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>

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

Matthew Has Arrived

A while back I mentioned that I was soon to become a father. Well that day arrived on Monday with the arrival of Matthew Christopher (which might help to explain the lack of posts in the last week - been a little busy).

After a bit of um-ing and ah-ing about whether he really wanted to be born on the 13th, or try to leave it for a few more hours, he decided he would enter the world on his exact due date after all - looks like he has his dad's sense of punctuality at least. Lets just hope he doesn't suffer from paraskavedekatriaphobia. I've also been told by a number of people that he has my nose, but I don't see it myself.

I guess there will be many more posts in the coming months with photos of my little boy, but for now here are the first couple - one taken just after we got him back from hospital on Tuesday and the other on Wednesday.

 

Nikon D200, Sigma 30mm f/1.4
1/60sec, f/3.2, ISO-800                                 1/100sec, f/1.4, flash

Monday News Story

This is a bit of a departure from the norm, and I promise the next post will be back to photography, but I just spotted this news story on the BBC and it has made my Monday morning a little more bearable - hopefully it will do the same for you. Just think, only a few days left until the weekend.

Splash

What with all the rain we've been having in the UK recently there hasn't been the opportunity for rambles outdoors to capture nice summer images. So, instead, one day last week while the rain was hammering down on the conservatory roof I sat just inside the door for a while and attempted to get a shot of the raindrops splashing onto the patio outside.

This really is just pot-luck - its very difficult to time a shot like this: by the time you register a moment it's gone. It's simply a case of firing off a load of shots and reviewing them later.

So, how did I do? Not great - this image was the best of over one hundred clicks, and the drop is just out of focus. Next time will be better - and maybe I'll remember to use a flash.

Nikon 18-200mm VR at 200mm, 1/90sec, f/5.6

Shipwreck

A shipwreck, seen from Land's End in Cornwall. I could be wrong, but I think this is the RMS Mulheim, which ran aground in March 2003.

This is the only decent shot I got at Land's End from our recent visit due to bad weather (the only outdoors shot anyway - some from the Doctor Who exhibition coming soon). A shame as we quite fancied a stroll along the cliff side path.

Nikon 18-200mm at 170mm, f/9, 1/125sec

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.

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.

More snow (for real this time)

The UK went into lock-down today. Not because of the latest wave of letter bomb scares, but because of a few inches of snow. Every time it happens someone says this country needs to be better prepared next time (today it was Jack Straw), and every time it's like the first time we've seen a bit of bad weather - websites go down with the number of people checking the forecast, the trains stop running or have to run slow, the roads close. A nice bit of chaos all round. Hopefully tomorrow will be better as I'm planning on going to Woking for a birthday party.

Anyway, here's a couple of shots from today - both taken with the Sigma 30mm.

 

f/8, 1/60sec                                                       f8, 1/125sec

Happy Brithday 'where I live'!

Just a regular winter (yes winter has arrived now) morning - get up in the dark, get dressed in the dark, wrap up warm and walk to the station in the dark to catch the train to work.

Only this morning, as I was standing on the platform waiting for the 0749 a strange thing occurred: fireworks! Lots of them. Before I saw them I heard them - thought there might be a war on that no-one had told me about. Then I noticed the lights and flashes to go with the bangs and wondered if another factory was on fire somewhere.

Turns out the town I live in, Milton Keynes, is officially 40 years old today. Hurrah! I don't tend to pay much attention to local events - its really just a convenient place to live where we can afford a decent house not too far from a quick rail connection to London - which is maybe why I didn't know about any of this.

The BBC has it covered of course. Just in case you have a hankering for seeing more of the famous concrete cows (sorry, another Wikipedia reference), here are a couple of my own shots of the petrified bovine herd from a while back.

Storm Damage in London

Yesterday the UK suffered from the worst storms in 17 years. Here in London, two-thirds of the way up the Centre Point tower, things started getting weird around lunch time, with the building starting to sway - a few people got a bit motion sick and decided to head on out. Lower down, the trees that had only recently been planted outside were almost blown completely away, water from the fountain was being blown right across the road and the building's revolving doors somehow got 'slammed' and shattered. Here are a couple of pics.

Boozy Dog - Old News

Turns out that story about the tipsy terrier I mentioned yesterday is old news: the Northern Echo reported it over three months ago. That didn't stop the Daily Express giving a whole page over to it today though - it even made it onto BBC Breakfast this morning.

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.