This is my brother Dan.

I know what you are thinking - he looks a little like Santa but with a ginger beard. Dan is rarely found without his camera, he lives over at AllThatComesWithIt.
 
I have been reading his blog recently and have noticed something…There are quite  few people in the blogosphere publishing reviews. Here are some examples from:

View From The Cloud
Avitable
Greg and Deb on the Web (though I cant find the orginal post)

This would be perfectly OK and fine but for one thing - These are reviews of various articles of food that my brother has sent to people all over the globe. He has neatly packaged up all of these samples (not to mention the various prizes he gives for competitions), made his merry way down to the post office and forked out his cash to send these items over the Atlantic to people he met over the internet. What a stand up guy you might say?

Except for the fact that his own estranged brother, lonely and on the other side of the planet - has yet to receive his christmas present (as clearly described in his blog here). Despite him having recived his presents by at least the end of January!

I WANT MY THUNDERCATS DVD!

Its 5.30 in the morning. I have been up since 4am. This is partially due to my jet-lag, the fact that I slept all day yesterday, and fear of getting up too late and missing my meeting in the morning. But it is also partially due to my most unwelcome visitors.

When I first arrived in Sydney, an English girl at my work explained about her home situation “I deal with the roaches and my boyfriend deals with the Huntsmans spiders”. 

“I don’t have any problem with these” I said - to which she replied - “You will!”.

At this point in my ignorance I thought they must live in some kind of hole of a house, bathing in their own filth. Or else they are out in the country somewhere that the insects can easily get into the house. I have since been round there and that is hardly the case.

I recently went to another friends flat who had a 3rd floor luxury apartment in Sydney’s desirable Darling Harbour. It was night and as he switched o the lights. I saw tens of little roaches scuttling for cover. He said that you just have to live with them as you cant get rid of them.

My tactic thus far has quite different and has been one of total annihilation. We recently had a bit of a problem in the kitchen. I saw one of them and it ran away, I thought nothing of it A couple of days later I went in at night and about 10 of the little b@stards ran down the back of the fridge! A healthy dosing of insect repellent later and we seemed to have solved the problem in the kitchen … the problem in fact seems to have relocated to my bedroom!

Just before I left for the UK (literally minutes) I caught a couple of the critters on the back of my Mac (which was at the time generating a fair bit of heat as I was attempting to rip Hudson Hawk to my Ipod). I had no time to deal with it in my usual fascist manner which worried me over the two weeks I was away.

So to cut a log story short, the other reason that I am up blogging at 5am is that several times over the night I have felt the little buggers crawl over my back! This is not helping my disrupted sleep patterns…

So as you may know I have spent the as couple of weeks in the UK, to see Lucy and have a brief break from my job here in Sydney. The trip back has thrown up a few surprises, things I wasn’t expecting:

Firstly I wasn’t expecting to miss the Yorkshire countryside as much as I did. Over a 30 hour trip I went from this:

To this:

(note: photograph is actually Lake District)

I grew up amongst rolling hills and woods, dry stone walls and most importantly buildings over 20 years old. And I wasn’t expecting to miss it as much as I did. As a friend of mine (Introducing “The Gambler”) said to me: you miss it because its your home. It was blooming cold and it was snowing, but I really enjoyed being back there.

Secondly, its only been a few months but I forgot how much of a good laugh my friends and I have together. You meet people and spend a lot of time together, but its only amongst the friends that you grow up with that you can let your true sense of humour shine and stop constantly editing yourself. I miss that.

The third thing that I realised, is that nothing really changes. as much as I love it at home, I love it out here for different reasons and things at home will always be the same. My friends will always be there (although a little older and more  under the thumb). So I’ll be sticking it out here for a few months more (until I have enough of my job) it seems.

My friend The Lawyer last Saturday in the Nook.

I haven’t been doing a lot of blogging in the last couple of weeks, and there is a good reason - I am currently on holiday from my Sydney residence in the rainy, snowing and cold UK!

I didn’t tell either of my parents and surprised them 10 or so days ago, but couldn’t blow my cover until just now as we had a surprise birthday for The City Worker over the weekend. Boy was it hard to plan the operation! I was thwarted at every turn by moder multimedia communication devices. I had to delete facebook wall posts, blogger comments, engage the help of several people in my deception and even get The City Workers girlfriend to hack into his email and delete tell tale messages accidentally sent through to him. Lord knows how the guy is supposed to have an affair when his girlfriend hacks his emails!

It all went well in the end and my mother was suitably surprised:

My Dad wasn’t too bothered:

The City worker was hardest of all to decieve as my sources tell me he had a small paddy at the thought that no-one would come to his birthday (we told him all the other guys weren’t coming too). But we had a fantastic time in The Infamous Nook. 

