Jonathan Stott

Here in Britain we almost exclusively use Celsius to measure temperature. Other countries, notably America, use Fahrenheit, which often makes it difficult to know just how warm or cold it is.

Converting between the two looks quite tricky:

From Celsius to Fahrenheit: C = (F - 32) × 5/9
From Fahrenheit to Celsius: F = (9/5 × C) + 32

Luckily it’s not too hard to do it in your head if you remember a few key points.

Firstly, for every 1°C there is 1.8°F.

Secondly, remember a handful of key points on the scales: 0°C = 32°F, 10°C = 50°F, 20°C = 68°F, 30°C = 86°F. Indeed, you should only need to remember one point - every 10°C above or below that is 18°F. Once you have worked out a key point, add on or take off however many lots of 1.8 you need.

Here’s an example: I want to convert 24°C into °F. I find the nearest key point (which I can remember or fairly easily derive in my head): 20°C is 68°F. Then I add four lots of 1.8: 68 + 7.2 = 75.2°F.

Converting from Celsius back to Fahrenheit should be equally easy.

This very simple idea makes converting between the two scales easy - most people tend to be put off trying to work it out in their head because of the perception that the formula is hard (probably because it has a division in it).

I have just been checking my website statistics for my photography website. I was shocked by the sheer volume of traffic coming from people who have hotlinked one of my photos to be the background for their (appallingly designed!) MySpace sites.

These three sites account for over 10% of my bandwidth this month alone:

• Site 1
• Site 2
• Site 3

It is interesting to see how much referral traffic I’ve been getting from MySpace over the last few months:

The problem seems to be that as someone adds one of my photos to their MySpace page, other people in their social network change their background too. So I end up with a viral spreading of my photos on the backgrounds of people’s MySpace pages!

What can I do about it?

Well, I could disable hot-linking altogether. This is not an attractive option as I already hot-link from some of my own sites (such as this blog). I could stop hot-linking from MySpace - possibly the more attractive option.

I think I know what I will do though: I will intercept all requests from MySpace for images and redirect them to something that might make the page look even worse. A full-screen animated GIF or something might do the trick. Or a photo of a cowpat.

Anyway, all those people currently hot-linking: be warned that your MySpace backgrounds will be changing soon!

Update 27/09/2006: I have implemented the redirect in my .htaccess file. Very simple change: all I added was a couple of rewrite conditions and a rule:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(profile\.)?myspace\.com/.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?myspace\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*\.jpg$ /evil.gif [R,L]

The file it redirects to is truly evil - viewing discretion advised!

A month ago I went to Swanage in Dorset to spend a few days camping with a youth camp. I’ve been most years since I was 11 and now I go to help out (50 kids require a lot of supervision!). The few days that I was there were great and I enjoyed myself even if the weather wasn’t all that great. However, getting home turned out to much, much more expensive than I’d planned!

Swanage has a railway station but you can only get trains as far as Norden, which doesn’t quite reach anywhere useful. The nearest station on the national network is Wareham. I wanted to stay as long as possible in Swanage (so that I didn’t miss dinner, even though I did!), so I’d arranged to stop overnight with a friend in Woking.

I got on the 21:42 train from Wareham - the last train of the night from there through to Woking and London. I knew that I couldn’t get all the way to Canterbury without travelling from London the next day, hence the overnight stay. I bought a Permit To Travel from the machine at Wareham for £1 seeing as the automatic ticket machine wouldn’t sell me anything to Brookwood (where I was being picked up) or Canterbury. The normal practice is to buy your ticket on the train.

After a few minutes, the conductor came around and I explained that I was travelling to Canterbury but was breaking my journey overnight at Brookwood. It takes him quite a while to find a ticket and eventually he sells me a Cheap Day Single from Wareham to Canterbury Stations for £50-ish. He assures me that the ticket will be valid from London to Canterbury the next morning.

Turns out that it’s not! The conductors changed at Bournemouth so my ticket was checked again. The second conductor told me that my ticket wouldn’t be valid beyond London because the train arrived at Waterloo after the last train to Canterbury. So I was sold a ticket that wouldn’t be valid for the whole journey that I asked for. Great! The second conductor forces me to buy two more tickets: a Cheap Day Single from Wareham to Brookwood and a Standard Day Single from Brookwood to Canterbury Stations, totalling £52-ish. This is what the first conductor should have done if he was doing his job properly.

