Uranium can be added to give glass a fluorescent yellow or green color
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Overview
...it's official! Glass containing uranium is actually coloured flourescent green/yellow!
After all my irritation at radioactive wastes always being portrayed as a glowing yellow/green liquid, that little point has made my day. Thankyou.
Woo hoo! I've passed my driving theory test.
I scored 35 out of 35 on the easy multiple choice questions ("A burning child staggers into the road in front of you. Do you (a) accelerate and run into the child so the flames are put out as it flies through the air, (b) pretend not to notice and drive past, (c) stop and help, (d) sit and watch"), and 46 out of 75 on the dreaded Hazard Perception - when the pass mark is 44!
Phew. Close. TOO close.
But anyway, onto the next step: the practical test. If I am lucky, I will get one booked before Christmas. The waiting lists around here are a bit mad.
We've spent today and yesterday running a stall in the craft tent of the annual Havering Show.
We had for sale some of my cast aluminium paperweights, and lots of things Sarah makes - Wigglypets, Fimo jewellery, bead bracelets, bookmarks, and so on.
Sadly, we made a loss! The crowd was conspicuously lacking our main target customer group - teenagers. This may have something to do with the fact that there was a fairground OUTSIDE the show, and the show itself cost four pounds to get in; unlike previous years, when the fairground had opened after the show had closed... it seemed like the fairground was in competition to the show.
We had lots of middle aged people and above, and young families with tiny children. The children loved the Wigglypets, and a few of them were dragged away crying by their parents - because few of the parents seemed willing to buy them for their children; perhaps due to the craft tent being quite deep into the show ground, so most of the children already had candy floss, painted faces, and balloons... and my theory is that the fact that most of the children ran up to the stall and picked up a wigglypet, only to have the parent yell "Don't TOUCH! PUT THAT DOWN!" at them, meant the parents couldn't possible "reward" the child for showing such enthusiasm by actually buying them something! We may have had more sales if we'd put them behind glass or something so the children aren't so tempted to disobey parental dictates :-/
Oh well. You live and learn. We picked up some details of other shows from neighbouring stallholders, so we'll try them and see if we get any better luck elsewhere. Ideally somewhere where all the teenagers aren't lured away.
As one small step along the road towards my dream of becoming a Victorian gentleman scientist, I've gone part time with my employer Frontwire Ltd and am now freelancing for the other half of it under the auspices of Snell Systems.
As well as selling my services as a software engineer and technical author, I'm also doing network installations.
Wish me luck - and if you need a network installed in the London area, drop us a line!
In order to avoid having to spend the first half hour of every conversation I have explaining that we're married, and how the wedding went, and so on, I've decided to put up a Snell-Pym blog that I can just point friends at for the latest news.
Alaric | alaric | 
Fri 17th Sep 2004 11:58 am | 
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