Collision Detection!

Why is everyone worried about CERN's monster accelertor? Don't they realise that there's enough antimatter being produced around the globe already? They're doing it State-side all the time. Quarks, strangeness and I remeber a third one - charm. Whatever happened to that? Maybe it only exists at budget time!

Oh what a circus, oh what a show....

.... paraphrasing Andrew Lloyd Webber.
As if the world hasn't realised, the U.K is going through the torture of it's General Election and is heading for what's called a "hung parliament": baiscally with none of the major parties having an overall majority.

I'm not a political; person as such, I leave that up to my wife who is outspoken to say the least: her beliefs being described as slightly to the right of Ghengis Khan. I make no comment myself. I will admit of being an avid watcher of the whole process of the Election due to the wonderful Circus is becomes over those weeks that lead up to the point where one or other of the party leaders heads off to Buckingham Palace to get the "Royal Assent".

The coverage from the national TV companies can be hilarious especially when life catches them on the hop and the headless chicken syndrome descends on the production team. Another humerous thing is the graphics and gymnastics some of the commentators come up with when trying to expalin the "current situation".

Leaving the jokes about "... having enough rope for all those necks!" in the first analysis this is not a good situation for the country, it doesn't make for a stable political situation. On further analysis it may be good for the Liberal Democrat party for a short length of time as they have enough members to acctually sway any vote in the House of Commons either for or against which ever of the larger parties becomes the Government.

In short I will be glued to the coverage for some time.

Tribute to an Ordinary Man

In Memoriam

Donald Daniel Simmonds

7th May 1931 - 13th December 2009

My father died on the 13th of December 2009: he finally succumbed to cancer at about 6.00am that morning. It was expected, just not this soon. If anything can be considered good about someone’s passing it is this: he never got to the point where either the cancer or the drugs could cause him any pain – physical or psychological.

Born 7th May 1931 in Fulham, South East London, he spent most of his childhood dodging the best the German Air force could throw at them. First a cub scout, then a scout, he and his contemporaries acted as the communications for the emergency services of the day, and as extra man-power for the LDVF and ARP, erecting table shelters in people’s houses. This was on top of a full day at school remember. He first met Mum in the scouts and guides (Her first name was Marion actually, but she preferred her middle name, June), who would later become his wife.

After school, came an apprenticeship with the North Thames Gas Company (Bad Smell and Smoke Company to the employees), and the re-acquaintance June.

WWII not having been over for that long, most if not all young men in the UK were still subject to National Service: Dad served in Klagenfurt; Austria, near the border with what was Yugoslavia. He fell in love with the country and the people and vowed he’d come and visit the place again. After National Service, it was back to work, and a change of direction, becoming an instrument maker for St. Thomas’ Hospital in Central London.
On 30th April 1955, Mum and Dad tied the knot at St. Mary-le-Park Church in Battersea, literally a stone’s throw from the Park, and three years later they were safely delivered of a son: yours truly.

By this time, Dad had taken on a new job as a service engineer for the fledgling service division of the BOC’s medical equipment division. Based at Brentford, his “patch” was most of South London, Kent, Surrey and Sussex: I remember the days when he would take me as company on the long trips to the furthest calls, including a nursing home in Brighton run by a group of Nuns. I always seem to make an impression on them as Dad told me of the frequent trips up and down the long corridors on a trolley pushed by a giggling group of novices!

While I was still young, Grand-dad Simmonds died of diabetic complications causing gangrene, and Dad inherited the four-story Victorian terraced house in Clapham where I spent most of my young life. The top two floors were given over to flats and two Tongan’s lived there. Daniel worked at John Lewis’ In Oxford Street and David worked at the Ritz. Tongans are an outgoing race and many times we were invited to “do’s” around London. Invariably we would end up back home with 20 or 30 of the community back at the house in Clapham with the food, drink and music flowing into the night.

Eventually, we had to move as the house was costing just too much to maintain as flats. We said a heart-felt goodbye to the Tongans and moved on. We settled in Surrey and stayed there until Dad became an instructor at the company’s training department in Harlow. We moved as a family to St. Margaret’s, near Stanstead Abbotts and immediately became actively involved with both the church and the Scouts and Guides in the area. It is amazing how quickly news travels in the Scout Association…. within two weeks of moving in, the District Commissioner for the area was on the door step welcoming us to the area.

