The difficulty of being green

My laptop's been comatose all week, thankfully due to a kaboomed power supply rather than any fault with the mainboard. While it took less than 24 hours for a replacement to arrive (thank you Layer One) it raised a question: what exactly do you do with a dead power supply?

Like most electronic gear, you can't just throw it in a bin; it'll still be a discrete article in the landfill 10,000 years hence. But I've no idea what to actually do with it that'll be useful, as opposed to merely make me feel a sense of smug self-satisfaction. (If you look at what energy actually gets saved by so-called conservationists you'll get a shock. Per person, cars emit less pollutants than trains, driving to the bottle bank generally negates any effect of recycling the glass, and taking this power supply to the Council dump or whatever will entail a detour involving cars AND trains.)

Any ideas gratefully received. In the meantime, anyone want a dead PSU?

The Onion - back on track

Idly surfing this article after Makepeace nostalgia-linked to it, it seems The Onion is back on form after a rocky 2005. This is a classic. And any Bay Area resident will laugh at this.

It's been a hard week. I think I'll go to the museum...

Every bit of bad luck I have this month, I'll just smile and think of this guy. Don't worry too much about the vases - they were probably old ones anyway.

Slow news day in Nairobi

I like to constantly remind myself that people in other countries have different concerns... and different opinions about what's newsworthy.

Lib Dems: on a platform of 'being entertaining'

The incredibly rapid implosion of Britain's third major party continues. Following Charles Kennedy's alcoholism and Oaten's rent boy allegations throwing the subsequent leadership race into disarry, my previous MP Simon Hughes has now admitted homosexual relationships in the past. But the Liberal Democrats are happy. Why? Because they've had more media coverage in the past two weeks than in the previous decade!

You just open your mouth, surely?

How exactly does a whale die of dehydration?

Bacchus beckons, to no avail

My drive to cut down alcohol intake is going fine, except when out; no wine on weekday evenings is now the rule rather than the exception. Definitely feeling clearer-headed, although I'm not sure the terrifying reality of existence is actually preferable to the comfortable numbness at the bottom of a decent bottle.

Liberal by name, liberal by...

Something nicely sniggerworthy in the job title of three-in-a-bed former Liberal leadership contender Mark Oaten: he's Home Affairs spokesman.

My word, it's really a week of hackneyed jokes on my blog.

More on the CIA's torture flights. It seems about 200 went through the UK. In fact Britain's airports are crammed daily with people shortly to experience extreme pain, but they're all flying Ryanair.

Yaaaaay Paul!

Paul Makepeace has scored a job with some little startup outfit or other. Always thought that guy was a great coder, and as I recall his parties aren't half bad either :-)

Talking about Canada's elective swing rightwards, former British Conservative leader Michael Howard hits it on the head: worldwide, we're seeing the utter failure of the centre-left to deliver.

The hard-left aren't my gang, but at least they have ideas and intellect, even if those ideas have bankrupted and corrupted every country that ever called itself Marxist, Stalinist, or Leninist. (Definition of a Socialist: someone who's really good at spending other people's money.) The centre-left, however - in Germany, Britain, much of Europe, and now Canada - likes the glamour of the revolution while lacking the brains to do the work.

Ideas are cheap. Execution is hard. Perhaps the reason Conservatives have fewer figureheads is that being a Conservative is harder. If you're blue you can't help people as much, you've got to take more responsibility for yourself and hold others responsible for theirs. In its worst incarnations - like the current American administration - this translates as greed, cronyism, and self-dealing. But at its best, Conservatism can build strong societies, great innovations, and sustainable growth.

Weren't pet rocks an 80s thing?

More Johnny English than James Bond: British spies have been hiding transmitters in garden ornaments.

Has John Prescott gone for a swim? No, it's Pete the Pilot Whale!

At first, Londoners thought the Deputy PM had taken a dive out of his Parliamentary window. But no, it's Britain's latest media sensation, Pete the Whale! (Note to Evening Standard: he's not a pilot.)

They've now got the big guy onto a barge - it's looking like they'll have to put him down, and the vet that does will be the object of hatred until the day he dies. They're not going to have many volunteers for that one.

Just goes to show that only three things sell newspapers - as one 1940s Fleet Street man put it, "Babies wiv an 'eart-throb, animals wiv an 'eart-throb, and what you might call sex." But as someone who's done two triathlons in that river, I find pictures like this rather scary.

Parrot sketch

Monty Python has a lot to answer for. Just as a group of hooded Middle Easterners on the news instantly evokes Life of Brian's stoning scene, nobody over 30 in Britain can see a story about a parrot without bringing up the Dead Parrot Sketch.

