I dread having to deal with Barclays Bank. It always turns into a protracted nightmare of calls until finally I find someone very helpful who is able to resolve the problem, or not. It’s not the people, who are almost without exception friendly and as helpful as they are able to be, it’s the systems.

I have been banking with Barclays for more than 25 years now and do I get any special treatment? I went overdrawn last year just before Christmas and as I am in Ireland I knew there was no way I was going to be able to post a cheque into them before Christmas hit so I asked if they could give me a £500 overdraft until the new year. No my recent transactions didn’t qualify me!

Today I spent half an hour on the phone, trying to find out if I did indeed have an overdaft as the online system said I had. 4 transfers later and it turns out that I don’t but whereas the online system appeared happy to give me a £1975 overdraft if I filled out just one page (until it said I already had an overdraft), the telephone adviser wanted my life history before giving me £500 overdraft. I gave up half way though the life history. Just not worth the hassle. And that’s not to mention the calculator thing that I will need to use in future every time I use online banking. Yet another thing to lose.

Despite all this frustration have I changed banks? No. Not yet. And it would be so easy to keep my happy and banking with Barclays for the rest of my life. I think Barcays should have a policy of giving all account holders over 15 years a free premium service. Make us feel valued. If you treat us the same as the person who has only had an account with you for a year, then why stay?

I shall be moving to an internet only bank who want to provide me with a good service and welcome any recommendations.

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A recent study shows that applying excess nitrogen fertilisers (most of which are made from natural gas) decreases the amount of soil carbon and overall yield. There has been a long term policy of over application in order to maximise yields, but this may have had the opposite effect.

See http://www.physorg.com/news112900965.html

If we are forced to reduce application rates by the increasing cost of fossil fuels and at the same time rebuild our soils with terra preta we might be able to increase yields on land which is going to be under pressure to provide food and energy and other materials such as bioplastics.

More about Terra Preta:
http://www.georgiaitp.org/carbon/orals.htm
http://www.eprida.com/

Bioplastics
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/10/22/green.plastics.ap/index.html

A clam over 400 years old was dredged up from the sea bed north of Iceland

Here are some other records:

Bacteria in suspended animation have been revivided from fossils 250 million years old!

The oldest living organisms are plants – a tree in Tasmania at 43,000 years.

A tortoise lived to 188.

http://www.physorg.com/news112794329.html

A battle has begun between three drought-ridden states in the eastern US over the flow of water from a lake. Should river mussels come before economics? People before endangered species.

This one is going to court.

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I knew cattle and sheep were responsible for a significant part of our greenhouse gas emissions but I was reminded of how much when I watched Countryfile today. Cows and sheep produce methane as part of their digestive process of which most comes out of the front end as a burp rather than the back end. Methane is 20 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so astonishingly, the emissions from one cow is equal to running an SUV for the year!

There is work being done to see if by changing the diet of these animals, using additives such as garlic and changing the varieties of grass, we can reduce emissions, an scientist of hopeful of up to 30% reductions.

One large cattle/milk farmer spent £85,000 on a digester 17 years ago and it now heats two homes, including an rayburn and the energy used on the farm.

It’s hard enough to suggest we should drive our cars less, to even think we should reduce the cows in our green fields seems almost sacrilegious.

Spent most of my spare time this week putting together a submission for my local town’s development plan. As with many development plans there is much good stuff int it, but they are based on the assumption that today’s trends will continue tomorrow and with so many challenges facing us – energy, climate change, decreasing resources of all kinds and now a fading property boom, I think that is a very risky assumption.

If you agree that tomorrow is likely to be much more energy constrained, this opens a wide range of opportunities for towns ready to grab them:

• Build a combined heat and power plant for the town providing cheaper heat and electricity and making it an attractive town for both residents and business.
• Develop as a centre for repair and remanufacture of goods – the trend towards repairs is already starting with companies like claimtracker in the UK
• Become a centre for low energy holidays such as walking and cycling with a range of quality resteraunts and other activies in the town.
• Develop a biogas plant to turn sewerage from a cost into a resource
• Install micro-hydro plants in the local rivers and stream
• Develop as a centre for small businesses who want to do work remotely by providing high quality video conferencing facilities that small groups could not currently afford.
• Build the first FabLab in Ireland and stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship in the town.

Read all 18 pages here:

Like the law of traffic that says the number of cars expands to fill the roads available, just think of London’s M25, there seems to be a similar one for laundry.  The number of clothes to be washed expands to keep the washing machine busy.  If it’s so easy to wash, why not just wear things once and then clean them so your clothes are always fresh and clean.

The article: http://www.physorg.com/news112154678.html asks if we spend less time doing the washing than 100 years ago.

I remember with some fondness, the first washing machine I had, a little twin tub where you put the washing in one side, ran a very quick cycle, about 10 mins I think, put the clothes in the the other side to spin and that was it!  It was more effort, but if you spent an hour doing the washing that was a lot of washing!  I now have two washing machines, yes two, and there is a good reason for this.

I have a conventional washing machine that gets used about twice a month, overnight, to do delicates.  The other is a big top loader with no heating element.  When I have a bath I can divert the bath water to the washing machine for the wash cycle and rinse with cold, which is, I’ve been told, efficient for removing detergent anyway.

So if we used recycled water to wash our clothes and only washed them when they were dirty, how much energy could we save?

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I am by no means a unix expert and don’t use it often enough to have these commands at my fingertips, so I collecting them in one place:

Restart Server:
shutdown -r now

What’s running:
ps aux

What using up disk space
du -k | sort -rn | head -20

Check for latest package:
rpm -qa | grep "mysql"

To replace all instances of oranges with bananas in the file mytext.txt

sed -e 's/oranges/bananas/g' mytext.txt

This will display the file with changes. I havn’t found a way of making the changes in situ, but to write the output to a new file:

sed -e 's/oranges/bananas/g' mytext.txt > newfile.txt

20 most recently updated files:
find . -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %pn' | sort -r | head -20

What’s using memory
top

Value of environment variables set
export

Want to look at Ireland’s Income per capita against urban density vs. the UK since 1960?
Play

You can also pick lots of other indicators and countries.

Fertility against urban population – Ireland, UK and Afghanistan Play

We intuitively know this is true, but logic tells us something different. Surely having 2 choices is better than none and therefore 3 is better again?

Just watched a presentation called The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less by Barry Swartz. Barry tells the story of how he had bought jeans for years from a store where there was only one type of jeans. They never fitted very well and he had to wear them in and then wore them for as long as possible to avoid having to avoid the wearing in process. Recently, when he went back to buy a new pair, he was asked what kind of jeans he wanted? Easy fit, straight fit, poppers, zippers, boot cut etc etc etc. Barry tried on many many pairs of jeans and eventually left with a pair that fitted him far better than any previous pair, but was Barry happy with his choice?

No, and why? Does any of this feel familiar:
- his expectations had been raised by the plethora of choices, there must be the perfect pair amongst so many.
- but how does he know he has the best pair, maybe the better pair were left behind?
- if so, it must be my fault because the jeans companies have done their best to give me the perfect pair for me.

Barry had better jeans but was less satisfied. More is less.

Highly recommend reading: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bschwar1/Choice%20Chapter.Revised.pdf
or viewing: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200&q;=engedu

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