Yep the French have set a new land speed record on their trains at 574.8 km/h, that's fast, very fast...

Now why can't we get some nice fast trains here in the UK? Apparently the French don't just have fast trains their trains actually run on time, what a concept...

We all take it for granted at work, we have email access and Internet access. Some of us however have more Internet access than others based on the corporate policies of the organizations we may work for. We use our computers for word processing, we save the documents we have created on the network for future use some of us may even have version control repositories for our documents and occasionally we print them out to read or hand over to clients or colleagues. But I was surprised and shocked to find out how computers are used at a small law firm I discovered they have some pretty cool multimedia machines with state of the art applications on them and all the machines were being used as were as glorified word processors. The secretaries would type up all the letters on the computers in MS Word, then they would print the letters out and occasionally the secretaries would exchange letters on floppy disks between each other and after they had printed two copies of the letter out and filed one copy they would delete the copy from their floppy disks to free up space! The machines they were using also had underused 60gig hard disks! What I found even funnier was that if they needed to do another copy of a letter or alter it they would end up typing it in the letter again from the paper copy! What was even more surprising was that they were not the only company doing this. If you've seen IT being under used in such a way I would love to hear from you, it would be interesting to find out why.

The situation regarding our 15 UK servicemen has raised a lot of questions primarily "Where was HMS Cornwall" and "Didn't HMS Cornwall see the Iranians approaching?". There is an interesting article found here which examines the incident.

One thing I found interesting and also disheartening was the amount of defense cuts Brown has been imposing on our Naval forces (maybe they are not "meeting their targets") :

• Navy to cut fleet by half  05/01/2007
• 20,000 posts go in defense cuts 21/07/2004
• Half of Royal Navy's ships in mothballs 31/12/2006
• UK Royal Navy faces potential front line cuts 12/12/2006

I can understand defense cuts, but only if we reduce our commitments to operations such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan, NATO and the Balkans.

Yep I tried making toad in the hole last night and I quite simply ruined it. It has got to be one of the worst cooking disasters I have ever had along with using raspberry petit filous instead of creme fraiche for a chicken recipe. Okay I had forgotten the creme fraiche and thought I could use it as a substitute, yeah I know it seemed okay at the time. This toad in the hole the batter was dreadful looks like it got soaked in too much of the fat from the sausages and some sunflower oil (why oh I don't know). Anyway if you have a better recipe for Toad in the hole please let me know or if you think you know what went wrong I'd love to hear from you (I think:)). Anyway don't you just love pizza home delivery?

Today has been filled with April fools day jokes from friends. Even larger companies such as Google have got into the act with Google TiSP a free broadband service available from Google which you receive by lowering a fibre optic cable down your toilet - class! Think Geek also had a load of funny trick products on their site such as the WiiHelm which was suppose to enable you to play Wii games by just nodding your head. The Joke Shop Shop also had people going, by thinking they were giving away free PS3's, when clicking on the link you got the "Gotcha! April Fools!" message.

Oh well I'm glad its all over now (safe!) I still haven't discovered what the BBC's April fools day joke was though.

There appears to be even more politics surrounding this issue and the irony of the situation is that its all over 0.5km of uninhabited sea water (according to Iran). That's right 0.5km a measurement so small when you think about it, lets just have a good think about it now.. that's 500 meters put into terms its probably 1 lap around a regular track at a schools sports day field. Now what secrets or installments could Iran possibly have hidden in that 500 meters worth of sea they have claimed as their own waters? Maybe its the fish they are trying to protect on their side of the border? No matter how you look at it when you get down to the actual argument there isn't much of case the Iranians are claiming the UK servicemen went 0.5km into Iranian territory the British say they didn't. The Iranians display a GPS device that supposedly proves they (UK servicemen) were, although there was probably nothing to stop the guards  who ambushed the UK Servicemen from taking a new co-ordinate with the device after they had taken it off the UK servicemen. The Iranians of course will ignore any satellite evidence that proves otherwise because now the evidence has become irrelevant it has all become part of a far bigger political game that is pushing the price of oil up and trying to humiliate the British. The letters sent back from Faye Turney added an interesting bit to the end which makes you think the letter was written under pressure which states

"Isn't it time for us to start withdrawing our forces from Iraq and let them determine their own future."

It makes you wonder if the Iranians are trying to turn the public against the British government and hoping this will put pressure on the UK to move away from Iraq? The truth of the matter is now neither government wants to loose face and neither one of them appears to have a way of backing down without doing so. The only other action if diplomacy fails in military action something that neither side will want to see happen and its probably what would have happened if the Iranians had captured US servicemen instead of British. At the moment the only deterrent from a military point of view the British have is the Trident nuclear one and I don't think anyone in the UK government  wants to even think of going there.

