Driving to Work

I've been driving to work recently, now that I found out I have somewhere safe park. Do like my reserved spot?

Actually, no, I haven't been given a huge bonus (this photo was taken in Switzerland, not London). Instead, the company who manage the office at work have announced that there are two parking bays in the car park reserved and free for use just for bikes - the motorbike kind, not the pedal kind.

This is a bit of a surprise as I'm sure we asked a year or two back and were told we'd have to pay.

Anyway, now that summer is finally here and I can leave my bike safe in the knowledge it will be there when I return, I can arrive and leave at times that suit me and save a bit of money too, rather than relying on the trains all the time.

EDIT: I wrote the above last night and was thinking about it again while riding in this morning: I realised that, if anything, driving is actually more expensive than the train. A weekly train ticket costs something like £92 - call it a round £19 a day. Driving costs £13 a day in petrol, tyres add maybe £8 a day (really! A pair costs nearly £300 and will last possibly 4000 miles, which is about 35 daily commutes), while general servicing and wear and tear add even more. Who would've thought the train would be the cheaper option?

State of the nation (2)

It's not often I read a newspaper. This week though I've had a couple of free copies of The Times and a particular story in Thursday's edition, about proposed changes to the driving test, caught my eye.

The on-line version of the story has been re-worded for some reason - maybe to give a work experience kid something to do - but the gist is the same. The sentence that caught my eye in the print version says 'The DfT consultation paper, entitled Learning to Drive, also proposes to stop publishing the questions for the theory test, meaning that candidates would no longer be able to memorise the answers without understanding the principles.'

For anyone who is unaware, the driving theory test for cars and bikes consists of a set of multiple choice questions, of which 43 from a selection of 50 must be answered correctly, followed by a hazard perception test in which only about 60% of potential hazards need to be spotted. The multiple choice questions can be downloaded, bought or practised on-line, while mock tests for the second part are also available in numerous places, such as here.

The proposal sounds reasonable then doesn't it? After all, the questions are derived from the Highway Code and multiple choice quizzes are never the hardest in the world, often relying more on common sense than knowledge. Almost everyone who pays their £28.50 (!) must pass easily with minutes to spare right?

Wrong. The actual pass rate for the driving theory test in the UK is less than two thirds.

<sigh>

Burning Trains

My train journey home last night took two and a half hours for what is normally a forty minute high-speed dash up the country.

It all started well, but the train came to a halt at Wembley Central and some of the lights went out. About ten minutes later the Train Manager announced that there was a burning freight train just ahead of us and, as the fire brigade were busy spraying water around, the power to overhead lines in the immediate area on both sets of north/south lines had been cut.

A while later the train's backup power supply depleted and the remaining lights went out. All passengers were forced to vacate and wait on the platform for a while, before squeezing into an already overcrowded London Overground train to Watford where another fast train was waiting.

Stopping the trains sounds very sensible - everyone knows that water and electricity don't mix very well (or do, that being the problem).

But ... hang on ... what happens when it rains?

Holiday Inspiration

Gah! I've been suffering a terrible lack of inspiration lately - I even sat down to write something last night, chose a nice photo that should have been easy, and spent a few minutes just staring at the empty Title field.

Hopefully normal service will be resumed shortly. However I can't leave my Photo Blog again without posting something relevant, so here is a photo from one of my favourite holiday locations of recent years - Raratonga in the Cook Islands. More to come soon.

Nikon D70, 18-70mm kit lens

Where's Dave?

Here I am!

It's been over two months since my last post, and over three since my last photo. I could blame it all on my home PC having blown a gasket (or whetever it is inside these things) or on being too busy achieving my New Year's resolutions, but one of those is a cop-out and the other is a lie. I'll leave it to you to decide which is which (although I had the boiler fixed so I haven't been completely idle).

My PC has really broken though. I think it was partially my fault. Before it went I started building a new one, and got far enough along to not want to go out and buy a completely pre-built new one that will work straight away, but not far enough to have finished it yet. This leaves me with no PC on which I can download and edit photos.

The new PC won't be done until at least the start of April, so my current plan is to go back over some of my favourite old snaps and start posting those - the blog heading does state 'past and present' after all.

