General

See the Guardian article on traffic light removal in Ealing.

A comment from one user: PhilippaB at 06 May 09, 2:07pm

The electric traffic light ...is a device inimical to the British character of waiting our turn. The British people should be trusted. When given freedom, a spontaneous order emerges, not anarchic chaos. We form a polite queue.

Isn't there then a danger that at busy junctions/crossroads, traffic will be slowed down even more as people wave each other on with cheerful cries of "after you, my good man!" - "no, please, I insist, after you!" - "Oh, really, you are too kind, good sir, but I really must insist!" - "Nay, sirrah, the privilege is yours!" etc etc.

Thus, traffic lights could be seen as actually speeding traffic up, by preventing drivers from being rendered immobile by their innate sense of generosity and fair play.

More tea vicar?

Wonderful. The British sense of humour.

Some of you may have read about my proposed trip through France. In the light of the huge number of miles, I think I'm going to scale back my expectations so that I can spend more time relaxing, rather than driving. If I think how tiring it is just doing a weekend run up to the Lake District and back, I'm simply not being realistic about my health and happiness in a 10-day trip. I'll save a longer run for when I can share the journey (and driving!) with Clare, and take a little more time. Going with someone else effectively halves all the costs as well: rooms for two cost as much as rooms for one, normally, and the fuel bill is halved. On the subject of halves, I'm also inclined to believe that other halves make for more fun holidays!

Accordingly, here is my adjusted route:


View a big'un

My stop-off in La Rochelle is due to the fact that I have a friend to visit there. It is also a great town that I've visited before, and, in fact, was the subject of one of my old French GCSE textbooks (don't ask me the name... Encore Tricolor?) I feel the place needs more exploration!

My plan will be to blatt through industrial France, sticking to the countryside where possible, and avoiding toll-roads. I'm hoping for sun (aren't we all?) and to find nice, reasonable places to stay. If you care to join me, you're welcome!

P.S. Thanks to all who kindly gave southerly suggestions. I'll make use of them in due course, but Atlantic Coast sights are of particular interest now!

When my lease runs out at the beginning of April, I'm not going to find a new place. Instead, I'm going to drive through France to Spain, and the route I plan to take is as follows:

James' France trip (Google Maps)

(Map and comments after the jump)

Read More

I don't know what everyone is using for looking up addresses, but I normally use PostcodeAnywhere's demo. They allow five free searches a day, but now I'm going to the source of this information: I've found an equally fast service from no less than the Universal Postal Union: Address Doctor. It's international and lets you search with just a house number and postcode, or with whatever information you have. Sometimes I visit a customer and I know the street address but need the postcode for invoice purposes, so this is going in my bookmarks straight away and there's no usage limit. Any better suggestions?

UPDATE

Ah, it is limited after all. I've noticed that the congestion charging page on http://tfl.gov.uk lets you look up a postcode, then presents you with matching addresses. That's very handy, too, but only if you already have the postcode, obviously.

After years of messing around with the excellent free service provided by No-IP, and making use of the jdv.hopto.org subdomain to host my personal site, I decided I might get something more permanent. It made me think of the old days as an impoverished student, never daring to stump up the £15 to register my own domain, even for what was to be a profitable company.

But here we are: jdv.me.uk, just for fun. And why did I get a .me.uk domain? A few reasons:

• They only came out c.2002, so not as many are registered, hence I could get the three-letter one I wanted!


• They were selected by Nominet to be personal domains, just as 07*** numbers in the UK are for get-me-anywhere, personal numbers.


• It made a lot more sense to get the .me.uk than the .org.uk: I really am never going to be an organisation!

Along with this, I have upgraded my Serendipity blog software to the latest version, and may create a new top banner, although I'll probably stick with the Kubrick theme, which I've always like, and that I know many people connect it with the blog idea going way back. I will be changing some of the paragraph and character styles, though. I can't stand the spacing of bulleted lists, and much prefer square bullets.

I will be adding articles about my Rotary involvement, and trying to garner local support for that, and links to a lot of services I hardly use, like some VoIP addresses that you won't get me on any more, and the community sites I hardly use.

Don't you just love it when intelligent people seem to lazily put the world to rights? Take a look at Structured Procrastination. John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford wrote some essays "defending yet more life choices generally seen as faults". I'll get through them all at some point.

This is just a quick note that I hope Google will index for the benefit of anyone else with the same problem: I tried to Google it when I first suffered with this irritation, but found no hits. Hopefully, this will help someone.

I bought a second-hand Daewoo Lacetti 1.6 SX. Lovely car, apart from one problem: an irritating knocking sound heard when the car was driven over uneven road surfaces, speed bumps or pot-holes. On affected vehicles, the sound emanates from the right off-side front quarter as heard from the cabin, and only occurs when the full weight of the engine drops down after a bump in the road. It is impossible to apply this force when the car is up on the ramp, so get the mechanic to test drive it hard with you.

The investigations made by various garages lead to replacement of (in order) stabilizer (anti-roll bar) bushes, right shock absorber, lower arm and steering rack. This was after 7 visits. Beware of misdiagnoses of this fault (although you might be glad that other faults are fixed, especially under warranty)!

The actual cause of the problem is well-known to Chevrolet, but because they do not deal with mechanics at even their main dealers, this crucial information was not passed on for many weeks. Have the hydro engine mounts checked. These are not like standard rubber ones on other cars, which clearly separate if faulty, but contain many components which produce the knocking sound on compression.

This fault affects both the 1.6 and (rarer) 1.8 models. Feel free to get in touch if I can help you in any way.