Diary Of An ADI - A Driving Instructor's Blog

Snow And Cancelled Lessons (And Tests)

21/12/2009

This is a very old post from the harsh winter of 2009! This is the post you are probably looking for – it’s about lessons and tests in snow.

I’m keeping this one updated into 2010… originally posted just before Christmas…

Reading some of the forums, you always find a load of smart arses who – if you can believe a word they say – never cancel lessons because of snow.

They are idiots. Or liars. Or both.

Up this way we haven’t had much snow – just a dusting over the last two nights. The problem, though, has been the temperature. It’s been down to -5°C, and as I said a couple of posts ago, the Nottingham City and County Councils still appear to be in conference deciding which roads to grit (and now its weekend, they won’t finish deciding until next week).

Yesterday, I took a pupil out at 8am – he’s at the stage where he needs to know how to drive in less-than-perfect conditions. However, we had a problem with the windscreen washer water freezing in the pipes (and that is with plenty of antifreeze in – but obviously no enough: I added a bottle of methylated spirit last night).

This morning I had a 9am lesson. The extra dusting of snow was treacherous on just about all roads (most of which still hadn’t been gritted). Even at a crawl I was slipping (ABS kicking in), and on downward slopes there was considerable movement no matter how slow you went. At one point I went over a roundabout on a slope and felt sideways movement – yet no discernible speed was shown on the speedo! The pupil’s road was as bad. She is a relative beginner, so I decided that one shouldn’t go out.

I used the opportunity to take the car into a hand car wash – I chose the hand wash because all the drive-thru washers in this area are out of action due to being frozen solid. It took the guys 25 minutes to get the water through – all their pipes and jet-wash machines were frozen solid! When I drove out the water on my mirror was sheet ice, and any droplets were formed into icicles immediately.

Then at 3pm this afternoon, I parked outside another pupil’s house. It had been sunny all day, but it suddenly went very dark. Just as she came out it began to snow heavily. She has a problem with harsh braking and steering – taking her out in that weather would have been stupid, so we cancelled the lesson.

And I had one booked at 6pm this evening. She is a beginner, and although the snow has stopped, it is lying on the ground and will freeze as the temperature falls (-2°C is forecast tonight). Again, at this stage she’ll gain nothing by driving in such hazardous conditions.

So today has been a total washout – I’ve lost £140. But it would have been irresponsible to put that above safety.

NOTE: This was originally posted on Sunday, 20/12/2009 – I lost the last three posts when I upgraded the database, so added them again today.

EDIT 5/1/2010 #1: I’ve been getting hits on “what happens next when a test is cancelled”.

Well, up until the end of that day your test will show as “taken”, but when the examiners finish for the day (which could be very early if they all go home because of a full day of cancellations) they will log your test as cancelled and you will automatically get a new date through the post. You should also be able to look online and see your new test date either later that day or the following day. If it still shows as “taken” call them up straight away – sometimes they forget.

Usually, you (or your parents) will go ballistic when you find out how far in the future your test is! You might be lucky and get a fairly early rearrangement, but it often goes in at the earliest normal bookable slot. Just phone up and moan, or keep looking for cancellations on the DSA’s web site.

If you do go for a cancellation, be very careful. I have had people whose tests were cancelled just before Christmas find early cancellation dates for this week. Now look out the window or listen to the weather forecast and see if they made a wise decision by doing that…!

Don’t forget: the weather isn’t the DSA’s fault. They are perfectly entitled to cancel for safety reasons if there is ice (or fog, or high winds, or heavy rain) around even if you or your parents have looked in your garden and decided there isn’t! And your Test Centre cannot do anything much about your test booking – you must call the normal booking line, not the Test Centre. At best they will do what would be much easier for you to do and phone the main booking line.

EDIT 5/1/2010 #2: I spoke with the Colwick Test Centre today and all tests were cancelled both yesterday and today (Monday and Tuesday). Bear in mind that we had a smattering of snow last night followed by -5°C and it was treacherous on most roads first thing, and side roads throughout the day.

