Yesterday evening we spent about one and a half hours in the company of a journalist and photographer from a local newspaper.  No, we haven’t reached celebrity status or have we had some crime committed against us, but we were wanted for a feature to be published in a magazine about new house developments.

As we have lived in our new house for around 2 years now and recommended others to do the same on our estate the PR company for the house builder suggested that we take part in a feature that was going to be in a magazine.  We thought that it looked like fun and so we gave it a shot.

The photographer arrived and took lots of photos of the property including all the rooms and external photographs too.  He also wanted some shots of myself and Helen in various places.  I was taken in the kitchen, Helen in a rather unusual shot looking down on the stairs and then us both at the front of the house.

We all can’t wait for the magazine to come out in November.  It is called Locations and should be out around the North West area of England.

Looking at the numbers in the title at first they seem to be any old set of random numbers that we see every day on various things in our lives. However as many of you will undoubtedly be aware of today, this set of numbers, although shorted by most to 9/11 will go down in the history books forever.

For me the day started as any other day would have. At the time I had just started my PGCE year in order to train to become a teacher. We had lectures all morning and then after lunch, for some reason or other we finished early. I got into the car to drive home and as usual turned on the radio – Rock FM on 97.4FM. As soon as I started listening I could tell that something devastating had happened. However throughout my journey home the radio DJ at the time never actually said what had occurred. He only talked about how tragic the event was.

The journey home from Lancaster took around 30 minutes and I arrived back home unusually early at around 1530. Intrigued at what the commotion was about on the radio I quickly put the TV on and suddenly realised what had happened. Every channel I turned to had footage of the towering inferno that so many New Yorkers witnessed.  As I tuned in the footage of the collapse of the South Tower was being re-run.  This tower had just collapsed.  I remember literally thinking “oh my god”.   I was struck with a sense of fear about what had caused this.  Could it really have been terrorists?  I suppose that question sort of remains unanswered and maybe will always remain like that.

When the North Tower collapsed I was watching the TV at around 1515.  My fear was raised even more.  I suppose half of it was about the suffering of the people in the New York and the other half was thinking “what is happening?” and “what could be next, somewhere in the UK?”.

I remember struggling to get to sleep that night and the day after working in college was difficult.  Our tutors were giving us advice all the time about what to say and do should pupils bring up the topic in a lesson.  That was advice that everyone was listening to and all found it very welcome.

What I have always thought about the fall of the World Trade Centre towers, is why the 1th September 2001?  What was it about that particular day that made it right for whoever it was that instigated these attacks?  I suppose it is ironic that the number nine eleven (911) would have been used an awful lot that morning in New York.  Off course 911 is the emergency services in the USA.

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Chronology of 9/11
Wikipedia – September 11th
[Video] The 9/11 Attacks

Yesterday I lost my baseball cap. I write about this has it amused me no end. I lost it in my car!

I was driving home from work with the roof down as the day was beautiful. My wife and I both noticed a very foul smell and I was beginning to wonder whether it was coming from the tyres on my car. It was the sort of burning rubber smell that I thought could be something rubbing against a tyre.

Therefore concerned that we may have blow out, I wound the window down in order to have a quick look over the side of the car, during a straight, safer section of road. As I did so my cap that I was wearing to shield from the sun from my eyes whilst driving was sucked of my head and landed on the road behind me.

I had the normal reaction that you would have if someone was to come up behind you and take your hat of your head. Both hands move towards your head in a reflex action to attempt to prevent the loss of the hat. Whilst driving at 50 mph this is not the best idea. For the rest of the journey I couldn’t help chuckling away to myself!

Luckily the cap as not a cherished one, like when Simon got his Boston Red Sox cap stolen. It was a necessity purchase when holidaying in France earlier this year. The moral of the story being don’t lean out of a soft top car when wearing head gear!

Driving to work this morning was just like any other journey. However I found myself behind a trailer. This wasn’t and ordinary trailer as attached to the back of it was a wood shredder, for shredding trees and the like. This led to a rather interesting conversation between myself and my wife.

It was right at the start of the journey and I said to my wife “look that’s one of those tree shredding machines”. Her reply may seem strange to those that don’t know her, but it wasn’t to me and close family/friends. “Helle Craft was killed with one of those you know”. It took me a second or two to work out where the information had come from but then it clicked, Forensic Detectives on TV. The case of Helle Craft had involved the murderer, I think her husband, killing her and then freezing the body. This ensured less blood splatter when she went through the shredder.

You may be thinking what is this wierdo doing writing about this? Good question. Well the answer lies in the conversation that followed and a news story today. They caught the murderer of Helle Craft because they found one of her finger nails. This meant that they could match DNA and also nail varnish. I said to my wife “It is amazing how a nail can lead to a murderer being charged. It is amazing how anyone gets away with murder these days”.

Watching these type of programs (Medical Detectives is another) they use tremendous skills in DNA printing and other forensic techniques to prove killers guilty. Today as news article on the BBC website has suggested that there should be a national DNA database and that everyone’s DNA should be recorded on there. I suppose that means that when DNA is found at a crime scene it can be matched with a member of the population. But is having your DNA taken a breech of your human rights? Is it another way in which the government of countries can keep control over what and when we do it? I am not sure but I do think that it is probably not right. It does in fringe on your freedom a little knowing that there is a record of your living self stored somewhere on a computer.

