Gas deficit today

Radio 4. I don't recall which program, but it's on the BBC news website too now...

Oh yes. been getting hits from that all day after a commenter mentioned the site

BTW today has seen a maximum wholesale electricity price of £990/Mwh. Yes. thats 99p a unit.!!!!

And its been above 30p most of the day.

switch off your personal vibrator NOW harry!

Solar panels still producing. Little snow round here so far. Very cold & windy.

I have woodburner stove, petrol generator, candles and camping gaz stove. Generator has been tested-OK Five years wood supply. Six spare gaz canisters.

Have Daily Mail to read by candlelight if neccesary.

Yes well that was probably because it needed a lot of money spent on it to make it suitable for the future and nobody wanted to pay it. Brian

I expect a document to have its own page numbers. Especially as you refer to them in the contents. Then you can print the doc out too.

I thought someone was working on salt-caverns for storage (somewhere in cheshire?) did that scheme die a death?

Can't they just let the pressure fall a bit so we use less?

And we're installing them because apparently we're warming the planet. Yeah right, I've got a foot of snow outside my front door! This is not warmer!

On Thu, 01 Mar 2018 16:56:00 -0000, harry w= rote:

Pessimist.

-- =

Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?

Click on French flag in top LH corner.

Yup. Le Continent is also pushing ze limits esp. with a large proportion of french nukes still down for political reasons

Replace by the Competition Commission in 1999. which was replaced by the Competition and Markets Authority in 2014. Perhaps you should update your sigs file.

Air gets in the pipes and boom!

It's just a name.

Why would air get in? I never said reduce it below atmospheric pressure, that would be daft. Nobody would get any gas at all, you'd just fill your gas tanks with air as the system ran backwards.

You've not been in a Mucky D's recently? Big touch screens to place your order on, or smaller ones at tables. Software programmed to do the up selling. Payment taken by card. It's not a big step to have delivery of the comestables to your table or take out pick up point automated (big Lamson tubes?).

The *really* hard bit to automate is the cooking and assembly to order,

I can't wait till we run out of natural resources and all those little wimps who seem to think we need to keep our houses warm just shrivel up and die.

Well if we'd just ignore all those f****it anti-fracking loonies....

In around 2002, my employer moved from the City of London to Canary Wharf and my commute went up from ~1hr each way to ~2hrs each way and reliability dropped off as well, due to having to make connections. I could reckon on 5 hours a day travelling, door to desk & desk to door on a good day.

I asked if I could start working from home and was told "no". So I said I was going to leave, since I couldn't continue doing this, long term, it was killing me. So they relented and I started working from home one day a week. We didn't have ADSL where we lived, too far from the exchange, so I too had ISDN (they paid). Over the next couple of years I increased my work-at-home days until I asked if I could work 4 days at home. At which point they said I could, but that the office day had to be in Sheffield (where my employer's main IT was located). That didn't bother me since (i) the London to Sheffield mainline passed through where I lived and (ii) they agreed the journey could count as work time.

While that was going on, my employer did a 180 degree reversal on their attitude to home working and started encouraging people to do it. A desk, chair, network drop and 'phone in the building in Canary Wharf was charged to your cost centre at £11K/year. Also, the building was full and it was cheaper to encourage people to work from home than to get more office space.

Precisely. Although I had a certain amount of hassle from one of my managers in this time, who actually said, to my face, that he liked to be able to see heads down and that it was a pity IT wasn't like engineering where you could count the number of widgets in the bin at the end of the day and know how much somebody had done. But he was an idiot, and I despise him to this day.

Some of the things I noticed during this time;

- If you're the only home worker in an office, you tend to get forgotten.

- I had to condense my "social" interactions into my one day in the office, so it looked like I spent the whole day talking to people. Well, I did. But it was mostly work.

- You can mostly manage meetings with video conferencing, but it's much easier if you've previously met the people involved.

- When your boss is in one country, your staff are (mostly) in a second and you're in a third, what difference does it make whether you're in the office or your back bedroom?

- You really need a dedicated space. Particularly if you have children.

- You really need good communication tools (email, IM, video).

- If you have a "knowledge worker" job, then peace and quiet at home is an absolute joy, compared to an open plan office.