Author: Mike

Spent last week in Turkey for our second visit, clearly we should have been visiting this wonderful country many times before now. Plenty of people have told us about its fantastic scenery, its numerous historical sights and the warm Mediterranean waters that lay on its coast.

As with our first trip last year, Turkey was to live up to expectations with a few new excursions, as well as a few pool days and a some good meals out at local restaurants.

Again, we stayed at a friends apartment just outside of Dalaman, not your typical tourist town, but I think closer to the norm that is rural Turkey.

Not wanting to turn this post into a holiday Blog! But I’ll jot down some interesting points of the week.

Went to visit Turtle beach (real name – İztuzu beach) at the end of the Dalyan Çayı River on a hire boat from Dalyan. Very pleasant boat trip through the nature reserve reed beds stopping on what was supposed to be a nesting area for Leather-Back Turtles. Overall very disappointing, too many people on a pretty tacky beach, beats me how any Turtles would ever want to could come up to nest here and lay their eggs. Maybe we were there at the wrong time!!!!

A much better second half of the day was a visit to the ruins of Kaunos (Caunus). When you stand in the silence (we were the only visitors there) you have to ask how they managed to build such a place with such huge stones with very little mechanical technology, plenty of slave labor I think!!! I took some good pictures, mostly in black and white (4 year old Canon IXUS 400) – a medium that doesn’t get full appreciation today.

There are lots of unsigned (and unmade) roads all over this part of Turkey (I assume that this is the same for much of rural Turkey).

Went out one day and just followed the twists and turns of one of these unmade roads until we ended up at the top of one of the hills surrounding Dalaman and we we’re met with another ideal photo opportunity above Koca Lake.

Could not get over how much traffic was using this unmade road, seems that there are a number of smaller villages further up the road towards the coast as can be seen from this Google map link.

What continues to amaze me when comparing Turkey to the UK is the quality and the low cost of the locally produced vegetables, I said this last time I visited Turkey. It seems that a year has not seem a great deal of price increase. Visited Dalaman market and purchased a number of items, plums, salad stuff, mushrooms, melons, apples and still had trouble spending 10 Turkish Lira (approximately £5.00). Some four days later, much of this purchase is still in good condition, not something that you could say for vegetables purchased here in the UK due to the over-amount of chilling used by the distribution chain.

Another interesting trip was a visit to Xanthos, a registered UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A curious British link to this ancient site is that in 19th century Briton Charles Fellows carried away many original artifacts from this site and are now to be found in the British Museum.

I suppose that many counties had similar people ‘removing’ historical artifacts, so I suppose that you can’t get too upset. However, there is an active restoration program although it is somewhat under funded, it is trying to save many of the remains, particularly many of the mosaics.

We finished of the afternoon with a visit to the Patara historical site and to spend a few hours on the lovely Patara beach (much better than the Turtle beach mentioned earlier in this post) and in what I can only say was some of the warmest water that I’ve swam in.

Overall a very good weeks holiday in Turkey, but with many more historical sites a other areas to visit, I’m sure that we will be visiting this country quite a few more times in the future.

Again, another survey, this time by Computeractive magazine highlights the poor ‘value for money’ that UK broadband users receive from their ISP’s.- Reported on the BBC technology web site

As I have said a number of times before, Ofcom need to get to grips with the ISP’s and the misleading way that can get away with the ‘up to 8MB’s for only £xx.xx’ statement whilst in most cases only delivering mediocre ‘product’ without any comeback from any regulatory organisations here in the UK.

If I buy just about any other product/service in the UK, then the supplier is duty bound to deliver to me what I have paid for. The use of the ‘up to’ clause in ISP’s advertisements is constantly being used to get away with the delivery of ‘faulty goods’.

Again, like many similar examples in the UK, we seem to be at the mercy of unregulated suppliers and government indifference to the problem. But I suppose its a price we have to pay for living in the UK.

Incidentally, this post was written using the latest version of Windows Live Writer, a brilliant piece of editorial software;  connecting via a purchased 3MB broadband connection and operating at 3MB all the time for only £12.00 per month here in Turkey! If they can do it here, then why can’t the UK ISP’s do it?

ContactPoint the newly renamed (ex DFES) UK government Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) Children’s Database is starting to cause some serious concerns on a number of fronts.

Will the content be safe? Will only the correct people have access? Will it be delivered on time? Will it continued to be funded by the DCSF after its initial launch?

Will the content be safe?

According to some [2], there are grave concerns about the whole database and its ability to protect the contents from illegal access and use. There has already been one case where an employee allegedly stole the database records of 2.3 million British children.

Will only the correct people have access?

In a letter to Christine Goodfellow, Director, ContactPoint Project at the DCSF from Richard Stiff, Chair of the ADCS Information Systems and Technology Policy Committee raises questions about the vetting of people that will have access to ContactPoint.

