Scargill

Archive for January, 2010

According to the forecast, the Northeast of Britain was going to see less snow today while the South could be getting the worst. Well, the thing is – it’s never stopped snowing all night and it’s STILL going strong! Schools are pretty much all closing, the back garden here is easily a foot deep in pretty packed snow… I’ll put a heavy coat on later and take the camera for some Kodak Moments but for now, here’s a CCTV image, 7.40am, Wark on Tyne.  I’m afraid that car is staying put for ANOTHER day! Goodness knows how much all of this is costing the country… according to the Guardian this is the worst snow for 50 years. I certainly agree I’ve never seen anything quite like this (I’d be 6 at the time and you don’t take much notice of things like weather at 6!)

Here in Northumberland, with just about the most snow and coldest temperatures I’ve seen this century, at least someone is having fun…. we get a few hours of glorious sunshine – then back to snowfall – with no sign of it slowing down. Meetings scrapped, people stopping at home… thank heavens for electricity!

Still a kitten but Ollie instinctively knows when he sees a bird!

No change of cutting the grass in the near future..

If I’ve done this right, not only will Twitter now automatically announce any new blog posts in www.scargill.net but also the site display will adjust automatically for iPhone users. That’s the theory. It’s snowing AGAIN today and my meetings have been cancelled – I had no faith that the public transport would be working anyway so that’s a relief. There’s been more ground cover overnight and as I write this it’s snowing AGAIN – my car is not going anywhere until we get some melting!

As a total aside, I’ve just installed Safari 4 on my PC, so now I have IE8, Firefox 3.5, Chrome and Safari. I’m amazed, not that long ago the latter seemed useless, would not work on lots of sites etc, now, it just works. NICE interface! Sadly, almost no plug-ins! Firefox still wins! Windows fans will note I’m now running all of this on Windows 7 64-bit platform and I agree, it’s Microsoft’s best effort to date. There are a couple of things that don’t run on the 64-bitter so I’m running VMWare and a 32-bit Windows 7 on the same machine – with very little speed loss. I leave it running constantly and so there is no inconvenience there.  Amazing what we can now take for granted.

Isn’t it amazing….Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said Labour will fight “every inch of the way” to win what will be a “big choice election” for Britain’s future.

And so.. what what kind of fighting was he doing all this time as he let us slide into the worst recession in my lifetime? Isn’t it a bit LATE for speeches? He’s blown our economy and blown ANY chance of him and his band of losers getting into government again for some time – hopefully for a LONG time.

If Gordon Brown was going to get us out of a mess, he’d have done it long before now, or even taken action to stop things getting this bad in the first place. He didn’t and he deserves to GO – the sooner the better.