Food for thought

I'm writing a web cam manual at work. It can automatically ftp an image every few seconds to a website. Well, the sample I have won't, buit it's supposed to. I've been thinking about this though. I could put an almost live web cam page on our internet page. Wouldn't that be fun. I'm investigating this anyway. I'll keep you all posted.

This morning I managed to start a long and protracted argument about whether the words for octopus andthe word for squid in Chinese are interchangeable. I think the matter is still unresolved but we have agreed that there are two seperate words with subtly different meanings. I'm not sure whether we have decided whether they are interchangeable. I only knew one word which I used for everything. It's easy to remember because it's very similar to the word for socks.

There has been an on-going argument this week also about quality and speed of work. This has resulted in a moving around of poeple and several strokey beard and pointy finger meetings. What I don't understand is how everyone's memory appears to be so short. We had precisely this same argument 1 year ago. It was decided that we were trying to produce first drafts too quickly and that the quality was suffereing. The solution; we were to get 10 days to produce every first draft. That worked for about 2 months. Then the deadlines started creeping forward agian. And here we are 1 year later with same problem.

I've looked through the news today and come to the conclusion that really not very much has happened in the last 24 hours. I notice that the Labour party didn't get as many viewers for their party election broadcast as the Conservatives, hooray! I also notice that Charles Kennedy has become a father for the first time, congratualtions to you sir. Nothing else very exciting has happened. It even seems as though the posecution team in the Michael Jackson case have run out of people who saw him molesting children, allegedly.

I did see that a new study has concluded that Britons waste about one third of their food. That is to say that one third of the food destined for human consumption in Britain lands up in the bin. This is being hailed as a terrible thing. I suppose that wasting food is not exactly desirable, but I can't see that it's a problem really. Food is bio-degradable, so throwing it away doesn't cause pollution. Fears over expired "use by" dates are being blamed for the wastage. I would have thought that eating expired food would have caused more problems than throwing it away.

If we were more efficient in our shopping habits and bought just the right amount of food, thus throwing less away, what would the benefit to society be? We would be richer I suppose, and the bin men would have lighter bins to carry. But the farners and supermarkets would be selling less produce and be poorer. And it's not as if the starving people in the poorer countries would benefit from our efficiency either as far as I can see. I suppose we could all donate some of the money we saved to good causes.