Twas a Cold and Frosty Morning...

Well any self respecting weather system would have produce frost - it is middle of winter. I don't care that it was probably about 15C, it was cold and I was wondering why I was up at 8am. Well actually, I wasn't wondering why I was up, I was going Diving, but I was thinking that it was a daft thing to be doing on such a cold day.

Yesterdays dive was at Egg Island, quite a long way down the coast, further than I'd been before (I think). From the boat you could see the Horizon quite distinctly, and unlike the normal horizon (which is pretty flat) it was Jagged. To start with it looked like a flotilla of small boats, then when I realised they disappeared and reappeared I realised it was waves. Big Waves. Very Big Waves. Always looking at the same coastline (Jamestown) it feels like the South Atlantic is quite a clam peaceful ocean, but seeing those waves showed that actually we're lucky the island Shelters the waters we use.

Stepping off a Cliff

Anyway, the dive was different from other dives I've done as it wasn't really a bottom dive. We started in the shallows right by the island and then moved out into slightly deeper water, then came to a small Gorge, the bottom of which was about 25m, as I'm only a beginner I'm only qualified to 18m so I didn't follow the others down and swam over the top. Then a little further on we got to what looked like the end of the sea mountain forming St Helena (I suspect it wasn't). I was already at 18m and couldn't resist standing on the edge of the cliff and stepping off J.

There were lots of Cameras on the dive - hopefully I'll get some photos to post. For now you'll have to live with this one of the RMS.

Dave said 'let there be stew'...

... and there was stew :)

What Time is it

Mr Wolf?

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'm sure it was a party game when I was younger, but really can't remember how it was  played.

Anyway, what time is it? Do you know?

Last week sometime I was having a conversation about timekeeping and how we have a slight problem with people leaving early. Later on I went out the office at 3:55pm (by my watch) to discover everything was deserted, everyone had gone home.

The following day I commented on this, and it then became apparent that the time is relative. Time is defined by clocks, and clocks go wrong. Battery clocks (most people will agree) gain or lose fairly consistently, so I'm used to working by my watch and cooker clocks along with any other mains powered clock. Well, my watch (waterproof to 100m) broke a few months back in the swimming pool, I got it going again, but I know it was reset here, how I decided what time it was I don't know. All mains clocks are equally dodgy (see The Day I Stopped Smiling).

So how else do you know what time it is? ahh, computers and the radio.

The Radio here is run by Mike. Whilst it's a perfectly entertaining commercial radio station I think they have the same slight issue with timekeeping as the rest of us. By my reckoning the 7am news (the only one I reliably hear every weekday) varies by anything up to 5min when it starts, and there certainly aren't any Pips. The internet should be reliable. But at work the IT security seems to have locked the clocks, so in one office they're all about 8minutes out, and in my office it seems to be in the region of 20seconds out. I've calculated this by looking at http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/, which I hope is accurate, but disagrees with my home computer by 3seconds...

Anyway, is the time absolute or relative? On Thursday I went to a friends house for a curry, the invite was for 5pm, I arrived as my watch said about 5:30pm, and I was not the last. The last person as my watch was saying about 7pm, but that's quite normal. 5pm, on the dot, lasted for about 2 hours.

A meeting scheduled for say 9:00, may start when my watch says 9:10, even if everyone is there by 8:50. Perhaps the answer is to specify not only the time, but the clock? This would at least be an accurate definitive system. It also resolves any problem with timekeeping at work, I'm not permitted to vary the hours we operate to be 8:25am to 3:55pm as I don't have the Authority, but I can specify which clock we use. Nobody else on the island would be likely to notice that we were running to GMT+5minutes, or Roads Time.

The only thing is that I still wouldn't have a reliable clock either in GMT or Roads Time... perhaps I should just stop wearing a watch, like many other people, and go with the flow. inevitably things will still happen, does it really matter if we don't know exactly when?

Today I have been mostly buying Carrots

It's odd, I've been meaning to make stew, but had run out of Carrots. When I first arrived they were plentiful, but recently I haven't really seen them.

