October 2003 Blog Posts
Today was R*'s birthday. Eight years old! I almost can't believe it. I have to keep reminding myself they grow up quickly and to make the best of it. Yesterday, we took her and her friends to Finding Nemo (again) and then out for a pizza before coming home for a sleepover. One of the girls didn't go to sleep until 1 am and then they all got up at 6 am! Argghhh. Jenny made a fab breakfast before they went home. Today has been kind of low key. We stayed at home. Only about six groups of kids came by Trick or Treating. There are some fireworks displays this weekend we might go to. Of coure, the big event in the UK is Guy Fawkes Night next week.
Finland first, North Korea last. In between you have Canada 10th, UK 27th, US 31st and Malaysia 104th. Check the article if you're interested how they came up with the ranking. Interesting how low the US scores.
The kids and I carved pumpkins yesterday while Jenny and her Mom went to London to listen to a talk by Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans. Sounded like a good talk. The pumpkins from left to right: K*, mine and R*'s
Another excellent magazine I picked up recently. The original environmental magazine subtitled "Rethinking Basic Assumptions". Very impressive editorial board, high production values, good punchy articles. For example, the October issues has a two page spread explaining why you should think twice about buying cut flowers again:
- Cash Crop Impacts - moving people off their land and causing food shortages
- Pesticide Abuse - there is no regulations governing the use of pesticides on flowers
- Poisoned Labourers - protection from pesticides not provided
- Water Waste - flowers get water when farms and people don't
- Workers Rights Abused - child labour, slave wages, etc
- Flower Miles - creating vast quantities of carbon dioxide emissions
Many other articles (like why your shampoo could be deadly!). It's worth picking up a copy if you can find it.
Picked up a copy of this
magazine recently. Excellent. I gotta subscribe to it. Ever wondered what was the best petrol station to fill up at? At least from an ethical point of view? Turns out BP and Shell are considered as making the most progress. Want to avoid GM food? Tesco can't guarantee their brand products are GM free but Marks & Spencer can. Check out this
guide. Good articles and references.
I discovered the Reading International Solidarity Center the other day and went down to check it out. It's very close to the Oracle Shopping Center if you know Reading. The place has a shop with a great book selection as well as a cafe. Can't vouch for the cafe yet but the book selection was excellent for global concerns. The place also hosts a lot of activist-type talks that look interesting. I think they should change the name of the place though. Solidarity? Wasn't that an 80's thing?
An ex-colleague of mine is an amateur producer/director and today I helped him out with a shoot of a DVD he's producing for the magician Etienne Pradier at Chilston Park. My role in the filming team was soundman; just taking care of the microphone and sound levels. I enjoyed it quite a lot. It's nice to be part of a team solving problems and making something. Yeah, I miss that. The DVD was of Etienne teaching how to do some of the tricks he does. It was just fun watching him explain the tricks as he did them! He's very good.
Soundman eh? Yeah, I could see that as a fun career to freelance in for a while.
I'm still working on the trip to Jordan travelogue. The draft is six pages and it still needs lots of editting and then I need to add photos. Hang on.
Jenny and I have been trying to plan out our holidays for next year. Now that we take holidays in high season, you have to plan this far ahead. The holiday would need to fall between April 3rd to 22nd or July 24th to Sept 1st. If any of you are interested in joining us, get in touch! We've always found it fun to go on holidays with others. Next year, I'm pretty keen to muck about with boats. Here are some ideas:
- Faraway offers Sail & Dive Expeditions in Thailand and Burma. The idea is to hire a catamaran with a skipper and dive equipment. It can also carry kayaks. It sounds awesome. We could share this with either another family or leave the kids and go with two other couples.
- Another idea I'm very partial to is a flotilla sailing holiday in the Aegean or Ionian. You don't need any experience and learn on the job so to speak. For example, check out Activity Holidays. Could do this for one week and then rent a villa for another week?
- We've been interested in renting a canal boat in France (probably Burgandy) for quite a while. It's too busy to do this in the summer but we could do it during the Easter break.
- Otherwise, we're always open to renting a large villa somewhere around the Mediterranean and not too far from the sea. You can get places that have their own olive groves, tennis courts, pools, billard tables, etc and they're really not that expensive. For example, look at Tuscany Now or Chez Nous.
Or get in touch if you've got other ideas for a good holiday.We'd prefer to stick to Europe.
Fantastic landmark class action suit against ChevronTexaco for it's environmental destruction in Ecuador. What's great is the New York Court of Appeals ruled that the trial will be held in Ecuador but the judgement is enforceable in the US. This opens the legal floodgates to claims by indigenous peoples around the world against western oil and mining companies.
