safe side, please update your feed link to http://markglover.co.uk/feed/

Thanks

Grass is Always Greener

When I first moved to Bristol, back in September 2004, I chose my accommodation very carefully from the wide range of buildings and locations offered by the university. I had it in my head at the time that I wanted to be at the centre of all the action and university life, so I deliberately chose a flat in the block with the highest student population in the city centre. I had it all planned out: parties, cinema, shopping, sight seeing, theatre – the works.

When I got to Bristol however, I encountered something of a culture shock, coming as I was, from a small, sleepy commuter town in Hampshire. I was emotionally intelligent enough at the time to foresee that I’d have to adjust to my new surroundings, but the sheer scale of the change drove me half way to insanity before the year was out and I could move to the suburbs.

The first thing that struck me was the noise. I’d been a regular visitor to London and many big towns and cities before moving to uni, so I was well versed in the sort of noises that cities make, but it didn’t take me long to realise the real challenge. You see, it isn’t the volume that is the problem, it’s the longevity of it. All day and all night the traffic purred away to itself and the sirens bleared. Every single day and night, with not so much as an hour’s peace to give my poor ears time to recover from the daily assult. The windows were single glazed, which I think probably exhasibated the problem still further, and it wasn’t that unusual for a particularly warm night to force me to leave the window open.

The second problem was the smell. From the moment I stepped through my front door each moring until the bus dropped me off at the out of town campus where all my classes took place, I was choked by a toxic cocktail of diesel fumes, fast food outlets, dodgy sewers and half a million other people making their way about the city. I’d never previously thought much about the value of fresh air, but once it was taken away from me, I would have given the world for it. This became especially apparent as the autumn wore on and I began to fully appreciate the ability of the pollution in the city centre to drive away those crisp cold mornings that had always told me that winter was coming. Even the frost and the snow was unable to penetrate the mild stew of exhaust gases.

The third problem was the view. I lived, as I have mentioned, in a small commuter town, prior to moving to Bristol, and although I wouldn’t dream of calling it the countryside, I was used to spending my days walking under trees, kicking the leaves, or admiring the dew on the grass early in the morning. In the centre of Bristol there was no grass and the only trees I could see from my building were struggling to break through the concrete and tarmac laid right up to their trunks.

Between these three major environmental differences and the social changes of arriving in a city where I knew no one and was unable to connect with the students I met due to my lack of interest in being continually drunk or stoned, I found myself alone and depressed most of the time, and stayed in my room, hardly ever partaking in any of the fun I’d planned for myself before arriving.

As the years went on things slowly improved. I moved out of the city centre, made a few friends and eventually got myself a girlfriend. The thing is, as my life in the suburbs gradually settled into some sort of routine, I found myself craving a life in the city centre again.

It’s not that I suddenly missed the fumes and the concrete, far from it, but I found it annoying that in order to take advantage of any of those things I was looking forward to about living in Bristol, I had to travel. Even something as simple as popping into a coffee shop for an hour meant half an hour on the bus or in the car each way, and excessive charges to match. Similarly the cinema was a long way away, and even the beloved countryside, which I was much closer to, wasn’t actually in walking distance at all.

At the time I was working in a bar at UWE, which is north of the city centre, and I was living in Kingswood, which is east, so my daily commute was a drive between the two, completely avoiding the centre, the restaurants, coffee shops and cinemas. Whilst this saved me a whole lot of traffic jams, I found that actually visiting the centre of the city I called home became something of a rarity, and I felt disconnected from whatever it was that gave the city its soul.

That said, during the course of the summer, L and I made the effort to go into town very regularly. We attended all the festivals we could, and ate in most of the restaurants. I even discovered a few new parks that I’d previously been unaware of.

For L, this summer was a chance to have one last look round the city she had grown up in, as well as showing me all the parts of it that were dear to her. For me, it was a chance to make up for my complete failure to find anything good about the place during my first few years there. Ironically, had I finished my degree on time and not stayed their an extra two years, I’d never have discovered the hidden gems that make Bristol such a wonderful city. Indeed, it was only after I’d moved out of the centre and was shortly due to leave the city that I finally realised what a wonderful place it was to live.

I think it is for this reason that L and I have made up our minds not to repeat the mistake. We have just completed our move to Plymouth, where we shall be for the next two years. I am currently unemployed and frantically looking for work, but that hasn’t stopped us settling down in our city centre apartment and engaging in absolutely everything we can find (and afford) to do here.

In the two weeks since we’ve arrived we’ve gone on a group walk on Mount Edgecumbe, visited the city museum and art gallery, swam at the Pavilions pool, attended a free comedy evening, walked along as much of the coast as our feet will manage, dined with friends and still managed to spend every sunny breakfast and lunch time in late September on our little balcony, looking out over Sutton Harbour. We’re even due to visit the theatre on Thursday!

For the five years I lived in Bristol, the grass was always greener on the other side, but now for the first time, I can honestly say the greenest grass is that which grows under my feet.

Asus Eee PC 1000 HE

It’s become something of a time honoured tradition on this blog that when I get a new piece of computer hardware, whether it be an iPod, a laptop or a mobile ph0ne, one of the first things I do with it is write a blog post using it. I have to say, of all the times I’ve done this, today is definitely the easiest, on account of the magnificent hardware I’m using.

As many of you will know, I love my iPod, and I’m sufficiently fast at typing on it to make blogging a reasonable possibility, even if it couldn’t be described as “ideal”. The device I’m typing on at the moment, however, is in a completely different league.

That’s right, it’s a netbook.

