An Apology

I am about to follow up on Kylie's post about Derbyshire, but first I would like to issue an apology.

The thing is, what with one thing and another, one tends to be slightly busy. And, what with one thing and another, writing long, informative, well-thought-out and interesting blog posts takes time. So I tend to write short, boring posts about everyday things, usually when I am annoyed about something. So I apologise. It's not really fair on you, the reader, as we actually have been doing some interesting things which you might like to read about.

That said, I am annoyed; I got quite substantially wet in a shower on the way home this afternoon. I was walking past a pub when it started, and I thought, "Well, I could nip in for a quick drink and this will probably pass over and then I can get on home." But then I thought, "Ah, it's only light; what's the chance I'll get really wet?" Stupidity comes in many forms, and this is one of them. Moral of the story: Pubs are there to drink in. Get to it.

But Derbyshire has many beauties, has it not?

Hello Everyone! Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. This is not Tom writing but Kylie. After much long-distance arm twisting, I have finally decided to write. I may not be as witty as some people, but I will aim to be slightly more informative.

Last weekend, our family hired a car and drove three hours to Derbyshire to enjoy the last of what summer had to offer. Why Derbyshire? (I hear you ask.) Well, a certain piece of literature described it as the best of all the counties. To quote from the miniseries (which is easily located on the web whereas (alas!) my copy of the book is still in a box in Suffolk):

But Derbyshire has many beauties, has it not?

Indeed. To me Derbyshire is the best of all counties.
You will judge for yourself whether Chatsworth is not the equal of Blenheim.
And surely these southern counties have nothing to compare to the wild and
untamed beauty of the Peaks.

So we went to explore it for ourselves. The photo above is from one of the wild and untamed bits... apparently. Of course, nothing in England is really wild and untamed: there are too many sheep for that. Originally this area (and most of England) would have been woodland, but the land was cleared first for grazing and then cropping (and not to try to curb inflation of the leaf currency, contrary to popular opinion), and sheep ensure that any aspiring trees are mown down in their tracks. Of course, trees would only get in the way of the view, which is deliciously green and... well English. Traipsing around the countryside also appears to be very English - we were conspicuous by our Australian accents. In fact, all weekend we seemed to go places where the majority of people were English families (complete with dog) on a day out. Yes, I know we're in England, but after spending time in Bath (where, if you want to ask directions, you first have to ask someone whether they're local) it is a novelty.

But Derbyshire isn't all countryside. It also has big houses, although this next house was in the neighbouring county of Cheshire. The family weren't at home for the summer but the grounds were delightful.

Does any of this look familiar? I hope so. I got quite excited seeing it. This is actually the rear of the house. There are archways from both the front and rear of the house going into the central courtyard. The 'front' door is actually located on the side of the house, off the courtyard. Which means, of course, that the house isn't quite as big as it seems from the outside as it's hollow in the inside, but it does mean that most rooms do get some natural light.


Alas! No Mr. Darcy! Anyone else for a swim in the lake?

The place is Lyme Park, originally owned by the Legh family but now a National Trust property. So the family really weren't home for the summer. The house was originally Tudor, but was remodelled in the 1720s by some Italian architect and now resembles an Italianate palace. Apart from starring as Pemberley (or, at least, the outside of it), it does have an interesting history. The original grant of land from the crown came about because of services rendered to the Black Prince (Prince Edward, 1330-1376) during the Hundred Years War. The Black Prince was young and leading one of his early campaigns when his standard was captured. The Legh family ancestor was the one to regain the flag, but he did this by chopping off the arm of the enemy carrying it. Rigor mortis set in, leaving the arm still clutching the standard when he returned. The Prince was very happy, sought to reward the soldier with land and, two generations later (these things take time), the family were granted the land which is now Lyme Park. The family were prodigiously proud of their history and so incorporated the arm grasping the standard on to their coat of arms, and then used it as a decoration on the ceiling. 19 times. Just to reinforce the point.

Lyme Park also has a 1400-acre medieval deer park, so we had venison for lunch at the restaurant on site. Venison is cheaper than beef here. It's going to be a long while before we have fillet steak again.


Another afternoon - another walk. This photo was taken on the way down from Mam Tor on the High Peak estate. The countryside looks more wild and untamed than the first photo. It was even picturesque in parts. Eliza really didn't like this part of the walk. We were up on a ridge and it was windy. She cheered up when we got out of the wind and found some sheep... and a family out walking the dog. Sheep and dogs and little children running around: such were Eliza's highlights of the weekend.

