…about 20 minutes ago…

Camps Bay Sunset, South Aftica

Now if only the Lions were being as sublime…

Almost by accident I noticed that the Marine Casualty Investigation Board published their report into an “incident” at a dinghy regatta in Dun Laoghaire in 2007.

As I had heard on the grapevine at the time the whole thing was an overreaction. The even organisers were pretty much on top of things when a squall came in, but asked for some additional help (to be doubly certain) from the lifeboat service. They suggested letting the coastguard know something was up and after than things snowballed. The number of competitors (over 100) was confused with the number of people in difficulty and before you know the pandemonium plan was put into effect, supplemented by the meeja hysteria plan.

I think most of the participants have learned some lessons from the whole thing. And it probably is better than they are learning lessons from an incident where people over reacted and no one was injured, to one where not enough was done and there were bodies.

What surprise me though, is that it took the MCIB two years to carry out their investigation. What exactly were they doing? There was no difficult technical investigation. All the participants were available to be interviewed and the facts seem to me to be pretty straightforward to ascertain. But it still took them 22 months to produce a report who’s body consists of only 6 pages (2500 words).

WTF were they doing for the last two years? Complex or difficult, investigations should not take this long. And I can’t see how this one was that difficult to do.

I am off to South Africa tomorrow for 10 days. Laura and I will be joining the Lions tour bandwagon. The South Africans have nicely laid on Irish weather (cool, damp, windy) for our trip to make us feel at home.

Service here may be intermittent, as I don’t know how expensive net access will be in our accomodation there. And because I am supposed to be touristing and not interwebbing!

I know I promised that I would put up more numbers on the Spirit of Ireland scheme. I am struggling a bit with this, because it isn’t really my field and the calculations are proving troublesome.

I did get an estimate for the amount of power storage these guys are looking at. They have an estimate of about 200GWh requires storage for to buffer us through quiet wind periods. I took a low estimate for average Irish power consumption (3000MW) and some Eirtricity figures for historical quiet periods (5 days with only 5% of capacity) to come up with a required storage of 342GWh (5 days x 24 hours x 3000MW x 95%), or about twice what they estimate. And that seems to typical of most of the numbers SoI have provided - they are grossly optimistic.

As I said I am not an expert in this area, but I have talked to people who are. And they all have two things to say - first that these guys are being surprisingly shy about opening up and providing real information about their proposals. And secondly that what information then have provided does not describe something that is realistic.

Even apart from the “it will all be fine” engineering numbers their economics have been slated. And from a political and practically point of view they seem to be in fantasy land (you can’t just turn several % of the national land area over to wind farms - it will have to be sourced, bought and people compensated), there is the difficulty of despoiling the best scenery in the country with hundreds or thousands of turbine sites and associated infrastructure, and don’t even get me started on the potential environmental impacts of pumping salt water into sensitive uplands for their storage solutions.

There was to be a discussion at Engineers Ireland about the whole scheme last night. As I am not a member I couldn’t go (and I need to sort stuff for my holidays which start tomorrow). But I am looking to see if I can get some information on what happened.

While I hate to give them the publicity by mentioning them again, it looks like we can draw a line under the Steorn farce. The independent jury of experts that they convened to review their fabulous perpetual motion machine have reported back. And as they said themselves:

The unanimous verdict of the Jury is that Steorn’s attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy. The jury is therefore ceasing work.

To paraphrase for those that might not understand technical language - Steorn are full of shit, and the laws of thermodynamics stand.

The boys over in the East Wall aren’t letting something small like the repeated, complete and utter failure of their fantasy technology to derail their plans/publicity machine. They maintain that the company:

“is now focused on commercial launch towards the end of this year, at which time academic and engineering validation would be released concurrent with public demonstrations”

Yeah right. And if any of their investors would like to invest in my new amazing “flying swine” power generation technology you can leave a comment below.

I posted about the first ones last year. Here are some of the religions that were missed the last time.

I am just back from the Tropical Medicine Bureau where I was getting all my various jabs brought up to date. The nurse said she was giving me Cholera and Rabies today.