But not just any netbook. You see, I did my research this time and actually read some reviews, beforedeciding on the model I wanted to buy. Thanks to the recession killing off expensive price tags on consumer electronics, it’s actually the highest rated netbook I’ve been able to find; the Asus EeePC 1000HE.

Those of you who are tech savvy will know that the first ever netbook to appear - the catalyst that sparked off mini-laptop mania – was the original Asus Eee PC. It was so good that it convinced manufacturers and consumers alike that there was a future in ultra-portable computers. Since then, Asus have been back to the drawing board several times, eventually coming up with the gorgeous bit of kit on which I now type to you dear reader.

They really have pulled out all the stops on this model, with a faster processor than before, an easy to use keyboard and (best of all) a 9.5 hour battery life. No, I’m not even joking. Nine and a half hours on one battery.

I won’t bother you with the technical spec, as I know many of you tend to tune out when that happens. Instead I’ll be restrained and just tell you what an amazing machine it is.

It’s a really amazing machine.

There you go. What, you want to know more? Ok, fair enough. The machine runs Windows XP, which, despite its age, remains the best operating system currently on the market. It’s also the only one that will run on this machine, since Vista is so hardware greedy that I’d have to pay an awful lot of money for a machine that’d run that mess of code smoothly. The hard drive is 160Gb, which is the same as the Windows drive on my desktop computer, and plenty adequate enough for what I need, and the…oh sod it!

Look, if you want the technical spec then you can find it here: http://eeepc.asus.com/global/product1000he-spec.html

If, on the other hand, you are asking what everyone I’ve shown it to has asked, ie “Apart from being small, what is it about this laptop that makes it half the price of a standard laptop?” then I shall tell you: it doesn’t have an optical disc drive.

That’s it.

No, seriously, that’s the only thing it’s lacking. Ok, ok, the hardware is slightly slower than you’d expect to find in a normal laptop, but so what? If it was using Vista it’d be a problem, but on XP it flies!

I think the thing that will make or break this machine for most people is whether it meets their needs or not. So, is this machine right for you? Well, if you are looking for a fully functional main computer that you can keep all your files on, watch DVDs, play the latest games and sync your iPod with then no. Granted, it’ll do all of those things apart from the DVD playing, but there are much better machines on the market you can use.

If, on the other hand, you already have a workhorse machine to do all of those things but are looking for a portable computer that isn’t going to run out of battery, break your back or disappoint you with a lack of ports, then absolutely this is the best machine you can get, and, at around £300 from Amazon, you’d be silly not to!

A Lazy Cat - Just Like Me

I am two people, not one.

I guess we all are, really. Not in a split personality way, although some people are. Just in a variable mood sort of way. I doubt I’m really that different from most people, and I don’t pretend to be so, so please don’t think otherwise of me. I know we all have different moods at different moments, but some people seem to do a better job of controlling their moods than others, and I’m not really sure how it is they do it.

The two people within me are quite distinct. They have different views and opinions, different hopes, ideas and plans. They are interested in different things, do different things, behave differently and, ultimately have different futures. The trouble is, I don’t really know which one is the Real me.

Person A is the Mark I’d like to be. He is motivated and enthusiastic. He loves life and loves learning. He has a powerful imagination and constantly dreams of the life he can achieve if he puts the effort in. He wants to succeed; wants to do whatever it takes to be the best. To make it to the top.

He’s the Mark who once wanted to be a lawyer. Now he can’t decide between becoming an IT professional and trying to be the best in the industry, going into management and working his arse off to become a chief exec in some large, global company or starting up his own business, where he’s already the boss, and if he works hard he can make a success of it.

Mark A respects himself and is respected by others. He wants to save up for a yacht and learn to sail. He wants to work out in the gym until he’s fit enough to enjoy exercising. He wants a big house, plenty of surplus income and lots of foreign holidays. He’s a success story; a product of all the best things that life in Britain has to offer. He’s a winner.

Person B is not the Mark I want to be, not by a long shot. The first thing to know about Mark B is that he’s lazy. I don’t just mean a little lazy, he’s digustingly so. He combines a particular mixture of laziness and procrastination that allows him to pass hour after hour whilst doing very little and wastes all the time he could be enjoying himself.

Mark B suffers from a deep set dislike of putting an effort into tasks. He shrinks away from companies whose job adverts say they are seeking “highly motivated types”. Mark B isn’t highly motivated at all. He has no motivation to do anything. His main focus is on achieving instant gratification and he’ll always seek out short term pleasure at the expense of long term gain.

This Mark has very little ambition in life. It’s not that he doesn’t wish to be rich or have everything he desires – far from it. It’s simply that he doesn’t want to have to do anything to get it, and as such he has no life ambition. Given the choice, he’d choose a deadend job with no responsibility, no matter how dull it is and how long it goes on for. Learning is not something Mark B takes much interest in. He is quite happy to have knowledge in his head, so long as he doesn’t have to put it there himself.

If this sounds dull and teenage-angsty then I apologise. I’m not a teenager and I’m not trying to whine, I merely wish to explore an issue that is bugging me, in the hope of embarking on a little self discovery in these words.

The problem is that I really, honestly do not know which Mark is the real one. Yea, I’d like it to be Mark A – who wouldn’t? I’d love to be a winner, I genuinely would. Or, at least I think I would. Surely if I do as much as I say I’d just do it, right?  But Mark B is here too, stealing my energy and drive. When he comes along (which he does at some point almost every day), it’s like I’m a car, speeding along, and then someone puts the brakes on. Try as I might I’m suddenly having the momentum forced out of me and I can’t fight against it.

