Sustainable Cottenham Group

With the end of winter almost in sight, we will stop thinking about heating bills, recover from the Christmas giving crunch, and probably have discarded another diet plan. But while matters hot and cold are still foremost; remember the environment and prepare your pocket before next winter. If your energy bill has been stressing you out, read on.

my best foot

The Sustainable Cottenham group was created to implement the goals of the Sustainable Parish Energy Partnership (SPEP) which helps parish councils support residents and communities to reduce energy bills, tackle climate change and build sustainable communities. The Cottenham group's main project at the moment is to get Cottenham insulated via the Eastern CRI Scheme.

The Sustainable Cottenham Group, has partnered with Cambridge Carbon Footprint who are guiding us in doing home surveys intended to help us find poor insulation, drafts, and other problems in our homes. Consisting of volunteers and some steerage from our councilors I would urge those interested to engage with the group via a councilor or group member. Not only are Cambridge Carbon Footprint arranging learning sessions which take homeowners through the technology, attitude change and available help sources, but they have also made a special thermal surveying camera available to Sustainable Cottenham and other groups. With these tools we can visit your home on request, and help you get started keeping your home warmer, bills down, and eventually greener too. A visit typically takes an hour, and we can help you find the exact cause of the cold air leaks you suspect are there but cannot find. We will show you ways to heat your home more efficiently without spending any money to start with.

my letter slot is letting in the cold

At the moment, thermal insulation surveys done can be particularly effective because cold air leaking into your home is so much colder and easier to detect, so you may want to hurry. A winter survey must be done in the cold of the evenings, with the house being heated at the time. The walk-through starts downstairs, moves upstairs, and then to the outside. Although recently built homes are well insulated, typical problems found are:

• a gap under the front door?
• gaps where door insulation has come away?
• radiators hidden behind large furniture?
• insulation disturbed by recent wiring or plumbing?
  

Get a check list tailored to what is going on in your home, and formulate your own family energy sustainability plan. Then move on to the structural changes and have Eastern CRI quote you on cavity wall and ceiling insulation.

The Sustainable Cottenham group plans to re-show the Age of Stupid DVD and to arrange a visit to the Donarbon recycling center. Energy monitors are available on loan for the power wizards amongst us; please contact Cllr Kelso for further information.

Sustainable Cottenham Group

Probably the easiest way to reduce your carbon footprint is to take steps to reduce permanently, without affecting your lifestyle. People will always reject long term sacrifice, a major reason why all diets start in January and fail in February, so better insulation and appliance use in your home (about a third of your footprint) can reduce impact long term. The Cottenham group are encouraging villagers to take up an offer to insulate your home based on a standardized quote and work order. This has been set up in conjunction with local councils to simplify getting insulation installed and reduce the cost to homeowners.

For anyone using this scheme, a referral portion is given back to the Parish Council through the Sustainable Cottenham Group.

See also -Community escapes big British Freeze and Thermal Imaging for Insulation.

A different community

Last night I met up with a different community, an obscure underground movement that challenges the educational values held by the captains of democracy. They call themselves happy hackers.
Technology has become more affordable to the mass-market, but at the same time more accessible. You can perform scientific observations, investigations and home learning now, more than ever before. It's a bit like open-source, but for education.

For more on what they do, visit my e-journal.
For that that find this prospect scary, do not visit my techno blog/journal.

Community escapes big British Freeze

Well to be honest, the whole county seems to have escaped the horror stories about the entire United Kingdom. There has been the good-natured grumble, the dismayed grumble, and then defense of Councils and the Highway Agency maintenance of our roads. The gritty part of this story is how the state has now gotten involved in what is really a day-today matter of letting a tiny team of often overlooked men, women and their machines get out there and grit the roads. Ok, it's not that funny - seriously; why do we need to get salt imported from the mainland in such a hurry? Are the 'food-miles' out of proportion with the emergency? That's not going to do my carbon footprint any good at all.
Talking about carbon, I wonder how green we can make our websites?
I have lost count of the internet interests in the village I live in. For 2500 households, we have at least 10 websites, all doing different things, for different reasons, many looking a bit Web 1.0. Sure, sites link to each other, we have to do this kind of thing to survive, but are we just surviving, or are the geeks in the community actually going somewhere with all this computing power.

