*snippet* Whilst laying in bed last night (8pm – I was feeling very tired again), I devised a way of generating large amounts of electrical power from a single AAA battery. Basically, I could take that AAA battery and power a house for an infinite amount of time on the “power generator” I devised. I’m still trying to find a flaw/fault in the “design” of the thing (very basic design using proven technology) as I know one must exist, but I’m having difficulties finding the flaw. It’s practically a perpetual motion machine (except it just generates electricity continuously and doesn’t actually “move”) and a great philosopher once said “In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics” (H.Simpson).
Author: Richy B.
Follow me on Mastodon at @rbairwell@mastodon.org.uk or just the posts on this blog by following @richyb@blog.rac.me.uk .
![[A CB radio whose users need to know the Phonetic alphabet]](https://blog.rac.me.uk/photos/2003/02/cbradio.jpg)
I’ve just got off the phone with a company where I had to spell my surname: I’ve got quite a difficult to correctly spell surname so I often have to spell it out phonetically (the “a for alpha” business), but three-quarters through I realised I couldn’t remember what ‘W’ was for (it’s for whisky). Oops. Anyway, as an aid to my memory more than anything, here’s the phonetic alphabet that dates from around 1995 (and has been approved by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, International Telecommunications Union and the FAA – so it’s “quite official”):
Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima Mike November Oscar Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra Tango Uniform Victor Whisky Xray Yankee Zulu
The UK police sometimes use “Indigo” instead of “India” and the actual spellings of some of the words may vary – but since they are made to be said rather the spelt themselves, it shouldn’t be much of a problem.
In aviation, they also use the following phonetic digits mainly to avoid “conflicts” with other words and digits (“five” may be mistaken for “fire”, but fife won’t be):
zero one two tree fower fife six seven eight niner
![[Guess That Movie Round 23]](https://blog.rac.me.uk/gtmimages/guessthatmovie_0023.jpg)
After 5 incorrect guesses, LD correctly recognised Guess That Movie 22 as being taken from the 1997 movie Air Force One ![[Order from Amazon.co.uk]](https://blog.rac.me.uk/photos/amazonbutton.jpg){kind=small}
. It showed Dean Stockwell as “Defence Secretary Walter Dean” – the clue I gave out (if you didn’t recognise him from the photo) was the corrupted introduction to Quantum Leap (in which I know him as “Al” the hologram). I should have realised that he was a distinguished actor and had been in many other movies other than Air Force One (126 movies/TV programmes according to his IMDb profile.
I’ve now updated the high score tables and whilst the last two rounds have made a little difference, there’s been no change in the rankings. It’s still Ph33r_m3 followed by LD (now on 445 points), then “Super Beastmaster” and then Kymberlie R. McGuire (who only managed to gain an extra 55 points with the rather difficult round 21: The Cure).
Anyway, here’s round 23 (already? *shocked*) of Guess That Movie. Which movie is this image taken from then?
A: Birthday Girl. Correctly guessed by Kymberlie R. McGuire
![[Guess That Movie Round 22]](https://blog.rac.me.uk/gtmimages/guessthatmovie_0022.jpg)
Kymberlie R. McGuire finally managed to correctly guess that Guess That Movie Round 21 was, in fact, the 1917 Charles Chaplin (better known as ‘Charlie Chaplin’) movie “The Cure“. The screenshots also shows Eric Campbell as “the man with the gout”.
I did warn you all that it was an old movie – it’s a good thing I didn’t say exactly how old! Now I’ve just got to work out how many points Kymberlie has won. Congratulations to her for winning, shame on the rest of you for not even guessing.
Now that we are no longer trapped in the past, facing images that are not your own – can you change the score board for the better? Your only guide in this round is this image, taken from a more recent movie, and it appears to the left as you can see. And so you need to find yourself guessing the movie, striving to gain the extra points and hoping the each guess will be the correct guess.