I think in many ways it comes down to energy. Whilst I have plenty of mental and physical energy, things are good. On Saturday afternoon I was Mark A, and I sat in Starbucks, drinking coffee, blogging away and loving every minute of it. On Sunday though I woke up with Mark B, and although I tried to fight on and get stuff done, I eventually went to bed with a mess of a flat, a pile of washing up and not a single shirt ironed. In fact, the only task I completed the whole day was to wash my car, which took barely 10 minutes. What a waste of time!

I know everyone has their off days. I’m not claiming to be anything special in that regard. I know everyone needs their chill out time, so that they can relax and recover, but that’s not what I’m talking about. At the moment I’m having so many off days, it’s stopping me progressing in life. People say to me “Mark, you’re an intelligent guy, but you’re so lazy. Think what you could be achieving if you just worked hard!” and they are completely right of course.

I’m writing about this here because I’m curious to know if anyone else suffers or has suffered from the same problem, and how they’ve solved it. I can’t believe that it simply isn’t possible for people like me to consistently find the drive to succeed.

I’m  just not ready to be Mark B.

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson

Back in March I casually mentioned that, because of the economic crisis, Nick Robinson had been replaced by Robert Peston as the BBC blogger of choice on the BBC News Front Page. Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m sure none of you can have failed to notice that Nick is back with a vengeance!

You see, he clearly reads my blog, and as soon as he read my observation, he set out on his daring plan to ensure that the Beeb would put him back where he belongs. Now, obviously it would be reckless of me to suggest that it was Nick Robinson who leaked the MPs’ expenses to the Daily Telegraph, and indeed it would raise the question of why he didn’t break the news himself (not to mention the fact that he’d probably threaten legal action unless I revoked the claim), but if anyone has done well out if this crisis it is he.

Actually, with the exception of Labour itself, it’s hard to find anyone who’s done badly out of the ongoing meltdown in the Cabinet. Thanks to my new job, I now have the option of not only checking the news headlines on my lunch break, but also of listening to the radio in the car and in the office if no one else is around, and the last few weeks have been somewhere between comedy and fantasy every time the news reader starts to speak. You might call me sadistic, but I’m enjoying watching the Government tearing itself apart more than I’ve enjoyed anything in the public domain for a long time.

Those normally prim and proper figures of state, who like to bore us at every opportunity with dull arguments  about dry policy have descended into what can only be described as the thinking man’s Big Brother. Indeed, with the 24 hour rolling news footage, the interviews, the name calling and the unnecessary racism (thank you BNP), the only obvious difference between the current political state and that dreadful show (which I’m reliably informed has just entered it’s 10th season – can it really have been a decade?!) is the channel it’s on, and the fact that Davina McCall has been replaced by a quietly amused balding man in distinctive thick rimmed glasses, barely able to conceal the heavily loaded irony from his voice as he attempts to report on the mess in Westminster with as little bias as is possible in such situations.

Blimey, that was a long sentence. I really must remember to pause for breath. Sorry about that.

It’s hard to know just how things will pan out in the next weeks. I’m too young to really remember the collapse of the Conservative government in 1997, nevermind the hounding from office of Margaret Thatcher earlier that same decade, but I suspect that even if I did, I still wouldn’t be able to give a clear prediction on how long Brown will last. What I can say with certainty though is that, when he finally goes, Nick Robinson will be there to report it, wearing a slow smile that says:

“Blog this Peston!”

Laptop in Starbucks - Not Mine

Wow, over three months since my last post here! Hasn’t time flown by?!

Well, probably not if you’ve actually been waiting for me to update, but in this age of RSS feeds and automation, who actually does that?

I come to you today from a corner of the (relatively) new Starbucks in Cabot Circus. Those of you who’ve been here for too long will probably remember that at one point I wrote quite a few posts whilst sat in one of the branches of Starbucks in Broadmead, either on my heavy old laptop, or else painstakingly tapped out on my old HTC Vox. Well, both the laptop and the Vox have died and been buried (read binned in the case of the laptop, recycled for the phone) and I’m now sat here using L’s laptop, which she has kindly lent me whilst she’s away in the Czech Republic. It’s the mark of a good girlfriend that she knows that the best way to help me deal with the inevitable loneliness of being without her for a week is to lend me a cool bit of computer to play with for the duration.

As I hinted at the start of this post, it has been an unforgivably long time since I last posted. Fortunately, it’s so common for me not to post for an extended period of time that if you are still reading this then you will probably forgive me any period of quietness. It does say something though when L, who has been pretty internet deprived for one reason or another recently is telling me I need to update more often.

On the plus side, my absence has given me far more to talk about than I’d have had if I’d blogged all the way through March, April and May. The main news, if anything that happens in my life can be said to be newsworthy, is that I’m no longer a bar tender in the staff bar of my university. In fact, in every way that really matters I’m no longer at university.

Back at the end of March, I received a phone call from my mum, who’d just been talking to someone who thought I might be a good employee and was I interested in a job? To cut a long story short, I’m now almost half way through a 5 month internship with a company called Data2Impact, who help large corporate and public sector clients to better manage the large quantities of data they are pushing through programs like Excel and Access. It probably doesn’t sound terribly interesting to a layman, but if you are interested in problem solving and programming macros, it’s a really cool place to work.

As an intern I’m gaining a huge amount of experience doing different sorts of work all over the company and loving every day of it. So far, I’ve only come across two draw backs of the placement, and I think I can live with both. The first is that the office I’m based in is in Andover, a full 90 miles from my flat in Bristol, so I spend a lot of time on the road and clock up pretty hefty fuel bills. The second is that I’m getting to do so many different cool things, I’ve no idea how I’m going to fit it all on my CV!

Job Crisis. What Job Crisis?

