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It was another somewhat chilly day, with a cold easterly wind blowing. The forecast is for much colder weather later this week and snow by the weekend. As it is winter, what else do you expect? Listening to some of the moans about the weather, one would be forgiven if it appears that cold weather is extreme. It is interesting that the older generation does not seem to be complaining as much as the younger generation. My response is simply to put on some decent winter clothing and not what many young people consider to be fashionable instead. I must be getting old, but at least I can go out in the cold and not freeze, unlike some younger people I know!

Mondays are often just full of routine, especially after the weekend as it is time to get the new week going. So there is not that much to say, so for a change, a very short post!

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The tower of Renfrew Town Hall with fireworks above.

© John G. Fender 2012

Late this afternoon, just as it was getting dark, the peace was shattered by the sound of fireworks. What had been billed as a "spectacular" display started at 4.30 pm as planned and marked the official opening of the refurbished Renfrew Town Hall.

The current Renfrew Town Hall was designed by James Lamb of Paisley and has a mixture of Gothic and French styles, with a tower that is 105 feet high, complete with corbelled turrets at each corner, which is a feature found in a few other town hall towers around the country. Renfrew Town Hall was originally opened in 1872, the opening being marked by a procession and grand opening ceremony.

However, in 1877, much of Renfrew Town Hall was destroyed by fire, necessitating rebuilding. This was undertaken by the lCerk of Works of the nearby Blyswood Estate, Loudon McQueen. He restored the Gothic style hall and offices, created a balustraded flat roof and increased the height of the tower so that it dominated the town. As a finishing touch a new clock was added.

The Town Hall has been undergoing refurbishment at a cost of around £5 million or £3.2 million, depending on which newspaper you read, with contributions from Renfrewshire Council, Renfrew Common Good Fund, Historic Scotland and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Whatever it cost, the refurbished Town Hall now houses the new Renfrew Community Museum and this afternoon saw a range of events in the town to mark the opening. There was a parade, perfomances by the Renfrew Burgh Band, the Clyde 1 Roadshow was also present. The official opening was to take place at 4.30pm and would be marked by the firework display.

The best place to see that was from a distance, so I watched it from one of my windows as I can see the Town Hall spire from where I stay on the other side of the river. Another advantage was that it was a darn sight warmer being indoors than outside! And was it spectacular...well not really. Five minutes of assorted rockets going up one after another and that was about it.

First it began raining. Then the rain turned to sleet. By the time I was driving home, it was a full blizzard, with snow swirling everywhere and building up on the road at an impressive rate. This was due more to the fact that traffic was virtually stationary, giving the snow a chance to build up. By the time I got home it had eased off and the accumulated snow was already starting to melt away, leaving everything covered in a layer of congealed water. However, as the temperatures dropped this started freezing and no doubt tomorrow morning will be a bit slippery underfoot.

An e-mail arrived in my inbox today from Google that got my attention, and from what has started appearing in the media, it seems to have got a lot of people's attention. Google has announced that they are scrapping over 60 different privacy policies on their various websites and services and replacing the lot with one that they say is "a lot shorter and easier to read". I'm all for simplicity with these things as some I have come across are both long and tortuous to read. The e-mail goes on to point out Google's desire to "desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google".

However, when I had a good look at the new policy, I noted they will link user data across all of their websites and services, so if you use, for example, Google Docs, YouTube, Gmail or Google+, then everything you do on these can be collated with the aim of serving you targetted advertising. After all, advertising is how Google makes it's money. But more than that, it now means that it will know a lot more about you and what you do online. Currently Google's Chrome web browser and Wallet payment service are not included, but I suspect that as some time in the future it will be brought into line with everything else.

You can use Google's dashboard and ad manager to control the level of information Google gleans and you can still use Google search anonymously, but if you sign in, then data can be collected about you. One way to minimize information being collected is to make sure that when you go on line, set your web browser to delete cookies at logout. It will be interesting to see what those who are concerned with privacy on the web make of it all.

If Google's new privacy policy is not enough, Facebook is making it's "Timeline" feature mandatory and users will get just 7 days to check to see what will be included giving you the chance to hide anything you may not want included. Up until now the feature was one where you had to opt in if you wanted it. Now you have no choice - you are getting it whether or not you want it.

The way it works is that unless you specifically click on "Hide from timeline" everything will be included and visible depending on your privacy settings. Your old photo albums use to be in an archive. With Timeline they will be right up there on your timeline and pretty large sized too. Photos and albums can be tagged, so if you do not want this feature, you will have to untag yourself from every photograph.

