Add comment October 3rd, 2010
Redundant in April.
Booker and Best (B&B) have been outbid for the Amicus Horizon contract by BSW Heating. This could be looked at positively because under ‘The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations’ (TUPE) all employees of B&B working on that contract are subsequently transfered and re-employed by the new contract holder.
But what are BSW like to work for? I have worked for bigger firms and in my experience the more detatched the admin staff are from the engineers the more the aggrevation rises. The thing I like about B&B is the down to earth attitude of (most) the bods in the office and the fact you can waltz in there whenever, for whatever reason and get your demands seen to. If my work is to be organised by some disconnected ‘Logistics Team’ situated somewhere in the misty murky depths of rural England, the chances are if things don’t run smoothly, I will make my grievances obvious and when this happens, I usually leave.
That aside I could be looking at better money, a ‘new’ van, decent accessories (laptop, phone, analyser, sniffer etc) and maybe a chance to handle breakdowns only as servicing does my head in. The one thing I need to research is their involvment on the industrial heating side, this being more desirable than domestic as you don’t get faced with sticky carpets, chip fat laden kitchens and cat litter tray overfflow often with the tenant sitting in the corner, pissed up and moaning about how ill they are!
Just awaiting a letter from the Director as to how they are going to deal with me, I will see my manager Monday about the pay rise I was going to ask for in November which I put off when this bombshell landed. All in all I see it as an opportunity to move on a bit, time will tell as it often does.
2 comments January 14th, 2012
Uneventfulness
An interesting thing happened to me today….Oh hang on, that was someone else. Been on ‘Industrial Call Out’ this weekend and not a sausage, speaking of sausages I must wash my van at some point. Got a shitty cold and ache like I’ve had a tanker parked on me overnight, plugged my 2 meter radio back into the home antenna today to have a flick around, also charged up the 70cm handie to go wandering and try to discover who is wiping out the key fobs up and down the road. We are guessing someone has recently installed a wireless system of some sort, maybe CCTV or a burglar alarm, remote keyless systems work on 433.92MHz and there is some sort of a digital signal on that frequency. Off for a walk now to see if I can track it down 
4 comments January 8th, 2012
Happy New Year?
Here I sit on January 1st in a gloomy room looking out at the rain dropping relentlessly from a very grey sky indeed. I could claim that to be metaphorical as this year doesn’t look so good, I don’t know why I look at the negative side of things most of the time, when I was in my early teens the future was exciting which pumped me with enthusiasm, now the future looks scary. It is true to say the global economy is in meltdown, the Euro will never work again which will drag us down as well as the rest of the world. What better chance to fabricate some dossier and make ludicrous claims about a country, to start a war with them, this is how the Federal Reserve and the IMF will try to balance it’s books. From where I’m sitting though, it’s going to get ugly this year, so batten down the hatches people.
Previous New Year Posts:
2011
2010
2009
2008
Add comment January 1st, 2012
Oh yes..no it might be.
Interestingly I have been to a pantomime. It kind of flies in the face of the issues raised in my previous post, watching grown men dance around on stage dressed as women, children dressed as vegetables performing a rendition of ‘Eat It,’ a parody of Michael Jackson’s Beat It, kind of uplifting in a sense. But it is all just part of the game.
The idea of life is to embrace everything that surrounds you, except that’s not really possible is it. Not when you have the palm of some tax collector hovering an inch below your chin, or the promise of bad tidings if you default on rent payments, the idea of we all pay our taxes so should you is… “old hat!” I don’t condone benefit scroungers but, tax is an old antiquated system that in our current economic climate is more or less proved not to work, Banks need to go. That may cost a few lives I’m afraid…WoooHarrrHarrr!!!
1 comment December 18th, 2011
Holy F***k
An uprising against an apparent rigged election in Moscow, and hey… Putin has been depicted as the ‘Anti-Christ’ in various ‘end of time’ texts. North Africa, Egypt, Mubarak was predicted to have died (or maybe overthrown) before the giant onslaught. Small factions in China are now organising themselves to take on the government, the Middle East in tatters, Syria in civil war, Israel and Hezzbollah (evidently funded by Iran) at each others throats over territorial rights, Iran’s ’supposed’ nuclear threat and the Giant stupid Western Governments who have only one motive, to start a war.
Now take into consideration the economy, the future of the Euro and the prospects of economic meltdown. Amonst the uprising of the BRICS countries, and the insistance that the dollar be reconsidered as the currency for trade, all this makes for a perfect opportunity for a current failing superpower to rage war. This could be an attack on Iranianian nuclear facilities, either by Israel or the US, either way it will be by the US, watch China, a war with Iran will close a major trading route affecting China’s economy bigtime, they know what the US are up to, and hours before you could see a missile attack on Taiwan, or possibly North Korea vs South?
