Breezing through

There strong winds scouring the coast today. GF wasn't too troubled as he caught the early train up to town. He had a good gossip with a friend from the Cabinet Office... which always brightens the journey.

At the Starfleet offices GF cracked on with the background work as the team spent time with the prospective client over the river. He managed to bump into some of the execs who run the old client engagement. So, again he was able to catch up on news and gossip regarding what's going on.

He caught an early train home only to find that it was far more busy and frantic than getting the usual train... what was interesting was that the Silver Vixen was able to track his progress and knew therefore that he was on the way. GF's phone contains a GPS and he has linked it with a Google service called Latitude. This in turn allows authorised people (in GF's case the Silver Vixen and Urban-cub) to see where he is by tracking him on a map on her laptop.

Slow

Train was slow coming home... but not busy. Unpleasant discussion between fellow travellers discussing decapitation and witnessing knife crime. Unpleasant subject made particularly worse by the fact that they seemed to be glorying in it like excited teenagers. Shame they were in their 30s....

Any price

An interesting day by the Thames.

Mother Superior called, out of the blue. It would appear that she has been catching up with old friends... and it appears that there are changes afoot.

For Gorse Fox the normal work continues as usual... and whilst interesting it is probably not worthy of wider exposure at this time. It's strange joining a project part way through and working with the pricing engine as it moves towards fruition. Today the emphasis was on system and service management.

What next

The Gorse Fox has been working at home today. There was no real necessity to meet face to face with anyone, and 5 hours of commuting would just reduce the working day. From about 07:00 GF was tapping away at the computer, catching up on the weekend e-mails, setting up conference calls for the day and working out what he would try to achieve in the day.

GF couldn't believe how much he had already achieved when he stopped for breakfast at 08:30... but was soon back at work. Calls came and went, items got ticked off the list, and new opportunities were brought to his attention... and hopefully there's something very interesting waiting just round the corner for GF to get stuck into!!

All in all... a really successful day.

Good and bad

The Gorse Fox has had a mixed day. Several problems seemed to fill the morning with frustrations... Urban-cub's WiFi would not connect, direct LAN connection would not work either, the main PC crashed 3 times and GF was not pleased.

Once the WiFi hub had been reset the PC seemed to stop crashing - and a deep diagnostic scan of the hard drive revealed no problems.

So much for the bad...

The good was that we finally managed to get through to Cousteau-cub. She is loving the Phillippines though a 4:30 start in the mornings means that she has to get to bed early each evening. The island is quite small - she can walk round it in an hour - and she only gets electricity for about 4-5 hours a day. Needless to say, internet access is very limited.

Anyway, it was great to hear from her finally... and know that all is well.

Nailing you colours

The Gorse Fox, whilst thinking about Global Warming, re-red an open letter that was sent to to the US Congress at the beginning of the month. It was written by 7 renowned atmospheric scientists:

The facts are:
The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for ten years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists' computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.
The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren? We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN'T EXIST.
The proposed legislation would cripple the US economy, putting us at a disadvantage compared to our competitors. For such drastic action, it is only prudent to demand genuine proof that it is needed, not guesswork, and not false claims about the state of the science.
DEMAND PROOF, NOT CONSENSUS
Finally, climate alarmism pays well. Many alarmists are profiting from their activism. There are billions of dollars floating around for the taking, and being taken.

Oh, and if you are tempted to say "But that's only 7 scientists" the Gorse Fox would point out that there were on 52 scientist involved in the IPCC report, yet a petition by over 700 scientists refuting it has been ignored.

Global Warming is NOT about science it is about politics and activism.

BBC Science deniers

Anyone with a modicum of sense and scientific training will have realised that the BBC long-ago departed from their neutral stance on reporting, and that now opinion is spouted as fact, and news regarding BBC-favoured doctrine is spun rather than reported.

We now have further evidence of this in the interview with Peter Sissons which is reported in today's Mail on Sunday.

In a wide-ranging attack, he also claims it is now 'effectively BBC policy' to stifle critics of the consensus view on global warming. He says: 'I believe I am one of a tiny number of BBC interviewers who have so much as raised the possibility that there is another side to the debate on climate change.>

'The Corporation's most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that "the science is settled", when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn't.

'But it is effectively BBC policy... that those views should not be heard.'

In the full article he goes on to cite his interview with a green activist after a march in London and the reaction that he got when he pointed out that the climate wasn't actually playing ball. Excellent stuff.

