Can anyone help?

Some time ago, my father chose to purchase a ShopVac Classic 30 vacuum cleaner for the office. The company that supplied it no longer do so, and do not supply bags or filters. None of the regular outlets stock them. I’ve found a source for the bags online (vacuumworld.co.uk), but they don’t do the filters.
I figure that we can’t be the only people in the country with this model of cleaner. So, if you have one, or know someone who does, do you know where to get bags and filters?

It’s a long time since I said it, but…

Beer with Greg, Paul F, Kearn and Hamish, with sightings of Sarah, Paul H, Dave, Gary, Nikki, Ted and Kristian.
Since we are engaged, I guess it is ok for me to say that I literally ache for Hels. We’ll not be together until Friday, which seems a long way from now.

(Addendum: must remember not to post here when under the influence of alcohol, as I tend to get excessively mushy.)

Stepping on a banana skin

The transport reporter on BBC South Today, Paul Clifton, used a term I’d not heard of before when talking about the campaigners opposed to the construction of a second runway at Gatwick. One step up from NIMBY (not in my back yard), he described them as BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone).
A friend of mine who is professionally involved in countryside management would describe BANANAs as being members of the "blue tit and woolly hat brigade". I know what he means – unfortunately, a balance has to be struck between conservation and infrastructure and development, and that sometimes means that what we would like to preserve has to give way for what we need to develop. Equally, sometimes that situation is reversed, and the poor people who make those decisions and then put them into practice are unlikely to ever satisfy everybody.

Free PCs for all..

Not much discussion in the Blogosphere (well, I’ve not seen much) of Metronomy, a new company that is giving away umpteen million (or several hundred thousand, depending on who you believe) free new IBM PCs. Or, to be more precise, it is loaning them on a rolling three year contract. There’s a catch of course – you must agree to be exposed to one minute of adverts for every twenty minutes of computer use, and must also use your computer for not less than thirty hours per month. I don’t find either of these restrictions to be particularly challenging – it’s easy enough to use the advert time for a loo or tea break, and an hour a day is pretty low level usage for most of the people who read this site. I also predict that patches will become available very quickly to suppress the adverts.
Is this a good idea, from either a commercial or marketing point of view? In my opinion, it will certainly have an impact on the PC market, probably wiping out the bottom end low-cost and very low margin machine market. Bad news for the likes of Dixons and Comet, I’d suggest. I am also unsure about the viability of the business model itself – will enough advertising revenue be generated to make the loan of the computers (and associated transport, admin and support costs) a profitable exercise? I’m not sure, as many companies are already wary of advertising on the net, having had their fingers burned by unrealistic promises in the past. I suspect that the main beneficiaries of adverts in this context are likely to be the usual suspects – purveyors of online financial services, Amazon and their competitors, the supermarkets and possibly also e-government. I don’t see it as being any more effective than other online adverts, other than by being more closely targeted than traditional net adverts.
We shall see. Hels and I may apply for one, just to see how we get on with it. After all, we need to be a three PC family, don’t we?

Walk in the park

A visit to London yesterday for dinner with friends as well as a visit to the Serpentine Gallery to see the exhibition of photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Pictures of nothing much at first glance, being in the main large monochrome seascapes, but revealing, on closer examination, a subtle texture of ripples, waves, clouds and stars.
It was the first time that either of us had been to the Serpentine, which is a rather neat and small building, glowing brightly in the darkness of a winter evening in Hyde Park. Its small size is actually an asset – no risk of getting "galleried out" at the Serpentine.
Even more impressive in Hyde Park was the brightly lit and shimmering Albert Memorial. In any other city in the world, such a structure would be the centre of massive tourist activity and would feature in every postcard. London simply has too many significant structures, and the Memorial is all too frequently overlooked.

The question

Assuming that the man arrested in Iraq really is Saddam Hussein, the real question that will be asked now is what exactly to do with him. So far, finding much evidence of anything at all has been a problem. I guess there is enough from the attacks on the Kurds and the war against Kuwait to convict him of something. But the question is, where will he be tried? And under which authority?