Haje’s Brain

Hi guys,

Sorry about the lack of updates recently, it’s been rather hectic in Haje-World recently: I’ve recently moved, and I’ve got a new job, so I’ve been a bit stacked with stuff to do. Finally, I haven’t got the internet sorted at home yet, so I’m typing this from an internet cafe with sticky keys, bad coffee and worse music.

Read more here!

If you’re active in today’s society, you can’t have missed the word ‘gadget’. The word itself is confusing, and means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

How come an item can be a gadget one week, and not the next? What makes one mobile phone a gadget, while another isn’t? Does something have to be high-tech to be a gadget? What draws people to gadgets? (more…)

This morning, I stumbled across a news story about how:

1) Last year, the top 10 NHS litigation claims are responsible for £68m of its budget.
2) all 10 of these claims were related to problems with complications in birth or pregnancy.

This bothers me on a whole series of levels. The average annual brutto salary in the UK is just over £20K. This means that the top litigants, who were on average granted £6.8m of compensation, were given 323 annual wages as a lump sum.

Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that civil litigation suits can be a way to keep businesses in check, but the NHS is a government organisation which currently is running at a £512m overspend. The past year, the NHS spent £593m on litigation cases. For a government agency run on taxpayer’s money, this is completely ridiculous. The UK only has about 60 million inhabitants, which means that each and every individual pays £10 every year, just to cover the litigation suits. (more…)

I recently had the fantastic opportunity of writing a book about photography for an US publisher. Of course, with the publisher being abroad, there were some tax issues with the venerable Internal Revenue Service. Basically, I was given the choice between a) giving the US Internal Revenue Service 30% of my earnings, and subsequently pay another significant percentage to the Inland Revenue (which are, of course, the UK tax authorities), or somehow get out of the US tax, and pay tax only in the UK. (more…)

So, the online bookmarking / social network site Reddit was down for a couple of days, and admits to having a lot of their data stolen. They further admit that the data will have included logins, passwords, and e-mail addresses.

The part that was stolen, according to the news story, was “media of ours that contained a backup of a portion of the reddit database was stolen recently”… Not being funny, but what the hell is a media company doing having unencrypted ‘backup media’ (CD or DVD, presumably) laying around? That’s hardly what’s known as being diligent in protecting your users. (more…)

So, as part of research for my job - and because I love this kind of stuff - I’ve been playing around with different types of social networking sites.

One of my friends, Ashley, pointed out FaceBook to me today. All I can say is - jesus christ, why isn’t MySpace more like FaceBook? In fact - why do people bother with myspace at all, when Facebook is better in just about every possible aspect? (more…)

There’s something to be said against seasonal affective disorder. Myself, I’ve never been struck particularly hard, but I do notice that getting up in the mornings becomes a bit more… pointless?

Nothing that a good sound-track can’t fix though… And here is my 2006 edition. (more…)

Anti Lag is a system used in highly tuned turbocharged vehicles, to reduce the effect of turbo lag.

How a turbocharger works

A turbocharger works by exploiting the pressure of the exhaust gasses moving out of an internal combustion engine. It consists of a turbine - driven by the exhaust gasses - which is connected to a compressor.

The air pump forces air into the inlet manifold. The higher density of the compressed air means that more fuel can be injected into the engine, which leads to much higher power output compared to a non-forced-induction car (also known as a ‘naturally aspirated’ engine) (more…)

The sport of Drifting has been around for quite a while, but with movies such as Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, and a recent increase in popularity in the D1 and Formula Drift championship, the newest motorsport on the block (or, more likely, around the block) is gathering speed.

Back in the day, you could drift with just about any car that’s got rear wheel drive - Sierras and Cavaliers were tremendously popular in the early years of UK drifting - but as competition levels went up, more is needed from the cars. (more…)

In for a penny, in for a pound is an old (British) English expression which relates to taking chances.

It has a few different etymologies, but all of them are crime or gambling related. The idea of the expression is that if you are going to be taking a risk of any kind, you may as well take a big risk, and try to reap the bigger reward. (more…)