27.11.2005
Wet Lazy Sunday Morning
An enjoyable Sunday morning down the South Coast of NSW is a very nice way to end the week. Listening to the rain come down, the thunder make loud noises in the not-so-far distance is all oddly relaxing (and looking around at the surge protection on everything to make sure that it all still looks ok…) Plans for today:
- Perl
- World of Warcraft (bloody bloody addictive game)
- reading
And that is about it.
Some more nails in the coffin this week about “climate change” or “global warming” depending on what you want to call it (in America, the answer to that question reveals what side of the political fence you are on). The interesting figure was that over the last 5000 years, the seas have risen by 1mm/year (as almost every nay-sayer will tell you) but over the last 150 years, the rate has doubled to 2mm/year. The expectation is that by 2100, the sea level will have risen by 40cm - I believe the only response to that is “oh crap”. Consider that for a few moments - the impact on industry, housing etc. Then look at the pictures of the shrinking Artic ice and think about ecological disaster.
Just in case you still believe the other side saying “this is just part of a natural cycle…blah…blah”, a 2 mile long ice core sample was taken in Antartica and shows that in the last 650,000 years, the level of carbon dioxide and methane has never been this high. Ever. Carbon dioxide levels are 27% higher and methane are 130% higher. Oh, and this is being published in Science, not exactly an unknown publication.
This sort of news makes me very proud to be a citizen of one of two major Western nations who haven’t signed the Kyoto Protocol and the country that has the highest per capita output of greenhouse gases (sarcasm in case you didn’t guess).
I see that certain family members are having what can only be described as an interesting time in England but it does make for interesting reading. It does show how used you can become to life in Australia and not realise that everywhere in the Western world has similiar standards or work practices.
The only question I have is now whether to do some perl stuff, play some World of Warcraft or settle in to start looking at databases again. For the first time in many years, I’m starting to have a need to use a database again. Flat text files are fine and can be very handy but for some of the work I’m doing, a proper SQL database would be much more suitable. Having to store multi-day data from various sources and compare/interpret gets rather difficult with only text files. I’ve setup and ran my own mysql databases for a number of years but I’ve never actually constructed my own. Decisions, decisions….