I’ve had a run of hits recently on the search term “how do I turn on the car heater”. The most obvious answer to this is: READ THE OWNER’S MANUAL. If your car doesn’t have one (it’s usually in the glove box or under a flap somewhere beneath the dashboard) you can easily download them off the internet.
Even without a user manual, though, the controls are pretty much self-explanatory. You usually have three rotary knobs – one for the fan speed, one for the temperature, and one to change the direction of the airflow from the fan.
The fan controller has several speeds, usually ranging from 0 (off) to 4 (maximum). The temperature controller is marked with blue (cool) and red (hot) markers, and by adjusting it you can set the mix of cool/hot air to get the right overall temperature blowing in through the vents.
The direction controller has a number of icons on it similar to those shown below.
From left to right, these represent the air blowing at the driver/passenger out of the dashboard vents, air blowing from both the dashboard and foot well vents, air blowing only into the foot well, air blowing into the foot well and through the windscreen vents, and air blowing only through the windscreen vents. Some vehicles may have other icons, but they will usually be self-explanatory if you understand the ones above. The dashboard air vents have baffles on them which can be closed or angled to adjust the airflow as necessary.
Note that the coolest air that the car can deliver using the basic heater system will be at the same temperature as the outside air, so if it’s 30°C outside then the air blowing through the vents will also be at 30°C. There will also be some ambient heating from the engine, which will be most noticeable when the car is stationary or moving slowly, so the incoming air may actually be several degrees above the outside air temperature.
Most modern cars have air conditioning, which is turned on/off using a button or switch marked “A/C”. This is capable of cooling the air down to substantially below the outside air temperature. The A/C unit also dehumidifies the incoming air, which is useful for preventing misting of your windows during cold weather, but it has the disadvantage of dehydrating the occupants of the car if it is left on all the time (it can lead to irritation of your eyes and throat).
Modern high-end cars have computerised “climate control” systems handling the airflow, often with some sort of visual display. With these it is possible to set different temperatures for the driver and passenger and – usually – the back seat passengers, too. They still use similar icons to what I’ve described above, though the precise mode of operation varies from vehicle to vehicle.
Most vehicles will also have a recirculation button (marked with a curved arrow or similar icon). This adjusts the internal baffles so that little or no outside air is directed into the car. It is useful if you drive through smoke or perhaps if you suffer from hay fever (though most cars these days have pollen filters), or if there is a bad smell outside.
Sometimes you couldn’t make it up. I found this on the BBC website while I was looking for something else.
Derby magistrate, Ajit Atwal, has been suspended as a result of this photo he had took in India posing with an AK-47 rifle.
You have to wonder what was going through his mind to have had the photo taken at all, and then to post it on Twitter for everyone to see. What was the purpose behind the pose?
You then start to wonder at how he managed to become a magistrate in the first place, and then how he can possibly claim he hasn’t “done [anything] wrong”.
You also have to wonder at how the police have concluded that no crime has been committed, and how the Liberal Democrats – of whom Atwal is a member – have decided to take no further action.
What the hell is this world coming to?
Note that this apparently surfaced some weeks ago and has been covered in the national press. I didn’t see it.
A reader sent me this link to an article in the Daily Mash. Titled “Roads are not a velodrome”, it pokes fun at that spiralling number of wannabe athletes who behave like apes on our roads as they take their fragile, expensive, two-wheeled toys that they can’t handle – either physically or mentally – out on to routes which are already dangerous.
Last week, on the Virgin roundabout in Colwick, for example, two of these twats were riding side-by-side and deliberately straight-lined it – still side-by-side. The retard who gave me the evil-eye is hopefully on some sort of court order to prevent him having children for the sake of society. He really shouldn’t be allowed to breed, but unfortunately people like him can usually do it asexually – and I’ll bet asexual sex is something he IS good at. Because cycling certainly doesn’t make the list.
I noticed a surge in hits from people searching for information about Alcopal or reviews of it. As I have said previously, Alcopal does not work. This is especially true when you consider that the guy who is peddling the stuff can’t even make up his mind how it is supposed to work in his marketing claims – he has variously said that it absorbs alcohol before you do, that it prevents it getting into the bloodstream “from the stomach”, and that it masks it on your breath. At the moment he appears to be back to claiming that it absorbs alcohol before you do – which would be scientifically impossible for such a small amount of material as is in the tablets, considering the volume of alcohol the type of arseholes likely to want to use it will have swallowed.
