Gerald the cuddly duck's Journal

Subject:	The brave, the bold, the battered heart of Chevrolet
Time:	1:30 pm.

So… the US automotive industry is in a bit of a fix, mainly because they've spent the last fifty years producing huge, crass, inefficient, unreliable monsters. Yes, there have been a handful of brilliant — or at least iconic — classics (Model T, Mustang, the '59 Cadillac Convertible, Trans Am, the Jeep), but they are the exceptions, not the rule.

So where do they go from here, if not into bankruptcy and the history books?

The USA can still build cars. Several European and Japanese models are built in the USA for the US market and some (the BMW X5, for example) are made there and exported for all markets.

The USA can still design cars. The big American car companies have owned the likes of Saab, Volvo, Jaguar and Aston Martin in recent years. Besides, the cars Ford sells under its own badge in Europe are a world apart from its efforts in America: only the Focus is shared, being a "compact" car in the USA.

What seems to be missing is the general image and ethos of making clever, innovative products. US marques are selling to an ever-dwindling market that wants chrome with everything, the "there ain't no substitute for cubes" bunker mentality that makes people think the Northstar engine (275hp from 4.6 litres) is a good idea.

There are clearly US consumers who want to buy clever, innovative products; they're buying Toyotas (Lexuses, Scions) and Volkswagens (Audis, Prsches, Bugattis). What would it take to make them buy an American car again?

I think it's time for Apple to make a car.

Comments: Read 13 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Wanting a new series of tubes
Time:	6:40 pm.
Mood:	Changeable.

So. Where would I go for ADSL if I wanted the following features:

2Mbps to me, 256kbps away from me
Low-contention
Unmetered
A static /29
Very good reliability
A recognition that I live on the end of a piece of wet string in a village, where 2Mbps is marginal so would need to be able to disable misguided attempts to run faster than that
A lack of pointless gimmicks, irritating sales pitches, etc.
A sensible price

I currently have all those features, except that I'm still paying the same monthly fee I was five years ago. I'm going to see if Zen fancy renegotiating that, but it would be good to have some alternatives.

Comments: Read 20 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Religion and medicine
Time:	12:07 pm.

"I think it is getting to the point where many of us feel we cannot talk to patients about their spiritual or religious needs or ask them about praying.

"Christianity is being seen as something that is unhelpful."

Yes. Quite. It is getting to that point, and Christianity is being seen that way. This is good, right and proper. It always fascinates me when the opposing side in an argument says "but if you hold position X then Y will happen" and the obvious response is "we hold position X because we want Y to happen". Some people seem to have a very blinkered view of how other people think.

More generally, everywhere I go in Addenbrooke's Hospital, I see posters advertising the Chaplaincy. It stands quite prominently down by the entrance, between the most major thoroughfare in the hospital and the shopping concourse. It's carefully neutral on matters of religion and denomination; the faux stained glass is just flames below segueing into blue skies and doves above, and the mugshot is a Diversity of bland non-threatening smiles. More tea, Vicar/Rabbi/Imam? I stepped in there once, when bored; the experience was to spiritual satisfaction what hospital food is to gastronomy.

I think it important that spiritual support be kept separate from medical. Then again, this is probably largely because I don't actually want any spiritual support in hospital. There is a class of crazy nutjob — the Jehovah's Witnesses, homeopaths, etc. — whose views have no place in modern medicine and can safely be marginalised. However, there are a lot more people who, while they freely admit that when their nose hair spontaneously combusts they want to be treated by the best rhinoflagrantologist money can buy, would feel more comfortable if they knew their rhinoflagrantologist was also a goodly, devout and God-fearing Christian.

That's nice, but what about the Hindu patients? Or the Hindu doctors? Only 71.6% of the UK population said they were Christian in the 2001 census; this suggests there's only a 50-50 chance doctor and patient will share a religion, far lower that they'll share a denomination. The nasopyrokinetic treatment room in A&E is not the place for a religious argument between a Bogomil and a Copt.

Then again… if the UK's best rhinoflagrantologist also happened to be a Shinto evangelist, would I rather go to the second best, or accept that, as well as being cured, I was going to be told to pray the nasal demons didn't return?

