Fuel prices
Never mind those charts you see of the 'average' price of fuel; they are normally wrong for the vast majority of people as they give equal weight to little-used expensive petrol stations as they do to the heavily-used cheaper ones. What you want is a chart of actual prices paid, not prices posted on forecourt signs.
Here is such a chart. Each dot represents a tank of diesel put onto one of my business's (small) fleet of vans, and the lorry. I started collecting this data in april 2008, which is where the chart begins. The vast majority of the data points are at reasonably cheap stations around the midlands. There are a few outlying expensive points, mainly caused by someone running empty on a long trip and filling up at a motorway services.
I don't have any data for petrol I'm afraid, putting petrol in vans causes them to break down, so it's something we don't do.
Attention, jobhunters
At the moment I have a job on offer so I have been sifting through CVs, doing interviews etc etc. Having seen a large number of job applications recently, I thought I'd share a few basic tips to help anyone reading this to actually get a job; instead of sending thousands of applications off to people who just click 'delete', perhaps after chuckling a little.
DON'T put or do these things on your CV:
1) A photo of yourself. I am not interested in seeing you looking like either a convicted paedo or a mail-order bride. I'm not employing actors, I'm employing mechanics. I don't care what you look like.
2) Your 'personal goals' to excel thoroughly in everything you do, climb Everest, watch every Rocky film back-to-back or whatever. Irrelevant vacuous bollocks.
3) Tell me in great detail about lots of irrelevant yet highly paid jobs, while the one job you've had similar to the one you're applying for is a footnote from 10 years ago. This tells me "stopgap job, he'll sod off very quickly".
4) Overuse 'power words' or marketing speak so your CV ends up reading like some scam webpage advertising a pyramid scheme. I mean FFS.
DO put or do these things on your CV:
1) Tell me about what similar jobs you've had, AND WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DID IN THEM. "Worked for Company 2001-2008" is OK, "Worked for Company 2001-2008, responding to breakdowns across X area, carrying out routine servicing at so-and-so, carrying out engine overhauls on XYZ , sourcing parts from a variety of suppliers, dealing with customers..." is fantastic and would stand a good chance of getting you a job. Even if your only job was working at a burger chain, and you're applying for a job as a shop assistant, tell them WHAT EXACTLY YOU DID. It shows at least that you know what you did there.
2) Put down RELEVANT qualifications. If the fact that you're a fully certified H&S forklift inspector and you were trained in advanced CANBUS troubleshooting is buried in details about your swimming certificates and your highest break in snooker, your relevant qualifications might not be noticed.
3) It's a good idea to summarise why the hell I should give you a job at the top of your CV. When applying for a mechanic's job, a paragraph or two saying "I am a highly experienced and skilled mechanic, who has carried out a wide variety of work from X to Y, on A, B and C machines." can work wonders.
More DONT's:
DON'T phone up every 2 days chasing your application. Some people recommend this; but I'm actually quite busy and chasing your application all the time is going to piss me off.
DON'T apply for jobs you're hideously unqualified for. By 'unqualified' I don't mean 'doesn't have a degree', I mean 'has so little of a clue about what the job involves, they dont realise that "forklift mechanic" might involve skills that you don't get simply by working in a place that has a forklift'. I've been on planes, that doesn't make me a plane mechanic. By appying for jobs you couldn't even be bothered to fully read the description of, you're wasting everybody's time.
*I wish to point out that this post represents my personal opinion and does not represent any official opinion of any company, anywhere. If you have applied for a job recently and you have done all of the 'donts' listed here, it is entirely coincidental and this post is in no way based on you being a tool.*
A failure of advertising
Seen in today's "Eureka" science supplement, in The Times.
A BMW advert, proudly proclaiming "drinks like a camel"; intended to describe good/low fuel consumption
...and directly over the page from this double-page spread; an article which explains that camels actually drink quite a lot...
Whoops.
This post was going to be entitled "truth in advertising", but the claimed 50mpg is actually quite good.
Now, before any beemer-haters start coming out of the woodwork, here is das FNS-wagen relaxing outside in the snow. It's actually very good on fuel 
Economy measures
I spoke to the managing agents of the block of flats I live in yesterday, to report some problems with the electrics. Basically the 'Economy 7' circuit timing is all to cock, the storage and water heaters are coming on in the day instead of the night, meaning everything is cold when I get up for work, and everything will be running on expensive day rate electricity.
Anyway, I phoned them back a little later because I remembered that the heaters in the communal areas haven't worked all winter, so I'm getting cold draughts under the front door etc etc. The conversation went something like this..
M "The heaters in the corridors haven't worked for some time.."
A "Yeah, we pulled all the fuses for them, they were costing a fortune in electricity"
M "Well, I'm not happy at all with that"
A "We asked all the property OWNERS and they agreed, you're just a tenant [emphasis hers], you'll have to complain to your landlord"
M "Well I only LIVE there.. what's next, are you going to turn the lift off to save money?"
A "Ah but the heaters aren't essential; most of the developments we manage don't have them, and the lift IS essential.."
M "But the heaters are fitted, and were there when I moved in, anyway the lift isn't essential, there's stairs..."
I strongly suspect that after my advice, next week the lift will be switched off..
I'm still trying to figure out how pissed off to be about this, it's not so much about the ambient temperature in the corridors (I dont exactly linger in them) as the fact that my heating bills are going up because my hot air is leaking away. My bedroom backs onto the stairwell as well, so thats colder now; the wall in question is freezing.
Thinking about it, what probably happened is that the agent wrote to the service charge payers, saying something like "Due to the rising cost of energy, the service charge will rise by X% next year, unless....". The (supposed) net reduction in the charge will reduce upward pressure on rents, so possibly my rent is lower now than it would have been, etc etc but my own electric bill has now risen by a certain amount as a result...
The main reason that I'm miffed is the fact that I didn't even know; they could have at least put a poxy notice up (after all, they have put notices up after the smoking ban that imply that we can't even smoke in the flats, which is incorrect). It would of course be poetic if in the future they had to shell out to repair damp and mould problems, caused by the lack of heating...
They DO earn back 0.1 Martin Point for NOT trying to 'enviro-bullshit' their way out of it, I expected some bollocks about "reducing our carbon footprint" (it's amazing how often this desire happens to mesh perfectly with the organisation in question saving money..).
Thoughts?