Interesting Links for 15-12-2011

• Few allergies in unstressed babies, Swedish researchers find
  (tags: babies allergies stress )
• There's a chunk of a Russian fleet sitting off of the Moray Firth at the moment
  (tags: russia navy scotland )
• TIME's Person Of The Year - The Protester.
  (tags: occupy protests usa time )
• Directions from The Shire to Mordor - Google Maps
  (tags: maps lotr funny google )
• UK living standards second highest in Europe (but on the way down)
  (tags: uk europe living )
• Facebook Is Making Us Miserable
  (tags: facebook happiness social_networking attention relationships friends )
• Assorted tips
  (tags: advice life )
• The rise of celiac and other problems with gluten
  (tags: wheat gluten celiac diet food )
• If you want to make better people, start with their environment
  (tags: personality culture society organisation )
• Lawrence Lessig on The Daily Show, talking about the root cause of the problems with American Politics
  (tags: usa politics video LawrenceLessig TheDailyShow )
• Scott Hanselman's 2011 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
  (tags: tools windows Development software utilities .net )
• What needs to happen to fix the problems in the Eurozone
  (tags: europe finance banks )

I really like this

From via Warren Ellis.

Edit: Aha! She's on LJ as oxboxer and has oodles of awesomeness.

THE BOILER IS FIXED!!!11!!1ONE!

I took the morning off work, as Julie was going to see her supervisor and the engineer was coming to finally fix the boiler. I pottered around, sorted out a couple of things I'd been meaning to do for ages (sorting out an old endowment policy and posting some memory sticks to my cousin), and he finally turned up around 10:30.

Thankfully the problem turned out to be simple. Apparently there's a pressure vessel in the boiler which needs to be kept pressurised. If it drops too low then it can't balance out the pressure in the central heating system, which then rises too high, the vent valve tries to remedy this, gets stuck open, and all of the water goes out of a small copper pipe into the back garden. The pressure vessel needs to be pumped up once every couple of years.

Which frankly sounds like a bit of a racket - as you have to get an engineer to do it, so that's a visit just for that every couple of years, for the life of the boiler. I also discovered that they do boiler insurance (which I'd rather have anyway) and that this includes a yearly maintenance checkup, which would sort this. And they're priced competitively with British Gas, who I was using with the old boiler. So that may well be the best option.

In other news, I went to see Hugo last night with tisme and momentsmusicaux, and it was amazing. Fuck James Cameron, Martin Scorcese is the master of 3D movie-making. The film had sense of wonder and magic that I've seen in precious few movies that actually _have_ magic in them. Highly recommended.