solar

Our domestic solar panels are finally working. Not on the grand scale of Blackfriars train station, but at least capable of earning a bob or two.

In practice they have been functioning ever since we moved in, but whatever benefits we'd expect to get from them were, instead, flowing to our main electricity supplier.

It turns out that there is copious additional paperwork associated with power generation. I have to get the plant, generation equipment and so on registered, quoting my micro generator certificate number.

The paperwork includes the need to prove that the panels affixed to a less-visible but highly south-facing part of the property were, indeed, ours.

Then there's the reading system deployed. We already have smart meters but the small consumer head unit doesn't work properly.

It can't detect one of the meters. A kind of Zigbee (similar to bluetooth) failing with the wrong codes.

I have a phone number to get it fixed, but it's been a bit like that old Python gas cooker sketch.

Their latest update told me I need to have a meter replaced in order to get the head unit to work. I don't believe them and think it is a simple 'pairing' problem.

The Feed in Tariff rebate amount is between 4.5p and 5.5p per KwH, which compares with about 12-13p per KwH to buy from the electricity supplier. In my naivety I'd assumed that simply having the installation would put my electricity into the system and I'd get a benefit. Not so. Unless I specifically count the electricity generated and tell the electricity board, they just take it and resell it to me anyway. I'm effective paying for my own generated power.

Inevitably, the electricity generation part requires a separate meter so we've a special unit and a big red switch indoors. The electricity company can't read the separate meter remotely on this modern high tech installation. Instead they have given us four date ranges throughout a year to supply readings (by post, perhaps?)

The government, via the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy are stopping the scheme for new entrants in March 2019. We've just squeaked in and get a 20 year feed in agreement.

The whole process raises all kinds of questions.

• How could the government get their estimates of payout so wrong that they had to cancel the scheme? The amount that electricity companies get is around 4 times that originally estimated.
• Why didn't the scheme track wholesale prices? That alone could account for some of the overpayments.
• How could a much heralded Clean Growth Strategy launched in 2012 need to be closed only a few years later? Some would say because of success, but the real reason is because of miscalculations.
• How does this bode for any other schemes to be introduced on this, or other, topics over the next year or two? I hear there may be quite a few deals to peg down.

I didn't specifically apply to get this system. It came with the new property. It's a great idea and was probably fitted far more economically as part of the whole construction programme. If I'd paid separately for it then my quick examination of the official break-even point would be about 20 years, which is (surprise!) the same length as the FiT rebates.

Now I see what they did. Spreadsheet engineering to make the scheme viable.

Happy New Year

Well, the partying has quietened down by the morning.

A chance to let off steam at the end of the year before hitting Control-Alt-Delete to bypass extended memory testing.

As long as there's a photo opportunity somewhere in the mix.

And I suppose a blind faith is required to see in 2019, after the unusual toff rule of 2018.

I don't just mean standing in a giant cocktail glass in the middle of a ballroom, either.

Nor looking at the morning flops still drinking Chianti from a raffia clad bottle.

Sometimes you have to know when it's time to move on to the next venue.

We've got it covered, but I sense we'll need to hide any confusion with a little song.

"Are we downhearted?"

Of course not. There is fun going forward.

year end 2018 - solace in the strangest place.

Symbolic 2018 snowball and cutover to emerging 2019.

Here's the 3min30 rashbre central video summary for 2018.

un-iced disgrace

I see the FTSE 100 continues to head south for the end of 2018. Around as low as at the time of the Brexit vote and 12% down on 2018's start.

Lack of strong and stable leadership has created the worst year since the 2008 financial crisis.

It doesn't get the same headlines because of the never ending Etonian bun-fight, yet everyones' pensions and investments are directly affected and devalued.

Maybe underhand whip tactics of extortion and blackmail will seal the fate of the meaningful (sic) vote?

Who knows.

smashed or spooged?

We'd arranged to meet at the usual pretty little village pub, which is right near the end of the Central Line.

"What are they building outside?" I asked.

"What, those cones by the Tescos?" said someone.

"What Tescos?" I replied.

"That's not building work. It's from the ram raid" said someone else.

"Ram raid?"

"They took the cashpoint machine with a digger."

"What? Breaking Bad hits Essex?"

"They did it around by us as well - at the Co-op," said someone else, "It's a thing now."

"...and it's been left like it here since October."

dawn

This time it's dawn on a motorway. Part of the grand scheme, this is a stopover en-route.

Contrary to other trips, I'm not doing this in a one-er.

An overnight pause can be quite refreshing. Especially when the new dawn is accompanied by still empty roads.

placing the past

I started out quite good at this. Guessing the correct time sequence from a series of events.

But it does get tricky. Sometimes events are close together.

