David Carrington

I love replying to misdirected emails. Here’s one that arrived in my personal inbox today:

Dear Mr Carrington

After looking through our files for your property ##########, I noted that the gas safety had expired. I contacted Mr ###### (who carried out the last gas safety) and he has reported that the ‘diverter valve is not working and needs to be replaced. Unfortunately he is not qualified to do this. I do have a plumber who can do this work and carry out a gas safety check at the same time. Please may I have your instructions.

Regards
Catherine Cutts

And my response:

Hi Catherine,

Thank you for looking into this. I’ve contacted my colleague, Doc, and he was able to resolve this with the aid of a flux capacitor.

Regards,
David

Today our company marketing team tweeted about Drivers to be fined for leaving engines running, which is essentially a UK scheme to cut down CO2 by fining drivers £20 if they refuse to turn off their engine when requested to do so – e.g. when loading.

It reminds me of the common practice in Switzerland where only the first handful of cars at a red traffic light are allowed to keep their engine running.

That actually makes a lot of sense to me:

“In Sweden, individuals have long refrained from engine idling when stopped in vehicle traffic. In Switzerland, there are laws that you have to turn your engine off if you are waiting at a red traffic light. In other European countries, permissible durations of engine idling vary from 10 seconds to 3 minutes. Italy and France allow 10 seconds, while drivers can idle for 40 seconds in Germany and 60 seconds in Holland. Several cities in Taiwan have banned engine idling effective in 2008. Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore allow 3 minutes of engine idling in any one-hour period. Fines and enforcement measures varies country to country.”

from Unnecessary Engine Idling

Strangely, this is my first post talking about cars after working for a car company for three and a half years!

You may have mixed results with this, as it won’t work everywhere. It’s worked in 3 of 4 places I tried.

Step 1) Download and open up Google Earth, making sure to turn on Street View layer

Step 2) Find one of the cool-looking Street View bubbles

Step 3) Turn on the timeline view to see aerial photo dates (the clock icon)

Step 4) Double click the street view bubble to enter the panoramic photo and see the new date appear:

Looks like Google had a busy Summer in the UK last year!

BBC News had an article on the UK government opening up a bunch of data for developers to play with the other day. I think it’s a real flaw in what’s most likely their article/linking policy that the actual link to the data is hidden on the right under the “Related Internet Links” section: Show Us a Better Way.

I’ve not had a chance to look at all of the available data, but it’s an interesting competition.

I’ve been playing Rohan quite a bit lately. I started the year by playing RF Online quite a lot, but switched (with many others) in order to avoid the unstable servers at the time. Waking up to test the game at it’s exact release time of 4am in the UK was a bit much, but vaguely worth it by the fact that I got first dibs on my name of choice for a healing class: Faith. Inspiration of the name was actually Faith from the game Alien Swarm, which was the main game I played last year. All three are highly recommended.

I’m enjoying Rohan, especially since a lot of the people I play with are the same one’s I played RF Online with. I’m a healing Elf woman, fairly well valued in the game to keep parties alive in times of crisis – or more typically, to take on big monsters for an hour or so. However, even a healer has limits with great big fiery dragons…

Watch as the two strongest players run away in fear, which turned out to be the right choice as they were able to come back and revive me so I could heal the whole group and get us back in action.