The first snowdrops of the year appeared a couple of days ago. A sure sign that spring is on the way.

It’s been mild so far, hasn’t it?

The competition involves 200 bands (that’s 8000 musicians) from Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales, the rest of Europe, Canada, USA, Australia, Pakistan, New Zealand, Brazil and Oman, among others. There are arenas covering all seven grade competitions, as well as Drum Major competition and Highland Games. And plenty of chip vans.

The best place to watch the best bands at the Grade 1 final tuning area, where the bands make their last minute preparations before entering the competition arena. They concentrate on tuning, tightening up the drumming…

…and getting tricky tunes right…

… before marching off into the competition arena.

Interestingly, Strathclyde Police band were the only band who didn’t use electronic tuners to check the tuning – instead they had two guys who listened and made careful adjustments to the drones. Now that’s serious musicianship.

Results

The Grade 1 results were…
1st Field Marshall Montgomery Pipe Band from Lisburn, Co. Antrim
2nd Simon Fraser University Pipe Band from Vancouver
3rd Scottish Lion 78th Fraser Highlanders from Toronto
4th= The House of Edgar Shotts and Dykehead
4th= Strathclyde Police Pipe Band

Field Marshall Montgomery have secured their second World Championship in two years. That makes up for us losing in the rugby.

More pictures on Flickr.

This mashup from Malcolm Daniel is a great 4-minute summary of the film:

Two things particularly struck me:

Firstly, Gore presents evidence from Antarctic ice cores, showing the atmospheric CO₂ levels over the last 650,000 years. Recently, certain climate-change sceptics have tried to throw doubt on the nature of the human-induced global warming by citing cyclical events through the Pleistocene glaciation. This graph indeed shows such cyclical events with glaciations interspersed with interglacials.

See also 600,000 year graph.

However, look at present-day CO₂ levels, at 380ppm, much higher than the historical maxima of around 280-290ppm. We are not in a cyclical interglacial, but in completely new territory.

The second thing that struck me was the fact that we have the technology, right now, to solve the problem (or at least to mitigate the worst effects). We don’t need mirrors in the sky, we need simple measures, but taken by everyone. These include energy-efficient appliances, industry and transport; renewables; and even carbon sequestration. With these, we can reduce our CO₂ emissions to 1970 levels!

Happy New Year!

Credit to Claire Thomson.

We had some spectacular thunderstorms in Glasgow last night. Usually when there is a thunderstorm you can see it coming, experience it for 20 minutes, and then watch it leave. Last night’s was much larger – it lasted between 8pm and midnight, and covered the entire sky over Glasgow. There was both forked and sheet lightning, and some torrential rain. I was speaking to a taxi driver today who saw manhole covers being lifted above the road level by the force of the water.

Some very spectacular pictures in Flickr and on the BBC website.

Anyway, this leads me to the main topic of this post:

As we were out during the storm I had left all my kit plugged in and turned on. When we returned my broadband was down, although the ADSL router seemed to be working fine, it was just not connecting. I thought I’d leave it, maybe BT were out fixing it, so I turned off the router and the PC. This morning, still no connection, and none when I got home from work either.

So I call BT Broadband Technical Support (0845 600 7030) and I get through to a guy in India. After confirming all my details, he asked me to:

1. Turn off my router
2. Unplug all the cables (power, telephone, ethernet, USB)
3. Wait 30 seconds
4. Plug in all the cables and turn on the router

And it worked!. Immediately!

I asked the guy why this might make a difference. He said that turning the router off and unplugging all the cables discharges all the static electricity that may have built up during the thunderstorm – particularly in the cable that connects to the telephone line.

I found the engineer really helpful – and it’s not often I say that!

Update 14:00. A nice 2 hour walk round to Pollok Park, crunching our way through fresh snow. Saw two small deer, one chasing the other through the Park, but they moved too fast to get pictures. Very pretty with the snow on all the trees and buildings, and the White Cart Water flowing through the middle of the Park.

On the way back, we passed by several of Pollok’s herd of Highland cattle, all in their element in the snow.

More pictures on Flickr.

To take advantage of this, we went for a nice walk yesterday around the Neilston Pad. (Coincidentally, Neilston is the site of the most boring webcam on the planet).

It was crisp, frosty, and sunny. We could see the tops of the mountains in the distance. Not bad for somewhere 15 minutes from home.

Both Jacqueline and I decided to strap on the walking boots and tramp to work, and it was fun to crunch through the fresh snow on the way to the station. The photograph was of Giffnock Station at 08:10 this morning (OK, OK, not the most exciting, but as atmospheric as I could make it..).

In East Kilbride, the snow was still on the ground when I left work, but was an icy, slushy mess back in Glasgow. Very glad of the boots!

All Scotrail trains are off this morning, so I had to drive to work – although the roads were clear.

It seems to have been stormy since Christmas. It does worry me that we are to expect more of this type of weather as a consequence of global warming.