Supermoon Eclipse 2015

I stayed up late last night to watch the eclipse. Here are some of the photos I took. First of all, the moon at around 10.30pm Sunday (before anything had started):Moon - 27/9/2015 approx 10.30pm

Now, the moon at about 1.20-am Monday morning. There was a hint of something in the top left, though it isn’t easily seen in the photo:Moon - about 1.20am Monday morning

This next one is at around 1.40am. Definitely something happening now but still not easily discernible on the photo:Moon - about 1.40am Monday morning

Now, the appearance at about 2.10am Monday. Absolutely no mistaking it now:Moon - approximately 2.10am Monday

This one is from around 2.30am:Moon - around 2.30am Monday morning

This is at 2.55am. I’d left it a bit long and it had progressed further than I expected:Moon - around 2.55am Monday morning

I noticed that although the reddish tinge was visible to the naked eye, I was focusing on the lit part of the moon so was getting quite a fast exposure – meaning that the red part wasn’t showing up. This next image is from the same time (2.55am), but with my focus on the darker part. The lit part is over-exposed slightly as a result:Moon - approx 2.55am Monday morning, different exposure

By now, it had almost reached totality and over-exposure wasn’t as much of a problem. This is from around 3.15am.Moon - around 3.15am Monday morning

Here’s another from the same time, with the focus shifted slightly:Moon - approx 3.15am Monday morning, different exposure

And finally around 3.40am. I couldn’t stay up any longer as I had to go to work in the morning (note that exposure time was so long you can even see a couple of stars just to the right):Moon - approximately 3.40am Monday Morning

And another different exposure from the same time:Moon - around 3.40am Monday morning, different exposure

If I ever do anything like this again, I’ll check to make sure forecast times are in BST and not GMT – everything was an hour later than I’d expected!

Chilwell High Street Speed Limit

Someone found the blog on that precise search term. The arseholes on Nottingham’s City Council have made it very difficult for the average driver with their overdue tram and the resulting speed limit changes.

Within the city ward there is the council’s “blanket 20mph speed limit on urban roads”. Not all urban roads, you understand. No, the morons couldn’t justify making it 20mph on all roads. So you find yourself moving from a 20mph zone, to a 30, then back to a 20 again, all in the space of a few dozen metres. But then you have the boroughs, who haven’t adopted the same policy, and to add to the confusion some areas of those (e.g. West Bridgford, in Rushcliffe Borough) are several miles closer to the city centre than some city areas (e.g. Clifton and Wilford).

Then there is the criminally inaccurate signage. There are still city areas where the original 30mph signs haven’t been taken down, and these stand isolated between the new 20mph signs. Much of the signage is probably illegal or non-enforceable, since it is of the wrong size – the City Council totally underestimated how many signs it would have to erect, and how much that would cost, so as well as the old 30mph signs it couldn’t afford to remove, it also couldn’t afford to replace existing large 20mph signs (where an old 30mph zone changed to 20mph) to smaller ones (now that those 20mph zones are within a larger 20mph zone). This breaches the The Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2002 (TSRGD) legislation.

Beeston and Chilwell are not within the city boundary, and speed limits there vary for reasons other than the incompetence and bloody-mindedness of the City’s Portfolio Holder for Planning and Housing. To answer the question used to find the blog, the speed limit on Chilwell High Street (actually, it’s Chilwell Road at the Beeston end and High Road at the Chilwell end) is 30mph along most of it. However, outside the Clown College for a distance of a couple of hundred metres it is 20mph. There are signs, but they are about half way in size between the big ones and the smaller repeaters, and they aren’t easily visible among the tram ironwork littering the place. At the time of writing they do not appear on Google Earth or Google Maps since the imagery on there was taken while tram construction was still incomplete.*

* It’s still incomplete now, but less so than it was then.

Total Lunar Eclipse

Anyone who is interested in this sort of thing will already know that Sunday night/Monday morning there will be a total lunar eclipse which coincides with a “supermoon” (where the moon is as close to the Earth as it gets, therefore at its largest). It’s quite a rare event, and another one isn’t due until 2033. The UK is also being dominated by high pressure at the moment, which promises clear skies.The moon as it appeared on 25 September

I’m planning to take some pictures of it, and if we DO get a clear sky then they should look like the one above. I took this tonight using a tripod and remote control shutter release with my Panasonic Lumix FZ200. You get an idea of how good this camera is for the price when you zoom in on the image a little.The lower left - showing Tycho, I think

If all goes to plan, I should be able to get a good set of images covering the eclipse.

