So you’ve decided to cut down on your energy usage and finally take the plunge and “Go Green”? Well just how does a regular household even KNOW how much energy they are using? Do you need to hire a scientist type guru to come around with some strange expensive energy measuring machines to see just how much wattage that microwave takes or the washing machine or the lights etc. If we do just how large will those machines be? Remember those old pictures of the first computer? It took up a whole room! Plus how much will a scientist geek with energy measuring instruments in a house cost? A small fortune you’d think.

Well don’t despair. The technology age is upon us. You can now go to your local hardware store (in some areas) and get an energy measuring gadget of your own. How do I know there is even such a thing? It says so on the Enigin Advice Blog. Apparently they are called power meters. This probably won’t be a surprise for all you DIY enthusiasts or outdoor living nature guys that know about generator things.

Anyway, not being one of those people, I was quite impressed to hear of such energy saving gadgets. Enigin suggests you should check all household gadgets to see just how much energy they are wasting - even on stand-by. So that means you need to start looking at the microwave, fridge, washing machine, and even lightbulbs in a new light.

Welcome mats are much under-rated staples of modern society if you ask me. Why am I spouting on about what would appear, on the surface, to be a particularly uninspiring subject with little (if anything I hear you cry) going for it? Well, because I recently conducted an experiment is for why. It went like this:

For one month I removed the welcome mat from outside my mat, just for kicks, to see what would happen when people arrived at my front door. And sure enough results were instant as Laser hair removal : immediately the glowing faces which had once met our “welcome you old git!” welcome mat turned sour and sad as they saw only a blank space on the floor instead of their much loved mat. They missed our epic hand-made (by me) mat and they missed it with gusto! Then, after a bit I put them out of their misery the poor saps and made a new mat. This one said “Welcome to the best abode on planet earth!” and was made with as much love and care, if not more, than the last. And let me tell you the change in my friends’ faces was astonishing. Suddenly my grumpiest mates were smiling bundles of joy and my most miserable friend Malcolm was–well–on the verge of looking like a normal happy person. My experiment had proved extremely fruitful, ha!

And I’ll tell you something: if there isn’t a surge in welcome mat sales after this article then I’ll be damned! (And to be honest I deserve at least a small cut!)

I tell you what one thing would alleviate much pain and make a million people feel instantly better. A thing which would cheer up even the most miserable miser. A thing which could turn whole countries around in a flash and transform normally very moody people into the kind of people that are the life and soul of the party. I am talking about what would happen if you knew someone was writing you an email, of course. How good would that be?

Instead of sitting there all miserable because you had no emails and didn’t know when the next one might come in (and your most recent Gentle YAG skin tightening appointment had just been cancelled, which is a major bummer), you could rejoice wholeheartedly in the blissful knowledge that the little bar in the corner (this is my imagined thing which would flash up when someone was writing you an email: I said it was one thing, I never said it was simple…) was flashing, letting you know that right at that moment, one of your mates was giving YOU and only YOU intense thought and concentration. Yes, they had taken half an hour or so out of their busy day to send you a thoughtful and insightful email!

Obviously there’s no guarantee that the email itself would be good, of course, but I have a feeling that even if it was an absolutely terrible email then it would still be a very good invention. Everyone likes to know that other people are thinking about them, don’t they?

Or maybe it’s just me–

This website talks about how we waste energy and how stupid it really is. And it has a very good point. We don’t waste our time, do we? So why should we waste such a precious commodity, and one which costs a great deal of money?

I don’t know where it will end, but I have to say I feel slightly happier knowing that Enigin are doing great things. May they continue to do great things. May they be awarded a medal at some point in the future!

Talk about forces of nature, that volcanic ash has caused so much disruption to flights and cost airline companies so much money that one can’t do anything but sit back and accept just how powerless we are in comparison to the natural forces around us. All the money in the world can’t do anything against that cloud of piping hot ash that is moving on the wind across all the UK, Europe and, just recently, the East coast of Canada.

The ash cloud is emanating from the volcano Eyjafjallajokull (what a mouthful) in Iceland and has caught a jet stream that originally pushed it towards the UK. Whilst the ash is at such an altitude that human health is not in immediate danger, and there are no immediate concerns about medical supplies, it has caused airlines to delay their flights indefinitely. The airline companies are haemorrhaging money at an alarming rate, some say it is in the hundreds of millions per week, and are desperate for their governments to overturn the decision to ground all flights. Some have even conducted their own test flights through the ash to see if it is ok for the planes to fly through it.

It is thought that the hot glass and debris found in the ash cloud will clog up engines causing them to fail. However, these test flights have shown that the planes are taking minimal to no damage. Governments have to be cautious of the cloud, despite these findings and I assume they won’t lift the ban on flights yet. I suspect the many thousands of people stuck on holidays will be stuck for a while yet. I for one would not get on a plane that intends to fly through the cloud right now. I am not the best flyer to begin with, and when you add a fiercely hot cloud of ash, glass and debris to the mix, you can bet I won’t be anywhere near a plane.

I hope that the situation resolves itself soon enough. The loss of flying due to companies going bankrupt would have huge impact on this modern world.