Other times they are impossibly out of sequence with expectations. Like the patenting of the typewriter.

A simple, fun game after the festive food.

party perfect revisited

Survivors of rashbre central's previous seasonal festivities will know that there's a certain point when the silly hats and party games make an appearance.

Not the tv-gaming variety, but analogue games involving old wrapping paper, sticky tape, fruit and the like. For the convenience of others, here's a few sure fire winners, which can be played at everything from amateur through to full Pro standard.

Required items: Wrapping paper, sticky tape, magazines, newspapers, highlighter pen, pins

1) Guess the name : Yes - simply providing the guests with paper hats or pin on labels which they can't see with the name of a sleb (celebrity) on it. They have to guess with the Yes/No answers. Classed as an icebreaker. Marilyn Monroe, Ed Sheeran, Frankenstein, Albert Einstein, A.footballer, Jason Bourne, 007, Mickey Mouse, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Ariana Granda. You get the idea.
2) Dress the person : Kinetic Game, two teams: 2-5 minutes. Select someone to be dressed using either old wrapping paper or a couple of recent magazines or newspapers.
3) Kipper racing : multiple teams. needs a long clear indoor space. cut or tear a largish fish shape from a sheet of wrapping paper or anything similar to hand. Add detail such as a hole for the eye, maybe a dorsal fin. Lie them flat on the floor and give other team members further sheets of paper/magazines to use to create air currents to propel the fish from a start line to a distant improvised finishing line.
4) Tell a tale : Pre select some groups of 7 unusual words from a magazine or newspaper article. Hand them to each team and and ask each team member in turn to tell a story using the seven words. Other teams have to try to guess the words.
(Example words from random article : luckier; heterosexual; chevrolet; banana; promoted; quitter; eggs. and from another page: emissions; cruise; leisurely; overcome; scoop; howling; endurance...you get the idea.)
5) Pass the orange : Why wait until after the dinner has finished to play this game? goes great with coffee.
6) Pictionary: drawing fast pictures based upon words. The boxed set is best for this one.
7) GrEEn GlaSS dOOr : The person in charge suggests playing this and that everyone else can try to be selected to go through the green glass door by suggesting appropriate pairs of things. Things that get in are a pOOl but no water; glaSS but no picture; MiRRor but no reflection (ie the first thing needs a double letter in it.. Play till last person gets it)
8) GGD variants : Play GGD (7) where instead of double letters, each sentence said by the next person has to start with a vowel "...and blah blah bla; ...or blah blah blah ...obviously" and another variant vowel/then consonant and another variant is start with next letter of alphabet.
9) Alphabet Game : Choose topic (Animals, Cars, Candy Bars, Popstars, Drinks). Start at A and round robin through to Z.
10) Stirring the Mush : Announce you are stirring the mush and (eg stand up, sit down, scratch your ear etc). Then start stirring the mush by any hand/body gesture you like. The invite someone to copy. the trick is thay have to do what you did BEFORE you started stirring the mush (eg scratch ear etc). Tell them whether they have passed or not then select next 'victim'. Repeat until all have worked it out.
11) Erect-a-pup : More newspaper for this two in -oner. Part one. Teams. who can make the longest tube in 2 minutes from rolled up paper? Sounds easy. Just watch what happens. Part Two. Now, in another three minutes make a model life sized puppy out of tubes of newspaper. Warning that some puppies will have 3, 5 legs at the end of this.

I think that's enough to get started. No animals harmed in the testing of these entertainments. You'll have to email me for the (ahem) rules of the frying pan and wooden spoon game...and don't forget charades!

*this post first appeared in 2008 and although it has had minor changes, I have left in the technorati tags.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, Xmas, party, games, party+games, icebreakers, holiday, christmas, festive, silly, crackers, seasonal, fun, charades, party+animals, erect-a-pup, stir, mush

Santa Calculations

Time to republish the Santa Calculations, which I first published back in 2006 and then updated in 2010. I'm using 7 billion as the world population.

Firstly, here's the link to the Santa tracking system created by NORAD.

For those of you who are more interested in the technology of Santa, NORAD's FAQs provide the following:

I've again used the Joel Potischman and Bruce Handy calculations as the basis for the speed calculations, with my own adaptations:

The most notable corrections to be applied are:

- Santa delivers no gifts to naughty children (not even coal)
- Naughty to nice ratio is 1:9
- As confirmed by NORAD, one Santa distributes all of the gifts.
- There is only one family per household.
- Santa bypasses non Santa belief system houses.
- Reindeer have recently eaten fresh magic acorns.


