Month: November 2006

£7,108.50? For an Aston Martin Vanguishtageguard? Driven by a guy who keeps writing them off and getting them machine-gunned, and thus has a positively negative no-claims bonus?

What, he’s getting a huge discount for keeping it garaged every night? He’s assumed to be parking it in the safest areas of town? They’re considering Q’s electrified handles as equivalent to a Thatcham Category LXXVII alarm? Or is ‘secret agent’ a perversely low insurance risk occupation, compared to, say, ‘television producer’?

I can see only two ways this makes sense:

1. Virgin insurance wanted a bit of free press, on reflection realised that a huge premium might not be the best story, and hence spun the figure down until it sounded vaguely plausible to them.
2. I’m getting stiffed for insurance on my 10,000-mile/year Smart parked in G41.

Both thoughts are likely correct.

Woo! This is a good one: ‘syzygy‘.

The last time I was in Glasgow, my combi boiler declined my polite requests to fire up and vent forth hot water, radiators for the supply of, leaving me in a situation of considerable chill. Now, in Dublin, my landlord/housemate and I find ourselves incapable of securing a supply of small wooden pellets.

Said pellets are something of a technological marvel, being formed from compressed waste sawdust, bagged, and (hypothetically) delivered to the likes of us. Thenceforth, they are poured liberally into a hopper which in turn feeds – via a terribly exciting Archimidean-screw arrangement – a surprisingly efficient burner/boiler system. Too liberally, it transpires, for we’ve run out of bags of pellets. Since the technology is (a.) relatively new, and (b.) Austrian, we’ve found ourselves unable to source additional supplies. For a week.

Upshot: it’s fecking cold in the house. We’re not quite at ambient temperature, but thanks to all the not-quite-fixed-yet draughts it’s surprisingly close. On Monday I came home and immediately stuck my hand in the fridge, just to see whether there was any point leaving it switched on. It was hard to tell.

The existential joy of the pellet boiler system is that, since the pellets are formed from waste, burning them is considered carbon-neutral. Hurrah. However, since we can’t track down any pellets to burn, we’re left to celebrate to the sound of one hand clapping.

Dang.

I’m having considerable success filtering off image-based spam, but I’m still seeing way more spam escape Mail’s filter than I did three or four months ago. Which is to say, of the couple of hundred junk messages I see every day, about fifty are now getting through, when it was down to about three or four. This article gives some background on what’s going on, and where this stuff originates. (via, via²)

The winners are up. Congrats to Nigel Pickard for the special achievement award (not listed on BAFTA’s pages, but mentioned by the BBC). He’s one of the Good Guys in all this, and on the exec committee of the Save Kids’ TV campaign.

Audio monitoring via CCTV cameras: when Blunkett thinks a surveillance measure has gone too far… etc etc. I’m sure you can fill in the rest.

Interesting, though, that his criticism appears to be centred around expectations of privacy. That is: when you’re walking down a street, you expect (and, he implies, have previously had) a measure of privacy in terms of what you say. I’m not sure he’s right on this – not because one doesn’t have an expectation of privacy in such circumstances, but because such an impression is already illusionary. Blanket surveillance is, however, a substantial shift.

To repeat my basic argument here: no, I’ve nothing to hide. But I reserve the right to absolutely have something I want to hide, at some unspecified date in the future. It is, I contend, the rôle of the people to watch their government, and not the other way around. ‘If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear’ is a manifestly unsound argument.

I’m staying in a tricked-out eco-house in Dublin (watch this space – it’s recently been nominated for all sorts of awards). While it has hemp insulation, bamboo stairs, LED lighting, and a zero-carbon-footprint wood-pellet burner (of which also more anon), the landlord/architect/housemate only finished the place a few weeks before I rocked up. It’s thus lacking some more-or-less common amenities, such as a television. Ironic, given that there was a crew here last week and the resulting show about the building goes out this Tuesday.

Otherwise, the lack of TV is less of a bind than one might expect. In part because Studio 60 isn’t yet being shown in Europe, and in part because my brother-in-law thoughtfully left behind DVDs of the first series of Deadwood when he was last in Glasgow.