But you have to admit this is funny. A guy finds out about his girlfriend's infidelity from his parrot - and then has to get rid of the parrot when he won't stop calling the guy's name out.

So California has executed its oldest Death Row prisoner yet. In keeping with tradition, Clarence Ray Allen has a three-part name - but did they really have to execute him just after midnight on his BIRTHDAY? "Merry fucking birthday! Hur hur hurr..." Zap.

I remember writing one of those 'What I want to be when I grow up' essays as a kid - I wanted to be an executioner. Can't remember if I preferred the noose or the blade, though. On reflection, it was probably demonstrative of nothing more than an early interest in black outfits.

Lengths of lines

Weird. Idly flipping around during a five minute afternoon tea recharge, I noticed some weird stuff about the Tube. The Jubilee Line, which I've always thought of as a long one, is in fact one of the shortest of the 'big' ones (discounting little 2km oddities like Waterloo & City) at 36km. While the Central line, which I thought was quite short, is in fact the longest at 72km.

(How this came up, incidentally, is that a newsfeed just churned out a figure of 2000 Tube drivers talking about strike action and I wondered how many drivers per train the system actually has. With 12 main lines, 63 trains on the Jubilee, and 408km of total track, a scratchpad figure would be 1 train per 600m max (that's a lot, isn't it? Do they have all the trains in operation at once?) making over 700 trains. So about 3 drivers per train which doesn't sound too overmanned. )

Million Dollar Homepage hits home

Well done, Alex! The Million Dollar Homepage reaches seven figures, thanks to an eBayer who valued the last hundred pixels at $380 each.

What's often forgotten in such brilliantly-simple ventures is the work that goes on behind the scenes - the endless effort needed to make an 'overnight success'. Alex Tew has constantly publicised his site and idea, giving up to a dozen interviews a day worldwide - it wasn't the hardest $1m ever made, but nor did it come as easily as most people think. It's not in the idea, but the execution.

Brown breaches EU borrowing rules

Looks like he ran out of fudges: the UK will break European borrowing guidelines soon. While the rules are designed to keep the Euro stable - and Britain's not in the Eurozone - any major deviation by an economy the size of Britain's will affect the zone's stability. Especially with so many countries on the edge; at least a dozen are in technical or overt breach of the S&GP.

More so than just after the election - when Blair et al won what'd normally be considered a landslide, yet suffered weeks of doom and gloom as pundits pondered all the seats he lost - this, I think, is the real beginning of the end for the New Labour project. I sense Brown's support starting to ebb.

After all, a trained monkey would've made a better Chancellor better than Brown. Somehow he's turned a £50bn surplus and a constantly growing economy into a £20bn hole in the public finances, despite raiding pensions and raising taxes everywhere.

Perhaps I'm being too hard, though. Chancellors aren't project managers, they're project administrators who think they're project managers. (An administrator's job is to note things down; a manager's is to make things happen.) Any influence they have on the UK economy is at best minimally positive and more often disproportionately negative. As that little tussle with the ERM (that ended John Major's PMship) proved, the weight Britain's government can bring to bear on the economy (a few clumsy billions) mean nothing when trillions move through world markets day by day, finding homes and influencing development faster and more efficiently.

As with other areas of government, the best thing it can do for the economy is to get out of the way. Unfortunately, no Chancellor of any colour is ever likely to realise it.

"The path is too deep...."

And, presumably, the way forward is unclear. (All I was trying to do was copy a large encrypted volume downstairs to my new 500GB of network attached storage.) Not really the sort of cod-philosophical message I wanted to hear on a Sunday night with a half triathlon equivalent, a kilo of noodles, and a bottle of wine behind me.

Great hardware department

One of those lumps of hardware that does exactly what it says on the tin: my new network hard disk. A plain and sturdy metal box, one Ethernet cable to my home ADSL hub and one power cable plugged in, no software clogging the disk or drivers to install; switched it on and everything just works. Half a terabyte of backup now available to my various wifi-linked PCs, protected by a firewall, passwords, and the latest SHA cryptofunk. Brilliant.

Cheers, Charles!

Even if he only did it because the BBC was about to expose his visits to an alcoholism treatment centre, I applaud Charles Kennedy for having the guts to announce his 'little problem' at a press conference. What he SHOULD have done, though, was something theatrical - bringing in a bottle of whisky and smashing it on the floor, for example. It'd get the public on his side, and play to this personable Scot's strengths.

In my view, the Lib Dems will now get shot of Kennedy; everyone loves a public hanging, even if senior Liberals have said they'll support him. My preference as his successor would be Simon Hughes - maverick eccentric, fond of bow ties and driving yellow taxicabs. (No idea of his policies, but since he's a Lib Dem it doesn't matter.)