I once did the Myers-Briggs (Personality) Type Indicator way back in my University days and I came out as an INTP (Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiver). Of course, I don't agree with putting people in boxes but the
description still finds plenty of resonance; better than a horoscope! Actually, they claim the type indicator isn't a box but a preferred way of working. Reasonable enough. I bring this up only because I stumbled upon a whole
INTP website. You can find out more at
KnowYourType.
I recently subscribed to this magazine and got my first issue yesterday. It's a bit thin but the articles are good. The magazine subtitle is "The people, the ideas, the action in the fight for global justice." Theme of the current issue is the nasty practices of the big pharmaceutical companies. Very nasty. At first blush it seems like the world would be much better off if there was a public trust that invested in critical research and kept ownership of the patents. Maybe a trust managed through the United Nations. Certainly a better solution than the WTO TRIPS agreement.
Great website explaining why you shouldn't drink milk. It's a
myth children need it for healthy bones.
The Boycott Bush campaign lists the top 30 donors to the Republican Party with global consumer brands. Microsoft is number three with a donation of $2.4 million. The call to boycott these brands is in response to the US rejection of the Kyoto agreement.
Microsoft used to be politically agnostic but the whole Department of Justifice affair certainly taught it that it couldn't be. It's now a politically savvy player and like most corporations, it's busy currying favour on Capitol Hill and donating money to both sides.
Interesting article by George Monbiot. Indeed, he's written a lot of
interesting articles.
Excellent article by George Monbiot about the sweet irony of the flight of jobs to India.
The US has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organisation arguing that the EU's reluctance to take GM foods is an illegal barrier to free trade. You can follow the above link to add yourself to a petition to throw this complaint out.
This is my latest CD purchase and what I've been listening to lately. I discovered them after one of the tracks was used to demo a 14,000 watt system at a
HiFi Show. It's heavier than a lot of stuff I've been listening to of late but it's very good. Listen to the sample of "Sing Along" which is very catchy. I really like their rendition of the old Jefferson Airplane number "White Rabbit". That's taking me back! Sounds like they would be excellent to see live with their percussion instruments including Airpoles, Anvil, Backpack Tubulum, Doulum, Drumulum, Dumpster, Piano Smasher, PVC Instrument and other novel items.
So you think you know all the issues facing the planet? I just finished reading this provocative little book which has 66 mini-essays on the myriad of ways we're screwing the planet and the developing nations. Obviously it sacrifices depth for breadth but it's easy to read and a great book for raising your awareness. I cringed at a few of the broad statements but there are references and further readings to back it up.
Yes, it does leave you feeling rather dismayed. Ignorance is bliss isn't it? Read it for yourself and figure out whether you can do anything. Buy it here for £5.59.
Tonight we saw
Steve Hackett at the Town Hall in High Wycombe. He was the guitarist for Genesis back in the 70's. A friend suggested seeing him and I went along for the heck of it even though I have never been a fan of Genesis or progressive rock. I'm still not. He played a lot of old Genesis material and got a great response from the audience. Some of it was ok but I would have been happy to leave at the intermission. His acoustic set was fine. As a guitarist, I didn't find him particularly inspiring technically or melodically. He's great at getting a lot of different sounds though.
Took K* to Legoland yesterday. He loves it and we need to make use of the annual pass. It's definitely getting cold though! The highlight, of course, is the lego shop. He sure is good at making stuff.
I just discovered the
Mailing Preference Service. They claim that by registering with them, your address will be scrubbed from up to 95% of direct mailing lists in the UK. I'm giving it a shot. Or if you want, you can add yourself to direct mailing lists (home, leisure, clothing, financial, sport, travel, children, community services).
Got together with some friends for another foreign film night and we watched
City Of Lost Children by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. Very strange film but a great feast visually. Often surreal, certainly enjoyable and nothing like a Hollywood film. If you like an offbeat film, it's worth watching.
I've just finished reading Change Activist: Make Big Things Happen Fast by Carmel McConnell. I first ran across it in the Microsoft library and thought it looked interesting so I bought it for my holiday reading.
It's quite hard to describe the book. It's essentially a pep talk to get you to be your own change activist working within the corporate environment and aligning your passion, principles and purpose. It's written in a very conversational, email style of partial sentences which is a bit disconcerting. I didn't find the book particularly well structured but the narrative is easy to digest and humorous.
Two key quotes from the book:
"The change activist is a hybrid, capable of business success, able to understand and steer their career by action on personal values. Lives Activist Rule 1: to thine own self be true. Insists on working with a sense of social contribution as a way of finding their true path."
"The change activist integrates hitting the strengthened bottom line into the job descriptions, team goal and finally into company objectives. Really. That way we can all help world trade solve humanities problems. Without risking lower profit."
