This is a classic case of what I call a Weasel Boy – imagine him behind you in traffic: you see a black pratmobile, spotty little oik barely able to see over the steering wheel, ears sticking out so in silhouette he looks like a wingnut, trying to get past you in any way he can.
But Ajmal Khan contacted The Sun to boast that he’d passed his test first time purely from skills learnt during joyriding. He even boasted that the car he passed his test in was not insured. The Sun has reported him to The DSA.
Khan wasn’t happy with the article, and according to this other story in Luton Today he is going to sue. The Sun says it taped the interview and is confident it can deflect any claim. But better still, Khan claims in this further story in The Bedforshire News that his call to The Sun was a hoax.
Khan had better make his mind up which story he’s going with, as it seems he has three different ones across three newspapers. The bit I like is where it describes him as ‘a student’. One thing you can be sure of, if he IS a student then it will be at one of those fun local colleges that do joke courses, and not a proper Uni.
She takes 4½ minutes to park – on yellow lines and in a taxi rank – in a space which is easily big enough to drive forwards into in a single smooth movement. She then reverses backwards and forwards without actually getting any closer to the kerb – in fact, she gets further away and causes an obstruction on the main road. Even when she does get the back wheels closer to the kerb, she’s too stupid to turn the steering wheel and bring the front in. She finally gets it almost (but not quite) straight.
This apparently took place in Coventry and was filmed by student Ian Kane from his student digs overlooking the road.
According to the article, the clip is being used by driving instructors as a lesson in how NOT to park. The woman has never been identified. Well, that would be like looking for a needle in a haystack 😀
Umit Tuncel is 7′ 1″ (seven feet one inches) tall, has size 15 feet, and he is learning to drive with BSM in one of their new Fiat 500s.
When you look around the BSM forums, and listen to the rhetoric in the test centre waiting rooms, you’d be forgiven for thinking that only people under 5 foot can even get through the door. An inside leg measurement of greater than 22 inches and you’ll be crippled for life – and a hundred Polar Bears will die if you try. Oooh. And several hundred metres of Arctic ice will disappear.
What nonsense!
The pictures clearly show that even someone this big can safely drive a Fiat 500. However, I’m sure some of the ex-BSM-know-it-alls will explain to us (via the forums) that he can’t possibly drive the car safely… just by looking at these photos.
If Umit can drive one, just about anyone can! If someone really does have problems driving a Fiat 500, I suspect they’d have trouble in quite a few cars.
Umit’s instructor says he is a good driver, and he has his test booked for February. Good luck to him.
EDIT 30/12/2009: What IS funny is that this story hasn’t been picked up on the normal forums (with one exception, and even there people are persisting with the ‘Noddy car’ gag). I guess it is because it goes against peoples collective beliefs – they want to believe the Fiat 500 is rubbish because they want to believe BSM is bad. But it does show that you have to be careful what you listen to when you scour the Internet. Information can be very one-sided as a result of this bias.
I had to go somewhere on Christmas Eve – a long drive south in snow and fog. I knew it was going to be a potentially risky journey, so I took special care.
You see, the night before – bearing in mind the many, many roads our illustrious Nottingham City and County Councils had seen fit not to grit – we had a strange combination of weather. The roads were already slick with compacted snow, and what first happened was that is rained heavily on top of this .
I’m not sure if those who work for the councils are aware of what happens when you pour water on top of ice when the outside temperature is at or below freezing, but if they do they certainly don’t seem to care.
After about half an hour of rain, the precipitation turned progressively through sleet and then to heavy snow. I should say that about another 1cm or more fell by the time it stopped.
Now, just imagine the surface that resulted from the following:
compacted and untreated sheet ice
water at 0°C
partially frozen water (sleet)
frozen water (snow)
further compaction by vehicles
sub-sero temperatures
I didn’t have to drive on this, fortunately (though there were some rural roads in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire closed for similar reasons). But listening to the radio as I started my journey on Christmas Eve, it appears that conditions Wednesday night and Thursday morning were some of the worst in memory. Police had had to close roads on just about any hill (according to the radio) because it was impossible to get up them. But unlike Gloucs and Wilts, where it was a few isolated rural roads they had closed, at least some of these in Nottingham were in the centre of the the City (Mapperley and Carlton).
Last night (Christmas Day evening) the temperature stayed above freezing and a lot of the snow finally began to melt properly – although the compacted and untreated surfaces are even more treacherous in this state. The roads have been iced over for a whole week, yet the Nottingham City and County Councils have done almost nothing.
The last week has cost me at least £400 in lost income.
Still, at least the councils saved some rock salt, eh?
I was playing with my new in-car camera last week and came across something you don’t really see very often when you are driving along.
moobarb Cow On A Trailer
I had to do a double-take when I saw it… but I also had to look it up when I got home to see what moobarb was all about (the van gave no clue, as far as I could see).