It is 6pm now and it has snowed (it still is a little) – not much, but it has covered the bare ground again. I don’t know if we will have much more, but lows of -3°C are forecast once it blows over. Anyone with a test at Colwick tomorrow really ought to phone first and expect it to be off. The morning ones in particular.

I was up there this afternoon with a pupil who has a test next week and at 2.30pm instructors were turning up for afternoon tests! A phone call would have saved a lot of wasted time.

The Law Is An Ass

21/12/2009

DOAADI

General

…And yet another Judge shows himself to be only one level above plankton on the evolutionary scale.

There’s been a story in the British press over the last few days ( Sunday Express version here). What happened was that Munir Hussain and his brother Tokeer came home to find burglars with knives in the house. The burglars threatened to kill his family.

Munir and Tokeer chased them and beat one of them up (a story in another paper says they used a cricket bat to hit Walid Salem – and they hit him so hard it broke). Salem has 54 previous convictions (that’s convictions, not attempted crimes – heaven knows how much he has gotten away with).

Now, here’s the question: what happened next?

Munir and Tokir have been jailed, and Salem has been let off with a 2-year supervision order – during which time he’ll undoubtedly add to his 54 previous convictions!

You really couldn’t make this up, could you?

The Judge (John Reddihough – the surname itself is enough to explain the gulf between his class and reality) said:

The prosecution rightly made it plain [he can’t even use normal English] that there was no allegation against you, Munir Hussain, in respect of the force you used against Salem in defending your own home and family or of the force used by either of you in apprehending Salem.

However, the attack which then occurred was totally unnecessary and amounted to a very violent revenge attack on a defenceless man.

It may be that some members of the public or media commentators will assert that Salem deserved what happened to him at the hands of you and the two others involved and that you should not have been prosecuted and need not be punished.

However, if persons were permitted to take the law into their own hands and inflict their own instant and violent punishment on an apprehended offender rather than letting the criminal justice system take its course, then the rule of law and our system of criminal justice, which are hallmarks of a civilised society, would collapse.

I wonder if this imbecile realises that Salem and his associates would have got away and not been dealt with by “criminal justice”, and so would have become part of the “civilised society” – of which Reddihough’s class is above, anyway – that justice is pontificating about?

What makes it worse is that the Police said at the trial that they didn’t want Munir and Tokeer jailed.

At least Salem appears to have been put out of circulation by the two heroes. Someone had to, because justice appears incapable of doing anything other than changing its own coleostomy bag, it would seem.

Given some of the idiotic decisions justice makes on a regular basis, it would have been easy to have freed the Hussains. But here we have yet another case of some geriatric panto dame demonstrating his skills at the expense of normal people.

EDIT 20/1/2010: This story has an update – Munir has been freed.

Spiders And Bots

18/12/2009

DOAADI

Latest Posts

I’ve recently installed some tracking software on my site so I can see who is online, who’s been online, and where they were from. Nothing sinister, but I just like to know what people are searching for in the context of where they live.

The software also lets you see which bots are crawling on your site. A bot (or spider) is sent by search engines to index your site so people can find it.

Now, you’d think that the likes of Google or Microsoft would be the ones doing all the crawling, wouldn’t you? In actual fact, a Googlebot makes a visit at such frequency that you will most likely not notice it has been there. At this moment in time, I have had a visit in the last 10 minutes or so from a Googlebot in Cabot, AR.

But get this: at the same time, I have been visited 22 times by Baiduspider (based in Beijing, China). And I bet the use of the words ‘Beijing’ and ‘China’ are going to get me a few dozen more visits.

Baiduspider appears to aggressively hunt for new posts. It has indexed my post about the first snow on all tags in a fraction of the time it takes Google to pick up on the same. Over the last few days, I have noticed that it is more or less continually present on my site.

I say this with my tongue firmly in my cheek, but I wonder why Beijing is so anxious to find all new posts so quickly?

EDIT: Wow. Both Google (Cabot, again) and Baiduspider got this within 1 minute of publishing! However, whereas the Googlebot is a single entity, Baiduspider is (so far) TWELVE separate entities. That’s 12 separate bots.

