What blogging means to me

Blogging is my favourite hobby. It is possible that people will think the wrong thing about it. They may think, who are you to write a blog? You're just an ordinary working man.

Well

Those people are right ,I am just an ordinary working man but most the main blogging platforms are free to use. If something is free and it is fun then why not use it? I mean, there are worse things I can be doing in my down time. I could be drinking alcohol or watching porn or a number of other destructive things.

The two main platforms that I know of are WordPress and Blogger. I chose Blogger because it is part of the Google family and is compatible with other Google things. The blogger app is free to download and use on the phone.

I think everyone should have a blog because it will cost them nothing and give them a creative outlet. Human beings are creative creatures and part of our well being depends on our creations. We need to draw pictures and write down our thoughts and make poems to have a healthy mind.

Although I am an ordinary man I see myself as a boat that is heading for placid water. A creative person that is filled with questions and a strong desire to know more.

The other thing people think is why I put my diary on social media. My answer would be, what diary? I don't have a diary. They would then say what is "Alan's public diary" ? And I would say it is a blog. It doesn't matter what I call it, a blog is a blog.

Cloudy Morning

Hello Jacob, my son. If you wanted to know what you were like when you were less than 6 months old, I can tell you.

You are very much like most babies. You cry when you are hungry or uncomfortable. You can't walk or talk or sit up unassisted. You are trying very hard to talk. Perhaps when you are a bit older you will talk a lot.

We play nursery rhymes on TV and you like some and dislike others. You dislike "Head, shoulders knees and toes". You like Bingo the dog. You also like some Spanish ones with dancing chickens. You also like the finger song. "One little finger, one little finger, one little finger, tap tap tap". You already have a very distinct personality and you are only 3 months old.

I wonder every day what you will be like when you are older and what the 20s decade will be like for you, something you know better than me since you have been there already.

Bible Anger

I read through many scriptures in the past and learned many things but there are a few things that made me angry.

I was angry when I read the story of Noah, let me explain. Noah built a large boat to save people and animals from a global flood. When the flood went away he got drunk and his clothes fell off. He had 3 sons, Shem Ham and Japheph. Ham laughed at his father's nakedness so he put a curse of him and his descendents that they will become slaves.

To me that was not fair because Ham's descendents didn't do anything to him. In fact at the time of the curse, nearly all of hams descendents were not born. Why would you place a curse on someone's descendents (your own decendents) when they didn't wrong you? One the same page the Israelites claim that the sole descendents of Ham were the Canaanites. This is twisting the truth because if all people on Earth descended from just three men then every person would have a bit of Shem, Ham and Japheth in them because their descendents would have interbred.
They were using the story as an excuse to treat the Canaanites as second class citizens in their own land.

I'm not angry at God, just angry at the way people were in the past.

Was I wrong to feel angry when I read that scripture? Do people feel angry when they read my blog? I don't think people even read it anyway. Is God angry at me for feeling angry at Noah? I know so little and have so many questions.

Why Henry

If I was to go back to the 15th century and meet Henry Tudor, also known as King Henry the 8th, I would tell him that his male sperm can't swim fast enough.... That is why he didn't have male children. He married six different women and gave them all a hard time, why? Because of his ignorance. Plus, the Tudor Dynasty turned the Island of Britain into a fierce millitry machine that would eventually suppress millions of people around the world. That is something I feel unhappy about. I feel like the English empire smeared something from me as an English man, you see I can't claim that my country The United Kingdom of Britain is wealthy because of its innovations because people can always claim that slave money and spoils got Britain started. It is like a bank robber that steals a one million £ gold ingot and then invests the stolen wealth into a franchise and makes £10 million. People can rightly claim that he made £9 million because of stolen money and would be poor without it. Some nations are more blameless than the English and they still became wealthy, they can claim that the wealth is because of their efforts alone.

You see, being English is not about suppressing people. It is about being an armchair philosopher and being modest. That is what the English always were before tyrants took control. They were harmless friends of their neighbors. It is ordinary people like me that will return the Island of Britain back into a harmless friend of the world.

Strange fear

What is more scary? Earth being contacted by Aliens or Discovering that the building blocks of all matter in the universe is just information.

