In honour of the weekly Gossip on the Underground:
“I’m rubbish at geography. I thought Asia was a small country, but it’s the massivest, massivest continent in the world.”
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Archive for the Category "Geeklife"
One of the problems with living in London is the sheer number of times in a week that you find yourself invited to the pub – or, indeed, to go out more generally. Not that I’m complaining, you understand; just making an observation, and one which may explain why, despite a week off work, I still feel like I need a holiday.
On Friday (although, having been off work all week I kept mistaking it for Saturday), I went to The Ship and Shovell near Charing Cross to meet Gordon, stalwart organiser of Scottish blogmeets and webmaster of the temporarily out of action Scottish Blogs.
Gordon being as well-connected as he is, there were rather a lot of bloggers in attendance which put me to shame for neglecting this place, and prompted me to get around to writing some of the posts I’ve had in the back of my mind for weeks (if not months).
I did my best to memorise who everyone was and which blogs they wrote, so I apologise to those I’ve inevitably missed. There was Tom Reynolds from Random Acts of Reality (and here’s his book, Blood, Sweat and Tea: Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance
(Update: Thanks to Gordon I can make my apologies to Hydragenic, bob’s yer uncle, and the girl with a one-track mind, another one of those clever people with a book
Several new blogs there I didn’t know before and will be adding to my feed reader.
And while resolving to write more on here, I’ll also be resolving to log in to that more often too.
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If you’d like to see a man made of holly* coming up the Thames on a boat – and I have just had 37 emails requesting exactly such a thing, which admittedly is something of a coincidence – then I suggest you watch the video below, which shows just such an occurrence occurring a couple of weeks ago.
And if you’d like an explanation of why, visit Mr Nimbos’s blog.
*plus flesh, bones and all the usual stuff
This year the clocks go forward to British Summer Time on Sunday 30th March, and back to GMT on October 26th – put those in your diary now. (Or your Outlook Calendar at least – if you have a diary, they probably come printed in already.)
I’ve been perusing some information about the system for deciding when the clocks change on the Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform website (as you do). Nowadays, it’s always the last Sunday in March and the last in October. It’s the same in all European Union member states and has been set down via EC Directive since way back when (i.e, 1981).
Directive 2000/84/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 January 2001 on summer-time arrangements sayeth in particular:
(2) Given that the Member States apply summer-time arrangements, it is important for the functioning of the internal market that a common date and time for the beginning and end of the summer-time period be fixed throughout the Community.
(3) Since the summer-time period considered most appropriate by the Member States runs from the end of March to the end of October, it is appropriate that that period therefore be maintained.
As directives have to be implemented into British law to take effect, this is done through Orders in Council under the European Communities Act 1972. The 1972 Summer Time Act (it was all go in 1972) is amended by the Order to enact the change.
The current arrangement settling on the last Sundays in March and October was introduced via the 9th Directive, which came into force through the Summer Time Order 2002. The main effect, as we already used roughly the same system, was to remove the previous contingency the moved the switch to BST earlier by a week if it would have fallen on Easter Sunday. I note that in the original 1972 arrangements, the changes happened at 2am GMT – now they happen at 1am.
Here endeth the lesson.
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