Nothing is impossible for an engineer

vin_petrol @ 2009-11-01T01:51:00

2009-11-01T01:51:11Z

Mr and Mrs Devil, Vin Petrol and Trash Petrol

Everything was expensive in the 70s

2009-10-19T12:11:07Z

trash_petrol and I were discussing the fact that when we were children, in the 1970s, *everything* was expensive. Since then, clearly many items have plummeted in price (in real terms). Technology is laughably cheap compared to prices in the 70s. As far as we could work out, pretty much everything is cheaper now than it was then.

But can anyone think of anything that is not cheaper now? About the only thing I could think of was tobacco. I'm sure that duty on cigarettes now is higher than it was in the 70s. Alcohol duty may well be higher, but alcoholic drinks seem to be far cheaper (think deals at supermarkets) so that the price seems to me cheaper overall. Not that I was drinking much in the 70s :-)

I'm wondering if the wisdom of my friends list can thing of any other examples? Fuel costs have fluctuated wildly - petrol was stupidly expensive after the oil crisis in 1973, and has been again recently, so that kinda doesn't count in my head. (Ooh, nice graph on wikipedia: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Oil_Prices_1861_2007.svg)

Tuna fish, possibly. That seems to cost more now than it did in the 1980s, as production methods have changed ("don't drown the dolphins") making it harder to produce. However, I was eating pilchards in the 70s so I don't know how much they cost then.

Eight legged monsters from outer space

2009-09-21T09:47:56Z

Is it just me, or are there a lot more Category 2s seeking the warmth of our houses this autumn?
I found one this morning lurking under a small pile of my dirty washing, as I picked it up to put it in the washing basket. I'll never wear those underpants again...

I helped build this

2009-09-17T11:33:14Z

After years of working away on things only visible on WAP or via SMS, recently the new Orange News site has gone live:

http://www.orange.co.uk/news

With back end CMS loading services written by me! Loads of wobbly XML comes in, gets parsed, processed and placed in our CMS using the Atom Publishing Protocol. So now you can all vaguely see what I do for a living.

Although, for how much longer, given this rather interesting news story that appeared on the day we launched:

http://web.orange.co.uk/article/copycat_fears_after_23_staff_die_by_suicide

Eek!

[In case you don't know, France Telecom owns Orange. And yes, I am well aware this means I work for a French company. It has been pointed out to me before. Regular and often! :-)]

Default school trip location

2009-08-26T11:19:24Z

I suspect we all have one of these. When you were at school, the cheap, local, default location for school trips. You probably went there multiple times. Kinda like the box factory in The Simpsons.

Mine is the supposed location of the Battle of Bosworth Field (I went to school in Ashby de la Zouch). trash_petrol's is Ironbridge Gorge (she went to school in Sutton Coldfield). I seem to recall road_runner telling me of several visits to Hartlepool nuclear power station (he went to school in Chester-le-street).

So what's yours?

Most tempting reason for owning an iPhone I've seen so far...

2009-07-29T14:47:15Z

http://www.wooji-juice.com/products/soundroid/

Hurrah for giant stompy robots!

[Link originally from pensive_mary]

Arrr it be Devon

2009-07-19T20:04:54Z

I am in deepest darkest Devon, in East Budleigh (birthplace of Sir Walter Raleigh). We drove down single track roads with grass growing in the middle of them to get here. I have no internet connection. I also have no mobi reception in the cottage we're staying in, something that's not really happened to me this century. To send out this message i have climbed a hill behind our cottage to get one bar of GPRS coverage. 3G doesnt happen round here.
Fortunately I got an HTC Touch Pro the other day so I once more have a phone with a 'real' keyboard.
Took sprogs to a donkey sanctuary this morning, which they enjoyed. Then we had a bracing walk on the stones of Budley Salterton beach in the wind and rain. Hurrah for England in the summertime.

