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On the pretest lesson we were running through all the manoeuvres. As we entered a retail park to do the Bay Park exercise, I said:

At the roundabout, turn left (first exit) and follow the road into the car park. We are NOT going into McDonalds – the road curves to the right.

So, we turn left off the roundabout and head straight into McDonalds (which is a left turn, as clearly indicated by the road markings). This was on top of another roundabout a few minutes earlier, where I’d said:

At the roundabout, turn right.

Admittedly, I didn’t say ‘third exit’ – but we end up going back the way we’ve just come!

(Incidentally, last night I was out with a pupil and I asked him to take the next turn on the right. This right turn is from a very wide road into another very wide one, and it heads down a steepish hill around a bend to the left. So, he tries it in 3rd gear, picks up 3rd gear speed on the turn itself, and then – and only then – tries to decide where the road goes and attempts to drive across it and into a small cul-de-sac. And better yet, he puts gas on as he panics. Things like this aren’t that common, but you have to be ready for them at all times!)

Anyway, back to that test. She was extremely nervous. Just about everything on the road was going wrong as we got closer to the test. But in spite of the bad pretest lesson, she passed with 7 driver faults . Well done AS.

I had to get up at 5.30am to pick up a pupil at 7am for an 8.20am test. I hate getting up early, but it is the best time to book tests so as not to disrupt the rest of my diary (although I finished at 10pm tonight, so it’s been a long day).

He passed first time with 7 driver faults, so well done AS.

Then I had a 12.30pm pickup for a 2.05pm test. This was an older pupil, and she was very nervous – she’d been sick this morning due to worry over the test. The thing was, she’s a great driver and the kind I’d put money on passing, but nothing I could say could persuade her that she stood a good chance of passing (it’s always the same, though).

And she did pass, with just 4 driver faults. Well done YC.

On top of all this I had the second lesson (8-10pm) with a new pupil who hadn’t driven before last Sunday, and he is going to be an absolute joy: he learns fast and he’s very pleasant. Plus he wants to pass as soon as possible and is taking 2 hour lessons several times a week.

I love days like these.

This story in The Telegraph covers a battle looming amongst Marks & Spencer (a UK retailer) shareholders concerning M&S’s surcharge on bras of size DD and above.

In summary, there is a bunch of lunatics calling themselves Busts 4 Justice who cannot accept that the extra material required to make a larger bra warrants an extra charge. Basically, they’re a bunch of feminists… and all that that implies from the perspectives of intelligence and reason.

Ever since I can remember, if I want an XL (or XXL, or XXXL, depending on the system used – usually, a mere L wouldn’t fit a Barbie Doll) T-shirt then I am accustomed to pay more for it than if I bought an S (which probably would need a magnifying glass to see properly). The same goes for underwear, trousers, shirts, suits, and so on.

Why do these idiots have to assume that brassieres are any different?

Ah, yes! They are feminists – so although anything which is pro-male is evil incarnate, it is completely acceptable for things to be pro-female… and the more anti-male the pro-female propaganda is the more acceptable it will be to these morons.

Can you imagine what small people might start doing if they twig that they’re paying the same as women with big breasts and tiny brains?

I also heard on the radio at lunchtime that this organisation has bought shares in M&S, and it plans to disrupt the next shareholder meeting with its protests (heaven knows what form these will take).

Edit: Seems like a lot of people are actually interested in Busts 4 Justice’s website – it’s actually a Facebook page and you can find it here.

They’ve got 15,500 members, and I can’t help wondering how many of them are men. But I will point out to them all that although M&S appears to have scrapped the surcharge (i.e. it is now making a loss/less profit on the larger sizes at a time of recession – well done ladies), it has done so not because Busts 4 Justice is right but because it wants to avoid the bad publicity childish behaviour at a shareholder meeting would create.

Que sera!

Further to the Prog Rock shows on BBC4 a couple of months ago, there was a great Blues Programme on yesterday – you can watch it online here (for 6 days).

There’s performances from Son House (he was awesome), The Kinks, BB King, Eric Clapton and others. Definitely worth a listen.

I didn’t mention that The Sun’s  online story yesterday ( which I commented on here) had the web page  title ‘ All Humanity Is At Risk ‘. Alarmist or what?

Well, today they have another story about a new case and the web page this time is titled ‘ Swine Flu Victims Face Bed Lottery In Pandemic ‘. Erm. It isn’t a pandemic and no one is facing a lottery for beds. But other than that it is totally accurate.

The Sun trumpets:

BRITAIN’S first person-to-person transfer of swine flu has been confirmed today.

NHS worker Graeme Pacitti, 24 – a pal of swine flu couple Iain and Dawn Askham **“ is being treated for the killer bug, the Scottish government said.

If what I heard on the radio today is true – and if it is pitted against The Sun then I’ll lay odds on it being so – they can’t confirm it is swine flu and the doctor they interviewed said the guy had some sniffles and things. Hardly the exploding intestines, erupting volcanoes, and cessation of all life on the planet the likes of The Sun is telling us swine flu gives rise to.

EDIT: OK. It has been confirmed Mr Pacitti has caught it from the two people who brought it back from Mexico. However, on the radio they were interviewing him by telephone and he was just saying how he felt a bit unwell. As I remember it, normal flu lays you out like anything and giving phone interviews is way down your list of capabilities, let alone priorities. The Sun was still guessing at this when it went to print.

There seems to be a worldwide conspiracy amongst vendors of this type of software – where you can analyse the log files which record who visited your site.

The software is either free (which also means that it has to be impossibly complicated to install and set up unless you wrote it in the first place), or you pay for it (which means having to rob a large bank in order to afford a version which comes even close to meeting some of your basic requirements).

