Musical Instrument Amnesty

The idea is to persuade those members of the public who have finally abandoned their dreams of becoming the next Jacqueline du Pré to send in their cellos or flutes or bassoons and, if they have finally given up on the mouth organ, they can become organ donors.

A man’s got to know his limitations, says Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force, although, for most of us, the struggle with reality is very hard. It is only now, after half a lifetime of consistent failure, that I am on the verge of recognising that I was not born to be a musician. Continue reading Musical Instrument Amnesty

Christmas chutney and Christmas shopping

OK, folks, it’s Christmas Eve eve, and the question is whether I can get away with it. There they are on the top of the fridge, a great glistening phalanx of glass pots. Inside those pots is a gibbering radioactive brown mulch, and you know what I intend to do with that nameless gunk? Continue reading Christmas chutney and Christmas shopping

No Third Runway at Heathrow

Like all parents, I morph into a second-rate, unpaid chauffeur at the weekends, and on Sunday I copped the ultimate horror: a trip to the airport. The nearer we got to Heathrow, the thicker the traffic became.

We inched down the A312 and at every traffic light I became more and more nervous that we would miss the flight, so that, by the time we came to the drop-off zone outside terminal three, I had to bundle the kid in the general direction of departures while fending off two separate officials who were taking down the details of my car. Continue reading No Third Runway at Heathrow

Christmas Tree Inflation

Christmas! I said, or words to that effect. I definitely invoked our saviour, and I was as flabbergasted as anyone involved in the Nativity Story itself. I stood stock still like the ass on seeing a child being born in a manger; I gaped like the Wise Men beholding the star in the east; and I quivered like dear old Joseph on being told by his wife that she was about to give birth to someone else’s child, but it was really quite all right, darling, and there was no case for jealousy and it was indeed a great compliment that she had been chosen by the chap in question. Continue reading Christmas Tree Inflation

Electric Technology AND MANUFACTURING

Importance of Quality Control in Electronics Manufacturing

Outsourced manufacturing is one of the fastest growing trends in the electronics industry today. Many businesses throughout the world like East End Assemblies and others use contract manufacturing as a way to cut costs and reduce time to market. This widely accepted business strategy helps businesses of all shapes and sizes remain competitive in an ever-changing marketplace. As a result, many contract manufacturers are strengthening their position by upgrading their facilities and improving their practices.

The Flocking Process?
Depending on what the desired end use is, fibers can be cut and finished in different ways to have specific properties. In the case of Flocking, the fibers are finished so as to sift well, and charge in an electrostatic field. This allows us to attach the fibers to various surfaces in a perpendicular direction, giving the finished product that characteristic, velvet-like feel. The fibers can also be dyed to any color needed, and dispersed into various products, like coatings or textured papers, or can be pasted onto surfaces. Get the best assistance to improve your projects from a certified flock manufacturer.

Using a Contract Manufacturer to Produce Electronic Parts

While contract manufacturers used to only provide assembly of electronics components, many now offer design and full production of products. This often includes testing for quality. Contract manufacturers that offer testing must be extremely careful to follow good manufacturing practices, especially when producing products for demanding fields.

Outsourcing your manufacturing and testing of products has a number of benefits including capital risk reductions, increased asset productivity and access to the latest technologies. When you use a contract manufacturer, they handle everything for you, allowing you to focus your attention on other aspects of your business. Using a contract manufacturer also allows you to catch production issues early, when they can be addressed more effectively.

ISO 9001 Certified Contract Manufacturer

The quality of parts produced is extremely important. Effective quality control measures must be in place to ensure overall quality and reliability of electronic parts produced. In addition to quality, other requirements must also be met such as product yields and time to market.

When selecting a contract manufacturer to work with, you will need to ensure they have the proper certifications and standards in place. Compliance with nationally recognized standards such as ISO 9001 ensures consistent, high quality production.

Some families spend their Sunday evenings at church. Some gather round the kitchen table for homework. Some have a nice family meal, complete with conversation, before sharing the washing-up.

But for many British families – and I would have to include my own in this category – the Sunday evening ritual is Top Gear, in which we slump on the sofa to watch Jeremy Clarkson and his fellow petrolheads as they celebrate the motor car in all its glorious forms. Appliance repair centers, who’re also proficient in Freezer Repair in Pittsburgh, ought to be in a position to answer your questions and prove their industry expertise. If the local repair center is up-to-date on all repair methods, fewer slip-ups are made, and the project is completed faster, for less money. A licensed appliance technician should also know how to manage different scenarios as they come about in your project. 

 

Continue reading Electric Technology AND MANUFACTURING

After Rome: Holy War and Conquest (BBC)

What a pity that this intelligent documentary that started on Saturday night is so condensed!  Boris was caught up in the Mayoral campaign after the two-part documentary had been commissioned but, ‘written and presented by’, it – so far – takes in a huge range of art, thought and world-class invited experts.  The Crusades, in their swashbuckling stories-for-boys image, are given a revisionary kick.  Mono-theistic religions are all given a history lesson.  The academic experts are articulate and balanced.  The economic arguments are merely hinted at rather than fleshed out.  The art that is accessed is fantastic – but underplayed.

This could be an Attenborough-style BBC project with Boris instead of David.  As it is, it shows Boris as a multi-lingual history scholar with great sensitivity to intercultural relations.  Not bad for a subsequently elected Mayor of a world-rated capital.