We then started talking about evidence and what can and cannot be used for convictions. DNA of a person at a crime scene does not prove that they committed the crime, only that they had opportunity. Therefore people should never prevent the police from taking DNA, but they do. The fact that someone refuses a DNA sample (presumably because they are guilty) cannot be used in court is probably what is wrong. If it was made law that if evidence of suspicion was great enough then the police could take your DNA by law then surely this would help solve crimes. If you refused then that counted as evidence that could be used in court to suggest you were guilty.

I suppose that on the one hand a national database of every bodies DNA pattern would assist but on the other it is an infringement of freedom. It is one of those questions that are really split down the middle. I suppose the question, that only the police and courts would know, which would help decide is, would this database catch more guilty people? If the answer is yes, then perhaps it is a good idea.

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BBC News – All UK Must be o a DNA Database
The Wood Chipper Murder

Arriving home from work this evening the weather was wonderful.  Blue skies and very warm.  Therefore my wife an I decided that we would go for a walk in the park instead of the usual sitting in front of the TV.  Walking through town to get to the park I found myself asking the question ” would that be acceptable in society 10 – 20 years ago?

What is he on about you are probably thinking?  Well there are three things that come to mind.  The first is perhaps something that has gone on for a while.  People driving round in there cars with their music blurring out at ridiculous noise levels, windows wound down so that the whole world can hear it.  Usually you hear it once as the vehicle (some are that Chaved Up you can hardly call them cars!) drives past, however this afternoon we walked down the line of cars in a traffic jam, two of which had there music blurring out.  This meant we passed them several times.

The second of these is mobile phones.  Now don’t get me wrong I am a lover of all technological gadgets that serve great purpose, which phones do, but what really annoys me is that people have music on there phones in public spaces blurring out loud.  Today we pasted several young people showing this off.  Walking down the street is the lower level of this however when you are walking round the supermarket I don’t expect, or want for that matter, someone with music (usually some crappy wrap stuff!) poisoning my public space.  Have they no respect for others in the vicinity?

The last of these is swearing.  Now I, like most have sweared.  It is not something new in my, or probably 99.9% of the people reading this posts vocabulary.  What I find awful is that usually when I swear it warrants it.  I mean something happens that genuinely makes you react like that.  Also I would even think, twice, no actually three or four times before swearing in public.  Not today though.  The language that you here on the streets is terrible.  Not only that but in other places.  I am a member of the gym and in the changing room the language is appalling, mostly from young men.  There are even children changing in the family area round the corner that hear every word.  What annoys me more than the swearing is that these (usually) youths seem to think that it is normal and acceptable.  Is it just me or is this so not the case?

I don’t want to live in a world whereby I cannot walk down the street without having the air waves deafened or swear words being shouted, and I think I am not alone.  It is almost as though these things are considered cool now.  Go to others countries and this does not happen.  I have never seen this on holidays to France, Portugal and even in the USA.  As far as I am concerned this is lack of respect for the community and does annoy me.

That said I still managed to enjoy our evening stroll and we sat for about 30 minutes putting the world to rights on a lovely bench under a tree, once we had fed the ducks.

Last Friday my Mac Mini arrived from the store and it was the most frustrating time as I couldn’t use it.  Why?  Well being an iMac owner I don’t have a computer monitor that I could use for the job and I didn’t have the correct leads to connect to TV.  All that has now been sorted and the Mac Mini is read to become the home media centre.  Here is the plan!

The Mac Mini is great in that it is exactly how it sounds – Mini!  If you are going to use a computer as the centre of your digital world, and it is going to sit in the living room with all the other digital toys that we all seem to have nowadays then it needs to be small.  You don’t want a great tower unit sat next to the TV.  The Mac Mini is perfect for this as it has dimension of 6.5 x 6.5 x 2 inches.  It can sit pride of place next to or underneath the TV near the Sky+ box and the DVD surround sound home theatre system.

I want to be able to listen to music without the need for CDs all over the house.  I don’t know about your CD music collection by my wife’s and mine have grown and grown since we first started buying them back in the early to mid 1990s.  We must haven early 300 of them.  Not only is is a pain having to find the one you want, searching through endless amounts of boxes, none of which contain the CD that the box says, storing 300 CDs in accessible places is rather difficult.  I already have most, if not all of the CDs loaded into my iTunes library on the iMac.  However with the iMac being in the office it is not great to have to go and change tracks from upstairs when you have guests listening to music downstairs, so here is what I plan to do.

All my music will be copied onto the Mac Mini that is going to live in the lounge. It will be removed from the iMac in the office, however I will share the music folder on the Mac Mini so that the iMac upstairs can populate the iTunes library without copying the music files to the iMac.  This way all the music can stay in the one place.  I will then be able to listen to the music on the iMac through the wireless network streaming it from the Mac Mini downstairs.  I am pretty confident that after some tests I carried out streaming MP3 tracks over a 54mbps wireless network the quality will be OK.  But as most of the time the music will be played downstairs I thought it better to stream from Mac Mini to iMac rather than the other way around.

Then downstairs in the lounge the Mac Mini will be connected to an amplifier.  This will then amplify the signal (they do exactly what they say on the box!) and send it to a speaker splitter.  This will split the signal 3 ways and send the signal to the kitchen, dining room and the lounge so that I can choose 1, 2 or all rooms to listen to the music in.  I will have to lay speakers cables to all these rooms but that shouldn’t be too difficult.

The last thing that I will have to do is to then connect the audio out from the Sky+ box to one of the audio in channels on the amplifier so that the sound of the TV can be heard in any of the rooms downstairs through the speakers in those rooms.

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Mac Mini from Apple