To iPad or not to iPad …

… that is the question.

[Malcolm spent twenty minutes rewriting Bill Shakespeare, before recognising it wasn’t worth the effort.]

Here, though, is the question [Watch it, Malcolm!] — the Lady in his Life has a MacBook, which, after three years of whips and scorns of time [Tut! Tut!], is suffering over-heating problems. The thousand natural shocks [That’s pushing your luck!] to which the Pert Young Piece has subjected her keyboard is causing problems. Meanwhile, Malcolm himself has been producing this pale cast of thought, about enterprises of great pith and moment [That’s it! You’re barred!] on a clapped-out PowerBook G4 and an iBook.

To the point!

There may, just may be the chance of an all-round up-grade, as part of a parental visit to First Born in Noo Joisey (and access to places where sales tax does not apply).

Pretty well everything that the inmates of Redfellow Hovel undertake could be done on an iPad.

So … are there cheaper, better (or even equivalent) alternatives? Is there some undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns but puzzles the will [No! That’s cheating!] which involves … Android?

A lot of the technology papers (flush with adverts for just those products) imply so. Murdoch’s Sunday Times invariably finds that an Apple product is second or third choice behind an Android vehicle.

Perhaps Malcolm and the Redfellow Hovel herd are missing out here?

And then, courtesy of macrumors.com (which might, just might, be biased) Malcolm hits on this:

Several reports have indicated that despite shipping hundreds of thousands or even millions of tablets, many of Apple’s competitors are not seeing consumer interest in their products and thus the devices are sitting on store shelves and in warehouses and not making their way into users’ hands. One of the most telling pieces of data comes in a new report from AllThingsD, which has learned that of the approximately 270,000 units of HP’s highly-promoted TouchPad shipped out to Best Buy’s distribution channels, only about 25,000 have been sold to customers.

According to one source who’s seen internal HP reports, Best Buy has taken delivery of 270,000 TouchPads and has so far managed to sell only 25,000, or less than 10 percent of the units in its inventory. 

A second person who has seen Best Buy’s TouchPad sales figures confirmed the results as “consistent with what I’ve seen,” and went so far as to say that 25,000 sold might be “charitable.” This source suggested that the 25,000-unit sales number may not account for units that consumers return to stores for a refund.

Best Buy is said to be so unhappy with the lack of momentum on TouchPad sales that it has asked HP to take many of the unsold units back, but HP is reportedly “pleading” with Best Buy to remain patient. HP recently slashed $100 off of the price of the TouchPad in attempt to spur sales and is hoping that the move will turn things around, dropping pricing on the entry-level 16 GB model to $399.99. HP’s price cut may not be having the desired effect, however, as reports coming in from retailers suggest that consumers are continuing to hold off in hopes that prices drop even further. 

So, such reports Must give us pause [Huh?] … there’s the respect/ That makes calamity of so long life; … With this regard their currents turn awry,/ And lose the name of action.

[I hate you, Malcolm. I really, really hate you!]

Wozzup?

They’re out of sorts in Sunderland
And terribly cross in Kent,
They’re dull in Hull
And the Isle of Mull
Is seething with discontent,
They’re nervous in Northumberland
And Devon is down the drain,
They’re filled with wrath
On the firth of Forth
And sullen on Salisbury Plain,
In Dublin they’re depressed, lads,
Maybe because they’re Celts
For Drake is going West, lads,
And so is everyone else.
Hurray-hurray-hurray!
Misery’s here to stay.

Chris Cook for The Financial Times:

The pressure on students receiving their A-level results on Thursday intensified as unemployment data released on Wednesday show 950,000 under-25s are looking for work – a rise of 15,000 in three months.

The unemployment rate for 16 to 18-year-olds seeking work is 36.7 per cent – compared with a rate of 7.9 per cent for the population as a whole. Among 18 to 24-year-olds it is 18 per cent.

Competition for jobs suitable for school-leavers is fierce. PwC, the business services company and the UK’s largest private graduate recruiter, reported that it had received 1,600 applications for entry to its school-leavers’ programme – an increase of 56 per cent since last year.

The lack of jobs for young people has driven more people to apply for university in the past few years: about 640,000 students from the UK and European Union are chasing about 450,000 places at UK universities for 2010-11.

The Daily Telegraph on the economy:

The Office for National Statistics said sales volumes, excluding petrol, rose just 0.2pc in July from the previous month and were flat year-on-year.

Analysts had forecast a rise of 0.3pc on the month and an equal annual rise, as retailers slashed prices aggressively in summer sales.

