jjb1970

I must admit, I do miss anglo-Indian food. The South Indian food here is superb but it's very different to anglo-Indian food which seems to be Northern Indian/Bangladeshi food adapted to local taste.

This was a new one for me. Sichuan A320 and A321 passenger jets are regular visitors to Singapore on their services to/from Chengdu but yesterday was the first time I've seen an A321F in their livery. I think these are P2F conversions but may be wrong.

It still amazes me how many white people (and alas, they are invariably white) visit Asia and then whinge that everything has noodles or rice. Free advice to anyone out there who hates rice and noodles - SE and East Asia may not be the right place for you to visit.

The food scene in Britain is much more diverse than Singapore. Singapore has superb local (Singaporean, Chinese, Malay, Indonesian south Indian and peranakan) food and the other SE Asian food options are superb, and there are plenty of excellent Japanese and Korean places. However looking beyond SE and East Asia people seem a lot less open to foreign food and it's noticeable that the three ethnic groups often stay within their own track. A lot of Chinese Singaporean people never eat Indian food for example. The usual multinationals are well represented (McD, BK, KFC, Pizza Hut, Nando etc) but good non-Asian food isn't that common. Our favourite is a Swiss place, marche movenpick which is very good.

Traction tyres seem to be a very Europe other than Britain thing. None of my North American or Asian models have traction tyres and hauling capacity is fine. I saw a beautiful professionally built Weinert kettle for sale the other day and it seemed odd to see traction tyres on such a model.

That tends to be the best way, as usually both parties have an awareness of each other and know what they're getting. In Britain it tends to be smaller organisations that do it, or it is very senior roles as in regular companies there are all sorts of interview and selection processes. A way around it is the hiring manager, if they know who they want, will write the job spec in such a way that their choice is the only one that fits. Quite often you see jobs with ridiculously specific demands as they want an internal candidate but have to advertise externally because of company procedures. Wasting peoples time to tick a box.

I'm off to Brussels tomorrow for a week. I was meant to fly Lufthansa but got a cryptic message saying my connection 'wasn't granted' which apparently is their way of saying they've cancelled so figure out some other way to get there. Listening to German friends and colleagues I may have dodged a bullet as Lufthansa seem to be all over the place. So it's Turkish via Istanbul, the New airport at Istanbul is vast, very impressive.

We had roast duck tonight, there's a good roast meat shop at the local MRT station which is cheaper than making it at home, and although it looks like just roast duck it's actually quite a convoluted and time consuming process to make Chinese roast duck.

At the risk of sounding cynical, the aspect of diversity sorely lacking in work places (and perhaps society) is diversity of thought. I am a marine engineer by training, marine engineers attend similar colleges and universities offering essentially the same syllabus everywhere and are assessed against the same criteria for their exams and to determine their grading. The result is that we all tend to think the same and fall into a common conception of conventional thought. Now in some ways that is unavoidable and a natural result of the nature of engineering but it also limits peoples receptivity to new ideas and change. And 'group think' introduces issues of its own. This isn't about prejudice in the usual sense but there's also an unwillingness to consider ideas outside our own experience. In class I was authorised to approve stuff under alternative design and arrangement rules, meaning they were outside existing regulations, rules and standards and were done on the basis of first principles and analysis. The usual response of most to the proposals submitted for such approval was 'what idiot thought this would be a good idea?' and I'd say that in reality that response was justified by subsequent developments but if you don't remain open to such ideas you will lose the small minority of brilliant ideas which do rewrite the book and change how we think about things.

Indeed, it's all but impossible to avoid unless you have a wall between interviewer and candidate but that raises the question of how can either side form a view of the other and whether it's the right match? You can infer quite a bit about a persons background from a candidates educational record (which schools and universities) and employment record. Is that because they were an outstanding student, received a scholarship etc or did they get the right start in life? And trying to erase all background information can be counter productive, if I see a CV from someone who has done well but not spectacularly so from a background which might be challenging I'd put a lot of weight on their human qualities, more so than someone who ticks all the academic boxes but who really should do so given their path through life. If it's truly blind and you just go on metrics then the obvious choice will be the one with a better record by those metrics which introduces a new set of barriers/advantages heavily influenced by social background. I used to work with a guy who was an inveterate social snob and who made no secret of the fact that he was looking for Oxbridge graduates, and preferred applicants from the Foreign and Commonwealth office or other government foreign services on a list of countries he considered acceptable alternatives. The result was predictable, a team of mini-me clones and zero diversity of thought processes and ideas. However, it was also true he never gave me any impression of being racist, sexist or anything and his team was actually very diverse in those terms. Because I was on the technical side I was recruited by a different hiring manager. On the technical side requiring an engineering degree, chartered engineer status and experience in policy/regulatory development meant they were going to get a certain type of candidate but at least those attributes had relevance to the role in a way that judging people from the university they attended and having worked for the right department in the right government didn't (if they were looking for civil servants then DfT would have been the relevant department).

