But what if you want to find conversations with multiple labels? For example you are interested only in messages labelled ‘Sales region 2′ and ‘Quarter 3 2010′.

Instead of going into ‘Show search options’ simply type your search into the search box at the top of the Gmail screen thus:

label:sales-region-2 label:quarter-3-2010

and click Search Mail. This will return a list of conversations containing both labels. Note that the label names are case insensitive, but you must replace spaces with a hyphen.

What if you are interested in messages with either label? Then you would use:

label:sales-region-2 OR label:quarter-3-2010

The OR operator must be uppercase. Alternatively you can use the pipe operator ‘|’ (shift+backslash on your keyboard) like this:

label:sales-region-2 | label:quarter-3-2010

You are probably three steps ahead of me here, and wondering about other compound searches. In fact you can choose from a long list of “query words” to build up a very specific search. In Gmail see Help articles › Using advanced search for the (almost) endless possibilities!

The roads would be safer if all vehicles were automatic, of course. No risk of stalling half way out of a junction. No need to take one hand off the steering wheel all the time. More attention available to deal with hazards and to control the speed and direction of the vehicle.

To quote Jerry Seinfeld:

The thing I admire most about the Chinese is that they’re hanging in there with the chopsticks. Because if you think about it, you know they’ve seen the fork, by now.

Well, I admire people who insist on buying cars with manual transmission, despite being fully aware of the automatic gearbox.

Today I went on a Technical Tour of that same aeroplane which, after five years standing out in the open, is now housed in the Concorde Centre. (Whilst this purpose built hangar protects the iconic plane from the wind and rain, it is unheated. The seven of us on our tour were bitterly cold for most of the 90 minute experience. If you are considering a tour, wait until spring!)

Our guide was enthusiastic and fluent, with a great deal of detailed knowledge which he seemed to take pleasure in sharing with us. He walked our small group slowly underneath the fuselage from tip to tail, explaining what each protruding sensor did, and describing the many design challenges which are unique to a supersonic passenger aircraft.

Compared with everyday airliners of course, Concorde is petite – it carried only 100 passengers. What I found surprising was that the four powerful Olympus engines which could propel her to 2,395 kph were also very small.

Our guide explained why the engine housings are rectangular, not round (because there have to be adjustable baffles in front of the intakes to reduce the velocity of air rushing into the engine). He also explained why the undercarriage is so tall compared with subsonic passenger aircraft (because Concorde took off and landed at an angle of some 13° compared with about 3° and so a stilt-like undercarriage was necessary to provide the necessary ground clearance at the tail).

The shape of the wings is a beautiful curve, with an almost imperceptible upward ‘flick’ of the outer trailing edge. This made it possible to fly at low speeds with wings designed to fly at twice the speed of sound.

Inside, we sat in comfortable leather seats with generous legroom. There was no provision for in-flight TV, and the overhead lockers are very shallow, with room for perhaps a briefcase or handbag each. The windows too are tiny, but it didn’t feel claustrophobic.

The washrooms were similar to those on everyday airliners, but the galleys were remarkably small. It must have been quite a challenge to serve 100 five-course haute cuisine meals on china plates from ovens the size of a child’s wardrobe.

Two-by-two we went forward to the flight deck and were invited to sit in the captain’s seat. Our guide explained all the displays and controls available to the crew – including the flight engineer who had his own wall of instruments to monitor. It was a cramped, austere environment with quite a restricted view through the visor.

Concorde is a magnificent technical achievement and beautiful too – a marvel which for 35 years could fly non-stop across the Atlantic faster than a rifle bullet. It is a shame that for financial reasons it was not possible to keep one or two in an airworthy condition for air shows and exhibitions.

I thought that was the end of our problems, but it dawned on us that the system seemed to be on at weird times of the day – and night! I checked and re-checked the clock and programme settings, and tried once more to make sense of the badly written Honeywell instruction manuals. Here’s an example:

The HCW80 and HC60NG are already teached-in (bounded).

