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Showing posts from 2012

December: Reasons to Be Cheerful…?

Well, a Merry Christmas to you all. The President is already several Xmas lunches for the better, including the Past Presidents’ Lunch. Apparently it is not until you are a ‘Past’ that the Secret of Eternal Youth is passed on to you.   For this guy the secret couldn’t come sooner! The Big Xmas Present this month was the Energy Bill. It was just the thing to use to bury good news. Published the same day were the public versions of the reports that Alistair Buchannan used for his scary Annual Lecture on UK energy security . But also published were some real sweeties in consultations from the Energy Efficiency Deployment Office on electricity consumption reduction.   Grief Reduction – the ‘R’ word! Check it out, read out Technical Resources on the CIBSE website , write in! Plug Guide F for all it is worth! There could be £3000/kW on offer in the capacity mechanism if I have my sums right! The Father Xmas Problem It was never clear to me as a child why Father Xmas bo

Political November…?

A building services engineer takes over the most powerful country in the world? Your President bottles out in the shadow of the UK political class. And the Energy Bill arrives just as DECs risk to all intents and purposes leaving. Thanks to the Counter Terrorism Acts this blog will not mention Guy Fawkes… We Paramount Leaders My Chinese student was conspicuously triumphalist this month. His country had changed presidents (OK Paramount Leader) and. it hadn’t cost $4billion. Indeed he noted they had actually changed the President. So a special congratulations from one President to another: to Xi Jinping in taking charge of the People’s Republic of China. I used to joke that there were more qualified engineers on the PRC Politiburo than CEng’s in DTI. The Politburo engineering count is now down to 3, but retirements taken into account, that probably still beats the Department of Business Innovation and Skills. Xi was trained as a chemical engineer, which, of course, is just

At the end of a busy month for CIBSE, President David Fisk asks if we are out of recession and if BIM is destined to be yet another government IT disaster.

October is the month for everything… October is a big month in the Presidential Calendar: joining ASHRAE and IMechE for Graduate of the Year Competition , opening the CIBSE Conference at Olympia, hosting the President’s Awards Dinner, dropping in on the Worshipful Company of Fan makers (as you do) and attending the Construction Industry Council . Meanwhile both my first and second year Masters students arrived on campus to systems engineer. Prestidigitation became Presidigitation. Thank heavens for Construction Advisers The CIBSE Conference opened alongside the Building Services exhibition on a bright autumn morning at Olympia. After a quick ‘ let’s keep it simple’ from yours truly, Paul Morrell, the outgoing Government Construction Adviser gave us his wise 40Mb PowerPoint take on the industry. CIBSE gave him an Armada Cup at my Awards Dinner a little later in the week at the Royal Society. In years of turmoil when Parliament often seemed little more than a rehearsal for th

The road to recovery? More Apple engineering and less loft conversions…

Of the historic events fighting to get into this month’s Presidential Blog - CIBSE September Board, Ofgem Board, Start of Term - all pale into insignificance against the Amazing: the launch of iPhone5 . Otherwise it’s back to work in North Korea and a tolerant CIBSE Board suffers a grumpy President. iPhone5 first. Its only snag (aside from the new connector and Maps App placing my house in the next street!) is that you still can’t remove the cement that was once on your fingers and now on the retina screen. Yet again iPhone isn’t the contractor’s phone of choice. What a massive global market to miss! I’ve still got an old Nokia with a sealed rubber keyboard ( YEN members may need to look ‘keyboard’ up on your iPad) that you could throw into a bucket of plaster with impunity. In that big fat CIRIA book ‘Barriers to Innovation in the Construction Industry’ the thinnest chapter must be ‘Barriers to Using the Mobile Phone’. Before it was invented, how did we ever give clients the

The most unsustainable Olympics ever?

Another historic blog... First the Rio+20 Conference , last month plumbers discover the Higgs Boson .   This month the most unsustainable Olympics ever...? Blogs record what your President does – and for a fortnight I did nothing but sit and cheer and occasionally eat McDonald’s.   For fourteen days no one mentioned ‘iconic’, ‘sustainable’, ‘innovative’, and certainly not ‘affordable’.   Instead it was faster, heavier, further – measurable and real - a brilliant celebration of what it is like to be normal , focussed and to deliver.   This year’s President’s Prize for Normal Engineering goes to the Boardman bikes. I can now reveal, as a Presidential exclusive, how Lord Coe won those few extra medals beyond wildest expectations, through a brilliant three phase tactical feint of D-Day proportions.   You will only read it here. First phase - unleash the London Creatives at the very beginning. Remember the logo that looked like a cow-pat , a mascot that looked the survivor