In-car Video Camera

18/12/2009

DOAADI

ADI, Computers & Tech

This is a very old article. Cameras have come a long way since I wrote it. However, I still haven’t found one I am completely happy with.

EDIT: I have updated the VholdR links below – the website is now under the Contour name and the old website no longer exists. Sorry for any confusion.

VholdR Contour HD 1080p Action Camcorder I think I mentioned in a previous post that I had tried various camera systems in my car. The last one was a 550 line bullet cam – great video, but a real pain with the cables (plus the separate recorder: I started with an Archos hard disk unit, then experimented with a SanDisk V-mate memory card recorder).

I saw this in one of my computer magazines last month. It’s the VholdR Contour HD 1080p (actually, the one in the magazine was the 720p, but I did a bit of reading first).

It is a full-HD camera, and it records directly to a micro SD memory card. At full HD (1080p) a 16GB card will hold around 4 hours of video (it comes with a 2GB card), and it also has several resolutions – various 1080p sizes, 720p (so a 16GB card will hold 8 hours of footage), and WVGA (16 hours on a single card). It is battery operated, so no cables to worry about.

It is tiny… it just about sits in the palm of your hand. There is a range of accessories – the one I have been waiting for is the windscreen mount (and it came while I was writing this). My car is in the garage for a recurring fault today so I haven’t been able to try the mount properly yet, but it is extremely solid (made of metal and plastic). I’m also waiting for a 16GB card to arrive.

VholdR (now under the Contour name) – the company which makes the camera – is based in the USA and specialises in extreme sports. The Contour is designed to be wearable – it is supplied with several mounts allowing you to fit it to your helmet or goggles if you are skiing, skydiving, or bike-riding. You can also get a handlebar mount – and one which I like a lot is a waterproof mount so you can take underwater videos!

If you have a look at the VholdR (Contour) website you can see the quality of the footage it takes. There are lots of videos taken by extreme sports enthusiasts (and people who aren’t so extreme – when I used to go skiing I did scarier stuff than that by accident). Seriously, though, you can see how useful it is being able to wear something so small which delivers such high quality. You can also download VholdR’s own software for editing the video.. It isn’t cheap – not in the UK, anyway. The 1080p costs £350 everywhere! The 720p is £250. The official UK distributor is Madison. However, if you look around – and if you don’t mind ordering from overseas eBay sellers – the 1080p only costs $330 (which currently converts to £205). ~~I suggest Easy Does It Customs (in Pittsburgh, PA)~~. EDIT: They don’t list on eBay anymore. Google for “Contour HD” and you’ll find it for as little as £119 in the UK now (as of July 2012) – or the Plus version with GPS at around £300.. .

The First Snow

18/12/2009

DOAADI

Latest Posts

Had a lesson at 7.45 this morning… there was a dusting of snow last night, and the temperature was fixed on 0°C (it still is, even at 10.30am with the sun shining). But I noticed a couple of things…

First of all, the number of roads which hadn’t been gritted. I took my pupil past the Chalfont Drive Test Centre and the road was slick with black ice and compacted snow (we may have had only a slight dusting, but it was a little more in some places). I don’t think for a moment that any of the 8.10, 8.20, or 8.40 tests went out – but they could have done if the gritters had done their job.

It’s annoying, because this cold weather has been forecast for a week – and especially seeing that last year, the biggest hazard on the road was the grit! They were shovelling the stuff on in lorry-loads full. I sometimes wonder what the Nottingham City and County Councils (and whoever their bureaucracy says is responsible for gritting) actually do for a living, because whatever it is it is rarely the appropriate thing. I should imagine they were all in meetings this morning discussing where to grit.

The second thing I noticed was the number of drivers who – as usual – haven’t got it into their heads yet the two most important things:

snow + cold = slippery
slippery + crap driving = accidents

They are driving too close, too fast, braking too harshly… it’s no wonder so many accidents occur. And there were plenty on the radio to listen to.

‘Tis The Season To Be Cancelling Lessons

08/12/2009

DOAADI

Latest Posts

Well, it’s started!

It’s the time of year when pupils suddenly realise they have an alternative use for their time and money, and start cancelling their lessons (or not booking anymore until January).

