Seperated at birth?

Possibly not best illustrated in these photographs, but those who know both will doubtless agree that my brother Jem, (right photograph) bears an uncanny resemblance to Brian Setzer (left photograph) of Stray Cats fame. Set aside that they were born on different continents roughly 3000 miles, and 3 years apart to different parents, otherwise they could have been brothers, or twins or clones or something.

 
Both play a mean bit of guitar and sing well, being accomplished recorded artists both in a band and in their own right. Both are self taught guitarists. Both ride motorbikes and have crashed them. Both own classic American cars. Both are into Rockabilly music. They probably both like fried chicken, although I might have made that up. The coincidences just keep stacking up don't they? Well in my mind they do.

It was even a possibility that they were in fact the same person, but that theory was disproved as they have met each other, (Birmingham, England 1991) and the universe failed to collapse in on itself.

Search on U-Tube and you are likely to find clips of both playing Stray Cat Strut or something similar. Can you tell the difference?

Dog chips. Korean serving suggestion?

So, following on from my last post, the Government has announced that all dogs must be chipped. This may be interpreted as a serving suggestion by our Korean friends who allegedly and famously eat dogs.

By inserting a microchip into the dog this will somehow prevent them attacking people. Apparently. No it won't. Microchipping the owners of such dangerous dogs might prevent them attacking people, the dogs that is not the owner, although often the two go together - violent people and dangerous dogs. If they microchip had some sort of detonator circuit that could be activated in the event of an incident that would be very effective, blowing up the dog, the owner, or both.

Presently if you are bitten by a dangerous dog which then runs away you have no way of identifying the owner. Somehow having the microchip will help. Presumably the government will issue us all with a microchip reader which we must then carry at all times in case of a dog attack. The question then arises of what happens if you are bitten by an "underground" dog, one that has not been chipped so that the owner cannot be identified? We already have criminals using "pool cars" which are not registered to anybody. Will we end up with "pool dogs?"

The legislation will of course only apply to England and Wales, Scotland has no plans to introduce compulsory chipping. So a little advice to our Scottish neighbours. In the event of a dog attack, run for the border!

A Nation of Dog Lovers?

Whilst walking to school this afternoon to collect my son, I spotted a notice which had been nailed to a fence by one of my distant neighbours across the other side of the village. The notice reads (not word for word, but to the effect) "If your dog shits on my garden again I will post it through your letterbox." This raised a few questions in my mind. He is either grammatically incorrect, or filled with great hatred for this dog. The way he has worded it, he will post the dog through the letterbox. Now, I don't know the breed of dog which is troubling him, but if it's leaving turds  of a size that have caused him to leave this threatening sign, I prepared to bet it's not a Yorkshire Terrier. And I would just love to see him try to cram a Great Dane through someones mail slot. It's at times like this I wish I could draw cartoons.
I presume his sign is merely badly worded and that he actually means to post the dog mess. I doubt however that Royal Mail will carry out such an operation. Some of the private postal companies might I suppose, but I doubt it. I once tried to post a Haggis, and it caused all sorts of problems. I got in such trouble once the bomb squad had finished. And anyway, if he knows the identity of the dog concerned why not go and speak civilly with the owner? My guess is he doesn't know, so, he'll have to scoop the poop and follow the unsuspecting owner back to his premises and do the dirty deed himself.
But hang on, that assumes the person with the dog is the owner. Supposing the dog is let out to "do it's business" and then simply follows some innocent member of the public home. Said innocent would then have shit posted through his door even though he's not the owner. Imagine the scene at breakfast time. "Anything in the post this morning dear?" - "No, darling, just the usual shit."
Dogs are of course mostly unnecessary, and if we did away with them it would solve this sort of problem.
I would permit only working dogs if I was King. Guide dogs for the blind and deaf, sheep dogs for shepherds, German Shepherds as Police dogs, sniffer dogs for customs, explosive sniffers for bomb disposals guys, that sort of thing. If we must have dogs as pets then limited breeds should be permitted. Labradors are okay as they are placid and their teeth fall out if they try to bite you, which they never do, and springer's are okay, if somewhat mental. Yorkshire Terriers. Oh dear, I am from Yorkshire and love all things Yorkshire except tea and terriers. Originally developed to chase rats down holes, they are all that a dog should not be - bittey little yappers, used as handbag ornaments by silly old ladies. In fact any dog which will tolerate being dressed up as a human, and is given presents at Christmas - straight into room 101 with them. Any dog developed for fighting - gone. Bulldogs - well Churchill has done his bit to make them look cute and cuddly, but ultimately they look like they need ironing, and they have that thing going on where they can;t let go once they've bitten you, so no, they go too. Greyhounds, apart from being neurotic, are too spindly, although I suppose they perform a useful purpose in diverting racing fans from the horses and are cheaper to run (no pun intended) so they can stay for now, purely as racing animals, not as pets though.
The St Bernard, reknown the world over for bringing alcoholic beverages to people lost in avalanches - creditable behaviour in a dog, so despite it's massive size it can remain. The Dulux dog goes though. How the hell did such a shaggy dog get to advertise paint? Whenever I paint it's bad enough with the bristles coming out of the brushes, without a moulting dog the size of a cow mooching about the room, loosing hair all over the fresh paint. And the Dalmatian, a lazy greyhound in a spotty coat - what's that all about?
Despite what you might think I do not hate dogs. as a kid we had miniature Shetland sheepdogs, an offshoot breed of the Collie, and if I ever consider keeping miniature sheep I'd have another one like a shot. but there has to be a good reason for having a dog. If you simply want a pet, get a goldfish - far simpler, easier to look after, and instead of it's shit being a problem, when it dies it becomes a problem with the shit - you flush it down the bog. Try doing that with a Great Dane.
I would encourage one particular dog over and above all others though - the mutt. The mutt is the prototype for what we will all become once ethnic mixing has been with us a few more generations. And whilst every breed of dog has it's own problems, the mongrel remains healthy, smart and fast enough to get away when it craps on your lawn.

