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With the cost of a barrel of oil at close to $120, it is interesting to see that the price of 1 litre of unleaded is now higher than ever before.  Looking at the chart below, showing the barrel of oil in red and the unleaded in blue, it is clear that the price we are paying is 20p/litre more expensive than when the cost of oil was at its current price….  This will be added tax and of course the fuel companies jacking the price on the forecourt at every opportunity.

One can only hope that the price of oil drops and that the petrol (gas) stations correct the price, however chance would be a fine thing!

Богородицаиконография

It is that time of year again and I have constructed a new cart to race down hill in order to raise money for The Air Ambulance.

My inspiration has come from a bird house that is being used to house a security camera….  Okay it is one that I designed and it sits at the end of my drive…

Anyhow the idea was to build a cart that looked like a birdhouse.  You may know that I have modified a go-kark, removing the engine, adding bigger wheels and a metal frame, which has been used to build the Yellow submarine and The Crimson Haybailer in previous years. 

So I set about building a frame which looked like this:

You will notice that it is about 3.5m high and about 1.0m wide and attached to the go-kart.

Once you have added the cladding and painted it it looks like this: (That is a Saab convertible behind it)

From the driving position you will get a view that looks like this:

So as  you can see, visibility is a little limited…

If you would like to help me raise money for the charity please give generously at this site: www.justgiving.com/mikemather and all funds will go directly to the charity The Air Ambulance….

I am hoping that I do not crash but I somehow expect that the dimensions of this cart have made that a forgone conclusion!

иконографиясвети илияWatching the screen and seeing something crawl across it is not unusual.  Normally you just brush it off.

Not this time!  The bug is in my computer, behind the screen and under the words!

It is not something that you can squash so I have to hope that it manages to find its way out….

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I have been waiting for an opportunity to get a iMac for a while.  Having followed MacRumors for a while and being told not to buy one, the day arrived when the new kit was released…

I have succumb to the temptation of  a really sleek, fast and powerful replacement for a laptop that had started to drive me up the wall…

I am looking forward this long overdue change.

In a short 60 days since I posted the first forecast for 2011 the cost of unleaded fuel has jumped by 5% while Brent crude is up by 17% with no end to these rises in sight.  This has been impacted by the many events that are taking place in North Africa, coupled with a rise in fuel duty in the UK and strong demand for fuel from developing nations. 

This chart shows the cost of unleaded fuel, the USD cost of Brent Crude and a forecast for the unleaded fuel.

The worrying thing about this trend is that we seem to be racing towards the levels forecasted for the end of 2011 and may well reach them by the middle of the year.

As the minutes from the Bank of England’s policymakers latest meeting are released, it is becoming clear that there is a move towards raising interest rates.

Mr Weale said that while inflation had been boosted in recent months by temporary factors, he was concerned that this could feed into people’s expectations about future inflation, making price rises self-perpetuating.

It is oblivious that as inflation rises we start to build the expectation or higher inflation into our behaviour and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Mr Posen wants us to downplay the risk of inflation.  Which world is he living in.  Everything that we are spending money on is getting more expensive.  Petrol prices, insurance costs, food, energy…..  No matter how much we wish that interest rates stay low and no matter how much we wish that inflation does not go up, this will not stop it from happening….

One of the new “obstacles” on the Tough guy course was the addition of the torture chamber.  Having completed part of the killing fields, being submersed in freezing water you enter the torture chamber. This is a log cabin with no windows into which you have a crawl over a mixture of rocks, gravel, mud and slime. 

In this dark space you initially encounter some thick pieces of wooden and metal pipes hanging from the roof.  Then you realise as you push through that the other competitors are screaming.  You think that they are being a bit weak, after all it is only dark and the wood an metal pipes can easily be pushed past.

This is all very well when you can see something….

As you crawl further into the dark, desperately seeking a way out you become aware of a sharp crack on you back, which hurts a lot.  You have just been electrocuted by an unseen nylon wire.  As you jolt away from the shock you get hit by another!  The only thing that you can think to do is crawl flat on your belly in the direction you hope will get you out. 