This time around, our erstwhile Snake Oil peddler is claiming that…
New Alcopal tablets guarantee to improve impairments caused by consuming alcohol. Enjoy your night out without the fear of being spiked or ending up in a drunken stupor. Alcopal’s clever little ingredient prevents alcohol being absorbed through the stomach and into the bloodstream; it also gives some protection to the liver and kidneys.
I’m not sure why it is “new”. Maybe because the “old” one didn’t work, after all? But the real problem is that 80% of the alcohol you drink gets absorbed in the small intestine and not the stomach, so even if there was even a slight scientific justification for for claiming Alcopal acts as some sort of barrier in the stomach region, it falls flat on its face when intestinal absorption is brought in. And the comment about the liver and kidneys is a sly suggestion that alcohol-related liver disease can be prevented by Alcopal.
The ingredients in Alcopal do not stop alcohol getting into your bloodstream to any significant extent. The ingredients in Alcopal do not protect your liver and kidneys. The ingredients in Alcopal simply do not work. And the fact that Alcopal Ltd didn’t even bother to respond to the ASA’s questions shows clearly what kind of people you are dealing with.
Don’t waste your time even thinking about buying anything that makes these claims.
You’ve probably seen the news this week about two cases of TB being caught from cats. I suspect that the cleaners at the Daily Mail and The Sun’s headquarters had to clean a lot of urine-soaked carpets this week, as the entire workforce at both establishments probably pissed itself at this brand new opportunity to scaremonger over something.
In fact, The Sun has already started. It managed to dig up a story about dog infecting a human with TB. Since The Sun is no longer free online, I’ll include a link to an alternative version from the Daily Mirror. You will note the wording which allows a timeframe to be surmised:
A child has been diagnosed with tuberculosis after catching it from a family dog.
The pet has now been put down after giving the child the lung disease at a house in Gloucestershire.
The child, aged under ten, has now made a full recovery, according to the Sun.
This is scaremongering at its most pathetic, and the incident appears completely unconnected with the two cat cases. None of the various stories (this one is in the Mail) says when the dog-child case occurred, though normal TB treatment lasts typically between 6-12 months (in serious cases, for up to 2 years) and if the child in question is “fully recovered”, infection must have occurred at the end of last summer at the latest. However, it does establish the fact – if it wasn’t already widely known – that TB can be transmitted from badgers to dogs (and cattle), and then from dogs (and cattle) to the kind of people who are then most likely to put the dogs (or cattle) in their mouths. Oh, and vice versa, because there are historical documented cases of dogs apparently catching TB from humans. There is no reason to assume that it couldn’t miss out the cattle stage and go straight from badger-to-human, and since almost ANY mammal can carry TB it doesn’t take a giant leap of your imagination to see it being transmitted directly from pets. Vets were warning of it a year ago.
If we look at the recent cat incidents that have resulted in human infection, they are from a cluster of nine cases of feline TB identified last year in Berkshire and Hampshire. To get a full picture of what was going on you really do have to read the the right source – one which sees value in scooping a dramatic chat with the “victims” – because it’s only then that you realise that if someone is as soft as a sack of monkeys they would have the cat up to their face a lot of the time (I like cats, and it’s what I’D do if I still had one, and from what I remember if you forget to rub your face against your cat, the cat will come and rub itself against your face to remind you). The stories attempt to blame cleaning an open wound on one cat as the route of transmission, but I’m not prepared to dismiss the in-your-face route that easily. It’s pretty obvious that if a cat had TB there is no reason why it wouldn’t pass this on to a human who was rubbing it with their nose! The cat involved died from the illness. It was a rescue cat and was already unwell.
Regular TB in humans is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (abbreviated M. tuberculosis). Mycobacterium bovis (or M. bovis) is the bacterium that causes TB in cattle, and which is carried by badgers and many other mammals – so many mammals, in fact, that the list includes humans. M. Bovis is the type of TB involved in these pet-human cases. According to Public Health England around 6% of TB deaths are attributable to M. bovis.
It is also worth noting that seven of the nine cats found to be positive for M. Bovis had bite and scratch wounds consistent with fighting with badgers, according to Carl Gorman – the vet who alerted authorities to the outbreak in Berkshire. He also said he believed that an outbreak in local herd of cattle was to blame. All nine cats lived within a three-mile radius, and six of them within 250 yards of each other. There’s nothing sinister involved, and it is certainly not “a mystery”, as suggested by one cat owner who had to have her cat put down. It is rare, but around 25 cats are nonetheless found to have contracted TB every year in Britain.