Not quite one for engrishfunny.com but I couldn’t be sure I was doing everything correctly. In the end I called the electrician back, half expecting him to tut and push an obvious button marked “press to make everything work properly.”

Thankfully he didn’t. My relief quickly turned to dismay, however, when he declared that there was nothing wrong with the system and that I should just see how we got on with it.

“Er, no. Fix it please.” I said. So he phoned a friend (actually his boss) who talked him through a fault-finding procedure which revealed – guess what? – the thermostat had been wired direct to the boiler, missing out the timeclock altogether!

So our central heating has in fact been on 24 hours a day since it was installed. Now I can actually feel the room temperature dropping for the first time in two weeks.

Note to Honeywell: it helps installation electricians if diagrams are correctly labelled and instructions are intelligible. Yours are not.

The hot water storage cylinder in the loft also got replaced – with one encased in foam lagging so we no longer have to have a pile of old blankets and duvets on top of it.

The flue was attached to the back of the house and ran right up beyond the eaves. Being made of asbestos, a specialist team was needed to take it down safely. On Monday they took one look at it and refused to go up on a ladder. So a team came yesterday and spent several hours putting up scaffolding, although they couldn’t see why the job could not have been done from a ladder.

I felt the same, but the contractor was paying the extra cost so it didn’t make much difference to me. However, I was annoyed to find that the scaffolders took it upon themselves to partially dismantle the asbestos flue in order to avoid having to build a higher scaffold. So,

• they did not do what they were paid for, and
• decided they could do a job for which a professional asbestos removal firm had been specified by the surveyor.

They cheerfully declared that they had found an asbsetos warning label when they pulled off the cowl and top section.

The asbestos men returned this morning and had the lot down and in the back of their van within an hour. The plumbers cracked on too, and by 2.00 pm the new boiler (a Baxi Solo 24 HE) was running. The first thing I noticed was that the flue (now only about 40 cm from the ground) sent out plumes of warm steam. “That’s normal.” I was told. So much for efficiency! The old one didn’t do that.

The other counter-intuitive thing was that they replaced the thermostatic radiator valve in the hall with a non-thermostatic one. The logic is (according to the Regulations) that all parts of the system must be under thermostatic control. So the boiler itself is controlled overall, based on the air temperature in the room which has the most air changes (ie the hall). A wireless hall thermostat is to be fitted on Monday when the electrician arrives.

People always quote the efficiency of condensing boilers as 95%-plus, but I have read that it all depends on whether condensing is actually occurring. As I understand it, if the water circulating around the radiators returns to the boiler too warm, then the water vapour in the exhaust gases cannot condense. This would occur if the boiler output is too high for the requirements of the house, or if it is a mild day, or if most of the radiators are calling for little or no heat.

Anyway, we shall see. Our gas bills were quite high and I am hoping that the cavity wall insulation, extra loft lagging and new boiler we have had installed this year will bring them right down – and maybe save a polar bear or two.

An appeal on the WordPress forums produced no solution, and I had assumed that I would just have to put up with it, because very few bloggers write posts with dates in the 1960′s.

But today I did another search for a solution and discovered this thread.

All I had to do was find the file

wp-includes/functions.php

and comment out this code:

// Sanity check for PHP 5.1.0-
if ( false === $i || intval($i) < 0 ) {
if ( ! $gmt )
$i = current_time( 'timestamp' );
else
$i = time();
// we should not let date() interfere with our
// specially computed timestamp
$gmt = true;
}

Thanks to gosunatxrea for providing a solution.

I think the late Mr Heller must have had a hand in drafting the building regulations which apply when you have cavity wall insulation. (This is the procedure where they drill holes all over your house and blow fluff into the cavity between the outer and inner walls. The idea is to reduce heat loss, thereby reducing the amount of gas you need to burn and ultimately doing your bit to save the planet.)

The regs say that if you have an open fire (which we do) and you want to make your house all nice and cosy and efficient with cavity wall insulation, you must make a stonking great hole in the wall to let fresh air in. And I’m talking big here. Not just an air brick or trickle vent, but a 100 cm² hole that a baby could crawl through. OK there are grilles over the hole so a baby couldn’t get in, but you get the point.