Essex Parking Wardens

I love this story. It seems that from Monday, teachers and parents outside Essex schools will be able to act as traffic wardens with the power to issue tickets. In what must rank as one of the greatest understatements of all time, a teaching union has warned:

…it could create conflict between staff and some parents.

I’ve mentioned this story before, but when I was working on tech support we dealt with calls from all over the country – sometimes, even from outside the UK. I think I can safely say that callers from Essex were generally the most obnoxious and aggressive of the lot. In one particular case, just after we’d had a new phone system installed which didn’t work too well, I answered one particular call with my usual cheery greeting, only to be answered with a tirade of abuse about how long he’d been waiting (a ridiculous 90 minutes). I explained that I understood his frustration and apologised to him, but I explained we had a new call handling system which had a few teething troubles that were outside the control of the support agents. His response was “don’t give me that”, and he went off again in his crass Ilford accent. I just said: “OK. You can wait another 90 minutes” and hung up.Essex - county of class

There’s a pretty good chance this guy – and plenty of others like him – turning up in their Chelsea tractors and parking wherever they damn well like (which is why this is happening in Essex in the first place) will not take that kindly to having their crassness highlighted by others.

Thurrock council has a rose-tinted view of the potential problems:

We have teachers, parents and residents telling us time and again about frighteningly dangerous parking outside schools, but we don’t have the money to have an army of traffic wardens.

There are teachers and head teachers who try to marshal the traffic already and what they’ve said to us is that if they have the authority to issue a ticket, it’s another weapon in their armoury.

I think we will get volunteers because issuing a ticket will be the last resort – it’s about talking and cajoling people to change their behaviour and I would be delighted if we never issue a single ticket.

What planet is this moron from? It’s Essex, with Essex mothers (and fathers) involved. The problem is so widespread that they have teachers, parents, and residents reporting serious parking problems ”time and again”. And he hopes that “talking and cajoling” will avoid the need to issue “a single ticket”? Why doesn’t HE sort it out instead of leaving it to the teachers? It’s his bloody job to handle it.

I wonder if I could get good odds on predicting when the first physical conflict will place?

2015 Darwin Awards – Too Late With This One

A few months ago, all hell broke loose in the Primark store, Leicester. You see, it turns out that a security guard – who was also a man (see feminist representation below) – had approached a woman who was breastfeeding and asked her to leave.Pick of Destiny - Satan

She refused, and the guard allegedly ripped the baby from her breast and effectively dangled it like a metaphorical carrot before the metaphorical donkey, telling her that if she wanted her daughter she’d have to go and get her.

At the time of the alleged incident, the woman – Caroline Starmer, 28, of Leicester – hurried on over to the Free to Feed breastfeeding campaign page and told her tale. She further wrote that she was in “complete shock” as a result of this “horrific experience” and in “a right mess” as a result of her treatment. Indeed, she was “shot” – which anyone would be after plundering the thesaurus so completely.

As you might imagine, there were plenty of people out there who believed the story immediately. They actually WANTED to believe it – starting with the kind of people who would join a website or campaign like Free to Feed*, and followed rapidly by those who host daytime TV shows.

Even in the first article, reporting the incident just after it had happened, Primark had pointed out that there was no CCTV evidence that she’d even been approached, let alone had her child torn from her breast. It concluded:

…that the customer’s allegation is not supported by the available evidence to date.

Quite. And the reason that the allegation wasn’t supported was that it never happened. None of it. You see, Starmer, whose Facebook page contains the “profile picture” below, along with loads of photos of children (of which she apparently has four) and little else, made it up.Starmer's profile picture

In actual fact, they knew as long ago as five minutes after she made the claim that she’d made it up. CCTV doesn’t lie. It took just 14 days from the initial story to the 2nd one, announcing she was being taken to court.

Leicestershire Police investigated her claims but she was charged with intent to pervert the course of justice.

Primark initially said it would investigate the allegation but after viewing in-store CCTV footage denied the incident had taken place.