Handbuilt electricity from junk.

It's been a month or so since I installed the Grid Tie inverter for my small scale solar power system and now time for a report and an update on the next part of the project.
According to the meter over the last 16 days I have generated 235 watts of electricity. Hardly enough to change the world, but a start. Peak Power so far has been 10 watts, but as low as 3 watts some days. From memory the two panels up on the roof are a 10 watt and a 5 watt, so I am losing a good proportion of the potential power in the inversion process. More and bigger panels are needed to make this worthwhile. I'm looking at 200 Watts worth on EBay at the moment which should really get things sparking.
I'm not convinced the meter is entirely accurate however, and I think more power is going through than it is recording. (Cheap Chinese crap!) Why so sure? Well last April I used on average 11.9 KW/H per day, this year I'm averaging 9.9 KW/H, an improvement of 2 KW/H per day or roughly a 20% improvement. That doesn't tally with the meter in the loft. Nor does the 2 KW/H improvement tally purely with the little panels I've put in,, as we were away for Easter and had four consecutive days of minimal use that probably screwed the figures. It'll take a longer test period to get an accurate record.

Anyhow, the next big step will be later this week when I hope to have a wind turbine coming on line to supplement the solar panels. I'm kind of proud to say i threw this together myself. Some photographs will follow in due course, but for now a description of this Heath Robinson contraption will have to suffice. The generator is in fact a motor intended for a child's electric scooter. The metalwork of the frame comes from an old running machine frame with the bearings and part of the steering column from a disability scooter, and the rigid plastic used to form the tail fin comes from an old sunbed. This is recycling and green technology at it's very best, built from junk. I need to make the hub to suit the blades when they arrive from EBay Land, these being the only parts I am buying ready made. I was going to buy PVC pipe and even make the blades myself, but then found some so cheap on Ebay it was too good a chance to pass up, and saved a lot of time and effort in designing and perfecting the right shape - someone else has done the hard work for me, and I'll just screw them to a hub and away we go. £11 bought six professionally made blades.

A bench test using the time honoured method of spinning the motor by hand shows about 3 to 7 volts achievable at very low speed. Spinning it with a power drill at max revs showed 37 volts coming up, with 12.7, the ideal battery charging voltage, at a moderate speed. I will then have to decide whether to charge batteries and reconnect my office lighting, which is plan B really, or go for plan A and wire the turbine into the grid tie inverter.

