Its no secret that I love a nice porter or mild beer. I've been known to do the WEWO (walk in, walk out) when the range of beers hasn't a nice dark offering and that is after I filter out the rubbish pubs offering standard mass produced slop.
Today the Cricketers in Horbury spoilt me with a choice of four darkies. We can discount the Timothy Taylor Ram Tam straight away as it always gives me a headache.
They often don't have any which is a real shame, but this choice was great. I've tried to upload a pic via my galaxy s2, but the kindle fire won't let me include it - if you see a pic it will be an inter android collaboration.
First up was Pendle Porter, a smooth 5.0% beer with a big head and smooth taste. Didn't like it at all, it was a struggle to drink and reminded me of a mass produced beer.
Next came Pennine Midnight Rose, another dark ale at 3.7%. Very nice and very moorish! Could drink this all day. Pours well and the taste is nice.
I now have the spectre of no 3, its Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Ale and tis 6% beauty has/bitten me before! Its one of those ales that fall close to the very strong bracket and typically tastes nice without been overpowering. The problem is that this is proper falling over water and a few of these sublime beauties really get you in the mood...
Oh well, once more into the breach dear friends...
Monday 7 May 2012
I have always been a huge fan of LEGO. My parents used to get me plenty when I was a small child, and as soon as I started earning a wage, I bought LEGO Technics sets. My children had every single DUPLO set that there was but at that time, we didn't invest in any "grown up" LEGO.
That all changed when I was out collecting milk money one day. One of the houses that I called at mentioned that they were selling there LEGO Technics sets. It turned out that they had all of the big sets and wanted £25 for the lot!
I kept the sets in an immaculately organised box with loads of trays for each type of component. I used to build all sorts of stuff and really enjoyed the creative element of using it, and the problem solving aspect of fitting components into a task that they weren't quite designed for was especially attractive for my anarchistic personality.
When I got divorced, my ex wouldnt let me have the LEGO set, quite petty really but there was nothing I could do about it and there were much bigger fights to fight. Im lucky that my three kids saw how important it was for me though and gradually small amounts of LEGO made their way to my house in a magical way!
Shortly after I re married, I was in a Toys R Us store (cant remember why, possibly looking for a present for my younger children) and I came across the NXT Mindstorms set. As a teacher, we had looked at these sets as a possible way of teaching programming but the idea of controlling all the bricks proved too much of a challenge so we never pursued it. To cut a long story short, I bought a set and began making all sorts of crazy robots!
The Internet is a great place to find building ideas and see videos of various robots that people have built. LEGO produce some very clever software for progamming the NXT brick and also for designing models and its all free.
Yesterday my wife and I went to The LEGO Show in Manchester. It was amazing to see how many people were there and some of the stuff that was on show is really inspiring and must have taken hundreds of hours.
I was very pleased to see the famous and world record holding Cubestormer solve a Rubiks Cube in 3.5s. Here is a video of it in action:
I couldnt resist buying another set and set 8043 looked really interesting. It uses four motors to control six directions of travel (three for the jib, two for the tracks and one to rotate the whole cab). A fourth motor is used to select which of set of functions is used by sliding a form of clutch between two settings. It also uses the same component to transfer power to the tracks. One motor drives a shaft that runs in the centre of the pivot for the cab and another motor uses a concentric tube to power the other track. I must take some more pics but for now here is a timelapse of the whole build process!
I had the pleasure of taking brood 2 to a static caravan at Filey last weekend. I had the worse man flu ever so I spent most of the weekend asleep and Sundays torrential downpour was certainly an experience.
On Saturday we popped into Bridlington. My grandma used to live there and when I was training to take over the Scarborough branch of Shoefayre, I took the train across every day to work in branch 196 which is right next to the harbour.
They were certainly one of the old school of retailer. None of the branches had a phone and we used to have to go to the local phone box to ring in our weekly sales every Friday tea time. Staff had to hand write a receipt which listed each purchase. Each receipt was then copied to a day sheet and a total for the day was calculated by adding up the columns. You soon became very adept at doing this and I can add up a column of figures much quicker in my head that using a calculator. As long as the money on the day sheet balanced with the amount in the till, and exceeded your sales target, all was well. Every three months, someone would come along and actually physically count the stock. You had to have a 'leakage' figure of less than 3% but I could usually get it down to a few quid every quarter of a million pounds! The system was supposed to be water tight but in practice there were many ways that you could adjust the figures and if they had a dishonest manager wanted to, they could have fleeced them. My regional manager related several stories of how some branches had 'fiddled' and he simply couldnt see how!
Anyway, this picture shows the Brid branch. It was really tiny but all those upper floors were crammed with stock! There was nothing worse than having to run up three flights of stairs to get another size on a busy Saturday afternoon.
Another world, but I learnt so much about retail. My Scarborough branch enjoyed often very good sales but sometimes we took very little (January in the snow) I am not at all surprised that they went under. Good value, quality shoes but no control over the stock levels!