Both Mum and Dad threw themselves into the life of the community and fund raising for various restoration jobs that the beautiful little Church in the village, becoming church wardens, and Dad becoming Crucifer and server at the Church.

Shortly after Dad retired, they decided to move on and settled in Hickling, a small village right on the Broads in Norfolk, again becoming actively involved with the community and St. Mary’s – the parish Church in Stalham – the nearest town, but as Dad put it ”….having a rest from the Scouts.”

In 1996 he became very ill very quickly, losing somewhere in the region of 70lbs in less than a few months. Diabetes had finally caught up with him. As usual, his attitude was, “OK, how do we cope with this and get back to normality?” It didn’t take long before Dad was Dad again.

We lost Mum in 2005, again to cancer – this time it was an un-diagnosed problem, not the cancer that eventually took her. Dad in his usual way outwardly took it in his stride, but you could see the pain of loss: suddenly being without someone you have been with for 50 years is not easy.

Even at this time last year the cancer still had not shown itself. Only at Easter was it noticeable that something was wrong, so wrong that he actually went to the doctors. His weight had started to drop again, losing his appetite and he was constantly tired. Initially the diagnosis was anaemia and he was sent for tests to try and find bleeding in his intestines: the classic way it hits someone of Dad’s age. After several sets of tests – including colonoscopy – they couldn’t find any bleeding, but he was still losing red blood cells. Regular transfusions kept him going and a CT scan was conducted. The results were clearly visible to see and the reason why he was anaemic was there for all to see.

The cancer had started out at the base of the oesophagus, where it splits into two for the lungs. It had finally spread to the lymph system and carried to the adrenal glands, and it was this that was causing the anaemia. It had been slowly spreading for quite some time: it was only Dad’s lifestyle and constitution that had hidden it for so long. It was now just a case of not IF but WHEN.

On the 2nd December, he had a fall at home as his legs were getting weak and was admitted to Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital. As he’d been preparing a meal when he fell, we as a family went up to try and get the house tidied up for when he came home. As I had to come back home for work, the last time I saw my father was the Sunday before he died.

My father wasn’t famous, he wasn’t one of these people that does something heroic, he was an ordinary man who could never turn away if someone needed help.

He had time for everyone.

He was slow to make friends, but he made them for life.

He was always ready to “muck in” and get his hands dirty. If you were stuck, he’d be there to help.

To the best of my knowledge he never held a grudge to any soul, living or dead, no matter what he thought of their character.

The one thing I will say about him is what he once said to me:- “Father by Birth, Friend by choice.”

The Worst of Times. The Best of Times

I got the phone call I was dreading at 6.25am this morning.
My father left this world peacefully around 6.00am. He felt no pain and was still compos mentis. From what the staff at the Norwich & Norfolk Hospital have told me, it was more that he ran out of energy trying to fight the cancer, rather than the cancer causing anything to fail.
If there can be anything to take solace in it is the fact that he has died now before the cancers started to cause any pain, and before he suffered the discomfort and frustrations of the chemo-therapy that they were planning to start.
Via this blog, I offer my heartfelt thanks to the staff at the hospital that looked after him in these past final days, and to all the wonderful, generous and helpful people in both Stalham and Hickling who have offered their help and support to both Dad and myself over the past six months or so.
May God go with you all and may his Peace be with you for ever.

In memoriam:

Donald Daniel Simmonds

May 1931 – December 2009

How to arrange your pseudopodia!

This Is Daniel











These are Daniel's new rugby boots.















This is the box they came in.










This is how many you get in a box!!!!!!!!!!

Don't tell me you've got it bad!

I'm a regular reader of Oddee.com and they've posted an item called "8 of the World's Most inspirational People" today. Each of the people who are featured on this page are truly inspiring. Ben Underwood who could "see" with his ears, Patrick Henry Hughes who is a virtuoso musician who cannot see, Sean Swarner who has repeatedly beaten the odds to survive several bouts of cancer and Jessica Cox who was born without limbs,but gained her pilot's licence, Nando Parrado who along with 16 others survived 72 days in freezing conditions in the high Andes and Randy Pausch who suffering from pancreatic cancer made an impact on so many people with his talk on how he accomplished the thing in life he wanted to do.