Those third party apps can also pose a problem because if you give them permission to add activity to your timeline, everyone will know what you are doing or what you are buying online. Do you really want that? Yes, you can manage everything to control what happens, but it's a pain and time consuming. Then there is the advertising and quite frankly I can do without being bombarded with adverts everytime I log in. Although I have used it, I am not a big fan of it and I can think of a simple way of dealing with the issues and have taken the necessary action. Goodbye Facebook!

With news that Petroplus, owners of the Coryton refinery in Essex is filing for insolvency, prices look set to shoot up as production has stopped. No doubt there will be panic buying as well, causing shortages as well. The refinery accounts for some 20% of the fuel supplies in the south east, but there are other refineries working normally and it just means that supplies will be moved around the country, so there is no need to panic. No doubt the news tomorrow will have reports of motorists scrambling to fill up, creating an artificial shortage.

A bit more worrying is the latest economic forecasts and these show that the economy is not improving as much as had been expected. The IMF has revised it's 2012 growth forecast downwards and the Eurozone is predicted to slip into "mild recession". If that was not bad enough the UK economy growth figure has also been revised downwards to only 0.6% this year and government debt has now passed the 1 trillion mark.

That's £1,000,000,000,000 or put another way an estimated £16,072 of debt for every person in the country. In order to get this under control, the austerity measures will have to continue and things will not get better for some quite time to come. Given all this news, it's no surprise that the markets fell today too.So ends a day of gloomy news and the weather was crap too!

Another study has managed to point out the obvious again - that when people are plugged into any device with headphones, they lose concentration of where they are going. The latest study in the United states looked at 116 accidents involving pedestrians wearing headphones. Of the 116 cases looked at by the study, 81 resulted in a fatality (70%) and more interestingly, in 29% of the cases a horn or other audible warning was sounded to warn the pedestrian of the presence of the vehicle that was about to hit them.

I had thought that the majority of cases would involve cars, or other road vehicles, but this study showed that trains accounted for 55% of the incidents, which bearing in mind that in the US, there are more crossings than in the UK, is not so surprising. Other findings were that 68% of victims were men and 89% of the incidents occurred in urban areas, which on the face of it is not surprising.

What the study does highlight, is that when walking along, plugged into a music player, be it a iPod or mobile phone, pedestrians are not paying attention to where they are going. This is not a phenomenon limited to the US, it's universal. You only need to walk along any busy street and see how many people blindly wander around, oblivious to their surroundings. Perhaps in such cases, it should be the pedestrian that is held wholly responsible for the resulting accident, with them footing the bill for the resulting costs.

I got on with the cooking today, preparing soup, making bread and making more pizza. That took most of the afternoon, but the weather was not too good, so it was an ideal time to get on with re-stocking the freezer. So that lot should last a few weeks. Of course, one of the pizzas was tried, along with a bottle of beer this evening, and very nice it was too!

It looks like the threat of having to adopt what has been dubbed "Berlin Time" has receded again when MP's who are against the measure made sure that the Daylight Savings Bill ran out of time in the House of Commons. If this Bill had been passed we would have had a three year trial adopting Central European Time, in effect being BST plus one hour in summer and GMT plus one in winter. This would have meant that we would not see daylight until around 10 am here in the west of Scotland and even later further north.

We tried using BST all year round between 1968 and 1971 and over the 3 year period, there was a net increase in the number of people killed or seriously injured on the roads. This goes against what those who want to change the clocks claim as they maintain it would be safer as it would be daylight in the evenings in winter. I witnessed an accident one dark morning when schoolchildren crossing at a light controlled pedestrian crossing, supervised by a crossing patrol were hit by a car. That would not have happened if the clocks had been left alone.

So I'm not in favour of any changes and if the Westminster government does vote to try such a daft scheme out, I'm sure it will mean that the SNP who are against it, gaining more support, something which both Labour and the Conservatives do not want with the question of Independence now firmly on the agenda, with a referendum to be held in 2014. The Daylight Savings Bill could be reintroduced but would need the support of Ministers and I can't see that happening any time soon, but I'm also sure the question will come up again in the future.

Today, a number of prominent websites were "blacked out" in protest at the two bills, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" and the the rather long winded "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act" going through the US Congress that, if passed, would bring in internet censorship that some have likened to the "Great Firewall of China".

The current wording of the bills would allow the US Attorney General to order ISPs to block access to foreign based websites suspected of trafficking in counterfeit or pirated goods, order search engines to delist these sites from their indexes, ban advertising on suspected sites and block payment services from processing transactions from accused sites.