More of a problem is where to put the turbine. Bolting a scaffold tube to the side of the house is my first thought, with the turbine supported in the main by the house wall and sticking up just above ridge height. Experts (and there are hundreds of those aren't there - more even than members of the S.A.S.) don;t recommend this as it can cause vibration damage to the house structure. Hmmm, not so sure I agree. What I might do is dig a hole, sink a scaffold tube down a couple of feet and bed it in concrete then bolt the remainder to the shed (wooden built, next to the house) then extend the scaffold tube up so it goes way up above the shed and house roof. Not sure if I will need planning permission for this though - I might get away with it as it's a temporary structure and only a small turbine. I have no idea what wattage it will kick out, but I'd be happy with 50 watts. Or maybe the scaffold tube just stuck in the jockey wheel of the caravan to start with and see how it goes. Yeah, that might be the way.

As ever watch this space readers.

Summer of ....... can't make it Rhyme with anything

For the last two weeks I have been the proud owner of an electric guitar, a cheap copy of the Fender Stratocaster, with an even cheaper and nastier practice amp, but good enough to learn on. I have taught myself  a few chords - four in fact, which makes me better qualified than Status Quo and can strum a few together to sound almost but not quite unlike Buddy Holly or Edward Cochrane. Well some of their intro's at least. So now that I am a proper musician, and with abject apologies to Brain Adams, here is my first go at songwriting. Some of the lyrics may need a bit of fine tuning I suspect, but it has everything a rock song should have, a car, a girl, a guitar and beer. 2012 is very difficult to rhyme though.

I got my first real six-string

Bought it at Ebay, Online,
Played it till my fingers got slightly sore and the neighbours complained about the noise,

well it was about a half past nine


Me and some guys from work
Had a band and we tried moderately hard

Ian quit and Steve got divorced

I shoulda known we'd never get far

Oh when I look back now

That summer seemed to last forever

And if I had the choice

Ya - I'd always wanna be somewhere else
Those were the worst days of my life



Ain't no use in complaining'

When you got a job to do

Spent my evening's down at the pub
And that's when I met you



Standin' by your mama's Porsche

You told me it would last forever

Oh and when you held my beer

I knew that it was now or never

Those were the worst days of my life



Back in the summer of 2012



Man we were wastin' time

We were middle aged and senseless

We needed to wind up to speed

I guess nothin' can last forever - forever, no



And now the tyres need changin'

Look at everything that's come and gone

Sometimes when I play that old six-string

I think about the chord I just played wrong



Driving your mama's Porsche

You told me it would last forever

But the sills have rusted out
and the motor doesn't sound too clever
Those were the worst days of my life