While my thoughts meander around what to choose, here's something you should definitely watch if any of the following are true: you quite like Star Wars; you think Lego is one of the best inventions ever; Eddie Izzard has ever made you giggle. Enjoy.

EDIT: Removed video as is caused IE to crash! You can see it here

Resolutions

I've been tagged by Neil after he created his own little meme. Neil wants to know what my New Year's Resolutions are. Normally I don't make resolutions, but this year I have.

I must first apologise to others that have tagged me where I haven't (yet) responded, but this one needs doing now if it's to be done at all. So, without further ado, here are my five:

• Fix the lights - we have two sets of lights in our living room at home and one of them has been broken for, literally, years. It's time to get them sorted out.


• Fix the boiler - our boiler currently has a problem and stops working when it gets hot. Not a good thing for a boiler. 'Rebooting' it seems to fix it for a time, but I resolve not to let this turn into another broken lights situation.


• Get a bit fitter - ah look ... my third resolution is almost a direct copy of Neil's third.


• Drink less - I don't tend to binge drink (except maybe when on a night out, but that doesn't happen often), but I do tend to have a drink almost every evening. I think I should probably reduce this a little. Doing this might also help with the previous resolution.


• Do better next time - ah, a cop out - I only have four real resolutions, whereas the challenge was to create five. This is just one example of how bad I am when tagged. Next time I'll try harder.

BBC iPlayer Without the Downloads

Time for a tangent ...

Back in July the BBC launched the iPlayer, a piece of software that would allow you to download and view programmes from the last seven days.

There were two problems: the player was only available for Windows, shutting out anyone with a Mac or Linux and a lot of people (myself included) are put off these days by having to install yet another client to watch/listen to locked content - most of the major channels seem to have their own versions of these things (e.g. Sky, Channel4), yet we're supposed to moving into a Video on Demand world in which we can watch anything at any time through our set top boxes.

Today, the BBC has launched a new version of the iPlayer. This time it's online. No downloads (apart from upgrading Flash if you still have an old version) - the videos just play in your web browser, like YouTube. This is great for me as I often find myself forgetting about things I meant to watch until shortly after they have ended.

OK, so it's nowhere near HD quality, but its good enough. If you have a web-enabled gaming console, you might even be able to get the service working through that, onto your TV, rather than watching on a monitor.

Content is only available if you live in the UK, but if you meet that criteria give it a go - I just discovered a show I'd never heard of before, The History of the World Backwards. Only the final episode is still available, so we're at the end (beginning) of history, featuring a henge design review meeting and talk of the hunting of a pre(post)-historic car wash. I'll now be watching out for earlier episodes when they are repeated.

Right, I'm off to watch last week's Top Gear...

A Milestone and a Conspiracy

Dave's Photo Blog is (or very soon will be, depending on when you are reading this) 5000 visitors old! Blimey.

Like many bloggers I pimp my site a little: pro-actively trying to reach a larger audience. Sites like Blog Explosion get me quite a few hits, as does commenting on other sites that I find interesting. However, the majority of visits to the blog come from Google, and its been quite interesting monitoring the statistics to see how people find my posts.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to see the search-term used when a hit comes through Google Images, but here are some examples of web searches that often find me:

• Dave Licence - before I started blogging, a search on my name would only have returned you with instructions on how to install a piece of software onto your Macintosh. The same search today will return my sites first, although this blog has actually dropped to third for some reason (see my conspiracy theory below). Unfortunately, a search for David Licence only returns my LinkedIn profile in third place.


• Delice de France (DdF) - ever since my piece on DdF's mediocre sandwiches a search on their name returned this site in second place, directly after the company homepage. This was a real hit-spinner, getting me at least one visitor a day. However, just before writing this post I noticed that I have completely disappeared from the results. Is this simply because the item is now too old, or (as I like to believe) an insidious conspiracy between DdF and Google to stop people thinking about where their food comes from? I'm secretly hoping that this post gets me back in the running.


• Donnington 2007 gp photo (plus many other combinations of MotoGP favourites) - another good source of hits is my series of photos from the Donnington MotoGP race at the end of June.


• Boat Jumble - an interesting one: I can't imagine what people are really looking for when entering this search, and my item only just makes the first page of results, but I still get several hits a week out of it.