The problem is that if the same standards were applied to US based websites then many respected and reputable sites could be blocked. This is simply because copyright is included in the infringements and the proposed measures will not take false-positives into account.

It will require a judge to approve requests to block sites, but once blacklisted there there is little chance of an effective appeal. So even a spurious claim of copyright infringement could lead to websites being taken down with little notice to the owners of the sites. It is in protest at the all embracing, badly thought out measures in these bills that a lot of the world wide web has been blacked out today.

My latest electricity statement arrived today and instead of being in the red, where I expected it to be, the effects of a so far mild winter meant that it was actually in the black - just. With the increased cost of energy, and a lot less money to go round, I have economised as far as I can with low energy light bulbs, "A" rated appliances whenever I need to replace one and so on. Adjusting the thermostat slightly has also helped, but I have reached the stage where I doubt if I can reduce energy use any more, except to stop using the stuff.

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A pair of batteries - which one cost only 21p?

© John G. Fender 2012

Batteries are essential items these days, especially for all of the gadgets that we have. Even more mundane everyday items, such as kitchen scales, or calculators need batteries. Although I have tried to ensure, as far as possible, anything I have that needs batteries uses standard AA or AAA sized batteries, there are still a couple of items that need something different.

My calculator, for example, needs two button sized CR2016 batteries and although these can last for a while, every so often then need to be replaced. So it was this week and I went down to the local high street electronics shop to get a couple. The had plenty in stock, but I left without buying a couple. The reason was that the price was beyond a joke.

I then had a look on Amazon and found the batteries I needed with no difficulty at all and promptly placed an order for a pack of 12. They arrived two days later, which was not bad considering they were sent via Royal Mail. The difference in price was remarkable.

The high street electronics store, which will remain nameless other than to say it's name begins with "M" wanted £3.89 for one battery whereas I got 12 for £2.60 and that was post free too. Thy batteries I have worked out at 21.6p each or a saving of £3.67 per battery over the high street price. With price differences like this, it is no wonder that high street retailers are seeing falling sales.

I know they have overheads that online retailers don't have, such as business rates and so on, but overcharging is simply going to drive their customers away. It will be interesting to see how the recession affects the high street over the next 12 months or so and I suspect that a few well known names might be history by this time next year.

Having seen quite a few cruise ships over the years as the arrive or depart from Greenock on the Clyde, the headlines that a cruise ship was sinking certainly caught my interest. The Costa Concordia apparently hit some rocks and headed for shallower waters to land it's passengers when it lost stability and rolled over onto it's side, where it lies half submerged.

The damage to the hull can clearly be seen in the photographs, including a huge rock that's embedded in the hull, so the ship must have hit the rocks at a fair speed and considering the momentum it would have had, it's not surprising that the damage is so severe.

The Costa Concordia was built in 2006 by Fincantieri at the Sestri Ponente yard in Genoa, Italy at a cost of £372 million. The ship is the lead ship of a class of 5 ships and is 290 metres in leangth with a beam of 35.5 metres ans a gorss tonnage of 114,5500 tonnes. The ship has 13 passenger decks and can accommodate up to 3,700 passengers in 1,500 cabins. The ship has a crew of 1,100. It is powered by 6 Wartsila diesel engines providing 75,600kW of power.

This is not the first time the Costa Concordia has been in the news. In November 2008 the ship collided with the dock at Palermo. It's sister ship Costa Europa hit the dock at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in February 2010 and 3 crew were killed. Sister ship Carnival Splendour, operating for Costa's parent company, Carnival Cruise Lines and based in Miami, suffered a fire in it's engine room and had to be towed to Ensenada in Mexico. The Costa Classica collided with the cargo ship Lowlands Longevity as it was entering Shanghai in 2010 and a near miss was reported in the English Channel when the Costa Atlantica nearly collided with another ship in 2008.

It's too early to say what happened and it will take a full investigation to establish the facts, but I am beginning to wonder if the safety of very large passenger ships needs to be re-assesssed in the light of this latest incident. True, the cruise ship industry has an enviable safety record, but then again, so did Atlantic liners one hundred years ago...until April that is. This year will see the 100th anniversary of what is perhaps the most famouse ship sinking of all time - the Titanic.

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Two of Strathclyde fire & Rescue's applicances in Nelson Mandela Place Glasgow at night, with blue lights flasing away.

© John G. Fender 2012

This evening as I headed home I noticed a large crowd of people milling around in Buchanan Street just at the entrance to the Subway station. This is usually a busy area, but there was far more people than usual, so something was up.

