Monthly Archives: August 2007

General

The Fridge is Toast

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No Beer in the Beer Chiller

As Beth mentioned in her post today, our Fridge-Freezer is toast… Well the fridge part is – and you could probably make toast on the back with how much it is running – however the freezer is freezing very nicely.

The problem has been coming on for a while. Before we went on holiday, we had a nice little glacier growing down the back wall inside the fridge. Everything was nicely chilled, but it didn’t seem overly right, so after a discussion with Beth we turned down the power on the fridge, which resulted in a lot of the ice melting. This unfortunately collected in the bottom of the fridge as the drain at the back was blocked, so Beth cleaned that out by putting some warm water mixed with a little bleach down. This cleared the blockage, but unfortunately when we came back from holiday the inside was a bit cool, but not exactly cold, so we turned the fridge up.

This made it slightly cooler, but not much, so again after some discussion and a bit of research online we decided to totally defrost the freezer part of the unit. This improved the situation slightly as the fridge compartment got a bit cooler, but again not cool enough – and to keep it not cool enough the motor on the fridge was running permanently. As a result, today we called out the repair man.

He spent fifteen minutes looking at it, checking the replaceable parts and since we’d already cleaned the outflow, defrosted the freezer and all the other possibilities announced that it wasn’t viable to repair – all the other options related to either problems with the gas in the heat exchanger at the back, or other things that couldn’t be easily fixed. The only option was replacement.

Here comes the next problem, our fridge/freezer is built in, hence the manufacturers bump the price up a bit, and it’s a special order too. They had a suitable replacement that was the right dimensions and the right proportions for doors, but it has to be ordered in.

Hence why we have what is pictured above in our living room. It’s one of those party beer coolers that they usually sell for barbecues, in this case with Stella Artois branding all over it. However with the shelf removed it can take a couple of bottles of milk, a few yoghurts, some margarine and some packs of meat – all the stuff from the fridge that will go off!

Politics

Exam Result Time

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So we’re now into the traditional period of the summer where the exam results are published – GCSE, A-Level and SATs – and the media runs endless negative stories. In fact you can actually write the news items ahead of the results, all you need is a “Falling Standards” article for if the pass rates go down, and an “Exams are getting easier” article for if they go up.

Having said that, yesterdays SATs results did both, with English and Science going up, but Maths falling – so guess which one is the headline…

The TV News, alongside the Daily Telegraph have also run headlines about “Four in 10 pupils ‘failing basics” (although the news went for 40%) based on a combined “3R’s” (although the Daily Telegraph writer doesn’t seem to be able to grasp counting to three as elsewhere in the article he says it is “made up of results in reading and writing”) – however when you look at it alongside the other figures there is something odd going on, as all of the individual categories are between 71% and 76%, and yet the combined result is 60% – needless to say the media organisations aren’t bothering to explain how this combined total is calculated…

The bottom line is that invariably the results are used by politicians as a stick to beat each other with – the current party in power will argue that standards are improving, the opposition that they are falling. They were doing it twenty years ago when I was going through the education system, and they are still doing it now. The only difference is that when I was at school the party in power was different.

So how do the politicians deal with improving standards? They change the curriculum, and it’s not that they change the curriculum for new pupils either, it gets changed for pupils who are already going through the process. For example when I was at school the History curriculum changed several times, putting different periods at different points, so I did some periods of history three times, and others not at all.

The whole increasing standards is crazy anyway, as by increasing the numbers of pupils achieving top grades, it has now resulted in needing A+ and A++ grades to differentiate pupils. Isn’t that just like McDonald’s renaming their drinks sizes from small, medium and large to medium, large and extra-large? The universities are interested in the top performing students, so are requiring comparison with the other pupils taking an exam – essentially they want bell curve grading – the politicians want to see rising standards, but using a simplistic measure that is easy to understand, so they go for the numbers achieving A-C grades – however the bell curve is steadily being shifted by the simplistic indication of rising standards, so in the A+ and A++ suggestion means that there would be five grade levels in the recorded band rather than the three there were when I was at school.

