Blood

So, I went to "give blood" today. Probably about my 30th time, but it suddenly dawned on me the incredible amount of staff and equipment involved at any one time for a relatively small amount of people going through the system. When I asked how much each bag of blood actually cost, it was not really too much of a surprise to hear "£130". In a serious operation, that soon mounts up!

Where is all the bio fuel?

So, why does the tax payer pay farmers to do nothing, i.e. set-aside etc.? If we pay them to do nothing, they might as well grow bio-fuel. Talking to my wife's sister and her husband who work in agriculture, they agree, and have been saying similar for around 5 years. Beaurocracy is just swamping and restricting farmers more each year. Why do we do this? Other EEC countries such as France, pay lip service to all this stuff and stick up for them-selves, good for them!

Led Zeppelin to play London?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/31/nzeppelin131.xml

I wonder if I could get tickets? Assuming I can justify the high prices!

Spring JMX

Just had my first experience of using the Spring JMX exporter. I can only say "WICKED!".

A few simple lines of XML in the application context and a Java system property, and all of a sudden you can use something like jconsole to view and update your Spring beans.

Charlotte Gray

Just finished reading Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks, pretty good stuff. Of course I've seen and read various things related to WW2 such as Schindlers List, but the plot line about the two young boys who ended up in the gas chambers really affected me, maybe because now I have my own children.

Why is the human race capable of these sorts of attrocities? How do we forgive? It makes day to day worries seem so insignificant when there is similar stuff going on in African countries such as Congo and Ruanda and maybe Iraq.