Obesity in Britain

During my visit to Blackpool, there were so many obese people I saw at the Zoo, restaurants, Pleasure Beach, roads, hotels and the Blackpool Tower. It seemed like middle Britain is inflicted with the obesity epidemic. I cannot say the same about Aberdeen, a place where I work and live.

Googling for the articles on 'Obesity in Britain', I came across the following news articles (courtesy Daily Mail), which seem to confirm what I saw in Blackpool. However, the articles do not suggest that obesity is only restricted to middle Britain. The epidemic appears to be much more widespread.

Fat Britain: Tackling the obesity epidemic. Click here.
Overweight Britons are among the fattest in Europe. Click here.
13m obese by 2010. Click here.

Lord Venkateswara Temple

We visited the temple of Lord Venkateswara at Tividale, Birmingham during our September long weekend break, which started at Blackpool and ended at Tividale. This temple is supposedly the first Venkateswara (Balaji) temple in the whole of Europe. We last visited the temple in July 2006 when it was in the final stages of its construction. The temple is now complete with poojas being performed daily. The temple complex additionally houses the deities of Lord Ganesha, Lord Kumar Swami, Goddess Lakshmi and Lord Hanuman. We had a good darshan; which included Archana and Madhyana Mangala Harthi.

A selected pictures of the temple complex.....

Long shots of the Temple Complex

Family at the Lord Venkateswara Temple

Blackpool

The children got a mini break from school (19th to 22nd) on account of the customary September long weekend. We took the opportunity to visit Blackpool, a popular holiday destination in Britain. Blackpool is located in the Lancashire county off the west coast of England, approximately 330 miles from Aberdeen.

Blackpool is most famous for its pubs, night clubs and casinos. For the children, its offers a Zoo, Pleasure Beach, Blackpool Tower and Circus, Sealife Centre, Sandcastle Water Park and many more. We visited the first three attractions spread over two days during which the weather was quite good and interluded with sunny spells.

The Blackpool Zoo was fun for the kids; though I would hasten to add that the South Lakes Wild Animal Park at Dalton-in-Furness, which we visited four and a half years back was much more memorable.

We started off at the Dinosaur Safari Park, which had life size models of various dinosaurs and woolly mammoths.

We then watched the sea lions being fed during their feeding time, though not for the first time.

In the past, we viewed sea lions at Blair Drummond in Scotland and Zoomarine in Algarve, Portugal. The routine with the sea lions in Zoomarine was very entertaining. The picture below shows a shot from such a routine.

We thereby went past enclosures, that had lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes and various other animals and birds. The highlight however was watching the Red Panda, a shy creature that spends most of its time on trees. We had an opportunity to watch its routine, which we believe is what it does most times; wake up from sleep, descend down the tree, have a quick eat, drink some water and make a quick ascent back up the tree.

A few selected pictures of animals and birds from the zoo....

A Kangaroo and a Markhor Goat

A Squirrel Monkey and Flamingoes

In the evening, we watched Venus Reborn an illuminated theatre tableau on Promenade.

The next morning we visited Pleasure Beach. Pleasure Beach is a Theme park with fun rides available for both children and adults. Needless to say the children had great fun. We booked a full day's wristbands (which allows unlimited access to majority of the rides) in advance via the internet and got a hefty discount of £40. For a family of four, two adults and two children, it costed us £81.

My advise is for families with children, where all the members would get onto atleast a few rides this option would work out cheaper. There could be instances where some family members may not want to get onto the rides. Under such circumstances, one is best advised to explore the option of buying tokens, which cost £1 each. A few small rides may cost 2 to 3 tokens, whilst there are the big rides which cost somewhere like 8 to 10 tokens.Wristbands are not valid to get onto Go Karts. One has to pay £4.50 per person.

A few pictures from our day at the Pleasure Beach.....

Children's Ride and Avalanche

Mini Dodgem and Go-Kart

Go-Kart and Carousel

In the evening, we visited the famous Blackpool Tower/Circus. We just had time to go to the top and get a visual spectacle of the city with all its bright and beautiful illumination.