Victoria Cadman of Investec said: “It’s another set of disappointing data, with the UK consumer limping along at best. What leaps out is that consumers are unwilling to spend on big ticket items – household goods are down 4.1pc on the year.

Colin Ellis of the British Venture Capital Association said the data suggested that households are still keeping a close eye on their spending.

He said: “With large rises in gas and electricity prices looming, consumer caution could be set to intensify in the months ahead.”

Excluding fuel, retail sales also grew by 0.2pc on the month and were 0.2pc lower than in July 2010.

Philip Aldrick decodes the Bank of England, also for the Telegraph:

Tables published today show that the Bank believes there is at least a one-in-10 chance the UK will suffer a double dip over the next 18 months.

Its current forecast is more bleak than any projection since February last year, as Britain was coming out of the deepest slump since the 1930s, and even worse than its outlook in May 2008, when the recession had just started.

Becky Barrow and Tim Shipman big up job prospects for the Daily Mail:

British jobs are now being taken by immigrants at a faster rate than under Labour, figures showed yesterday.

The number of British people of working age with jobs has plummeted by nearly 100,000 since David  Cameron took office – but nearly 300,000 foreigners have found work.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith yesterday warned that the Government is in ‘the last chance saloon’ if it wants to get British people off benefits and into the workplace.

The number of immigrant workers has reached a record 4.1million, the figures from the Office for National Statistics show.

Under, Labour immigrant workers came in at the same rate as jobs were created.

But the latest figures suggest that not only have immigrants taken all the jobs created in Britain over the past year, but they have pushed nearly 100,000 British people out of the workplace and on to benefits.

The only British-born people being  successful in the jobs market are around 50,000 pensioners who have gone back to work because times are tight. When the over-65s are included in the figures, the number of British people with jobs has fallen by 50,000 over the past 12 months.

The BBC puts it all in perspective:

European and US shares have seen more large falls, as the uncertainty that has caused recent turmoil returns.

London’s FTSE 100 index ended the day down 4.5%, while Germany’s Dax lost 5.8%. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones fell 3.7% in morning trading.

Shares in some leading banks plummeted, with Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland down more than 11%.

Analysts again cited reasons including worries about global growth, and the eurozone debt crisis.

“People are nervous about the outlook for the global economy,” Grant Lewis, head of economic research at Daiwa Capital Markets in London, told the BBC.

“Every piece of economic data that has come out recently has been weaker than expected.”

Headline, The Guardian, 8th January 2010:

What is the secret of David Cameron’s success?

And what is Malcolm’s conclusion? — 

 

It’s not even worth the Fisking. Just ….

To and from the lighthouse

Not Virginia Woolf, but Peter Scott, Paul Gallico and a brave band of boaters.

Last autumn Malcolm felt moved to write about the  East Bank “lighthouse” (it’s not: it’s a seamark) at the outfall of the River Nene. That post had a curious existence: for quite a while it featured strongly in Malcolm’s meagre quantum of “hits”. He concluded it was because he was doing a better job than the estate agents in selling the structure.

The rest of the story appears in the current issue of Waterways World:

Well done, the Hiltons.

Even so, Malcolm hopes they find space to acknowledge that this was not just Peter Scott’s abode (and that for a fairly short time). It was also an inspiration for Philip Rhayader’s home in Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose — though, to make Rhayader’s Dunkirk trip more credible, Gallico removed the Fenland Nene to the fictional “Aelder” and the Essex Marshes.

Once upon a none-too-distant time that book was an essential, a “Blyton breaker”, in the cause of developing young readers. It seems to have fallen foul of “political correctness” because of the references to Rhayader as a “cripple” and a “hunchback”.

Pity the objectors don’t swallow their instinctive prejudices and trust Gallico to do the job for them:

Frith saw the yellow light of Rhayader’s lantern down by his little wharf, and she found him there. His sailboat was rocking gently on a flooding tide and he was loading supplies into her—water and food and bottles of brandy, gear and a spare sail. When he turned to the sound of her coming, she saw that he was pale, but that his dark eyes, usually so kind and placid, were glowing with excitement, and he was breathing heavily from his exertions.

Sudden alarm seized Frith. The snow goose was forgotten. “Philip! Ye be goin’ away?”

Rhayader paused in his work to greet her, and there was something in his face, a glow and a look, that she had never seen there before.

“Frith! I am glad you came. Yes, I must go away. A little trip. I will come back.” His usually kindly voice was hoarse with what was suppressed inside him.

Frith asked: “Where must ye go?”