And yep, that was a clue. I’m not sure what good it’ll do you, but at least it’s a clue… Go on Guess That Movie! (just leave a comment with your name, email address and the name of the movie you are guessing: URLs are optional, but email address will never be shown).
A: Air Force One . Correctly guessed by LD
![[Busy]](https://blog.rac.me.uk/photos/2003/02/busy.jpg)
Like the Roger Hargreaves’ Mr.Men character “Mr. Busy” , I’ve been extremely busy the last week and a bit and just haven’t had much time to my self – let alone enough spare time to make any blog entries. My “to do” list currently has “Redesign 4 websites, Design 1 website, Launch another website, convert a complex Perl+XML based script to PHP” and many other things on it – and that’s all in addition to my “normal” work load. It doesn’t help with it being so frigging cold at the moment – it’s currently -5° outside at the moment – that’s in Celsius/Centigrade (where 0 degrees is water freezing). If you are more used to to other scales – -5 C is approximately 268.1° Kelvin or even 23° F (Fahrenheit) if you are one of those strange people still using that temperature scale. It’s expected to rise to a maximum of +5 tomorrow (278.1 K/41 F) – but when I’ve got to walk to work, it’ll be more like 2° (again that’s 35.6°F or 275.1°K). We are having snow on a every-other-day to daily basis at the moment: there’s just a very light covering outside at this point, but Monday night it was really belting it down!
It didn’t really help when I got home from work today (I actually finished bang-on-time: yesterday I worked an extra 40 minutes to try and clear some of my backlog) and discovered that a ghost had turned my central heating thermostat down from 25 to around 8 (I think it’s in celsius, but I’ve never really checked). Ok – it was probably me turning it down sometime during the night (I actually was asleep at 7pm, woke up again around 11pm and then back to sleep around 11.30pm – hence why there were no blog entries for Tuesday) – but the house was still freezing! I ended up sticking the heating on high and sitting downstairs in front of the gas fire trying to keep warm (whilst reading 3 magazines that have arrived for me in the last 2 days and a 3 day old newspaper: hey, I’m trying to catch up with things!).
At one point my parents rang and I had a chat with them – I did initially think it was my GESF (green eyed southern friend), but it wasn’t to be. I haven’t spoken to her in ages: it’s not been intentional, but I just haven’t had the time to do so. I’ll try and call her tomorrow evening though (even though she’s dancing after work) as I really do miss her voice a bit and I just want to see how things are looking for a certain date next week. I’m currently in a half-mind whether or not to get her anything for Valentines Day: yes, I like her quite a bit, but I’m not sure how she feels about me and I don’t want to lose a good friend either… Decisions decisions. I suppose it doesn’t help having only spoken to her a couple of times this year so far – during December we were speaking to each other practically every other day!
Oh – I actually had a recruitment agency call me up yesterday (Tuesday) and leave a message for me: but I didn’t get a chance to call them back until today. They’ve found me a job. I can work at home (the company in question is, in fact, based in the North East of England, but allow telecommuting) and it’s a job as a search engine optimiser…
Yep, I’m already doing that exact same job and I only started 3 weeks ago – I like the job, the company, my co-workers (hell – even some of those people that pay our wages – ‘customers’ is the polite term I think) and I’m really getting into the swing of things so much that I’ve got no intentions to leave at all! Even though the job offer I received from the agency was quite a bit more than my current base salary (the offer was £25,000 per year – I’m on a bit less than that but with commission/bonus scheme). But if any body else is interested in it though, leave a comment (or send an email to seovacancy@[insert the URL of this blog – blog.beebware…. – here]: this email address will be deactivated on Saturday though) – and I’ll either give the agency your details or give you theirs. They are looking for someone really quick though so hurry. No, I don’t know which company it is but I know the techy jobmarket is only just making a come back so if anybody is interested…
I also know there’s a PHP programmer’s job available in the West Midlands (Dudley area) – again, drop a comment or email phpvacancy@[see above] and I’ll sort something out.
Blarg flibblepenguin! Is it really 1.41am on Thursday? Bed time for moi I think! ALLO!