Scargill

Here we go – as usual I’m off-camera as I’m the one doing the video!

Maureen and I are having a nice break at our cottage in Bellingham! And why not.  Here’s hoping you have a very nice Christmas break – and if you’ve not seen it yet, I recommend getting hold of the movie INCEPTION over the Christmas break. I’ve now watched it three times – it’s an absolute WINNER.

Jobs all done, everything’s working… I think it’s possible we’ll actually get a couple of day’s break without worries – what more could you want.  Time to plan the summer get-away, which right now is looking like a drive down to Portsmouth, over to France and then the drive down to Spain. Lots of opportunities to go to places we’ve never been before!

Merry Christmas

Update 2022

I had a video in here but YouTube seems to have lost it – Groom’s Bothy – sold years ago and now renamed to Groom Bothy – what HAVE they done to our front door!

The protests in London were a sure sign that our version of democracy has failed.  Our Royal Family were attacked in their own car for heaven’s sake. Now, I’m no follower of the royals, indeed generally I’ve no interest in them at all, I’m not even sure what place they have in the 21st century but they are there and they are our royal family – the people responsible for smashing the window should be put away in prison for a long, long time.

I used to think the Chinese were terrible – such an incident over there and indeed in many countries would result in a number of people being tear-gassed or worse – and I used to think “thank heavens that doesn’t happen here in civilised Britain”.

Well, clearly we’re not civilised any more – yesterdays riots proved that – we’re a bunch of badly behaved morons and should be treated as such when we act that way. I personally think the education hikes are terrible – but then I think the recession is terrible – hey, DEAL WITH IT. We’re in financial straights and I see ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why students or anyone else should be sheltered from it. I’ve spent my life working and paying taxes and had ABSOLUTELY ZILCH out of the government or the people of Britain – I owe others NOTHING and yet I’m asked for more and more taxes, if they can’t get it in pay, they get it every time you spend money. Anyone who has managed to bring themselves up from the bottom gets RIPPED no matter which way they turn – and it’s about time things changed.  But getting pissed and ripping up London is not going to help the tax-payers, is it?

We keep hearing about Android tablets  – what do we see in the shops or on the web that’s actually for SALE? A solitary Galaxy Tab which is selling well but is a bit on the small side and hardly “thin” – and that’s about it – other tablets are either still in the works, still using older versions of Android – or recalled. Meanwhile the iPad has it’s new operating system upgrade, new Apps updates and now there is Apple TV -  which means that thanks to the REMOTE app, you can now use your iPad or even iPhone to control your TV, browse your music selection, make playlists and more.

I can’t think of a better gimmick for parties right now than to appear armed with wireless iPad and offer to let guests make their own music selections.  It all works and the Apple TV product is cheap.

Chances of getting compatible software on an Android device in the near future? I don’t think so.. all we need now is for SKYPE and APPLE to get their act together and put Skype video on the iPhone 4.

Peter Scargill

It’s quite some time since I did anything with YouTube and I have to say, well impressed. After spending the morning putting together a short video (you may get a smile, it’s not Hollywood – but the NEXT ONE will be!!) and trying to decide where to store it. I normally use BLIP.TV but I thought I’d give YouTube a try. there was a time when it took AGES to get stuff up there but hey – times change. It took only minutes to upload and annotate. Well impressed…

Of course I forgot all about the jacussi bath, real fire and a thousand other features but next time….

I normally keep my gripes for larger companies but in this case I’m going to make an exception…  on 15th of October 2010 I sent a payment to them for a battery and charger for my camera. on 16th of October they sent a note to say they were shipping my order. on 17th October they sent an email to say it was shipped and would arrive in 5010 working days.

What they didn’t say at the time was that that the good were shipped in CHINA on 17th.

After 3 threatening letters all of which were of course wasted – the goods turned up today, 6th of December. Just so you know if you get the urge to buy anything from them. Over SEVEN WEEKS!

It makes you laugh…. global warming… here we are in the second winter in a row that beats records for heaven-knows how many years.

