The Staffordshire Building Society

A sad sight - I remember this friendly little branch of the local building society and the kind way that they treated me the first time that I went in. Some years after that I remember the letter from the Portman saying that despite the takeov...erm, merger, ther was no intention of changing the local brand for the Staffordshire. Then I remember seeing Portman slapped all over it. Then Nationwide zapped Portman. And Nationwide have a branch around the corner and down the High Street of course. Voila.

Back to Brussels

More proposal review work brings me back to Brussels for a few days, not too long after returning from a short visit to Finland doing some work there and also to see Bruce Springsteen again at Tampere.  Brussels is humid tonight and there was some very strange music coming out of the cafe across the road from the hotel.  One glass of wine and the sight of an unfortunate crawling around the pavement a little the worse the wear was enough tonight.  Early night and double expresso in the morning should set me up for the day ahead.

Plastic everywhere

An enterprising solution to the seemingly ubiquitouos problem of waste plastic wrapping and bagging.

It's back...

Service @ Skerratt.com resumes - or so it seems. Now I must begin the updating.  But first, 2 days in Brussels working with the EU and, before that, the joys of the M6 and Birmingham Airport.

Journey to the Darkside

Skerratt.com has gawn...erm...dark. I tried to be too clever by half and update the nameservers for the . com, .org and .net sites only to find that they have all moved into some form of domain registration propogation limbo adjacent to the 6th circle of hell. Things have been a little flakey for a while as I hosted the site with one company whilst the domains were run from another - no big deal in itself but when you throw in the .org and the .net pointing to the .com and the pages for the .com living 250 miles away as the crow flies then with me in the mix it's a recipe for disaster.

Anyhow, I have now set in motion the transfer of .com so that it can co-habit with the site content. We shall have to wait and see if they become happy bedfellows and fellowesses...as a first step seeing something resembling the old site rather than a parking notice would be a great start.

Patience grasshopper...and another glass of wine.

El Capitan - the hard way

Anyone who has been to Yosemite and looked up...and up...and up...from the bottom of that BIG mountain they have there will appreciate this lovely short vid. narrated by a member of the first team who climbed it.

Brian Cox speaks of Carl Sagan

I miss Carl - I miss looking forward to hearing and seeing him on the radio and TV and I miss reading his ideas and descriptions of the things that matter most in our world.

Like Brian, I was also one of those who sat and listened and watched every one of those 13 episodes of Cosmos, and, through Carl, began to understand for myself the awsomeness and the beauty and the intrigue and the wonderful, jaw-dropping shear scale of those 'billions and billions' of stars and the unimaginable distances and dimensions between them.

One thing that has lived with me since the time I first heard Carl describe it was that we are all made of 'star-stuff'. All of the atoms except hydrogen that go to make each and every one of us has, at some time, been in a star...somewhere...long ago. That is just a staggering, humbling, fantastic concept to grasp. 'We are made of star stuff' - I've just found the quote in my hard back copy of the book on page 233. Bought at the time of the original transmission, re-read on countless occasions and treasured greatly, this book along with The Demon Haunted World has done more than I realise in shaping who I am and how I think.

"For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." — Carl Sagan, Cosmos.