Wow! Happy New Year everybody! I just got back from South Africa, where it was 25-30 degrees everyday to a cold and snowy Southampton! According to my phone, it was 34 degrees in Cape Town, and -3 in Southampton... Thats 37 degrees difference!!! Wow!
Anyway, re-installing all my applications and doing yearly maintenance upgrades on my pc's has got me stuck into a whole lot of old errors I once had, and cannot remember how to fix anymore! So frustrating - One of the problems is with my TeX installation (The ECS class I use requires lstpatch.sty - Which I should probably get off CTAN - Ohhh now I remember how to get it....)
I suppose I should also upload some pics to make this blog not so drab. So here goes, a random selection of images... Wait, I should qualify what the first lot of images are about. I am concerned about the pricing structure in place around the world today. I suppose it is more evident in the UK than it is in South Africa, but it seems to me that products have no relation to their cost. So for example, Figure 1 shows a picture of two chickens next to each other in a prominent UK Supermarket. Figures 2 and 3 show close ups of the chicken prices and the details, and here is where I am utterly confused. The Chicken is priced per kilogram on the price tag. So the supermarket thinks that the bigger the chicken, the more you pay, but because the one chicken is slightly larger than the other chicken and is classed as a 'medium' chicken and not a 'small' chicken, you pay less per kilogram, and hence the larger chicken is cheaper than the smaller chicken - A situation which is the antithesis of the price per kilogram... WHAT???
Figure 1: Chickens Side by side
Figure 2: Small Expensive Chicken
Figure 3: Medium Cheap ChickenThat is just truly insane to me. It is obviously not a discount situation where you buy more and save, as the larger chicken IS cheaper than the smaller chicken, and I can't believe that it costs the farmer less to produce a larger chicken, but here you have a definitive situation where chicken is cheaper for a larger one than a smaller one. Insane.
Back in South Africa, another prominent Supermarket chain have got super techincal - Another crazy situation: Africa is more technically advanced then the Developed World... WHAT??? Why is it called the developed world?? Well maybe the technology has no value, but I thought it was very interesting. Figure 4 shows these shelves labelled with electronic price labels so as to allow you to see the price electronically! Wow - I think that is pretty cool, but so long as you need to change your prices rapidly or something...
Figure 4: Electronic price tags.
Anyway, that concludes my rant, I think I will just leave you with this movie clip of my balcony when we arrived back. It is very pretty and therapeutic to see the snow falling, and I hope this captures a tiny fraction of that experience :)
PS. After being told my blog was extremely depressing, I have resolved this year to be more fun and exciting about my posts. I hope this has a more positive tone than previous blog posts. Keep well and love to all.
