Andy Ramblings

The UK doesn't have one of the best transplant systems, the system is primarily and opt in system. This basically means that you have to have your I would sign up to be added to the list, incidentally, you can do that here and if your based in the UK, I urge you to do so. There was one main problem with the system, ok there are many, but you work with what you have. The main problem was that if you, had joined up, but your next of kin or relatives said no, then that was it, you would not donate anything. This happened in 1 in 10 cases.

Chris Rudge, managing director of UK Transplant, said the wishes of approximately one in 10 possible donors were overturned by their families under the current system.

Source

From next week, the system will be changing, if you signed up, yes sign up here, your wishes will be respected.
Ok, I am totally aware that this is an emotive subject, but there are people here in the UK who are waiting for a life changing transplant, and believe me, I know it's life changing, I've had 3 kidney transplants, and believe me, I do think of the donor families and the loss that they have had for me to live on.
All I can say is this, if you do sign up, don't keep it to yourself, tell your family, tell your friends, and most of all tell your loved ones. It makes it so much easier for them, if they know that you wanted to donate.

Oh did I tell you? You can register to the UK transplant list here. They also allow your to amend you details.
As some slogan went, You don't need to go to heaven with all your organs, as they are sure to hell needed down here.
Ok that's it, that's my public announcement over. I don't need to advise you... Read More

In the past, road sweepers used to use a rather efficient device called a brush, or a broom, something that had a rather nice rhythm to it, wiish wisshhh  tock tock. It didn't make much noise. Oh but these days, when the price of petrol is high, the need for machines, the need for noise to make it appear that you are doing something. Like teenagers with motorbikes, taking the silencer out of the exhaust just so you can hear them coming 20 miles off Yep, I'm on a big bike, lots a noise! It's crap as we know, the engine is just a small wee 50cc engine that is just a noise maker.
You'll be wondering what the hell is this writer on about? Yep, there is some logic to the madness that lies beneath this crazed mind.
It's a nice sunny morning, it's neither too cold, nor too hot, just right, you hear the birds in the trees (ok the bleeding pigeons cooing away) then along comes some motorised sound! It's the new engine powered leaf cleaner, Wrrrrrrrrrrrr wrrrrrrrrr wrrrrrrrrr You know the ones.

Yep, those things, those machines that kill silence, of a nice morning. Why are they needed? They are noisy, generate pollution, and I can't say they offer any benefits to the user except broken ears and an extra long arm?
What's wrong with the good 'ol brush? you remember, the Broom and brush that would do the job effectively and not wake up the whole neighbourhood!
I would like the guy who uses this machine at 8am in the morning to be woken up at 1am with one of those machines. It felt like 1am to be till I looked at my clock...
What's wrong with this?

well tell me ?

It's Sunday afternoon and nothin' on TV and the weather isn't too nice. It's warm inside, and the web is my oyster. yep, it's time to do a little bit of browsing around.
I popped over to Rachel North London, a good read and an even better writer. Where upon I find that she is talking about a puzzle. A hackers puzzle to be more precise.

So here it is. the link to the hackers puzzle. If you're very good you should be able to do it in 10mins, so they say, I don't know who 'they' are so I wouldn't be able to vouch for them. But to set you mind at rest there are only 23 levels till you see your prize.
I got stuck at ojofuffo but remember who your friends are, Google and wiki they will provide many of the answers. In fact in real life they do help hackers find stuff that you didn't know about.

There you go, have fun. I may post the answers later, but as they said in the X-files, The truth is out there, somewhere if you know where to look and you know what your looking for etc... Read More

Yep, have you every seen what it's like to see approx 55,000 fireworks going of in 5 seconds looks, let alone sounds like? Don't ask me... And also, why would someone be mad enough to let of that many in that short a time needs to be, either mad! or trying for a world record!

A man has attempted to set a new world record by launching more than 55,000 fireworks in just five seconds. Roy Lowry wanted to beat the existing record of 39,210 at the National Fireworks Championships in Plymouth.

So you want to see what it's like letting of 55,000 fireworks in 5 secs?
Well It's not an almighty bang, nope, it's 55,000 small ones going of at the same time!
You can see it all here thanks to the BBC. Make sure your sound isn't too high...

Over the last few days, the astronomical world has been in turmoil over a new planet (2003 UB313) is it a planet or is it not, would it demote pluto to a mere junior planet. It's all to do with size, yep for this guys size does matter. This isn't where CNN went wrong. IT was in distance...

The Hubble Space Telescope measured the bright, rocky object officially known as 2003 UB313 [Xena], at about 1,490 miles (2,300 kilometers) in diameter, roughly 70 miles (112 kilometers) longer than Pluto. At 9 billion miles (15 kilometers) from the sun, it is the farthest known object in the solar system.

Source

Read that quote again, yes, 9 billion miles = 15 KM!! I suppose that makes a 26 mile marathon not as big as all that. I mean, it wouldn't even draw a sweat from us metric types. I suppose that we will be waiting for the imperial types to finish their little run.
There you go, another reason not to watch 24hr news. It's not really a good source of news as they tend to run the same story over and over and over and over and... oh you know... over again. Best to just find your news on the interweb.