We also spent a day at Chatsworth. Chatsworth is larger and grander than Lyme Park, and is actually located in Derbyshire. I'll leave it to another post to describe it.

I get all the news I need from the weather report

Anyone else love that song? Anyway, we're not in New York.

Have you ever noticed that weather forecasters have a rather particular set of terms they use in producing forecasts? In Australia, weather forecasts are almost completely made up of terms such as 'scattered showers', 'isolated thunder-storms', 'moderate to fresh south-west breeze', 'warm to hot with an afternoon sea-breeze,' etc. It's a bit hard to convey in a series of snippets, but the language is quite precise and formal. When you go outside, you can quite easily correlate the language with what you see; if the forecast says 'scattered showers', you can go outside, look around, and see the odd dark cloud with water coming out the bottom and they are, indeed, scattered. Today's forecast for Adelaide is not a bad example:

A shower or two. A cool to cold day with light winds, tending moderate southwestin the afternoon.

I can read that and tell exactly what the day will feel like in Adelaide.

I had assumed that this was common to weather forecasters everywhere, but this turns out not to be the case. British weather forecasters are rather less formal about their forecasts. Indeed, they often sound a bit embarrased by the weather (and with the summer we are having, fair enough). They use phrases like 'still the odd shower around, though essentially much drier,' 'feeling rather cool again,' 'unseasonably strong winds across the Southern counties,' 'occasionally breezy,' 'a fair chance of persistent rain,' and, my favourite, 'disappointingly cold.' All taken from the forecast for Bristol for the next two weeks, I'm afraid.

The Glorious English Summer

This is the current rainfall radar for Great Britain and Ireland.

Tom's Tips for Travellers #1

Do not buy food in English railway stations. Ever.

I have just paid £2.70 for what must a real-world realisation of the worst ham & cheese croissant theoretically possible.

Work Culture

One of the great questions about the world, along with Why does Jeremy Clarkson exist? and How do six billion people manage to produce so little television worth watching? is, What are secretarial staff for, exactly?

In Australia, true secretarial staff are becoming increasingly rare. Even where you can identify them, they tend to have titles like Office Manager or Security and Safety Officer, by which they prefer to be known. Here are a few things that such staff will not do for you in an Australian company:

• Type that letter to a client for you;
• Deal with your mail;
• Make coffee for you;
• Make your lunch;
• Wash your dishes after lunch;

and so on. In fact, a cynic might allege that Australian secretaries are only interested in doing jobs that increase their own power base within the company. Australian secretarial staff are generally very adverse to the above list of jobs, but very happy to, for instance, book travel (and approve or reject travel plans), prepare bids in response to tenders (and determine relative client-funded pay-scales for individuals) and so on.

I am a bit bemused to find that this is not the case in Britain, at least, certainly not at GH. All mail is opened by the secretaries, and dealt with as best they can; you only see it if they're not sure what to do with it. GH provides drip-filter coffee and lunch for their staff; the secretarial staff can be seen each morning, setting up the coffee machine (if no early-birds get desperate and beat them to it, which might actually be most of the time, often me), taking the delivery of sandwiches from Sainsbury's, laying out the pickles, mustard, beetroot, fruit, mayonnaise etc, slicing tomato and so on. And it seems to be just normal to dump your dishes on the bench afterwards, and let them load the dishwasher and pack the dishes away afterwards. Most people (including me) will load their own dishes if the dishwasher is not full for the day yet, but with two domestic dishwashers serving more than a hundred people, this inevitably runs out fairly early. So the secretarial staff deal with it.

Those familiar with an Australian office environment will likely notice some differences here. I suspect that, when I get used to it, I will rather enjoy it; for the moment it is quite uncomfortable, and I keep wanting to offer to help. At least once I have been told not to, because my time is too expensive for that (or at least better off billed to a customer).

And to elaborate on an earlier question, we have 43 free-to-air (so long as you pay your TV license fee) channels here; several of them are, admittedly devoted to to sort of infomercial only seen on late-night TV in Australia, or to constant music videos and the like, but there must still be at least 25 channels showing general television which then allege you would like to watch. Why is it that, at any one time, three of them will be showing Top Gear? which, if you do the math, tells you there are a very large number of Top Gear repeats here, and that Top Gear is sensationally popular here. There is also a channel called UKTV History, which sounds really interesting to me, being quite interested in the more popular bits of history; a quick look through to next week's programming shows that it only broadcasts for about eight hours a day (fair enough I guess) and repeats shows about every two days (what?). It perhaps goes to show that the Australian model of four channels with few repeats might be about right.

