We spent a lot of time today building some flat pack furniture. This was some shelves that we bought quite a while ago, but never got around to building because it required time, effort and patience. Three things that we rarely had on their own, let alone at the same …
You can now sign up for July’s Disastrous Dinners Event.
I have decided not to host one during June due to a couple of other IChemE events including our AGM. The next talk will be by myself and will cover how sugar managed to blow up a factory. My …
I started the day with two tasks that I wanted to complete. One, I thought would be very simple, it is done so many times, all I would need to do is find an example online and copy it, possibly with a couple of minor tweeks. The second task involved …
Today I needed to go back to our supplier's factory to do some more testing, but I also had a meeting first thing at our own site first. As a result, I drove over to the other factory at 10:15 rather than the usual 07:15.
What a difference …
Over the weekend we were discussing how people view the EU and, in particular, the idea that it is somehow undemocratic. I don't intend to go into detail about how this is silly when compared to Westminster with its First-Past-the-Post voting for one chamber and complete lack of voting for …
Our kids have an amazing ability to wake up before the alarm every day EXCEPT the days that they go to nursery. On nursery days, we can sleep in for up to 30 minutes before we really need to get up, at which point the rest of the morning routine …
This morning, the weather was brilliant. I took a quick trip into Edinburgh to pick up my bike from the bike shop after its service. This involved a nice walk on my own through the woods, a quiet train ride into Edinburgh, a leisurely stroll through the streets of edinburgh …
After finishing their dinner, the two boys went back outside to play in the garden. I was asked if I could get their bikes out. As I was still finishing my own food, and it was nearly time for bed, I told them that I wasn’t getting them out …
Tomorrow will very likely be the last time I get to vote in the European elections. I am not completely sure who I will vote for.
It is a proportional representation system, therefore the choice should be simple: vote for the party whose policies match your own the closest. And …
Yesterday I was able to attend a presentation on alarms and HMIs1by Bill Hollifield. Bill quiet literally wrote the books on alarms and HMIs.
The first part of the presentation was on alarm management, what problems different sites face and how to fix them. To be honest, there …
At some point back in Febuary, I was admiaring the beautiful sunrise on the way into work. I took a quick photo before putting my phone away before entering the site. As usual when I looked at the photo on the screen, it was not anywhere near as nice as …
Rocking in this chair
Close your eyes and cuddle in
Sleep tight little one
So one of our kids decided that leaving the supermarket be the main entrance was a silly idea. This double door with big bars on it would let us get to the car much faster. If course he managed to set of an alarm. A very loud alarm. Painfully loud …
One of the discussions that happened after the previous Disastrous Dinners talk covered operator fatigue, particularly when performing monotonous activities that still require a great deal of focus.
The conversation started with a discussion about how much distraction you allow in a control room. Do you ban all Personal phones …
Last night David Sparks gave a great presentation on the Smiler Rollercoaster accident that happened at Alton Towers in 2015. This was the latest in my disastrous dinners series of events that aim to provide a talk about process safety in a social environment that everyone should be able to …
Whenever I have a thought, followed by the thought "I should write about that", I try to write the first thought down as soon as possible.
If I don't write it down, the chances are high that I will forget about it. It doesn't have to be much, just enough …
Back in 2014, I was curious how the proportional representation system used for the EU elections, the D'Hondt method, worked. I built a simple javascript program to allocate the seats based on the number of votes for different parties, then added recent opinion polls to the page to see how …
NOTICE I initially posted this article with the wrong title, calling the phone the A0 rather than A40.
After postponing as long as I could, I eventually accepted that I needed a new phone and bought one last weekend.
My requirements were:
Journey on the train
Adventure to Newcastle
To watch the rugby
Scotrail have managed to annoy some folk by claiming that they don’t charge extra for traveling at peak times, they merely offer a discount for travelling at off-peak times. Of course both ways of looking at it end up with the same result, but scotrail want to frame it …
I wanted to do a calculation. It is quite a complex calculation but I remember writing a tool to do it about five years ago. I thought it would be a quick job to look the old tool out, updated some numbers and check the results.
Unfortunately after half an …
How hard can it be
To do your job and connect?
”Very” says bluetooth
I have finished reading Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and my main feelings about it are those of frustration.
On the whole I did not like the book. I think I mostly agree with the author, but his style is so off putting that I can't see myself recommending it …
I am used to the idea of working on a bank holiday. The place I work at just lumps all the bank holidays into your normal annual holiday allowance1. If you want to take the bank holiday off, you need to book it off. The places my dad and …
This weekend has been a party weekend. We have now reached the stage of family life that the social calendar is booked up with events that our kids are invited to rather ourselves. It was nice to see the boys having lots of fun, even if it does make them …
Ken Perlin wrote a blogpost last night about being nowhere, the idea of being in a place such as a train station or airport, where everyone is just on their way to somewhere else.
Well almost everyone.
