The Rock Star's Tribute to Michael Jackson (Latvia Style)

Complete with random drunken girl.

This was actually a brilliant bar we went to on a couple of nights.

On Latvia

I have just got back from a 5 day trip to Latvia and am now in recovery mode. At the moment this involves trying to de-tox by drinking water and eating celery, though this is not working so well...

Riga is a brilliant city however - full of contradictions. On the bad side, the influx of stag-do's into the country as assisted by Ryanair's cheap flights (I may prepare an entire blog post about my feelings for Ryanair) has meant that the city is full of sleazy joints where attractive women feign interest in you to trick you into buying £500 bottles of champagne. The hostel I stayed at has a whole list of clubs and bars that 'you cannot go into or you WILL be robbed'.

This has led to a bit of bad blood between the Latvians and the English and we struggled a little bit to get to see the real city. We weren't helped by the fact that there were seven of us, and we were drinking, and we were loud!

I have kind of decided that I will try to veto foreign stag do's arranged by my mates, as I really think it can affect a place.

On the good side we did managed to do some cool things, like get ourselves into a Latvian nightclub on the 6th floor of some old soviet bloc concrete building, we had some great food and managed to get out of the city to some of the beach resorts which were absolutely fantastic. And unlike when we went to Prague 5 or so years ago, we managed to completely avoid the stags (except in the airport), and by Monday the stags had all disappeared. So it can be done!

Riga is beautiful and boasts some of most beautiful people you will ever see anywhere (and I've been on a fair few different continents). Just don't go where the stag do's do.

Goodbye John.

When I was traveling to Canada a lot for work back in 2006-07, I worked with quite a character called John. 

John was an electrician of some 35 years service to a large steel works that I worked on a long term energy reduction project with. He had been there so long that in fact his employee number was '3'.

John spent most of his years as an electrical maintenance supervisor, trouble-shooting problems and responding to breakdowns on the many large motors and electricity supply systems at the site. Towards the end of his career (actually I think it was technically after he retired), John became actively involved in our energy teams, being the implementer for many of the good ideas that were generated. It was a great project and since has become a case study for the work we do over there.

He got so involved that he saw a gap in the market when trying to solve one of the energy efficiency issues on site relating to industrial lighting control - he began building his own automatic control systems that could withstand the incredibly dusty, dirty, tough conditions in a steel melt-shop. He set up his own company delivering these simple robust systems to anyone who would have them.

John and I spend many an hour walking the myriad of switch rooms, investigating pumps and fans and motors and drives across the factory. He would tell me funny stories about how the guy who first build the site, built the huge electric arc furnace on the assumption that he could just plug it into the local grid and faced a 1 year delay in production start up due to having to get a larger supply to the entire township to feed his factory. He would tell me of his ice fishing escapades on the local river, and we would discuss the merits of American trucks and European diesels.

The funniest story I remember, though I cant tell it properly, was about how one of the factory cats (semi feral creatures which are often found in steelworks and fed by the operators - to keep the rats down), got into one of the electrical rooms and electricuted itself across two live circuits and took town the entire factory causing $100,000 of lost production. Feeding cats was banned after that, though I did see a couple of soot covered creatures which I mistook for huge rats myself.

I remember John fondly because he was, despite his age, extremely kind, very courteous,  enthusiastic, friendly and warm. And because he had a real belief in what we were doing. A real deep seeded belief that the work we were doing was important - not just for money saving reasons, but for moral reasons too.

I am writing this post because today I found out that John died of cancer a few months ago.

Goodbye John.

I Have Found a New Hero

I am not the kind of person that usually looks up to anyone. I hate our celebrity culture and if someone asked me who my hero was, I would rally struggle for an answer, possibly citing Tim Flannery of some ageing rock god.

I have found a new hero. He is a little short, overweight, as silly hair and is a complete geek. Not general hero material. But I agree with absolutely everything he says.

David Mitchell is one half of the comedy duo that wrote Peep Show. In my opinion the funniest comedy show EVER written. I am struggling to find a video that I can embed, but I have linked a you-tube clip here.

Recently I have discovered that David Mitchell is extremely funny, but also that he shares almost all of my opinions too. Surprisingly left wing and Tory hating for a Cambridge graduate, he now blogs regularly on 'Comment is Free' on the Guardian / Observer website and his articles are just about the only thing I laugh out loud at in this age of over-stimulation. Witty and clever - the only problem being that some of the commenters cant quite keep up with his point.

Here are some favourites on wheelie bins and Alan Sugar. 

What got me laughing today:

"They say a sneeze is like a mini-orgasm. Well, if my cock went off six times in a row every couple of minutes for hours on end I'd cut the blasted thing off"

There' Something Weird About this Recession

A recession is a time of hard graft, where everybody just gets on with it and tries to get out the other side without losing their job / house / business beer allowance. Its a time when everybody is grim faced and resolute. The sky is grey, its always raining, and old episodes of 'Cheers' are on repeat play on the TV.

Thats how I imagine the early 90's.

But the funny thing about this recession is its not really like that at all. 

I work in an office where approximately 70% of the staff are being forced down to a 4 day week (and there have been several redundancies in the last six months). Where we are battered by constant edicts from up above, telling us off for spending too much money on mobile phone calls, informing us of the new biro rationing scheme and battering us about how bad we are performing financially (but at the same time completely missing the point and failing to understand the simple steps which would actually make us more profitable - steps which everyone around me seems to understand).

It seems to have become a little bit of a joke almost. For some its almost at that if-I-dont-laugh-i-will-cry point. I can only laugh at spending days writing a proposal for a client, only to find that that client has gone bust a few days later. Luckily I am still busy at the moment, but others joke about having sat in the office not having done any work for the last three days.

Added to this, the industry I work in has basically seen blanket recruitment freezes. There is usually a relatively high turnover of staff, but as nobody is recruiting - nobody is leaving. In my team of twenty, the personnel has not changed in twelve months. Nobody is getting pay rises, nobody is getting promotion, therefore levels of office politics are low.

This, along with worries about impending doom has actual led, in my opinion to wierdly high levels of humour an camaraderie in a group where nobody usually has any time to talk to one another. 

Its very strange.