Coming To A Tesco Near You Soon: Martian Asparagus

Yes, apparently it's official - you could probably grow pretty good asparagus on Mars. See the article on Reuters here.

Phew.

I for one, am greatly relieved now that I know our asparagus stocks are safe well into the next century and beyond. If we can now just crack deploying a sustainable greenhouse on Mars, and of course a small branch of B & Q, we could move on to cucumbers and from there sort out all the worlds food problems.

A Martian War Machine, seen here wielding an asparagus-tip Doomsday device. The prophetic nature of H.G. Wells' writing continues to astonish even today.

Despite the deeply profound implications of discovering both water (in ice form) and alkaline soil - two key scientific finds which greatly increase the probability of indigenous lifeforms existing on our closest neighbouring planet; NASA decide to break the news gently through the use of fruit and veg metaphors.

Early test flights of the Beagle 2 probe gave no hint or indication as to the abject and dismal failure that was to come.

The decision by the NASA publicity department to let some veg-obsessed "wet chemist" (check his department name) to talk to anyone about this makes even the Beagle 2 team look like sophisticated urbanites.

Dr. Colin Pillinger, chief Mekon behind the Beagle 2 mission. Seen here with a giant George Forman grill, bought for him by his team last Chrimbo as a commiseration prize for crashing his brain-child into the Red Planet.

Think or Thwim

So I took my eldest son down to the new Llandudno Swim Center last night, to have a bit of a look around and for him to participate in his first training session in the new pool as part of the Abergele Performance Squad.

Although the pool still isn't quite finished, there's enough of it there - for instance a big hole with some water in it - to see that it should turn out to be a central attraction for the Conwy area, and further add to the facilities available within the area for swimmers of all ages, young and old alike. The internal layout of the building is modern, clean and has a definite feeling of space to it. Even the viewing stands seem to have a bit more leg room and perhaps more importantly - circulating air - than you typically find in other venues.

The New Llandudno Swim Center - a number of local councillors and residents expressed concern that in the event of a severe flood in Llandudno, the building would be difficult to find due to it's "wave camouflage" design.

The only slight problem I noticed was that the car park (which incidentally, is "pay and display" and shared with Venu Cymru next door) was massively flooded last night - so much so that it looked as if they'd actually constructed a separate outdoor pool as part of the whole development.

They should probably sort out the drainage in the car park, if only to prevent any prospective customers from either 1) floating off whilst attempting to enter the building, or 2) returning to their car only to find it jacked up on a pile of dead crabs as a result of a bunch of marauding haddock stealing their tyres.

Members of the Swim Wales governing body perform a spot-check inspection of tiling around the inside of the new Llandudno warm-up pool, only to find that the local Cosa Nostra swimming jamboree had been there earlier in the day.

Other than this minor problem - which admittedly is still in keeping with the aquatic theme of the new building - it looks to me as if this was most definately 6 million clams well spent. I might even learn to swim myself.

British Tennis Star Wins At Wimbledon...

...Common 24 Hour Garage! According to sources here, here and here, after a hard night out on the rinse last night, former ACE British Tennis Star Tim Henman managed to pick up a startling and unexpected victory, by managing to scratch his way to a £10 prize on an impulse scratch-card.

Eye witness accounts cited here, here and here go on to explain how even though it seemed as if triumph was going to be snatched from poor Tim's hands at the last minute due to a strawberry in the winning match being obscured by a drop of hot chilli sauce, he gave everyone present a characteristically effortless performance by wiping away the offending condiment with a sleeve volley close to his baseline.

The actual scratch card that propelled good old Tim to victory last night in Wimbledon Common. The proprietor of the 24 hour garage was said to be "underwhelmed and offended" by the performance.

Well done Tim, keep up the good form we're all behind you for the 2012 Poker Stars Olympiad.

Extra Recycling Bins - Find Them Here!

Bit of good news here (well at least it's news to me). Recently, whilst digging around on the local Conwy County Borough Council web site, I noticed that buried quite deep within the pages relating to kerbside recycling and collection, you can actually order new green recycling boxes and bags at no extra cost. (At least no explicit cost - don't get me started on the Council Tax).

Given that there are five of us in my household, and that we regularly run out of containers for the recyclable waste and other rubbish that we generate now that collections are done on alternate weeks, I decided to give this a whirl.

It was all easy enough, I simply completed the online form, and within a week a nice, shiny new recycling box was waiting for me as I returned home from a business trip down to London. Result.

After a long wait, a group of elderly Abergele residents rejoice as they make use of a new recycling point to dispose of their used syringes, burnt spoons and blocked crack pipes.