On the two occasions I've ended up as a hospital in-patient, I seem to remember being asked my religion. Maybe the compromise here is to add a second question, like a more prominent version of the ubiquitous tiny-print tickyboxes: do you want this information used solely for statistical purposes, also shared with the chaplaincy, shared with the chaplaincy and medical staff or projected into the night sky using a stroboscopic psychedelic Bat-signal? Actually, better: the medical staff could also answer a similar question, and — like automated Valentine servers — a Mac Mini in the corner of the server room could hold its own counsel most of the time, but let doctor and patient know if they'd mutually found their ideal metaphysical date.

Comments: Read 37 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Melting like hot candle wax
Time:	1:18 am.
Mood:	Sombre.

Well, Michael Jackson's dead.

As The Onion pointed out in its own inimitable style back in 2005, and Fark has now resurrected in its own tasteless style, the "real" Michael Jackson died a long time ago. The three Jackson albums I own are Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad: after he reached some approximation to maturity and before he went completely to pieces. It's very sad that he was so messed up by, well, everything.

It's late, and I ought to be in bed, but I just popped downstairs for a quick listen to Liberian Girl and Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough.

I've not had enough. It's been completely obvious for at least a decade that the genius was gone and it wasn't coming back, but that doesn't make it any easier to accept that now the person is gone, too.

(Of course, he was deranged and had obvious motivation to fake his own death. Given the conspiracy theories that surround Elvis's relatively straightforward passing, I expect to see some pretty… complicated speculations in due course.)

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Nor any drop to drink
Time:	12:37 pm.
Mood:	Suspicious, fat.

Can someone please tell me succinctly: are the British Nutrition Foundation the good guys or the bad guys?

I ask because of this BBC article which indicates that a BBC journalist has understood the BNF to be saying that studies "suggest" a meal with a high water content is more filling than a drier meal plus some water. While the advice to consume more water seems uncontroversial, that bit makes little sense to me.

If they're right, the article is extremely relevant to my interests, but it frankly sounds neither plausible nor well-researched.

On the one hand, Wikipedia says the BNF's members are, amongst others, "Coca Cola Company, Mc Donald's, Pepsico, Kraft Foods, Nestle and Unilever". That's either ominous, or it's selective reporting subtly supporting a far from neutral point of view.

On the other, I can't spot anything terribly bad about the BNF at badscience.net; Ben sometimes even quotes their research as authoritative without being rude about them at all!

Less objective reasons to have a bad feeling about them include their abbreviation lying half way between "NF" and "BNP", and the first hit if one Googles "BNF" being "Enabling Cookies: BNF.org".

Comments: Read 8 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Inventory
Time:	3:33 pm.
Mood:	Complete.

The time has come to get some stuff transferred from my old car to my new then sell what's left of the old one for whatever I can get.

To this end, I've spent today recharging the battery and failing to get my old car to the tyre place to have its tyres changed for the spare noisy-running ones from the garage. Drat.

However, I've now managed to remove everything of mine from the car. Out of curiosity, I made a list:

( Long! )
That's what accumulates in a car over 7½ years of ownership — when it's mine, at any rate.

Rather than simply bundling it all out of one car and into the other, I'm pausing to think. Some of the stuff is clearly a good idea. Some is obvious detritus. Some, I feel, naturally forms part of a "continental touring kit" that's only needed when driving abroad. Unless I start making far more excursions than in recent years, that shouldn't be in the car full-time.

Some other items, however, I'm undecided about.

Having tried my brother's, I've decided there are much better inflatable mattresses to be had nowadays, with integrated mains-powered inflaters. I should probably get one of those then eliminate the battery pack and 12V inflater.

People keep telling me that all garages sell petrol cans these days. Is that really true? Then again, touching wood, and although I've cut it extremely fine once or twice, I've never actually run out of fuel anyway.

Conversely, I'd recommend to anyone that they carry a few disposable latex gloves. They're incredibly handy when you want to furtle in the engine bay and won't be able to wash your hands afterwards. They also turn out to be useful for dismantling deer-stained bumpers, of course, which is where this tale began…

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	A day of vehicular eventfulness
Time:	12:24 am.
Mood:	Incident-prone.