If you are visitor 5000 (check the counter at the bottom of the page), if you know anything more about how much Delice de France paid Google to knock me out of the search results, or if you work for DdF and instead would like to pay me a large sum to say something nice about you be sure to leave a comment.

File it Under Crazy?

Quite often when people find out you're about to have your first child they offer some advice - a common piece of which seems to be 'cram in as much sleep as you can now, you'll need it!'

Now, while you can't actually store sleep as this advice might suggest, it has made me think about sleep in general. Sleeping lots more than necessary wastes time and usually makes me just feel really drowsy for the rest of that day. I often sleep too much at weekends and am never good at getting up in the mornings. However, whenever I do wake up later than 10am I always feel a little guilty and I don't really 'get into' the day as I would like.

So I've been wondering whether its possible to train yourself to need less sleep. It's known that some people need more sleep than others, and the recommendation is eight hours. But ... if your body knew it was going to get less sleep, maybe the sleep you gave it would be better taken. Hmmm. I found this story after a quick search and it seems that it can work. Maybe not for everyone, but with a baby on the way and three weeks off work, maybe I will try reducing my sleep to something like six hours a day.

Or maybe I'll just file the thought in 'Dave's box of crazy ponderings'. Things that normally end up in this box are daydream-ideas or questions that could work ... if only some law of nature were altered slightly. Such as:

• Gravity keeps everything rooted to the planet. If everyone in the world were to jump at the same time, would gravity get confused and lose some?
  
• If everyone in the world were to run (or drive I suppose) in the same direction at once - e.g. east to west or north to south - would the force exerted be enough to change the spin of the planet?

You get the idea. Anyway, if, by some miracle, the sleep idea remains out of the box and does work, I'll let you know - with two hours more awake-time in every day I can spend even more time on the internet writing rubbish like this!

Eight Things About Dave

I have been 'tagged' by Livingsword. Normally I would ignore these things and move on, but this one I'm going to do - if only because I am off work with a cold and it has given me something to do.

First, there are some rules to this game:

• Each player must post these rules first.
  
• Each player then posts eight random facts/habits about themselves.
  
• At the end of your post, you should choose eight more people to tag - list their names.
  
• Leave the eight people a comment telling them they’re tagged.

So, here are eight things about me that you may not have known already.

1) I used to smoke. I don't think I was ever really addicted in the same way that many people are - I could go hours, days or weeks without thinking about a cigarette - I just liked a smoke. Some months I would smoke a lot, but I was never anywhere near a 20-a-day guy. All of a sudden a couple of years ago I just went off them - no idea why, but I haven't smoked since and have no desire to again. One thing I do know though is that if I was ever going to have a hangover in the morning, it would always be worse if drinking had been combined with smoking.

2) I'm going to be a father in less than a month! We don't know yet whether it will be a boy or a girl, but we have names chosen for each. I can't tell you what they are, but I can say that I wanted to give a boy the middle name Xavier (pronounced X-avier, like in X-Men, not like in Spanish), but was over-ruled.

3) I probably spend far too long sitting in front of a computer - at work, at home, anywhere.

4) I don't eat my five a day. In fact its probably a rare day when I eat three.

5) My favourite Italian restaurant, outside Italy, is in Tallinn, Estonia.

6) I've never been in trouble with the police. The closest I came was when I was probably ten years old ... walking home with my mum on a snowy day I was hanging back a bit and threw a hard snowball at a passing car, hitting the windscreen. The car slowed and I ran, telling my mum I wanted to get home quicker. The car followed me and caught up - the driver told me that the snowball could have broken his windscreen and caused an accident and he should have dialled the fuzz. That scared me senseless. I saw the car driver several times in the following couple of years, but have no idea if he ever recognised me again.

7) I have never given blood. Or had a blood test taken (to my knowledge).

8) This is my one hundred and second blog post. I wasn't sure I would keep this going for very long, but I'm still here.


So now I have to choose the people I am going to tag. I don't really expect all of them to reciprocate and play along, but they get tagged anyway:

• Neilly Done
  
• Ming
  
• The Jiffler
  
• Mrs. Jiffler
  
• Kiran
  
• Sara
  
• Ludivine
  
• SuffolkGirl

Delice de France - imported sarnies?