The two cat incidents are the first documented cases of cat-to-human transmission. There’s no reason to assume it hasn’t happened before, or that it won’t happen again. The apparently unrelated dog-to-human case proves that.
It would appear that a rat weighing around 1kg chewed through concrete and wood to gain entry into a Stockholm kitchen, whereupon it traumatised the human and feline inhabitants for several days until it was finally caught in a giant mousetrap.
As you can see from the photo, it was bloody huge – and unlike the British examples, it really does look like a proper rat. Mind you, yet again something which is such a scientific curiosity that it should be on display in a museum has been destroyed and cannot therefore be verified.
Note the nonsense at the end of the article. There is no scientific evidence that rats are getting bigger – and yet scientists “believe” that they could eventually grow to the size of sheep and weigh nearly 13 stones.
I saw something recently where someone was blaming the fall in numbers of those seeking to become driving instructors on the recession (i.e. the last two years) and, naturally, on RED Driving School – who were actually sold and became a completely different company to the one reviled by most know-it-alls way back in 2010 (i.e. overFOUR years ago).
In actual fact – and it IS a fact – the numbers seeking training began to fall off at least 4 or 5 years ago (not two), which is probably part of the reason why the original RED got into difficulties in the first place. What has actually happened is that the recession has caused many struggling ADIs to quit the job altogether, which has in turn created a market for those who are thinking about becoming ADIs themselves. Indeed, the recession has also created a pool of such people as its effects have not been confined to just the driver training industry. In essence, the recession has created a market and supplied the consumers all in one go. I commented on this a few months ago in the ADI News version of the blog (the New Year issue, I think), and predicted a run on those wishing to become instructors. From what I’ve seen, this is already happening, and even on forums the number of new members asking for advice (and being given given lots of the negative variety) is noticeably greater.
The effects of the recession (particularly the rise out of it) don’t end there, either. I am picking up a new pupil typically every other day at the moment. I’m not exaggerating when I say I may have to close my books for a while to new pupils – and considering that I work weekends and evenings if required, it takes a lot to fill my diary to the level that it’s at right now. This time last year was very quiet – that’s when the recession finally hit me – and it lasted until the summer. Since then it’s just been upwards.
I do find it surprising that so many so-called “professionals” can continue to fail to understand that RED is not the company it used to be in all sorts of different ways. and essentially just retains the name. To keep trying to use the RED name as some sort of dirty weapon – as if all this didn’t happen – is just foolish, and betrays a very bitter outlook.
Recently, I’ve been picking up comments from driving instructors admitting to stress and related health problems (ulcers, obesity, etc.).
I have to confess that when I got on the scales recently I almost lost 10kg there and then when I saw how heavy I was. It’s all due to sitting down all day and not getting any exercise, and I am now on the Mother Of All Diets. Obesity, of course, is a health issue – although it can create or add to stress if you’re worried about it. But it IS something you can easily take control of if you make the effort.
When I was in the final throes of being in the rat race I was getting no recognition for my good performance. Extra work was being piled on to me. In one example I, as a scientist working with process formulation and manufacturing matters for biotech and pharmaceutical companies around the world, was forced to take on the work of an accountant who had left the company until the person they had earmarked to replace him became available. The woman they were waiting for was the wife of a middle manager elsewhere in the organisation, and when she eventually arrived the work I’d done was snatched away with not a word of thanks or congratulations by anyone involved, and she spent the next six months asking ME what to do! And then there were the increasingly stupid managers and policies (of which the accountancy story above is just one example) which prevented any of my other work getting done unless I put in unpaid overtime. Even if I’d stayed there, there was absolutely no chance that any of my work would ever have resulted in promotion – by that time my star had passed its ascendant. And if I had stayed, I’m certain it would have killed me, because the stress I was beginning to experience was totally outside my control. A high pressure job with no reward is a very unpleasant thing.
Stress is different though. Some people are more susceptible than others, and the health problems that result from it can be life-changing and life-lasting. Stress doesn’t always come with a fanfare, either – it can creep up on you, and you might not realise the toll it is taking until it’s too late. It can lead to heart disease, depression, and all kinds of other things.
My experience certainly echoes what the various authorities have to say about external factors such as your job leading to stress. And you might also be worried about your finances or your health, and this can also develop into stress.