I thought I'd pop this down on the blog because there are probably quite a large number of people in around the Abergele area that don't even realise that this is general council policy. (Also, I'm pretty desperate for things to write about as you can probably tell).

In fact, if you rummage around a bit more on their web-site you even find the statement:

You may request additional boxes and bags as you feel is necessary to enable you to recycle waste.

Isn't that nice of the council? I think it is, and I also think that it shows their genuine committment to helping us all behave in a slightly more eco-friendly manner.

Of course, there's no telling how long this policy will stay in effect if everyone starts requesting extra recycling boxes and bags....but I guess there's only one way to find out. :0)

More information on all things council and in particular kerbside recycling can be found here.

Project Managers and Paper Bags

I work within the IT industry for a software house, doing a highly technical job that takes me all over the place and gives me the opportunity to meet a broad mix of different customers, and work on a good selection of reasonably large-scale software implementation projects.

Over the past couple of years, or perhaps a little longer - myself and many of my colleagues have started to notice a fairly worrying pattern beginning to emerge within the IT sector; more specifically within the approach and organisation of medium-large software implementation projects.

It's simply this: the number of project managers within IT appears to be growing at an exponential rate, and the number of skilled staff that are actually capable of delivering anything tangible on a given project is in a reciprocal decline.

Whereas perhaps five years ago, when working through a deployment lifecycle on a medium duration/medium complexity project there might have been maybe one, possibly two project managers involved, my recent experience has been that for an equivalent project (even on the much smaller, tactical projects) I regularly have to liase with and bump up against anywhere up to about ten PM's in order to make any kind of forward progress at all.

To avoid any misunderstanding, let me clarify what (in this context) I mean by a project manager:

• Anyone that can't be seen to directly contribute to the project through the production of anything directly related to the delivery of the end product. (And that could be anything tangible such as documents, code, training etc...)
• Anyone that insists on only having a "high level" view of the various project elements.
• Anyone that appears to spend a great deal of their time dealing with "issues" and allegedly "managing risks".
• Anyone that has no apparent grasp of technical aspects of the project, and isn't a key business stakeholder affiliated with the project.
• Anyone from a non-technical background who attends a large number of meetings within the working week.
  

So it's not just the traditional notion of a PM, I'm probably abusing the term a bit here so that it encompasses all non-productive members of the project team.

Ideally, a strong PM should have the correct background for an IT project - not like Ralph here, who didn't realise until it was too late that in actual fact, a SAP workflow solution was required and not an extension to the local public toilets.

I guess what I'm really saying is that there's generally a lot more useless cruft wrapped around even the most simple projects these days, and what's more it appears to be consistently impacting the delivery capability inherent within the technical teams on these projects.

That's not all:

• IT project implementation costs are steadily on the increase, as the amount of money required to support superfluous project staff also increases.
• IT project implementation timescales are stretching, as more and more time is taken over pointless meetings and debates within entire clusters of non-technical project affiliates, for the sake of some weird form of self-fulfillment or self-aggrandisement. Often, key technical people are diverted away from productive work in order to attend such meetings, or to participate in such debates just in order to introduce some level of credibility to the whole charade.
• The number of key risks - which should be managed by this crew of project managers - is actually increasing in most projects due to poor communication and "chinese whispers" developing between and amongst them. (I could cite several examples where pretty innocuous events have been turned into deal-breakers as a result of this).
• Software-based solutions are consistently failing to meet requirements as a result of the previous three points, largely because of the fact that over-spend and poor project time-management ultimately result in feature reduction and requirements sidelining. It's a regular thing.

So, is this just bureaucracy gone mad or is there something fundamentally broken (or breaking) within the IT sector? Am I just working on entirely the wrong projects?

I personally think that there are a number of things going on:

• There is (and it's well documented) a genuine skills shortage within the IT sector, and the number of experienced, well-qualified technical staff to work on individual projects has dropped significantly over the past five or so years.
• There is an increase in the number of workers within the IT sector, but many of them lack the basic understanding of the fundamental principles behind computing and at a higher level, IT.
  
• Those people with little or no technical grasp of the subject matter are beginning to display aspirations to move into project management as a distinct, worthwhile career path. Without any formal technical grounding in the projects that they'd hope to manage. (It's like the old adage - "If you can't do, teach".)
  