Sorry, shouldn’t gloat, I know it’s tough out there, and I’m not likely to be spared the difficulties for long, because of the other major development in my life at the moment. Given that everyone who’s anyone knows already, and we aren’t keeping it secret, I’m hoping L won’t mind me announcing here that she and I have decided to live together in September. We actually decided back in January, but as I’ve already said, I’m not very good at keeping this blog up to date.

As I may or may not have mentioned before, L is at university down in Plymouth, and after a year of driving down to see her every weekend, the thought of having to keep up this lifestyle for another two years isn’t exactly appealing. My degree, which has kept me routed in Bristol for 5 years is now all but over (just waiting for the results of my finals – fingers crossed) so, with no reason for me to remain here, I’ve decided to move down to Plymouth, and L and I are going to get an apartment together. The major upside of this is that we’ll be able to enjoy being together and seeing each other every day, without the long hours on the road and the massive fuel bill. On the downside, it means leaving Bristol (which I’ve come to love) and having to look for a new job, as there’s no way I can cope with the 6 hours a day I’d need to spend in the car if I were to commute between my office and my new home.

L has returned to Bristol for the summer now, having finished her year at uni, and it’s been great having her around the last few days. It’s entirely possible that since I don’t have to travel quite as much, I may start updating more regularly. I can’t make any promises, but I do hope to keep you up to date with the massive changes in my life, as well as all the fun that I’m expecting summer 09 to bring.

Thanks, as always, go to all of you for bothering to read me. Perhaps now you could go one step further and be bothered to comment with an answer to the following question: Would you be able to cope with me changing the URL for my RSS feed once again? I’m painfully aware that I’ve changed it several times already during the life of this blog, but I’m thinking of moving the blog over to my main website, http://markglover.co.uk so as to keep everything under one roof, as it were. Your thoughts please…

Hiding Banker

For me, a poor, penniless student with no property, no morgage, no deposit for a morgage, no shares and no capital, the recession has, so far, had very little impact on my life. Perhpas this will change in a few months when I try to get myself the well paid, exciting graduate job that the government promised me I’d get, if only I’d go to university first, but for now I find myself disconnected from the issue that has made headlines virtually everyday for the last 18 months.

In fact, the most obvious sign that there is a recession, so far as I can tell, besides the fact that I now own the bank withwhom I hold such a large overdraft, is the change of blogging hierarchy on the BBC News Front Page. Back in the Good Old Days there was a permanent spot reserved for the blog of the Beeb’s Political Editor Nick Robinson, who’s regular takes on the latest political stories provided us with welcome relief when the news was going a little bit slowly. Now though we are enduring the dark days, and poor Nick has been replaced by the man blamed for the run on Northern Rock. A man who, in all probability, might actually be Satan himself: the BBC’s Business Editor Robert Peston.

Ok, he probably isn’t Satan – if he was he’d be working for ITV – but it’d be hard to deny that he’s loving the current economic turmoil and the massive shove into the limelight it’s given him. I remember glancing at the headlines on the BBC website the other day and spotting the following, amusing little arrangement. The leading article was reporting another major problem with the economy. I think it was a report on another bank admitting massive losses or something, and under it was a list of related stories, as you usually get. It looked something like this:

Bank of Monkeys Reports £4bn Losses

Housing Market Falls Further

Bananas R Us Goes Into Administration

4,500 Jobs Lost At Chocolate Teapots Ltd

And then, at the bottom of the list, was this cheerful entry:

Peston: Good News At Last

That man has serious issues…

Anyway, so we are in a recession, and if Satan Peston is to be believed, it is all the fault of poor banking practices, which I have to say, I’m perfectly willing to go along with. Recently, I’ve had far more to do with my bank than I’m used to; partly because I’m earning less than I used to be, and so am having to juggle my finances a bit to keep in the black, and partly because the Fabulous L and I are spending this coming weekend in Brussels, enjoying our first ever romantic weekend away, and so there’s been a lot of buying of Eurostar tickets and booking hotels and buying Euros and what not to be done, all of which involves banks.

So, what I want to know is this: Why does it take 4 whole days for L to transfer some money from her account to mine via the electronic wonderfulness of the internet, using services provided by banks, who are, after all, specialists at moving money, when it takes less than a minute for a girl in M&S to take a wad of notes from me, count them, tell me what I’ll get in Euros if I go either under or over, count out the Euros and hand them to me in and nice little envelope? *Pants*

It’s absurd! How can banks justify these waiting times, which haven’t changed since coins were first invented, in the 21st Century. It takes less than a second to send enough information down a phoneline to securely authorise a transaction. Less than a second. It is a tiny, tiny amount of data, even taking encryption into account. There is more data in this paragraph than is needed to move money from one account to another, and yet our banks tell us it takes 4 working days. Working days? What are those? I use my money 7 days a week and I expect it to work 7 days a week. I don’t expect it to take weekends off and finish early on a Friday; especially not when I’m having to work evenings and sometimes weekends to earn it!

I tried to visit my bank at 9 o clock one Wednesday morning before Christmas, and found it to be closed. Why? Because they were having a staff meeting, and they were too sodding lazy to come in an hour early to do so, meaning that the bank couldn’t open until 10. 10 in the morning! I know bars that open earlier than that!

*Deep Breath*

I’m sorry, dear reader, that this is fast turning into an insane rant, of the sort you probably don’t want to listen to, but am I the only one who sees the sheer insanity of the situation? The government is worrying itself over bad banking practices suck as risk management, which may be all very well, but how are they able to deal with something like that in banks when the sector as a whole hasn’t even mastered basic customer service skills? How can anyone hope to reform practices that are so complicated even the bankers don’t really understand them, when they can’t even master the art of being open on time?

