Failure is the Key to Success

I have changed the comments system that was in use on my blog today. I migrated all of the previous comments into the new system and believe it to be working fine. I have set the system to allow me to moderate the comments initially, but will turn this off in the next day or so when I know it is working correctly.

Let me know what you think and if I’ve really got it wrong and you can’t let me know in the comments, then you can let me know via my contact me page.

Thanks to David Airey for making me aware of a problem with my comments and suggesting the contact me page.

Reading Evel’s Make a Wish post on And another thing… this morning brought a smile to my face and reminded me of a few pet stories.

When I was a boy we had a Scottish Terrier called Cindy, who was quite a character. She was only about a year older than me and would tear about all over the garden on her tiny legs. One summer, my mum had cooked some beetroot and left them on a plate outside to cool. We thought we hadn’t seen Cindy for a while… yes, she had discovered the beetroot and was busy eating them. So, you have to picture this, a small black terrier with purple tinted muzzle looking very guilty.

When I got married, Jo had a cat, Mitzi, who came to live with us. She was unique as all pets are. When I fitted the cat flat we had to teach her how to use it. You know when you see a cartoon cat being put through a cat flap and they manage to get all four paws on the surround and are resisting all attempts to push them through..well it happens in real life and it looks just as funny. She was eventually persuaded with chicken. She knew she could talk and would often hold conversations with us. She was also rather insecure and so some winter nights I would be found out in the garden with a torch, while she went about her business as she wouldn’t go out on her own. Mitzi also had a habit of waiting until we were part of the way down the stairs and then dashing down one side of the steps and crossing to the other side of the steps under your feet as you stepped down.

About 10 years ago we were adopted by another cat which we called Smokey. She sort of moved in and she and Mitzi agreed to keep out of each other’s way. She was very underweight, just skin and bones. She started to fill out and then it became obvious that we had gained a package deal. At the end of June, she gave birth to two kittens. As we didn’t intend to keep either of them, we just gave them names to identify them.

So we had Spot and Stripe and with their mother who was only about a year older than them, it was like having 3 kittens loose in the house. The two kittens would regularly empty the bin in the living room and then roll it round the room. After a few months Spot went to someone that Jo worked with and was renamed Mischief, which she lived up to after breaking a branch off an artificial Christmas tree. When I refitted the bathroom, Smokey being a small cat disappeared under the floorboards after squeezing through the hole where a waste pipe had been. It took a while to get her back out and instead of a grey and white cat we had a grey and grey cat.

Stripe will often supervise when I am loading the dishwasher and will usually offer her advice and comments on life the universe and everything. Stripe loves the rain and will always go outside if it’s raining and then when she comes in shakes like a dog.

Where do the fish come in? Well, we have an aquarium of tropical fish and no there aren’t any strange stories to tell there, but it made the title sound better.

Tags:cats,pets

Gary has just tagged me with a new meme he has just made up. So anyway, I’ve just bought Gary a Guinness, a good start to Friday night. Cheers!

Here are the rules:

1. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to signup for a PayPal business account so that you can receive payments. It only takes a few minutes to sign up.

2. If you have a blog, either install Ankesh Kothari’s Buy Me a Beer plugin on your wordpress blog, or paste some variant of the code below into an appropriate place. If you don’t have a blog, you can still participate by including a version of this code that points to your PayPal account in a comment on this post:

<form name="beerexchangememe"
action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr"
target="paypal" method="post">
<input
type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick" />
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="[your PayPal account email]” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”return” value=”" />
<input type=”hidden” name=”item_name” value=”Beer Exchange” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”amount” value=”$4″ />
<a href=”https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=[your
PayPal account email]&amount=$4&item_name=Beer+Exchange+Meme”
target=”paypal”>Buy Me a Beer</a>
</form>

3. Work through the comments on this post and follow each of the links to buy a beer for each of the commenters on this post, and then add your own to the end. If you don’t like beer, then a glass of wine or a cup of coffee is fine too. Just like when you go to the pub, arriving early means you buy a smaller round, and then reap the benefits of a beer from everyone else that arrives after you.

4. Feel free to tag your friends, and have them join in too

5. When you’ve collected enough beer for a serious session of drinking, have someone photograph or video the proceedings and post the results back to your blog.

Although, link do not appear to work when posting in my comments, I will edit them so that the links work. Hmm, ‘collected enough for a serious session of drinking’, that wouldn’t be much for me then.

Buy Me a Stella

I’m not sure how well this will go, but I’ll tag David at Creative Design, Derek at Derek Semmler dot com and Sean at Sean-Dinner.com. You got a link even if I don’t get a drink.