Today Star had some, I bought about half, then I went to Thorpes, who had lots, so I got another bagful. When I saw them in Victoria I had to resist, I wonder where they all came from?

Evidence

Just posting some evidence of my Diving, for those of you who don't recognise me - I'm the one in the nice warm coat! as opposed to one of the 10 who were pretending not to be cold.

I would post the photo of me underwater, but I look like a pleb so I won't.

p.s. Darran - good to hear from you, I did respond to your comment.

Various Things

This morning the Scouts did a Basil Read car wash, Basil Read being the Airport Contractor, and some other cars. Washing and cleaning 30 cars inside and out we raised over £350 in 4½ hours towards the Scouts Trip to Ascension later this month. It was hard work; and I spent most of my time keeping records of who had paid, what order the cars came in and then moving them around to get the clean ones out and the next dirty ones in.

Luckily (luckily is, I think, the correct word) it all went ok. We ended up with 4 floor mats out of someone's car, but I'm sure we'll find where they belong. An hour and a half in, one of the first people called by to see how we were doing and we discovered that somehow his truck had been missed! The two either side had been done and the overspray from the hose made it look like his had too, but it hadn't. We asked for another 10 minutes just to 'finish it off' luckily it took him 15 minutes to finish his coffee and when he came back we were nearly done!

Last week, despite being a short week, was a looonnngggg weeek. It feels like I did a full weeks work in 3 days. I think part of this is that I had probably the most stressful incident of my career. Without going into too many details someone has built a bridge over a highway ditch to access their building plot. They have planning consent, but they didn't get highway consent. I had 3 days to consider the matter before making a recommendation to committee on Monday on whether to approve the retrospective application or not. Looking at the design that was submitted to planning it was pretty simple, in the sense that it looked like a bridge, but very few structural details and no structural calculations were included. Despite this I calculated that the overall design was ok as it was one of these 'over engineered' designs.

I then delved a little deeper and started to discover some more things, like they didn't actually use reinforcing steel as it wasn't available, they just used slightly larger normal steel. Hmmm, divide strength by 2, touch and go, but ok. Then I checked the depth of the slab, it's only 80% of what was shown on the drawings, hmmm, recalulate, not a huge difference, but starting to not look strong enough for the big lorries. Then I realised this normal steel wasn't ribbed like rebar is, but was smooth. Hmmm, that isn't allowed, how do I calculate it? Hmmm, change the way I'm doing the calculation, make up a new system based from first principles on how to assess the strength of the steel. Hmmm... not good.

I knew that recommending that the bridge was demolished was not going to go down well. In the end I've gone through the detail and I think I can recommend approval with a few alterations as conditions and a 5T weight limit. But, I'm not saying it's safe, no way!

Bearing in mind that, before Wednesday, the last time I designed a Concrete Slab was at Uni (10 years ago), and even then I hated Concrete Design and ALL my projects used a Steel Frame!

Anyway an easy weekend doing nothing now, except that it's already 5:40 on Saturday!

You Know it's Winter when...

• getting dressed in the morning you check what the weather looks like, and decide not to wear shorts
• you have a coat in the car - just in case
• every time you go swimming you think 'if it gets any colder it'll be too cold to swim in an outdoor unheated pool'
• you have to find your jumpers in the evening
• you know where your heater is
• the shower temperature is above half-way

Yes it's just under a month to mid-winter solstice and it's cold. It's now often -2d during the day (just to clarify a d (or a degree on the dave scale) is equivalent to a C (or a degree centigrade), but with zero set at a sensible temperature. Therefore -2d=18C and -20d=0C. There are F's but I don't understand them, I could explain in K but some readers wouldn't understand that).

It's so cold I've even taken to wearing a coat to work, and not opening all the windows until about lunchtime.

Still, it could be worse, it could be a British Summer!

UPDATE:
It gets worse, some days after deciding not to wear shorts you really wish you had, and then you realise you haven't got your swimming kit with you so cannot even cool off in the pool :(

It's 3 weeks to midwinter and this is the view from my drive:

it's a hard life, but someone has to do it!