I spent a few minutes peering into the Internet as I scoffed toast. Some chap I used to know forty-five years ago had been posting photos to my old school’s Facebook page. I suppose it is a sign of our times that photos are far more readily available (to create and to share) these days, but my old school’s Facebook page really does sum up one of the fundamental principles of that school. If you weren’t good enough to be in the spots team then you could f… off. There are quite a few photos on that Facebook page… mostly all of the same dozen faces. When I was at the school there was (about) seven hundred and fifty boys there. You’d never know that looking at most of the remaining photos.
Are schools today like that?
I saw an ex-colleague was spreading anti-vaccine conspiracy theory bollox based on the principle that modern science is a fabrication made up by the big pharma companies who are trying to sell their products. I chuckled and resisted the temptation to point out that big pharma companies are big because their products work. Unlike the supposedly cancer-curing products my ex-colleague tried to sell until she went to prison for selling unlicenced crackpot cures (that didn’t work).
Once the dogs had scoffed their brekkie I took them out. Having spent quite a bit of time creating a Wherigo cartridge the thing was ready for testing. So we took a little drive out. As we drove there was more talk on the radio about the recent panic-buying of petrol. This made me think.
I spent twenty-five minutes queuing for petrol yesterday. It wasn’t that bad. But something’s occurred to me. The government wants the sale of petrol and diesel cars to have stopped by 2030. Whilst there will still be petrol and diesel cars about, more and more electric cars will be the norm.
So… where will we charge the things? New houses will be legally required to have a charging point for an electric car. But my house doesn’t have one and there’s no point installing one as I’ve no guarantee of parking the car outside. As I type this, my car is parked about two hundred yards away. I will have to use some public charging point. As will thousands of other people.
The electrical infrastructure for anything like enough charging points simply isn’t there so I shall be queueing up for some time to then sit about waiting half an hour for my (as yet unbought) electric car to charge. And as my (as yet unbought) electric car will have a range of about half that of my current car, where I currently spend about five minutes a week fuelling the car, in future this will be a chore of several hours twice a week. I suspect the advent of the electric car (and demise of the petrol one) will force me to move house or into retirement.
We got to where we wanted to be, and I started up the Wherigo cartridge. We walked for two and a half miles and it was a good walk. Apart from a roll in fox poo the dogs were as good as gold. The field testing of the Wherigo cartridge worked well. There were a couple of mistakes I’d made in it which were easily corrected, but it has got one problem in that whenever a typed response is required it gives a “scan QR” button. I wish it wouldn’t.
As we walked back to the car so the dogs started pulling like things possessed. Someone had left a dressed rabbit on the side of the path. Not a dead rabbit covered in gore that a fox might have had. A dressed rabbit, perfectly skinned like you might see in a butcher’s shop window. What was that all about?
We drove home through torrential rain; we’d been lucky. If we’d walked for five minutes more we would have been soaked through. It didn’t take *that* long to scrub the fox poo off of the dogs. I put a load of washing in to scrub, ran round with the Hoover and made a start correcting the mistakes in the Wherigo cartridge. As I fiddled on-line I had an ongoing Facebook messenger row with the bank who seemed to be determined to log a complaint on my behalf about the bad service they felt I’d had from their telephone helpline. They seemed to be utterly unwilling to address my actual question (NOT complaint) about why they were sharing confidential information about my accounts with third parties. Eventually they effectively admitted that there was no such thing as banker-customer confidentiality and that they would tell anything to anyone who asked, but refused to say anything more unless I lodged a formal complaint.
By then the washing was done. I hung it out round the house and ironed shirts whilst watching a film. “Wild Rose” was… I won’t say it was good and I won’t say it was bad. I will say it was incomprehensible. With many of the leading characters speaking in a thick Glaswegian accent I couldn’t understand any of what was being said so I turned it off half-way through.
I spent a few minutes (over an hour) sorting out the cache pages for my latest Wheri-project then looked out some pots to use as the caches. It was at this point when “er indoors TM” came home. I had intended to mow the lawn and clean the pond filter today but never got round to it – where did the day go ? For a rostered day off I’ve been busier than if I’d gone to work.
No comments:
Post a Comment