This morning on the Sky music channels

2009-06-26T10:44:48Z

*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Guns N' Roses! Hurrah for the Kerrang! channel :-)

Watch thoughts

2009-04-01T11:37:58Z

You know what I want from a watch? I would really like one that displays:
1) The current datetime for UTC in ISO 8601 format: 2009-04-01 11:33:06 as I type.
2) The current local datetime in ISO 8601 format: 2009-04-01 12:33:06.
3) The current Unix timet: 1 238 585 633 as I type.
Come on Casio, build it for me! There are watches for pilots and divers. I want one for a speccy nerd like me! Working with 24 hour rolling news and data services I have to think in terms of UTC, and lots of the code I work with uses the Unix epoch time. What clocks on the wall say is for 'locals'.

I aint dead...

2009-03-31T21:38:31Z

although things have been mildly grim. Two weekends ago we all went off to Centerparcs (Sherwood Forest) with custancia and family. This was lots of fun. evie_petrol has thoroughly got over her fear of water and was thrashing around with Ellie lots. Ellie is a much better swimmer, but if Evie wore a buoyancy aid she could keep up with Ellie and the two of them thrashed around together in the pool nicely. Daddy went on some water slides for the first time in, er, decades and all was good. On Saturday night trash_petrol and custancia went out for a drink and Paul [WINOLJ] and I played several games of Memoir '44. I got to say such things as "achtung panzer!", "eat lead, Fritz", "take that, Ivan", etc, and eat lots of nachos.

Unfortunately, I awoke on Sunday morning feeling very ill. I wondered if I had eaten too many nachos. We took the sprogs out to rampage on the adventure playground, but I eventually had to admit defeat and take to my bed. Shortly afterwards I was very sick. Now, historically, I've often been ill at Centerparcs or after I've been swimming. We wondered if I have some curious sensitivity to chlorine or something? So we kinda decided this was why I was ill and didn't think much more of it. I did the best I could for the next couple of days, but I was quite out of it.

Then on Monday night evie_petrol was sick too. When she returned to school we discovered there was a sickness bug doing the rounds and 10 children were off in one class at her school. All became clear...

amelia_petrol got it Wednesday night, and trash_petrol finally succumbed on Friday. Fortunately, by the time trash_petrol was laid out by it I had recovered, so there was always one responsible adult (stop sniggering) who could child-wrangle.

Finally, taking evie_petrol to ballet on Saturday morning custancia appeared without Paul and explained that he was at home being very sick. Oh dear.

We all seem to have recovered now, although the unexpected weight loss has been nice. I've had to tighten my belt a notch!

I've finished work today for a couple of weeks. I'm taking the Easter school holidays off then it's back to work fulltime. The next three days will be relaxing - just amelia_petrol at home. Next week Bonkers Girl will be at home and things will be, er, less peaceful...

Watchmen

2009-03-12T16:17:24Z

I went to see Watchmen last night [Hurrah for Orange Wednesdays]. I thought it was great, which was good, seeing as I've been waiting 20 years for that film! As Jonathan Ross noted in his review, it's not often you get to sit in a cinema and feel a warm fuzzy glow as you watch a film made just for you.

Y'see, I'm an old 80s comic fanboy. I dug out my copy of Watchmen for a re-read. Here's my copy:

A 12 issue limited series published 'monthly' by DC in 1986 to 1987. Although 'monthly' got rather stretched towards the end when the whole thing fell behind schedule.

Most were bought from the long defunct Zap Comics, somewhere in a grotty cellar behind the Silver Arcade in Leicester. It was "Non Distributed" in the UK, so all copies were air-freighted in, and you paid a premium price. I have a vague recollection that one issue's distribution was delayed, as the whole DC consignment for that month got stopped by Customs, due to some dodgy imagery in another comic possibly falling foul of UK obscenity laws at that time.

Obviously, I've got many of the other iconic DC comics of that era: Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Sandman, V for Vendetta, etc. The only gaping gap in my collection is that I failed to be on-the-case with The Dark Knight Returns, and I don't have that in its original four issue form. I've also got most of the run of The Question that started in 1987. This was the Charlton character that Alan Moore was originally going to use in Watchmen, who eventually mutated into Rorschach. In issue 17 of The Question the title character actually reads the graphic novel of Watchmen and notes the similarity between himself and Rorscharch.

I never bought Marvel, and to this day I have a curious anti-Marvel affectation. I've not seen the X-Men, Spiderman or Fantastic Four films, as they're from "the rival company".