Why is it that we live in a world where I can spend my money in Tesco at 3 in the morning, but I can’t deposit a cheque at 6 in the evening? Or at the weekends? Or bank holidays?

It seems to me that if the government wish to make good on their promise to overhaul the banking system, perhaps they’d be better off starting at the bottom again and working their way up. At least then they wouldn’t be building on foundations of sand.

Pasta Hut

Well, hello there blog! Been a while hasn’t it?

Yes, yes, I know and I’m sorry. But as I have pointed out in a few of my recent posts, coursework comes before blogging. Or rather came before blogging. For now I’m proud to announce that at around 09:30am this morning I finally handed in the last piece of coursework on my degree course

As you can imagine, I am delighted to say the least. I’ve been working on this year’s coursework for the past two months, and I know my blogging has suffered for it, but I really hope that that is about to change now that it is over, done and out the way.

And so to today’s post, which I’m actually writing, proper old skool style, in Word, rather than in WordPress. Not by choice, I might add, but thanks to a bunch of greedy people using over 150Gb of bandwidth to download stuff from my servers this morning, my account has now been suspended for 24 hours, to let the servers recover. Which, by the way, is really, really annoying on the first evening in 2 months that I’ve been able to justify playing with my various websites.

Anyway, enough about that. What I actually wish to talk to you about today is a visit the Divine L and I made to Pizza Hut in Plymouth the other week. We’d fancied going for a while, especially given the whole Pizza/Pasta thing.

Actually on that note, it probably goes without saying, but that is one of the worst ideas in the history of retailing. Pizza Hut works. It makes good tasting, desirable pizzas at prices people are prepared to pay, in a wide enough range of options to satisfy everyone, save the strictly orthodox members of a cult, sworn to abstain from Pizza. It works really well. There was no need to waste all that money switching to Pasta Hut. Even if the idea wasn’t too stupid to try, the reality helped put aside any doubts on the issue I had.

We were, as I previously observed, keen to visit Pizza Hut to try the new pasta dishes. We’d acquired a 50% off voucher, in order to ease our bank accounts and, upon arriving, we found ourselves stuck between craving a pizza and wanting to try the new pasta offerings.

In the end we settled on one pizza and one pasta dish, to share between us. I forget which pizza we chose, as they are all rather nice, but I think it might have been the Chicken Supreme. The memory of the pasta will, I fear, never leave my memory though, for it was a disappointment from the first sorry mouthful until the last.

As it was a limited edition, we decided to try the Liz McClarnon Signature Pasta Dish. According to the menu, former Atomic Kitten Liz had recently won Celebrity Masterchef. If this is true then I can only assume that the judges had left their taste buds at home that day. Not that it would have made much difference. The dish was so bland that at first I thought I’d accidentally put a napkin in my mouth instead of the £7.99 pasta offering. It was like taking a microwave pasta meal and then somehow extracting what little flavour was left.

The pasta was tasteless.

The mascarpone sauce was tasteless.

The Italian Style sausage was tasteless.

The roasted tomatoes were, yep, you’ve guessed it, tasteless.

How could a meal be so bland? Was it just me? No, L was of exactly the same opinion. The pizza was lovely, but the pasta could have been made from cardboard. I could have been eating the table for all my taste buds knew!

What an utter disappointment, to build one’s hopes up so, only to have them dashed by such a miserable offering. If it hadn’t been for the 50% off voucher ensuring that we weren’t actually paying for the thing, we’d have probably demanded our money back, it was that poor. And L and I aren’t exactly known for complaining about food. Quite the reverse in fact.

Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you. If you feel the need to go to Pizza Hut, please do. If you feel the need to order a pizza, please do. If you feel the need to have a healthy salad with it, please, please do. But whatever you do, please do not waste your hard earned cash on a Pizza Hut pasta, they just aren’t worth it.

/rant

As I write this the snow is falling for at least the third time this week, and it has been forecast to land on Bristol almost every day for the next week or so. I guess when they say it’s the most dramatic snow for 20 years they really mean it, huh?

Today Bristol was hit far worse than before, resulting in the closure of my uni and most of the schools in the area, as well as a suspension of all the buses in the city for several hours. I took advantage of my first ever snow day to get you some decent quality photos of the snow around here, taken on a proper camera this time.

By the time I’d finished applying for jobs and had eaten lunch, the snow in Bristol itself had turned completely to slush, so I decided to venture out of the city and take a walk along the Bristol to Bath cycle path, at the point that it passes the Avon Valley Railway. Hopefully the resulting pictures offer something slightly different to the usual pictures of snow covered cars.

Many, many more photos can be found in my Flickr Photostream, so please take a look if you are interested

I’m hoping to find time this afternoon to write a longer, more interesting post than the one I’m writing now. This is just a little something to keep you going, written quickly in the gap between the end of a seminar and the start of the following lecture.

For those of you living outside the UK/under a rock/in a house with no doors or windows, this week has seen virtually the entire country hit by the worst snow in nearly two decades. Whilst most of the UK’s bloggers will be able to provide you with imaculate photos of deep snow covering everything up to a depth of 10 feet, taken with the latest, most expensive DSLRs, I’m going to offer you a few pictures of the 3 or 4 inches of snow that fell yesterday in Bristol, as recorded by the built in camera on my 30 quid Nokia. After all, I know you choose to read this blog because of its outstanding quality

I took a couple of these as I left uni at around 3pm yesterday afternoon. The rest are taken around my apartment about half an hour later.

Sorry about the quality. Hope you like!

Scalpel

This is a post that I started writing over a week ago and I’ve only just found the time to finish it. Apologies for the delay!

