217 Lemurs

So Wednesday night is shopping night.

Exhausted from the exertions of the day and the drama of Asda people (who are not dissimilar to the people of Walmart)

I hauled bags and myself into the first cab I saw.

There was something of a dawning realisation that this is not the normal South Manchester cab company.

Clearly bored with Rossendale this driver was prowling for customers far from home.

He must have been using the Haslingden Halo for guidance…

Because he clearly had no idea where he was.

But equally he wasn’t worried

but that was because he was determined to ask me whether to turn left or right at every single intersection

Beyond this we did have a conversation - the conclusion - it is cold tonight

And it was his first day on the job

In between he managed a bit of multi-tasking - primarily with numerous mobile phones

but I did make it back home…

That was a lesson learned - I’m just not sure what the lesson was. But somewhere, right now, a taxi driver from Rossendale is utterly lost in South Manchester.

I spotted the Chat Moss Herbs delivery van this morning on the way to work. I’m not sure why but my immediate thought was - a gift of the Victorians. Somewhere in my memory I recalled that Chat Moss was the recipient of Manchester’s night soil through the late 1800s. Quite by coincidence I saw the van just near Regent Road near the Irwell where the remains of one the terminals for shipping the night soil out to the Moss still exists (just behind the Campanile Hotel).

The various web pages about Chat Moss and the night soil suggests that the last shipment happened around 90 years ago in 1923.

The e-text, “A History of Feeding Manchester”, turns out to be quite useful for dating the various influences and changing circumstances in and around Manchester. This book is hosted on the Kindling Trust website - a Manchester based trust concerned with sustainable living and activism. The site itself not offers information but documents upcoming relevant events.

I recently spotted two relatively unusual ideas for energy generation. Both seem a bit implausible but at least they suggest that people are applying a level of creativity to the problem of generating electricity.

The first is described as beach ball solar generators which places a generator inside a transparent ball in the desert. While at first glance this seems a bit unnecessary the latex ball provides a stabilising base that can be easily moved and tilted to meet changing conditions (although the website suggests that this might not regarded as a feature).

The second generator gathers wind energy by providing modular windmills that interlock together to increase stability and power. The windmills are mounted on the sides of buildings - which seems to also be the source of most of the criticism of the devices and the claim that the building would itself block the flow of air across the vanes. There is evidence that there is enough wind flowing over the surface of buildings to generate power - but the suggested mechanism for capturing this is somewhat more unconventional.

This is enough to give up on sheep and be a little bit scared of them…

Blimey “No Starch Press” has 21, yep, 21 different titles including “Fantastic Contraptions”, “Badass Lego Guns” and “Forbidden Lego”. 

Curiously - or maybe not - the other books No Starch produce are about programming, systems admin, hardware and manga (for example, “The Manga guide to databases”.