Vague Update

2009-03-11T12:55:24Z

I'm back at work for a short three-day-week at the moment, so today is my virtual Friday! I'm looking forward to being back at home with Amelia. Looking after Evie was always pretty hard work, but Amelia ambles around and gurgles. As long as she has plenty of toys to play with and the odd chunk of bread to munch on she's happy. So tomorrow Trash and I can sneak out shopping for a bit with Amelia in tow.

Coming back to work has been something of a tiring shock. I went to bed around 20:00 last night. I also had to contend with 15,865 emails waiting for me when I got back. Fortunately, most were error emails, which had been sorted into relevant folders by Outlook rules. Generally, unless you're actually there when a process is spewing out error emails, they have little historical value. Sadly, there were still 656 'real' emails waiting in my Inbox to be sifted through though.

My motorbike is back alive as well. After a couple of months with the clever Stuart Rafferty she's all fixed up and back on the road. The weather is a bit nicer to, so I've been riding her to work and back this week. It'll soon be spring. It ended up costing me almost exactly the insurance settlement. They gave me £2000, I bought the 'wreck' for £700, and it cost £1300 to be repaired. I couldn't see this in purely monetary terms though. That VFR is a beautiful example of the final itteration of the VFR 750 design, before Honda made a hash of things with the distinctly inferior VFR 800. It is the closest thing to perfection on two wheels I'll ever ride. It would have been a crime against motorcycling to send that bike to the scrapyard.

Watch geeking

2009-03-05T15:30:11Z

My aged F-91W had a bit of an accident. I had it strapped to my belt, but it caught on a door handle when I was child-wrangling. The strap snapped, and the top left button no longer works. And yes, that is a duct tape repair you can see to the strap already. So it was time to buy a new watch. As has been established, I can't afford an Omega Speedmaster Profession (yet), but there are currently five Casios space-rated by NASA for use inside space vehicles. The most recently rated is the G-9000, so I got one of those from TICTOCWATCHES.CO.UK. It's a G-SHOCK and an absolute monster on my wrist.
Unfortunately, the mothers gathered outside the school yesterday at hometime seemed utterly unimpressed by my fantastic new piece of technology. Bah! I shall have to wait till I get back to work next week where fellow Casio fans will appreciate it.

Update

2009-03-04T12:02:32Z

Generally speaking, all going well here.

Amelia got a bit of a snotty cold last week, and went rather downhill on Friday. Her breathing sounded awful. We took her to the doctor (who wasn't in the least concerned about her rattly breathing), and he discovered she had a bit of an ear infection, which was making her miserable. She was prescribed Amoxicillin, which she takes easily enough, and she's much improved now. She's still got an amazingly snotty nose though. As she will ill on Saturday Trash didn't bother going up to Middlesbrough to see them play Liverpool. It was obviously going to be a loss for Middlesbrough anyway :-) [Non-football people: amazingly, Boro won 2-0!]

We also took Amelia into my office yesterday to meet my workmates. She was transfixed by my colleague Godwin ... from Nigeria! Thinking about it, that could quite easily be the first time she's ever seen a black person. You could see her little brain thinking "what?! do humans come in this colour too?!" :-) It did bring home to me what a male dominated industry IT is though. I've spent a few weeks in "woman's world", doing things like going to Tiny Tots and doing the school run, so I've been surrounded by large quantities of women. My office is a huge nest of specky boy nerds. This is one of the reasons I talk to woman a lot when I go out. I see plenty of men at work.

We went to a parents' evening meeting with Evie's teacher last night, and she seems to be progressing fine at school. Apparently, she's moving away from playing with the boy from across the road (Matty) and playing more with the girls now. Her literacy and numeracy skill are as expected, considering she's 4! :-) She has a few cute 'confusions' in her learning: she mixes up 'h' and 'n', due to the difference in the length of the stem. The teacher did tell us that she had noticed no change in Evie's behaviour since Amelia arrived, which is good. Often the teachers can notice a change in a child when a younger sibling arrives.

We had another social worker visit this morning, which went well. Amelia was a little poppet throughout and a living advert for "I am a well attached little child".