One thing my mother drilled in to my head when I was a small boy (aside from never being late) was that there were two things that I should never do, and two things that she would not accept from me when growing up. those things were lying and stealing. This was good as there was no mention of getting drunk and puking on my shoes, or engaging in mass murder.

Ever since that time, honesty has been pretty important to me. I have tried to always be honest in my job and it has paid off pretty well - I find that clients trust me more, and that I dont tend to get caught out as others do by lying.

This is why I am having a few troubles with my current boss. After having moved to Australia, I have been fed a number of major lies by my manager - and he has been caught out by every single one (that I know about).

These range from; making out that the team was much larger than it is (before I even started); to not telling me that the only other guy that does my kind of work was leaving; to not telling me that he was going to work abroad for 3 months; to not giving me any of the relocation help that I later found out I was entitled to.

He is known around the office for being mercenary and extremely ambitious. He sells a lot of work, some of it on mistruths given to our clients.

Which raises the question. What do you do when you find out that your manager clearly does not have your back?

I went to a coal conference on Monday. It was all about the future of coal and how it can contribute to a sustainable future. What was interesting about this conference was that I was actually the only person there under 50. It was certainly old school!

What was more interesting was that the conference was attended by a guy that everyone referred to as ‘George’ and knew by name. I thought they must all be a part of the same old boys club and probably play bridge together or something. As it turns out, old George is a bit of a celebrity - he attends all of the local seminars on renewable energy and such in his suave pin striped suits with his eighty year old head covered by a lengthy white combover - and he shouts down the speakers!

“I have a question” he will enquire politely raising his hand, actually more of a statement. “There is absolutely and categorically no point in doing all of this, when the whole climate change and CO2 thing is absolute tosh and nonsense” he will shout, raising his voice to unexpectedly high volumes. “and I have the proof” he will claim raising his bits of paper up in the air.

“Hi George” the speaker will reply. ”I am afraid that your question is not really relevant to the topic and we don’t have the time to debate that kind of thing. Though I am pleased that these debates are still active, and scientists are still being challenged” the speaker will lie.

He went to a solar thermal talk last week and is apparently a regular all over Sydney according to my colleagues. It made me chuckle a little. 

I want to be just like that when I am old.

Another periodic look at one of my most memorable photos over the last few years (although I must confess - I didn’t take this one)…

This photo was taken by the Sergeant Major on the steep slope up to the Biarro Alto (I took this to mean ‘beer district’ but apparently it actually means ‘high district’) in the Portugese capital of Lisbon. 

The cast were (I think) right to left: The Artist, myself, The Nurse, The City Worker, and the Lawyer.

There were some good times had at the top of this hill, including playing street football with a couple of Brazilian teenagers (who put us seriously to shame!), watching Portugal play in the World Cup in the bars during the day, drinking Sangria all night, and people milling around in the streets until sunrise.

One of my friends ‘The Artist’ probably has some more vivid memories than most of this street. This street was the precise street that he got mugged. 

The Artist doesn’t have much luck when it comes tour our little holidays - in fact you might have heard me mention The Artists close encounter with a moped in Slovenia(a year earlier). The year we went to Lisbon was no different. 

He had decided to walk home early on the Sunday (our last night) and was heading down the hill when he was confronted by a couple of locals with knives. He did what any sensible person would do … he ran for it. Unfortunately as it turned out, his assailants ran quicker. This surprised us  - as to us, the Artist was the fastest man alive. We used him as a kind of ‘Forrest Gump’ during our interform rugby years. I guess time had taken its toll.

He found himself bereft of his mobile phone and wallet (anyone who knows The Artist would realise that the value of those items was probably a princeley 53p). And for some reason became exceptionally annoyed when (after spending the entire evening in the police station), we rolled back into the hostel room after an outrageous nights partying (including persuading a number of dancers in a club to do the world cup Peter Crouch robot dance) and didn’t believe that he had actually been mugged.

The next year, the Artist was pickpocketed in Valencia - but that is a different story…

If you visit this place regularly, you may have noticed a link (amongst many of my other defunct links) which doesn’t work entitled ‘Buy T-Shirts and Contribute to my Mates Beer Money’. 

This was an enterprise undertaken my one of the former members of the gang, we will call him ‘The One That Got Away’. 

We lost contact when we were around 17 and he went off to the ‘College of Knowledge’ which was the name we gave to the local Tech, whilst most of the rest of us went to Greenhead. He was a good lad, but got involved in some shady stuff and ended up moving away to Manchester which was a real shame.

Anyway in recent year he has returned, and we’ve had a few beers together. Its amazing how quickly you revert to old ways after not seeing one another for nearly 10 years. You spend your youth developing your sense of humour with those who are around you at the time - and that connection never really goes.

I was in contact with him earlier this year, and it turns out he has a new enterprise:

You have no idea how much this excites me because, the idea of discount beer is much more appealing than discount t-shirts (although I will accept a t-shirt too if someone is willing to give me one). And also - the restaurant is literally less than 80m from my mums house! So the stumble to bed will be an easy one!