I got a newsletter recently, one of the Cambridge professors has a plan to make PCs greener, perhaps things like desktops that shut off when not in use, servers that go into sleep mode when not used; I'm probably breaking some patent law by just talking about this. So where are you going today Conrad? (Wow, this journal is looking like a blog, suddenly I'm talking to myself)
Greener printing, greener load-time web pages, in short greener conscience.
In more pertinent news, an update on a new plan to start a Cottenham e-newsletter circulation will be up next. The site is still blank, but it won't hurt to get some early visits.

I should get ready for my big interview tomorrow. Ciao.

Thermal Imaging for Insulation

Our village has been awarded some funding recently by peoples ITV millions program for our community center. It meant we had to get together and vote for our village via phone over a single day. The number of telephone votes proved, that the village has a lot going for it, and a lot of spirit. Hopefully the Sustainable Cottenham project will see similar support. The part of the program that interests me is energy saving, in all it's forms.

The interesting bit for me at the moment is thermal insulation surveying, and a cool tool called a Thermal Imaging Camera - sometimes used in firefighting, electrical fault detection, and in building inspection.

The picture  left is the kind of thing the camera does. There are a number of conditions that need to be right for the survey to be effective, and even tools that can assist in amplifying the leak detection opportunities.
Aspects like:

• Rain
• wind
• Sunshine
• Heating not actually running

All mess with the survey, meaning it has to be

• Cold at night, or
• Overcast

I can only imagine, this survey - although lots of it is done indoors too will be a lot of hard difficult work. The survey is being assisted by the loan of the device from 'Carbon Footprint'.

Links:

• Transition Cambridge website 
• Thermal images from homes in Cambridge
• Cambridge Carbon Footprint
  

New year resolution

How many people have you given dignity this Christmas? It's a rhetorical, so I'm leaving it there.

Welcome to 2010

The end of the festive season is drawing near. All passengers wishing to catch the bus back to Jan 2009, please disembark now, before the next stop. An educational year, but not one I want to live through again, no sir!
About 69 desperate journal entries were posted, all just musings that define the year's highs and lows as you would expect.

• The year saw some tentative entry into English pub life .
• I started having fun building micro controller gidgets (these notes now move to a new space)
• I was really enjoying my new workplace
• But it came to an unfortunate end for no "good" reason.

At this point 2010 can only get better, will it hold crazy new-years resolutions. Will drug or drink-induced homicides stop? As per last year, loosing weight will be in order, keeping the chin up is also called for, and at any rate, promises to be different to 2009.

Happy new Year

Words as Tools

The warning letter given me by my littlest angel.
"dad is not allowed
in my bedroom
until
in the morning"

Please excuse the grammar, but that is literacy at 5 years for you. Better than most, once we teach him the direction of the tummy facing for 'b' and 'd', he will be writing up the magna carta. For those who do not know what this kind of letter is, this is the Magna Carta according to Gregory. I just love it :-)

I think this writ was a response to my harsh words ejecting the aforementioned denizen from the parental bedroom. I found it stuck on our door, I also hope this means we can use words much more in the future.

Blog clean-up

Having decided to work a bit on my networking skills, here is another of the series of auto-posts. Auto-posts are detected by looking at the post-time, the minutes are set to 00, and I type them up, and trigger them usually a day or two hence, to post when I'm nicely warm in bed sleeping.

I've also added more widgets to my blog - but have a question now about audience and focus.

Boxing day meaning

It turns out that the origins of boxing day are lost in the mists so to speak, this is only interesting because where I lived, the name got changed to Day of Goodwill, in order to remove the colonial connotation attached to the holiday.
Because the history has been lost in the British observance , its particularly cunning to bring up the topic of how we treat our history. It's honestly moot, because even the origins of festival days 'adopted' by the christian faith seem to be lacking in effectiveness at bringing their point across.

For a long time I thought public holidays (called bank holidays in the UK after the abolishing of the slave trade) were just ways to get extra holidays, and undercut a countries GDP in a secret communist plot to make people believe they were getting a day off for free. That was a long time ago, a long time ago. I went on for a while to the idea that holidays were productivity devices, intended to make people work even harder in the run-up. It works well for projects that need to get out of the door sometimes. But my healthy paranoia has been proven unfounded time and again. It's just a in which day to recover from our own indulgences.

Twas the night before Christmas

And all through the house, not a creature was stirring. not even a mouse...

It is probably the most exciting time of year for children. this year was pretty good because it has been snowing up to Christmas, the snow has all melted now, but that does not change the white Christmas feel. In fact I'm not sure a frost feast-day is all that great a deal. before someone comes out in Grinch mode, we will just clarify, it's Scrooge mode this year, although the boys are not that hard done by in the end. This year there is just not a 'big-ticket' present under the tree for each of them.


I have gotten out quite cheaply too, all I have is a Mr Men coffee mug - appropriately it's the Mr grumpy character. I hope that's not a predestination.

Passport processing times (RSA)

I got the following email this morning - still waiting for my fresh South African passport to come back. We need to renew soon, so may as well get it done now before the rush on British Citizenship applications begins. You got to apply early, it looks like it normally takes 2-4 months, and 6 on the outside.

CLOSURE OF THE CONSULAR SECTION DURING FESTIVE SEASON
23 DECEMBER - 8.45 – 12h45
24-28 DECEMBER - CLOSED
29-30 DECEMBER - 8.45 – 12h45
31 DECEMBER - 1 JANUARY - CLOSED


Still enjoying reading the study guide for the "Life in the UK" test :-). It's pretty much Hobson's choice I hear - whatever that means.

It's obligatory to have images in blog posts, so here is one blast from the past - in South Africa.

Pray for Schools

Wouldn’t it be great if every local school was a prayed for school!

Pray for schools is an evening to encourage such a vision! So whether your a parent, student, or staff member. Church, children, or youth leader, please join Christian Resources Into Schools, Ely Diocese, Scripture Union, WCCYM and Cambridge & District YFC for a special night of inspiration.
http://www.cambridgeyfc.com/prayforschools
Pray for Schools - Friday 22nd January 2010

For those who are in the area:
St Bede’s School
Birdwood Road,
Cambridge
7.45-9.15pm (Coffee from 7.30pm)


3 web based resources to ignite and inspire:
Bible engagement - www.wordlive.org
School clubs and groups – www.schoolslive.org
Sunday groups – www.lightlive.org

Software download statistics

My download report for the last 2 weeks, looks impressive, but what does it mean?
Report for - Modbus - PLC Simulator






Report for - DIP Switch






I will have to come back in a month's time and compare.
Statistics are gathered from these 2 URLs on a 3rd-party download site called BrotherSoft. (nope, not related to Broederbond)
I need to turn this all into a marketing window.

Iced in for Xmas?

Tomorrow we will decide if we are going to be traveling on Christmas day. Looks pretty poorly, it snowed 5 days ago, and there is no sign of this stuff melting away. More cold weather, and some sleet already falling tonite means more slippery conditions.

On a lighter note, 2010 may be a good year :-)

What matters now

Free e-book, download it here off Seth's blog .
OK, so you are selling me another free book, I think without even asking the question I am asking more. So I'll share a bit about Dignity (this was my TFTD a week ago by some co-incidence), nothing spooky going on.
"Dignity is more important than wealth. It’s going
to be a long, long time before we can make
everyone on earth wealthy, but we can help people
find dignity this year (right now if we choose to)."

Go ahead, download it, I dare you to rush this.

Brrrr it's cold outside

OK, can someone remind me, why I came to live in this icy cold place?













The snow is very powdery as you can see here. Not wet enough to roll up into a snowman without a whole lot of effort.










It's unusual to get snow before Christmas, if at all until Feb, but it has been pretty much fun.

Boys+Railway+Mud=Fun

Before:

After:

Proof:

Wheel blockage:

Yep, it's blocked with mud we think:

Aaah, the happy biker:

Disappointed that I missed out on all the fun this time - good stuff!

Do not Click

I'm warning you, do not click here . But if you do (you should) you only have to click once, on the entire site it's the internet, but without carpel-tunnel syndrome Yay!

Software Engineering

I once was given a theoretical challenge, write a software engine, that can write software to interface with other system on it's own through learning. A kind of AI but not AI, instead at the end it must write it's own new program. Yes, it is possible if you had enough time for a process to connect up to another process, and try through brute force to start sharing data; finally saving the result as a new program. It's conceivable only because computers are good at repetitive tasks, so long as a human starts both ends off with a fighting chance and there are some rules in place, it should work?

Well the problem was a bit more complicated than that, but I nonetheless went off to consider this problem. Firstly with fear because if it could be done, software developers would start putting themselves out of work, but eventually once convinced it could not be done, I relaxed a little. Well this was a long time ago, perhaps a few decades hence I could re-formulate the same original question properly and on paper (I won't now because that would loose IP), and ask it again.

Engineering is full of questions and solutions that just do not quite work at the time. How many new technologies enabling their completion do there need to be?