The British parliament is now in Prorogation, an arcane term meaning between sessions. It will be opened again on Tuesday with the traditional speech by the Head of State.
The opening of Parliament is full of tradition; the Royal Standard is raised on the flagpole of the Victoria Tower the moment that the Queen steps out of the Royal Coach. Whilst she goes to powder her nose, Black Rod goes to the Chamber of the House of Commons to ask nicely if they wouldn’t mind popping along to the other big tent to hear what the Boss has to say and has the door slammed in his face, the ultimate rebuttal of a cold caller doorstep salesman.  Symbolically, this means that the Monarch can F*** right off, can’t you see that we are eating our tea?

I was surprised to see a large crowd of 4′ tall undead chasing around the corridors of Morley Town Hall tonight, but there again, it was the first Morley lantern festival. Lanterns were judged on the town hall steps, there was a disco inside with cake, biscuits & drinks, you could bob for apples ( to win a toffee apple) and there was even a Pumpkin shaped Piñata for the kids to clobber at the end of the evening.

The event was very popular (well, the price was right) The fire limit had been arbitarily set at 300 but way more turned up than that and someone took the executive decision to ignore health & safety & just let them in. (It wasn’t a problem, I’ve seen the hall more crowded at jumble sales.

(We left a little before the end, so we don’t know if it was as much of a partial success as chasing the dragon back in the Spring). David’s costume wasn’t very Halloween-like, although he had a vampire outfit in a carrier bag if the whimsy took him. (It didn’t.)

I’ve added this line here so you can see the comments bar in IE.

The first thing I had to do at work this morning was to change the time on one of our call handling systems after the UK weekend time change from British Summer Time (BST) to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Most of our systems handle this automatically via Windows (if set up correctly), but this was a Unix based platform. It wasn’t affecting the handling of calls but it was potentially screwing up the call statistics as well as displaying incorrectly on the phones. (It wasn’t worth connecting in remotely out of hours to make the change although when the clocks go forward in the Spring it is a different matter).

We take accurate time for granted. Apparently there was some confusion at Gatwick airport yesterday morning when a system failed to put the time back and airport lounge display boards were giving duff information. The Register describes it as “Anarchy” and it just shows how overly dependent we are on IT systems.

Why does Britain still bother with Summer Time? that argument is for another occasion and no doubt the EU will make up our minds for us. However, I remember seeing a rather unusual clock once at a military facility with two sets of hands on a common dial. One set showed the local time (with a normal 12 hour face) whilst the other set showed military time (called Zulu time) with a 24 hour face. They told me that Zulu time was always GMT and expressed in 24 hour notation so there was no confusion during exercises. The Airline industry also work on the same principle, although it is known as UCT which stands for Co-ordinated universal time in a delightful bit of International Telecommunications workable compromise.

I had previously wondered why it was called Zulu Time apart from the the obvious thing that Z is Zulu in the phonetic alphabet. Why wasn’t it called Alpha time? The answer is curious. Zulu equates to zero at the Meridian, so Alpha is plus one, Bravo is plus two ans so on all the way around to the opposite side of the world (with one quirk) until we get to the international date line, at which time it counts down again from Yankee to November. So Mike and Yankee mean the same thing, whilst the quirk is that Juliet isn’t used at all. There are also eight half-time zones in use, the only one I was aware of being Newfoundland (Papa*) which is thirty minutes ahead of Atlantic Standard Time. (The Newfies are to Canadians like the Irish are to Brits and the Polish are to yanks). If you are confused, to see a list of time zones, have a look here.

I don’t know if you have twigged, but the picture is of a backwards clock where the dial is labelled backwards and the hands rotate anti-clockwise. I’ve seen one of these before in someone’s house and it is rather unsettling due to the initial familiarity, unlike strange ball or binary clocks where they don’t look like clocks. If you want one, here is a link.

Making sensible “green” choices often present something of a dilemma. Take drying your hands after a comfort break, What is better for the environment, using an electric hand dryer or paper towels? The answer appears to depend on what your vested interests are!

The reality is that generally it takes several paper towels to dry your hands properly, or longer than you are prepared to stand in front of a hot air hand dryer. As Ben Elton commented back in the 80s, “they should just hang up a pair of jeans on a nail” whilst wiping his hands on his bum.

When Karen rang up over the weekend, she told me about these remarkable hand dryers she had seen in the toilets at Toddington Motorway Services. “Get on ‘tinternet and look them up” she said, so I did. Made by James Dyson of Cyclonic Vacuum Cleaner fame, the Dyson Airblade is a three year engineering rethink of a proper solution to the problem. A 400 MPH narrow jet of cold air totally dries your hands in ten seconds. They also look very futuristic as well! (Wikipedia suggests there may be some controversy though).

The Press section of the Dyson site has very restrictive use of their images, fortunately there is a public domain one at Wikipedia, often a great source for useful legitimate images.

(They don’t have them at Toddington North, she checked on the way back!)

We have a little problem with our cooker. It is gas on the top with two ovens, one a combi grill and the other fan assisted.

A couple of weeks ago, the fan oven continued to heat after being turned off. It produced a cloud of smoke burning off the grease on the oven walls and I imagine the fan didn’t like it too much, either. We turned it off at the wall and after it had cooled down and then it seemed to be fine after checking it out.

This weekend, though, it went dodgy again. My spam Fritters were rather overcooked and I twigged that the oven was way too hot. There is something doo-lally with the thermostat, although it does go off with the timer function.

Today, I took the back access panel off to see if I could disconnect the coil and still use the rest of the cooker. Surprisingly, the answer was no- there are three feeds from the incoming bus bar but losing the oven also loses the electronics and the piezo igniter (the hob is gas). I have to say how flimsy I thought the innards were and the wiring thickness looked barely adequate for the harsh environment encountered inside.

We have now booked a Hotpoint Engineer, although it isn’t cheap. There is a five year parts guarantee but they charge £35 to visit and labour is a further £55. (I exaggerate slightly, there is a penny change from both of these prices). We will get them to fix the wobbly knob while they are here, it wasn’t worth worrying about it before.

The bear is called Paddy the Chef and it is David’s. He had a trip to the Build-A-Bear store and helped stuff it himself. (Well, he got to keep his foot on the blower pedal).