Back in the summer of 2012

Cycle path psychopaths

It's that time of year again, now that the clocks have changed when I think about cycling to work once more. Lighter nights and mornings, warmer temperatures, the increasing cost of diesel and a spreading waistline all mean it makes sense. A 22 mile round trip means it doesn't.
However my memory is short, so I forgot all the aches and pains caused last year, and on Monday I got out my bike and set off to work at 5 a.m.
I have two choices of route to work - one takes me along a disused railway line which at the nearest end is unmetalled, rough, bumpy and filled with rabbit holes. This necessitates a very powerful headlamp, as hitting one of these mini quarries at 15 mph is enough to send you over the handlebars, and straight to casualty. The latter end of this line is tarmac but strewn with burnt out cars, mopeds broken glass and burglars returning home from the night shift - in fact the nearer to Hull you get the more hazardous it becomes.
The alternative route is along the A1033, the main road running between Hull and Withernsea, which now is mostly a 30mph limit, which means cars are passing within an inch of your handlebars at only around 50 mph most days. On reaching the city boundary there is a cycle track. This should be good news but isn't.
Many years ago representatives of Hull City Council went on what they called a "fact finding tour" of Holland to study their cycle lanes before they built some in Hull. The same trip might be called a free holiday, a junket, or a waste of tax payers money. I am not sure what they did there, but I suspect they smoke some of the locally produced tobacco, as clearly they forgot all they had learnt about cycle lanes. I've been to Holland, and when not visiting prostitutes and smoking dope, and if not busy with their fingers in dykes (the dams that is, not lesbian prostitutes) the Hollandish people ride cycles. A lot. They do good cycle track. Their tracks are flat, level, well maintained and importantly SEPERATED from other traffic. They are not simply a bit of road with a different coloured surface and some white paint. They are purpose built, not a pavement split in half. They have to function well, as everybody in Holland has about 12 bikes each. They have one to ride to the train station, which they leave there, and one at the station at the other end of the line which they ride to work. Then they have a shopping bike, a bike for leisure, a bike for visiting prostitutes on, a holiday bike and bizarrely, in a country renown the world over for being flat, a Mountain bike. This makes for rather a lot of cycles on the road. They have multistorey cycle parks, there are so many.
Hull is of course a flat city. Possibly the flattest city in the UK, so you would think Hull City Council would really promote cycling, and possibly electric cars as well, but they do for both what John Prescott does for Weight Watchers. And the cycle paths they came up with are a joke.
Take the example I use alongside Hedon Road (A1033) from Saltend into the city. This a shared cycle and footpath, with a thick white line separating the two. I ride a cross mountain cycle - not an angry bike as the name might suggest, but a cross between a road bike and a mountain cycle. This gives me a compromise between a heavy duty frame and forks, capable of the abuse metered out by the potholed roads of the city, with road gearing and chunky road tyres capable of off road use but equally capable and grippy on the streets. What they do not grip on is slippery white lines which are raised about 1/2 an inch above the tarmac. White lines on roads are generally invisible or worn out, yet these are surprisingly well maintained and surprisingly slippery. Particularly at 20 to 25 mph which is reasonably achievable on the bike I ride.
At each junction, wherever the cycle track crosses a driveway, road, factory entrance etc they have seen fit to put those little nobbly pavers that let blind people know there is a road crossing. This is all very well on the pavement, but not on the cycle track, because at that point you are braking and steering, and loose grip again just at the critical moment. To make things worse the major junctions have barriers to steer around which necessitate a tight ninety degree turn, which is impossible even at low speed with no grip, turning and braking at the same time. They may as well have spread custard there. Why do we need those nobbly pavers there? I appreciate that there are a few blind cyclists around, but in my experience they ride tandems with a sighted rider at the front doing the navigation, braking and steering. An important safety tip, i feel, is not to put the blind person in charge. And even if he was up front I believe that they "see" the nobbles by feeling them through the soles of their feet - not helpful when your feet are on the pedals and you are sensing through the tyres via the frame and handlebars. And even if you did detect the nobbly pavers you would have to be doing less than walking pace to react and stop in time. So, HCC do away with those please. And whilst your at it remove the fluted pavers which act like tramlines to steer you into the railings as you try to negotiate the turn.
Next trim back the hedges and trees that border the cycle path and shield the view of traffic turning into the side roads so that cyclists can see it and vice versa. Also trim back the trees and hedges that border the track generally so that cyclists don't get soaked through with rain and dew as they cycle down avoiding the occasional pedestrian they might come across.
My next gripe is that whilst the cycle track is clearly marked with red coloured tarmac, lots of signs and white paint nothing is done about the cars that park on it, so cyclists have to swerve around these as well as other unexpected hazards. Amongst these is a bus shelter right in the middle of the cycle lane and believe it or not a post box. Yes instead of moving the pillar box the cycle lane deviates around it in a little chicane - not a sweeping diversion you might expect, but a slalom worthy of Cloisters. And the nearer to the city centre you get the more vague the cycle path becomes, petering out unexpectedly, then reappearing ambiguously at a set of traffic lights before disappearing again and then rejoining the road and mixing it with buses and heavy goods vehicles with the cyclist protected by nothing more than a faded line of white paint.
Some may say that cyclists deserve nothing better, as we pay no road tax, etc etc. however I hasten to point out that I DO pay road tax, I've paid it for the car I've left at home in order to risk my life and sanity for to ride the damn bike in the first place.
Once all that is done maybe, just maybe I will enjoy that 22 mile journey. If only the weather would improve too.