blog.species5618.net

At a Microsoft Architect Conference this week,?? Dave Colpin said RFID tag in bins (and collected data) should be used to educate NOT punish, for example “Did you know you waste is 10% lower than the average house hold of your size”

Positive feedback on the good things, not negative feedback (or punishment) for the bad things. This is the same approach Tanya Bryon uses with unruly children. This can be extended to almost any walk of life???

Pence (or CO2) Per Mile meters in cars instead VSP. ??Encourage the drivers to slow down and protect the environment, rather than have some computer TRY and fix a problem which has already occurred.

GPS for insurance / road tax in cars, should be sold as a way to thank careful drivers with money back not an additional charge/ punishment for drivers who driver on clogged roads drive at unreasonable speeds. Yeh ok the end result is the same, but more people are likely to join in.

For the simple minded, this could even be reduced to a RAG (Red, Amber, Green) status system. My EON smart meter does just that for my instantaneous power consumption. It took my wife just three weeks to start asking ???who is using all the electric??? when the red light came on..

As a planet we must start to be more careful, but Fines/Punishment is not the way to do it

I recently stumbled across some of the worst PSTN/Broadband customer premises wiring I have ever seen. TWO lines, both with ADSL, and proper ADSL faceplates on the Master Sockets., All sounds good so far. TWO other rooms, each with extensions in for both lines, but this is where it heads south.

1. The extensions are TWO wire connected not the usual THREE
2. The extensions are connected to the telco side of the master socket, not the customer side of the master socket, so are not filtered for ADSL/PSTN use properly

The net result was, the phones do not ring, the lines is noisey (as ADSL is not filtered properly) and the modem/router only connects at 7.6Mb/s despite being only 5 meters (yes 5 Meters, that is NOT a typo) from the exchange equipment…

Yes you guessed it this is INSIDE a village telephone exchange………….

A while I scribbled an article on ???persistence or stupidity??? a rough review on the effect of todays internet + a few friends and their ability to capture the moment when you do something really stupid and post it in the internet, youtube.com, epicfail.com, facebook.com is full of such precious gems of entertainment. Mind you it is nothing new, the tabloid press have been making millions of the odd photo or a knickerless or drunken celeb.
I too have various photos (on film, remember that !!) of my mates in our more outrageous years, so I am not immune. But appear to have got of lightly so far.
Not so for some friends of friends of friends on Facebook.com, where photographs of teenagers (just) can be seen smoking, in school uniform on school property. One can only assumed that this level of stupidity will stand them in good stead when they apply for their Darwin award in years to come.

Parents are too quick to blame other drivers for accidents involving children.

But here we have some parents takeing the “rules don’t apply to me” line, or should I say ZigZag

Some while ago my wife brought me a Maplin badged, Watson WH1081 weather station. It has an outdoor unit which measures temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity and rain fall. A wireless indoor unit then displays and logs the data. The indoor unit also has a USB port allowing it to be connected to a computer of some description.

The Software that comes with it is fairly basic, however http://sandaysoft.com offers some free and very powerful software call cumulus.

The cumulus software will talk to the indoor unit, manage the data logger, produce charts as you might expect. Then come the great stuff, it has built in tools to upload the data to a web site of your choosing, via FTP, as well as uploading the data to several weather services. A recent addition to the feature set is twitter. Cumulus will now send a tweet on a predefined regular basis with a summary of the current weather conditions

Mine is now tweeting to http://twitter.com/abbeymeadwx

Slilmbridge, originally uploaded by species5618.

A Day out at Slimbridge Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust

Autumn trees, originally uploaded by species5618.

simple shot, on route to school

Today my son turned 13
When I was 13 a handfull of my friends did not have a home phone, nights/days out had to be arranged by the time you left school or did not happen, homework was handwritten, home computers where rare, and ran at 4MHz with between 1 and 16kB of memory, hard disk where unheard of outside corporate circles and a 10 MB disk drive was the size of a washing machine. My TV was a 12 inch black and white portable which recieved THREE channels

Today, 98% of teenage kids have ther own personal mobile phone, a night out can be arranged by text, twitter, facebook, msn from the moble phone while on route to the destination. For his last history project, jake created a well edited 8 minute video and for his next it is a web site, the phone in his pocket runs at 500Mhz and has 8GB of memory, his (yes his own personal) laptop has 2GB memory 2x 2G Hz processors and a huge 250 GB hard disk drive. Jakes TV is a 42inch plamsa with all the toys and over 300 channels to chose from

Oh to be a teenager today

On the flip side when I was a teenager coping a grope with the teenage girl next door was considered a laugh, making a factual reference to someones ethnic background was the norm, and clipping a kid round the ear for scrumping apples was a daily summer time event…… today any of those would get you arrested