Dream team for the next British election: lugubrious PM Gordon Brown presiding over low growth and high taxes, fresh-faced David Cameron establishing New Conservatism, and Simon Hughes providing comic relief with a conscience. That'd be just great.

Intel's 65nm chips go gold

Latest chips out of the gate from Intel use a 65nm process. The pathways on the chips are just 0.00000065 of a metre across, which is really, really small, not far off the basic scale of ordinary matter. Yet they're doing it with industrial-age tools that fall far short of atomic-scale precision, masks and lithographics and acid washes and electron beams and x-rays that need a lot of hotrodding just to fool them into functioning.

Just three years ago 130nm was incredible enough, with 90 playing really hard-to-get. Yet this isn't 'nanotech'; under Foresight's definition nanotech refers to the precision of the engineering rather than the scale of the components. So this process is still microtechnology, hacking away at clumps of matter until you're left with something small, rather than the dream of molecular nanotechnology, building things atom by atom from the bottom up. But still... what an achievement modern chip production is.

Just think what this kind of engineering needs. Sixty-five nanometres! Silicon's a fairly fat atom, so that means the chip pathways are only about three hundred atoms wide. If you could walk down one of those pathways, the ground would be bumpy, and each bump would be an atom. Our analog macroscale world and the fine-grained world of the atomic scale are moving closer all the time.

And best of all, this technology's not rarified: it'll be in our desktops by summer. That's when great technology really deserves the name: when it becomes something everybody can use. Am I the only one who still gets a thrill when he switches on his PC?

Cameron driving forward

The Conservatives' latest ad strikes the right note; as long as they can keep their nerve and not rise to the provocations, they'll be comfortably back in power by 2010. The ad appeals to the masses on taxes and the NHS, without alienating the wealthy. And admitting that little issue with the ERM? A masterstroke.

Yesterday, Cameron showed his tactical focus: painting Gordon Brown as an old fart (since it's Brown he'll be facing at the next election) while letting it be known he thinks Tony Blair is an OK bloke. If he can avoid peaking too early, he's on course to beat PM Brown in a couple of years, and kick New Labour back into the wilderness. The plan has got off to a good start.

Happy to see you, 2006

On New Year's Eve, I took a long walk along the Thames from Greenwich as the London sky exploded. And I felt happy.

Happy at the possibilities I'm looking at in 2006: plenty of jobs and projects coming up. At just how utterly amazing this town is; a place where you just can't get bored, a place I'm happy to make my home. Even happy at the things I'm not happy about. Like not travelling enough. Not being fast enough in Triathlon. Not having a car, not having enough sex, having too big a balance on my Visa card. But all these things can be fixed. I'm happy because it's important to have things to look forward to.

So welcome, 2006. It's going to be a great year.

Stop whining, Ukraine

What a gas. I'm in two minds about Putin's latest strongarm tactics - cutting off Ukraine's gas supplies after they refused a price hike.

Ukraine's been paying $50 a K for Russia's gas - presumably mostly Siberian, with its price a hangover from Soviet times. Like many other recently independent republics, the Ukrainians are learning that you can't keep the benefits of being a subject state when you go it alone. On the face of it, Russia's 'request' (bear in mind a Russian request rarely has a No option) that they stump up $200+, in line with European customers, seems reasonable.

But like most of politics, it ultimately depends on where you draw the line in history. When countries split themselves in two (or twelve) they tend to leave disputed assets in place; the Black Sea Fleet, a web of oil pipelines, land-use rights.... with legal agreements and financial structures no less immutable for being intangible.

This stuff is the real hard work of independence - usually ignored by protesters camped out with their candles outside authoritarian architecture. Doing the numbers and the paperwork isn't a mopping-up operation; it's the whole show.

I wonder if the nationalists in Scotland (valid claim) and Wales (less valid) would be so enthusiastic after a proper economic impact study? Scotland's economic viability depends entirely on where you draw the line in the oilfields; Wales isn't a viable economic unit at all. Come to that, there are vast tracts of the North and Southwest of England that are hopelessly addicted to aid from Whitehall - and London feels more like a nation than a city, the neat line of the M25 as much a line of control as the DMZ between the Koreas.

Maybe I should declare independence for a certain 20 sq m footprint of southeast London. After all, my little mews house is a viable nation-state with legal title to its territory, high population density (equivalent to 50,000 people per sq km), a sound if slightly risky economic policy, a high PSBR but good overseas earnings to cover it, and interest rates and currency tied to its neighbouring countries. And if I ever have expansionary ambitions, the house next door is coming up for sale soon, which would double Chrisland's surface area at a stroke.