However, there are internal factors to consider, as well. You may just be a negative person in the first place, or be a perfectionist who cannot accept their limitations or mistakes. You may find it difficult to plan and coordinate tasks, or look for fixed ideas as solutions to every problem and then be unable to manage the consequences. You may be introverted, and yet be expected to do extrovert things. The list goes on.
Becoming – and being – a driving instructor is potentially stressful from Day One. You may have chosen this career as a result of redundancy or difficulty getting a salaried job, and that raises the ante immediately. Only having three chances to pass Parts 2 and 3 of the exams is bad enough, but if you fear exams in the first place then the situation is much worse. Get through those and there’s the initial setting up of your business to consider. Where will the pupils come from – especially if you listened to the hype and went solo right away? Are you good enough at business matters to survive? Have you been realistic about your earnings profile both at the start, and after your workload stabilises? How will you cope when work drops off (which it always does at some point)? Out on the road there is the issue of pupils trying to total your car. There are other road users who can’t accept that a learner is in front of them, or has priority in a situation, and who behave accordingly – to which your pupil will respond in kind by panicking and trying even harder to total your car. There are homeowners who are convinced the boundaries of their property extend 100 metres in all directions beyond their fence, and who will cause trouble when you stop outside their house. Again, the list goes on and on. And most of these things remain issues every day that you are an instructor.
If you really know what you are doing you can deal with all that – certainly enough to prevent it resulting in stress-related illnesses. But the reason I wrote this article was because of some other comments I read about travelling times between lessons.
My ideal day is to have a two-hour lesson at 10am, another at 2pm, and one more at 6pm. Give me a full week of those and I am very happy indeed. The two-hour gap gives me time to go to the loo, have a snack, put my feet up, or go and do some shopping. A much less satisfying day is if I get six one-hour lessons, because that only leaves an hour between each, and that means rushing between them. So I was surprised to see someone claim that they leave half an hour or “even 45 minutes” so that they can go shopping, eat in a cafe, and/or take a toilet break. If you want to have stress creep up on you, that is one sure-fire way of letting it!
You see, with my “ideal day” I’d end up with 42 hours of lessons in a week, because I work 7 days a week (including evenings) if needs be. Of course, in reality I don’t always do 42 hours. I once did 60 (and it hurt), and at the start of last year when the recession finally caught up with me I did a few weeks in the low twenties (that hurt, too, but for different reasons). My average is typically in the range 30-40 hours – with the occasional weeks higher or lower than that.
I suspect that the problem lies with the minimum number of hours an instructor needs to work if they do this full-time. For it to be anywhere near worthwhile as a paying job you’ve got to do at least 25-30 hours a week. If you work 7 days a week that means an average of at least four hours a day, but if you don’t do evenings or weekends, the average daily hours rises to at least six. When you start trying to squeeze that in Monday to Friday daytimes you’re creating a problem for yourself, and the only way you can do it is if you start giving yourself silly 30-minute travelling times. Subsequently, that means timing your lessons to perfection (i.e. using a stopwatch and never over-running even by a minute). And this is for just 30 hours – you haven’t a hope in hell of fitting in extra lessons if pupils want them. There is no way you can do this job full time such that you are working literally ALL the time while you’re doing it, and do it to a high standard, if you are racing from one lesson to the next all the time. Heck, one of the main reasons I went for it was that you can “choose your own hours” – and you can, as long as you don’t interpret that as being able to pick and choose pupils as if they were controlled by a tap.
You can see how working in a rushed manner is going to create stress just by itself. But by treating pupils the way you’re going to have to treat them, and bearing in mind the way you might be behaving towards them if you’re already maxed out on the stress-o-meter by racing between lessons, you’re very likely to lose some of them. They aren’t going to give you a good review, and so over time your workload will quite possibly be adversely affected by it. And that leads to yet more stress. Believe me, I pick pupils up all the time who are surprised at how I conduct my lessons (in turn, I’m always surprised by what they have become accustomed to).
By leaving myself at least an hour between lessons (wherever possible) I can make sure I’m nice and relaxed at the start of each one, and I don’t have to worry about over-running by a few minutes. By not restricting my available hours in the first place I have no worries about being able to get my required number of lessons in. By being generous to pupils, it allows me room to negotiate when the need arises. So I am managing all the stressful parts of the job that I have the ability to directly influence. Plus, the extra work when it’s available covers me for time off when I need it and the lean times when the work isn’t quite as freely available.