As I sit on this rail replacement coach, from which I write to you on my iPod, furiously trying to turn up my music to drown out some in-coach noise pollution that I take to be Radio 1, I’m driven to wonder why, in an age where most of the travelling public have invested in portable music players it is considered necessary to deafen people with a coach radio on maximum volume? As if pubic transport isn’t unpleasant enough!

You may have noticed that I’ve been suspiciously quiet so far this year. No, I’ve not abandoned you, dear reader, I’ve just been horrifically busy with this and that.

For starters, following the New Year party I attended with L and hosted by some of her friends, I’ve been added to the list of regular invitees to all manner of social events, which has been lovely. Secondly I’ve been virutally overrun with coursework. I’m now a quarter of the way through a series of pieces that will keep me occupied until the end of February, seemingly with not much of a break. It is so bad in fact that I’ve elected to write this post while travelling, as it’s about the only time I can justify a leisure activity.

The other big time consumer though, and the one that I wish to talk about tonight is the surgery I had on my ingrown toenail.

WARNING: The following post describes in some detail a surgical operation and may make unpleasant reading for some people. If you are a minor or of a queasy disposition, please stop reading now.

Ah that’s better, I’m now sat on a warm comfortable train, without anyone playing annoyingly loud music at me.

So first I’ll start with L and my adventure to the clinic and then talk about life post-op til you all drift off to sleep. L, btw has been and absolute star the whole time and I’d have really struggled to get through the first few days without her.

Anyway, it’s the first Wednesday of 2009 and L and I have just got off the bus in Downend, slightly later than planned as we discovered on trying to flag down an earlier bus that we were stood at the wrong (unmarked) stop for that particular bus and the one we wanted was back round the corner. We set off walking to the clinic, which is hidden away on a housing estate.

“Are you sure you know the way?” says L. I assure her that I do and that we just have to turn left off the highstreet and then left again and we’ll be there. Five minutes later we arrive back at the high street.

A little investigation reveals that it should have been a left, a right and then a left. Eventually we arrive however, and I’m quickly shown in.

The procedure is to be carried out by a chiropodist with the aid of two student chiropodists who, according to their uniforms, come from the same uni as L, which I tell them as a means of breaking the ice.

They seem mildly impressed, but not as impressed as when I show them my toe, which has been growing steadily worse for 6 months.

“Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one this bad!” says one.

“Me neither, this is the sort of thing you see photographs of in text books!” agrees his companion.

“Can we take a photo?” they chime together, brandishing a camera phone.

The procedure starts with a spray can. What was in the can I can’t say. All I know is that when they spray it on my foot it feels like someone has dropped it into a particularly chilly part of the Arctic. Apparently this is to numb my foot so the injection of local anaesthetic doesn’t hurt, they explain. Next comes the injection, which really doesn’t hurt all that much.

I lie on the bed and watch them preparing their equipment. It requires a lot of preparation, or so it seems to me, especially for a little thing like a toe. Every now and again the chiropodist comes over to me and pokes my toe to test for numbness. Eventually they decide it is ready and begin covering the area in that orangey brown liquid they always smear on peoples throats before cutting into them on House. House, btw is the single source of my (very limited) medical knowledge.

What follows is so far beyond surreal it could easily be a dream. Every time that that toe has been stubbed, knocked, stepped on or pushed into a tight shoe in the last 6 months it has been extremely painful. Now I’m lying here looking at my foot and seeing the medical students poking it roughly with a scalpel, cutting away the damaged flesh that covers the edge of the nail. I feel the pressure of their movements, but in terms of pain, it might as well have been someone else’s foot. I’ve been under local anaesthetic before, but last time the surgery was on my face (in A&E) and I was too upset to really appreciate what was happening.

At first the synopsis is good. It looks like they can save the nail and just remove the side bits, where they dig into my foot. They proceed with my happy consent and remove the first side. When they begin working on the other side however, I can see from their faces that they aren’t happy.

“I’m sorry” says the chiropodist, “the flesh under the nail is badly damaged and has loosened the nail too much. I think we’re going to have to take it off completely.”

The first time this prospect was put to me during an examination a few months earlier, I remember being quite upset. By now though I’ve had time to think about it and my attachment to the nail that has left me limping for half a year seems to have dried up. I instruct them to proceed.

I’ve always been very much in favour of students learning on the job, as I don’t feel that textbooks are much substitute for personal experience, and I must say I feel very reassured as each of the students in turn gets to have a go with the scalpel on my foot. I’m tempted to have a go myself, as I don’t feel I’m really pulling my weight in this surgery, but feet can be difficult to reach when you have a bit of a belly as I do.

They finish after a time and begin to dress the foot. The dressing, once complete is about the size of a satsuma. I’m silently grateful that I remembered to bring flip-flops, as the idea of putting a shoe on over it is laughable.

I thank the team for a superb job and hobble out to reception where L has been sitting waiting patiently for me.

“Shall I call a taxi?” she asks.

“No that’s ok” I reply. “I feel fine, let’s save ourselves a few quid and take the bus. We could even stop at the pub on the way back and get some lunch. I really fancy a burger!”

Of course, that’s the problem with anaesthetic. You have a massive dressing on what remains of your toe but you feel like you can run a marathon. By the time we get to the bus stop, the blood has soaked through the dressing and onto the flip-flop and I’m beginning to feel the first pangs of what promises to be quite a bit of pain.

The rest of the day is spent with my foot up on a cushion. Poor L finds herself running round like my own personal Florence Nightingale, and I’m extremely grateful for her efforts. She’d make a good nurse, and I tell her this. Repeatedly. She even furnishes me with ample pain killers, after a quick search of my flat reveals that I have none.