A real welcome is what you want when you visit a business’s blog, isn’t it? To feel as though you really are seeing the big picture. But so often that is not the case. Instead of a proper straight, honest talking to, you get a load of rubbish about how great the company is and how professional they are, when really they are actually only after your money in any way they can possibly get at it. So, with that in mind, when clicking this next link you’ll see why I was suitably impressed: http://www.eniginblog.com/2009/11/17/hi-welcome-to-the-enigin-blog-dot-com/

How cool is that? Very! Yes, I know–A company blogger admitting that he isn’t all that and even that he has no experience writing whatosever, yes, really–How refreshing that is to read.

You could be forgiven for thinking that it’s a marketing ploy, I suppose, and you probably wouldn’t be the first to think so. A variation on the old woe is me trick. But look at all of Enigin’s blogs and I think you’ll see that they really do tell it how it is. Unlike many companies they don’t make things up. They simply honestly tell you about their business practices, and then let you make your mind up.

Another most excellent thing about Enigin is their ability to go off on tangents about things which have almost nothing to do with the original subject; and not in a bad way, because it always leads to some new fact that I would never have learnt. Going off on tangents just like real people do. That alone makes me feel as though I am reading things written by a real human being, as opposed to someone typing straight out of a textbook, telling us what we want to hear.

Sneezing: we’ve all heard the rumours–.That the air rushes out with such force that it can literally BLOW your eyes out of their sockets. But it’s a load of nonsense, right?

Hmm, that depends on what your name is–

I had a friend named Dean when I was in my last year of school. Dean was one of those kids who was ten years ahead of all the others. He knew about bras and what the word Virgin meant long before any of us knew that shoes other than those sold in Clarks existed–

One day I found Dean on the field. He was sitting on the ground opposite his friend (the one everyone said needed a tummy tuck ), and they were having some kind of a competition which involved staring. This was nothing new, but there was something different. Every now and again they would inhale and stare up at the Sun. Then one of them would sneeze, and so on.

I said, “what’s all this Dean?”

He said, “A sneezing competition of course, we’re seeing if we can make our eyeballs come out of our heads.”

Great idea, I thought, but I’ll leave you both to it–

Now, what happened next varies, depending on who you ask. Some say that Dean sneezed like a beast, stood up and ran about with his eyeballs dangling–and some say it never happened. That Dean made it up. I’m not sure either way. All I know is, after that day Dean could never look at me straight again. At all times he looked the way people do who have just got off a rollercoaster–

Before the age of Botox, film posters used to be incredible. Once a film was almost ready to be released, a skilled and experienced artist would go to work designing mind-blowing imagery that would not only reflect the style and tone of the film, thus beckoning the movie-goer to see it as soon as possible, but stand on its own as a one-off piece of history worth wall-space in any gallery.

Then, one day, everything, abruptly, stopped.

Tragically, nearly all today’s film posters are knocked up in a number of days and instead of a skilled artist employing his / her talent, a marketing team with only basic knowledge sifts through a number of images lifted straight from the film, before getting them approved and having titles and lettering added. That’s it. No art involved. Because of this there are maybe only two or three film poster artists working in the industry today; it’s truly a sad situation. And unless a revolution happens then this will be the way it remains for the future.

I have nothing against photoshop and computer graphics. In the right situation they can serve a purpose, and I understand the economics of it: it is of course a much cheaper and easier way to do business. But the problem is quality: a photoshopped poster simply can not compete with the quality of the film posters of old. The colour and definition of paint is far richer, more interesting, and infinitely more eye-catching to a passerby than anything a marketing team can quickly come up with.

And who can blame them for thinking such things? Any country—aside from third-world ones where water is a bit more of a priority than ice-cold beer—who cannot provide this basic human right deserves to be known as one of squalor and disrepute. We must stand up, people, and make changes to our society. We must do something now so that the legacy of our country—a country rich in ale and beer-making knowledge—will remain not only intact for our children to come, but prosper and become known as the capital of cold-beer drinking and other horrible things like Botox Manchester in all of Europe!

I have no idea who it was that started off the whole “You can’t trust a man with a beard” thing but I would like to take that person to one side and give them a damn good talking to. I wonder, did the inventor of the saying know how much hurt, pain and world-wide misery their few words would cause? I doubt it, but then I would, wouldn’t I? I have a beard and am extremely kind. Thus I have a habit of forgiving people who are anti beard. How gracious is that?!

Another thing you should know, if you still doubt me, is that having a beard has nothing to do with hiding behind anything. My beard, for example, is there simply for the feel. I have always liked the way the beard sits on my face and plan to be the proud owner of a beard for many years to come.

All hail the beard! For it is one of the greatest inventions that the world has ever seen. And let it also be known that some of the world’s wisest men have had beards. For that matter, how many wise men can you name who don’t have a beard?

One final rant that I feel I must have is about chemical face peel. I mean, why is it that we are in a society today where this is resonable, and where you can ride the tube in rushhour and look around you and see about a million ads for different kinds of cosmetic procedures. And now they are directing these ads towards young people. But most especially, because I can’t actually get a face peel done with a beard, which pretty much sucks.