The distant wail of fire engines only confirmed my suspicions that it was a fire alarm and sure enough two of Strathclyde Fire & Rescue's rescue pumps arrived very shortly afterwards, with blue lights strobing away, having rushed through the evening traffic from Cowcaddens Fire Station.

They were followed a few minutes later by another rescue pump that had come all the way from Yorkhill Fire Station, which is not exactly nearby. Usually Calton fire station also covers the city centre, but obviously they were not available, so the next nearest appliance was dispatched.

However, it soon became clear that it was a false alarm and the Yorkhill's appliance returned to it's station as soon as it arrived, whilst the crews from Cowcaddens finished checking the building that the alarm had caused to empty out.

I took the opportunity to try some night photography with the new camera and the results are not bad at all, considering the dazzling flashing blue lights, headlights and other distractions. Holding the camera steady was also a bit of a challenge, but I seem to have managed it well enough!

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The polar bear in Crocket's window.

© John G. Fender 2012

Back at the beginning of December I mentioned an interesting reminder that we were heading into the depths of winter.

This was the skeleton that was displayed in the window of Crockets the Ironmonger in Glasgow as part of it's display of winter clothing. As I like the unusual, that appealed to my warped sense of humour, hence the mention.

Recently the weather has been unseasonably mild and daffodils have even been reported as appearing somewhat early. But as the Met Office is warning of a colder snap over the weekend, it was interesting to see the advertising in Crocket's window today.

There was a little polar bear clad in hat and scarf and surrounded by all sorts of heaters that are available to buy and the sign proclaimed that the store has "Enough heaters to warm a polar bear".

Whilst real polar bears have their own nice warm fur coats and certainly don not need a hat or scarf, or heaters for that matter, the one in the window is obviously feeling the cold. Still, it shows initiative with the advertising, and you can see the polar bear in the accompanying photograph.

Today was "Patch Tuesday" again. Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday in the month and the day when Microsoft releases the patches for it's software. So it was a case of downloading and installing various patches. This itself is fairly straightforward as the process is mostly automatic and you can leave the computer to get on with it. The time consuming bit comes when you have more than one computer that needs patched. So I spend most of the evening getting the computers patched and doing some housekeeping on them.

This week sees the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and already reports of the latest technology and gadgets are circulating widely. What is shown at the show now will be on our shelves later this year and the next generation smartphones and latest notebook and ultrabook computers are already dominating the news. Given the costs of the latest in gadgets, I'll not be rushing out anytime soon to spend what little hard earned cash I have, but will make do with my existing gadgets. They may be ageing, but the do the job!

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HMS Daring sailing down the Clyde in January 2009 bound for Portsmouth.

© John G. Fender 2012

As regular readers will know, I have an interest in the Royal Navy's new Type 45 destroyers, mainly for the reason that they were build not far from where I stay and I've seen at least one of them most days since HMS Daring, the first, was launched and as a consequence I have mentioned the Royal Navy's new Type 45 destroyers quite a lot on these pages over the few years, although it is quite a while since I last did so.

Now after four years of trials, the first of the Type 45 Destroyers, HMS Daring, is to be deployed on it's first mission. It's is being sent to the Middle East to patrol the Gulf area and the Straits of Hormuz in particular. According to the Ministry of Defence, this is has been planned for some time and is purely routine, HMS Daring replacing one of the frigates already in the area.

This will be the first real test of the Type 45 destroyers and the capabilities of the ship and much is being made of the advanced nature of the ship's weaponry, but just how effective the Sea Viper missiles are against supersonic surface skimming missiles has still to be seen. I mentioned this issue in May last year (see: Fully armed at last! - Wednesday 18th May 2011).

That said, the Type 45 is a highly capable design and in summary the specifications are as follows. The ships are 152.4 metres long with a beam of 21.2 metres and a displacement of 7,350 tons. They are fitted with the Sea Viper Missile System, claimed to be the best system in the world. It is capable of dealing with attacks using multiple anti-ship missiles. The ships will also be fitted with the BAE Insyte Sampson Multi-Functional Radar (MFR) (for surveillance and fire control) as well as the Thales S1850M Long Range Radar (LRR) for air and surface search.

Weaponry includes the Sylver launcher with a both Aster 15 and Aster 30 missiles and one 4.5" Mk 8 Medium Calibre Gun system is mounted on the forward deck in front of the missile launcher and two Oerlikon 30 mm guns are also carried. Two Phalanx 20 mm Close in Weapon Systems are also fitted. The ships also have two miniguns and 6 general purpose machine guns. Although not fitted, the ships can also accommodate two quad Boeing AGM-84 Harpoon launchers and Tomahawk cruise missiles. A Westland Lynx HMA8 or Merlin HM1 helicopter will be carried and this will be capable of launching Stingray torpedoes.