I thought it might be an organic dairy, or possibly some refreshing new yoghurt drink… something like that anyway.
It’s actually pretty boring (to me, at least): they are a furniture supplier.
However, it goes to show how effective some forms of advertising can be. This particular one might be lost on some people: I am definitely not one to be taken in by hype and most advertising leaves me cold, but seeing this really got me wondering what it was all about.
Maybe driving instructors could learn a thing or two here. Driving school advertising tends to be either very Victorian (plenty of flowery language because you are old and speak like that anyway) or very Antipodean (state the obvious – and only the obvious – because your audience is stupid). In other words: basic.
And strike 3! My 9.37am test this morning at Colwick MPTC has also been cancelled. That’s all my tests this week.
I was thinking: since the Nottinghamshire County Council and Nottingham City Council have shown their combined incompetence by not gritting so many roads for over a week now, I wonder if there is any avenue for litigation by driving instructors? You know, suing them for lost income?
The roads around both test centres are abysmal – even a week after the bad weather arrived. I have seen gritters out, and I can see exactly what our illustrious councils are up to: they are only gritting large roads – no doubt in an attempt to conserve rock salt supplies so they can’t be accused of running out of that again (remember February this year?)
What makes it worse is that Nottingham has had no more than 1-2cm of snow spread over 3 or 4 light dustings. The problem is hard, compacted, and completely untreated ice.
My web host is 1&1 – I joined up with them a couple of years ago because they were doing a ‘free year’ offer, and my then web host (UKHosts) had really annoyed me by being hacked (and whoever did it had deleted all the index files and main images)… but not telling me until some of my clients complained their websites were down, and I called them! (And see the comment right at the end of this article – looks like it may have happened again.)
The old “we tried to call you when it happened” crap didn’t cut any ice with me.
Anyway, the great thing about 1&1 is that if you email them with a technical query (or any other type of question come to that), they respond within an hour. UKHosts used to ignore their emails and it was always the same guy who eventually dealt with any query after you’d eventually lost your temper and sent an arsey email. Plus, their phone was permanently engaged or otherwise on answerphone – which they also never used to respond to.
Anyway, I use WordPress to run this blog. Every so often there is an upgrade to fix bugs or add new features, and so far that hasn’t been an issue. However, with the last upgrade you can only run WordPress from a MySQL database version higher than 4.1.something (I forget which now). Mine was 4.0.something.
My account allows me to create MySQL 4 and MySQL 5 databases, and in the recesses of my mind I seem to have a recollection that WordPress specifically mentioned MySQL 4 when I first set it up. Therefore, I was running WordPress from the earlier version of a MySQL database.
Creating a new MySQL 5 database was easy – but it was empty! I needed to be able to transfer my old database data into the new one. Everything indicated that this was a walk in the park. An absolute doddle. After all, I had made periodic backups of my database, so I could restore the site quickly if anything ever went wrong. Well, all I can say is, I am bloody happy that I never had to do that. I had plenty of fun and games doing what appears to be a simple operation.
The only criticism I would have of 1&1 over this was their FAQs. Basically, they are wrong (unless they have updated them as a result of my problem). At best, the FAQs are incredibly misleading – missing out spaces on instructions for command line operations is a guaranteed disaster – and command line systems are not known for being logical in the first place.
Anyway, without going into huge detail over what went wrong, here is how to do it right (and it was 1&1 who sorted this out for me). I will assume you have created a new MySQL 5 database from within your Admin Panel.
First of all you need to back up your old database. Go to yourAdmin Panel, go to the MySQL Admin area, and choose the database you want to back up:
Select Your Database
In the PHPMyAdmin area, click on “Export”:
Export The Database
In the database window (shown below), leave everything unchanged except for the tick box (circled) – you want to save your file – and make sure the SQL option is selected:
Select Settings And Save File
Just choose somewhere to save the file where you can find it (call it something simple like ‘dump_db’), then click GO. This will create your backup file.
Now you need to use your FTP client to upload the ‘dump_db.sql’ file to the root directory of your webspace – that’s the highest level you can go to, above all your folders for your websites.
All of this was the easy part. 1&1 has various FAQs for importing the dumped database, but none of them worked for me. It turned out my database was too big (it was less than 7MB, but they’d told me it just needed to be less than 9MB for the standard import from MyPHPAdmin to work).
If you are lucky, clicking on the SQL button will allow you to browse your PC for the dumped file and restore it from there. But I wasn’t lucky. I had to use SSH to complete the restore.