I think I may try to get out somewhere soon and see some people. I think I've stayed in for about three weeks now. The only interrupted night's sleep I've had have been due to Evie though. She still sometimes wakes up about once a week with some spurious issue. Last night her quilt fell off her bed and knocked her lego model over. I wondered off to sort this out, and on my return Trash queried if Evie's leg had fallen off, so loud had been the wailing. Amelia has actually always slept through, even when ill. To be honest, Amelia can sleep for England - she loves it. Weekend mornings seem to feature Evie and I getting up at some god-forsaken hour (06:30 or similar), then later prodding Trash and Amelia out of bed at 09:15 because we need to be getting on with stuff. Amelia is sleeping now, which is why I have the chance to bash this entry in.

Evie has been playing with her Lego a lot recently. Not quite sure why - she wasn't too bothered for many years, and it's a chunky old set of Duplo blocks. Possibly because I do stop Amelia from playing with it, so it's quite clearly "her toy". I really enjoy playing with Lego with her though. When I was a sprog, my Lego was a really important toy to me. I used to build huge quantities of spaceships, rockets, moonbases, etc. When I tired of a model it would suffer a terrible crash into my bedroom wall. I find clicking Lego bricks together very therapeutic. So I'm now searching on ebay to get her a load of normal Lego.

Google Latitude

2009-03-03T14:05:26Z

Feel free to add me: vpetrol@gmail.com

What on Earth is trash_petrol up to?

2009-02-20T21:17:34Z

Cheerleading?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQWzd3Qb690

*cackle*

Pictures of Amelia Petrol

2009-02-18T22:01:13Z

From our first meeting:
http://vinpetrol.fotopic.net/c1655800.html

Adopting second child

2009-02-18T21:49:04Z

Phew, after a busy few days amelia_petrol is now living with us. We started introductions with meeting her for the first time on Monday last week, and we've been increasingly involved in her care ever since. We picked her up to bring her here to her "forever home" at around 11:00 this morning. She's now placed with us, and (assuming nothing goes wrong) we can apply for the permanent adoption order in about three months time.
Introductions were tiring, and involved treks over to Hull every day, including a marathon 3.75 hour journey back through the snow on Thursday night last week, when Arras Hill East of Market Weighton was temporarily blocked. Grandparents snuck round on various occasions to meet their new granddaughter.
She's totally different to evie_petrol, in that she's "quiet and placid" (as she was described to us in early documentation). She's quite content to amble about and play with stuff, and observes what's going on around her constantly.
She crashed out this evening without any hassles around 19:30 in her new bedroom. Let's hope she sleeps through.
evie_petrol is coping with it reasonably well. She's currently probably a textbook case in the kind of mood swings a first child goes through when a second shows up, sometimes loving her new sister, other times being a bit annoyed she's no longer the centre of attention 100% of the time. Sometimes she wants to be the big girl, other times she regresses and wants to be a baby again.
Amelia's already met all the children that live on the close where I live, and been subjected to the screaming madhouse that our house sometimes becomes. She's fine with this: the foster parents where she spent her first year always had numerous children there. She's effectively been brought up to believe that live involves lots of people about and lots of noise.
So I'm now the father of two daughters. When it all gets a bit hormonal in 10 years time I know that the house WiFi reaches the summer house, so I can retire there with a laptop while fems scream at each other :-)

Brief Update

2009-02-12T22:49:51Z

Thanks everyone for best wishes about our current events. Everything is going well in Hull, although the journey back tonight was very grim (took 3.75 hours). It's very tiring going over there every day, and obviously I'm far from a computer to spod on.

Amelia is lovely, and (as described by social services) "quiet and placid". This is something of a shock after Bonkers Girl. We took her out today and she was quite happy being wheeled around shopping in her push-chair, even falling asleep at one point. We did things we never could have done with evie_petrol: went into a bookshop and looked at books in peace for several minutes; had a coffee in Starbucks where she was easily entertained by a cuddly toy; fed her in a public place without having to apologise to lots of people for the fact they were now wearing her lunch; etc.
Will write more when I get chance, but I'm off to bed now.

Snow post

2009-02-12T14:09:00Z

I am actually in Hull, so can I just say "er ner it's sner!"

