Last Night on Earth

Got a whole bunch of family round for Christmas. And a bunch of board games to try out. Tonight we fired up Last Night on Earth. This is a zombie game with heroic players battling hordes of incoming zombies. Great fun. I particularly like the characterisations of each of the heroic players, which are drawn in true B-Movie style.

It is a really good game, even though we all got devoured by the walking dead…

The Perils of Simple Jobs

One of my many theories about life is that sometimes the universe must have its fun whenever you try to achieve something. I was reminded of this when I tried to fix a broken bulb in the electric fire which was causing a rather lopsided fake fireplace display. Since I reckoned this was an easy win, I thought I’d sort it out. At this point I can imagine the universe pulling up its chair (if it sits on anything), getting out the popcorn and opening a beer. Rob is starting on a job around the house. Always good for a laugh.

I should have known I was in for trouble when I discovered that we actually had some spare bulbs of the right type, but nevertheless I ploughed on and took the fire to pieces. The broken bulb was easy to find, and even easier to remove. But that was mainly because the light fitting fell to bits. The penny pinchers who made my fire had saved a few pence by not using metal bulb sockets, instead using cheaper plastic ones. These work fine for the warranty period, but not that much beyond it. There must have been a meeting somewhere where they decided that they could save around 20 pence per unit by making them prone to fall apart like this.

So, at 4:55 in the afternoon I’ve got a sudden need for light fittings. So it is out into the rain to the only shop around that stands a chance of selling them. Which of course closed around two minutes before I got there. Wah.

The following morning, after an evening staring at an empty fireplace, I manage to make it to my favourite hardware store, Toolstation, where I pick up a bunch of light sockets for 43 pence each (an amazing price when you consider how much they are in other DIY stores).

So, problem solved, right? I’ve even bought a spare set of sockets which I’ll put in the back of the fire in case this ever happens again. All I have to do is take out the broken parts and refit the replacements. Except that, of course, the new sockets have a different connection arrangement that means the wires are now too short. So now I have to spend ages trying to feed in extra cable because the penny pinching people who made my fire (see above) had used just enough to fit and nothing more. I wonder if that was decided at a different meeting or the same one?

Anyhoo, after approximately ten times the effort I thought it would take, I now have a fully illuminated fire. And the universe has had a good laugh.

You get what you pay for

Some years ago we were helping dad move house. Having loaded up we headed onto the road. As we rounded our first corner we heard a horrible sliding noise from the contents of the van followed by an enormous crash. Tim, who was riding shotgun next to me, said “Ah well. You get the help you pay for”. Of course none of us were professional house movers, we were just helping dad out. And it turned out that the enormous crash was caused by a box of cutlery, so no harm was done. But the remark has stuck with me.

I was reminded of it when the terms and conditions for Instragram were changed recently, and people suddenly found that things they thought they owned (i.e. the pictures they had taken) were now ripe for exploitation by the company that was storing them. Instagram decided that they could use any of the pictures held on their servers for profit and advertising. There has been something of a backlash against this, and as a result some back tracking on the part of the company, but I think it has opened up a useful debate. Perhaps, as a result of it, paying for things will come back into fashion.

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of free services. For a start they can vanish or change at any moment, taking with them stuff that might be important to you. And of course, as the saying goes, if you are not paying for the service, you are the product. Facebook sells its ability to target you with custom ads. Google surrounds your Gmail inbox with links to “related services”. And if you ever search for anything (for example my quest for an oven) you will find yourself haunted by matching adverts in every web page you visit for a while.

If something is important to me I’ll pay for it. I put my pictures on Flickr and have done for ages. It costs me around 24 dollars a year to do this, but I can now complain to the site if they ever get lost, and Flickr don’t have to sell my photographs to stay in business.

Maybe in the long term the price of service provision will drop to the point where companies will be able to provide the service for a small fee, rather than have to hawk around personal data for profit. Flickr are obviously keen to cash in on this, and have just launched an offer of three months free hosting to try and tempt people away from “free” sites.

Farewell Gerry Anderson

Very sad to hear today of the death of Gerry Anderson, creator of Thunderbirds. I was lucky enough to have Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet as the background to my childhood and I thought they were all wonderful. But I really loved Thunderbirds most of all. It had the longest episodes, the best stories and the biggest gadgets. We used to watch it in black and white on the telly that took ages to warm up. I vividly remember getting a copy of the TV 21 kids magazine and finding out that Thunderbird 2 was green.

Gerry Anderson managed to create a future that we all wanted to live in. So what if there was a gigantic lemon squeezer on the hanger of Thunderbird 1, people moved a bit strangely, and there were never more than about five of them in a room, that was what a whole generation of kids (including me) wanted to grow up into. If you want to find out more about this wonderful world you can start at the Haynes manual for the programme and go on from there.

I’m going to put on a choice episode, perhaps “Path of Destruction” and drink a toast to one of the most visionary TV producers there has ever been.

Christmas Fun

Had a great Christmas. Hope you did too.

Got a nice big Lego kit. Something tells me I should be a bit too old for things like Lego. But I ignore it.

Got great socks too. Coming soon to a First Year lecture near you….

Cottingham church at 5:00 on Christmas Day

Thanks Santa.

I think you should know that number one son now has no hair on his right hand after lighting this…..