I found out this week that Quantum entanglement has been proven with camera technology. The theory is that particles that are separated can influence one another over distances so the state of one particle can affect the state of another particle even if that particle is very far away, like on the other side of the universe. When you look closely at the world at the sub atomic level you find that it is more like software than hardware.

The world we are living in is a volatile fluid world that is constantly reconfiguring itself. When you walk on the floor, the floor is not holding you up, the electric forces that surround particles in the floor are pushing your particles away and making you think you are walking on something solid. You are walking on electric force fields. That is one example of how crazy this world is.

I'm not saying we are living in a computer simulation but I am saying I wouldn't be surprised if we are.

Boris power

Boris Johnson has been voted leader of the conservative party, the Queen has welcomed him to the helm and he has made his speech and summoned his cabinet team.  Therasa May has stepped down, she did well I think.

Why did they take so long? We knew last month that Boris would win, he had more than double the votes as all the other candidates. Why did we wait until there is only 3 months left before the October deadline? I think they should have fast tracked his promotion.

My local MP Steve Barker happens to be the most hard core Brexiteer in the whole house of commons, why did he turn down a cabinet position? He has a clear plan in place. I guess he just wants to remain a back bencher.

Do they know that people like me get nervous when cabinet ministers quit on mass. When people are fleeing in a movie it is because there is danger, they are either running from an explosion or a monster. Yet the cabinet ministers and leaders are stepping down so often that they may as well go to Ikea and get a whole new Cabinet, I know that joke is not funny.

I wish Boris good luck, I keep my chin up for my island home. Rule Britania, my island of Hope and glory. May the Island of Great Britain and it's family stay in prosperity.

Maths Trick

This blog is not just about things I like, I hope it could be a constructive thing that the community finds useful.

Anyway

I have a trick for quickly working out percentages.

To know the percentage of a price I move the decimal place of the percent 2 places then multiply by the price.

5 percent would be Price X 0.05
20 percent would be Price X 0.20

If I wanted to add percent I would add 1.0 to the percentage

Adding 5 percent would be Price X 1.05
Adding 20 percent would be Price X 1.20

If I wanted to subtract a percentage I would take away the percentage from 100 then multiply by the new percent.

Subtracting 5 percent would be Price X 0.95
Subtracting 20 percent would be Price X 0.80

That's it.

Veranda house quirks

The other day I wrote about my dream home. I missed out a few quirks about the home because the blog entry was getting too long.

It is a quaint place to live. The first quirk is that it would have a tiny metro rail. This sounds crazy but hear me out. From the basement to the man cave on the top floor there would be a small train with 4 carriages that are just big enough for one person to sit in them. You see the 2nd floor at the top of the house is the laundry room and the bar inside the man cave and drinks and dirty laundry would be hard to carry all the way to the top of the house. If I could build a small train that is just big enough for people to sit single file and it would travel through the spaces in the wall then that would be very cool. I Could make the entrance to the train station in a cupboard. And the station could be the size of a typical bathroom in a person's house with all the nostalgic gimics of a metro rail system like a speaker making announcements and a map and a progress display. This quirk comes and goes daily like the tides because my logical side thinks it is silly and my creative side thinks it is cool.

The other quirk would be the man cave at the top of the house. It would be themed but the theme changes often. The most likey theme would be cold blooded animals like reptiles and amphibians. Or the theme could be retro gaming like pack man and Mario bros. The other theme would be movie monsters such as the zenomorphs from alien and predetors from the movie predetor. Friends and family would know the theme of the man cave bar and buy gifts for it.

I'll stop there before you get a sillynes overload.

Veranda house

If I were to build a house from scratch it would be a peaceful haven and a very beautiful place to live.

It is a dream of mine to build my own home from scratch. My custom built house would have a porch that goes all the way around the house like a veranda. The porch would have a wooden floor and balustrade and very comfortable padded wicker seats. The house and porch would be elevated from the ground by 1 meter. The basement would be 1 meter below ground so the ceiling of the basement would be 2 meters. Cars would park in the basement but would only need to go down a 1 meter ramp. The walls of the basement that are above ground would be metal grills with grooves cut into them to let light into the basement and would be black in winter to trap heat from the sun. One side of the grills is black and the other is yellow and they turn around to expose the black side to the sun in winter.