This is all scary shit but highly viable, more dangerous than the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, there could well be a point where I will grab may family and “Run to the Hills” before the idea of total global inihallation becomes mainstream.
4 comments December 17th, 2011
Cold Winter?
Waiting for winter, are we gonna return to the glum mild winters that I wrote about before? I chuckle when I think of the Headlines of the newspapers at the beginning of October warning of minus twenty arctic conditions by the end of the month, it’s just proof of what bullshit the tabloids write. Well it is only the beginning of December and traditionally in the south east it rarely snows before Christmas, so there’s hope yet for the new year
3 comments December 8th, 2011
New PC
Have had nothing but problems with my old PC with it just switching off during booting, After isolating all peripherals it turns out it’s either a motherboard failure or the CPU itself. These were donated by Mr Shane back in 2007/8 upgrading me to a 3GHz 64 Bit machine so I cannot complain as it probably 5 years old or more, so I’ve now built my myself a long overdue machine.
It’s now an AMD PhenomII 955 3.2GHz QUAD CORE with 8GB 1333MHz RAM should be pretty nifty, my original graphics card though was AGP not PCIEX, again Mr Shane has donated a graphics card to see me till I can afford something a bit whizzy, then I can try a few games out
Add comment November 12th, 2011
Dwindling Intellect.
I have spent the day troubling myself with the design of a weather compensated central heating thermostat, a relatively simple concept, but for some reason I cannot get my head around it. Designs similar to this used to just fall into place, is this the engineer’s equivelent to writers block? Or have I just been away for too long?
With Phenylketonuria, there is the possibilty that intelligence can fluctuate according to the levels of phenylalanine (Phe) in the brain, I have been on a strict diet for more than a week, I know the Phe levels in the blood follow closely with eating habits, but the concentration within the brain lags somewhat, and as I have been off diet for a considerable long period, maybe I need to wait before the concentration subsides and I become more focused. This is something that has blighted my everyday functioning when it comes to the way I eat. So my relationship with food is stained, knowing I have to eat correctly to function normally is obvious, but functioning normally doesn’t necessarlly correlate with continuing a special diet. All I can do is continue with the diet and hope it improves my cognitive processes, but there is a little part of me that is sceptical, how will I know unless I endure this?
1 comment October 16th, 2011
Draco The Dragon
Sit out in your garden and facing north this evening and stare up into the sky, astromoners are predicting that the Dranonid meteor shower could produce upto 1,000 meteors per hour, that makes it officially a storm. They will emerge form the constellation of Draco, hence their name – Draconids, though there are varying forecasts for the actual intensity. Ordinarily, the Draconid meteor shower is a “sleeper” with just about 10 meteors per hour. But this year, the Earth is forecast to pass through more of the comet 21P Giacobini-Zinner’s filaments than usual according to dust stream models used by scientists, These models simulate dozens to hundreds of meteors per hour, given this large range, the shower could be either quite a spectacle or a bit of a let down. ‘21P Giacobini-Zinner’ is a periodic comet which returns every six years and four months.
One problem for potential spectators in the south of England is that it could well be cloudy when the peak is expected between 7pm & 10pm BST (1800 and 2100 UTC, these times varied a little in my research) but I am keeping one eye on the latest satellite forecasts in hope
Update 1845: Err… complete cloud cover and no breaks looking at the satellite imagery, looks like a night in. 
Update 2116: A clearing in the clouds and I saw ONE very bright Draconoid!
This photo doesn’t include the meteor, but it was taken in the same vicinity, about 67 degree elevation SSW.
2 comments October 8th, 2011
Neutrino Communication
Neutrinos. Faster than light and unaffected by ordinary matter, the idea of a neutrino communications transceiver could be a possibilty. So instead of dragging fibre optics across the seabed for miles and miles and all the technical challenges that brings to light, such technology could channel a stream of encoded neutrinos straight through the center of the earth, unhindered, without the need for focusing or amplification.
Current research into crystalline structures such as sapphire for detecting neutrinos is not exactly successful…yet. There is also a big problem in actually producing them, one theory (that we all are familiar with) is that if a crystal can detect such illusive particles and oscillate, then the same crystal if oscillated in the same manner, will produce neutrinos, these can then be encoded and directed more precisely than a laser.
“A neutrino beam a few centimetres wide and with the same energy as a 20-watt light bulb would interact with normal matter so infrequently, it would lose barely a few million billionths of its power as it journeyed through the Earth!” [1]
Oddly, Pirelli (Yes The Tyre Manufacturer) are providing funding for the project, they are a world leader in fibre optics, something that would be superceded by this technology so it makes sense they want a piece of it. Naturally there is sceptism but also enthusiasm out there on this subject, but all the same it’s kinda cool this sort of research is being undertaken, although the product of this research is unlikely to affect our lives for many years, if not decades, if at all.
[1] Matin Durrani – New Scientist vol 182 issue 2443
1 comment September 27th, 2011