I’m not too worried, though. For a start, I originally had over 40 hours booked for this week (this is one useful little trick to help deal with cancellations: book as many as you can, so that cancellations don’t matter). The freed up slots I can now offer to pupils who’d said they wanted lessons, but who I couldn’t fit in – even if a only a couple take the offer it helps offset the lost income. And even if they don’t, it’s time off for me, and I’ve still got over 30 hours scheduled.

To be fair to my lot, they are at least being honest by telling me they can’t afford lessons with Christmas coming up. I can also understand where they are coming from: learning to drive is definitely not cheap when you add it all up.

One thing I will never agree with, though: other instructors who insist that Christmas is when it traditionally goes quiet. The worst that can be said is that – for two weeks – some pupils will not be taking lessons. This is no big surprise, seeing how Christmas is celebrated in this country. Other than that, it is business as usual as far as I am concerned.

EDIT 8/12/2009: And there you go! Just after I wrote this entry, I got an email from a pupil booking 12 hours of lessons over the next three weeks!

Mind you, I feel sorry for one of my others. He had a lesson booked for tonight, and he’s off to Australia tomorrow on a school cricket tour. I got a call from his mum about an hour before saying he has been injured playing rugby (someone stood on his knee). I hope he’s OK – his family was going out to meet him in a couple of weeks and they were due to be spending Christmas out there – but his mum sounded upset, and his injury seems quite serious.

Cockpit Drill

08/12/2009

DOAADI

ADI, Driving Tests

What’s all this about, then? I’m getting hits on the search term “aa cockpit drill “.

Assuming it isn’t something to do with flying, and people who can’t use search engines properly, just bear in mind the following.

the cockpit drill is not usually assessed as part of the driving test (though it could be)
it’s got bugger all to do with the “AA” or anyone else’s name
the AA doesn’t have its own version
nor should anyone else – and if they do, it isn’t “official”
all the cockpit drill does is push you towards driving safely and under control
it doesn’t really matter what order you do it in as long as the final result means you are sitting comfortably and can see easily all around you

Commonsense, however, suggests that the cockpit drill is most effectively completed as follows:

doors >> leg reach >> arm reach >> mirrors >> seatbelt >> head restraint

shut the doors properly
for leg reach, you want to be able to push the clutch all the way down to the floor without stretching
for arm reach, you want to be able to hold the 10 to 2 position with a slight bend at the elbows so your arms don’t get tired – a good way to gauge this is to reach out over the steering wheel (whilst sitting normally) and your wrists should rest on top of the steering wheel
for the mirrors, you do not want to see half the car – nor do you want to be unable to see the car at all
don’t forget the head restraint with the seatbelt (two safety devices together)

I say “commonsense” simply because there’s no point adjusting your seat after your mirrors, because your head position will change. And you’ll need to fiddle with the leg and arm reach together to get the best position, because moving your back forward after your legs are positioned might move your legs a bit so you’ll have to re-adjust. But as long as people get there in the end, it doesn’t matter. A half-decent ADI should be able to run through this for the first time in a few minutes – then they can get on with teaching people to drive. It just needs a recap for the first few lessons until the pupil automatically gets themselves ready each time.

I should also point out that holding the wheel at the 10 to 2 position isn’t mandatory and you won’t fail because of not doing it as long as your steering is in control.

It isn’t rocket science.

What is the official cockpit drill?

There’s no such thing. Just make sure everything is adjusted properly and your seatbelt is on and you’re there.

Status Quo + Roy Wood At Sheffield Arena

07/12/2009

DOAADI

Music

EDIT 18/3/2011: Someone came here asking “what is Roy Wood doing now” and I noticed his site is down. I don’t know why. As far as I know he is still touring.

I went to Sheffield last night to see Status Quo , with Roy Wood’s Rock & Roll Band in support.

Roy Wood began his music career in the sixties – most famously with The Move , and in later years with The Electric Light Orchestra . But I remember him from my teenage years in his band, Wizzard .

Outwardly, he’s kept his age well – he doesn’t look that much different to the way he does in the videos they keep showing of Wizzard in its heyday on the cable music channels. But he’s also kept his voice.

