Just when you think you are having a bad day.....

.... there is always someone else who is having a worse one!

The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) is being sued for $350m (£185m) by a trading company at the centre of a giant share sale error.

A trader with Mizuho Securities mistyped an order and sold 610,000 shares for one yen instead of one share for 610,000 yen last December. 1 Japanese yen = 0.00839066958 U.S. dollars!

A fault in the TSE's computer system meant the trade could not be cancelled and Mizuho lost $225m. Doh!

Chinooks anyone?

The answer should be, "no thanks, I've already got some sat in a hangar in Wiltshire!" read on....

The Independent on Sunday reports....

"Britain is so short of helicopters in Afghanistan that military chiefs are being forced to scour the world for civilian aircraft"

"An ageing fleet of just eight Chinooks is working around the clock to supply and reinforce soldiers in remote outposts facing waves of Taliban attacks. The only Chinook in the Falklands was taken away for use in the campaign."

"the MoD has been forced to seek out commercial operators for non-combat operations, to free more military craft for use at the front line. So urgent is the need that Britain is understood to be asking other nations that have ordered Merlin helicopters from Westland to allow the MoD to requisition them. " I understand that these Merlins are on order for Denmark.

Given that we appear to be is such a tight spot, I ask one simple question - why the hell are there at least 6 brand new Chinooks sat in a hangar at Boscombe Down doing nothing? My understanding is that they require some kind of software upgrade that will cost millions of pounds to rectify - well Mr Blair, put your money where your mouth is, get your chequebook out, the soldiers risking their lives at your instigation need these machines, and they need them now.

Weekend road warrior....

... a few weeks ago I saw a re-run Top Gear, it had an article where Hamster (yes, the one who crashed the jet-powered car) was driving an Ariel Atom (pictured right).

At the time I did some research, it all looked very nice - price OK(ish) at £35k, performance excellent at 0-60mph in 2.91 sec.! but, would I fit my 6'3" carcase into one? Don't know, so decided to put it in the pile of "Things to do". Ariel are only based in Crewkerne, about an hour West of where I live down the A303, so one day in the Spring when I'm next down their way, I will pop in & see it in the flesh.

Whilst browsing around today, I find an article on a car that takes a modified Ariel chassis, throws away the supercharged 2.0 litre Honda iVTEC 300bhp engine and replaces it with.... can you guess? A 3-phase, 236hp AC induction motor! I've always know that electric motors can deliver a great turn of speed, but the batteries required to power them are frankly shite. But it appears that Wrightspeed have developed a concept car - the X1, that delivers these great performance figures - 0-60 ~ 3.0 seconds (0.09 behind the petrol car), a top speed of 112mph (electronically limited) and a range >100 miles in urban use (sinking to ~25 miles if driven on a track day!), they promise better endurance in the production model.

Take a look at this video to get an idea of how good an idea this is, let's hope the creator - Ian Wright get's the X1 into production soon.