York Street works

I had wondered Wednesday night why the no parking cones were arrayed down the left-hand side of York Street; on Thursday I found out. A roadworks to the right sign as you approach from Lion Hill, two large yellow signs telling us that the (unmarked) right-hand lane was closed, and cones further down to push us into the left.

They were digging up the pavement between the Chinese takeaway and the barbers and needed the space to allow pedestrians access. All well and good, but wouldn't it have been an idea to temporarily move the bus-stop that's directly opposite the works a bit further up the road?

Then again according to the report it's Electricity work that's only supposed to be for one day (yesterday).

The cause of the telephone outage

I did pop an email over to Clive at the Shuttle mentioning the outage yesterday as a possible story. It seems that BT are much more willing to keep the press informed as to what was going on than they do anyone else, though perhaps not to a degree of accuracy.

I called them up at roughly 3pm (the lines being out from around 2pm not 4pm) after ascertaining that it wasn't just our building and that it seemed to affect a much wider area.


I told them it wasn't just affecting us and that they may have a problem with the exchange yet their response - we can see no faults on the system, perhaps it's a fault at your end.

The actual cause - "technical problems in several exchanges".

Dead lines

Here's an odd one - I just got back from lunch and the buildings telephone lines were dead. All the internal systems worked, just no outside dial tone. However here's the weird thing I plugged a test phone into the broadband line - no tone, yet the broadband is still working. I check over the road - they have a dial tone.

I return, we now have a dial tone. Oh good. Until I realise we can't make any calls out. Over the road can, we can't. On any of the three lines. Oh and anyone calling here seems to get "network busy".

[Update - Nope over the road can't call out, and trying to call local numbers from my mobile just bombs out. So it looks like the local exchange is out]

[Contacted someone on the other side of the river by mobile, their phone is out too.]

Forbidden Island review

Looking after the Bratii on Sunday I tried out a new game I'd bought "Forbidden Island" 2-4 players ages 10 up. It comes in a nice tin box about half the size of a 'standard' board game and takes up about a half-metre square to set-up so it doesn't need a lot of space.


The premise is that treasure seekers land on this island and need to find the four treasures and escape before the island sinks. So it's a co-operative rather than competitive game which is a damn good reason for trying to get the Bratii to play it.

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Adobe Acrobat printer spool

One of those automatic updates for Adobe Acrobat came down the line last week and failed to install properly with Vista locking up as it tried to work.

One restart later and I found that Acrobat thought it had the latest version and thus no updates were necessary. Hmm guess it worked then, certainly opened everything up okay.

Nope. Yesterday I went to turn a spreadsheet into a PDF and found the printer was gone. There's no way to install it so I had to head into the Control Panel and do a repair. Off it chortled in the background while I carried on with other work. As some information was needed to takeaway I hit print to send it to the local printer and received the message that there were no printers installed.

Yep in order to repair itself and re-install the printer driver Acrobat had to turn off the printer service. As the repair involved downloading things this meant I had to wait for over five minutes for it to do its thing.

What on earth is the need to stop the printer service just to add or remove a printer?

Teaching the kids

Watched this morning as a women tried to drag six kids and push a seventh across the three lanes of Vale Road. Out into the queue of the third lane (the sun is out and low) she went and peered around the vehicles to see the other two lanes.

So we go to all the trouble to teach children to always cross where they can see clearly, where it's safe etc. and then undermine it all by pulling stunts like this. And before anyone thinks I'm just criticising the generation under me, I watch those of my generation and those above me (who really should know better) doing the same thing.

Sure sometimes the road layout stinks and the local council in their wisdom has positioned crossing points in areas that prevent you seeing what's coming; but that doesn't excuse all of it.

Beyond science

Over at the Shuttle on Hugh's blogs there's been discussion about science or to be precise at what point does science stop. I mentioned there the table/stool point - what's the difference between the two? If I sit on a table does it become a stool? In other words things that cannot be empirically dissected. I also mentioned the uncanny valley where the features of Homer Simpson seem more 'realistic' than the most sophisticated computer generated image.

In than vein here are the latest benchmarks from 3DMark that use cutting edge technology to render two scenes - a jungle temple and underwater exploration. They look great, but I doubt anyone watching them would mistake it for reality or even a filmed sequence. Why not?

Science provides a framework in which to function, yet some things don't quite slot in and just sticks out the side; left hanging there. It's possible we may find the connecting pieces, it's possible there are no connecting pieces, but if we just launch ourselves off without a tether it's meaningless.