Will it be delivered on time?

If past government IT project late deliveries are to be used as examples, then we could be in for yet another late delivery.

Will it continued to be funded by the DCSF after its initial launch?

There are real concerns that this will put yet greater strain on local government finances, some saying that it will add some £50.00 to individual local council tax bills.

Clearly, there is not much time to get everything correct as ContactPoint is due online during early 2008. We’ll keep an eye on this over the next few months and track other related issues of interest as they arise.

Well at least for the Kilogram it isn’t!

It seem that the original measured weigh, the International Prototype Kilogram is loosing weight! Does this mean that all the calculations for converting from/to imperial weights will need to change?

Perhaps not. Here’s the full story for those Imperial die-hard’s, perhaps some Imperial Weight Terrorists have managed to sabotage the original Prototype Kilogram as part of their campaign to retain Imperial measurements in the UK.

Excellent article on the Guardian web site by Henry Porter yesterday.

Having spent some 18 years in the Navy, its good to see that they Navy is getting more money for new ships, though I am still not sure why we need two 65,000 ton aircraft carriers, particularly when we will have to buy the planes to fly from them from the USA – now there’s a surprise!.

That said, defense spending has to be shared across all the services to maintain and even development of all services. A comment on the Sunday BBC Parkinson show told of shortage of ammunition in Afghanistan; we all know the past stories about lack of body armour and the conditions that many of the returning injured soldiers have had to endure.

It’s an interesting article that I hope will prompt some thoughts in the current government, but I expect it won’t!

The full article.

I’ve watched with disbelief over the past few days how this story has continued to develop.

I can’t believe that the Policia Judiciária have put both parents up as official suspects, particularly as it seems to be based on what appears to be flimsy new evidence that has been put forward such as DNA traces found in their hire car!

Are they really trying to say that the McCann’s killed their daughter, hid the body locally and then 25 days later put it in to the hire car boot and took it away to some other place to bury it whilst all the time being hounded by the various press packs.

I’m no forensic scientist, but surely after 25 days, unless a body has been kept in a freezer (which one did the McCann’s use!) any body will have certainly started to decompose and would have left massive amounts of DNA in the boot of the car (even if wrapped), more than enough to be conclusive.

Also if the car has, or is playing such a big part in the investigation, why has it not been seized, why were the McCann’s still using to drive to the Airport yesterday.

I think that the Policia Judiciária are putting up smoke screens to cover what seems to be a lackluster investigation that has shown up serious failings in their system.

More to follow on this unfolding story I think.

I had a discussion the other day with some colleagues about the scales of measuring the size of objects. There are many ranges of definitions from small to large for example.

But what about something that is outside this range? So after a short discussion we came up with a list from one end to another, I know it’s not definitive, but I’m sure it covers a pretty good range. Unless of course you know more!!

Size Range – From top to bottom!

• Infinite
• Gigantasorous
• Humongous
• Colossal
• Immense
• Huge
• Gigantic
• Large
• Big
• Normal
• Small
• Tiny
• Minute
• Diminutive
• Microscopic
• Atomic
• Subatomic
• Infinitesimal

Argentina beat France at the opening match of the Rugby World Cup!!!!

What a win and what a competition this will be.

A few months ago we received one of those free samples through our letter box, a small bottle of washing machine Comfort Conditioning Cream – with Sweet Almond Oil fabric softener. Instructions were to use it in the same way as our normal fabric softener. I think half the bottle was used and the rest left to one side as not being of much different from the original softener.

Imagine my surprise when I found out today that quite a number of other people had received the freebie and had suffered the same problem without realising the cause; a blocked softener dispenser!

It seems that the thickness of this sample seems to have congealed in the dispenser as the washing machine had warmed up and when the machine reached the softener cycle, nothing came out.

Why we had not realised that is was this sample that was the culprit I do not know. You have to clean out the softener dispenser every so often anyway. How this subject came up I can’t remember, but I know at least six other people that had the same problem who won’t be using the full size version of this sample. Sorry Mr. Comfort!

During my recent short trip to Southern France I used the French Autoroutes again.

I think I have been driving on these roads (and many ordinary French roads) for over 25 years and I am always amazed how easy they are to use. Yes, the tolls have increased in recent years, but as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Clean service stations, very few traffic jams and an easy drive (is the road covering?).

I wonder why our Motorways have not caught up with the same notion of providing value for money, well I suppose its because there owned by ??? That’s a good question, who does own our motor ways. It’s easy to see who owns the M6 Toll road and how much better it is than other UK motorways, maybe its because it’s a Toll road!

I can’t see how the UK can cope with any further increase in the number of cars on our roads, unless like the French, we use our roads better and start introducing some form of ‘pay per use’ and use that money to improve the roads.