My dad used to design and project manage shop refits including several shops …
At the start of last month, a team member announced that at the end of the shutdown, he was going to weigh the same as me. He was going to start eating healthier and focusing on his exercise. I was unaware of this at the time, I was working off-site …
I was listening to a discussion about a study titled “Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?”. Most of the other coverage of the study has been around which groups of people were shown to be either more or less truthful while merely describing the …
We have some 'smart lights' installed in our house with various timers set up. When we first set them up, we found that they occasionally got mixed up and would be on when we would want them off. I had thought we had bottomed out all the bugs months ago …
After last night’s post, I received a comment via linkedin, pointing out that it takes a fair bit of money to produce quality content and it needs to get paid for some how. If companies are not willing to put the money in, then the only alternative is to …
IChemE have just published a blog post How do we achieve, maintain and demonstrate competencies for process safety?.
IChemE and its members are intrinsically involved in sharing lessons through various streams of work; the IChemE Safety Centre, the Safety and Loss Prevention Special Interest Group, and producing journals and publications …
Last night, I logged into twitter for the first time in two and a half years. I simply posted a link to yesterday’s blogpost, so that the pedal on parliament organisers would be aware that it had been written.
I have considered, should I end my self imposed exile …
This weekend will host numerous Pedal on Parliament protests around the country. Pedal on Parliament is a campaign to improve facilities for active travel, that is walking as well as cycling. The theory being that if there are better facilities, safer and faster paths, more people will travel by active …
Well that didn’t last long. My shiny new bike managed two days of commuting and has already had its first flat tire. So it is back to driving.
My bike isn’t the only one feeling flat. I think it is a combination of fighting a cold and the …
We have discovered an unexpected side effect of energy efficient light bulbs.
When I was a kid, the lamps1 operate at really high temperatures. Therefore you were encouraged not to play with them because if you did touch them it hurt. Lots.
These days, the LED lamps produce very …
This evening, I am feeling sonder. Sonder is, according to [the dictionary of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”1.
As I look out at all the houses I can see across the valley …
Today I somehow managed to find the time to do some home baking. One of the local baker shops sells Balmoral Pies, like scotch pies, but with chicken, creamy sauce and haggis in them. I was curious if I could recreate the pie for the members of my family who …
There has been a campaign for some years to try and get the term ‘Engineer’ protected in the same way that Architect and Doctor and a few other professions are. The reason being that engineers who have had to attend university to get a degree in engineering and then do …
We went out as a family for a day of cycling. Well, some cycling and lots of playing at the Falkirk Wheel. It was a good opportunity to enjoy my new bike.
On the way home I was pulling the trailer and about to enter calendar park. I hit a …
Ken Perlin wrote a blog post a couple of days ago examining how people will write code in the future. There is a discussion around whether the QWERTY keyboard will continue to be the main input method or will something else take over? Will we use gestures and graphical programing …
For the past three weeks, I have been at a suppliers factory testing a project prior to delivery to site. The other day, one of the managers of the other company came over to our group and gave a graduate a challenge, write an excel script to colour each cell …
Tonight I have admitted defeat. It is the third Wednesday of the month, the night I had penciled in for this month's Disastrous Dinner. The problem being that I still haven't organised it yet.
I could have organised an event for next week, but I want to move away from …
While looking at the pictures of last night's fire in Notre-Dame, I am again reminded of how powerful and destructive fires are.
I have held a fire hose when it was active. I know what the force of water leaving the hose feels like. And yet, the pictures of the …
This morning was a morning full of mistakes on my part. Nothing serious, just frustrating. Lots of small things that just lead to more work needing done. More stuff to tidy up. Lucky the day has gotten better as it has gone on and it has actually been a pretty …
To go with my new bike, I bought a couple of new locks on amazon. One was a high security thing, while the other was what others have described as a ‘cafe lock’. The sort of thing that is very light and easy to carry and can be attached in …
To celebrate our 7 year anniversary, we went to a car show, then went and picked up my new bike. While on the surface this may sound like the sort of thing that would get me into trouble and may result in a divorce, I think I should be OK …
When browsing the web, I (and I know I am not alone) am getting more and more frustrated by all the bloat that many websites throw at us. Some news websites are particularly bad. I understand that they want to make money by adding revenue from adverts, but full screen …
So an MP1 has lodged a bill that would attempt to "oblige" acceptance of Scottish banknotes south of the border.
What a waste of time. Maybe if something like this was introduced 50 years ago it would have had a use, but considering the decline in cash payments, there …
I have heard that prior to having kids, silence is golden, but after you have kids, silence is suspicious.
That was certainly true tonight while cooking dinner. Denise and myself were in the kitchen, while the kids were playing together. After a while Denise had noticed that the kids had …
After yesterday's post, I remembered about a time when working in Newark. I was living on my own in a flat, and had no car at the time.
As a result, any time I was outside, I would have a helmet on. I had no garden to spend time in …