A few weeks ago The Old Angel pub was forced to cancel a Valentine’s Day event it was organising called “Bag a Slag, Grab a Hag”. The organiser was one of the female staff and it was just a bit of fun, offering those taking part free drinks.
The important thing to bear in mind here is that you can safely bet that a significant proportion of those taking part would have been neither slags or hags. That’s why it was simply a “fun” event. But that didn’t stop the local Feminist Action Network (FAN) representative, Ruth Greenburg, from asking:
Is that all women are – slags and hags?
You can safely conclude that FAN is completely devoid of any sense of humour whatsoever. And Nottingham City Council also showed its true colours yet again by trumping up the charges and effectively threatening the landlord’s licence.
It was interesting, therefore, to see this new BBC story today reporting that student feminist campaigners had succeeded in getting newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Star banned from Student Union shops on the University campus. And all because of Page 3.
Francesca Garforth, who led the campaign group University of Nottingham Feminists with Jo Lockwood Estrin, said it was simply wrong to use suggestive pictures as a way of selling papers.
“It takes the idea that this woman has an opinion and is allowed to voice it because she’s also got her breasts out,” she said.
Miss Estrin said: “The amount of people it harms – one in seven women on university campuses in the UK are raped or seriously sexually assaulted and we do believe that it is a link to these kinds of images being normalised.
“Seeing these images on a day-to-day basis normalises the idea that women are there and voiceless.”
Well, I suppose everyone is entitled to their 15 minutes of fame. Meanwhile, the women who choose to appear on Page 3 will, of course, continue to make wads of money in spite of Garforth and Estrin’s “victory”. And the students will just buy their copies of the papers somewhere else.
I am very, very shocked by the punishment he has been given.
I don’t think that is fair at all. I think they must have wanted to make an example of him. But I think a slap on the wrist would have been sufficient.
Perhaps he could have gone on a driver awareness course, but what he has got from the court is really quite harsh. I would not wish that fine on anybody.
Whoa. Hold on a minute, here. Debbie Pugh – a “company director” – wasn’t quite so forgiving back in January. When the Daily Mail interviewed her at the time, she said:
The water went up over my shoulders, totally drenching me and the children – it was dirty, cold and it was disgusting. What he did was absolutely on purpose, there’s no doubt about it at all.
The driver could have avoided the puddle by going around it but he chose to speed through it and soak us all. I was fuming at the time.
My boy was in tears afterwards. The children were so wet I thought they might have to wear their PE kits when they arrived at school.
I saw the police were behind him when it happened but I did not initially realise they had stopped him.
When I came back from the school at about 9am there were blue lights flashing and they had pulled a car over and I realised it was him. At the time I was so angry – I am glad the police took action – people can’t go around driving like that.
You see, Ms Pugh, you got your wish. He no longer can go around driving like that. And this is one good reason why people like you shouldn’t be interviewed by newspapers and your opinions publicised. Your indignation could easily have influenced the outcome of the court’s decision, whereas your complete change of tune wouldn’t. Once upon a time, your ambivalent attitude might easily have resulted in someone innocent being executed. In this modern setting, Lees can no longer drive and may lose his job as a result.
Now, I am not commenting on the severity of the punishment. Lees deserves to be punished, and I don’t believe all his claims of innocence for one second. But again we have the problem of consistency in British Law. As the more recent report mentions, back in 2009 a woman, Kerry Callard, posted a Facebook video of herself splashing some kids at a bus stop. She can be heard squealing with glee as she does so. But police only “had a word with her”. Then, several years before that a guy from Somerset was fined £150 and given three points on his licence for wetting the trouser bottoms of a workman as he drove through a puddle at 10mph.
The offence of splashing pedestrian – certainly, the prosecution of it – is quite rare. But the few extant cases clearly show blatant sexual discrimination on the part of the authorities. Callard is by far the worst offender in this small sample – even videoing herself committing the crime on purpose – yet she got off completely. Someone who was taking genuine care through a puddle got points. Lees is somewhere in between those two – and got six points plus a £500 fine. As a new driver, six points is equal to a ban.
to sitting down all day and not getting any exercise, and I am now on the Mother Of All Diets. Obesity, of course, is a health issue – although it can create or add to stress if you’re worried about it. But it IS something you can easily take control of if you make the effort.