David Morris – brassedoff.net

You may remember, dear reader, that I wrote a couple of weeks ago that we’d purchased a small telescope, viewing of stars and planets for the use of? Well, now the clocks have changed, there’s more night time to go at because it’s dark when I get home from work, so for an hour, myself and Mrs Woolforbrains have been staring up at the night sky trying to identify a galaxy that should be visible.

We’ve got a planesphere which is supposed to give us the location of all sorts of interesting things.

It would if we could get it lined up properly. I managed to find a fuzzy ball that wasn’t a star which I thought was what we were looking for, but wasn’t entirely convinced. It’s a bit like pointing the telescope at “that star over there just above the gutter of the house, above our Daniel’s bedroom” level of accuracy. Not brilliant!

I’ve also downloaded a free bit of software called Stellarium. It’s a great piece of work. It’s also intensely annoying, because after having checked Stellarium, now my extremities have warmed up, I think we were looking in the wrong place… maybe. Mrs WfB isn’t convinced! On the other hand, we could have been looking at the Andromeda Nebula. So many stars. It’s awfully confusing for beginners.

I think I’ll go for a look at the Pleiades tomorrow though, weather permitting. They’re definitely visible with the naked eye, so we should be able to get the telescope pointing in the right direction!

I wonder whether the BBC News Online editors faced a quandary when dealing with this story this morning?

The reason? Well, I always thought ‘fart’ as a word for describing the action of ‘outgassing’, flatulence, trumping etc was, if not rude, then certainly not a word normally used in polite conversation. The problem is that ‘flatulence gas linked to blood pressure’ would have probably been too long to fit in the little ‘most read’ panel at the side of the page. So, instead, they’ve used the ’street word’. Don’t get me wrong. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. In fact, it’s quite refreshing (pun intended) to see the Beeb using common English, but I can’t help wondering that if they hadn’t used the the word fart in the article, if it fact it would have been the second most read article for the day?

Interestingly, the word fart is one of the oldest words in the English language with roots in Old High German, Norse, Greek and Sanskrit (if you believe everything you read in Wikipedia!) and the same article describes the word as “generally considered unsuitable in a formal environment by modern English speakers, and it may be considered vulgar or offensive in some situations” all of which amaze me that the Beeb STILL used it in the article.

This is really what I pay my licence fee for! I can’t wait for the complaints from the elderly ladies of middle England as they choke on their cornflakes!

Just a quick note ona technical issue… I’ve just been modifying the default Counterpath eyeBeam softphone dial plan to work with our (UK) three digit extension scheme. Everything beginning 2 – 8 will potentially be an internal extension. Everything beginning with a zero (in my contact list at any rate) is an external extension.

The default dial plan is  #1\a\a.T;match=1;prestrip=2; which strips off the account number (#1) before placing the call. I’ve only got a single SIP account to worry about (and I’ve not considered international numbers yet). All the numbersin my contact list are either full UK PSTN numbers starting with a ‘0′ or international (starting with a ‘+’ sign), so this works for me (leaving out the international numbers for the time being):  [2-8]xxT|0\a\a.T;match=2;pre=”9″

I suppose if I wanted to deal with the international prefix, I could do this: [2-8]xxT|+x.T|0\a\a.T;match=2;prestrip=1;pre=”9011″;match=3;pre=”9″

Well, looking at the scores, I didn’t get my wish for two points last night against Swindon. Ne’er mind…

What has been interesting today has been trying to make sense of the new licensing / qualification rules for small passenger trip boats on inland waterway class A waters. Class A waters effectively means shallow narrow canals. Just like the Chesterfield Canal in fact. Small trip boats means 12 or less seats, i.e. Seth Ellis-sized.

The rules have just changed regarding who can and can’t operate the boat, and there seems to be a bit of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) circulating, so in an effort to find out what’s the Right Thing as far as our trip boat is concerned, I made a few phone calls this morning.

The first one was to the Inland Waterways Association or which I’m a member and the Trust is a corporate member. The IWA have a little bit of their own axe to grind in all this because one of the “approved courses” for boat operation is theirs, and it’s all new and shiney. They confirmed what I’d read in the Small Passenger Boat Code which was that skippers have to be qualified i.e. hold one of four or five approved certificates and have, where appropriate, have the necessary experience, but that’s all. No-one else on the boat (e.g. tea mashers) need to have any formal qualifications.

I thought I’d seek a second opinion, and this time, went to the horses’ mouth, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. This is the Government body that want us all to be qualified in the first place. The first call was to the wrong person, but he was very helpful and put me in touch with one of the Marine Surveyors in the Beverley office who was, again, very helpful and understanding.

With his assistance, we went through the qualification requirements in the Small Passenger Boat Code practically line by line and understand exactly what we need to do to be compliant, and guess what? It’s practically what we thought in the first place before the sudden deluge of FUD referred to earlier.

The long and short of it is, all skippers need (in our case) to hold a Royal Yachting Association Inland Waterways Helmsmans’ Certificate, have 12 months experience and have completed a self-declared medical fitness questionnaire which states that the person is not in imminent danger of dying or being medically incapacititated whilst in charge of the boat.