The next day it is time to have the dressing changed for a smaller one; a task which is performed by a slightly scary Scottish lady, who tells me in no uncertain terms that I was an idiot for taking the bus and that I’ve probably made the whole thing worse. She also implies that I don’t know how to take care of myself, which seems a little harsh. When she points to the swollen state of my toe as a sign of the abuse that I put it through the day before, I don’t even bother pointing out that the toe is less swollen than it was the day before and that 6 months of walking around on an ingrown toe nail is far worse than a short walk post op.

Since then things have been pretty good. I still have a dressing on the toe, which I change myself after bathing it each morning in warm salt water, and I have to wear a plastic bag on it in the shower to keep it dry, but otherwise life is more or less back to normal. Incidentally, if anyone else is in the same position, might I recommend disposable freezer bags for keeping injuries dry in the shower? They lack the holes found in carrier bags and all you need is an elastic band to hold them in place and they work a treat.

Now I just have to hope and pray that everything is fixed by the time I visit Brussels with L in March, as I can think of few things less fun than walking miles and miles round a city I’m visiting without being able to walk as comfortably as I’d like.

I hope this hasn’t been too yucky a post for you to read. I’m sure many bloggers would file this under Too Much Info, but I like to write about my life, and this surgery has been the defining characteristic of 2009 for me, so there.

I can make my next post a little less stomach churning if you’d like?

Happy New Year

Oh dear Lord! Gerald, come quickly, that dreadful Mark Glover is about to bore everyone to death with another of those horrible end of year summary round-robin-esque posts that make such DULL reading every December. How utterly awful!

That’s right dear reader, it’s the annual End of Year Summary Round-Robbin-Esque post! Yes, yes I know Everyone does them Every year and they aren’t much fun, but this is my blog and I’ll write whatever I jolly well want to, thank you very much. If you don’t want to read it you don’t have to, I won’t be offended, but don’t expect me to take the hint and not write posts like this, because it’s what I do.

So, without further ado:

My 2008 in Summary

The last year, which at the time of writing has approximately 9 hours and 9 minutes left to run, has been pretty good for me, one way or another. Things started slowly enough, with my degree still dragging, and work dragging even more. I was still working full time, and for a few weeks I got to pretend to be in charge whilst my supervisor was off work with a bad back.

At Easter I visited Cardiff for the first time and survived. Unknown to me at the time (although I suspected it) I’d just failed a large chunk of my year through not doing my coursework properly, and soon I’d be going on to fail an equally large chunk of the exams as well. Nonetheless, I was in good spirits when I directed my parents to the Jolly Sailor in Saltford to celebrate my 22nd birthday in June. They’d bought me what must rank as my ultimate gadget of all time, my iPod Touch. I won’t start ranting about it here, but it’s bloody fantastic! At the end of that month I developed an ingrown toenail, which has left me limping for the last 6 months, but should be fixed next week when the NHS chop my leg off.

Darling this just won’t do! If he doesn’t find something to talk about that isn’t a disgusting medical condition soon I’m going to need another G&T!

In July I embarked on a summer work schedule that would see me in work every single day for over a month. It was pretty gruelling, but I hold no grudges as whilst there I got chatting to the girl who I’m now extremely pleased to call my girlfriend, L. Her arrival in my life has impacted my opinion of the whole year, and she dominates the remaining months, both in terms of time and my moods.

August and September were a blur of work and dates that sped by far too fast but left me with enough happy memories for a lifetime. L’s gentle but firm influence helped me pass all my resits and enter my final year of university, my degree finally back on track.

At the end of September L returned to her own university course in Plymouth, and so began the now familiar routine of driving or training the 130 miles between our cities every weekend. It isn’t an ideal situation for many reasons, but we’ve made it work and shall continue to do so in the New Year.

December involved sharing the run up to Christmas with a partner for the first time in my life, and the whole experience was better for being able to share it with L. We spent Christmas itself with our respective families but much of the rest of the holidays have been ours to share.

In a few hours she and I will attend our first New Year’s Eve party together. I predict it’ll be like When Harry Met Sally, but with less shouting.

Gerald, will you wake up! He’s finished talking about his 2008 and now he’s going to be disgustingly optimistic about the year ahead. I don’t think I can take much more of this; it’s making me feel queasy!

2009 Here I Come

And so to the New Year. What does 2009 have in store for me? Well first and foremost, a lot of coursework. I’m expecting to be snowed under pretty much solidly for the next two months, but once it’s complete I’ll never have to do coursework again! L and I are celebrating with a weekend break to Brussels in the Spring, the result of hard saving and a small Lottery win last year.

In the Summer I’m expecting to complete my degree and then things get weird. For the first time in my entire life, I have nothing planned. I went to uni as soon as I’d finished school, and so I’ve been in education solidly for the last 18 years of my life. Every year I’ve known that come September it’ll be back to school, 6th form or university. This year September won’t be back to anything. How bizarre!

Obviously I’m hoping to repay the extensive investment in my education over the last 18 years by my parents, teachers and the State by getting a job, but what job? Perhaps this time next year I’ll have the answer to that big, looming question.

For now though it’s still 2008, and what better way to finish off the year than by wishing you all a

Happy New Year!

Oh thank goodness, I thought he’d never stop!

Merry Christmas

to all my readers!

Honda FCX Clarity

Some time ago I wrote a post detailing what I thought might be the future of energy consumption in this ever more environmentally aware world that we seem to be occupying, and if your browser handles the transition from my old blog platform to WordPress a little better than mine does, you might still be able to read it. For those who can’t, or would rather not trawl through the archive for October 2007, I stated that thanks to massive advances in technology, electric cars might soon replace petrol and diesel ones.