The only problem is that in order to make the 30 hour trip from Sydney to Holmfirth worthwhile - I would have to skank approximately 400 beers!

Here is the link if you are interested (as usual it doesn’t work): www.mezze-bar-restaurant.com  

I had planned to do the “Random Review” thing on a regular basis, however being as I don’t have so much time on my hands anymore (in fact none) and I haven’t really had the chance to read, it has been some time since my last post of this nature.

This review is related to Climate Change (as everything I write appears to be nowadays). I work in the field as an engineer and have little time to actually look back at advancing climate chance science which evolves at a rate that I just can’t keep up with, so I have been trying to brush up on the issues. If you are interested - read on…

An Inconvenient Truth (the Book), Al Gore 

Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” was an exceptionally important film. This was not because of the groundbreaking science contained within or because of any new concepts relating to emissions reduction scenarios. It was because of two reasons: 

1. Al Gore is an excellent speaker
2. His film managed to explain climate change in simple terms to those who would otherwise have remained oblivious.

But this is a book review and as such relates to the accompanying tome which I first picked up in Chicago in late 2006. This gave me the opportunity to read the text before I saw the film. In many ways the book is still excellent. As with the film, the book follows Gore around the world as he presents his key-note speech on the dangers of climate change. 

I don’t have a copy with me now, but one of the things that sticks in my mind is the photograph of mount Kilimanjaro a decade ago and the comparison with how it looks now, with vastly lessened permanent snows.

My main problems with the booklie with the fact that far too much of the story is focussed on Gore and his childhood, this is good in one respect as it maintains interest in his struggle to get his message across - but … if you were to make all of your opinions based upon his explanations he would have you believe that it was his university lecturers who first discovered the problem, and it was he alone carrying the torch through the 80’s and 90’s which is a bit of a mistruth.

I am going to give it 3 Rabbit Raisins:

The Weathermakers, Tim Flannery, 2006

The main reason why I wrote the review of Al Gores book was that I wanted to make a comparison with Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers”.

I picked up the Weathermakers back in December ‘07 (a little late I know seeing as it was written in 2006) based upon recommendation from a much respected former colleague in the UK … and wow was I blown away in just a few Chapters! Tim Flannery (Australian of the year for 2006) presents information on Climate Change science in a way I have never read before - with wit, excellent writing skills, and superb honesty. It is so easy for the layman to read - from start to finish.

He, unlike Gore presents arguments and scientific consensus complete with sources and potential counter arguments in a very complete text. He is an ecologist by profession and takes us from discussions on the fate of the golden toad in Costa Rica to concepts of evolution and the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’. He tells stories of struggling scientists trying to get their ideas accepted into the mainstream which helps the reader to understand why (to the general public) it appears that this climate change thing has just been sprung on us. 

Best of all, he gives possible outcomes in terms of impacts upon life. What will happen to use when energy becomes scarce and economies tighten up? And why have economists been forever arguing about the potential costs for climate change mitigation, and are they actually greater than the costs of dong nothing?

Some of his arguments run into the philosophical, he muses that the source of our civilisation is our cities. Large concentrations of people dependent on networks that supply them with food and water. He considers that in times of scarcity it will be the specialists that suffer as happens in nature (e.g. his golden toad). Therefore it will be those in non-essential jobs that feel the pinch first.

A few of my favourite extracts:

On global population:
“In that seemingly distant age [1961] there were just 3 billion people, and they were only using half of the total resources that our global ecosystem could sustainably provide. A short 25 years later, in 1986, we had reached a watershed, for that year our population topped 5 billion, and such was our collective thirst for resources that we were using all of the earths sustainable production. In essence [since 1986] we have been running the environmental equivalent of a budget deficit, which is only sustained by plundering our capital base.”

On the Economic Cost of Climate Change:
“Since the 1970s insurance losses have risen at an annual rate of around 10 per cent , reaching $100 billion by 1999. Losses at this scale threaten the very fabric of our economic system … such a rate of increase means that by 2065 or soon thereafter, the damage bill resulting from climate change may equal the total value of everything that humanity produced in the course of a year.”

On Politics
“As early as 1977 the New York Times carried the headline ‘Scientists Fear Heavy Use of Coal May Bring Adverse Shift in Climate’ but it was not until the late 1980 when [it became apparent] that constraints could be applied to damaging emissions and action to restrict greenhouse emissions was emerging - that industry embarked upon its propaganda war. Among the first to move were US coal producers, Fred Palmer, then head of Western Fuels … led a campaign - informed apparently by his personal beliefs - that the earth’s atmosphere ‘is deficient in Carbon Dioxide’”

Quite simply - an extremely important, yet little known book.

I am going to give the Weather Makers RCWR’s first ever 5 Rabbit Raisin Rating: