Diary Of An ADI

Archive for April, 2009

Sexism is a terrible thing! So it is with regret and total shame that I give you something which has been around for years and which makes me smile everytime I see it.

Presenting The AA’s new publication: The Girly Atlas Of Britain (now updated for 2010).

Girly Map Of Britain

I must say that I have never… never, ever, EVER… met lots of women drivers for whom this atlas would be an ideal and extremely useful present.

I have also never… never, ever, EVER… joked with my female learners that when they pass they definitely need to buy a satnav.

The potential risks associated with any flu epidemic shouldn’t be taken lightly. People have already died in Mexico, of course, but so far I don’t think there have been any deaths elsewhere – and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

But the situation is obviously being taken very seriously by the authorities. Yesterday, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that a “pandemic was imminent“. You can see a news report and read about it here.

In addition, UK television has a new advert – which I saw for the first time this morning – aimed at trying to contain any possible outbreak. You can’t help but wonder if a mere tissue and washing your hands is going to be enough if you generate as much snot when you sneeze as that guy in the clip.

Of course, The Sun is laying it on with a shovel as usual. In today’s paper copy it announces:

IT JUST GOT WORSE: Pandemic is ‘imminent’

It’s current online story is trying its hardest to sound dramatic. It says:

Yesterday a red alert was issued across the planet **” as the boss of the World Health Organisation warned chillingly: “The whole of humanity is under threat in a pandemic.**

Still no mention of the fact that every case so far in the UK has been as a direct result of travel to Mexico. No cases yet of human-to-human transfer. Oh, and unless it is a typo, notice that the WHO spokesman actually said “in a” pandemic and not “of a” pandemic. The Sun specialises in this kind of detail. Specifically: ignoring it. Mind you, the WHO is guilty of hyping this up big time.

The Sun also trumpets:

Britain now has EIGHT confirmed cases of the deadly virus.

It isn’t ‘deadly’. The WHO have pointed out that there have only been 8  deaths associated with it (not the 159 reported elsewhere) and all those have been in Mexico (7) and the US (1). This is also blogged by someone here – slightly older data. In the UK, those diagnosed a few days ago are apparently getting better. Bear in mind that in the US alone about 50,000 people die each year due to normal flu.

And on a lighter note, there is this new product available that might just offer the same level of protection.

Oinksip - For Swine Flu

For non-UK viewers, there is a product in the UK called LemSip (a lemon-flavoured drink containing basic painkillers and decongestants) which purports to get rid of colds and flu.

It remains to be seen how bad all this turns out to be. But at least the British can joke in times of trouble. My own opinion is that this is massive overkill by the media. Again. A couple of years ago we were all going to die from Bird Flu and we were only one step away from roasting anyone who’d been to Hong Kong over an open fire. And Bird Flu was actually deadly in 50% of cases. It’s also worth noting that the WHO at that time was saying a flu pandemic was long-overdue and that an outbreak of Bird Flu could lead to 2,000,000-50,000,000 deaths worldwide (that last figure is almost the entire population of the UK).

Of course, before that there was the Armageddon that was the Y2K bug. And Foot & Mouth Disease. And what about Salmonella in eggs? The media loves to imagine up doomsday scenarios.

I’ve heard that people are boycotting pork already. Idiots.

Parallels are already being drawn with Spanish Flu and the early 20th Century outbreak. No consideration of the fact that no drugs were available to treat illnesses then (many died as a result of pneumonia, and we have drugs to treat that) or that the general state of health was not the same as it is now.

Don’t worry! If it does turn out to be The End Of The World then there’s not a lot you can do. But for me? Well, I’ll be planning what I’m going to do for next year’s holidays, just like always.

There seems to be a worldwide conspiracy amongst vendors of this type of software – where you can analyse the log files which record who visited your site.

The software is either free (which also means that it has to be impossibly complicated to install and set up unless you wrote it in the first place), or you pay for it (which means having to rob a large bank in order to afford a version which comes even close to meeting some of your basic requirements).

I discovered this over the last two days. WordPress’s stats plugin started playing up, and I was confronted with a never-changing bar graph which showed absolutely meaningless data. So I began looking for something a bit more advanced. I started with the free stuff, like you do. I managed to find one or two open-source programs which didn’t involve downloading the source code, compiling it, and deploying it yourself (a lot of open-source stuff is extremely experimental). I managed to get some of them working, only to discover the authors appear to have a bar chart fixation (and a crap bar chart fixation, at that). Why is it that open-source programmers usually have absolutely no concept of neat appearance or ease-of-use? You inevitably have to install some obscure patch (or Java – and wade through the 3 million variants it exists as to get the right one, usually an older version because the open-source you are trying to use won’t run on the current version), and then find out it won’t work anyway!

After trialling a couple of free ones I quickly discovered their limitations. Probably the main one is that the log files my host provides contain the hits for all the sites I host on my webspace, and these freebies just take the whole file and process it without any filtering.

So I switched my attention to the ones you have to pay for. The cheapest one I found was about $70 – and that is not cheap at all, when you consider you can get fully-functional video authoring suites (for example) for less than half that price. But they nearly all exist in various versions: beginner, business, pro, and so on, and the one that has the features you might need is always one of the top-end versions – and the price now leaps to at least $150 and sometimes as much as £2,000

If you’re going to spend anything like this kind of money you want to try the software first, right? So with one of them I did. Everything was going perfectly smoothly right up to the not-so-insignificant part where I tried to run the 30-day trial for the first time:

You have altered your system clock to try and circumvent copy-protection. Blah, blah, blah!

No I bloody haven’t. I have just installed the program and run it for the first time and this message came up less than 5 seconds later. So have a word with Mr Uninstaller, and enjoy your duel with the Recession.

I did discover that many of these Commercial Thugs provide a ‘lite’ version (i.e. free), but I also discovered that the lite version is invariably totally useless – like buying a car, and finding out the free ‘lite’ model doesn’t come with an engine or wheels. Or a chassis. And maybe not even paint.

I installed a few others and got nowhere. Some simply wouldn’t run. Others were utter rubbish. In fact, I was unable to trial a single one that appeared to come even close to what I wanted – and they expect me to pay $150+ for this? Think again.

Anyway, WordPress seems to have sorted out the prolonged outage that it didn’t tell me about, so I can stick with that for a while longer. I suppose it did tell people somewhere or other. But unless you are more interested in talking about WordPress than actually using it I guess you’d miss it.

I’m convinced I saw one of these this evening.

I was driving home and I’d stopped to make a phone call. The place where I stopped was right underneath the flightpath for incoming aircraft at East Midlands Airport.

You have to imagine the landing path running from left to right (basically, east to west). You usually see the planes banking in from either the north or south on the eastern (left) side of the flightpath as they take their turn out of the stack. At peak times there is about one plane every few minutes.

Well, at some time shortly after 8pm there was a plane travelling along the normal route from left to right (east to west) when another plane cut across from south to north. They were at the same altitude (judging by their relative sizes) and I can honestly say that they occupied less than an outstretched hand’s breadth of the sky. That is bloody close for a plane at such a low altitude, I’m sure.

Not seen anything in the news, though.

Great gig on Sunday. Went to see Gary Moore at the Leeds O2 Academy with a friend who lives up that way.

Gary Moore was better than usual – lots of solos and extended pieces. He seems to get better as he gets older. But a bonus to the gig was the support act: Buddy Whittington.

Buddy is a blues musician – and a bloody great gutarist and vocalist, above all else. I must admit that when he came on stage his face looked familiar, but the name didn’t ring any bells. I think he was on a BBC show a few months ago with Eric Clapton. He has to be one of the best blues guitarists around at the moment.

He was also a really nice guy. At the end of his set he announced that his new CD was on sale at the merchandise kiosk. When I went over there it turns out he was there signing copies and chatting with people, so I’ve got a real keeper here, I reckon. It seems he does this at most of his gigs, which just reinforces what a decent bloke he is.

His album is on sale from Amazon here, and I really recommend it.

I like eggs!

In all the years I’ve been eating them I have never come across a bad one. Well, not until recently. Oh, I’d heard of them – but I’d never encountered one myself.

For the last few years I’ve been eating free-range eggs. And I mean proper free-range ones: bought from a farm shop down in Wiltshire. I must have bought tens of dozens, and I had still never encountered a bad one.

Then, a couple of months ago, I bought 2 dozen and as I’d got to the last few one of them turned out to be bad. It was green inside, and the smell was indescribable.

Not to be put off, the last time I went past the farm I bought another 3 dozen. Big mistake: about a quarter of them appear to be bad. In fact, the one I cracked last night had a noticeable flat side to the egg shell. I guessed it was going to be odd before I’d cracked it.

It doesn’t half put you off.

I’m down that way again this week, so I’ll nip in and find out if they have a problem with their hens. Seems weird that after so many hundreds there should all of a sudden be such a high rate of bad ones.

This one has to be seen to be believed. The story, in The Sun, tells how a teenage girl (aged 12) was videoed punching and kicking a puppy she was supposed to be dog-walking. It was filmed by a neighbour who had already apparently witnessed abuse.

The fat little thug was believed to be an ‘animal lover’ and was going to be given a puppy as a pet. The worst part is where she kicks it in the head.

If the story is to be believed, her parents do seem half-decent and are shocked. They say she will not be getting her own dog now.

As the neighbour who filmed it is quoted as saying:

In a few years she might be a babysitter and who knows what she might do. I couldn’t believe it was able to walk after all she had put it through.

Quite right. This little bitch is tomorrow’s adult – if she can do this to a dog at 12, just think what she could do to her own children. This is one big reason why the country (and the world) is in such a mess.

OK. So I switched my phone provider from BT to Virgin and, as a result, I do not have an extension upstairs. I needed to send a fax urgently from my PC so I started looking around for something which would let me do it.

Initially I tried using a DECT transmitter to get a signal upstairs, and although it worked fine for sending the fax it would simply not ring the phones on any incoming call. So I had to do away with it, even though it was really a great piece of kit… on paper, anyway.

The fact I hadn’t got a fax system was eating me up, so I thought that there simply must be something for Skype. Surprisingly little, as it happens – at least if you are thinking free or cheap.

I found something called PamFax. Looks the business, and I just needed to send another fax so I fired it up. The pay-as-you-go option costs something like €0.14 per page (allegedly – see below), charged to your Skype account, and that’s not too bad… are you ready for this?

I scanned in my document, and after PamFax refusing to send it because it couldn’t count the number of pages in the PDF file I’d created, I downloaded some freeware which converts PDF to DOC files. So I fired up Word 2007 and tried again.

I was informed that the number I was sending the fax to (an 0870 number) was “either slow or a mobile/business number” so the cost was “adjusted slightly”.

My heart spontaneously began beating again when I realised there was a “cancel” button… but it had stopped shortly after I read “the new charge will be €33.43“.

Yep. The price was going to jump from 14 cents up to nearly 34 Euros – 240 times the original price. No excuse for this whatsoever and it is a total rip-off - I can call that 0870 landline number from Skype for a standard rate, and fax using a normal fax system for the same rate on a landline.

PamFax is going to be saying hello to Mr Recycle Bin later tonight. I thought I’d found something decent, but I was sadly mistaken – don’t fall for this and be aware of it if you install PamFax.

Now, if it kills me I’m going to figure out how to use my smartphone as a modem.

EDIT: As it happens, PamFax and Mr Recycle Bin didn’t get on too well (it wouldn’t uninstall cleanly). I had to get rid of most of it by editing the Registry directly. Pile of garbage, it is.

EDIT 20/11/2009: I noticed someone found this page using “can you use PamFax to send a fax to an 0870 number”. In summary, yes you can – but when I tried it, it tried to bill me €33.43. That’s over £30 for a single page in my case (at current exchange rates).

Take my advice, DO NOT USE PAMFAX – IT IS A RIP-OFF. You would not know how much it was billing you unless you sat and watched every fax it sent. And £30 per page is criminal.

EDIT 02/05/2010: Just for the record, I installed Sky HD in an upstairs room and part of the agreement is that I have to have it connected to a phone line for the first 12 months (I don’t have an issue with that – the only problem was: NO PHONE LINE UPSTAIRS).

Now, it would cost close to £100 to have an extension fitted, so I returned to the idea of the DECT transmitter sold by Maplin. This time, though, instead of connecting the downstairs phone to the base unit, I just used a splitter on the main socket and plugged the phone into one side and the DECT unit to the other. It works perfectly, so I have a phone line I can use for faxes near my PC now.

Well, we’ve had a few months of pretty low fuel prices. It went up to £1.20+ a litre at the peak of the last hike, but fell quite quickly to well under 90p. It was funny reading the know-it-alls in the driving instructing industry who predicted “that’s it: it will never fall below £1 ever again“.

Well, there was a delayed tax which went on to the price a few weeks ago and prices have risen a little in their own right – currently around 93p a litre.

But the Daily Mail hasn’t tried to cause problems for while and has now reported that price rises have “[overtaken] last spring’s cost surge”. What idiots these people are – half of the increase was due to a delayed tax increase, so has nothing to do with last year’s rises. It’s also down to oil companies profiteering.

But this is just the Mail trying to cause another scare. And it has the kind of readership which readily drives its 4x4s to the nearest garage the second the Mail tells them to.

Just watching the BBC lunchtime news and saw some demonstrations against job losses in Northern Ireland.

Why are people stupid enough to believe that going on strike, demonstrating, rioting (it’s inevitable, isn’t it?), and so on is somehow enough to drag a company back from the edge of bankruptcy and into a healthy situation?

I mean, these same people are probably the ones who were prepared to strike the last time the company in question (and I’m speaking generally) forgot to replace a toilet roll in the company lavatory, or switched to a cheaper and less luxurious alternative. They’ll be the same ones who never miss a chance to report problems to The Union. Trust me, I’ve been there and witnessed it over many years – it IS the way things operate.

So I wonder why it is they can’t see where one of the biggest causes of the mess the company they’re demonstrating against is in is really located?