Tags:meme,stella

A few days ago I was tagged by Vijay with the $456 Billion meme. This was started by Sam of Blog, MD who was inspired by the Boston Globe feature ‘What does $456 Billion buy‘. The original article suggested several US orientated possibilities but also quotes figures from the World Bank suggesting that $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth. Wow, that’s some serious issues that it would have funded.

I’ve been thinking for a few days about how to answer this and am still struggling. Vijay set the bar quite high with his post about Tuberculosis in India. When you start thinking in terms of saving people’s lives it becomes difficult to find other options to spend it on. I don’t think I will start quoting a lot of figures, otherwise the research will suck me in and this post will never get made.

Anyway, once you have eliminated diseases, (I wish it were that easy,) you then need to grow crops to feed the people, as otherwise living in starvation is no quality of life. Then it makes you think about the ‘food mountains’ that we have in the west which allows us to maintain price stability in the markets and just how wrong this is. In 2006 the EU food mountain exceeded 13 million tonnes. We in Europe are paying to store food, I read in one article 1 million a month, and destroy it if it is unused, while people are starving. Maybe instead of storing it, we spend a little of the money to ship the food to where it is needed as soon as it is produced. If the US can grow rice and ship it to Japan, then I’m sure it can be shipped to anywhere. There will always be arguments who will pay for it, but hey who’s paying to store it? OK, so I’ve eliminated disease, fed the world, now on to improving quality of life. People need hope that tomorrow will be better than today and next week will be better than this. In the many drought and war torn countries, I don’t know what the answer is. I’m sure that money will help, but I’m just not sure how, maybe through providing education so that the people can see their own solution to their plight and with funding improve life day by day. Maybe if the situation was stable, and the people not starving, businesses would look to invest in the poorer countries. Unfortunately, I’ll be cynical here, many businesses will probably only invest because the labour might be cheaper than the current locations.

I know it will probably not happen for a long time, but we need to start thinking on a more global, ‘what is the right thing’, rather than the current insular, ‘what can I get from it’

Hmm, I think I’ve deviated from the meme a lot and had better stop here before I loose the plot completely.

As this has made me think so much, I had better tag Ilker at the Thinking Blog. I will also tag Gary, KyleBeabo and Becky

Tags:$456 billion

I haven’t had time today to think about what to post due to working on a ’simple hard disc replacement’ for someone at work. The original hard disc wouldn’t boot into Windows XP or the recovery console. After installing Windows XP sucessfully, it all went wrong after I installed Service Pack 2. It turns out the replacement hard disc was too large for the BIOS and although Windows XP was able to install, it hadn’t seen all of the disc, then after SP2 it could see all of the disc, but not the operating system install. XP SP2 would not format the disc to do a fresh install, so I eventually managed to repair the original disc and then added the new disc as a second drive.

So anyway, I’ve had a chance to look at what other people are posting about and here is a couple.

Scott Adams in his post yesterday on The Dilbert Blog was talking about the story of the 200 people, including James Doohan’s cremated remains that were launched into space on a suborbital flight. It appears that the cremated remains travelled into space before their return to earth. However, that’s when it went a bit wrong. The rocket parachuted down in dense vegetation on a New Mexico mountain side and hasn’t been found yet.

JMB from Nobody Important is posting by email, from aboard a cruise to Alaska and providing us with a wonderful description as she travels along.

As a country we are resistant to change. The European Union has shelved plans which would have made it illegal to use imperial measures after 2009.

We changed to decimal currency in 1971 and it was phased in over 18 months with some new coins and retaining some of the old coins. For example the shilling coin became 5 new pence. This was planned for 5 years before the changeover.

However, metric measures have not totally replaced imperial measurements. Almost everyone still uses imperial measures in everyday life. When you go to the pub, you buy a pint of beer. Although you have to buy petrol by the litre (because they stopped displaying the price per gallon when it got to about £3 per gallon), you still talk about the fuel economy of your car in miles per gallon. Road signs legally display distances in yards and miles and speed limits are in miles per hour.

Currently, all loose goods sold with reference to units of quantity have to be weighed and sold using the metric system. However, imperial measurements may also be displayed as “supplementary indications” - as a second label. This means that when you go to the supermarket to buy milk, you aren’t really buying a 4 pint bottle, you are buying a 2.272 litre bottle that just happens to contain 4 pints.

I grew up with imperial measures at home, but was taught metric at school and generally am conversant in either. The only exception to this is temperature, I only use Celsius and really struggle to relate to temperature in Fahrenheit. At work, when I was an electronics engineer, I was at ease using formulas with mm, but at home I am more likely to measure in feet and inches.

I am noticing that my son is interchanging them without problem, so that’s another generation that will grow up with both. I’m quite glad that the EU have given up trying to force their views on us for this area.

Tags:imperial measures,weights measures