The Garage

As I mentioned in my last post, this is the interior of my garage. What you can't see is that the roof area is also stuffed. It gives me a headache just thinking of having to find something and with my dodgy knee it can be dangerous. Guess what my resolution is for Spring?
I did find my soldering gear though and have fixed the indicator in my car. I also cleaned it inside and out and hopefully its all systems go for my weekend expedition to visit my daughter.

Car Maintenance

What a miserable cold day its been. I started out with the intention of giving my car an oil change followed by a good clean inside and out. Normally I do the oil change myself but with my dodgy knee I decided to let a local garage do it for me. So far so good but driving home a front indicator stopped working; another simple job I thought, I’ll soon change that bulb.
It wasn’t the bulb though, it was one of the wires that had broken next to the light fitting and there wasn’t the room to fit a simple connector. It meant I had to split the fitting and solder a wire directly onto the pin, at least as a temp. measure as we are off to visit our daughter this weekend.
Next problem is finding my soldering gear; I knew it was in the garage somewhere but it needed finding and my garage is almost a cuboid of solid matter. I did find the gear eventually but I was shivering with cold, my fingers were numb and I decided that it can all wait until tomorrow. In fact I recon I’ll take a picture of the damn place and post it…tomorrow.
We have been listening to the reports of bomb explosions in India which will have been causing my daughter some concern as her flat mate is currently over there doing some work. I can’t contact her at the minute either to find out if she’s phoned home.
There’s no bunch of idiots quite like a religious bunch of idiots. In fact to paraphrase an old saying, it takes religion to turn a bunch of idiots into a gang of terrorists.

The Congo

I was very deflated to see the latest problem developing in the DRCongo with the invasion of Tutsi forces from Rwanda. Many people of course will dismiss it as just another demonstration of incompetent Africans mismanaging their affairs. Flippancy and cynicism towards most political problems is widespread so its not surprising that it should manifest itself towards the complex issues effecting Africa.
I recently read Tim Butchers book ‘Blood River’ which describes his recent journey down the River Congo. As the Africa correspondent for the Daily Telegraph he was emulating the journey of H. M. Stanley (Dr Livingstone I presume) who was also a Telegraph reporter at the time.
Tim did his homework and the book is full of the history of the area from the good, bad and ugly of the Belgium era to the modern problems of Rwanda and how they have impacted on the Congo. The area is rich in mineral wealth but the lack of an infrastructure, a corrupt military, civil service and political structure propped up by foreign companies and governments ensure that the area is a honey pot for others to dip their sticky fingers in.
No, I don’t know a solution to the problems other than to paint with a broad brush a scenario where the countries wealth is used for the benefit of the areas people. This in turn implies secure borders, the end of corruption and the sovereignty of the Congo.
This sounds like I’m actually proposing a solution but Tim’s book shows that that these proposals probably represent a challenge that no country or group of countries, given a commitment which they currently don’t have, could resolve in the short term. So the sooner the commitment and effort are made the better.
I've just reread this and decided I'm glad I'm not a politition.

Back to Work. Terrorism.

I’ve just been to see a doctor at an occupational health company to see if I’m fit to start work anytime soon and we jointly agreed that I should start on Monday but to be super aware that my new knee requires TLC. I called into work on the way home to share the good news and came to realize that I really really really don’t want to go back. Damn.
Other news from work while I’ve been off sick include; 2 guy’s have had heart attacks, another has a blood clot in his leg and another has to have a piece of bone removed. We are not even a large company. Damn.

I’ve just been reading one of my favourite websites http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ which points out that much effort has been made to implicate Obama with terrorism. The nazi’s however, who have just been arrested for plotting mass murder, have not yet been called terrorists. Perhaps only non-white muslims can attain such exalted status? Or a non white, christian, if he’s standing for high office? Call me an old cynic…or crazy……..

Clocks Going Back!

Not only am I crazy but SAD as well. I’ve just copied this from the BBC’s web site and its self-explanatory.
In October, just when you get used to it getting dark at around 5.30-6.00pm we change our clocks from following British Summer Time (BST) back to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). This means it will be dark an hour earlier, and don't we all notice it! It seems as though suddenly the nights are substantially longer. Subconsciously, many of us will feel winter has dawned. Most of us will be travelling to and from work in darkness, so perhaps it's not surprising that so many people, up to one in every 20 people, suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) during the UK's long winter days. This is a specific type of depression that experts believe is related to a lack of exposure to daylight. It affects people at the same time each year - during autumn and winter.
Dreams of a tropical sun.........................

Another CV and Fishing

I mentioned in a previous post the absurd CV’s I got when working as team leader in Deltic but the silliest one I ever read was produced by a toolmaker in Siemens, Metering, Oldham. As the company subcontracted more and more of its processes he became the last toolmaker employed by them and I think he fancied he could negotiate himself a pay rise by the expedient of spreading rumours of his departure. He mentioned to me that he hadn’t a CV yet so I suggested he write one. (This is real clever stuff isn’t it? If you can’t follow the technical and philosophical paradigms, don’t get too upset).
The next thing I knew was he had written one, and half the staff, including management, had it thrust under their noses for comment. It was beautiful. There were 5 pages to it and you got to page 3 before finding that he was a toolmaker and page 4 was solely devoted to the fish he had caught as a sea angler. I took pity on him and got him to shorten it to 2 pages. Wasn’t I soft?
One of the other engineers was a course angler and every year sold raffle tickets, the proceeds going to an organisation concerned with the preservation of fish stocks. Our toolmaker (nicknamed keepnet) refused to buy them. ‘I don’t want to preserve ‘em’ he said, ‘I want to catch ‘em and eat ‘em’. Crazy big time.

Deltic Fireworks

Re previous Deltic posts full of doom and gloom I did have some fun as well. We had one great guy, a welder, who was an anarchist. He actually wasn’t and didn’t know anything about anarchy but he did have a Mohican haircut and went to ‘Oiy’ music dances. He thought it was great to wear a tee-shirt that read ‘only insecure bastards want security’ which is as reactionary and anti-anarchist as you can get.
He was always good for a laugh though and one of the things he would do was throw a sponge ball about the workshop, usually catching someone unawares. It was about 6” dia, very soft and absolutely filthy. I hid it one day and painted it black then wrote BOMB on it in white. It was nearly bonfire night so a sparkler was easily obtained which I stuck in it, lit and tossed to our anarchist. I’d like to say that it was the funniest thing to have happened in Deltic for 200 years but heck, Deltic was only about 10 years old.
Poor sod always seemed to have a bad time at weekends, as thugs’d ambush him on his way home from the pub. He’d come into work on a Monday morning with a black eye regularly. Why the idiots want to attack a guy because his hair is spiked up I just don’t know.