I am wondering will I collapse of diarrhea driven dehydration, before I start foaming at the mouth and am overcome by an uncontrollable urge to bite people?

Day three of my tour of the Middle east and I wake in the U.A.E. in Abu Dhabi. This place is Dubai’s big brother. The one that is still a bit flash, but is a bit more mature as well. And because it didn’t totally lose the run of itself like Dubai did, ended up bailing out it’s little brother back in February.

I have one meeting this morning, and I don’t leave until tomorrow morning, so I might get a chance to see a bit of the place. Well, as much as you can see in 3 or 4 hours of an evening. It is amazing when you think about it though. Here I am, about a 1/6th of the way around the world from Ireland. But I will leave on a flight tomorrow morning about 09:45 and I will be back in Dublin shortly after lunch time. Well in time to make sailing tomorrow evening.

This wonderful age would be even more wonderful mind you if supposedly bleeding edge high tech companies like Firefox and Google could understand that just because my IP is in the middle east doesn’t mean I speak Arabic. No matter where I go, and despite having a profile which says show me everything in English, a Google search through Firefox always defaults to the local language for the IP where I am residing. In Sweden this is annoying, in the Middle East it is impossible (Arabic is a right to left script). This is a regular problem with American products, because people there just don’t travel beyond their own shores enough!

Anyway, at the moment I am staying in a nice resort hotel near the waterfront. It is an international chain hotel, but it has a very local feel. There is an arrow on the ceiling pointing to Mecca, Wherever the architect could, they have used marble, and it has an impressive loo.

Now I was going to show you some photos, but for some reason I cannot connect by FTP to my server to upload them. And I can’t put them on Flickr as I get a warning message in the browser saying “Access to this site is currently blocked. The site falls under the Prohibited Content Categories of the UAE’s Internet Access Management Policy”. A little later when I am connected to the corporate VPN I will show you how daft that is, as I bypass their lame ass filter and get the content up.

For now I need to head to the office and begin my day. I just have to brush my teeth first. That will of course be done using bottled water. I don’t want any repeat of what happened with my previous stay in a Sheraton, in Istanbul last year.

So here I am in the Middle East. And I can tell you it is hot. Damn hot. As the man once said “you could fry an egg on the stones here, if you had an egg”. I think it is to be 40°C tomorrow. It was a cool 27°C when I got here at 21:30.

You know of course you are in the Gulf, when there are loads of people from the Indian sub continent to do all the manual work. I counted 26 waiting outside the Ethiad plan to unload out bags! And the air conditioning is industrial strength. Even though is is so hot you could fry an egg… I had to bring a fleece for when I am indoors.

Unlike my trip to Dubai a few years ago, I won’t get to see much of Bahrain (or Abu Dhabi where I am off to tomorrow). For starters the Iranian embassy won’t return my calls, so I guess I won’t be going to help Ahmadinejad work out his little constitutional kerfuffle (is that the right term for stealing an election?). Instead I will just do a 3 hour meeting in the morning and then fly back to the UAE for another one on Wednesday.

I do have one bit of advice or people visiting Bahrain. Come with cash. You need to buy an entry visa on arrival which costs about €10. There are no ATMs before immigration, and the one foreign exchange desk doesn’t take cards. It’s cash only. As I only had €5 in my wallet it looked like I was caught in a catch 22 situation. My pathetic plight seemed to stir something in one of the immigration officials and he arranged for me to pay for the visa by credit card. But he was the only one of the three I talked to that even knew this was possible.

Oh, and they have Filipino nurses with surgical masks taking IR images of everyone on landing in Bahrain and the UAE to check for elevated temperatures because of swine flu.

You have been warned!

I see there is a lot of trouble in Iran/Persia (I used to share a house with a woman from that part of the world and she was very insistent it was Persia) after the election last week. The government has even disabled SMS on the various mobile phone networks.

That makes it all telecoms related. I think I should go out there, see what is happening. Maybe I can help them all sort everything out.

If anyone needs me, I will be in in the Gulf for the next few days.