Having noticed that the price of diesel had at last dropped back below £1.13/litre I went to fill my car up at the Shell station nearest my office.

It advertised 111.9p on the boards outside, so I filled up with 52 litres.

Upon recording my transaction on my company fuel spreadsheet it stated that I’d actually paid 117.9p for each litre. So I called the filling station.

A helpful gent answered and when I asked whether fuel had risen 6p a litre between driving in and filling up he replied “Did you use pump six sir?”

When I responded in the affirmative he stated, “Ah, that’s the special V-Power diesel. It retails at 117.9p this week.”

According to the Shell website, V-Power is meant to make my car both more economical and faster. Once I’ve finished this tank we’ll see how much more economical it actually is (if any!) and work out whether it’s better value.

At the moment I’m both sceptical and annoyed at spending more than I’d expected. If you’re going to fill up at a Shell station, make sure you’ve got the right pump!

Some days are really great and Friday was one of those. My friend Martin called with good news. To cut a long story short he had a free Mac iBook for me which a friend of his had as excess stock in their warehouse.

The friend had asked Martin if he knew anyone who could use such a machine, and my name came up.

So I’m now the proud keeper of a 2006 iBook with built-in Superdrive.

Sweet!!

I know people like me have a reputation of going on about how great Macs are, but I pulled over the entire apps, files, settings, email, iTunes music and users from my G4 with a £3.50 firewire cable and the built in migration program in OSX Tiger. A few clicks and around two hours to transfer everything across – job done!

Awesome!

Don’t forget the clocks go forward tonight!

Don’t change your login password at work on the evening before a four-day holiday…

Not normally words that would, of themselves, strike fear into your heart, but I’ve been mulling over this for quite a while now. Is “The News” helpful to us?

Over the last few months I’ve realised that I try to avoid the headline news, preferring to use tools like Google Reader and specific feeds from various websites to find out about things I’m actually interested in.

In recent years ‘news’ seems to have been taken over by sensationalism and gossip, and I’m beginning to believe that it is turning our society into one heavily influenced by fear, uncertainty and doubt (or FUD as you may have read it).

I think that news has probably influenced people to do wrong, as they compare the ‘level’ of their crime to that of ones reported in the media. They either seem to think that their crime is minor in comparison to others, or they actually set out to become infamous by committing one major act that they know will go round the world via satellite and in many languages. Some of them have even entered our vocabulary – 9/11and 7/7 for example.

If you google ‘Massacre’ you’ll find the CNN.com Virginia Tech microsite on the first page of results. This site goes into an incredible level of detail about ‘the worst shooting in American history’. There’s even a timeline of shootings in US educational establishments ranging back to 1955. If you look through them you’ll see a range of incidents starting with one kid shooting another because he was being bullied by him, to the death of 33 members of staff and students in a single incident. Even just reading about it now makes my heart beat faster because I understand that anyone at any time could cause the death of people around me.

Do I need this level of information?

Does this feeling of fear actually help our communities?

I’m not sure it does.

We’re finding more and more surveillance taking place on every move of our lives. Even plans like opening up the hard shoulder on motorways at peak time involves tracking the movement of specific vehicles, as does the congestion charge in London, but everyone knows that sometimes these things don’t work properly.

The fear of something happening is meaning that we are accepting plans to track each person in our country, a country which we grew up believing was “a free country”.

When the media mainpulate headlines to slant the story, the general public begin to mistrust their sources of information, whilst trying to maintain a belief that most of the news MUST be true. An example of inconsistent headlines; during October 1997 three newspapers covered the story of the stabbing of Police Constable Nina Mackay as follows:

WPc paid with her life for dedication to duty – The Times

WPc was knifed to death after removing armour – The Telegraph

SCANDAL OF PSYCHO FREED TO KILL HERO COP NINA – The Sun

And yes, the Sun headline was all in capital letters.

We were so manipulated in the 1980s by the government of the time that ‘spin’ has become part of our vocabulary and part of our mistrust. We rarely believe what politicians tell us any more, which only adds to our fear, uncertainty and doubt. “What are they really up to?“ run our thoughts. Well, mine do anyway.

So much of recent news has involved ‘global warming’ and then you read this and have to wonder. Is it just an excuse to tax the people of the UK even more?

We also discover that politicians who are responsible for specific parts of government clearly know very little about the very thing they’re meant to be in charge of.

UK politicians mainly resign after considerable external pressures when others are perhaps more honorable.

1 Peter 5 outlines the desired mindset of people who are in power over other people:

”To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness of Christ’s sufferings and one who also will share in the glory to be revealed: Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, serving as overseers—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.”
As I get older I realise that the people who have power over us don’t always fulfil the ideal above. We could worry, but further on the message continues by saying:

”Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.

Here endeth the lesson.

Got the above in my emails this morning (we have a McAfee product on MrsG-T’s PC) and tried the quiz. My job requires me to know about Data Protection policies and I’m pretty careful about which sites I register with. However, I only managed 5 out of a possible 8 for this quiz.

I suggest that you give it a go as it makes its point very well! Click here to get to the quiz.

Apologies that it’s an advert for McAfee products but to date we’ve found them to be very reliable.

Three years ago today MrsG-T and I were in a local maternity unit as MicroG-T decided to grace us with his presence!

It’s been a joy to watch him grow up thus far, at least now that he sleeps a bit better. (In saying that he’s sitting next to me singing and sticking stickers on things and it’s 22:01…)

He’s very much like his dad – loves gadgets, peanut butter, soy sauce on chips and music. Sometimes all at the same time!

Happy birthday my much-loved son.

And, Happy Birthday to my big Bruv tomorrow too!

On the BBC website today there’s a story entitled ‘Glaciers suffer record shrinkage’ which quotes experts as stating that we need to take “immediate action” to reverse the trend of melting glaciers.

Dr Wilfred Harberli, a Director at the World Glacier Monitoring Service, is quoted as saying, “The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight.”

He’s quoted in the Observer as saying, “There’s no absolute proof, but nevertheless the evidence is strong: this is really extraordinary.”

So, in essence, these experts want immediate action to be taken on something which they state has no absolute proof. Good thing our justice system doesn’t work like that…

Having bought my HP Ipaq handset a few months ago I was sardonically amused to see the banner above on a website.

So far, compared my old Treo, I’ve done more:

- soft-resets. I’ve spent more time vainly stabbing at the call-answer button which for some reason chooses when to work and when not to. And requires a reset to regain control.

- hard-resets. When even the power button isn’t reacting and I’ve had to remove the battery and replace.

- cursing. Cursing the fact that the OS is so slow on occasion that I’ve stabbed buttons too many times thinking that the handset hasn’t reacted and resulting in completing actions that I never intended to complete.

- waiting. Mainly for the stupid thing to boot up post-reset (see items 1 and 2).

- wondering. Mainly why the Opera browser won’t work as the hot keys stop working in Java. Thus I’m stuck with Mobile Internet Explorer (curse it). And partly wondering why I ever thought that Microsoft might have managed to make the software work properly. You know, properly. As in, all the time.

Croft Original Sherry used to have an ad campaign which was built around the strapline, “One instinctively knows when something is right.” It’s definitely a truism, and so I’m saving hard, and in August when my contract runs out I’m having one of these which I instinctively know will be right.

Check THIS out! That’s a Mac Mini with LCD screen and keyboard all kitted out for his fiancee by Dave Veloz. Awesome!

As seen at Macenstein and with more photos and info at Steampunk.