Going oot

The Silver Vixen and Gorse Fox boarded the train for London. It was going to be nice to meet up with the Canadian cousins. The journey was pretty uneventful, though the tube was absolutely packed for the last leg of the journey. We walked up from Embankment to Covent Garden and hovered around the west end of the Apple Market watching and waiting for our tourists.

Through the magic of mobile telephony we finally met up, Nutty Cousin, Squiffy Sarah, Marvellous Matthew and Bashful Mark were looking well and there was so much gossip to catch up on. We headed for TGI Friday's to grab something to eat before they rushed off to the theatre. We had a lovely couple of hours catching up on the sports that Marvellous Matthew plays, gossop about work, gossip about family, holiday destinations and so forth.

All too quickly the time ticked by and they had to rush for a taxi to get them to the theatre. The Silver Vixen and Gorse Fox wandered back to the station and caught the train home. It was all over so quickly.

Not the News

Gorse Fox would like to point out that Michael Jackson is still dead.

He doesn't mean to be insensitive... but hasn't this circus gone on long enough

The March of Progress

The Gorse Fox refers you to the linked article in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle a rather depressing, but brilliant view of progress over the past 40 years.

Discipline

Now the Gorse Fox should start by making it quite clear that he is NOT cognisant of the facts of the case. He knows nothing beyond what has been reported (and we all know how accurate that is likely to be).

The Gorse Fox has this sneaking suspicion that this sad case of a teacher assualting a pupil is not quite what it seems. Of course we are told that he was a good boy, of course he used to carry the shopping for his mum, of course butter wouldn't melt in his mouth... however, the Gorse Fox knows well that his persona was veryy different at home from that which was displayed in class or when mingling with classmates. Gorse Fox suspects that what we have is a teacher that has been tormented and terrorised once too often and he has snapped.

Gorse Fox does not condone this response, but he is amazed that it does not happen more often. He blames the abject liberals and educationalists that destryed the concept of discipline and respect on the altar of freedom of speech and stupid ideas leaving us with cases of feral students and cowering teachers.

He knows this is the extreme... and many are well behaved and studious, but there is no longer any credible sanction against ill-discipline and disruptive behaviour. 

(In the spirit of transparency, GF should note that he was caned at least once a year throughout his school years - he doesn't look back on this as brutalising, but on his own stupid fault for breaking school rules or not learning his Latin vocabulary).

Ad iudicium omnes

Limescale

One of the showers has been playing up. It became almost impossible to turn the water on or off and to adjust the temerature. GF phone his trusty plumber, but he would not countenance coming to fix it. GF eventually contacted the manufacturer and their service engineer turned up. 

They will only do the work if the water to the shower can be isolated. GF had crawled into the loft space to turn the isolation valves. They, however, had evidently been equally affected by the limescale that was (no doubt) the source of the problem.

WD40 would not shift it

GF's scredriver would not shift it

GF's BIG screw driver would not shift it.

The only solution was to take drastic action. The main stop cock for the house was switched off and all of the taps opened. The tanks emptied and all was ready when the engineer arrived. Needless to say the maintenance took about 5 minutes, and cost a lot of money. The shower is now fixed and all is well.

Gardening

Mellors turned up first thing (as usual for a Friday). Gorse Fox noticed after a while that he had brought his totty with him. That's the first time for quite a while that we have seen her. Well he was chirpy enough and got the job done.

Council

A busy day was not helped by the train's insistence on sitting in a siding for 10 minutes on the journey to London. GF is not sure whether some previous train had been cancelled but ours was heaving by the time it was half-way.

Work continued on the hunt for needles in haystacks, but was briefly diverted by some detailed discussion on modelling tools. This was bothe interesting and frustrating as it revealed how much GF had done, but also how much was yet to do (and how many concepts were still unclear in the way in which the tooling worked).

GF had to get away early in order to get to the Council meeting. This started later than usual, and unusually had a couple of member of the public in attendance. Whilst nothing too controversial was discussed, the meeting seemed to drag on, and GF was glad to get home.

Courting

The Silver Vixen was still staying with Betty and Barney Rubble... yesterday's NGS open day was very successful despite the occasional showers and today she was joining them on a trip to Hampton Court Flower Show. Again whilst they had the odd shower they had a very full day.

Gorse Fox meanwhile had to go to Basingstoke for a deep-dive into some of the design aspects of various text analytics engines so that he could evaluate whether there are any gaps in our proposed solution and also understand where the performance challenges would arise. It was a really good and interesting day.