There would be a lounge on the (elevated) ground floor of the house with French-doors that open into the porch. Next to the lounge would be a gym, the gym would have its own showers. on the corner of the house would be a dining room and kitchen. In the other corner would be a children's play room and study room.

On the first floor of the house is the bedrooms. The walls of the 1st floor would be off set  inwards from the ground floor and there would be a lawn that extends all the way to the end of the porch roof but at the edge of the porch roof would be a hedge to stop people falling. So it would be like a hanging garden. The bedrooms would have french doors that open into the hanging garden lawn. They would also have their own toilets and showers.

I can't talk about the colour of the walls and decorations because I'm married and my wife would probably choose the colours of the walls. She is much better at that than me. 

At the top of the house would be the man cave. It is a room full of men's toys, pool table, table tennis table, football table, big screen with all the games consoles and a bar and café, the café counter would have coffee machines and 2 liter bottles of water. And the bar would have small fridges filled with drinks. It would be themed, although the theme changes often in my head. The man cave at the top would also be off set inwards from the floor below so the building would look little bit like a pyramid. The space it is off set by would be for a thin and long conservatory for growing tomatoes and vegtables and a space at the back for drying clothes. Hidden behind the bar would be a large water tank that stores rain water and uses it for a small laundry room in the middle of the floor. The water expelled from the washing machine would be used again by the toilets in the floor below.

My words don't really describe it. It is beautiful and a wonderful place to live.

Wealth is not bad

I have met people in my life that say Money doesn't buy you happyness or the rich are evil or money is evil.

I think that none of that is true because Abraham, Solomon and Job in the bible were given  a lot of wealth by God. People like me are happy by default, it is tragedy and misfortune that makes most people unhappy.
In this world we rely on machines to live so we need wealth to get by. Everything we rely on to live costs money except the air we breathe. Even the clean water we drink costs money.

Making me wealthy would never corrupt me and it would make me more happy. I would be more happy because the things make me less happy would be gone.

Cloudy night

Jacob my son, it is cloudy today but I am sure your mind will be clear.

There are times when it is good to argue and there are times when it is bad. If you are defending yourself in a courtroom, then it is good. But normally it is just a waste of your time and risk of provoking destructive behavior.

If you can't reason with someone in 10 minutes then you can't reason with them in 1 day. Why waste your breath. Just accept that the person doesn't have your point of view. If you win an argument then what is the prize? Air? Dust? Your reasoning is a gift so why try hard to give it when they don't want it.

East and West

If I was to some up the way the world is right now, I would say that it is dividing itself up into segments. Although there is no real east or west on a sphere, we have decided that the border with turkey and all of west Europe and North America and Japan is west and the rest of the world is east. What a world!!!

Rainy morning

Jacob my son, in this world if you go too slow you suffer and if you go too fast you also suffer.

When there is a war, the man that sits still gets shot by the sniper and the man that runs is hit by artillery. The man that moves slowly but steady has a better chance.

In life it is better to go at a steady pace but not too fast. Don't try to do everything at once and do everything at a steady pace. But it is bad to do nothing for too long.

There is a story of the tortoise and the hare. The hare was faster than the tortoise but the tortoise won the race because he didn't stop. The hare ran ahead of the tortoise in the beginning but he then stopped running and sat down for too long. It is better to be like the tortoise that is slow and steady. Only stop and rest when it is time to rest, at the end of the day or at the weekend.

English Sabbath

One of the most disputed religious teachings on this side of the world is the Sabbath.

The Sabbath is the day of rest at the end of a week. In Jewish teachings, the sabbath is the day after the sixth day when creation was finished and God rested. On the Sabbath you're expected not to do any work and to rest the whole day and be thankful to God, The Sabbath is on a Saturday.

When Jesus was on the Earth, he healed people on the Sabbath, the Pharisees and other religious leaders tried to get him stoned to death for working on the Sabbath but it wasn't work for Jesus. He wasn't doing it as work, he was healing people because he loved them and didn't want them to suffer. They didn't get it.