I downloaded PuTTY (an open source telnet client). You just run this program from the downloaded file – it doesn’t install anything to your PC. When it opens, it looks like this:
PuTTY Settings Window
Type in your host name – it’s the name you use in your FTP client and will be something like ‘ftp.yourdomainname.co.uk’. Make sure SSH is selected, then click ‘Open’. You will now get the telnet window, like this:
PuTTY Telnet Window
At the prompt, type in your username (again, the one you use to access your webspace using your FTP client – with 1&1 it’ll be something like ‘u50012345’), then press ENTER. Enter your password (same as your FTP again), and press ENTER. You’ll now see something like this:
Logged Into Your Server
Now you’re ready for the most important – and most tricky – part. You’ve got to run a command to copy the dumped database into the new one. It has to be typed EXACTLY right using the EXACT parameters (this was one of the confusing parts of the FAQs, because the usernames and passwords are not what you’d expect unless you’ve done this before).
Look at your list of databases again (in your MySQL Admin area):
The Database List
Those values I have highlighted are the database name, the database username, and the database host name. You’ll also need a password – and this is one which you set up specifically for SSH from your main Admin Panel. Note that the names are for the MySQL 5 database – the one you want to copy your dumped data into.
At the prompt in the telnet (PuTTY) window, you must type the following. It has to be exactly like this (substituting the relevant data from your Admin Panel):
mysql -h db9876.oneandone.co.uk -u dbo343434343 -p db343434343 < dump_file.sql
Let me just repeat that, but highlighting the spaces you must type using the symbol “• ” in red:
Press ENTER, then type in your SSH password when prompted, and press ENTER again. The command will execute and your new MySQL 5 database should now contain all your dumped data.
EDIT 03/01/2010: I noticed someone searching for “how to open an sql file and edit”. This is quite simple – you need to use a text editor that doesn’t alter the file by adding headers or messing with file extensions. Notepad++ is an open source program and works perfectly for this and other code editing.
EDIT 22/1/2010: In the last two days I have had several hits on the search term “ukhosts hacked”. My experience was well over a year ago (I’ve been with 1&1 for over a year, and I changed to them directly as a result of the example I gave at the start of this article). I can only guess that UKHosts has been hacked again.
If anyone knows, use the Contact Form from the menu above and give me the details.
I had a 9.17am test and didn’t expect it to go ahead. It snowed a little more last night and the temperature is stuck at -1ºC – and the roads were already treacherous around the test centre and on side roads.
To add to the problems, a lorry had shed its load this morning on the Colwick Loop Road – the examiner I spoke to on the phone said that alone was enough for them to have to cancel the first couple of tests as there was gridlock down there, but the weather was going to stop them going ahead anyway.
It is still hard to believe that the Nottingham City and County Councils have not gritted the minor roads. All it would take is one pass and they’d be free of ice.
Yesterday afternoon I had a lesson with the pupil whose test today has been cancelled. We couldn’t get up her road on the way back – the only way was with a run up, and trying to do it from a standing start was impossible (and that prat in the ice cream van who lives on Allington Road in Lenton who hooted us got stuck as well – serves the tosser right).
As an artefact to upgrading my database from mySQL 4.0 to mySQL 5.0 (so I could apply the latest WordPress update), I noticed a whole heap of ‘Â’ symbols had appeared in my previous posts.
I started to edit them out, then realised there must be a better way. Thanks to Brad J Frey’s blog, I fixed it in about 15 seconds.
All you have to do is log into your PHPMyAdmin control panel for the database you want to change, then choose the SQL button, as shown here:
PHPMyAdmin For Database
This opens up a window – make sure you select the SQL tab:
MySQL Query Window
This is the query I used to get rid of the  symbols:
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET post_content = replace(post_content,””,””);
The general format is:
UPDATE `tablename` SET fieldname = replace(fieldname,”what-to-replace”,”what-to-replace-with”);
Just hit GO and the replace operation is done very quickly.
EDIT 22/12/2009: But even better than this, I found a plugin for WordPress which does the search and replace for you. Thanks to thedeadone.net for that. It’s much better.
I had an 8.40am test this morning, and I picked the pupil up at 6.45am. It was deadly on some roads – on some downward slopes you simple couldn’t stop.
I knew the test would be cancelled, but I couldn’t confirm it until the test centre staff got into work (that turned out to be 7.30am). I didn’t charge her – how can you? – but we used the hour we were driving around to get some valuable snow/skidding experience.
I’m not optimistic about my next two early tests tomorrow and Wednesday.
EDIT 21/12/2009 #1: Oh. And I have STILL not seen one gritting lorry. Some of the bigger roads have been done at long last – but 99% of the others haven’t. Good ol’ Nottingham City and County Councils, eh?
EDIT 21/12/2009 #2: The test centre cancelled the whole day of tests in the end – I had a quick chat with the SE this afternoon while I was out with a pupil. And I saw ONE gritting lorry while I was out with another pupil tonight at around 6.15pm.