Calculation Assumptions (2014):

- World population = 7.06 billion
- Children under 18 = 2.353 billion (Hmm may be higher)
- Global Santa based belief systems: 33%
- Max children requiring delivery therefore 784 million
- Children per household: 3.5 (may seem high?)
- Number of households requiring distribution 224 million
- Naughty to nice factor applied but not many all naughty households
- Remove all naughty households (25% 0f 10%) = 5.6 million
- Eastern orthodox using Jan 5 instead of Dec 25 = 16 Million
- Target Households = 202 million on Dec 25
- Estimated child bed time 21:00 (9pm) with 7 hours sleep.

(child sleep duration on Dec 24 may also require revision)

Gives circa 31 hours (24+7) for all deliveries
Time is 1860 mins or 111,600 seconds

Average number of homes to visit per second = circa 1810.
So average delivery per household is 552 milliseconds, which is why Santa normally appears a bit blurry (I previously thought it was the sherry)

Land surface minus Antarctica is around 79 million square miles. Distribute destinations evenly = 0.7 miles between households creating a total distance of circa 110 million miles.

So 110 million miles in 31 hours = 3.6 million miles an hour or circa 1000 miles per second or Mach 4770 at a linear speed.

This explains Rudolph's red nose because of air resistance creating around 20 quintillion Joules of energy per second, which would convert a non reindeer nose to charcoal at such energy levels. I think the acceleration and deceleration per household may also need some examination.

Luckily Santa has lots of special powers so these mere physics facts are no problem to such a superhero.

vox

I've been meaning to write something about the enjoyable dystopian book club I joined some months ago. It was almost an accident, when I tried to join a regular book club there was a clash of dates so I delved further and found this alternative.

It's been surprisingly good choice, even if some of the books have been a little - er - controversial. There's been some I've really enjoyed and then every so often one comes along that's in another category.

A recent novel, which we discussed in a rammed pub pre-Christmas, is called Vox, by Christina Dalcher. It's a modern book, published in 2018 and after I read it I looked at a few reviews, all of which seemed to be positive.

I'l have to admit that I struggled.

The premise was that women, in some parallel future, were given a bracelet which counted words. After 100 were spoken in a single day the patrician device administered electric shocks of increasing magnitude. Our heroine was able to dodge the predicament by having a social mission Which Only She Could Perform, to Save Someone Important.

I'm not giving away a plot spoiler with that, the book cover does more than enough of that. My copy was downloaded to Kindle and I read it quite quickly. I couldn't get away from the thought that it had been hurriedly constructed and lacked ideas beyond the initial premise.

Thus, I approached the lively pub table where we'd discuss it with some trepidation that I'd missed an important point, or that the book was cutting edge feminist writing that I'd somehow misinterpreted.

But that's the strange thing. I was a bit late for the session, which usually meets at 7pm. Only 20 minutes late but the conversation was already onto other topics. No one had liked the book. Some had read it all (like me) and others had abandoned it early.

From this highly mixed group of around a dozen who will easily challenge one another there didn't seem to be a saving grace. I decided it had been written hurriedly, others decided that someone had given the author the initial idea and she'd written it up but not added anything. It could have made a short story, maybe based around a one hundred word concept.

I'm intrigued though, by the slick marketing and promotion that the novel seems to have attracted. People with photographs holding it by their library. Many dozens of adoring positive reviews on Amazon. Something doesn't quite add up.

A vox pop of reviewers hiding a riotous crowd close to madness?

loop de loop

The Xmas loop-de-loop travels have started. It'll mean that the blog goes a bit wibbly for a few days until I regain power, wi-fi and time.

I've plenty of complicated road junctions to traverse, a couple of tricky jams along the way and no doubt some unscheduled stops to deal with. But hey.

new speed from an old iMac

I had to clear a space on the desk to add the other iMac. That's the one I've been updating. The main change has been the replacement of the hard drive with a 2Tb SSD.

It was a case of clone the disk then suction the screen's magnetically held glass to reveal Torq screws. Unscrew the ones around the edge then cautiously unscrew and unclip the screen from the chassis. Notice I used a soft surface. Unping the drive and replace. Then put it all back together carefully, remembering to clean all the surfaces.

It's made a huge difference to this 2008 vintage computer which now runs again faster than when it was new.

Using Blackmagic's disk test, the write speed of 230MB/sec is slightly faster than my slimline iMac with its Fusion (SDD+HDD) drive, although, in fairness, the read speed is still slower, albeit respectable.

Considering the upgraded machine is 10 years old, I'd suggest that the total cost of ownership is exceptionally good. Prior Windows PCs have needed significant exchange at around the three year mark.

I'm not so sure that a modern slim line iMac would take such an easy upgrade.

I'll be putting the silver one back where it belongs at the earliest opportunity. Meantime I'm pleased that it can continue to earn its keep.