One however stands out for me and that is Australian Nic Vujicic. He to my mind deserves pride of place at the top of the page because of his attitude to life. With all the so-called problems I have, they pale into insignificance against any of these people and Nic in particular. He was born without limbs and had to learn to live without them. I will eventually lose the use of mine and have to do the same.

Please watch this video and then visit his website at

http://lifewithoutlimbs.org/

We don't care! We're Google! We're the Web!

Actually, no you're not.
What you are is a company that seem to want to emulate Microsoft's sales division.

To what am I referring?

iGoogle.

Someone somewhere within the corporate nightmare that the company has become has decided "Hey we can give everyone Google Chat - whether they want it or not!" And before anyone responds, "but you can disable it!" yes, you can... but you can't hide it!

I suppose what's worse than this is that person - in their infinite wisdom/stupidy (delete as appropriate) has decided to move the tabs from the top to the side of the page, thus making the layout awkward - to say the least.

A point here people! Not everyone out here in Webbyland has super splondicious 16 x 9 widescreen monitors yet and have to put up with old-fashioned fuddy-duddy 4 x 3 instead!

PLEASE! - give people a choice or you are going to find a lot of people no longer using iGoogle!

How I hate the night.

Have you any idea what's it like to walk around as if you're drunk all the time?

I am now suffering from yet another auto-immune problem (those of you who have seen my diabetes blog may be up to date with this) which means that my spinal cord is losing it's insulation - known as myelin. This is turn results in some inflamation around where the problem exists.

So how does this relate to the title of this post? .... Marvin the Paranoid Android.

Marvin constantly complains of having a terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side. I now constantly have what I can only describe as an "un-pain" down my right side.

The title of the post comes from a song that Marvin composes at one point where his life is particularly sour:

"Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night."

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Marvin the Paranoid Android's "dolorous ditty", composed after being attached to the Krikkit War Computer.

Whether his pain is similar to mine, I cannot say.

I describe it as an "un-pain" because it isn't really like any other feeling I've experienced. It is essentially an absence of sensation, but it has all the mental overtones that pain would normally give - there is discomfort, there is the inability to find anywhere comfortable to alleviate the feeling. What is worse is that pain killers do not relieve it.

Because the inflammation results in anything from minor numbness to having my foot stop working at any one time. It is startling to say the least to be walking along perfectly normally then suddenly lurch sideways as your right leg either doesn't go where you were expecting it to go, or just not support your weight correctly.

I've taken to carrying a walking stick at the moment. How much of it's aide is physical and how much is psychological is debatable, but it does seem to help.

Washington: it could have been worse.

My condolences to the families of the seven people who have lost their lives in the metro crash, and my sympathies to the injured and their families. I have been reading the reports of what happened and know from the major Tube accidents in London at King's Cross and Moorgate that it can have far reaching consequences on all those involved.

Now the NTSB have to work out why it happened and one thing that I have noticed in various reports is the mention of the state in which a lot of the infrastructure of the system is in, it seems to vary from "clean and reliable" to "crumbling" and "in a state of dis-repair". I suspect that - as in most cases - this point of view is coloured by which part of the system the persons making these comments actually use.

My biggest worry is not that this happened by why it happened. Not knowing how the metro system in DC is run, I can only speculate that the problem behind this accident could be one of lack of investment and I'm hoping that we are not looking at yet another case of "Damn the customers, we need to keep the share-holders happy".

Maybe some of the financial people of the world should realise they are not exempt from life and that one day they may very well have to face the same change in life that the families of those seven people are now having to come to terms with themselves.

A plea to all the governments of the world: make sure that your health and safety laws make it prohibitively expensive so that it is always cheaper for companies and their directors to carry out safety work, rather than take the hit with the fines and law suits.

Relax! It's a new week!

It's been a few weeks since I posted: the wonderful Dual D's of diabetes and depression kept me off the web for a week, and then a week of enforced leave with no internet connection for another.