Her Facebook page is curiously empty since May this year, though it appears to have been regularly used up until that time. That isn’t surprising, though I’d have liked to have seen what had been written before it was taken down.

Starmer has been warned that she could be jailed when she is sentenced in December. Hopefully, she will be (God only knows the damage she could have done if anyone of the male persuasion had been named in all this). But don’t hold your breath – she holds the aces, being a woman and a mother.

All in all, someone who really should be up for a Darwin Award if it wasn’t for the fact her DNA is already out there.


Laughably, Free to Feed has responded. In the updated BBC story, they apparently:

…apologised to Primark and said there were “no winners here”.

Actually, there are. Primark won. The police won. Justice won. Starmer lost. And Free to Feed ended up looking foolish for joining the bandwagon so readily. They added:

Our good nature and intent was completely abused by someone that we believed in good faith, and wanted to help.

Perhaps if they hadn’t been so eager to believe without having the facts, the risky matter of faith wouldn’t have been an issue. And their other comment:

What possesses people to fabricate lies on this level and drag everyone else down with them, will always be a mystery to us

Isn’t such a mystery when you consider the amount of money a woman is likely to receive if there is even the slightest degree of implied discrimination against her.


* My opinion on breastfeeding in public is as valid as anyone else’s. Perhaps more so, since it isn’t warped by the flood of hormones that seem to follow the birth of some people’s children (and I include the fathers in that), forcing them to believe that everyone else should be glad to experience every noise and bodily function their child is capable of.

I don’t care how “natural” it is: breastfeeding should be done privately in cordoned off areas intended for the purpose – not in full view of everyone. And that’s just as true when the person doing it is part of the Militant Front. A baby is quite likely to puke (“spit up” is the Earth Mommy phrase) after feeding, and if I’m eating in a restaurant I definitely do not want that forced on me any more than I want to savour the smell of a soiled nappy while I’m in the middle of a steak. (and I experienced that once when I was in France).

I shouldn’t have to. Period.

2015 Darwin Awards – Two New Candidates

Make a note: Richard Yates and Dean March. This is what they look like:Richard Yates and Dean March

What they did – and it is hard to imagine that anyone could be so thick – is cause almost £600,000 of damage to the East Coast Mainline, affecting 129 trains and resulting in the equivalent of two solid days of delays.

Why did they do it? To steal metal cable with a scrap value of £43. Yes, that’s forty three pounds – no missing decimals or anything.

The funny thing is that when they were together, they probably imagined that they’d committed the perfect crime, and £43 was quite possibly the most money either of them had ever seen. Neither of them looks like they could hold down any form of honest job. I mean, even a McDonalds burger flipper would get more than £43 for a single day’s work – without the added risk of a jail term. These two twats got jailed for between 2 and 3 years each.

One of them looks like he couldn’t breed if he tried. Both of them look like they shouldn’t try. For the sake of society, guys, take the Darwin Awards nomination and stay celibate.

Windows 10 Update (KB3087040) Fails

Windows 10 tried to update yesterday for a known Adobe Flash Player vulnerability. However, the update repeatedly failed (a further three times today) with an error 0x80004005.Windows Update history

Until Microsoft fixes it, the workaround is to install the update manually. Download either the 32-bit or 64-bit installer (use the link that is relevant to your system) and run it. Then run Windows Update again just to make sure the KB3087040 install is confirmed – it should now report that your machine is up to date and checking your update history will show a successful install.

Apparently, the update installs on Windows 7 and 8 system with no trouble. It’s just Windows 10 where there’s a problem – and even then, not with every Windows 10 machine if reports are true.

Test Waiting Times

I’ve heard a lot of complaints lately about the waiting times for driving tests. DVSA knows there is a problem and it is trying to deal with it though what that article doesn’t mention is the back door solution also being looked at, which involves making the test so easy that a monkey could pass it. Mark my words: that second solution is the one that they’ll go with (assuming the public consultation that will follow the trial a) doesn’t overwhelmingly come out against it, and b) if it does, the consultation isn’t ignored).Driving Examiner - source: DVSA (Open Government Licence)

That Despatch article explains why waiting times have gone up. First, there is the upturn in the economy, which means people are taking tests in greater numbers (for many, it adds a vital string to their bow when job hunting). Second, DVSA says it has had more examiners retiring. Third, DVSA says there has been a surge in 20-somethings taking their tests after putting it off (I’m not sure why they give this as a separate reason, as it is just the first one worded differently.