And let me take this opportunity to plug MythTV; a free software digital video recorder for your TV. With this and a £50 TV receiver card, I can control our TV from the computer. A week ago I told it to record any Top Gear episodes that came on; I now have sixty one and a half episodes recorded, which rather demonstrates the validity of my complaint, I think. Handy bit of software, though.

OK, Jack has asked me to say a bit about my new job. He assures me that lots of people are interested. Well, you are, aren't you?

I work for a company called Garrad Hassan and Partners. We are wind turbine design consultants. We have been in the business since 1984, well before wind turbines were fashionable and, so I am told, we are the very best there is in design consultancy when it comes to wind turbines.

We cover every aspect of wind turbine design; from site selection, wind modelling and power output prediction for a given site, right through mechanical design of the turbines and the towers, electrical design and component selection, to controller design and integration, factory test support, prototype tower commisioning, Human Machine Interface (HMI) design and so on.

So what's it like to be a raving greeny? Actually, the people who work for GH are an interesting mix. Some are in the business because they believe they are making the world a better place and want to see the end of fossil fuels and nuclear power; some are there because wind turbines present some very interesting problems in engineering; some are there because it's a job that pays the bills. Most, I suspect, are a mixture of all three, including me.

We work in a fantastic old building called St Vincent's Works. It is pretty much what you'd get if you crossed a factory with a fairy castle. The wikipedia page has quite a good photo. It was originally built in the 1800s some time, and was mostly concerned with the manufacture of corrugated iron for export to Australia; apparently quite a lot of the corrugated iron used in early Australian buildings came from this factory. The factory portion (which you can't see in the photo) is now derelict and held up with scaffolding; the office portion has been well-maintained and refurbished over the years. The entry foyer is an octagonal chamber with eight arched entry-ways, murals on walls and floor constructed from ceramic tiles, concealed up-lighting to highlight the nice bits, slate stairs up to the first floor and so on. Every visitor just stops and looks at it for a minute or so, and so did I when I first came in.

My particular job is in the controllers group of the software department; we are responsible for implementing control algorithms produced by our turbine design people and also developing HMIs to go with them. This presents some interesing, although hardly unique, challenges.

For starters, we never impose hardware choices on our customers. We do advise when we are asked to do so, but most customers have already decided whose hardware they want to use and we just promise to support it. Our controller needs to be very portable, then; to different hardware, differnt operating systems, different communications protocols and so on. We are constantly porting our software to new platforms, and trying to make sure we keep as much as possible in common between the platforms. Some customers even change their minds half way through the project, and we still promise to support it; it is part of the service.

It turns out that wind turbines are complex beasts, with plenty of potential to go badly wrong, and it is our responsibility to make sure we never get into those situations and that everything goes right. How bad can it be? Have a look at this; this is what happens when a turbine goes wrong. This condition is known as overspeed, and is about the worst thing that can happen to a turbine. It is both expensive and extremely dangerous. The description on that page is not quite accurate; I think the story is that a maintenance crew had disabled the controller's overspeed protection for maintenance purposes when the wind came up unexpectedly, and a couple of other overspeed protection systems failed. Don't quote me on that, though. Thankfully, the crew had time to get out.

My particular responsibilities are basically the messy bits of controller implementation; I don't know a lot about how controllers work, but I am responsible for making them (and their HMIs) work on every platform any customer asks us for. So far my work has been mostly behind-the-scenes, preparing some abstractions to make this a lot easier in future.

So there you are; that's what I do all day. It is interesting and entertaining. I am also walking four miles each day to get to the train, from the train to work and back again. At first this was a bit of a drag, but now I am finding I quite enjoy it. I feel a lot fitter than I have in a long time. Occasionally I take the bus from the end of our street instead; when I get to work, I feel like I have missed out and it leaves me feeling edgy and disquieted. Besides, with the dreadful traffic we have here, it is quicker to walk one and a quarter miles to the train and take the train than to walk a hundred yards to the bus and take the bus. Sigh. We will see how I go in winter, when the sun comes up after I get to work and goes down before I leave.