He played a lot of the old, well-known songs – including The Move’s Flowers In The Rain, Blackberry Way, and Fire Brigade .

His backing band was quite impressive. I haven’t got a clue what their names are (look at his official site to find out ), but they consisted of backing/co-lead singer, four sax players, keyboards, bass guitar, and drums.

t seems this was only part of the full band he tours with – he has a seven-piece brass section most of the time.

As you’d expect, he finished with Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday. The crowd had remained seated throughout the set (what can you expect from old people?) but they got up to clap and dance for this one. In fact, the only thing they didn’t do was get their lighters out and start waving them around!

After the set was changed, Status Quo came on. Francis Rossi has been unwell – a number of gigs prior to this one had been cancelled or postponed (I think he has had bronchitis). He looked a little drawn, and Rick Parfitt did appear to be doing most of the vocals early on.

Now, I have to be honest – I’m not the biggest Quo fan in the world. I don’t dislike them or anything, and I do enjoy listening to them (I enjoy just about anything live. Except rap, of course). But a lot of my interest is based on two things. Firstly, they play guitars, and secondly, the are more or less legends in the music business.

The set was actually very good. The animated back-screens worked very well, and the rest of the band was very accomplished (even if the bass player did look like someone you want to slap). Quo played most of their hits, either in full or in medley.

From a musical perspective, it was a very enjoyable night.

I like to people-watch when I go to these things – I mentioned the average age of the crowd at the last Queen concert I went to, and I always mention general behaviour and demeanour (who could forget all those children trying to take their own photographs on mobiles at the MGMT gig?)

If anything, the average age of this lot was the highest yet. About three quarters of the way through the Quo set, many of them started to sit down – unable to cope with long periods of standing. But the overriding annoyance this time was the old-people smell. Specifically, old women’s perfume!

I had two near me. One of them was wearing that sickly flat stuff that makes you feel sick, and another was wearing something that felt like you were having two nails hammered up your nose. God, it was overpowering. And that’s another thing I just reminded myself of: I’d say that more than 50% of the crowd was female.

It was pleasantly easy to get out of the car park (only half the Arena had been used for this show, so there was only half the usual traffic – and a lot had come by bus anyway). It was also pleasantly cheap to park (£5). Compare this to when Rush played there – parking had been extended to cover a big field behind the Arena, and it took well over an hour to get out, and I think it cost more like £10 to park.

Anyway, enough moaning. It was still a good night, and a very pleasant way to end a year of live shows (I don’t think I’ll go to another this year).

Oh. One more thing. I’m going to have to get a decent bloody camera, which can take pictures in low light with a fast shutter speed. Only a handful came out – it all depends on how still you can hold your hand and whether the subject moves. Mind you, this Sony is over 5 years old now.

I Wonder If Mummy And Daddy Know?

02/12/2009

DOAADI

Latest Posts

Last week, I came up the A52 in Nottingham towards the Nottingham Knight roundabout (from the North). I was taking the right turn on to the A60 towards Ruddington. It’s national speed limit on this roundabout.

I pulled on to the roundabout and – as I got halfway across – a blue Citroen Saxo (reg. no. MV52 VBX ) decided it was going to go from the A60 coming from Wilford Hill. It was filled to bursting with schoolkids – two boys and two girls, I think.

I had to slow down rapidly to avoid a collision.

On its own this wouldn’t have been the end of the world – as far as people demonstrating they should have been put down at birth goes. You get a lot of it.

But what made it all the more irritating was the fact that the whole car full of retards thought it was immensely amusing and kept looking back to laugh. I really do think it was the highlight of their week. They turned right into Ruddington, along Kirk Lane, so I assume that’s where they live.

You can’t help wonder what their parents would make of all this. You hope that they wouldn’t be impressed and would ground the little cretins – the driver, at least, seeing how he put the lives of his three occupants and me at serious risk; but also the passengers, for demonstrating their complete lack of maturity in situations which threaten other peoples lives.

This is what you’d hope. The frightening thing is that these prats probably got the attitude FROM their parents.