Posts

Showing posts from February 17, 2008

6.0 quake 200 miles from home.

You wouldn't know it where we are, but a 6.0 quake shook Wells in Nevada this morning, 200 miles to the west of us. Makes me wonder whether we should invest in earthquake insurance. The problem is that they keep going on about "the big one" here, telling us we're well overdue. The USGS doesn't agree, instead reckoning the Utah earthquake clock has over a 100 years to go. Everyone is afraid of the Wasatch Fault, but that's not the problem here; it's the blind faults that cause most shakers in Utah. What to do? On the one hand, hundreds of little quakes each year mean the faults are letting off steam so a large one is unlikely. On the other hand, todays event destroyed buildings very close to home. I wonder what the chances are that an insurance company would actually pay out on quake insurance? After all, insurance companies don't make money by paying out.

I'm so glad we left England.

Given that airports typically are closed between 1am and 6am, when do you think the perfect time would be to upgrade a baggage handling system's software? If you guessed the answer was "peak travel hours", congratulations, you must work for BA or the BAA And then to compound the issue, it would be a brilliant idea to then ban suitcases from all flights and impose a size restriction on the carry-on bags. BA and the BAA do it again - utter chaos at one of the country's busiest airports. BA bans suitcases from flights

Toshiba calls it quits. RIP HD-DVD

Do you hear those bells in the distance? It's the Church of HD signalling the demise of HD-DVD. Toshiba announced today that they're killing HD-DVD. They're pulling all the licenses, stopping the manufacture of hardware and software. Blu-Ray wins. Which is nice for two reasons. 1. It's the better format technically - which means this is a first because the technically better format normally loses (minidisc, betamax etc) 2. We, the consumer, don't have to deal with yet another stupid format war. Well, there is a third reason of course - it's going to cause a hell of a lot of problems for Microsoft who baselined the Xbollox360 on HD-DVD. So sad. Toshiba kills HD-DVD

It's winter - deal with it.

The news tonight had a bunch of soundbites of people complaining about the weather. One woman was going on about how she was counting the seconds until it was officially spring. Tag her. Go back to her in August when we've had 20 days of 40 degree heat and see what she says - I bet any amount of money she says she's fed up of the summer. Anyone remember last year when people were bitching about how little snow we had? When we had 30 inversion days where the air was allegedly so bad people were being advised to stay inside? Deal with it people - it's winter. We're having a bumper snow year this year which means lots of meltwater, which means topped up reservoirs, lakes and rivers. We've only had 6 inversion days this year. We should all be uber-pleased with this.

9890 vertical feet

Another good skiing day today - sunny but cold - which was much better than last week. At least today you didn't break into a sweat just riding the lift :)