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>

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...

The Great Fire of (East) London

I've been really bad lately - only one post in November, and now here we are almost a third of the way through December! I have some catching up to do.

Well actually that's not really true - for some reason I haven't been taking many photos recently so there's not much to catch up on. Various things have been getting in the way - busy at work, busy at home, it's dark now when I leave the house in the morning and when I get back at night, I've been doing some extra curricular work designing a website and when I have had some free time I've been playing Crysis.

Even the photos I did take last month went untouched until today when I finally got around to downloading them onto my PC and playing around with them ... Back in the middle of November there was a large fire in the East of London on the site of a future Olympics venue. From our office we had an amazing view of the huge plume of smoke and could see the flames when they were at their highest.

So, even though they are four weeks late and this isn't news any more, here are a couple of those photos. In the first one I like the way the smoke takes the shape of a dolphin jumping from the ground, and the fact there is a plane that seems to be flying straight for it. The second has been messed with a little to make the plume more ominous.

 

Sony DSC-T200

Licence Licensed

A recent comment-conversation with Rebecca and post from Ming reminded me that I needed to do something about clarifying the status of the images I post to the internet.

I do not sell many of my images (I have a few on iStockphoto, a stock photography site, but the returns are too low to concern anyone) so wouldn't be losing any money if someone decided to 'appropriate' an image from this site for their own use, but at the same time I would hope that no-one did that without asking.

To make things clearer I have created a license for my images using Creative Commons.

The license means that anyone is free to share and use any of the images I post on this blog in a non-commercial manner, as long as they do not alter the images in any way and I am given credit, either via name or a link back to this site.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the images you see here are usually around 800 by 600 pixels in size, while the majority of my work is shot with a ten mega pixel camera. That means if you do copy an image from this site you are not getting the best version, by quite a long way.

I am happy to supply anyone with a full-sized version of any of my images if I am asked. As well as getting the best quality available, you will also be able to host the image wherever it suits you, rather than relying on me not changing my links randomly.

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

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 - 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?

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.

Life In Still Mode

Every now and then I click the 'Next Blog>>' button on the Navbar at the top of this page and see what I come across. Today's click found me at Life In Still Mode, where I found some great photography. The latest post (Traffic) is as good as the rest on there - I'll be visiting back every now and then to see what's new.

Free News

I'm not a fan of newspapers - I don't buy a daily and I don't pick up any I see lying around, much preferring to turn back to whatever book I happen to be carrying at the time. Newspapers to me are not worth the effort and insult my sense of responsibility slightly by being too easy to not recycle. I often wish I was more 'in tune' with current events, but not enough to be buying or reading a paper every day.

If you live in London, travel into or around London, or have read Neilly Done, you'll know that that over the last few months there have been a growing number of free papers being produced and handed out in our fine-ish capital. Due to a number of factors - having read Neil's post, having had a couple of pints after work, sitting down on the train and being confronted by a stack of about eighteen papers - I decided to shun my copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, much as it entertained me this morning, and pick up the first thing that came to hand - London Lite.

I think I continued reading this paper because it had a picture on the front of Britney in fishnet tights and I had a random conversation today about fishnets. Strange but true. Actually, it wasn't that random a conversation - I started it. But for some reason this morning it seemed like almost everyone was wearing fishnets and I don't particularly like them so I mentioned it and then Britney turns up wearing them!

Now this paper, London Lite, I found as pointless as any other. In fact, more so, due to the way that it inexpertly weaves celebrity gossip with real news. However it still kept me reading for the entire 45 minute journey and there were a few things in there that made me chuckle and/or think for a moment.

• First up was the guy who somehow managed to successfully charge people £300 to sit their driving theory test for them. I wish I'd thought of that. Unsurprisingly, given what I know of this test having sat it myself four years ago, he had a 100% pass rate. Until he got caught.
• Next, there's a quarter of a page given over to Gail Porter slipping on a step. Since when is that news? Or gossip? I'll admit I have a bit of a soft spot for Gail Porter ever since her Blue Peter days, but surely this is just an excuse to point out (probably again) that she's got alopecia. I didn't know that before, but hey, now we have something in common :-)
• Apparently Jennifer Aniston sleeps in her dog's bed when she wants to get an extra 20 minutes kip. I guess with her being so rich her dog probably has a bigger bed than I do, but that's still odd.
• Lastly, there's the story of a dog that takes the bus down to his local pub when he's supposed to be working down the farm. The story says that the dog's owner originally bought the terrier to keep down the rodent population. See now, that's where he's gone wrong - I'd have bought a cat for that particular duty. Most people are aware that cats are better suited to that role and that, generally, they're tee-total. There's always the exception that proves the rule, but I'd trust a cat with my stock of hooch before I'd leave Fido alone with an opposable thumb and a bottle of vodka.
  

Maybe its because of those two pints earlier, or perhaps its due the extra one I had on the train home, but I find myself here writing about my paper-reading experience, almost in its entirety. This is my longest blog post ever. I've suddenly become what I feared most - your everyday, archetypal blogger, rambling on about nothing that anyone is ever going to read. Is that what beer does to a person? Are the majority of bloggers permanently drunk? I tend to have a couple of drinks after work at least once a week - perhaps this will happen again. Should I be scared?

There is a happy ending to this story - I bought the paper home with me and it will be recycled.

PS - Kiran, update your Blog and maybe I'll post some failed fireworks photos to make you feel better about your own.

Shameless self-plug

In case you didn't see the link on the right to my website here it is again - www.davelicence.com

I have just updated my pages and have uploaded a load more pictures there - you won't see them all here as this photo-blog is intended only for my favourite shot every week or two, so pop over to main webpages for more.