All of a sudden you encounter an 2 foot deep trench with rocks on the bottom which you have to cross.  What you cannot see is the number of nylon threads hanging down directly over the trench, snaking down towards the ground. 

The nylon wires near the trench…. fine when lit by a camera, not so good in the pitch black….

You have to push on, get shocked once and you will be hit again and again as your body reacts to the sting and tries to escape!  All the while the cries of others ring in your ears. 

A faint light ahead shows you that the exit is near.  A number of drainage pipes into which you crawl are the only way out.  Not only is it now pitch black but you have to drag yourself on your elbows and inch forward on your toes as the space is so small….  At the end of the tunnel the person in front reaches in a offers a hand to pull you out of the pipe which is now on an upward slope, covered in slimy mud.  As you exit the marshals cover you in flour or some other gunk, just to make you feel fantastic!

I keep thinking that the interest rates in the UK are going to go up considerably and make life miserable for much of the population.  Every time I mention this to anyone, they all say “it can’t happen, it would be too awful”….  So why does this make it impossible?

Since when is it possible to have low interest rates while at the same time printing money.  The US have printed $2,000,000,000,000 over the last couple of years and look like it will continue.  The UK has printed £200,000,000 and it is announced that Ireland has just printed €51,000,000 as an “emergency loan” not backed by anything! being listed by the central bank as other assets! 

How cool it would be to have access to that printing press!  Oh, I can’t, as it is illegal.

So what happens when money is printed and flooded into the economy, you get inflation.  But the banks have a trick for this as well.  Control the measures that are used to determine the rate of inflation to ensure that it doesn’t look too bad.  The thing is though, the cost of just about everything is going up!  

So I have decided to pay off all my debts and then carefully place my assets somewhere else….  While I may resort to further borrowing, this will be done on the basis of high inflation and poor returns elsewhere….  I do not want to be at the mercy of the politicians and the markets as they drive.

Having been playing with some numbers around the price of a litre of unleaded petrol, I was curious to see what the charts can tell us.

This chart shows the average UK price of a litre of unleaded petrol (blue line) and the cost of a barrel of Brent crude oil (red line) between Jan 2003 and Dec 2010.

Of course there are many factors that influence the price of oil and the cost of a litre of petrol, including exchange rates, global demand, speculation and taxation.  However it is interesting to see the relationship between the commodity and finished article.  In the UK the largest single component of the price of petrol in tax.  With the average take a litre of petrol in December 2010 being about 67% (duty and VAT). 

Of course this is set to rise on Tuesday 4th Jan 2011, (two days time) when the government increases fuel duty by 0.76p and VAT goes up by 2.5%.  With further rises later in the year.

So what can we expect a litre of unleaded to cost in 12 months time?  Using the last 2 years data the graph looks like this:

The trend line shows that the price will rise to 148p per litre by the end of 2011.  This means that to fill a car with 70 litre capacity will cost £103.60 a 20% rise on the price we pay today (123p/litre).

While this does not take into account any of the things that can impact the price, it will be interesting to see what the price actually ends at…..

There are a number of interesting business /software trends that are being identified for 2011.  The list varies, mostly based on the bias of the author and their favourite topic.  Take for example ComputerWorld’s Regev Yativ who identifies:

• Mobile computing applications
• Extracting a return on EXISTING investment (ROEI)
• Enterprise software migrating to the cloud
• Better performance to rich business applications
• A combination of trends with multi tier architecture

While HR Tech Blog’s  John Sumser points to:

• Small Startups and an entrepreneurial explosion
• Outsourcing of HR & Recruitment Process continuing
• The “Year of the App” not just mobile but as a way of extending a software offering

Enterprise Irregulars, Phil Wainewright identifies 2011 as a fascinating year in software as a service and the mobile arena.

• Mainstream means mobile as it becomes the primary platform for many
• The cloud will provide better visibility and accountability
• Social technologies cross over into enterprise applications

What strikes a chord with all of them is the sense that everyone is becoming overwhelmed with data, yet it offers huge value for those who know how to mine and exploit it.  The continued importance of Business Intelligence where data can be filtered, joined and represented will be exploited and then visually represented for wider interpretation and utilization will continue as an important trend in 2011.