Currently there are still two Type 45 Destroyers still fitting out on the Clyde, these being HMS Defender and HMS Duncan. HMS Defender is due to be handed over to the Royal Navy later this year and HMS Duncan will start it's sea trials, probably in the Spring. No doubt, I'll be mentioning these events here in due course

This year sees the Olympic Games being held in London and when tickets went on sale there was a scramble to get them and many events sold out very quickly. Yesterday, tickets that were unwanted could be bought and sold via the official website and this would allow people with tickets they no longer wanted to get their money back if the tickets were sold.

However, the website crashed shortly after going live and remains offline while the problems are investigated and there is still no indication of when it will go back online. This is not the sort of publicity that the organizers need for such an event as the whole world is watching. This latest fiasco follows that of last year when over 1 million people failed to get tickets when they first went on sale.

If that were not bad enough, the organizers have admitted that a number tickets for the synchronized swimming events were sold twice and a lot of people are being disappointed in now being told they cannot attend the event of their choice and being offered tickets to alternative events. There are still 1.3 million tickets still to be sold and these will go on sale in April, offering a final chance for those who want to go to an event to apply for a ticket.

I'll not be one of those applying for any tickets - they cost far too much in my view and in these financially strained times my money will be far better spent on the essentials, such as paying the bills or getting the shopping. Besides, if you really want to watch the Olympic games, there will no doubt be total coverage of every event on television, complete with repeats on umpteen channels and online. Not only that, but you will be able to get closer to the action that being stuck in a seat in the further recesses of the venue!

A few days ago, I ordered another memory card for my camera from Amazon, this one being a bit bigger than the last one. I thought that the package would arrive within a few days and sure enough it arrived today. I had expected the package to be dispatched from one of the local distribution deports, but looking at the labels on the package, I found that this was not the case.

The package had actually been dispatched from the Orleans distribution depot on the same day as the order was placed. The French postal system had the package at the airport within a couple of hours and it arrived in the UK just before midnight judging from the information on the tracking website. Then, the UK distribution system took over.

The package took 6 days to get to me, but taking the holidays into account, it is not as bad as it seems. However, the contrast in efficiency is interesting and says a lot about the various distribution networks. Usually, the UK system is highly efficient, but there are times when it is less so and it seem more prone to the effects of weather, holidays and resource problems than networks in other countries. I think I might just have stumbled on an ideal topic for a thesis!

That aside, the new memory card is now installed in the camera and with twice the capacity of the old one, means that I will not have to worry about running out of memory, especially when you consider that the the size of digital images seems to be increasing all the time along with ever more pixels in camera sensors.

I know things are not too good in the economy and the recession is causing many businesses to face insolvency. A number of well know UK high street store chains have already collapsed or are in administration and more are expected to follow. Now comes news that one of the most widely known names in the world seems to be facing bankruptcy protection. The company in question is Eastman, who once had some 90% of film sales, back in the pre-digital days. Paradoxically, it was Kodak that invented the digital camera too. Kodak today is better known for it's range of photo-printers that claim to be cheaper on ink costs than most others.

According to the respected newspaper, the respected Wall Street Journal, the problems the company faces stems from inept management over the last 20 or so years as the company failed to react to the rise of digital technology, clinging to it's traditional film processing business until too late. Now it is trying to sell of it's patent portfolio but I think it is a case of too little, too late. Given the fierce competition in the remaining markets that the company is active in, it can only be a matter of time before it goes the way of Polaroid, another name that is a part of photographic history.

It was a windy night and the winds grew in intensity to such an extent that the Met Office issued a Red Alert for Central Scotland. This is the first time this year a Red Alert has beein issued, but then we are only 3 days into the year! Even the sever gales we had at the beginning of December warranted only an amber alert, so today's gales were stronger - much stronger.

Trees have come down around the city, there was numerous areas with flooding, lorries were blown over, chimneys collapsed, roofs were torn off buildings and even the Christmas tree in Glasgow's George Square was blown down. The main road bridges were all closed and trains and ferries cancelled. Some areas are without power as overhead lines have come down.

Even this morning's high tide did not seem to recede until well after it should have done and I have not seen the river so high in all the years I have been living nearby, Police advice was not go go out unless essential, and being a holiday here, I stayed in and got on with digitising the photographic archive, assisted I must admit during the afternoon, by a glass of a rather nice single malt that I got for Christmas!