Mr Mist’s Blog

Okay so it’s floating around the news and has been Slashdotted but basically there’s some crazy plan to equip cars with black boxes that beam information about the roads that they are being driven on up to sateliettes and then the government produces a bill every month for road usage. Apparently this scheme then generates revenue. Now, I may be being stupid here, but surely the following will prevent this type of thing from ever working :

1) You could simply remove the black box and leave it on the driveway.
2) It would cost a huge amount of money to equip even new cars with the boxes, let alone all the existing ones.

To add to that, there’s the whole question of what else is this black box going to do? If it knows where you are then is it going to be reporting our movements back to central government? Will it also be producing speeding fines? What happens if your car is stolen, do you still pay the bill whilst someone else is burning around in your car? And what about all the inevitable glitches in the system? Will the bills be itemised and will there be a chance for appeal, or is it just a big pound figure landing on your doormat that you *will* pay even if you’ve not driven anywhere for the past month?

I don’t know how far in the future these plans are supposed to be as the article on BBC news does not go into much detail, but personally I think that

a) We are way off this sort of thing working and
b) It’s the wrong direction to go in.

We should be trying to stop people from having to move anyway, not charging them when they do. For example I have to make a journey to work every day, why should it cost me money out of my wage packet to have to get to and from work. I’d be perfectly happy to work from home and I could do the same thing with a decent internet link. If the government invested in that sort of infrastructure instead and encouraged firms to engage in flexible working practises then that would make a much better dent in the traffic problem than invoking charges (which surely would just be passed on to an employing company, I should think.)

Well, I’m now three weeks into project : rain collection.

Today’s results are -

Device 1 - 32ml
Device 2 - 33ml

So it’s time for some statistics. Over the first week, I collected a total of 60 and 69 ml of rain in the devices, so the week 1 daily mean rainfall was 9 and 10 ml for devices 1 and 2 respectively.

In week 2, I brought in 43 and 51 ml over the week, giving a daily mean of 6 and 7 ml of rain (the driest of the 3 weeks so far).

For week 3, 50.3 and 64 ml of rainfall were gathered over the week, giving daily averages of 7 and 9.1 ml.

In another week, I’ll have a whole month’s worth of data to play around with. Whoever knew collecting rain in tin cans could bring so much pleasure?

Okay I eventually happened across this Colorgenics site which is a bit like a star reading but based on a set of colours that you choose in a certain order. The first time I did it I chose

grey yellow green red purple blue brown black

and here’s the first paragraph of the result it came up with :

"Presently, you are trying to break away from a situation that is causing you considerable worry and concern. Things are getting on top of you and you are feeling depressed almost to breaking point.Obviously there must be a way out - but at this time the solution seems to be escaping you. You want to "get away from it all" and as a consequence you appear to be sullen, introverted and refuse to get involved in any discussion or arguments which could aggravate the situation. Accept the fact that "as you feel - so your body will respond"… and so therefore "pretend" to the world about you that everything is going beautifully and if you act as if "all is going well" everything will, whether you believe it or not, will work out as you would like it to."

…and I reckon that that is very close to what’s going on in my mind around about now. I’m certainly not happy with the way my life is at the moment. Things need to change, probably starting with my job and moving on from there to sort out other things. The rest of the result was pretty good too, though I did disagree with one paragraph. I went back and changed the order but the reading was not as close, so I guess first time is the charm for that. Give it a go to see what it comes up with for your life. (Note for the sceptical, yes I do realise that the answers are general enough so that something in the result will fit most people, but it’s rare that I see a result from this sort of thing that matches me so closely.)

If you are stressed and require a moment to chill out, you could do worse than try this site (link ironically no longer available, try meditation instead I guess..) which has a number of different tranquil things to gaze at and disappear into. (Beware javascript pop-up window and flash are required. This may in itself stress you out if you are as anal as me.)

I reckon it’s quite good….

…Until you get to the end of the tranquil moment and it’s an advert. For a bank of all things. Still, you can repeat the tranquil moments over and over. You’ll probably need to as you realise that advertising methods far from stopping at ridiculously annoying pop-under adverts are being turned into more and more cunning and inventive things designed to warp your mind to work a certain *way*. ha.

have nothing to do with this entry, which is mostly about rain collection and other various things. First off the results from today which are :

Device 1 : 4ml
Device 2 : 10ml

Now. I’m a bit concerned about these results. It snowed today but not particualarly hard. What really bothers me is the difference between the two. I mean I thought that the funnel was supposed to stop evaporation and therefore the level should be higher but twice as high? Surely there could not have been this much evaporation. Is the whole experiment wrong? Is device 2 bigger than device 1? Eeek. So many variables. Also device two which is in fact a baked bean tin as evidenced in the photos way back when this started, is now starting to rust internally. Wheras device 1 which is a cat food tin is perfectly fine inside, no hint of rust. Are baked bean cans more poorly made than cat food cans? If so, why?

I really have no links to blog today, because I’ve not been randomly browsing the web all day, I’ve instead been doing my OU work, which I really need to catch up on, and absolutely MUST finish the assignment for by tomorrow.

I also changed the lens on my car headlamp, which was cracked and now isn’t. That was great fun.

More Later. (Or possibly tomorrow.)