Quite frankly, DVSA should have seen the examiner crisis coming and dealt with it long before it became a problem. Come to think of it, they also ought to have anticipated the country coming out of recession, because it was pretty bloody obvious that it was going to end sooner or later. I detected the upturn as long ago as early 2014 – I wrote about it on the blog – yet DVSA says it only predicted an increase in the number of tests “late last year”. I’m sure I recall them predicting a fall in the numbers of those taking tests within the same time frame as all of this even though their own data show a sustained increase in tests from January 2013 onwards (and that was during the depths of the recession).

None of it makes any sense. And to top it all, there’s only been a 5% increase in the number of tests taken between January and March 2015 compared with the same period last year – yet waiting times have gone up by more than 100%.

Recruiting new examiners will take ages. From what I’ve read on certain forums they’re only on the situational judgement test (the earliest part of recruitment process) even now, in spite of claiming that recruitment started in October 2014 (it may be a different intake, of course, though it is more likely that “starting” something in civil service speak translates into taking almost a year before it turns into “doing” it). The actual training and probationary periods alone add up to over 10 months before anyone can be a fully-functioning examiner, and before that there are other tests intended to sort the wheat from the chaff. Allowing for the typical civil service efficiency noted above you can probably add up to six weeks of dead time between each of the stages, so we’ll be lucky if we see any examiners from this source before 2017. Of course, that leaves another possible back door open, and I can see them trying to fast track unsuitable people through the training programme.

Phew. I wrote a lot more than I intended there once I got going. The real reason I did this article, though, was the because of an item I got on the newsfeeds concerning Liverpool’s test waiting times – between 9 and 13 weeks, apparently. Well, my local test centres are officially claiming between 9 and 13 weeks, but I can assure you that one pupil who booked a test a few weeks ago could only get one in January 2016. When I worked it out, it must have been about 19 or 20 weeks. That’s around 10 weeks more than the official figure, and it’s a discrepancy I have been seeing for the whole of this year – with actual waiting times being considerably (and consistently) greater than the officially reported ones.

I also note from that news item that a local instructor is claiming that the long waiting times are costing him work, because people want tests quickly and they therefore go to other parts of the country if they can’t get them in Liverpool! Now, it may be a Liverpool thing, and perhaps people there really do go elsewhere if they can’t get an early test date. But the question I would ask is: where? The Manchester area has official waiting times of between 5 and 9 weeks, which in reality is probably closer to 15 weeks. Leeds is officially almost as bad as Liverpool. Anyone traveling further afield than that is crazy. My own pupils have been shopping around, I must admit, but only to book tests at the local test centre with the best time. Anyone who comes to me in September wanting to pass before Christmas, I tell them straight that they have got virtually no chance – and especially not if they haven’t even done their theory test yet.

Incidentally, that same instructor also claims his franchisees all have full diaries. In that case, you can’t say that you’re losing work – turning it down because you can’t accommodate it is not “losing” it. You’re only losing it if you want it and need it, but it goes elsewhere.

He also says that DVSA don’t pay examiners to work weekends anymore. Again, I can’t speak for Liverpool, but DVSA says in that Despatch article I linked to at the start that examiners are being encouraged “to work additional hours to provide more tests.” One of my current pupils has got a Sunday test in mid-October, which he booked in early August (that was 10 weeks even then), so – and as I say, unless Liverpool is different – that instructor’s comments are incorrect.No. of tests taken - official DVSA figures

Another Liverpool instructor is quoted as saying that the number of tests decreased over the last few years. I refer again to the official DVSA figures, which do not back up this claim at all. In December 2012 they carried out around 100,000 tests, but since then the number has steadily increased, to over 150,000 in April 2015. The most tests conducted in a single month was around 170,000 in October 2007 so we are very nearly at that same level right now.

The only relevant factor has to be the number of people eligible for (and trying to) take the driving test. Irrespective of retirements or anything else, if they are conducting almost as many tests as they were back in 2007 (and they are), then if the waiting time is increasing it simply has to be just that more people want tests than in 2007! And only that.

Of course, you then have to ask who these additional test candidates really are. Can they all be 20-somethings who decided not to learn during the recession? My own observations suggest not.