You can’t even shut the grilles, for that would be against the regs. Sheesh. I know it’s important there is enough oxygen in the room for the occupants to breathe, but all we have done is put fluff in the wall cavity.

How much oxygen was actually getting into the room through two layers of brick, plaster and wallpaper? Here’s an experiment. Go up to the wall as if to kiss it, and blow as hard as you can. Did you manage to exhale even a molecule of air into the wall? Thought not.

So now we have a permanent draught in the living room, thanks to cavity wall insulation and Catch-22 building regulations.

When people choose an email address they don’t consider how easy it will be in the future to impart that address orally to someone else. So you get addresses like

foxi_laydee237@hotmail.com

or

kool-dood4u123@yahoo.co.uk

You have to describe such addresses, with a high chance of something going wrong in the process.

The random digits are usually offered by the system when you set up your email account – presumably because there are already 122 customers calling themselves ‘kool-dood4u’ or whatever.

So it occurred to me that it would be simpler all round to choose a purely numeric address. It’s easy to quote a telephone number – why not have just numbers in the first part of your email address? They could even be the same as your phone number for that matter.

You might agree that it’s a good idea – but it’s not new. CompuServe used a numeric addressing convention (like 12345.1234@compuserve.com) back in the day, but so-called ‘friendly’ addresses usurped them. In fact I understand that CompuServe Classic is finally shutting down at the end of this month after 30 years. In the history of technological development, sometimes the early simple ideas were the best.

Does this new abundance of images bring me greater pleasure? You guessed the answer – no. The innocuous paper picture was almost literally ‘part of the furniture’. Most of the time I paid no attention to it, and I gave it no more than an occasional glance. Now, I find myself becoming irritated when image number 24 reappears on the Samsung. I’ve already seen that one!

You can adjust the brightness and the transition style between images, and I have set both to be the least eye-catching. So apart from the fact that the frame is white plastic with the word Samsung printed on it and therefore is distinctly not just a piece of furniture, it blends in as best it can. The picture rendition is stunningly clear, and once set up it does its job well. Yet still, whereas I had expected delight, I feel mild annoyance.

This particular photo frame can be used in a different way – as a second monitor for your computer, if you choose to hook it up via USB. Maybe Samsung knows that the novelty of a digital photo frame soon wears off, I don’t know.

I shall leave it running for a couple of weeks, and see how I feel then. Perhaps it will become almost invisible. By the way, if you are considering the Samsung SPF-83H yourself, note that it does not have wireless connectivity as claimed on the Samsung website and elsewhere. To transfer photos you can use a USB cable, or a USB memory stick, or insert a SD, MMC, CF or MS card.

You might also find that assembling the stand is impossible without a smear of washing up liquid on the ball which fits into a hard rubberised socket. Once in place it works well. You cannot mount it on a wall – again I have read elsewhere that you can.

As it happens, I am an enthusiastic supporter of speed cameras for the following reasons:

• they slow down traffic, leading to safer roads and lower pollution
• they generate income, thus reducing the general tax burden
• they ignore law abiding motorists

Think about it. Speed cameras only take pictures of speeding vehicles. Other motorists are left alone to go about their lawful activities without being snooped on. If you are going to have electronic law enforcement then this is an almost perfect arrangement.

So why are speed cameras being removed? I really don’t know. Sure, they are unpopular. But that can’t be the explanation. I fear something worse will replace them. That something is average speed cameras.

If you have a network of CCTV cameras hooked up to an automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system, then you can calculate the time taken for each vehicle to travel a known distance, and hence its average speed.

Trouble is, such a system needs to log everyone’s movements, not just the lawbreakers. Records could be kept indefinitely, and used for all sorts of purposes in future, none of which have been debated or approved of by the public at large. So if you are happy with the removal of those ugly Gatso cameras, just think about the Orwellian system which might be put in their place.