Computer back!

Well I now have a nice new laptop! So I should be posting again pretty soon.
Sorry for the huge lapse in posting.
See you all soon!

Start of Spring!

Today would be the 1st of March and therefore the official start of spring (if you divide the months up in to chunks of three for each season). Things do actually feel warmer, and the days are definatly longer. No more getting up and it still being dark!

My computer is still in hospital as well and it looks like a laptop is needed. Next weekend I will hopefully get a chance to go and look at some. So I am hoping that I may be able to get back to the world of blogging soon.

Happy spring everyone!
It means we are nearly at summer guys!

Computer Problems

Unfortunatly due to a blown processor or motherboard (not sure which but they are the two likely culprits) I have no computer. As such I am currently writing to you from a public machine. I am sorry for the lack of posts, be sure that I will resume posting when I either fix my computer or get a new one.

Thanks guys,
happy blogging.

Happy Valentines Day!

Happy Valentines day everyone! Remember, don’t be too cheesy, be sincere.

How did we come about to Valentines day then? There are a lot of different stories about this day. Below is a collection of some of the more popular Valentines day history stories:

Feast of Lupercal
This festival of love traces its origin ancient Roman Festival when the ‘Feast of Lupercal’ was celebrated in the honor of the Roman God of Fertility. The day is closely associated with the mutual exchange of love notes in the form of “valentines.” According to a time worn custom, on the eve of Lupercalia (14th of Feb) a ritual of ‘name drawing’ was followed, during which a young man drew the name of a girl from the lot, who was to be his sweetheart for the whole year. Quite often, the couple would fall in love with each other and later marry. The custom lasted for a long time until people felt that the custom was un-Christian and that mates should be chosen by sight, not luck.

Bravery of St. Valentine
Valentine’s Day was actually due to the efforts and daring of a priest St Valentine that the festival got its name and clearer meaning. During the reign of Emperor Claudius II Rome was involved in several bloody and unpopular campaigns. Claudius cancelled all marriages and engagements because he thought that people did not wish to leave their families. Hence, they did not join army. A romantic priest St. Valentine defied his order, who was then killed on 14th Feb, about 270AD. After his death Valentine was named a Saint. Hence, St Valentine became the patron saint of lovers

Another Version Associated with St. Valentine
As per another story, Valentine attempted to help Christians escape from the Roman prison as they were being tortured and beaten there. According to another version, Valentine fell in love with jailer’s daughter who visited him during confinement. Before his death Valentine wrote a farewell letter to his sweetheart from the jail and signed ‘From your Valentine’. The expression became quite popular amongst love struck and is still very much in vogue.

Season of Birds Mating
Previously, people held a belief that birds started to look for their mate from February 14. This notion helped to link Valentine’s day with love and romance. People began to celebrate Valentine’s Day as a day of romance by exchanging love notes and simple gifts such as flower.

A nice collection of the different views on how Valentines Day came about.
Again, happy Valentines day!
And happy blogging.

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin! 200th birthday.

Today, when I loaded up Google, the little picture was changed and I saw that today, is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday!

For those of you who do not know who Charles Darwin was, he was a naturalist of great importance in the history of science. He is in a sense the “father” of evolution in that he was the first to properly explain it; the notion of it had been around before Darwin but most people believed it to be false. The bible was read literally about many things and in the book of Genesis, it is written that God created the Earth and its animals the way they are today. This of course is a contradiction of evolution.

Valentines Day: 3 days to go…

Well it’s wednesday evening and in 3 days time, couples across the country, and indeed world, will be exchanging their love. However some of the Valentines day garbage that accompanies the whole thing I think can be a little unnecessary. There are too many frilly, pink and red things about. Cards with soppy messages, cakes in heart shapes and other sickly things which can be a little too cheesy. So cheesy infact that it sometimes makes you feel like your going to suffer cardiac arrest from it all.

However not wanting to sound too cynical, I think the whole general idea is a fantastic one. Lets be honest here, there is not enough love in the world and Valentines day is an official day to show your love for someone. So OK, it is cheesy, but still a good idea.

So share all the love guys!

My dislike for bottled water.

I thoroughly dislike bottled water. It really is the most pointless, wasteful product in the UK (off the top of my head). When we live in a society in which we have water on tap, and yet I have been to families in which people want to drink bottled water because “the tap water tastes funny.”

Where I live you can get water either at a fixed rate per year or pay per cubic meter. Either way youll be paying somewhere around £1.20 per cubic meter of water. Thats £1.20 for 1000 litres of water! ($1.76)

In comparison, if you want bottled water you can pay anything from £0.50 per litre upwards for branded water. If you go for the cheap bottled water you can get away with only £0.20 a litre. Still, compare this to tap water. At its cheapest, bottled water would cost £200 for 1000 litres where as tap water costs about £1.20. That makes bottled water atleast 167 times more expensive than tap water. It gets worse. For some smaller kids packs of branded water, your paying £1 for a litre of water. Thats over 800 times as expensive as tap water! Then theres all the spring water and sparkling water and water in glass bottles!