Well, I've now had the new car for three weeks, and it seems to be in very good condition generally. Things I've noticed need sorting out:

Aircon (possibly just a recharge)
Tyres (new but crap)
A sidelight bulb
Driver's seat heater
Sound system head unit backlight
A whine from somewhere (quite possibly tyres)
Wheel balance (but not worth doing before tyres are changed)

…and that's it. I've now tested almost everything, the main exception being the rear seat heaters. Oh, I also need to get my mobile phone car kit moved across.

However…

Those tyres I mentioned? They're H-rated Nankang Taiwanese hunks of shit. So far as I can tell, they only cost about £30 a corner and boy does it show! And this morning, on the way to work, one of them developed a fast puncture. It wasn't quite a blow-out, but it went from normal pressure to completely flat in well under five seconds.

Fortunately, unlike my previous car, the new one still has its jack and wheel-nut wrench. I'd never changed a tyre before, and had no instructions with me, but it seems I did an adequate job.

Good news: the spare is a perfectly respectable Dunlop. Bad news: it had a nail in it. Bugger!

The spare was holding pressure, so I limped the car back to Huntingdon and visited my usual tyre place, STS Tyre Pros. Apparently I'm a valued customer and they were worried that the debacle in February would have scared me off, so were delighted to see me again. They've ordered me two new Dunlops and I'll take the part-worn pair off my old car. In the meantime, the nail turned out to be very short, so no repair was necessary.

I feel the urgency of switching to decent tyres a little more acutely now. Allegedly, a car tyre will fail on average every 100,000 miles or so. This is my first failure in 400,000 miles so either I was due my dose of bad luck anyway, or my policy of never skimping on tyre quality has been paying off. Thank goodness it happened before I traded in my spare wheel compartment for an LPG tank.

On the way home, I bumped into a big white limousine with custom plate L1YMO. And when I say "bumped" I mean it more nearly literally than I'm comfortable with. The loony was driving along without any lights — and clearly knew it. At the first convenient stopping point, I pulled over and dialed 999. The police were very glad to hear from me as they'd already had two calls about the same car but hadn't managed to find it; they sounded genuinely grateful to have corroboration of its registration mark and a considerably more accurate fix on its location. Hopefully they stopped it before anybody got hurt.

So off I go to dream of more placid motoring tomorrow.

Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	The osteoporosis saga continues
Time:	11:25 pm.
Mood:	Boned.

After the last thrilling installment, I had more blood tests then went and saw my GP again.

The first thing I discovered was that the blood test results had gone astray. The second was that I got the numbers the wrong way round in the previous posting: my spine is down 3.0 and pelvis down 0.6 . The units, apparently, are standard deviations, and the threshold for intervention is -2.5 . So my situation isn't so very poor, and there was probably quite an element of bad luck in my fracture last September.

I mentioned

doc_spod's concerns about my nasal steroids and they agreed to switch me to cromoglycate after conferring a little. (My GP is a young and inexperienced one; it was one of the practice partners who prescribed me mometasone and airily dismissed my concerns about taking steroids continuously for several years.) I'm now weaning myself gradually off the mometasone while ramping up the cromoglycate.

My initial reaction is that cromoglycate isn't as effective — certainly not for pollen irritation of the eyes. But then again it's allegedly much safer, so maybe I just use a higher dose. Or perhaps I go looking for something supplementary to sort my eyes out.

Eventually, after much prodding, the hospital and my GP's surgery between them found my blood test results. My GP has now seen them, though mysteriously they don't feature in the surgery's patient records yet.

Anyway, everything is apparently normal except my thyroid, which indicates I'm mildly deficient in vitamin D. That's not entirely surprising. It turns out "Calcichew D3 Forte" means "calcium and vitamin D", so I'm already getting a supplement — I just wish they'd told me. Various tests of renal function and the like allegedly indicate it's safe to take extra calcium and to start on the alendronate.

As a bonus, my GP is referring me back to the Metabolic Bone Unit for further consideration. Maybe this time they'll actually communicate with me.

Comments: Read 12 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Things that go beep in the night
Time:	10:28 pm.
Mood:	Alarmed.

I popped into the Bar Hill Tesco this evening on my way home.

As I was strolling towards the self-service checkout, I heard an alarm noise of some kind, a continuous tone that swept up and down in frequency with period somewhere around a second. It wasn't very loud, nor was it possible to tell what was emitting it or why. I knew it wasn't the noise made by the security sensors or gates at the door, nor one of their trolley shunters. My best guess was that it was something to do with the bureau de change by the entrance, or maybe a car alarm by the cashpoints outside.