• There is an decreasing lack of understanding at a business level as to what's involved in delivering any form of engineering project, of which IT projects are just a subset. For some reason, with the rise of the throway consumerist society it appears to be the normal expectation now that IT systems can be deployed simply with little real technical skill and knowledge.
• To supplement the lack of skilled resource (which has the net effect of driving up project cost and therefore commercial risk) companies have locked into this vicious cycle of employing more and more people in lower-middle management roles, to somehow manage this risk, without understanding that increased beurocracy leads to increased cost.
• Outsourcing of IT has exacerbated this whole thing, given that nowadays in large companies that have outsourced vast tracts of their IT delivery capability a larger part of project implementation time is spent fencing around the SLA (service level agreement) as opposed to actually getting anything done.
• Outsourcing has also (quite successfully unfortunately) managed to reinforce this belief that lots of lower-cost resource is better than smaller numbers of higher-cost expert resource. This is a complete piece of kiddology. Use of lower cost, high volume resource increases the management overhead on a project, decreases overall quality on a project and fundamentally stifles the innovation that needs to be present as part of the makeup of any successful solution delivery.
• The internal organisation and IT delivery capability within more and more private organisations is beginning to - through regulatory policy making and massively complex third-party supplier relationships - beginning to parallel the business model of the most inefficient organisational structures we know of: the public sector organisations such as those run by the government. (I'd love to hear from anyone that can credibly put up a strong counter-argument that these organisations operate at peak efficiency).
  

A pragmatic approach to project management can bring about a healthy orange glow that invigorates and revitalises the entire project team.

I don't have anything specific against project managers - so please all you PM's out there please don't take this personally. What I'm actually quite concerned about is what appears to be a general malaise within the IT sector at the moment, which (if it spins out to its natural conclusion) the economic downturn we're currently seeing could well make a whole lot worse.

There is, of course a definite need for good, strong project managers on all but the most trivial of projects, and I'm actually honoured to work with a couple of people that succeed in turning project management into a real asset on a number of gigs. What I really find frustrating is this apparent wish to over-egg the whole management side of IT projects at present.

Is this just me, or does anyone else have a similar (or counter) viewpoint on the whole thing?

Thank You Orson Scott Card...

...for Enders Game. I've just read this for the second time after nearly twenty years and have to admit that it's an absolutely fantastic, seminal sci-fi work that inspires, is thought provoking and is a genuine joy to read.

I picked up a copy recently for my eleven year old son, who's a voracious reader and who's recently been keen to get into some sci-fi after pretty much reading most of the contemporary "young adult" fiction out there at the moment. Once he'd finished with it (and I have to say that he thought it was completely awesome and has since read the first two sequels Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide) I picked it up and worked my way through it in about a day.

For those of you that have never read it, then the basic plot is centered around the early years of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin as he is taken from his home and put through a military school (Battle School and later Commander School) with the sole objective to turn him into the perfect military leader, to help Earth overcome the forces of the (apparently) nefarious Buggers - an insect like race hailing from some far flung corner of the galaxy.

This book has a number of quite visionary elements to it in my opinion, and brims over with engaging and thought provoking ideas that really good sci-fi should always have. To name but a few of the ones that I found most interesting are:

1. The idea of propagating "remote" war through the medium of simulated reality. Ender and his cohorts are trained over the years using rich simulated environments, not a million miles away from the kind of FPS and RTS games that have been evolving over the past ten years.
2. The idea of a political, questionably democratic movement asserting itself through nothing other than the media networks and news channels. One of the sub-themes within the book is how Ender's brother and sister rise to have real political power as a result of them instigating of social change purely through the expression of their ideas on something very similar to the Internet as we know it today.
3. The notion of homogenisation of nation-states into less granular super-powers and the alignment of these super states against opposing idealogical principles.
4. What it means to be a killer and what it means to separate the consequences of an action from the initial intention of the action.

Meaty stuff eh? Don't get me wrong though, although there are some heavy-weight concepts woven throughout the fabric of this book - the reason why it's so good is that it has a pace and pathos that keeps you engaged throughout, so much so that at the end of the book you really do find yourself empathising with a number of lead characters; in particular Ender himself.

In other words, it strikes precisely the right balance between challenging the reader at the abstract, philosophical level but (if you want to take the whole thing a lot more literally and on face value) also allows even the most casual reader to enjoy a thoroughly good yarn with all the trademarks of strong character development, interesting and intriguing plot twists - the lot.

Thank you Orson Scott Card, for this fantastic and amazing novel.

UFO Across The Mersey

I've just clocked this post on the BBC web-site: BBC NEWS | England | Close encounters over Mersey which contains some rather dubious footage of some "mysterious" lights in the sky over the Mersey last night.

