Ahhh, an improvement in the weather this weekend… sunny, with a little chill in the air. So, we headed down into down to check out Cardiff centre to look around the place and get some more Xmas shopping done. The centre was heaving, so wasn’t that fun at times. We did have a cracking snack for lunch though. Very nice hog roast and stuffing roll served up in one of the stalls in the special Xmas market they have on at the moment.

We pretty much spent most of the afternoon there, before we headed off to a quiet pub/bar just on the outside of the central part of Cardiff. That was pretty much to kill time, before we headed off to a Portugese restaurant for food that evening. Pretty good, considering there was a big party going on in there at the time. We’ll probably head back there after the the holidays to test out the place again.

Sunday was a chilled out day. Headed down to the centre again, to check out the small farmers market. Some pretty good stuff there too, which we’ll be eating through the week. We figure that by shopping from the main central market and this farmers market, we’ll be cutting down on our food shop from Sainsbury. All we need know are the bikes, so we don’t have to take the bus into the centre.

Finally got an internet connection at home, a little bit slower than the 45Mb we used to have. This one is a data modem card, since getting a fixed line broadband connection would be cost prohibitive if we are not going to stay in this rented accomodation for a long period of time. We can pick up a 1.4Mb signal apparently, but I suspect actual transfer rates are anywhere between 340ish Kb to that 1.4Mb figure. Not bad, considering that fixed line broadband in the outskirts of Cardiff is only 512Mb anyway!!!
My mail is all up and running on my user account. Yuko’s one still has a few problems (she can’t recieve email), so I suspect it’s some form of wierd port blocking on the device. I need to play around with those settings before the Mac is fully ‘Net Operational’ for her.

Anyway, in todays other news I saw on the Internet.

Oil

Peak? Well, it seems OPEC is cutting production again in February.

Also, there was an interesting little snippet in the Nov/Dec OPEC Bulletin…

The question of ‘peak oil’

Dr. Shokri Ghanem, chairman of the People’s committee, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) of Libya, winner of the 2006 Petroleum Executive Award

The question of peak oil output, which once was the concern of few individuals, has become a concern of some countries, as well as several organizations. Despite the fact that many are unhappy with Hubbert’s peak oil predictions, his 1970 peak oil theory for the US turned out to be quite accurate, and for many, particularly the pessimists, his end-of-the-century peak oil predictions for the world also proved to be correct.

However, while some of the more pessimistic oil specialists are declaring that peak oil has already been passed, or at best is here now, others believe it is not going to arrive before 2010. Some optimists give the world a little more breathing space – that is to say up to 2020, and perhaps even up to 2030. However, all in all, most would appear to agree that peak oil output is not very far away for all of us. It could take place sometime within the next decade or so, which in fact means that there is not much time left for a world economy to be driven largely by oil.

Furthermore, under any of these scenarios, and since peak oil output is not about the time at which oil will run out, but the time at which production can no longer be increased to cope with increased demand, it seems the only way the oil price can go is up.

This conclusion seems to be in line with the view held by the peak oil output advocates who argue that the ongoing oil price rises are mainly due to supply-demand imbalances. This is because we are at, or near, the production peak of world oil, if not on the downward slope of the Hubbert’s peak curve. This is not to deny the role of other factors (such as geopolitical), but only to stress the importance of supply and demand for crude oil as the prime factor in determining the price of the commodity.

The comments in bold are quite a statement to come from an OPEC man.

Happenings in Japan

Seems the Au(KDDI) bandwagon rolls on. Not suprising really, and DoCoMo are the ones who are really getting hurt by hit. Wouldn’t suprise me to see Au eventually become the No.1 mobile operator in Japan.
Meanwhile, this was a pretty horrific story…