Made in 2004, Deadwood is an uncompromising Western, set in a gold-rush town in the late nineteenth century. It’s entirely, wonderfully, gloriously, brilliantly well carried-off; supremely confident, nicely written, beautifully shot, magnificently paced (which I cannot say of every glossy-and-otherwise-excellent US drama – Galactica, I’m looking at you) and with career-defining performances. Not least from Ian McShane, for whom Lovejoy is now some piffling little thing he did back in his early years; McShane is Al Swearengen. I can’t wait to see the second series.

What I hadn’t appreciated until part-way through the series is that not only did Deadwood genuinely exist, but most of the characters were inspired by historic figures too. Amazing times.

A few years ago, we featured on How2 the world’s smallest radio-control helicopter, an amazing little thing called Pixel made by a chap called Alexander Van De Rostyne. It was tiny, fluttered around with astonishing stability, and while Alexander had been a bit tricky to coax over from Belgium he turned out to be thoroughly charming on the day. Fun all round. The only real problem was that Pixel had cost thousands of dollars to build and was a one-off labour of love.

Alexander was subsequently involved in the commercial Piccolo r/c helicopter kit, which with a rotor diameter of a foot or so was a somewhat different beast to the Pixel family, but still pretty darn small – though strictly for outdoor use. Now, however, all this has changed – PicoZ is a Van De Rostyne-designed microhelicopter for indoor use, sold through the likes of Firebox for the princely sum of £30.

Picture the scene, dear reader: I had cause, recently, to purchase flowers for an acquaintance who shall henceforth be known herein as ‘Flossie.’ This, however, presented a conundrum. For while I’m not so crass as to believe that anybody doesn’t like flowers, Flossie is not exactly a ‘girlie’ girl. ‘Say it with flowers’ hardly seemed right; I elected to say it with sub-miniature infra-red controlled brushless DC-motor driven direct-drive (collectiveless) aerial machinery. Works for me.

The PicoZ (the box is labeled ‘PicooZ,’ thanks to some licensing snafu, and at least one website refers to it as the ‘PiccoZ’ too) is an absolute joy. Which is to say, it’s a frisky little blighter with an apparent suicide streak when it comes to walls, corners, door frames, and going-behind-the-fishtank. Thirty minutes’ charging provides about ten minutes’ flight time, by the end of which the throttle control is nicely linear and some measure of hover stability can be achieved. There’s no cyclic control – the helicopter is trimmed to fly slowly forwards, with the right stick controlling tail rotor bias (there’s a separate trim control which more-or-less stops the poor little thing spinning around crazily, once you get it right). Draughts are disastrous, and Flossie’s Pico needs a tad more noseweight to make sufficient headway – apparently, there’s considerable variation from one unit to another on this.

Nevertheless, I’m astonished at the thing’s general stability. Flying it is challenging rather than frustrating, and hence it’s immensely satisfying when you manage to land on, say, the chair you’d intended rather than in the lampshade, on the cat, or whatever. So far it’s proving surprisingly robust, too.

Genuinely one of the best toys I’ve ever seen. It’s no surprise they keep selling out at Firebox… I must remember to pick one up for myself, it’s right up there in ‘must have’ territory, and there’s a growing mod community. I should also note that Flossie was appropriately thrilled.

CITV’s 2001’s wanted.com notwithstanding, Swap Shop has been off the air for about 25 years. Apparently, there’s a festive one-off in the offing:

In a similarly nostalgic vein, Noel Edmonds will be reunited with Keith Chegwin, Maggie Philbin and John Craven for a one-off edition of Swap Shop to trawl through 30 years of Saturday morning children’s television.

(the Guardian)

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. Most likely I’ll be in Dublin anyway, and the point will be moot.

This is one of my current colleagues in Dublin, talking about going to the loo in a restaurant in China, shopped by ‘friends’ in Chicago. Don’cha just lurve being able to hide in the sidestreets of the global village?