So its grossly over-priced for what it is, but also its wasteful. Bottled water is (suprise suprise) bottled. When your done with the bottle, the bottle gets thrown away, or has to be recycled. This is using up firstly, crude oil for making the plastic bottles, and also is then throwing them away, or using energy to recycle them. Plus theres all the transport costs for moving the water to the stores to be sold and all the packaging that goes along with that.

The last desperatly sad thing about it is where it comes from. There are too many stories of bottled water being sold as “pure” and yet it is just tap water in a bottle:

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,1151532,00.html

The article above is about a water scandal with Coca-Cola, where they were trying to launch a new brand of bottled water which was marketed to be “pure as bottled water gets” and turned out that it was infact just water bottled from the tap at the Coca-Cola production facility in Sidcup. I also read in a newspaper article about how water companies would go and start bottling water from 3rd world areas, using all the natural water in the area and bottling it, before shipping it off to places like the UK for us to drink when we already have water on tap. The ironic thing is that today I see in shops that some of the money spent on drinks goes towards helping 3rd world contries (Red Nose Day). Makes you think.

There have been a lot of negative things said about bottled water in the above, and while I rather dislike the whole idea of selling water in a bottle for anything between 160 and 800 times the tap water price, it is useful in situations such as natural disasters, where the infrastructure has been damaged and bottled water becomes the only source of clean drinking water. Then bottled water has a purpose I feel.

Otherwise, if you want bottled water just get a bottle and fill it up with water from the tap. Not only are you reusing that same bottle and recycling, but your also paying a fraction of the price compared to what you would have done if you had paid for it at the shop. So please, don’t buy bottled water, just take water with you.

Thats enough on my thoughts of bottled water. If you want to share your thoughts on the matter I am more than happy to listen. Please leave a comment.

Bushfire outbreaks in Australia.

Latest news on BBC is the bushfires in Australia. It was pretty shocking to read about. Aparently 170 people have already died in the fire and the Prime Minister has said he expects the death toll to rise.

The fire is ment to have “affected” (is the word used) an area of 3,000 sq km. Which is 1,200 sq miles. The police think that some of the fires might have been started by arsonists:

Police believe some of the fires were started deliberately – actions which Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said amounted to “mass murder”.

Pretty bad to be honest. I would feel rather awful if I was the one who had helped start some of those fires. They must be facing some pretty bad sentences. Anyway here are some of the stories from people off the BBC website:

Some described escaping down roads lined with burning trees, while their cars caught fire in the furnace-like heat.

One man said he siphoned off the water from his vehicle’s radiator to try to save the life of a neighbour who had been set alight.

Kinglake resident Thomas Legrary described finding a neighbour with up to 50% burns on his body. They put him in the swimming pool to keep him cool.

Elsewhere in Kinglake, Jack Barber and his wife fled just ahead of the flames but found their escape route blocked by fallen power lines and trees.

They took shelter at a school, but that also caught fire. They then ran to an exposed cricket ground ringed by trees where they found five other people.

“All around us were 100ft (30m) flames ringing the oval and we ran where the wind wasn’t. It was swirling all over the place. For three hours, we dodged the wind,” Mr Barber said.

Bad stuff. Although there is supposed to be colder weather coming which is ment to help the firefighters and army control the fire. My thoughts go out to them.

Link to the page for it on the BBC

Google Earth 5.0

I just found out today that Google have released Google Earth 5.0. This latest release of Google Earth has a lot of new features I don’t remember from the old Google Earth (I’m talking way back here). So now they have added in a feature that lets you explore the oceans of the world. You can also do novel things such as choosing when you look at something. So you could view say, Paris in 2000, or in 2008! The idea being that you can see changes that have happened.

I havn’t personally checked out the new Google Earth (mainly because I always found it a pain to have installed) but I watched an interesting video showing it off from Google.

http://earth.google.com/

Blonde buying a TV.

I became slightly bored so I thought I would add a blonde joke on here. Please don’t take offence as I am actually myself blonde.

A blonde walks in to a shop. “I’d like to buy a TV please,” she says.

“Sorry, we don’t sell to blondes,” replies the shop assistant. Annoyed the blonde leaves, determined to get a TV.

The next day the blonde walks back in to the same shop, after dying her hair brown and says “I’d like one of your TVs’ please.”

“Sorry, we still don’t sell to blondes,” he replies stubbornly. Baffled, the blonde returns home that day.

The next day, after facial reconstruction and wearing a clever disguise the blonde walks into the shop and says “I’d like to buy a TV please.”

“Don’t you get it? We don’t sell to blondes,” the shop assistant says slightly annoyed.

“I don’t understand. How did you know it was me?” The blonde asks, confused as to how the assistant knew it was her.

“This is a microwave shop,” the shop assistant replies.

Amusing I thought.