I found myself travelling home from London slightly late the other night after stopping for a couple of Guinnesses after work. As often happens in this situation I hadn't eaten so decided to grab something from the station. In the past I would have had a Burger King, but I'm going off them (the ones from Euston anyway, plus I had one for lunch!) and wanted something different. The kiosk closest to the appointed platform was Delice de France so I swung by and ordered a panini and a pastry.

As I stood on the train and ate, something on the packaging caught my eye:

This produce has been manufactured in France using only the finest grades of flour from specially selected wheats.

What? Are they blatantly lying or do they actually make sandwiches in France and drive them over to the UK - a big lorry full of rolls, stopping at every Delice kiosk from Dover northwards until demand outstrips supply? Either they're just being plain stupid and breaking the Trade Descriptions Act or they really are importing butties from the continent.

The packaging goes on to say:

We pride ourselves on the care and attention taken to ensure that our customers' requirements are fulfilled every time.

Now, given that Delice De France outlets are normally located in the sort of place where people just want a fast-food, slightly healthier alternative to BK and McD, the customers' requirement is for food that simply tastes OK - they're not expecting a cordon bleu experience consisting of imported delicacies. And to be honest the only bit of that sentence they seem to be getting is 'imported' - the food is as average as you would expect from a train station.

I'm not normally the type of person who spends time scouring the shops for 'local produce'. However, my carbon footprint is large enough already, thanks (twenty flights so far this year and I haven't been travelling much) - I don't think I'll be visiting Delice again.

Facebook

I may have briefly mocked it, but thanks to Neil I've discovered Facebook.

I joined because I pretty much have to join every site I come across and I have to take advantage of the firewall being broken at work while I still can.

I've also just discovered that there are eighteen other people with Facebook accounts that I share a surname with. This may not be news to your common-or-garden surname-holders, but for me, with the surname Licence, this is a bit of a revelation: apart from people in my direct family (of which none have accounts), I've never met anyone with the surname Licence, or anyone else who has (apart from the check-in girl at Gibraltar airport, but that conversation was so weird I've put that in the 'I may have been dreaming' category).

I've also just run a surname search (thanks Helen) on the Surname Profiler Project, where you can track the distribution of your name between the 1881 and 1998 censuses, and found that there are only eight Licences in every one million people in the country - still pretty unique.

Anyway, feel free to join me on Facebook - I'm reasonably sure you'll easily be able to find me through a name search.

Tickets: transaction fees, services charges and postage?

A little bit of a rant coming up. Apologies.

Before going on holiday last week I bought some gig tickets from Ticketmaster and as well as adding a £3.00 service charge per ticket to the transaction price, they also wanted £2.00 to deliver the tickets ... by email!

Yesterday I was looking at tickets for another event and the charges were similarly offensive - £2.50 service charge per ticket, plus £4.95 for postage. A fiver? For an envelope (stuffed with adverts no doubt) and a stamp?

Funnily enough, this practice has been in the news today (and, more humorously, here). Maybe something will be done, or maybe its just a politician making some noise to get noticed and look cool. In the meantime, your best option is to shop around - if you can get to the box office and pay cash it will probably be cheapest, otherwise there are a number of on-line agencies available, for example See Tickets, Express Events and (the cheapest for the ticket I was looking for at least) Ticket Web.

Update (just in case you're wondering)

I've not gone. It may have been more than a week since I posted, but I'm still here. I've been in Cornwall (where a lot of people seem to think their county is, or should be, a separate country for some reason) on holiday - on maybe the wettest week this year. There are a few photos to follow I promise!

Me and Mrs L just got back home this afternoon to a nice, clean, and non-burgled house (since I had my bike stolen last year, having things stolen seems to be a psychological concern - if I was American I might consider counselling) and since then we've watched last week's Lost (hey Neil - it's great!) and a bit of Eurovision (hah! we almost came last!) and I've drunk straight Smirnoff (like James Bond) and listened to music.

Tip Top.

In fact I've just rediscovered Inspiral Carpets - excellent band. I've even gone as far as ordering Revenge of the Goldfish from Amazon - I attest that this is the one of the best album covers ever. Care to argue? Do you have a better one?