This morning I got up at 5.30am and it was minus 13c, apparently the other morning as late as 7am it was minus 16c. Here in the Northeast (at least in Northumberland) we’ve been WHITE for over a week now – though at least the sun is shining today. I’ve never seen as many icicles in my life as we have here on our drainpipes.

The weather’s not getting any better here in downtown Wark though it HAS stopped snowing (touch wood)… As you can see I’ve been relieving the boredom (Housitosis) by taking the larger icicles off my walls and planting them. Well, it’s no better or worse than making snow-men!  The picture really doesn’t do these things justice as some of them are 3ft high!!

I’ve just been sitting here for the last hour talking to a reporter from Computer Weekly about broadband and rural connectivity – she wanted to know how technology could help businesses with rising fuel costs etc.. and I took the opportunity to point out that a big cost for many folk today is transport – travel consumes an increasing part of our finances – especially those of us to go back and forth to meetings all over the place… and the likes of teleconferencing has made a big difference.. but it’s all down to communications reliability.

I spent part of this week stuck here in Wark, conferencing in to meetings in Blackpool and at it’s best, your modern PC with something like SKYPE is a great way to cut down on travel costs – but for serious use, you really need reliable broadband – and sadly the places that need this the most in winter -  i.e. rural areas, happen to be amongst the have-nots when it comes to high speed broadband.  Here in Wark I can get something like 5Mbyte downloads – but only a half meg uploads and there doesn’t seem to be any way around that. As conferencing only really makes use of the latter, I’m always worried that any dip in connectivity will mess up the conference-  and of course, it does. This weekend my broadband went off completely for a couple of days and since it came back up, it’s been working but I’m getting warning messages constantly about poor connectivity. 

I’m assuming that large chunks of ice wrapped around the various phone connections from here to the exchange won’t be helping matters! Roll on the warmer weather…

Ok, last year didn’t come till the very end but this winter we’re off to a flying start in darkest Northumbria. While the rest of the country enjoys “variable weather” – we’re well and truly in the white stuff and it’s showing no signs of change.

Mid-last week the snow started and temperatures plummeted.. I don’t think we’ve seen anything above 2c since then and most of the time it’s way below zero.

Friday night the broadband went off here at Willow Cottage and stayed off until Monday – thankfully we’ve a “spare” in the form of Orange broadband which only JUST justifies the title. I was supposed to be in Blackpool but the roads here as you’ll see are very dangerous right now. If I had travelled I’d be coming back to even more as right now it’s snowing AGAIN.

Climate change YES, global warming… erm… I don’t think so.

Anyway, enough talk – here are the pictures taken this morning up in Wark.

So according to the pope, condoms ARE ok in certain circumstances – that is – to reduce infection (BBC website, 20th Nov 2010).

Very generous of him… but…

There is a lot I feel proud of in this 21st century world… our technological prowess, the fact we’ve managed NOT to bomb the hell out of ourselves since World War 2… and Cheryl Cole. But this guy… is it just me? It seems patently obvious that no matter what words these fanatics choose to use, the reason the Catholic Church is so against contraception is that they want CATHOLICS to BREED! He’s only mincing his way out of this because he knows the church is onto an absolute LOSER! We’ve TOO MANY PEOPLE, not enough RESOURCES!!

And now for something completely different… the BEST OF Harry and Paul on the iPlayer – BRILLIANT…

While watching this brilliant comedy you might like to ponder how lucky we are to live in a country where comedians and others can say whatever they like. Consider for a moment Cheng Jianping, who repeated someone elses TWEET and added the words “Charge, Angry Youth”.  Pretty harmless you might say… but her angry words have landed her with “a year of re-education through labour” – which I’m sure is just the Chinese way of saying “brainwashing through physical exhaustion” – and the frightening thing is that we are so meshed in with the Chinese economy that if we wanted to take trade sanctions against them or indeed ANY sanction for this barbaric behaviour, we haven’t a HOPE.