Words came tumbling from Rhayader now. He must go to Dunkirk. A hundred miles across the North Sea. A British army was trapped there on the sands, awaiting destruction at the hands of the advancing Germans. The port was in flames, the position hopeless. He had heard it in the village when he had gone for supplies. Men were putting out from Chelmbury in answer to the government’s call, every tug and fishing boat or power launch that could propel itself was heading across the sea to haul the men off the beaches to the transports and destroyers that could not reach the shallows, to rescue as many as possible from the Germans’ fire.

Frith listened and felt her heart dying within her. He was saying that he would cross the sea in his little boat. It could take six men at a time; in a pinch, seven. He could make many trips from the beaches to the transports.

The girl was young, primitive, inarticulate. She did not understand war, or what had happened in France, or the meaning of the trapped army, but the blood within her told her that here was danger.

“Philip! Must ‘ee go? You’ll not come back. Why must it be ‘ee?”

The fever seemed to have gone from Rhayader’s soul with the first rush of words, and he explained it to her in terms that she could understand.

He said: “Men are huddled on the beaches like hunted birds, Frith, like the wounded and hunted birds we used to find and bring to sanctuary. Over them fly the steel peregrines, hawks and gyrfalcons, and they have no shelter from these iron birds of prey. They are lost and storm-driven and harried, like the Princesse Perdue you found and brought to me out of the marshes many years ago, and we healed her. They need help, my dear, as our wild creatures have needed help, and that is why I must go. It is something that I can do. Yes, I can. For once —for once I can be a man and play my part.”

Frith stared at Rhayader. He had changed so. For the first time she saw that he was no longer ugly or mis-shapen or grotesque, but very beautiful. Things were turmoiling in her own soul, crying to be said, and she did not know how to say them.

“I’ll come with ‘ee, Philip.”

Rhayader shook his head. “Your place in the boat would cause a soldier to be left behind, and another and another. I must go alone.”

An intrepid voyage

The barges which decorate British waterways are not properly called “narrow boats for nothing. They have to fit the canals, and that means they are 6 feet 10 inches in width (to fit the seven foot wide dock gates). To go everywhere on the inland waterways, the tight limits of the Calder and Hebble Navigation means a length of 56 feet is the limit (though 70 footers are quite common). Then there’s the vertical dimensions: a three foot draft in probably pushing the limit, and the “air draft” (to get under fixed bridges) not usually more than six feet or so.

Those are not dimensions which suggest a seagoing craft, particularly when speeds of 4 mph are considered “speeding” on the inland waterways.

Which is why a trip passing the East Bank lighthouse, which also appears in that same issue of Waterways World represents somewhere between the height of folly and a daring mission:

Of all the tidal passages an inland craft can make, the Wash is perhaps the most formidable.

It’s not necessarily more dangerous than the others, but it is complicated to navigate; it requires a weather eye and careful pilotage; and it does need a lot of planning and care. Above all, it’s by far the longest. It will take you a whole day or night, and you’ll be up to six miles from land at times, far from immediate assistance.

What’s more, it’s not a passage that narrowboats can normally make in a single crossing: you need to beach up halfway through to await the turn of the tide. And with a distance of from 32 to 46 miles, winding around treacherous sandbanks, it’s the most complicated of all tidal passages for canal boats.

There then follows Andrew Denny’s account of ten boats making the crossing. For the purposes of this post, Malcolm is concerned with the early part:

The path from Wisbech to the coast is straightforward, provided you don’t meet any large commercial vessels, and it has few landmarks. The only note of caution is the major swing bridge at Long Sutton, large enough to pass under without hindrance, and the port of Sutton Bridge …

A couple of miles further on is the last landmark of the Nene — the pair of Victorian ‘lighthouses’ at Guys Head. It’s said they were never built to be true lighthouses, but simply landmarks for sailors to find the entrance to the river through the myriadsandbars. Sir Peter Scott, the naturalist, owned and lived in the eastern one in his latter years.

Fair enough, except for two details:

• Scott’s residence at the East Bank was in his twenties and thirties — and he lived to be nearly eighty — so hardly his “latter years”
• The Nene outfall was dug by Jolliffe and Banks for John Rennie between 1826 and 1831. The two “lighthouses” were Rennie’s final flourish, and so hardly “Victorian”.

Kudos to Ms Maher

Tired of the daily chore of stripping out the Russian and Chinese spam, Malcolm was chuffed and taken by the comment from Janet Maher or, as she prefers elsewhere, Sinéad Ní Mheachair.

Her  web-site, MaherMatters, is well worth the trip — fresh, neat, and informative. Nice one.