I went on to list the example of the Tesla, a battery powered, electric motor propelled roadster, which had been featured on the BBC’s technology show, Click. Well, it seems that a year and 2 months on, Top Gear have finally caught up, as last week they conducted a review and test drive of the Tesla, and were reasonably impressed.

However, they then went on to show a video of James May reviewing the new Honda FCX Clarity, which he thinks is the most important development in the history of cars in over 100 years, and you know what? I’m inclined to agree with him. In fact, I feel so strongly about this, that I’ve spent all of 10 seconds on YouTube, and have found a clip of his report for you to watch. I appreciate that it is 8 and a half minutes long, which in internet terms is nearly a year, but if you have even the slightest interest in cars, the environment, climate change or the future, I really think you need to watch it:

Now, is it just me, or is this the key to solving that cornerstone of the global warming problem, car emissions? The technology in this car could, as I understand it, be rolled out to every single vehicle type on the road, just as soon as the fuel is available to supply it. It could, I think be rolled out to ships as well. Many new submarines are already using hydrogen fuel cells as their main source of propulsion. Trains already use electric motors to turn their wheels, so why not replace the overhead power lines and diesel generators with fuel cells instead?

Planes, I admit, may be a different matter. The dangers involved in carrying compressed hydrogen would have to be overcome, as would the extreme power needs required by modern jet engines, which perhaps electric motors simply cannot deliver yet. But this technology isn’t finished. It can still be adapted and improved for different purposes, with the result that one day we could see all our energy needs met in this way.

There is still a long way to go before hydrogen filling stations are as abundant as petrol stations, but it is happening slowly. Even if governments continue to reject the option of forcing car manufacturers to adopt this technology by law, the market itself will create the demand for these cars, and soon too.

I can’t say when the hydrogen pumps will get fitted at your local Tesco Petrol station, nor exactly how much it’ll cost, but I sincerely hope that by the time my trusty Ford Fiesta is due for retirement, I’ll have the option of switching to hydrogen. And if that option is there, and it’s affordable, I hope I won’t be the only one asking to whom I make the cheque payable!

(Have you seen any petrol stations offering hydrogen yet? Would you consider buying a hydrogen fuel cell car next time you visit the forecourt? Do you see this as the future, or am I getting all excited about nothing? Comments below please)

Just saw this over at Steve Clayton’s blog and thought I’d share:

(This is an embedded Youtube Video and I’ve absolutely no idea whether it’ll show in your RSS reader. If you can’t see anything please click through to the site for the full experience)

A very amusing comment on the miniturisation of Technology I’m sure you’ll agree.

It’s 24th December 2003 and my 15 year old self has just arrived home from a 12 hour shift at Waitrose. I enter the lounge to discover the family tree is up but not decorated, the ceiling decorations are nowhere to be seen andmy family are rushing around like maniacs trying to get the house clean before Christmas Day. I’m left to decorate the tree by myself, whilst the ceiling decorations lie forgotten in a box somewhere. By the time I’m finished it is bed time and I am tired and cross and finding myself pretty short of Christmas cheer.

Back when I was a kid, Christmas was the biggest deal of the whole year. I’d have my list written in November and would be unable to sleep by mid December due to the excitement building up in me ahead of the big day. That all changed that year, when I discovered for the first time the harsh reality of Christmas for adults. It’s a lot of work for a very short day of relaxation and happiness.

Subsequent years have proved almost as bad, with long working or uni hours and ever more preparation to get through before the 25th. Last year was my first Christmas in my New Flat, and with it my first tree, decorations and everything else. To this day I still feel a slight pain in my fingers when I recall tying lengths of thread to several dozen new baubles over the course of about 4 hours one evening. As for presents, I finally fell into that worst category of men, the Christmas Eve panic shopper!

This year things are different. I now have a girlfriend, L, and like all girlfriends her mission in life is to organise me (with my whole hearted support, naturally). We spent an entire weekend buying and wrapping presents a couple of weeks ago and I now have nothing left to buy for anyone this year, apart from L herself, who has come in under budget, but I’m working on that.

When I returned from Plymouth on Sunday night I considered going to bed, but, in the spirit of organisation I stayed up til half 1 in the morning hanging ceiling decorations. It reminded me why my parents have always been less than enthusiastic for this task, as I’m finally reaching the point in my life (aged 22) where climbing on furniture to stick drawing pins into the ceiling just doesn’t hold the same appeal as it once did.

The tree, also, is planned, even if not yet bought. For the last few weeks I’ve been working extended shifts at work, which have seen me not getting home until around half past 8 every night. This ends tomorrow (Thank God) and I’ll be leaving work at 3pm on Thursday, driving to B&Q and crying over the cost of Norwegian Spruces. The idea is that by the time I drive L back to Bristol for the holidays on Saturday, the tree will be standing, covered in working lights and ready for us to decorate together, just to prove that we are a real couple who do couply things together.

Tonight I think I’ll write the dreaded Christmas cards, of which I have 3 large boxes, having bought new ones without checking to see if I had any left for at least 2 years in a row, as I discovered the other day. Wrapping paper will also not be a problem, as it seems to my (not entirely scientific) estimates that I should have enough to wrap a double decker bus, should the need arise.

My point, besides possibly irritating all those less organised people with my gloating, is that for the first time in years, when Christmas finally arrives I shall be ready, happy and enthusiastic about the day. I’d begun to think that Christmas was just a colossal waste of time and energy, but a little festive planning has left me as excited as a child all over again. And no, I won’t be working a 12 hour shift on Christmas Eve this year. I’ve elected to finish on the 22nd, so as to enjoy the holidays that bit more, with no more stress and planning to be carried out by The Big Festive Deadline.

Happy December Everyone!