Changing the clocks - a complete waste of time

Damn you, Mr Willett!

It's that time of year again when British Summer Time has just ended and everyone in the UK has had to set all their clocks back an hour to revert to Greenwich Mean Time. Every time this happens, I wonder at the point of it all as it takes an enormous amount of effort to give no apparent benefit. It is a procedure that could so easily be done away with, and it only takes one person forgetting to throw things into disarray, yet it has existed for almost a century and seems to be accepted as a fact of life and rarely questioned. The arguments against the practice clearly outweigh those in favour of it, and as a means of saving money its abolition is much less controversial than many of the government's other proposals, so I can't understand why we continue to abide by this antiquated and irrelevant tradition without questioning its real purpose.

Showbus part 2

Rather later than anticipated due to other commitments, here is the promised second part of my review of this year's Showbus rally at Woburn Abbey. Having already described the serious organisational problems in the first part, this one is rather more positive and concentrates on the exhibits themselves. At an event of this size, it isn't realistically possible to photograph everything, and I had seen several of the vehicles before at smaller local events so these were overlooked in favour of those I hadn't previously encountered. As discussed elsewhere on this blog, the big groups and their low-floor buses aren't of great interest, and nor are London buses, so I make no apologies for largely ignoring these too, and this review focuses on the vehicles that caught my eye.

This Plaxton Viewmaster was superb and one of my favourites.

Welcome to Cass County

Record Review: Cass County by Don Henley

The release of new material by Don Henley is an all-too-rare occurrence so September 25 2015 was a momentous day for fans as his much-anticipated fifth solo album Cass County finally went on sale. Henley fans have been waiting a very long time for this as it has been fifteen years since his last solo release Inside Job and eight years since the Eagles' Long Road Out Of Eden, and in those eight years all three of Henley's bandmates have released new albums: Timothy B. Schmit's Expando, Glenn Frey's After Hours and Joe Walsh's Analog Man, leaving Henley as the last Eagle to commit to a new release. So what is this long-awaited album like and does it live up to the weight of expectation? Read on to find out what I think...

Making better use of the news feed

As a software developer myself, I understand that one of the biggest challenges facing IT companies, especially the large ones with user numbers in the thousands or even millions, is effectively communicating product changes to these users. Many companies fail dismally at this, resulting in much of their user base remaining quite simply unaware that these changes have been made unless they stumble across them accidentally. Putting news in a support forum or on a webpage is ineffective as the majority of users don't visit these sites and won't see these posts, and emails are fraught with problems of delivery failures and spam filtering with no guarantee of receipt. What is needed is a way to communicate information on software changes directly to the user through a medium they are already using to receive other types of news, and it suddenly occurred to me that Facebook already have the perfect platform for achieving this, yet are not exploiting the full power of it.

Shambolic Showbus

A tale of woe from Woburn...

Showbus has firmly established itself on bus enthusiasts' calendars and claims to be Britain's biggest and best bus rally, but that claim must be in doubt after the experience of the 2015 event yesterday. In recent years it had settled at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, a well suited if expensive venue, but with the museum no longer willing to host the event an alternative had to be found and this year it returned to Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, where it had last been held in 1992. It had been nine years since I last attended a Showbus rally, but with Woburn being a simple 20 mile journey from home I felt it was worth a visit this time. Little did I know of the controversy that was about to unfold and ruin what had once been a premier event. Showbus has thrown off its old nickname of 'Showerbus' and taken on various new ones including 'Slowbus' and 'Shamblesbus'...

Unsung heroes: the Invacar

Today's unsung hero was a common (if not universally popular) sight but has been gone from Britain's roads for over a decade: the Invacar Model 70 invalid carriage that was once the government's preferred option for the provision of motoring to the disabled and seemed to be a fixture pretty much everywhere. While most older vehicles have disappeared gradually due to natural attrition, the Invacar's demise was much more sudden and literally a case of "here today, gone tomorrow", having been outlawed overnight and quickly scrapped almost to the point of extinction. It arguably outlived its usefulness and was no longer appropriate, and was killed off in favour of much better options, but the country's roads just aren't the same without its distinctive presence.

Any colour you like as long as it's blue. Who remembers these buzzing around?
(By Charles01 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Unsung heroes: Nissan Bluebird

The unsung heroes series today turns its attention to another car from a Japanese manufacturer, although in reality it was actually a product of home-grown British industry. This was the car with which Nissan established themselves as a major player in Europe and that laid the foundations for the Japanese marques' dominance of UK car production. Cars from Japan may have started to gain a substantial foothold in the 1970s, but it was in the eighties with models like the T12/T72 Nissan Bluebird that they really became a mainstream choice. It may have had a Japanese badge but the Bluebird was essentially a British car, more so than many of the contemporary Fords and Vauxhalls that despite being thought of as British were actually built elsewhere in mainland Europe. The earliest Bluebirds are now thirty years old but survival rates are higher than many of their contemporaries, a testament to their durability and the large quantities in which they were sold.

An early Washington-built Bluebird, still giving good service to its ninth owner.

Further Facebook friend frustration

Following up on a previous post written a few months ago, I have started to notice a new form of irritating behaviour becoming increasingly common on Facebook recently. Many friend requests are never being accepted or rejected by the recipient and are simply being left pending indefinitely, and in some cases this appears to be deliberate and intentional. It only takes a second to click the 'Accept' or 'Not now' buttons so at first I thought this was simply laziness, and to some extent it probably is but I've started to realise Facebook themselves may also be partly responsible.

To support my argument I have been regularly monitoring someone I sent a request to and have confirmed that she has accepted friend requests from other people since receiving mine that is still pending, and thus has definitely been online and seen my request. I find that extremely annoying: when accepting those requests there is no good reason why she couldn't have dealt with mine at the same time, so I just don't understand why it has been ignored and others accepted. Please people, if you don't want to be friends with someone, at least make the effort to let them know by rejecting their request and don't just leave them in suspense forever.

Buses Festival at Gaydon

A couple of months since my last visit to Gaydon for the truck show, I was back again on Sunday, this time for the Buses Festival. Organised by Buses magazine, this was a new event on the rally calendar for 2014 in response to dissatisfaction with the 2013 Showbus venue at Long Marston, and returned bigger and better this year, with almost a hundred vehicles in attendance. This was the first bus rally I had attended for a couple of years so these are my impressions, both as a first-time visitor to this particular event and as a returnee to bus rallies in general.

The M50 - a drive into the past

A trip to South Wales with a friend at the weekend saw part of the journey undertaken on the M50 motorway, or Ross Spur as it is sometimes known, and as a passenger I was able to appreciate the unique character of this odd little road. While many readers would probably consider roads in general to be boring and motorways especially so, the M50 is actually rather interesting, despite being a mere 21 miles long with only four junctions. Being one of Britain's oldest motorways but lightly used and little modified since it was built, it is probably as close as it is possible to get to an authentic 1960s motorway travel experience, and one of those four junctions is also rather remarkable.