The children got to do the 'Walk of Faith' wherein they walked over a sheet of glass with nothing underneath for about 320 ft.

Techfest 2008

On Sunday (13th September) we visited Techfest 2008, an annual festival of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), which usually takes place in September at the Aberdeen Beach Ballroom and Leisure Centre. The idea behind the festival is to nurture interest in children and adults alike in STEM.

We started the day by visiting the stall 'Curious about Chemistry'. Here the children discovered the wonders of chemistry. One of the experiment was to create a rocket type lift-off using some commonly available items at home. This is how it is done. Pour some vinegar in a small cylindrical photo film holder, then put an antacid effervescent tablet and place the cap over the holder. Shake it a little and the pressure built within creates a lift off to about five meters. Children also learnt how to create slime in a lab.

At 'Catch the Wind' stall, we got to design and build a practical windmill. We managed to assemble a windmill which worked, but our design generated power which was less powerful (10 secs slower) than the top design.

We then moved on to 'Madlab', where Lalit learnt the secrets of soldering and making his own electronic gadget, a Lie Detector.

In the afternoon, we attended a show titled Professor Brainstorm's 'Feel the Force'. This show taught the children about Magnetic, Gravitational, Centrifugal and Compression forces.

We later got to participate in a 'Satrosphere Solar Sprint', where we had to build a Solar Buggy out of recycled materials. Lalit built a buggy which was faster than the one I built.

The children really enjoyed this year's Techfest. In the previous years they learnt about Bendy Bridges, making compost in a bottle, making a Fun Copter and many more.

World stock markets meltdown

The world stock markets took a beating this morning following the news that Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the US have filed for bankruptcy. 5000 people in the London office have lost their jobs. Now HP is set to cut 25,000 jobs over the next three years. If this can happen to the biggest names in the business world, then nobody is immune from this once in a century economic crisis the world is undergoing at the moment.

VirtualBox in Ubuntu

I use Ubuntu as an alternate operating system at home in place of Windows XP. I started using it extensively since the release of Fiesty Fawn, which is a year and a half back. It is installed on my external hard disk (WD Passport). Ubuntu is an operating system based on Linux, which is free and the community help pages are more than adequate to help a novice or an intermediate user. I managed to get help whenever I got myself into sticky situations. The most recent one was to do with the Network Manager, about which I'll write in a future post.

Following the release of Google Chrome (newest entrant to web browser market) earlier this month I wanted to install it on Ubuntu, but was disappointed that a Linux version is not available. I got to know that it could only be done using Wine, a Windows Emulator on Linux. My experience with Wine isn't that great till date because of its inability to provide the full functionality of a windows software (like iTunes, Winamp, Realplayer etc.) on Linux.

Scouring through the Google results I came across a website which showed how to install Google Chrome on Ubuntu using VirtualBox. Wow! I thought, a virtualisation software, where I could run software built for windows (which do not have a Linux equivalent) without having to leave Ubuntu. I loaded my virtual version of Windows using Virtual Box following the instructions on the above website. I then installed Google Chrome and voila. Here I am using Google Chrome browser to access my blog and write this post without having to leave Ubuntu.

I could have done the same dozen other ways, but I chose to do it this way.

Using VirtualBox I can run the fully featured Real Player, Windows Media Player and also Winamp. I will download iTunes some other time and am sure it will work just fine.

Britain's Credit Crunch

Britain's economy is hit by the credit crunch. The stock market which had a great run in the past three years or so, is officially into its bear phase. FTSE 100 has fallen from its lofty heights of 6400 on May 19th this year to the current 5300. The same can be said of the housing market. There are more sellers than buyers and the situation just seems to get worse. The news is Barratt Homes (one of the biggest builders in Britain) is trying to attract buyers by paying stamp duty on houses worth up to £500,000 and protecting people selling their Barratt-bought homes from house price falls of up to 15% for the next three years. Such innovative ideas may attract the buyers, but the mortgage lenders are few and far between. Furthermore, London brokerage Savills expects house prices in the UK to fall by 25% over the course of 2008 and 2009. This would surely put off the first time buyers from stepping onto the property ladder.