Enforced? - Yes. My GP said that if I didn't take some time off I'd end up a gibbering wreck huddled in a corner somewhere.

Last week was "half-term" week in the UK so I took advantage of this and took the family out to Norfolk to see my Father: the boys thoroughly enjoy visiting him. As usual there were the odd one-or-two jobs that needed assistance, this time clearing my father's attic out so that some new insulation could be put in. It was hot and dirty work, but it's incredible how a week of doing something completely different like this can be so relaxing, even if it's even a mundane task.

So re-vitalised I return to work. Even aggravation from our own pointy-haired boss doesn't get through to me to start with. Now, that has to be some kind of success!

Big is not beautiful.

Michael Douglas' character Gordon Gekko, in the movie "Wall Street" famously said to his audience of stakeholders: "Greed is - for lack of a better word - good". I've never agreed with that philosophy as most, if not all the people who subscribe to it, end up in a worse state than when they bought into it. Unfortunately, there's a lot of innocents that unwittingly subscribe to it as well and get burned even worse. The movie reflected the time at which it was made, where banking and stock markets were the place to be. and the premise that "big is beautiful" seems to have persisted to a large degree even through the current economic crisis: some may even say that it in fact started it, but this is not my point here.

My point is that sadly one area of industry where this philosophy does still persist is IT. This is understandable considering that the financial world was one of it's biggest founders, and even after 20+ years of non-financial use some companies IT is still run by the Finance Department.

So, what's the problem? In a word, inertia.

Talk to any physicist or engineer with any mechanical background and they will tell you that the larger an object is, the more force you need to get it to start. However, once it is moving it will keep moving without much force at all - that roughly is inertia.

You can apply this analogy very well to corporate bodies - you can say they're like a super tanker: once they're moving it's easy to keep them moving, but they take a long time to do anything once they are unless you use a lot of energy.

What's worse is if it loses all power, no matter what the command crew does, it will just keep going on the same course until it hits something hard, and the results will not be pretty - as the real Wall St. found out with Lehmann Bros.

In the IT world the alarm bells should start ringing sooner but, as above, it's a case of whether the right people hear them. I've now heard two with my current employer: a global IT support company. The first was when we started to have to jump through hoops to get even the smallest travel claims approved, the second made me and others where I'm based do an enormous mental double-take. It is that the upper management are considering the option of off-shoring our own IT.

Scott Addams once drew a Dilbert cartoon about this - I thought he was joking!

Best job in the world

Congratulations to Ben Southall from Hampshire for finally winning through against the other 35,000 or so people to get every one's dream job - only having to work 12 hours a week as caretaker of a semi tropical island.

If I was younger I think I'd have applied for it!

Almost a prayer meeting

I was riding home on a bus last night when something happened in front of me that just made me smile. It really did give me a good feeling.

When I got on the bus, an elderly African Gent got on with me and sat in front of me. A young woman sat next to him. He began talking to her and although I couldn't hear much of what was being said, there were broad smiles on both faces, especially when the gent produced a copy of "Awake", one of the pamphlets that the Jehovah's Witnesses hand out over here in the UK. The broad smile on the woman's face was something to be hold, and I saw her say the words "Thank you, but I'm Jewish".

She got off a stop or two later and an elderly African woman got on and sat next to him. I saw the copy of Awake re-appear as he began to start the conversation again. However, this time he was presented by this woman with titles I knew where normally published by one of the Baptist churches in the UK.

The interaction between these two people was a joy to behold, even if I couldn't hear everything that was said. When the woman got off just before I did, the smiles on these two people's faces said it all. They may have had slightly differing faiths, but their shared belief was indomitable!

Why blog?

A rhetorical question really.
In my case, it's really just an exercise in trying to put my feelings down in words, and if it provokes comment or discussion so be it.

A lot of the time I suspect this will be some form of reaction to a news item or somethingthat's caused me to think about something that would normally be trivial in my daily life.

There's been many people giving reasons not to blog, some citing that there's no point in subjecting the rest of the world to your own drivel. Drivel or not, being able to have your say is something some people do not have the opportunity to do even in this day-and-age.

So I will re-iterate something that Arthur Wellesley (once the Duke of Wellington) is attributed with... "Publish and be damned!"