One of the most recent blogs I have added to my blog roll is Daily Referendum run by Steve Green. The site is always an interesting read and like its name suggests enables voting in a daily referendum on current political topics in the UK. 

According to the following article dated 26 February 2007. The credit card  fraud appears to have occurred between July 2005 and January 2007! This has got to be one of the worst cases of credit card fraud I have seen in the press for some time now.

The amount of card fraud going on now a days you'd be forgiven for going into your bank withdrawing your money over the counter and paying for your goods in good old cash.

Interesting post containing a video on my friend Julians blog about the decline of the PS3 by Sony. The video does seem more inclined towards the Xbox.

As far as I am concerned I think the PS3 is an amazing machine and had the benefit of seeing one at a demo with the most amazing graphics I have seen in a long time. However I think the price tag will be its downfall, maybe what Sony should have done was specked down the machine so it wasn't so expensive when they launched it which I think is the only thing that puts people off the console. The console has just about everything included making it a powerful multimedia machine. If Sony had included a desktop OS, keyboard, mouse etc they may even have been able to target it towards part of the desktop PC market (maybe this would be included at a later date as an optional extra).

Okay its not really a cat tracking device its my newest toy called the Loc8tor. Its basically a mini tracking device which comes complete with two tracking tags the size of a paper clip (well a thick paper clip as you can see on Willows collar) which I purchased from Amazon for £59.99. Its actually intended as a personal tracking device to keep track of things you might loose such as keys, wallets, mobile phones or cats, okay not cats but that didn't stop me from trying it out on two of our troublesome moggy's Willow and Lucy. They have a habit of disappearing  and this little device makes it all the easier to find them when they go missing. You'll be amazed to find out where cats go and do with their time beside the usual finding a warm car bonnet to sit on in the mornings.

The device reminds me of an episode of aliens as the alien gets closer the louder and louder it beeped. The Loc8tor is exactly the same and allows you to have up to 24 tags registered per tracking device, you know your getting closer by the audible beep and a little beep given off by the tags themselves. You can also choose which tags you wish to track with this little gadget and give each of the tags a name. How cool is that!

Target driven government is a concept we are all familiar with where government sets departments targets or quotas to meet by what ever means necessary if they do not meet it thy re penalized. I thought I would come up with a fun story to try and explain where it goes wrong.

Jingles was king of the monkeys who lived in the jungle, he wasn't really king anymore since he had declared himself prime leader. He had recently come to power and on the promise of far more food through the winters months, which the monkeys usually ran out of. He decided the best way to get enough food collected was to split the large groups of monkeys into smaller groups to start collecting the food. So he split them up into two groups the monkeys who collected bananas and those that collected nuts. He wanted to motivate the monkeys that collected the nuts and bananas and knew there wasn't any real motivation for them so he set them targets which were quotas for each monkey. If the group that were collecting bananas collected a hundred banana's each they would have met their quota however if they did not meet their quota they would not get any nuts. He did the same to the monkeys who collected nuts and told them they would not get any bananas if they did not meet their quota.

The monkeys tried hard to meet their targets which they were allowed to achieve by any means possible as long as they met them. The monkeys that were collecting the nuts were not doing too good and started to be penalized, the monkey in charge of the ones collecting the bananas noticed this and didn't want his monkeys to go without nuts. So he started devising schemes such as counting bananas twice or getting monkeys to repack the bananas and then counting them again when they did. Jingles was amazed by how well the monkeys collecting the bananas publicly announced how great they were and how his new form of governing the monkeys was working. They monkeys who were collecting the nuts felt very depressed and were told if they did not improve more of them would be removed and set to collecting bananas instead. The head of the monkeys collecting nuts complained that it was not possible to collect enough nuts but Jingles only pointed to the head of the monkeys collecting bananas as an example. Winter soon came and the monkeys started to run out of food. Jingles wanted to know why there were less bananas in the store rooms than there were accounted for and uncovered what the monkeys collecting bananas had done. Jingles realized that he had probably set targets that could not be achieved and that what ever you set people will find ways around the system.

Iran has denied the UK embassy in Iran access to the detained UK servicemen in an article here on the BBC website.

I had said previously in my blog entry yesterday I believe the Iranians will be milking this incident for all its worth. It looks as though there have even been calls to put the servicemen on trial, I am guessing this will probably be for spying. Iran off course knows how to play its own public and how to breed an atmosphere of contempt for the west its been doing so for many years now. My guess is that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who hasn't been doing himself any favors on how he has let the Iranian economy slip will probably seize on this opportunity to distract people from this. His nuclear ambitions has also been a distraction point for his people, the sanctions it will bring to his country could be quite crippling we all saw the effects the sanctions had on Iraq when Sadam was still in power.

The only peaceful use of nuclear power is for electric power generation which for an oil rich state is not a high priority in my opinion unless Iran has suddenly developed a new zero emission policy to help curb global warming?