Consultants - dontcha just luv 'em?!?

Over at David Hepworth's there's an intelligent debate going on about Consultants, amongst other things. It's very good.

However, being time poor but sarcasm rich you won't get anything quite so involved from me. It's a different paradigm. I'll just paint a picture with my own enriched version of my favourite description of this noble best-of-breed:

"Consultants? - They're like seagulls: They spy your chips, fly in, squawk a lot, flap round your head for a while, land, strut around, eat all your food, squawk a lot more, then suddenly take off, fly around you for a bit longer, squawk en masse, crap on you, then disappear. It's very hard to tell one from another."

Ithenkyow.

Heck - it's BBC bullshit time

'Nazi' cattle indeed. What do they do then, herd themselves into their own cattle trucks?

I also hope you enjoy the commentary, with it's insightful summary of the Nazi rampage through Europe.

See the 'Nazi cattle' here

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8019029.stm

BBC News - for all your red-top website needs. Doh. Get a grip, BBC, you're meant to be better than this.

Easter Eggs

When was the last time you saw a pair of beauties like this hanging outside a house? They really are the (HMV dogs) nuts aren't they. They're commonly referred to as egg insulators (not dog's eggs, so no sniggering at the back please).


Apologies to those who do know, but for those who don't they are radio aerial, or antenna insulators, used to prevent loss of the radio signal to earth in old style long wire aerials, when receiving your actual BBC Light Programme, or if you preferred, the World Service, VOA, Radio Moscow/Prague/Luxembourg and so on.

Aerial insulators are still used to this day by aficionados of old radio sets, listeners to the short wave and by radio amateurs, a-transmitting and a-receiving worldwide.

Antenna arrays used by those folks can be complex, but for domestic listening pleasure, the general configuration was to have one end fixed to the house, and the other attached to a tall pole at the end of the garden, with the wire hanging between the insulators.

Here's a diagram of the typical installation you might remember seeing at your house. It's in Italian, so let's say it's to honour Guglielmo Marconi.


So a setup like the one in my photo at the top of the post would usually be for a home radio receiver. It would have been a feature of a vast number of Britain's houses from the 1930s through to the 1960s, when transistor radios started to take over, because the long wire aerials were usually required for Radio Sets using valves - perhaps an Ekco, Defiant, Grundig, Cossor, HMV, Pye, Bush, Phillips or a Marconi. Perhaps you or someone you know had one. Perhaps you still do!

But the aerial isn't all that you need to get the best from your old radio. You also need to get the radio signal through your (wooden) window frame to the radio inside the house, without earthing the wire and losing the signal. For this you need an insulator - this one is the typical paxoline tube with a copper thread running through it.


Finally, an earth point is required, in order to set up a good signal flow between the broadcast transmitter and the radio receiver - which are linked together by the earth potential of the, er, Earth.


Now you're all set to go - sit back and enjoy the mellow tones, and, have a Happy Easter!

Click to enlarge pic


Click to enlarge pic


Click to enlarge pic


For those that need more nostalgia there are many websites about old radios, for example this one, from the U.S.

625 & 405

You don't see many of the old style 405 line VHF TV aerials these days and no wonder as they've been unable to pick up a useful TV signal for more than 20 years. So those that are left, although obsolete often remain in place, safely out of reach. A perch for birds and a passing query for anyone happening to glance upwards.

Actually you don't see too many of the 'old style' 625 UHF aerials being put up these days either. Most people seem to believe the hype that they need an aerial resembling a massive bog-brush in order to pick up 'digital'.

Which in most cases they don't of course.

When the digital signal strength gets boosted in a couple of years time with the demise of the long time standard analogue, the old style copper wire will suffice on it's own I should think.

Still, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Flying Bomb - Secret Weapon

It was always a big thing for me when the clocks went forward. Then you could 'play outside' for a spell after school, visit friends, wander the streets and generally enjoy the novelty of going outside after your tea.

So what better thing to do then, way back in the late 1960s and early 70s, than to excitedly remember and rediscover those treasured toys you'd had for Christmas, what seemed like an age ago. Perhaps something like the Space Explorer, pictured above, yes?

OK then, let's see how the Space Explorer does on the nearly-lunar landscape of your back garden, or, why not play with it in the street for a while, to see how it copes with climbing up and down the kerb?

Why not? I'll tell you why not.

Because of these:


By the end of March, in those far off years, these bulging, bursting, running-sore Zinc-Carbon swine would have deteriorated, leaked, and discharged acidic zinc chloride all over the inside of the battery compartment of your prized possession, rotting the contacts and rendering the toy useless. Unless you were lucky and managed to clean the stuff out. Always a tricky business though, no guarantees of success there - they'd had a three month head start on their sticky sabotage mission.

I remain convinced that the Hong Kong battery manufacturers, probably owned by the toy makers, made the battery casings out of the thinnest possible metal, in order to ensure a steady sale of replacement toys. Not that we needed any encouragement to pester for something new, to be honest.

Ever Ready were a bit better, but not immune to leakage and ruination either - so no smirking at the back.


Even though batteries these days don't leak, at least not very often - not unless you buy 20 for a pound batteries in order to visit your own disappointment of years gone by on others - and why would you - it's still an automatic reaction in my head to say, "Don't leave the batteries in, they'll leak!".

It's a traditional mantra handed down through the generations, and I usually say it out loud, before I've thought about what I'm saying. If I'm lucky I get the chance to explain. Now and again though, I'm proven right. Ha.

Technical Help Please

Out of curiosity I've been looking into what it means when people say they are downloading films or TV using 'torrent'. I've never done it.

Along the way I've also been advised about or have read of various horror stories that befall torrent users. These generally fall under the categories of:

Legal penalties
Technical (equipment) ruin
Security breaches (theft of data)
Virus infestation
Identity theft enabled by collection of personal data, leading to fraud - or worse...

and, to top it off,

A generous frosting of SPAM.

I am just wondering if any of these disasters are common, or are we talking about the odd few events that have caught out the unwary, which have then been blown out of all proportion?

Are there good ways to download, and preferred sites to go to?
Do you need better or new software?
Is setting up for the whole process really like wearing 15 condoms for safety's sake, so that it's not really worth bothering to go through with it?

I'd be grateful if any regular torrent-eers could offer me some sage advice.