Not in itself particularly interesting thought I, until I watched the Flash vid associated with it and caught the snippet taken from de-classified MoD report regarding some blokes apparent contact with an alien life-form called Algar.

I for one, would like to be the first to offer my condolences for his great loss, with Algar being killed by another race of beings. Let's hope this doesn't cause some kind of inter-galactic war.

BTW, if you're interested in tracking down the original Algar report and other completely bonkers reports of lights in the sky, space cows, ray umbrellas and erm...visitations, then check out the National Archives page here.

Caravan Tax

Caravans, caravans, caravans.

If, like me you're fortunate enough to live in a scenic part of the UK then you're probably used to the periodic influx of caravans (and associated caravanners) that happens each and every bank holiday, school holiday break or sunny weekend.

They appear in their thousands like some weird invading army tugging their mobile lounges behind their oversized saloons or 4x4's, generally moving at no more than 50 miles per hour, clogging up not only the main arterial routes into a region, but also all the less-travelled A-roads and B-roads, back lanes and population centers. They get everywhere.

Local roads that you would normally traverse in a matter of minutes to get to your local amenities become clogged, glutinous affairs where forward progress becomes a source of intense frustration and stress.

With ironic names like the "Rapier", "Swift", "Valiant" or "Swallow" other road users are forced to sit behind these cumbersome, ugly contraptions as they make their ponderous way to the nearest herding point, so that their occupants can plug in their mains electricity, set up their satellite TV, crack open their chemical bog and get down to enjoying the thrills and exuberance of a truly nomadic lifestyle.

The Avondale Land Ranger - a prince amongst caravans to some, just another white, wheeled coffin to others.

I'm not a fan, as you can probably tell. To me, caravans can be basically summed up as the "suburbs on the move". Each weekend, thousands upon thousands of people pack up their stuff, cram it all into a lounge on wheels with all the creature comforts that they would have in their own homes and hunt out specifically clinical, managed, safe resting places where they can set up camp and get down to enjoying what they would probably do if they were still in their lounge back home in good old Suburbia.

The popularity of caravanning in the UK is huge. Some statistics taken from the Caravan Club indicate that:

• There are currently approximately 1 million registered caravanners within the UK.
• The CC annual turnover is £95 million pounds, indicating a sizable market for "value add" caravanning services.
• The number of registered caravanners more than doubled (from 100,000 to 250,000) between the years of 1971 and 1982.
• That caravanners inject somewhere in the region of £370 million pounds a year into various regional ecomonies.
• There is on average, one CC badged caravan site for every 30 square miles of country within the UK.

That means that taken as an aggregate, the registered caravan owners within the UK equate to a small city, mobilising and spreading out throughout the furthest reaches of the UK each public holiday. A small city moving along the highways and byways.

As I was sitting in my car on the A55 the other day (incidentally stuck in a jam caused by an overturned caravan) it occurred to me that I've never seen (and admittedly not really actively gone looking for) any kind of lobbying asking for a degree of taxation to be applied to the use of caravans. It hit me in a flash what a genius idea this would be. My rationale is simple:

1. Caravans have the aerodynamic profile of a melted blancmange, and so vastly increase the fuel consumption (and therefore emissions) of the vehicle towing them to their final destination.
2. To tow a caravan, you need a fair degree of torque, which generally you only get with larger, thirstier and dirtier engines, such as those found in the 4 x 4 models - often diesels.
3. Towing a caravan dramatically reduces the fuel efficiency of the towing vehicle, and so lead to an increased consumption of diesel, petrol - driving up demand and so the forecourt fuel prices.
   
4. Caravans are slow and directly cause congestion on many of the UK roads, resulting in jams and therefore driving up the emissions from vehicles of other road users; given that they end up having to sit around for longer periods with their engines running, in lower gears. Given the current governmental policy around road tax and linking it to emissions, this also has the indirect effect of driving up the cost of road tax for other road users.
   
5. Caravans add either 50% or 100% the number of axles bearing down on the road (taken with those connected to the towing vehicle) and so must increase and/or exacerbate the wear and tear of the highways, thereby indirectly driving up the road tax for other road users.

Taking all these (alright, alright - somewhat biased) points into account, it struck me that on many levels, caravans can be thought of as just another HGV vehicle; you could replace the word caravan in many of the above points with "articulated lorry" and they'd still make sense.

Use of HGV vehicles is of course, heavily regulated and heavily taxed (directly or indirectly) and given that they share so many fundamental characteristics with the caravan, I don't really understand why the two things should be treated so differently.