Trash twirls a baton

2009-02-09T21:14:25Z

Many years ago trash_petrol learnt how to twirl a baton as a tiny little majorette. She's just got involved with it again *mumble* years later. She needs to practice a lot, but we figured you might like to see a flash of her hidden past:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgn9z2nPEnE

Introductions - day one

2009-02-09T21:04:32Z

All went well today. Met amelia_petrol for the very first time. She was a little timid at first but soon decided we were OK and she would interact with us. Some pictures:
http://pics.livejournal.com/vin_petrol/gallery/0000pd26

There Is Only One

2009-02-06T12:23:13Z

Yesterday's ShortList magazine had a feature on expensive men's watches. I looked at it, but none of them interested me. Y'see, if I've not bored you already about this, only one expensive watch on this planet motivates me. If I can't have it, I'm quite happy to wear my Casio. Until I can afford the £1000 I'll need for one, all other watches are merely placeholders. More expensive and exclusive watches from other manufacturers have no interest for me.

It's the Omega Speedmaster Professional. If you don't know why this is, perhaps if I show you a picture of what's on the back of it all will become clear:

Clearly, the ultimate watch for an engineer. To quote the Wikipedia entry:

"The Speedmaster passed NASA's numerous tests, which included exposure to extreme temperatures, vacuum, intense humidity, corrosion, shock, acceleration, pressure, vibration and noise, whereas the Rolex, Breitling, Bulova, Longines and Heuer, notably, all failed."

This is the watch that Buzz Aldrin wore on the moon (Neil left his inside the LEM), and that Jim Lovell used to time the rocket burns on the crippled Apollo 13. No other watch has that kind of history. It's the only watch cleared for use in Extra Vehicular Activities, although (interestingly) a selection of quite cheap Casios are cleared for use in microgravity inside space vehicles.

*sigh* one day...

So does anyone else have any singular items that they lust after?

Technology

2009-02-02T11:19:22Z

When I was in London last weekend, I had a definite preference for travelling on the underground, especially the deep-bore tube lines (I got a curious thrill being able to travel on the deepest part of the network). This is partly because underground trains are a bit like monorails, in that they're forever associated with "the future" in my head, thanks to Gerry Anderson's Space:1999, which I watched at a formative age. I can easily travel on buses anywhere in the world. Look, this is what an underground train is like in my head:

Whereas these are clunky old low-tech buses:

*Obviously* tube trains are better!

[I picked that bit of footage of buses out last night, wandering around YouTube. It turns out this morning that modern London buses don't actually work when it's snowing! :-)]

An unfortunate word

2009-01-30T16:45:39Z

I see the World Rally Championships have started again. Years ago I wrote some code to process the results PA send to us and put them on the Orange WAP site. The data source I use for this is not designed for automated processing, so it sometimes goes wrong. We accept this risk, on a cost-benefits analysis: better to do this cheaply and have automated results that rarely go wrong, rather than pay an expensive human to get it right all the time.

To help me spot if it's gone wrong it emails the processed results set to myself and the support staff here, and it's been doing this happily for years. We can just glance at the email and tell if it's gone horribly wrong, and fix it if it does.

Last year we moved to a new, more corporate desktop PC and email system. Hold that thought...

Suddenly, one race weekend late last year, I stopped getting the Rally emails. "Oh no", thinks I, "my code is broken is utterly broken and failing without sending out any kind of error message or warning. What is wrong with it?" So I carefully single step the latest results file using the debugger, and realise that it did indeed work fine. It's just that the email didn't actually reach me. So I send myself a quick test email. That shows up fine, and anyway other systems are emailing me without problem. I copy and paste the results set into an email and it does NOT arrive. Eek! What on Earth in a set of Rally results can stop it being received as an email? So I look very carefully at the results set...

And then I see it. I can't receive emails concerning the World Rally Championships because there's a driver taking part in this competition called Federico Villagra! His surname trips the spam filter here and the emails are discarded. This is him:

http://www.wrc.com/jsp/index.jsp?lnk=501&featureid=1210&desc=Federico%20Villagra

It took several weeks journey through a typically byzantine corporate helpdesk system to get his name whitelisted so that I can receive emails that mention that name.

I wonder if he has email problems himself? Do you think he has an account and wonders why no one ever emails him?