Firetop

Being an avid Star Wars memorabilia collector, last year I had to purchase the Star Wars potato heads for my collection, adding Darth Tater, Artoo-Potatoo ‘with Princess Tater’ and Spud Trooper to my desktop decor. Imagine my surprise and joy when on Saturday whilst clothes shopping for my daughter, I found a new potato head, this time in recognition of the latest Transformers movie - it had to be the ultimate transforming Autobot - Optimash Prime! (more…)

With all the severe flooding we’ve been having of late in the UK, and tabloid headlines unsurprisingly attributing it all to ‘global warming’, I started looking at the alternating patterns of the Polar Jet Stream in years gone by to see if we really should be worried. The answer? Yes you guessed it… Man is always worried – in June 1974 it reportedly snowed in London because of an unusually low Polar Jet Stream, all around the world weather was very unsettled; drought, severe flooding and tornadoes. What tickled me most was finding an article from Time Magazine’s 1974 archive entitled ‘Another Ice Age’. (more…)

Six months after my first article about the use of Clubscan to scan the driving licences of all drinkers at the Rat and Parrot in Crawley, the news of my petition surfaced on the front of The London Metro newspaper today. It seems James Brokenshire (MP for Hornchurch and Shadow Home Affairs Minister) has heard about what’s going on with software like Clubscan and raised some concerns publicly. Yesterday I was contacted by the Metro news desk and asked for my thoughts – today I was quoted in the Metro. (more…)

I’ve been thanking my lucky stars that we don’t live beside a river in Gloucestershire of late. However, this morning the serious nature of the problem was brought home to me when the Firetop server was put offline for two hours because of the rising flood waters in Gloucester - home of our dedicated server. The flood waters themselves don’t threaten the server physically, even the potential outage of power in the area is covered by back-up generators, instead support staff were unable to get into the office quickly to reboot equipment after the generators kicked in. Thankfully they won’t be going home tonight (they couldn’t if they wanted to) so things should be ticking along as normal for the foreseeable future, but it makes you realise how much the physical world does still impact on the virtual one. (more…)

Suzie_Q and I have just got back from an evening’s pram stroll up to the Yicken Chinese take-away on South Street to grab some easy dinner. On the way up we passed Waterstones bookshop where what looked like homeless people had taken up residence in the doorway. As we got closer I could see a sign outside saying ‘Welcome Muggles’ and it became clear that these were not vagrants but parents and children huddled with blankets awaiting the launch of the final Harry Potter book ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’. It’s actually quite cold out this evening after the downpours, I’m quite surprised that the children can tolerate it, especially considering that they’re just going to find out that Harry dies and then cry themselves to sleep. (more…)

On Sunday afternoon we took Maria for her second trip around the M25 to the ExCel centre in London, her last visit being to the London Baby Show - but back then she couldn’t see much from inside the womb! Now almost two weeks old and gaining weight & height rapidly, we took her for her first initiation into the fantasy realm of Star Wars for ‘Celebration Europe’ (you can’t wait too long). In honesty this was obviously more for me (and Suzie_Q) - getting out of the house is recommended when faced with the relentless onslaught of feeding, nappy changing and sleep deprivation. Maria was so impressed that she slept her way around the exhibition stands despite the pumping Star Wars tunes and sound effects, luckily for her we managed to get her photo taken with Bounty Hunter ‘Boba Fett’. (more…)

One of the problems with today’s multi-employer career path is that it’s easy to acquire multiple pension funds and lose track of them, recently I’ve been looking into consolidating my own pension investments into a personal stakeholder pension scheme. Pensions are of course still getting a bad write-up after years of over-estimated benefits forecasting and the problem of an ever-aging population. However, with many employers still offering to match employee contributions, plus the associated tax benefits, I still believe it’s worth investing in a pension as part of an overall investment portfolio. Ethical investing is important to me; from a karmic perspective I don’t want to be funding animal testing, worker exploitation or weapons development. However, finding an ethical pension fund wasn’t so easy, it took a fair bit of time to identify a good performer with suitable online tools for my needs. (more…)

As if bringing my new daughter home from hospital wasn’t exciting enough, on Friday evening I discovered that the Premier League’s free ‘Budweiser sponsored’ fantasy football competition was back for a new season, a whole week earlier than last year! I’m not sure that I’ll have time to run my usual pay-to-play competition with friends, especially as last year I didn’t even manage to chase up the £10 fees from over half the entrants. However, if anybody does fancy a bit of fun and want to join the free-to-play Firetop league, just create a fantasy football team and then enter the following code to play against me: 27088-14649 (more…)

So Tuesday was quite a long day, after 48 hours of waiting in hospital post waters breaking, Suzie_Q called me at 7:30am to tell me to get over ASAP. Then about half an hour later she called me again to tell me I wasn’t allowed in until 9am, so I went to MacDonald’s for breakfast en-route. Around 8:45am I got in to see my wife at the delivery suite and met the mid-wife. We had so many mid-wives and doctors that day that I lost track of how many we saw, I’d say over the three days we’ve seen three doctors, two registrars and fourteen mid-wives. It’s quite stressful because at each change over you want to keep them updated on progress, which I’m sure is annoying for them all, but makes you feel safe. (more…)

I’ve just got home for a quick power nap on day two of the ongoing labour saga. On Sunday morning at 11am Suzie_Q’s waters broke and we were advised by the midwife (on the telephone) to head over to the antenatal day centre immediately. At the hospital two very friendly midwives wired Sue’s belly up to the monitor to track the baby’s heart beat and any uterine contractions, they also confirmed upon examination that the waters had indeed gone. Unfortunately baby’s head is too high and not yet engaged, which carries a risk of a prolapsed umbilical cord (cord delivered before baby), so Suzie_Q was told to stay in by the registrar (who had performed another examination). By 4pm they found a bed on the main ward and midwife number three took us over there. (more…)