Hypocrites

BBC complaining about sport moving to "pay TV"...

Hold on; since when has the BBC been free?

Quiet

The Gorse Fox is working at home today. 5 hours of travel seemed a little pointless when most of the rest of the team are away in various meetings.

The Silver Vixen has gone to see Betty and Barney Rubble and help them with their NGS Open Day. This has been very successful so far, so SV is lending a pair of hands.

Change

Today saw a break in the weather. The wall-to-wall sunshine of the last week or so was interrupted by grey clouds. The Gorse Fox was even subjected to the indignity of a couple of spots of rain as he waited for the train to carry him to London.

It was a good day with further progress on the current project. This was made easier when GF met up with Deep Blue for a brain dump on one of the modelling tools which meant that GF's efforts were accelerated by the greater familiarity.

Quiet journey home through the rain around London, but once back on the south coast it was reported by theSilver Vixen that it had remained dry throughout.

Technical Giant

After the success of yesterday's technological efforts, the Gorse Fox decided to install the new external Hard Drive in order to move some files around.

The drive was connected to the power, the USB cable connected to the hub, Windows emitted a sound and voila - Nothing! GF had to return to debug mode. Could this be the PC or was it the drive?

He disconnected it and connected it to a laptop - Windows emitted it's sound and voila - still nothing. GF restarted the laptop. Nada.

Could it be the cables? He checked they were firmly seated in the sockets and tried again, niet.

Then he noticed that he had picked up the wrong cable and had been attaching his external DVD drive instead of the HDD all along. This could just be the source of the problem! Someone must have laced the local water supply with stupid pills - GF drank deeply!

Coincidence

The Gorse Fox wonders ig it is a coincidence that in the same week that the BBC have reported: Police dogs found dead in hot car

They have also reported: US man sets new hot-dog eating record

Maybe not!

Calling

Isn't it astonishing that you can pick up a phone almost anywhere and talk to people virtually anywhere on the planet... one of the true technological miracles of our age.

Cousteau-cub is now in the Phillippines and has a new phone number. We tried to call her a couple of times, but the call rang out, so suspect she was either working, asleep, or somewhere noisy.

So much for technological miracles!

Sparks

There was a moment on Friday that the Gorse Fox looked back on with consternation. He was on one of the many phone calls that filled the day when, of a sudden, thyere a diminuendo of sound as the background hum of his PC faded to nothing. It was as if the plug had been removed. A faint aroma of TCP filled the room. The PC was dead.

Being brave and grown up about these things he gave it a gentle kick and ignored it until this morning. Removing it from its housing he unplugged all of the cables and took the covers off. No visible signs of the problem were evident, but GF was sure it was the PSU. Phoning his local supplier he checked that suitable units were in stock... and headed off towards Portsmouth.

A couple of hours later GF was home clutching a new PSU (and some memory and a new external disk). He removed the old PSU and replaced it with the new one. He had upgraded the power from 145W to 650W with a view that he was not going to overload this one! A few minutes later the computer was running its disk-check. GF fitted the memory and put the covers back on. The computer started and all was well.

Well almost. GF is having to fiddle about as it keeps suggesting a "Safe Mode" start. He hasn't got to the bottom of this yet, but isn't too worried at this point as everything seems to work.

Whilst he's in a mood to rant

Whilst thinking about the video below, he remembered the Jenny McCarthy Body Count

This a website that keeps track of the damage being done by one US-based ill-informed "celebrity" who has been campaigning against vaccines of various types.

Now at first a few cranks deciding to risk their children to serious illness can be understood. Now that the science is in, and so conclusively proves her position to be untenable the continued campaign is actually dangerous and if more people follow we can get to a state where the "herd immunity" is lost and the diseases in question become rampant again.

People like her (and Prince Charles for that matter) should leave the science to scientists and genuine qualified medical practitioners and stick to opening shopping centres and talking to flowers.

Just a drop

Some clips are too good not to share.

The Gorse Fox is what our Colonial cousins would call a "skeptic". Actually, he isn't. He is just a bloke with an enquiring mind that looks at the actaul peer reviewed evidence in real scientific journals.

Don't bother pouring one of those for the Gorse Fox!

Swimlanes

Well that was a good day. Very busy, but some real design work for a change. Spent much of the day drawing swimlanes to show the way in which information flows around a system. Interesting for the Gorse Fox... but boring for readers.

A quiet journey home and a fine Weissbier.