I have a strange obsession with time. I have never been able to hear the pips and not feel the urge to check my watch or look at a nearby clock. Every time I hear the Town Hall Clock chime, I compare to see how far wrong it is. (It is particularly amusing when the chimes get out of synch with the clock, often due to them muting it for Brass Band recordings in the Town Hall).

I expect people to be not late and meetings to start on time, a habit that not too many others share!

My first significant watch was a Sinclair Black Watch which I got for my eighteenth birthday. It lasted a year before the cheap plastic case fell to bits but the electronics kept going for another five.

Over the last few years, I have generally bought radio controlled ones which take care of GMT/BST- or at least the Rugby ones do. (I had a European one synchronised to Germany and I was at the mercy of being out of step on occasions). I was rather shocked to notice it was a second out last week, until I realised I was listening to the pips on DAB Radio which has a noticable propagation delay.

I think I know why I am so paranoid about time- it is reconciling call traces across disparate systems running with different system times, particularly when trying to track down specific calls across voice recorders, MI systems & itemised bills.

The internet is supposed to cure all that as accurate Internet time is readily available using NTP (network time protocol) derived from stratum - 1 (i.e. very accurate) clocks. However I have worked at places where derived system time was loads out & stayed that way.

Tick… tick… tick…

When writing the blog about wiring colour changes, I recalled the very complicated gas meter arrangements in the Factory of CCT Theatre Lighting in Windsor House, Mitcham. It had previously been the factory for Windsor bathroom fittings who made taps & suchlike, presumably needing a lot of energy for casting, chroming & foundrywork.

Don Hindle, the MD, used to refer to the labyrinth of cupboard plumbing as “three phase gas”.

I mentioned in a previous posting about how the Morley Borough Independents had tried to track down some letter writers to find that they apparently didn’t exist.

In today’s Morley Advertiser, a (real) Labour Town Councillor berates them and sympathises with the views of (possibly imaginary) Mrs. Dorothy Sanders of Churwell.

Now news reaches me that the snippet is featured in Labour Watch, a website devoted to exposing the failings of the labour party.

In the interests of fairness, the website does link to hatchet jobs for all the other major parties as well! Let’s face it, it isn’t difficult to find all political parties wanting.

I did find an interesting link to a site called Polidex an online trading game. I have therefore posted my own MP up (above the Simpsons Defcon status in the sidebar), just because I can, really.

My reader may not be aware that there are some changes in the offing for wiring colour codes in medium voltage electrical installations (i.e. 230v/415v stuff).

Once upon a time, red was nasty, green harmless and black mostly harmless. Yellow and blue could also be nasty as well, and particularly nasty in conjunction with each other and red. Flex cable was red, black green as well until EU harmonisation came along. Then, Red became brown, black became blue and green was also yellow in a stripy sort of way. The green became yellow-green in permanent wiring as well, but red and black stayed.

Now, the brown/blue/yellow-green is making it into permanent installations, but just to make it more complex, yellow becomes black and blue becomes grey. All clear? You can download a handy guide care of PLASA, the professional lighting & sound association.

Just in case you think it is change for changes sake, yellow often used to be white and a very long time ago it was green. So there…

Of course for someone with a background in telephony, the worst we had to worry about was 86v AC superimposed on -50v DC which could give a nasty rash if it resulted in the victim scraping their hand up the back of the jumper tags.

-50v DC might sound quite benign but it could melt spanners when available at several thousand amps…

We went to see a Panto last night, called “Cinderfella”, at the Rugby Club. A Panto in March? It’s a Yorkshire thing. A Panto in a Rugby Club? Yes, you guessed it, consenting adults only!

The club have been doing pantos since 1975 so you’d expect them to be pretty good at it by now & they certainly are. The scenery might be two-dimensional but the performances are anything but wooden.

They also enjoy big song & dance numbers, it is remarkable to see routines involving more than twenty people in a space smaller than the average living room.

There are two stars of the show. the first one is the leading Dame, a barn of a bloke whose off the cuff comments frequently outshine the regular dialogue. The other star is a chap named Ooby Doo, a builder who I know from Round Table. He is big & gormless looking, a pleasant bloke but remarkably incoherent with half a glass of shandy inside him. The good news is that he dances as well as he makes speeches, rampant dyslexia. His remarkable style frequently stole the show.

The patrons are packed in (about two hundred seated at long tables bier-kellar style) & it runs for six nights so 1,200 people have a great time and many others are disappointed. (Tickets are reputed to be as rare as rocking horse sh*t).

Good on you Morley RFC, & good luck at Twickenham next month!