A more egalitarian approach could be achieved in a number of ways:

1. Introduce an uplift on the standard road tax for any car owners that intend to tow a caravan.
2. Introduce a separate caravan road tax - i.e. have a caravan registered as a separate, legal vehicle that is subject to same road tax banding as standard non-HGV vehicles.
3. Introduce a tachometer-based taxation which introduces a price per mile travelled levy that would need to be paid dependent on usage.
4. Introduce a devolutionary toll-based system which would be collected using the existing caravan-site infrastructure, thereby eliminated the need for any additional infrastructure (i.e. toll boothes).
   

Looking around on the web, it appears that some degree of caravan taxation has in fact been proposed previously - check out this page for Margaret Becketts anti-caravan taxation stance and a link to a petition against it.


Margaret Beckett getting sloshed in her caravan. This picture was actually taken moving at high speed down the M4 between Swindon and Bristol.

Margaret Beckett, unusually, not in her caravan and attending to matters of state.

It looks to me as the basic arguments against some form of caravan taxation fall could be summarised as follows:

1. People have a "right to roam" freely, taken way too literally this is translated into the right that caravanners have to "hitch up" and then subsequently invade any part of the UK, without having to pay for the privilege.
2. Caravanners typically only use their caravans occasionally, and so some form of taxation that assumes constant or background usage would be unfair.
3. Stars and upstanding role models such as Madonna and Jamie Oliver, have claimed at some point to have either caravanned, or more likely purchased some massively expensive all in one "roam-a-home" as part of some publicity stunt or strategy, so it must be alright, good and decent.
4. Caravanners contribute massively to the local econonmy, through the purchase of foodstuffs, refills for their chemical toilets etc...

All of the above, with the exception of number four seem pretty unsubstantial from where I'm sitting. To take each in turn:

1. Everyone has a right to roam in their caravan, except of course for travellers and those with a genuinely peripatetic or itinerant lifestyle, where land ownership and invasion of privacy laws appear to come into force. I suspect that most caravan-fans would probably support the taxation of genuinely migratory people, and I also suspect that most caravan owners wouldn't like to have a transient settlement on their back door step.
   
2. Occasional use of a caravan is moot. The point is that most caravanners tend to occasionally use their caravans at the same occasional point in time, thereby creating the problems cited earlier in this posting. If there was some kind of uniform distribution governing the occasional use of the caravanning fraternity, then many of the problems wouldn't be as bad as I'd perceive them to be. The fact is that the major downsides to caravan use are symptomatic of a clustered pattern to their usage and distribution across the UK roads at peak periods throughout the year.
3. I'm not going into this one, it's a lifestyle choice I suppose - sincere or otherwise.
4. OK - so the contribution to local economy is great. Not as great as it would be if a small proprtion of the caravanners elected to use a local hotel, guest house or other means of local accommodation as an alternative once in a while. Those non-caravanners that don't have the ability to be "self-sufficient" surely contribute a larger proportion of revenue to local business, than those that basically sit in their mobile lounges, eating food probably bought in Tesco before they set off.

There. That's about all I wanted to say on the subject of caravans for the time being - and I'm pressed for time so need to crack on with some other stuff. If you read this post, and have a strong view one way or the other then I'd love to hear from you - just pop in a comment using the links provided.

Primus

OK - so this is my first blog post ever (even though I've been working in the IT sector for something like 13 years now); so right up front I'll apologise to all of you readers for my slightly less than polished writing style.

To be honest, I don't even read many blog articles myself and so I'm not 100% certain what mode of speech is regarded as cool within the blogosphere (is that the correct word?) - I'm just going to try and be as spontaneous as possible, and try not to inject too many expletives
into my postings.

The purpose of this blog? Well, simple really - it's nothing more complicated than just having somewhere that I can use to put down my thoughts, reflections and rants about various topics, many of which will probably seem trivial, a lot of which will seem irrelevant and hopefully a few of which might be interesting enough to merit reading by your good selves, and at least perhaps give you something to think about (or sympathise with or rage against).

I understand that this blog engine has a commenting facility built in, and to be honest I'd more than welcome comments (no matter how inane, no matter how blunt or derogatory); I've a pretty thick skin and above all value the right of others to have a healthy, hopefully grown up discussion on any particular subject. Get personal with me in your comments and I'll get personal right back at you. You have been warned :)

Given that I've never really done this before, this blog won't have (or at least I don't think it will at the moment) a specific subject area - I've quite eclectic interests and tastes to be honest, so expect to see some fairly wide and varied posts on here.

That's about it for a starter - I've just started my working day so need to get cracking with my day job, I'll put up my first "real" posting later on in the day.