Neighbours: Officially Bonkers

I used to watch Neighbours every day - school was only two minutes walk from my house so me and a group of friends used to go back to mine during lunch and catch up on the latest happenings in Ramsey Street and Summer Bay.

Leaving school also meant leaving behind soaps almost completely.

This week however, while not in Sweden, I've been working at home and managed to catch both Tuesdays and today's Neighbours instalments. On Tuesday I learnt that Karl had a pet rooster, called Springsteen, which he was in the process of trying to hypnotise into not crowing. Today Susan discovered lice in Karl's beard and traced them back to Springsteen ... the cock had to go.

If you're near a TV at 5:40 this evening, I honestly encourage you to watch today's episode - when Karl is whimpering over loosing his feathered friend he actually says 'but we shared so many memories' and there follows a short montage of all their special moments - including the time he sang to his buddy in the garden and the extra special moment they had sharing crisps from the same dish while watching TV. It really is one of the most hilarious pieces of television I have seen in a long time.

Update - tags added

Kiran suggested I tag my holiday posts to make them easier to find as a group. I've gone a step further and have tagged all my old posts - the holiday ones can be found under 'nepal'. Tags are over on the left.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone with any comments on the tags I've used - too many, too few, suggestions?

UK/US Airport Security

Time for a bit of a tangent - back to the trek next post, honest.

I've just arrived in Jersey after a short flight from Gatwick. I didn't measure the actual times spent on each part of the journey, but I'm pretty sure I spent longer in the queue for airport security than I did in the plane. Security - that's the bit after check in and before duty-free! This has happened to me a few times in the last year or two at Gatwick, Heathrow and Luton, and it seems to be becoming more common in today's terror-alert age.

I saw a related news story today about US security - except this one concerns incoming passengers. For the last few years the US has been collecting two fingerprints from everyone entering (including transit passengers, which I don't get). Now they want to start collecting prints from all ten fingers. They don't think this will take much longer than collecting two, but anyone sensible would find that doubtful.

I travel quite a bit with work and do holidays on top, but in the last few years, apart from some regular trips to Zurich, I haven't had to use many major-city airports in developed/western countries, apart from London and the USA. I have however been through Gambia, Phnom Penh and Kathmandu recently, and compared to UK/USA airports, these have been a breeze to navigate - the people are friendlier too.

I'm probably very wrong, but perhaps the moral of all this is if you really want to fly from the UK to the US, you might actually save travelling time by booking your flights between Paris and Canada and taking trains the rest of the way to avoid all the crazy airport security.

PC vs Mac

I'm a PC owner - always have been and probably (never say never right?) always will be. Just been watching the PC vs Mac ads though and they are fairly amusing. The PC guy even looks like Bill Gates. Anyway, if you've not seen them I recommend a view. There's but a load here.

edit: I had to remove the embedded video - it was causing IE7 to crash when accessing the blog! You can see this yourself if you have IE7 at my test blog here.

Barbie's Dog

This is hilarious... I'm sitting at home listening to Bloc Party, with some Wacky Races on silent on Boomerang and a book in my hand (as you do).

I look up after finishing a paragraph and what do I see? The adverts are on and there seems to be a plastic dog going for a shit on the screen in front of me!

Yes, Barbie now has a dog. It's called Tanner and you can feed it dog biscuits, wait for it to 'go to the bathroom', then do the responsible thing and clean up after it. Brilliant. What will they think of next? There's one thing right there I hope never to be asked for by any daughter of mine.

Bugger. Now I've gone and missed the end of Wacky Races. Wonder who won?

Mrs Jiffler and Google Reader

You may have taken a browse through some of my other oft-visited blogs and sites under the 'ALSO SEE ...' banner on the right. If so, you'll probably have read The Jiffler's blog and possibly even have attempted to copy one of his zen-measured cookery creations.

Now Mrs. Jiffler has a blog too - she recently moved out to Senegal and is posting about her experiences in and around Dakar. Her first properly descriptive post about the place is now up here.

I've also just stumbled across Google Reader. If you find yourself, like me, visiting the same set of blogs regularly you can use this online service to subscribe to the feeds and never miss a post. As well as Blogger, it also currently supports My Space, del.icio.us, flikr, Live Journal, Windows Live Spaces and Xanga. Even better, you can add Google Reader as a widget on your Google homepage - here's mine as an example.