How many times can the same minibus appear on the Google Streetview coverage of Stafford?
Well, it seems to be outside my house
But it is also outside Pete’s house (Pan right, and there it is).
Postman Pat called this week, delivering somewhat of a surprise. Amid the usual bumf from marketing robots, and a letter addressed to Mr. Austin Allego (more in a future post), he brought 2 DVDs from Paul Balmer of Waterway Routes. Here they are photographed on my nice brown duvet, as my desk is far too cluttered for them to fit on to.
The two DVD sets (Birmingham Canal Navigations and Caldon Canal) each contain two DVDs, a map, an explanatory booklet and a catalogue leaflet, as shown in the awful quality photograph here.
So what is on the DVDs? Well, one from each set contains an overview of the canal system in question, with highlights of the journeys. The other DVD contains a speeded up journey of the entire system, filmed from the box of the boat. Each is narrated by Paul himself (I assume).
Both are fascinating, and well worth the price (especially my free ones), and should Paul ever produce editions for the Lancaster Canal or Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal I’ll happily fork out the money for them.
Yesterday, while helping clear out my uncle’s house before his move to the new bungalow, I discovered these wonderful photographs of him going on holiday sometime in the late 50s or early 60s.
The Aeroplane
Nothing remarkable here, you may think. It looks quite a small ‘plane, with a big nose.
All aboard!
The passengers are boarding. My uncle, Mr. Harry Blews, is the chap directly below the “T”, and his wife, Mrs. Mary Blews, stands below the “C”.
So far we see nothing out of the ordinary. But hang on! Harry Blews isn’t the sort of man to waste money on airport parking, even in the days when England was still using the Turnip as currency. Neither would he trust his beloved Humber Hawk to the care of Johnny Southerner whilst on a trip to foreign shores.
So then, where is the car?
Crikey!
Yes, for the holiday maker in a hurry, or indeed Morcambe and Wise in That Riviera Touch, the Bristol 170 could carry three cars and their passengers, and at a price that Textiles Manager from Preston could afford. Fantastic. Its almost like science fiction, but from 50 years ago. Can you imagine Ryan Air doing this today? Hell, they’d charge you extra for carrying the spare wheel.
Jeremy Clarkson once said that the grounding of Concorde was “a massive leap backwards for mankind”. Thats as maybe, but in the 50s people flew on holiday with their cars, and in the 21st Century they don’t. That is what I call a massive leap backwards.
Here is a little bit more information about that particular aircraft…
G-ANWK, a Bristol 170 Mk32, was first registered on Jan 31st, 1956. It was operated by Silver City Airways, between Lydd to Le Touquet, from June of that year until January 1963 when it was taken over by British United Air Ferries. Withdrawn from service in October, 1969, the ‘plane was finally broken up in August, 1970. Here is another photo.
Already this year I’ve travelled more rail miles that in the preceeding ten years. Two Stafford/Preston return trips has reminded me why I avoid the railways like the plague: The Virgin Voyager.
A Voyager at Stafford
Some people might say that they represent a giant leap forward in train technology. These people are probably short, have no sense of smell and enjoy rollercoasters. And are probably clinically insane.
Myself, I’m of above average height, can still smell despite a good few years chain-smoking and hate all fairground rides. I’ll neatly sidestep the sanity issue (I’m typing this on a Datawind Ubisurfer – I must have been bananas to buy it).
My first major moan about the Voyager concerns the piss-awful seats and lack of legroom. Now when I say that I am of above average height I mean that I am abiout six foot four. This doesn’t put me into the realm of basketball players or circus freaks, but it does stop me sitting in most of the seats on a Voyager. Table seats are fine, if you want to share a table with a drunken Scottish squaddie (are they all AWOL and hiding on the trains, or is it always the same one?), and the priority wheelshair users’ seating has sufficient room, but the majority of the seating would require me to undergo a leg-ectomy for me to use them. I suppose I could sit sideways across two seats, but that is uncouth, yobbish behaviour for the sort of folk who play their music loud in public.
Yobbish behaviour
When Charles Darwin designed the human olfactory organs he must have had quite a chuckle to himself when he put in the bits that enable you to smell the unique aroma of a Virgin Voyager. Is a whiff of flatulence combined with a hint of smoke? A solid leavening of used toilet with a dash of electrical burning? Or is it,as I suspect, a full blown massive turd secreted directly on to an electric heater full of cat hair? The reason for this is apparently that the toilet effluent tanks vent into the bodywork, and that the wiring is prone to going shonky. Not even the APT had these features!
An APT, not on fire.
But these are just minor nit-picking flaws, I can almost hear you say. Surely the superior ride quality makes up for them? Well, yes, of course, assuming your idea of a nice journey involves lurching from side to side, up and down, and occassionally backwards and forwards. During the course of typing this, by netbook as been dislodged from the little wanky tray-table no less than three times. I’d have a smoother ride in a Land Rover. Across a bomb site. Under shelling.
The Next Generation Voyager will have more comforts.
And let us not forget, the government spent millions between 1959 and 1974 to electrify the West Coast Main Line, and now Captain Beardy is pissing all over this by running diesel trains on it. Money well spent! Its like buying the entire run of Star Trek Voyager on DVD, and copying them on to ropey old VHS tapes, then scrubbing the tapes with magnets before watching them.
But never mind. Just watch a video of better times.
I’m trying to get to grips with my impulse purchase of the week. For reasons best left unexplored I’ve parted with about 120 quid for a Datawind UbiSurfer from Maplin. Its a ex-display model, hence the slight price reduction over the RRP of £149.99.
So, what is the UbiSurfer? In short, its a cheap netbook running an implementation of Linux. Oh, with a years free internet access thrown in.
More about that later, but first the specs:
Note the lack of a spec concerning the processor. Apparently it is some form of ARM 500Mhz job.
Applications wise you get the usual word processing and spreadsheet offerings, and a collections of email clients, PDF readers and the like, all GPLed programs.
For web browsing you have Mozilla IceWeasel (Firefox), which only works when connected via a Wifi hotspot, and the UbiSurfer browser itself.
And now we get to the main (only) reason that I bought this thing: free internet access. Included in the price of the device is 30 hours access per month (for a year) to Vodaphone’s GPRS network, via an onboard modem. As we all know, GPRS isn’t exactly lightening fast, but Datawind claim that any web page can be loaded in 7 seconds.
This is supposed to be achieved by Datawind pre-rendering the web pages on their servers (in Canada) and sending them on in a compressed form to the UbiSurfer browser, which then decodes and displays them.
Ok, that sounds fine in theory, but in practice its not so good.
Datawind’s own site (www.datawind.com) takes about fifteen seconds to load, and more complex site such a Google Mail can take up to a minute to fully render.
This pre-rendering process also throws up problems when entering data onto a web page. Tabbing between fields can take up to ten seconds.
Obviously these problems don’t occur when using IceWeasel and connecting via a Wifi hotspot.
But, oddly, my biggest complaint about the UbiSurfer browser is about the hideous splash screen which also comes up when you disconnect, thus preventing you from viewing pages offline. Here it is in all its glory.
Just look at the smug pissweasel. Those grass stains are going to raise questions in the office after lunch. Luckily you can overwrite the this image with something less irritating.
I shall continue to persevere with this thing, in the hope that I can find a use for it.
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