Ok, not much to yack about. Being a bit of a Geek. I have taken the the jump, leap of faith and have upgraded the serendipity software from Version 1 to a beta version 1.1. A big jump in the admin part of the serendipity which has been improved quite dramatically with increased manageability and I have to add, excellent media management to make the adding of pictures as easy as possible with quite a few basic image manipulation tools, like crop, resize, rotate simple tools as I said.
A new addition is the ability to edit the text that can be saved into the image. This is called the IPTC information. This is where you can pop in copyright info in to Jpeg images only. Not bad I have to add.
Other than that, lots of other new features. Read more info here.
Oh and by the way. I've added a e-mail announcement service from feedblitz down in the My little tag area. This service will send you and e-mail every time I do an update.
There, that's it, enough geekiness for now.

I had to get out, I was running out of medicines, running out of food and I had spent all Friday at home fixing websites till the wee hours. Well, a bit of a lie there, not quite to the wee hours, but till late. So come Saturday supplies being thin and well, I had to get out!
So I escaped from the grips of my PC, twas almost like escaping gravity, a big push, leap was needed, but I did it. I got out and headed towards London Docklands, It's nice there, lots of shops, all easy to get to and well all indoors to was out of the rain.

I love Olive oil, in fact I'm not to shy to spend over £6 for a 1lt bottle.(at my local Sainsbury) The oil I get is Farchioni Extra Virgin Olive Oil 'Il Casolare' from Umbria. It's the oil taken from the very first pressing, so it's a bit murky, but boy does taste delicious! This is the kind of olive oil you pour onto a saucer, with bits of chillies. Dip some chipata bread bits in and have for a starter, or side dish. What I needed was a nice drizzler so that I don't have to worry about the stopper. As you can see in the image, it's like a beer bottle, a Grolsch so by the time your half way through the bottle, you have quite some oil slipping down the sides, gets kinda messy, so a drizzler was needed.
You can order it from here, but it's pricey! 
On my way to find the said drizzler, I found something that I that any good office worker want's. You know when the office only provides cheap and nasty instant coffee, you know, that coffee you need to add 3 or 4 tables spoons of the stuff before you get a 'hit'. Yep, you know what I'm on about. Anyway, some one who obviously likes coffee, had the same problem and was thinking how can I have my proper coffee, my ground coffee at the office. So what did this guy do? He imagined how can he get his cafetière and a mug together? So along comes the Smart Café cafetière hot mug! Read More

Ok, so your at either a dead end job, or nothing to do? bored silly. The boss gone for their French lunch break, ie starts at 13:00 and finishes 5 mins before going home time. or you like living life dangerously you read your round of blogs from the office. How can you hid your browser window? You could have several browser windows up, and work pages are in one and blogs in another? risky? But why play dangerously? Why not just read your blogs in boss proof window!

Yep, you can, some smart people over at workFriendly have managed the trick. Pop over and check it out.

Oh and by the way, if you get in any trouble with the Boss, that's not my fault, you wanted to live life dangerously? sometime you might not hit on the safe route.

Ok. my site has been off line for almost 24hrs. This was caused by my hosting company. It would have been ok if they had advised me that they were going to 'move' my sites to a newer server (Thanks). The move meant that some code had to be searched for and replaced. Took me  a while. But now the site is back up and running.

Other than that, It's not a good time to fly to or from the UK... Your not allow to take anything on a plane. I think this won't last long as the big airlines who rely on the business traveler, will start to complain.

Of the 20 people who were arrested for 'planning' a tur'ist attack on Heathrow airport I bet most will be let off or the police will not find any evidence, and the whole thing dropped and hidden. call me a skeptic if you like, but the current record of the current government is not very good at all.
Remember the WMD report, turned out to be a pack of lies, The ricin plot, turned out to be, yep a nice convenient story to allow Blair to be 'tougher' or Tur'ist. And the best one to date, the Forest Gate arrest.

I think they have cried wolf too many times. They had on this occasion better produce something or Blair and his cronies will be up shit creek.

Some very wise and artistic person, not knowing if it was a bloke or a gal, I will call the person a person. Anyway, they came up with a rather entertaining way to BBQ you sausages, not sure if it'll work with English ones, but sure will work with more meaty ones. Oh dear the pun is getting quite bad here. Suffice to say, click the link below and have a chuckle... Read More

Further to the current issues of the ID cards pending disaster, So far the whole project has been critisied by The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry into the thinking behind ID Cards, published today, found the government had decided what it wanted to do before it had determined if it would even work.
Not only are the trials not really upto the real world, but they now one of the main technologies that underpin the ID card scheme, RFID, is now under attack. This technologie is now begining to be used in delevery systems, as it is, to be honest very good for tracking loads of boxes in a Lorry, no need to go through the whole lorry too see what's in there, just scan all the RFID tags and the jobs done.
Practical for stores, to track their stock, but once it's bought, is the things turned off? Do I know, not really. I just have to trust the cashier has deactivated it. That's all I have.
Back to ID cards, yes, RFID is usefull, all you have to do is scan the passport and your details pop up on a screen, if your Bin Laden in disgues, in a I Love George Bush T-Shirt, your gonna get caught. Yes, sounds good, it can catch the bad guys. Yippee, easy work for the home office.

BUT No, it's not that easy! If the Police and other autherities can read the card, then so can other people, people who I don't want to read the card. As all the cards have to be able to be read by all nations, it means a standard has to be thrashed out, with standards, come published stanards, once they are published, then any one can read your passport details without you knowing? right? yes, right they can.



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