Wouldn’t it be easier to keep a consistent curriculum and consistent exam system? Probably, but since one of the stated aims of the National Curriculum is to “prepare all pupils for the … experiences of life” going through an education system where the rules are continuously being changed by politicians is going to be one of the most valuable lessons for life experience!

Pictures

Beth’s Pictures Posted

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Beth has posted her set of pictures from our week down around Taizé.

Although she tended to avoid duplicating my pictures when she knew I’d taken a shot, there are some opportunities for comparison between the performance of her new Canon IXUS and my older Fujifilm Finepix.

Differences to note are firstly that although on paper the Canon has the higher resolution, the Fujifilm produces higher resolution pictures thanks to the Super CCD – although whether the interpolation that the camera does to produce the higher resolution picture produces a better picture is open for debate. Secondly, and probably the biggest difference when shooting in low light conditions such as those for many of the interior shots is that the Canon has an optical image stabiliser which makes a big difference to being able to get a decent shot. Whilst I was having to ensure that the camera was totally still for a lot of shots – and a number of them that looked fine on the camera display were binned from my set – in most cases Beth just pointed the camera and took the picture. The results certainly justify the decision to opt for a lower resolution model with an optical image stabiliser (indicated by an IS in the model number) rather than a higher resolution model without. For direct comparison, check out in particular some of the stained glass window shots that we both took.

Anyway, for a different look at our trip, take a browse through Beth’s pictures.

Transport

Has Heathrow Terminal 4 Improved?

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Back at Christmas I posted a big grumble about the fiasco that is Heathrow Terminal 4 – a piece that even got me quoted in the Times. Heading over to France this last week, we went with British Airways, again from Terminal 4, this time into Geneva Airport in Switzerland.

So first up, there have been changes with the notorious ‘Fast Bag Drop’… Yes, rather than sort out the problems, they’ve just dropped the word ‘Fast’ from the title. Interestingly they’ve also done the same in Geneva, but as with Calgary we’d checked in and put the bags through in a few minutes there, unlike the twenty minute queue at Heathrow.

The other hassle we had last time was caused by the lack of available gates in the terminal, and it was the same this time around as we were bussed out to a remote stand. This didn’t cause us much of a delay going out, but coming back the inbound plane was over an hour late, entirely due to the same situation. According to the crew on the plane, they had been ready to go on time, but the flight coming out to Geneva had about twenty special needs passengers. Bear in mind that all of this would have been known to British Airways, but the plane was again on a remote stand. Whereas in Geneva the special needs passengers were taken off without too much of a delay over the air bridge, at Heathrow where on the remote stand the only access to the plane is up steps, it took them over an hour to load the passengers, resulting in such a delay that our plane took off only a minute or two before the next Geneva to London flight. It had one advantage though, when we touched down at Heathrow, they did put our flight onto a free gate at terminal 4, so at least we didn’t have to contend with the interminable wait for busses.

Thankfully all our baggage arrived – although considering that on the same day the Telegraph were running a story about the airlines selling off some of the hundreds of thousands that fail to be returned in the paper that was being given out, you couldn’t blame people for being worried that they wouldn’t!

Although we can do little to avoid Heathrow or Gatwick when heading to Canada Рcertainly it might be worth considering the Eurostar/TGV option next time we head to Taiz̩.

General

A Nice Write-Up

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Catching up with updates and links I came across this nice complimentary write up of the blog from Jon Tackabury over at Binary Fortress Software, listing sites he regularly reads:

A frequently updated, very well written and often insightful blog that I love reading. It covers such a wide range of topics it’s always fresh and enjoyable to read. Often times there are multiple posts per day, all of them verbose and a pleasure to read.

As another ego boost, it’s listed between Ars Technica and Coding Horror…