Oh boy…
It’s going to be a fun week alright….
First, the good stuff. We have gone BROADBAND! :D Officially, I’m still awaiting my modem and welcome pack, and my “you have broadband” e-mail from Tiscali. Unofficially, I didn’t fancy the naff SAGEM USB modem, and bought a £28 Thomson network capable one weeks ago to connect upto my Linksys wireless router.
Today I connected it on the offchance, and got 3 green lights! Needless to say, I rigged some cables around and both laptops, both desktops and shitbag are online and running at a steady 512k a second. All antivirus and antispyware is up to date, and I’ve installed the latest drivers for my NVidia graphics card which has REALLY kicked Doom3 in the ass..:)
Now, the mediocre stuff. Rik has (after prompting) bought 2 new PCs for himself and Lynn. They WERE running 2 pentium2 300 PCs with 128mb memory tops. One needed XP reinstalling, one was still running 98, with an upgrade due.
For £60 apeice, they’ve bought a pair of Viglen Contender P3/1Ghz PCs with 256mb RAM, 40Gb Hard disks, CD, floppy and ZIP250 drives, from www.speedie.co.uk.
Both are in the workshop, keeping shitbag company. Both are XPSP2, and have Office and AVG installed, and are awaiting the fitting of a CD burner, and a secondary hard disk. One needs a modem, and then he can collect them.
For ex-business PCs they’re not in bad shape! I’ve serviced them, soaked both CPU fans in WD40, and now they’re silent. £60…how can anyone not like a £60 bargain PC? ;)
The bad stuff…oh lordy. Maybe you’ve missed our sorry petrol prices. If you have, you’ve been asleep! We are approaching (or in some cases have now surpassed) the £1 (about $1.84) a litre mark for unleaded 95RON fuel. We have fuel protests threatened for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday…we have hauliers threatening low speed rolling roadblocks on major motorways. We have panic buying at the pumps-some people are filling tanks, barrels and whatever to hoard supplies.
Why? Petrol goes off, guys. It’s not exactly something I’d like in the back of my garage! Mm…sitting bomb…
Besides, what does it acheive? You buy lots, you give LOTS of money to the people who you’re ideally trying to keep it from by protesting. Duh. I reckon 3 days of blockades and interruptions can be ridden out by those companies due to the high profits they’ll have made from the panic on the run-up! What you ARE doing is being selfish. We’re ALL in the same bloody ship-we ALL need fuel to work-you just drain the pumps and inconvenience others.
I’m not saying I’m happy-i’m not. I’m apprehensive! I cover about 200 miles a week, purely work mileage. Without a car, I can’t get to work. I don’t want to pay a fortune to run a car-but I know that my legs and my condition present me with no viable other choice of transport.
I also see MAJOR issues for commerce, companies and the country as a whole due to spiralling fuel costs-I think the prices are stupid. I think we get screwed tax-wise as drivers anyway-we seem to pay more and more, yet I see more and more wasted in beaurocracy(?) and half assed pissing around by the powers that be. Does it go back into the roads? From the roads I drive, it is not evident.
What does Gordon Brown say? Last look I gave to Firefox, it was “I’m not dropping tax to stabilise the pump price.” No, you’re begging OPEC to up the output of crude oil, and suggesting they plough more money into finding and tapping new fuel reserves, saying to us “tough titty” basically.
Talk about short sighted. What about investing money in developing alternative fuel sources? I know Diesels have been run basically on old chip oil before, and I’ve been reading about how some place in the UK has managed to create a car fuel based on wheat or somesuch…develop that! Develop electric cars, make them affordable. Develop and make affordable solar power systems for households to use to charge them and run electrical items. How about building a LOT more cycle friendly routes along exisiting roads? I’ve seen electrically assisted mountian bikes around-i could live with that!
Crude oil fuels are finite-they WILL run out. Do we plan for that and develop alternatives? Not as much as we should, I know that.
I spent 2 weeks in an ECOCABIN in Wales, a chalet run entirely by wind, water or solar power charging battery banks. We had lights, we were warm, we had radios and 240V mains via inverters-we just had to be frugal with power. Was it easy? Yep. Would I love to live like that now? Yep.
Every bulb in the house is a CFL lamp-I am trying to be power concious, but..it’s not the same. It was satisfying to be in a mad storm, and think “I have no mains power grid, and I don’t give a toss!”.
Anyway..yes…this week I will be driving to work. I will not be panic buying fuel-merely brimming my tank occasionally. I may choose to do it at 2am to avoid the panic crowds, but I did the same last time this happened. I have reset the Astra’s engine and gearbox computers to allow them to “learn” my driving style, and I am training the car with a light foot. I know it can do 460 miles on a tank-I want to see if it can best even that. I am actively planning my week to minimize driving, and I am confident that my 2 week fuel tank will ride me through at least the initial panic.
When will we learn, eh?
EDIT–>Look, cheap fuel!!
http://www.petroldirect.com/