So in the end I have spent £102 on train tickets for a journey that should cost half that. Good job I had some way to pay for the second lot of tickets otherwise I would have been stuck.

I wrote to South West Trains the next week demanding the cost of the first ticket back - they replied on the 6th September saying that they had too many complaints at the moment so it might take a while to look at my case. It’s 11 days since then and I still haven’t heard anything. I will give them a call if I don’t hear anything soon - it’s a long time to wait to get back your money!

My main issue with all this is that as a passenger I am expected to know all the terms and conditions of the tickets that I buy, even if that information is not available to you. Each ticket has a set of conditions, but it is impossible to get a comprehensive list of the trains that the ticket is valid on or not, when it’s valid or by which route I must go. To put the onus on the passenger is remarkably unfair, especially when train company staff don’t know the terms and conditions themselves!

Update 21/09/2006 Well I have finally heard back from South West Trains. They have sent me £50 of Rail Vouchers which are only redeemable on rail tickets. This is not terribly useful seeing as I really don’t use the railways that much. It would take me ages to spend £50 on rail tickets! I think I will have to see whether my credit card company can help me out, but it’s been over four weeks since I was sold the tickets now. I am awaiting Consumer Direct to phone me back so I can find out what my statutory rights are with regards to missold rail tickets.

Update 22/09/2006 I will be returning the Rail Vouchers to South West Trains and demanding the full cash refund for the service that I was sold but unable to use because of the ineptitude of their staff. What is even more annoying is that South West Trains obviously do not properly read letters of complaint - in their letter to me they essentially put the blame on me!

…it is the customers [sic] responsibility to ensure that the correct ticket is purchased for the journey.

How am I supposed to be able to do that when their staff can’t sell me the right ticket or give me the correct information! I will give South West Trains seven days to reply to my letter - it’s dragging on way too long now, and I really don’t want to have to wait another 17 days to get another reply.

If their next reply is not satisfactory, I can take my complaint to the Passengerfocus, the national rail consumer watchdog and see what they suggest as a course of action.

On my photography website, I have a total of 5544 photos. That’s quite a few! Unfortunately I have been really lazy when it comes to captioning them to make them searchable or just to say what they are of! There are currently 2808 photos awaiting captioning.

Unfortunately, I have photos going back 7 years on there, so remembering what some of them are of is quite a challenge. Starting from this summer I have been keeping a little notebook with me when I’m out photographing - this was especially useful when I was in America this year as I could note down things about each photo when I take it (such as the name of a geyser at Yellowstone or the name of a lake that we happen to be driving past).

Luckily, only 287 photos from the last couple of years need captioning. I should be able to get that done over the next few days.

The next challenge is to make sure that every photo is georeferenced so that I know where I took it from. This helps when I revisit somewhere - I can quickly and easily find other photos I took years ago from near by.

It is 40 years since the 500ft BT Tower in Birmingham was completed. The tallest building in the Midlands, the BT Tower has since become one of Birmingham’s most iconic landmarks, defining the skyline of the city as visible from miles around.

The building was originally built to provide extra telephone capacity for the city and is still used for communications purposes to this day with up to 40 microwave dishes and aerials adorning the top of the tower. It underwent a make-over in 2003, replacing the rather grubby yellow paint with a brighter white paint. BT’s logo is emblazoned on two sides of the tower - probably the most ideal product placement in the city!

I’ve recently been reorganising my time to make sure I don’t waste it doing dull things. One of the things that I’ve been keen to get back to doing is baking, so inspired by the profusion of blackberries recently I have baked a blackberry crumble. My fruit crumble recipe is remarkably simple - it only really takes 10 minutes to prepare and 45 minutes to cook. I managed to pick 3lb of blackberries, so I now have 2lb left in the freezer.

Almost as simple (although it requires a bit more effort to beat the butter) is my shortbread recipe. And very yummy it is too!

I hope to do more baking in the near future - especially my divine recipe for chocolate chip cookies!