Petrol prices

Vote with this lot to show your displeasure about a proposed £2.35 tax hike on petrol that is due to come in next week - whish would push unleaded up to over £1 a litre.

I did some sums a while ago and now fill up in London as the petrol is cheaper than in Worcester where I spend a lot of time. It's 3p cheaper a litre. I usually fill up with 55litres. So on one tank of fuel that's £1.65 more for the same product. Over the course of a year, that's over £85!!! So, on a similar basis, this would cost me an extra £122.2 a year. On fuel that already has 80p tax on 95p per litre. Stuff that...

http://www.petrolprices.com/blog/we-cant-take-another-p-now-82.html

A collegue highlighted to me the story the other day of Sisyphus. If your not aware of who or what he's done, he was the Greek hing who was punished for tricking and deceiving the gods (amongst others) and was made to push a large boulder up a hill for eternity. However, this was an interesting summary of the story:

It is the total lack of value of what Sisyphus has to work so hard to achieve that makes his punishment so horrific. It is not because his labor is merely arduous and eternal, but because it is arduous and eternally pointless, that he must suffer from doing it. One cannot imagine him happy unless one foolishly imagines him, or imagines him foolish. As a metaphor for part of the human condition and the plight of some people -- even those often considered most successful because we mistakenly think change is progress or that there are no hollow victories -- the myth of Sisyphus is a sad commentary. The work of far too many people has been, and continues to be, pushing a rock up a hill merely to change its location.

Sounds like everybody's job at some time or another doesn't it...

Ah the joys. The team I work with are a bit wiped out this morning. This may be something to do with the leaving do for one of our team last night. He was tipsy before even got to the restaurant, which is probably the fault of our Spur 0, meeting room 1 staff who supplied him with an Apple Schnapps on the house as he was leaving.

Needless to say, a good curry was had a big turn out (there were 1about 16 of us) before retreating to a local bar that is a specialist in whisky where we proceded to try and taste all 100 of them before closing (which was a challenge, as it gave us 15 minutes...)

Prior to this, I'd done a 7.2km run (according to the gmap-pedometer site) in 45 minutes, which included a 5 minute stretch, so the time aspect to this weekends run is looking good. I could have carried on and done a full 10 last night but was running a bit behind time as I was supposed to be in the bar! Such is life.

All in all, I can't wait to get home today and some kip!

Thought I'd share some interesting web sites with you.

This is a good one for walkers and runners - a Google map mashup that let's you click a route onto the map and it calculates how far the distance is. Very useful, especially with a 10K run on the horizon it let's you accurately chart your training miles.
Pedometer

The next one is a bit funny - it's built into Google Earth and is a flight sim.
Flight sim
I was useless and kept crashing...

I'm never having kids - one weekend with the future niece and nephew have told me that! OK, I know I will, but seriously they are hard work! Good fun though, and an excuse to go and see an exhibition on Wallace and Gromit. Well executed and interesting, with lots of models and background. The best bit about it all though is the background adverts and the like.

Rubbish rugby yesterday, to be expected though as we put out a B side, to give them a full week to prepare for Italy. It just shows how Italy have come on, they used to be the whipping boys in the 6 nations and now we take a week to make sure we win (and even then it's not assured!) Roll on Saturday night for the big game! I love these big tournaments, live sport on a Saturday night - you can't beat it.

Football wasn't so great over the weekend. A beating by Rangers was expected, if not one to be enjoyed, Liverpool need to get hold of Rafa and leave Torres on the field and not the bench. What's the point in spending all that money and not playing him? Arsenal - who'd have seen that one coming - they are awesome again! Granted, it was against Derby who are hardly great, but with some easier games in the next few weeks for them they will still be top of the table for a few weeks yet. My revamped fantasy team are coming good, with the highest points tally in our league this week (mainly thanks to Cesc) but with the midfield all contributing well it makes a big difference. Time to swap out Martins though - he's not getting near a game with Newcastle so might swap him out for Adebayor or Anelka, who are both starting and getting goals (you get points for time on the field).

Chelski - oh how I laugh. Avrum Grant will win you nothing. Marco Van Basten is not the man for you - he's his own man and would end up arguing with Roman. So until Roman does his UEFA pro badge, you'll get nobody managers or those with aspirations and no credentials.