I just watched 'Jaws' again on bluray, the fact it's an oldie and many of us have seen it so many times can obscure just what a remarkable film it is. The down side is it probably did more to damage the image of sharks and cause people to be frightened of shark attack than everything else on the subject put together. That's obviously a legitimate fear as shark attack is a real danger in some areas but as with so many other 'predators' sharks have far more cause to be frightened of humans than we have of them. However the way Spielberg builds tension, the use of music and the chemistry between the three leads (which legend has it mirrored difficult relationships behind the scenes) and Spielberg's usual outstanding direction resulted in a truly brilliant movie, one of the great achievements of cinema. Well worth watching again.

One of the things I like about the US is the variety of food, the diversity of people means you can find just about anything. And a lot of the small diners and truck stalls are superb. That's something I like about London, name a style of food and you'll probably find it in London and find it done pretty well.

Well at least the thread seems to have established that brown windsor soup was a real thing and found on British merchant vessels🤩

SWATH is one of those ideas which has persuasive arguments in its favour for very specific use cases, particularly where stability in the sense of vessel movement (as opposed to naval architectural stability) is important. However I'm not sure it'd be appropriate for a combatant design as they tend to be problematic in damage scenarios (as with most multi-hull types).

Some ships going in/out of Pasir Gudang through the passage between Changi Beach and Pulau Ubin in Singapore. Pasir Gudang is a port in Johor, Malaysia, just to the East of Johor Bahru. There is a container terminal in Pasir Gudang but it's been overtaken by the newer port of Tanjung Pelepas on the West side of Johor Bahru which is massively bigger than Pasir Gudang container terminal.

The king of biscuits (other than the Carr's water biscuit and orange club obviously) is the Lotte Binch, if you see Lotte Binch on sale I recommend them.

I've heard it said that criticising Tim tams is al.ost as bad as criticising meat pies😲🤣

It was a regular on menu cards in P&O Containers.

The genre of steam punk seems to have evolved out of 19th century futurology, it's a fascinating niche of history.

Bak kut teh for dinner tonight, a hot and sour pork rib soup. To be honest it's not my favourite SE Asian dish but Mrs JJB is a great enthusiast of it and made it today.

I find this quite sad. Singapore is infamous for having a fiercely competitive view of the world and wanting to be first in stuff. I think a deep seated envy of Australia's global leadership in the field of dangerous wildlife with all those venomous spiders, boxing kangaroos, wild hogs etc has made Singapore try to join in. A sad sign of insecurity, surely the crocodiles or marauding gangs of homicidal macaques would be a better effort to try and look impressive.

The pay on offer for many UK based positions wouldn't be bad if tax was less and cost of living lower. And pay has been distorted by government benefits to subsidize industry by trying to top up people's income to something which is liveable. That doesn't just affect low pay, low skilled jobs, an awful lot of skilled and professional staff qualify for various benefits. The canard about people asking for lower annual pay rises to avoid crossing thresholds whereby they'd lose benefits isn't an urban myth, I had a few people quietly request it when I had people managing responsibilities. Which is properly messed up in my view, not the individuals who were acting in a rational way but a screwed up system.

The regulatory control on marine fuel is sulphure content. MARPOL VI regulation 14 limits sulphur content to 0.1% in emissions control areas (ECAs) and 0.5% outside ECAs(still massively higher than the 10ppm limit for fuel oils in Europe for automotive and industrial application). At the moment there are only a handful of ECAs around Europe and the USA though there are local restrictions in a few places (such as China) so the great majority of marine oil fuel is 0.5%. At the time MARPOL was revised it was thought this would push shipping onto either middle distillate fuels in the DM- series or LNG but the fuel suppliers developed low sulphur fuel oils, either by desulphurization or blending. A further issue is exhaust gas cleaning which is allowed as an equivalent means of compliance under MARPOL VI regulation 4 (there's a much more heated debate over EGCS water discharge). The result is that the principal marine oil fuel grades are still residuals in the RM- series. Apologies for this diversion, but if trains use oil on British rails it'll be 10ppm S compliant diesel/gas oil.

The PBY is in Danish SAR colours I think.

A thread about kettle names made me kind of nostalgic about ye olde British foods much loved by P&O cooks I have never had anywhere else. One was Cumberland sauce, named after the Duke, not the county. Ham with Cumberland sauce was a regular on P&O menu cards. Another was brown Windsor soup. Corned beef is another, not bully beef but beef brisket cooked in brine, never had that since leaving P&O.