Category: General

I was secret £5,000-a-time prostitute, claims clerk who stole from office.

Really?

They were graceful beasts weren’t they? Especially the Vulcan.

 

Came across this chappie on my kitchen floor – he was about as big as my hand.  Unfortunately for him, the flash attracted my Owner, and his rate of climb on take-off wasn’t fast enough.  She calculated the rate of climb and trajectory and picked him out of the air like a black, furry Bloodhound.  Very pleased with heself she was, too.

Unbeknownst to me, Mrs FEEG had applied for some Olympic tickets. Recently we had the spectacle of Boris Johnson on TV moaning about the fact that he did not get any that he applied for personally (of course I think there is the odd freebie in the pipeline for London Councillors, but, to be fair, I think he did return a lot of these). We feel very lucky.

However, Mrs FEEG has just announced she has got two tickets for a morning session of the athletics at the Olympic Stadium. I think the events are round 1 of the Womens 100M Hurdles (goody, goody, some of the lady sprinters and hurdlers are really fit 🙂 ), the Mens 800M and Discus qualifying, which is good because I used to be school champion at the discus, so I know a bit about it and the Womens 1500M round 1 and Shot Put qualifying as well.

These should be all very entertaining and none of the long drawn out long distance races which, quite frankly bore me to tears (and yes I know it is all tactical, but it is still boring). Roll on next summer!

There is a little almanac in its 82nd year of publication in Portugal called the “Borda D’Agua”. It contains all sorts of useful information such as Saints’ Days, full moons and what to plant in any particular month. It also includes the tmes of the rising and the setting of the sun.

My question is this: On 1st June, the sun rose at 05:14 hrs and set at 19:55hrs. On 30th June the sun will rise at 05:15 hrs, but will set later at 20:06hrs.

If the days are supposed to be shortening after the summer solstice, can any erudite or highbrow Charioteer explain this apparent anomoly to a thick wolf?

OZ

Many years ago (at least 30), as an engineer in the civil service, I was once asked on a project management course to draw a simple chart of my senior management structure.  This I did.  Showing the structure of the ‘Division’ in which I worked leading to a large amorphous cloud.

“What’s that?” the tutor asked.

“Well”, I replied; “I know how decisions are made up to a point, beyond that any decision-making is cloud based and I have absolutely no idea what rationale leads to the decisions that are made and passed down from the cloud”!

Continue reading “Heads up in the clouds”

For Janus when he’s feeling better!

If you want a comprehensive explanation of the relationship between pixels and resolution then you will find it here.

This however is a very simple piece without any technical jargon.

If you imagine pixels are just dots of colour which when viewed all go to making your photo a reasonably accurate representation of the image you intended to photograph, it may help.

The general rule is the more pixels your photos contain, the more detailed and pleasing the image. My camera is set to take photos of roughly 2000 pixels in width, which is the maximum allowed. Yes, it is a bit old now and modern cameras will allow you to take bigger pictures. These are big files!

Now on this site, the maximum width for photos is only 700 pixels in width in posts and 600 in comments. So by reducing the number of pixels you are effectively throwing them away. The pictures still display pretty well on your screen at home, so you don’t need the additional pixels, and they take up room in the Media Library.

But once you have thrown away these pixels, you can’t put them back. Your photo-editing software will allow you to try, but it doesn’t work. You can, however, go back to your original large image to crop it and focus on a different part of your image without losing the crispness and turning it to mush!

If you are reducing or cropping photos, it’s a good idea to practise on a copy, so your original image is still intact, and you don’t have to worry.

This Wednesday, 22 June, marks the seventieth anniversary of the start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia.  It was to be the biggest, and the bloodiest, military campaign in history, concluding in the ruins of the Reichstag in May, 1945.

In retrospect Hitler’s precipitate decision, which was to mark the beginning of the end of the Third Reich, looks disastrous, was disastrous, because there were all sorts of reasons why Germany could not defeat the Soviets in a major war.  Russia not only had the space to absorb the shock of Blitzkrieg, a tactic pursued hitherto with such dramatic results, but it also had the capacity to survive defeats in battle that would have finished any other nation on earth.

But this is looking at history retrospectively, a God’s eye view, so to speak.  There is one question, looking from the ground up, that is still legitimate to ask: namely, how close did the German invasion of Russia come to success?
Continue reading “Cursing the Devil”

I take up my pen in this Year of Grace Two Thousand and Eleven to apprise you that I imminently purpose to embark, at some considerable risk to my person, on an hazardous and lengthy voyage to a little known former province of the great British Empire; an Empire which, at its zenith, bestrode ‘the narrow world like a Colossus’ as the Bard has it. My sole and faithful companion will be the trusty Mrs M, often styled ‘The Passepartout of Embra’. I will be furnishing you with a full chronicle of my journey to the island of Terra Australis Incognita.

I have, as my inspiration, the ‘great travellers’ described by the immortal Jules Verne (1828-1905) in his masterpiece, ‘Celebrated Travels and Travellers’. To borrow from the great man in his ‘Preface’ thereto, I trust that my readers will render to Mrs M the credit due to her for her ‘share in a work which will demonstrate what manner of men the great travellers have been from the time of Hanno and Herodotus down to Livingstone and Stanley’ (and me, in my opinion, if Jules had lived long enough to learn of my many and manifest talents). Continue reading “What I’m Going to Read on My Holidays”

Continue reading “So much for Global Warming?”