The most interesting ideas I got from the book were:
- That maybe there should be some optimism that corporations could evolve to offer more; the so-called triple bottom line of profits, environment and social contributions. Ethical branding could be more than just a marketing ploy. Maybe. I'd certainly like to work for a company like that.
- The section on trust was very interesting. Trust as a form of social capital. Trust being critical for change and quick actions. It would be interesting to look at social structures and processes in terms of trust. How is trust created? Maybe the pub is the key institution for trust creation! Something to mull over.
A good read if you want a pep talk on a way to approach your career. You might want to check out the other books by Your Momentum.
One of those people with too much time....
Glad to see hard evidence that some GM crops are harmful. Full text of the Farm Scale Evaluations report here. Still, it only evaluates one small aspect of GM crops. Hopefully this makes it ever more clear that GM crops are a nightmare to assess in terms of their impact.
Meanwhile, the Gates Foundation is giving $25 million for research into GM food can provide extra vitamins and micro-nutrients to people in developing countries. Now there's a dilema. It's certainly great to see GM used to benefit the end consumer rather than the producer particularly for such a worthy cause. However, it still means introducing new GM crops which are very difficult to assess in terms of their total impact on the environment. It's worth researching though.
The idea is to visit each location a latitude and longitude integer degree intersects and take a picture of it to post on this website. Anorak travellers unite! Think I need to go get a GPS system...
Once again the US - Bush - seem to have such a poor foreign policy. Israel contorts this idiotic idea of "war on terrorism" to it's own agenda and the US supports it. The wall sucks. Nice to see that the moderates are still
talking.
Michael Moore is coming to town on Nov 9th speaking at the Palladium in London: "launching his new patriotic move for regime change `
Dude, Where's My Country?`" The 6pm show is sold out but there's another show at 8:30. I've got tickets! Should be great. Follow the link to
Orange One Word to buy them online. Just noticed you can also read his (short)
Oscar Speech here.
I can't believe we've already received our first Christmas Catalogue in the post. I don't want to think about Christmas yet! You think retailers could wait a bit longer although I bet there are people out there who already have their gifts sorted out.
Jenny and I are both foodies so we both take food issues pretty seriously. This superb little site tackles the issue of the food quality of school meals in the UK. Low quality processed food dominates school meals costing as little as 31p per day compared with 60p spent on a prisoner's lunch. Appalling. There's a good
summary report.
I'm back and not going anywhere again for a couple of months. The trip to Jordan was absolutely brilliant! We thoroughly enjoyed it. Highlights included:
- Floating in the Dead Sea
- Touring Petra (remember Indiana Jones)
- Five awesome days of diving including a night dive
- Riding a camel around Wadi Rum enjoying the sunset and moonrise
There's lots to tell you about. I'll work on putting that travelogue together to post sometime next week.
I'm afraid this blog will be going quiet again. Jenny and I are leaving today for a sightseeing and diving holiday in Jordan with Aquatours. I'm quite excited about it even if we will be between Israel and Iraq. We're going without the children and will be staying in Amman, Petra and Aqaba doing various excursions. I'm really looking forward to diving the Red Sea. We'll be back on Oct 13th and as usual a travelogue will appear soon afterwards.
R* had to memorize the following poem:
A man of words and not of deeds.
Is like a garden full of weeds;
And when the weeds begin to grow,
It's like a garden full of snow;
And when the snow begins to fall,
It's like a bird upon the wall;
And when the bird away does fly,
It's like an eagle in the sky;
And when the sky begins to roar,
It's like a lion at the door;
And when the door begins to crack,
It's like a stick across your back;
And when your back begins to smart,
It's like a penknife in your heart;
And when your heart begins to bleed,
You're dead, you're dead, and dead indeed.
MIT has put
course materials for 500 of it's courses online. Verying interesting. Some courses even have the lecture notes and video while others mostly give you a reading list. Worth poking around your favourite academic subjects.
We're back from Wales and I've written a short travelogue of the trip
here. When we finally get around to replacing our people mover, I'm sure we'll take a closer look at buying a 4x4.
It's end of the month so I've been checking my website stats. The most visits come from the Netherlands but I think that's due to to search engine indexing servers. Next is the UK which makes sense but the third place most visitors are from is Lithuania. So welcome Lithuania! How you find me I have no idea. After that it's Australia, Brazil and Hungary. Unique visitors is down a bit to 877 but still managed 197 views of that Writing Code Is Stupid article. By far most people who find this website via a search is looking for StrengthsFinder and that article got 102 views. So is StrengthsFinder taking off in Lithuania?