I swiped my purchases; I inserted a £20 note; I waited for my change. At that point a member of staff came up and demanded to know why I wasn't evacuating the building.

A few seconds later, they put out an announcement over the public address system saying that the noise was the fire alarm and everyone was to evacuate the store. Until then, people had been obliviously continuing to shop.

TTOTD: Make your fire alarm sound like a fire alarm.

(Since I could tell for certain there was no horrible flaming death anywhere near me or my route to the exit I insisted on collecting my £16 or so of change and my shopping before leaving. There was no way I was going to humour them by hoping either would still be there once the fire brigade had been and gone.)

Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Damn
Time:	8:29 pm.

Last week, I wrote in

emperor's LJ that "I wouldn't be at all surprised if we had a referendum on proportional representation alongside the next general election. I don't think PR would actually be a good thing, but a referendum on PR would be an easy way for Labour to dissipate one plank of the LibDems' constituency in an emergency."

Alan Johnson proposed electoral reform a fortnight ago; a few hours after I wrote that, he was appointed Home Secretary in the reshuffle.

Now Gordon's going to make an announcement tomorrow. I often wish my cynicism weren't so well-founded. Grr.

Meanwhile, the Wikipedia article on voting systems is one of the most interesting I've seen in a long while, and I want to study it more carefully. The criteria for voting systems seem to have a lot in common with the criteria of security infrastructures and cryptosystems; I wonder what would happen if we encouraged security experts to give voting systems as much attention as they currently give the mechanics of voting.

Moreover, one of the key advantages I see in our first-past-the-post system is that, like tennis scoring, it tends to favour stronger parties at the expense of weaker ones, increasing the chance of a majority government. While there are examples of effective coalition governments for people to point at, the risk of major parties being held to ransom by bit-players in coalitions is very real. Maybe what we need is to apply a gamma correction to Parliament…

Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Always-on, but usually-cheap?
Time:	8:04 pm.
Mood:	Speculative.

I have a computer that I leave turned on all the time at home. It runs daemons; I log in remotely; it acts as server to other computers in the house.

It's a fairly modest desktop PC.

I'd quite like to replace it in due course with a big server. Maybe something with eight Nehalem cores, many gig of RAM and many terabytes of RAID storage.

However, while I'd quite often like that available for doing stuff that's memory-, CPU- and data-intensive, maybe 90% of the time it would be lying idle. At those times, a tiddly box with, say, one 1GHz CPU, a quarter gig of slow RAM and a few gig of SSD would suffice. The former's power consumption, even when idle, would be extremely high.

So maybe what I want is two computers, a tiny always-on one, plus the big one I turn on when needed, perhaps via a remote power switching strip or similar. Except that's not what I want; I want something better.

What I really want is a box that contains both the tiny low-power-consumption computer and the hefty one and can migrate the operating system seamlessly from one to the other according to demand.

For the storage, that means I want HSM that keeps commonly-needed stuff in SSD while everything else lives on the hard drives. When the filesystem is being thrashed, it can bring the huge RAM into play for buffering.

I suspect it would be necessary to switch over the CPU and memory together rather than independently; I could cope with that.

How much of that is currently possible with Linux? HSM seems a very distant prospect, but searches for "hot plug CPU" and "hot plug memory" bring up various promising-looking but vague references to NUMA architectures.

Comments: Read 17 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Compare and contrast
Time:	5:51 pm.
Mood:	Surprised.

Case A: After ten inches of snow fall, a father ties a sledge to the back of his 4×4 and tows his son for 500 yards, weaving through rush-hour traffic.

Case B: Man gets drunk and drives his wife's car on which he's not insured. A police officer tries to stop him when he spins his wheels dangerously; the man shouts "fuck off" and drives straight at the policeman who has to jump out of the way, being struck a glancing blow. He flees the scene and is later caught by another police officer.

How serious do you think each of these is?

It seems the courts intend to send the driver in the first case to prison, whereas the second driver got a three-month suspended sentence, 200 hours of community service and £600 of fines.

That seems… inconsistent to me.

Comments: Read 26 or Add Your Own.

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