I discovered this over the last two days. WordPress’s stats plugin started playing up, and I was confronted with a never-changing bar graph which showed absolutely meaningless data. So I began looking for something a bit more advanced. I started with the free stuff, like you do. I managed to find one or two open-source programs which didn’t involve downloading the source code, compiling it, and deploying it yourself (a lot of open-source stuff is extremely experimental). I managed to get some of them working, only to discover the authors appear to have a bar chart fixation (and a crap bar chart fixation, at that). Why is it that open-source programmers usually have absolutely no concept of neat appearance or ease-of-use? You inevitably have to install some obscure patch (or Java – and wade through the 3 million variants it exists as to get the right one, usually an older version because the open-source you are trying to use won’t run on the current version), and then find out it won’t work anyway!

After trialling a couple of free ones I quickly discovered their limitations. Probably the main one is that the log files my host provides contain the hits for all the sites I host on my webspace, and these freebies just take the whole file and process it without any filtering.

So I switched my attention to the ones you have to pay for. The cheapest one I found was about $70 – and that is not cheap at all, when you consider you can get fully-functional video authoring suites (for example) for less than half that price. But they nearly all exist in various versions: beginner, business, pro, and so on, and the one that has the features you might need is always one of the top-end versions – and the price now leaps to at least $150 and sometimes as much as £2,000

If you’re going to spend anything like this kind of money you want to try the software first, right? So with one of them I did. Everything was going perfectly smoothly right up to the not-so-insignificant part where I tried to run the 30-day trial for the first time:

You have altered your system clock to try and circumvent copy-protection. Blah, blah, blah!

No I bloody haven’t. I have just installed the program and run it for the first time and this message came up less than 5 seconds later. So have a word with Mr Uninstaller, and enjoy your duel with the Recession.

I did discover that many of these Commercial Thugs provide a ‘lite’ version (i.e. free), but I also discovered that the lite version is invariably totally useless – like buying a car, and finding out the free ‘lite’ model doesn’t come with an engine or wheels. Or a chassis. And maybe not even paint.

I installed a few others and got nowhere. Some simply wouldn’t run. Others were utter rubbish. In fact, I was unable to trial a single one that appeared to come even close to what I wanted – and they expect me to pay $150+ for this? Think again.

Anyway, WordPress seems to have sorted out the prolonged outage that it didn’t tell me about, so I can stick with that for a while longer. I suppose it did tell people somewhere or other. But unless you are more interested in talking about WordPress than actually using it I guess you’d miss it.

I’m convinced I saw one of these this evening.

I was driving home and I’d stopped to make a phone call. The place where I stopped was right underneath the flightpath for incoming aircraft at East Midlands Airport.

You have to imagine the landing path running from left to right (basically, east to west). You usually see the planes banking in from either the north or south on the eastern (left) side of the flightpath as they take their turn out of the stack. At peak times there is about one plane every few minutes.

Well, at some time shortly after 8pm there was a plane travelling along the normal route from left to right (east to west) when another plane cut across from south to north. They were at the same altitude (judging by their relative sizes) and I can honestly say that they occupied less than an outstretched hand’s breadth of the sky. That is bloody close for a plane at such a low altitude, I’m sure.

Not seen anything in the news, though.

Great gig on Sunday. Went to see Gary Moore at the Leeds O2 Academy with a friend who lives up that way.

Gary Moore was better than usual – lots of solos and extended pieces. He seems to get better as he gets older. But a bonus to the gig was the support act: Buddy Whittington.

Buddy is a blues musician – and a bloody great gutarist and vocalist, above all else. I must admit that when he came on stage his face looked familiar, but the name didn’t ring any bells. I think he was on a BBC show a few months ago with Eric Clapton. He has to be one of the best blues guitarists around at the moment.

He was also a really nice guy. At the end of his set he announced that his new CD was on sale at the merchandise kiosk. When I went over there it turns out he was there signing copies and chatting with people, so I’ve got a real keeper here, I reckon. It seems he does this at most of his gigs, which just reinforces what a decent bloke he is.

His album is on sale from Amazon here, and I really recommend it.

Well, we’ve had a few months of pretty low fuel prices. It went up to £1.20+ a litre at the peak of the last hike, but fell quite quickly to well under 90p. It was funny reading the know-it-alls in the driving instructing industry who predicted “that’s it: it will never fall below £1 ever again “.

Well, there was a delayed tax which went on to the price a few weeks ago and prices have risen a little in their own right – currently around 93p a litre.

But the Daily Mail hasn’t tried to cause problems for while and has now reported that price rises have “[overtaken] last spring’s cost surge”. What idiots these people are – half of the increase was due to a delayed tax increase, so has nothing to do with last year’s rises. It’s also down to oil companies profiteering.

But this is just the Mail trying to cause another scare. And it has the kind of readership which readily drives its 4x4s to the nearest garage the second the Mail tells them to.

Just watching the BBC lunchtime news and saw some demonstrations against job losses in Northern Ireland.

Why are people stupid enough to believe that going on strike, demonstrating, rioting (it’s inevitable, isn’t it?), and so on is somehow enough to drag a company back from the edge of bankruptcy and into a healthy situation?

I mean, these same people are probably the ones who were prepared to strike the last time the company in question (and I’m speaking generally) forgot to replace a toilet roll in the company lavatory, or switched to a cheaper and less luxurious alternative. They’ll be the same ones who never miss a chance to report problems to The Union. Trust me, I’ve been there and witnessed it over many years – it IS the way things operate.

So I wonder why it is they can’t see where one of the biggest causes of the mess the company they’re demonstrating against is in is really located?