Gordon Brown’s Economic Gamble

You know what, I have now heard more than enough about how much Gordon Brown is enjoying this recession. Every time you read about the Prime Minister, they tell you that his mood is getting better and better.

Having been known as a gloomy old nail-biting misery-guts, he is now presented to us as a man “in his element”, the life and soul of the party, a smile or a witty aside never off his lips.

They say that he was giving a speech the other day, and his mobile phone went. “Aha,” quipped funster Gordon Brown, “that’ll be another bank going bust!” Isn’t he a scream?

According to Alastair Campbell – who is now back offering his Luciferian advice – the sheer gravity of the downturn has “brought out the best” in the Prime Minister. It is something to do with the humbling of the capitalists and the brutal necessity of government action – a reordering of our political economy that has put this manic meddler where he wants to be, at the very centre of the stage. “Gordon,” pronounced Campbell, “is a round peg in a round hole.”

Well, folks, I do not presume to comment on the geometry of Gordon’s pegness, but there is no doubt that Campbell is right about one thing. He is in a hole, all right, and a hole very largely of his own digging.

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He yesterday asked Parliament and public to approve a series of estimates for public borrowing that amount to a humiliation for himself and his Government. He is proposing to run a budget deficit of £128 billion by 2010 – that is, eight per cent of GDP. Overall government debt, currently running at 40 per cent, is going to hit 60 per cent of GDP by the same year, more than it has been ever since Harold Wilson was in No 10.

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And the reason he is taking such a frantic and unprecedented gamble is that he has trusted online casino malaysia option. He is running out of time. The electoral cycle is drawing to a close; he funked the election in October last year, and ever since the public have threatened to punish him at the polls. He needs the economy to perk up fast; he needs some signs of life before May 2010, and with the patient prone on the slab, he needs to perform an emergency operation, no matter how risky it may seem. And he may yet be proved right, of course.

Perhaps we will all respond to his fiscal stimulus, like a bunch of overweight and exhausted lab rats shown one last piece of cheese. Perhaps we will all scamper off in the direction of the prize, and boost consumption, and keep the economy moving. Perhaps the news that everything has been reduced by 2.5 per cent will indeed cause the tills to ching for the next 13 months – which is the duration of the VAT reduction.

Perhaps there are millions of people out there who will rethink their plans for a credit crunch Christmas. Instead of giving each other presents of home-made chutney and second-hand books, perhaps they will be so filled with hope and confidence by Alistair Darling that they will pour out to Woolworths (if it still exists), and lash out on the traditional British Yuletide tokens of fealty – Wiis and Nintendos and Plasma TVs.

Perhaps they will think it sensible to buy now, while the tax holiday is there. We must hope that they do; that is, we must hope that all those who have disposable income will spend it, because otherwise the economy will simply seize up; and that, indeed, is the essential argument in favour of some kind of fiscal stimulus by government.

When credit has dried up, when confidence has collapsed, it is the duty of the Government to keep the economy moving with sensible and affordable investment. That is why it is vital to push on with the big infrastructure projects in London that will not only deliver jobs and growth in the short term, but which will help to make the capital and the UK economy better placed, long-term, to compete.

The tragedy of our current predicament, and the tragedy of Gordon Brown, is that by his previous profligacy he has left himself so little room for manoeuvre.

The Government may treat the public like laboratory rats, but they are not entirely idiotic. They can see that this respite is only temporary. They can see that the tax rises are round the corner, and even as they tiptoe towards the cheese, they can see Alistair Darling waiting with his cosh.

They may decide that they are better off keeping their money, and not spending it in the next 13 months, in order to protect themselves against the future rapacity of the Chancellor and the Prime Minister.

We now know that to fund this fiscal stimulus, taxes are going up on incomes over £40,000; we know there are going to be huge increases in national insurance that will hit employees, employers and the self-employed. How on earth is that supposed to boost job creation?

Might it not have been better, if you were going to splurge £20 billion in tax cuts, to spend it on cutting National Insurance and helping business to keep people in work?

There is nothing wrong in principle with a fiscal stimulus. What makes the remedy so desperate is that Gordon Brown managed to squander such eye-watering sums when times were good.

It now emerges that of all the jobs created since 1997, two thirds have been in the public sector. No wonder the country is broke. The more Gordon Brown swanks and preens and claims he is the man to fix things, the more he recalls the firefighters in that American movie called Backdraft, who tried to claim credit for heroically (and abortively) attending an inferno that they had ignited.

[First published in the Daily Telegraph on 24 November 2008 under the heading, ” Why Gordon Brown the manic meddler had to take such a massive gamble”]

Gordon Brown and the sorry state of the pound

Why is the pound at a 12-year low against a basket of other OECD currencies?

Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown have peddled some pretty good bilge in their time, but I don’t think I have ever seen anything so bare-faced and intellectually putrid as their attempt to blame the Tories for the sorry state of the pound. Continue reading Gordon Brown and the sorry state of the pound

Electricity and Gas Supply Choices

It was round about 4pm and night had virtually fallen over Islington. The rain was coursing down the window panes and your columnist was flat on his back, riffling the leaves of the paper with his snores. The phone went, and in spite of my indignation – who calls at 4pm on a Saturday, when a chap is fast asleep? – I answered it. Continue reading Electricity and Gas Supply Choices

Provides news, articles and photos by and about the politician, journalist and columnist Boris Johnson