Ok, it took a couple of phone calls to clarify that lot, but having done so, a few people will probably sleep easier in their beds tonight!

Legal disclaimer bit…

Obviously, what I’ve written about here is our interpretation as it applies to our little operation. Before following any of my advice, you’d be well served to check out for yourself how the new rules and regs apply to your specific operation.

…the hockey season that is. It’s a few weeks old. The Scimitars haven’t had a particularly auspicious start to the season, but things are starting to look up after a loss on penalties last Saturday and a 1-0 road win against Bracknell last Sunday.

So, it was with some optimism that I set off for the 80 mile drive down to Peterborough yesterday evening. The saving grace is that the A1, although full of speed cameras, is fairly quiet on a Saturday evening, so there was little to hold progress (at this point I feel obliged to point out that despite my reference to speed cameras, I don’t push the envelope as far as they’re concerned, and I’ve got a clean licence with 28 years of driving behind me).

I arrived at Peterborough in plenty of time, met up with a few more of our crowd outside and chatted about the previous weekend. Once inside, an average coffee and biscuit later and we were ready for the warmup which looked pretty good. All went well until the Zamboni came out for the pre-game cut. One lap of the ice and the Zamboni packed up. Some time later, we found out that the cutter had dropped and gouged  several deep holes in the ice. Despite valiant attempts to repair the situation by the rink management, the ice surface was deemed too unsafe to play on and the game was called off. One of our players put his skate on the damaged area and sunk in over an inch (25mm). At speeds, this could have easily caused a nasty fall and unjury – something no-one wants to see, so the decision to abandon, although disappointing, was made for all the right reasons and although disappointing for home and away fans alike, was the Right Thing.

So, home tonight against Swindon. Here’s hoping for a good two points.

I suspect most of my friends already know this…

…but you didn’t know I’d been away. Yes, I know I’ve not been a good blogger recently, and I promise to try and be more interesting and relevant. I’ve just had a couple of days in Dusseldorf on business. I had fun and games with my mobile because in a recent bout of account tidying up at work, I succeeded in cancelling roaming on my own handset. Consequently, when I got to Germany on Sunday, I had no workable mobile. I had to wait until I could ring Orange on Monday to get it reactivated which they did immediately.

So I could keep in touch with the world, I was forced (!) to fork out (ok, I’m expensing it!) €27 for 24 hours of wireless internet access in the hotel. Ok, it was very quick, but European hotels (and I include the UK in that) really do need to take a leaf out of their US cousins’ books and start offering it free of charge. I know there’s the argument about “providing a premier service”, but I expect that if I’m paying €180/night for the hotel, the network access should come with the deal. The motel I stop at in the US is $80/night and the network access comes free. Go figure.

I didn’t take a camera of any sort along this time, so you’ll just have to imagine the scene, sat at a tented bar next to the river (Rhine) watching the heavily laden barges and passenger boats fighting against the fast-flowing current. The beer was pretty good as well. This live webcam is just around the corner from where we were, on the riverside.

First off, a new gadget. I’ve bought a telescope! We’ve got a pretty good specialist shop in the village – Rother Valley Optics – and Daniel and I paid them a visit yesterday, coming out with a 70mm refractor telescope, a bunch of eye pieces and a Canon EOS adapter!

It’s a first attempt. I know it’s a bit blurry, but I’ll work on it.

As  well as looking at the moon, we’ve found Jupiter and amazingly,we managed to seethree or four of its moons. I’m sure there’s loads more to see up there on clear winter nights!

Another little thing I’ve been busy with is the new web site for the Canal Trust. This is the current one. The proposed new one is built using Joomla. I’ve put the theme together from scratch, starting off with a blank theme and a tutorial. I’m quite proud of where it is at the moment, but there’s quite a bit more work to do. I’m not entirely convinced about the masthead yet… I’m working on it.

I opened a message from a contact today. I’ve got McAfee security suite installed on my home PC so it scans all the emails looking for dodgy stuff. It clearly didn’t like this one.

Quite why is beyond me, other than the obvious competition issues!

I decided over the weekend that I ought to upgrade my laptop to Vista. I’m not a Vista fan, but eventually it’s going to become necessary at work, so the sooner we get some experience, the better. I’ve got a couple of my chaps using it already.

So, I stuck the copy of the Vista Business DVD in my laptop DVD drive and kicked off the process.

I then stopped the process and decided to run the Vista upgrade evaluation tool to measure my Vista “experience”.

This ran for 30 minutes (I honestly thought it had crashed) whilst it evaluated my system and all the software and devices on it. At the end of the 30 minute period, it infomred me that it didn’t have enough free disc to perform the upgrade.

It’s a 60GB hard drive, but my laptop is dual boot Windows and SuSE 11.0. I’m not prepared to forgoe SuSE11.0 su it will remain an XP / SuSE machine until I can get around to getting another HDD for it. Vista will have to wait a bit longer!