Later on, the Catholics moved the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday because Jesus rose from the dead on that Day. They renamed it the day of the Lord, some of the Catholics were angered by this change and became Protestants.(They were also angry about the statues in the church building but that is another story)

The Protestants and the Catholics were fighting and setting fire to one another so the English thought these guys need to have a cup of tea, we only had Danylion and nettle because we haven't been to India yet

So the English came along and helped fix the problem. They created the English Sabbath. They renamed it the weekend. They said why don't you stop working on Saturday and Sunday and be thankful to God on Friday evening and Saturday morning. If you have a headache on Saturday morning you can still go to observe God Sunday because it is one big Sabbath. (Many Protestants moved their Sabbath back to Sunday because they forgot why they are Protestants. Isn't that right Anglicans, Pentecostals, and Methodists!) Well it is one big Sabbath I guess.

Another problem came up, the work wasn't getting done because we were only working 5 days a week. So the English said, "do I have to solve every problem in the world?" so they made a machine that traps steam while it expands and converts the expanding force into and turning force and called it the weekend maker. The weekend maker could turn the machinery so fast that we have more time on our hands and the work still gets done.

Well that is my story of the English Sabbath, you decide how true it is. While I will keep telling it.

Birthday conclusion

My birthday has finished and I can say I had a great time. We went to my local golf course and played some golf as a family and had a nice meal at the restaurant in the golf course.

We made it a day to remember. It was my first birthday as a father and I was happy.

If I was to sum up my life I would describe myself as a boat that is heading towards placid waters and an lantern made of oak. My grains of growth are small and close together making me rigid but I have a fire inside me that can consume me.

I was born in the 80s, a kid in the 90s, a young man at the turn of the millennium, now a father at the dawn of the 20s decade. I watched the whole world change around me.

Birthday

It is the middle of Summer and it is my Birthday, yesterday England won the Cricket world cup, I'm not into cricket, I didn't even watch it.

I was born in the 80s, a kid in the 90s, a young man at the turn of the millennium. Now I am a mature adult with a family heading towards the 20s decade with hopes and dreams still burning.

I am a boat sailing towards placid waters. I am an oak lantern, my grains are close together and packed tightly but my dreams can burn through and consume me.

Will I make today a day to remember, I'll report back shortly.

Brexit rethink

In 2016, I voted to leave the European Union. The EU is a trading block that allows member states to trade without paying import taxes. I had my reasons, I won't bore you but I will just say that I think that the member states are too different to be together in a trading block, their tax rates are all different and their pay rates are all different and big multinational companies take advantage of these differences and abuse them. Of all the people I know in my family and friend circle I think I was the most reluctant Brexiteer.

Anyway.

If we had another referendum tomorrow, I would vote the other way. I would be a reluctant remainer because it is obvious now that the kingdom isn't ready to break off. Only the English and the Welsh want brexit. The other brother nations of the kingdom want to remain. I think most Brits overall want to remain because many young people that were too young to vote want to stay and some people didn't vote because they saw the polls and thought the verdict was clearly theirs. I remember there was a storm that day. We certainly aren't prepared for brexit, although I was given the impression  we were back in 2016 before we voted.

I will listen to what other people think.

Electric bike

I was looking at electric bikes and thought they are doing it wrong. The battery is a large stack of lithium batteries that slide into a cartridge at the back of the bike. The electric motor is over powered. Everything they do makes the price of the bike unnecessary.

I was looking on the Amazon website at cylinder batteries such as AAA AA C and D types. You won't believe this but many rechargable c bateries produce 5,000 milliamps. That is 5 amps, about 60 watts of power each. They are only 1 and a half volts but that is ok because when you put batteries together end to end the voltage is doubled up. What I am saying is that with just 8 c batteries you can have 12 volts or 40 amps although would wouldn't get more current if they are connected end to end. You would need to connect them in parallel to increase the amps.  To me 5 amps is an enormous amount of power. And the c batteries would fit inside the bike frame. The tubing of a typical bike frame is just over 30 millimeters. C batteries are less than 30 millimeters (3 cm) so If I made electric bikes, the tubing of the bike frame would have a plastic cylendrical holder and connectors to hold an array of 8 batteries. The 8 batteries would be cheap because they are not specifically made for bikes and are standard batteries. Plus if there is no time to charge the batteries, then they could be removed and swapped for freshly charged ones.

If I built an electric bike, it would have a tiny and weak electric motor but the motor would have a gear system that converts speed into force so if the motor is spinning at 1000 rpm then I would attach gears that have a final turn ratio that is one tenth so it gets more power and slower speeds that are ok for bikes. It doesn't take much power to push a pedal bike and I can certainly see where the power can come from.