I had an interesting incident that happened recently, which prompted me to come up with this post. In my earlier post I mentioned that I ordered a Seagate 1 TB Hard Disk from the BT shop. The original order was made on 20th August, scheduled to be delivered by the courier Amtrak on the 22nd. I called them up on 22nd afternoon saying that nobody would be at home and I would collect the parcel from their depot on 23rd, which happened to be a Saturday. On 23rd I was informed that due to some technical reasons they were asked not to give parcels to any customers. Only later did I come to know that Amtrak had gone into Administration on 22nd.

The latest news today is the holiday firm XL has gone into Administration. With the high fuel prices I expect a few of the low budget airlines could go into Administration.

Geni

Geni is a website where one could interactively build their family tree.

Last week we had visitors from India who were second cousins of my wife; Kalpana and Dr. Adinarayana Sastry. Dr. Sastry is a surgical Gastroentologist working in NIMS Hyderabad. Dr. Sastry received an FRCS award at Hunter Hall, University of Glasgow in recognition of his work in the field of GI.

Dr. Sastry is very interested in Genealogy and is the one who has introduced me to Geni. I have started to populate the family tree on both my father and mother's side. I intend to extend the tree as far as I can with the help of other family members to know where our families stood a few generations back.

Seagate 1TB hard disk

After a long wait for two weeks, I got my 1 TB Seagate hard disk yesterday, which I ordered from the BT Shop. I have a Dell Dimension 9200, which originally came with a 250 GB Seagate hard disk. I needed the extra storage space for my videos and pictures and to backup my hard disk. Initially, I was a bit apprehensive about installing it myself, as I have never installed an internal hard disk before. I looked at the Dell manual available online, which gave the necessary instructions on how to replace one.

Tools needed: (1) A mini screw driver with a star head and (2) Anti static wrist strap.

The Dell manual missed out the vital point about screwing the hard disk onto the bracket. An other aspect to note is the SATA cable and the power cable in the box supplied by Seagate are too small to be of any use. It is advisable to atleast buy a SATA cable, the one with a single right angle connector for installing a hard disk in a similar Dell make PC.

Post installation, I enabled the hard disk in BIOS and then formatted it using the Seagate Discwizard software. The software had the following handy features: add new disc (which let me do my partitioning), clone disc, image backup and image restore. The software is available for download from the Seagate website. I cannot vouch for its use on non Seagate hard disks as I never had a chance to use on one.

Google Chrome

Last week I installed a Beta version of Google Chrome ; the latest entrant to the browser market from Google. BBC website featured the pre-release news about the web browser in the UK. On 1st September I looked at Chrome’s comic book feature, which made me sit up and take note, as it seemed a pretty innovative way of presenting a new product launch. After a pretty long wait on 2nd September, the eventual moment arrived at 9 pm GMT when it was available for downloading. The downloading and installation processes were pretty uneventful.

My first thoughts are the browser is definitely quick. I am a great fan of Google Maps and I always had trouble loading them in other browsers; Firefox, IE, Opera and Flock. In Chrome they loaded almost instantaneously. The picture in YouTube appeared a bit better than in the other browsers. However, it doesn’t work on music sites with embedded media players. Raaga.com is one of them, which uses an embedded Realplayer.

The feature I liked the most in Chrome is ‘One box for everything’, i.e. merging of the address and search boxes into one. ‘Incognito mode’ feature may seem new and innovative to the IE and Firefox users, but in Safari the Private browsing mode has been available since 2005.

The experts verdict is it has bugs. The foremost one is the carpetbomb bug, which for the moment has kept me away from using Chrome as my default browser. My wish is all the known bugs are removed before its final stable release.