Is it just me ?

I was a child in the 80s and a kid in the 90s, a young man in the millennium decade and now a mature adult with a child, at the doorstep to the 20s decade. If anyone should judge my island it should be me, my verdict would be accurate.

I think that we are nincompoops.

We privatized our railways. So now the British railway network is a fragmented overpriced pile of tosh. It used to be integrated and cheap but now it is not. The so called competitive pressure between operators doesn't exist they all have a manopoly on their bit of the track.

Our government tried to bring out a poll tax so every adult pays for the cost of the local authorities civil servants. It was obviously un-enforceable plus we had many riots. However the VAT went up to what is now 20% from 15% then 17.5%. There was no riot, yet you are paying more tax you nincompoops!!! When you buy 5 t-shirts, one of them is just tax. Let that sink in.

We use water that is clean enough to drink to flush our toilet. The water has lime in it so it ruins washing machines.  Yet rain water with no linestone in it fails on our roofs every 3 days or so.

There is more but I don't like putting down my nation.

Six means something

One thing I always noticed is that the number six has a very deep meaning.

Half a dozen is 6 and many products are sold in units of 6

There are six distinct colours in the spectrum of visible light. There are six different types of quarks that make up all the atoms in the universe. Insects have six legs.

It is written in the scriptures that God created the universe and everything in it in six days then he rested on the seventh day, the Sabbath. That parable is open to interpretation. Like how long a day is in the story and whether God slows down time and stuff like that.

There is just something about that number.. I will look into how that number fits into everything.

Genghis and me

Genghis Khan is a warrior that ruled the second largest empire in the world, Millions of people around the world claim to a descendent of Genghis Khan. I believe it is not just because he had many children but because of the way humanity is. Let me explain

If I have 2 children and my children have 2 children then I will have 4 Grandchildren and 6 descendents, if my Grandchildren have 2 children each then I will have 8 great grandchildren. If my descendants continue having 2 children each then there will be 16 then 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096,8192 descendants.

Eventually, every person on Earth will be my descent. My future descendants will become links in other people's family trees. I'm not being boastful or pompous, just pointing out that many people living today will become the ancestor to everyone on Earth in the future because everyone on Earth's family tree will be so big that everyone living today would fit on it.

It is hot

It is summer now and I am writing this message to my son. It is in plain sight on the public domain. Very few people will read this, perhaps just an older version of myself and Jacob. Some people will read this because their finger is slow and their device thought they pressed the link when they were actually scrolling. Other people will read this because they think it is a real diary when it is actually just a blog. Some people reading this may be looking for ways to get me fired from my job, that person has received their punishment because they won't get those 2 minutes back from reading this and I have been writing this blog for five years now and there was a time when  I was obsessed with toaster ovens.

In this world we live in, life is very volatile. It is possible that in the near future, I am no longer alive because accidents happen and these bodies we have can fail for all sorts of reasons.

If I was to give advice to you, I would say always aim to be a man of integrity. If any person in this world doesn't respect you then try to distance yourself from them and ignore them, don't try to change them

More to follow..

Superman Hadouken

In the Movie Superman 2, I remember a scene where Superman was confronted by his 3 enemies in his base.

One of them flies towards him, then Superman throws his logo and it turns into a sheet of polyurethane and wraps around the villain and throws him to the ground and then disappears. I got the impression Superman is into Spiderman movies :-p. I always wondered what Superman's weapon was.

Later in life I got an answer, not sure if it is the correct one though. In the computer game street fighter, some of the fighters announce they are going to make a Hadouken and move their hands so fast that the air around their hands turns to a ball of plasma and shoots out at their rival. I'm sure that every guy that was a kid in the nineties tried to make their own Hadouken with their hands, it never ends well especially if your parents have a lot of fragile things sitting around.  Anyway, a Hadouken is a wave of energy given off by mythical fighter's fast moving hands. I wondered if Superman's polyurethane logo thing was a Hadouken.

My point is wouldn't it be nice if a media creation was accompanied by an explanation by the creator, like a back story. Every movie should back story to explain the story in more depth.

The mystery of life, the unsolved, the never ending quest.