The Mumbling Fernando

Vindictive, how? you ask. Well perhaps not quite vindictive, but they don’t seem to like me, perhaps it was for that one time they wouldn’t send me a replacement log book so I couldn’t get my road tax and hence they tried to fine me.

For the second year in a row they have sent me a Tax reminder form which has no reference number i.e. there is no way for me to declare SORN (Statutory Off Road Notification) for my old car without having to go to a post office.

This is admittedly one minor irritation if it were not for the fact I was promised (by DVLA) I would receive a reminder with an internet/telephone reference number this year. Their website also fails to tell you that you need a ’special’ V11 form to be able to do anything over telephone/internet. It’s only after much playing with their website and then the most infuriating calls with a multi level queuing system which goes something like – press 1 to talk about licencing… press 2 to talk about V11 …. press 3 to talk about SORN….. “you have selected SORN, here is an irritating voice message which tells you nothing that you need to know and promptly hangs up”.

Joy. In this country we have to present three legal documents together to even purchase Road Tax. There are so many legal requirements to run a car and at a huge cost, surely it’s about time they integrated Road Tax as part of our insurance policy payment?

Slight digression – The government wants to have a national database of all our biometric data at a cost of over £600m/yr + setup costs, yet can’t even handle an electronic Road Tax system. QED?

The new TomTom 910 looks rather sweet. A rather well trimmed unit with a 4″ screen and 20gb hard disc with maps for the whole of the US, Canada and Europe coverage from Portugal right through to Poland.

They’ve also gone for a really multifunctional approach. 12gb of the hard disc is used for maps, the rest is free to do as you wish. So you can stick music (has built in mp3 player), photos (has photo gallery software [Ed. notes - slideshow while driving - hmm curious]) etc It apparently can also control your ipod. Rather snazzy piece of kit I must say, I just need someone to give me £500

Hoorah for funky computers in cars! www.tomtom.com

http://shelleytherepublican.com/2006/04/linux-european-threat-to-our-computers.html

Impressive, no?

I ordered a few bits from Ebuyer on Thursday to be delievered on Friday. Or so I thought when I hit the ‘pay for my order’ button. Not a second after I had paid, the delivery date changed to “Tuesday 2nd of May”. Seems I’d missed the eBuyer 5pm next day delivery order deadline by a few seconds. No matter.

This morning I hit the ‘order tracking’ button to see that it had been delivered to my local depot. So I jumped in the car and went down to the depot only to be told that my package was in a locked and sealed cage that they could not open till Tuesday.

Seems a shame really, I drove down there to pick it up and now they’ll probably end up trying to deliver it at least twice. C’est la vie.

So I go looking for some tech help on the Blueyonder website, but before I find anything the following article hits me:

http://www.newtechspy.com/articles06/boeing797.html

For the non-plane geeks amongst you, Boeing and Airbus are the two largest civil aircraft manufacturers in the world and they really don’t like each other. They’re constantly bickering, Boeing accuses Airbus of getting subsidies from the EU which makes unfair trade and Airbus accuses Boeing that it gets a Fort Knox under the door from the US Department of Defence etc etc

Both also have a history of not appreciating their competition and getting rather screwed as a result, this usually results in further bickering and accusations flying across the pond with most recently Airbus claiming to the aviation market that Boeing’s latest aircraft (787 – Dreamliner) is inherently unsafe due to new materials used in manufacture.

The Boeing 747 or ‘Jumbo Jet’ has long been regarded as one of the most influential in civil aviation history. It brought long distance travel to the masses and with the Anglo-French Concorde re-glamorised air travel. Thirty six years after the first commercial flight of the 747, the Airbus A380 or ‘Super Jumbo’ goes to service. But what has really changed?

The A380 is a fair amount larger, it carries more passengers and considerably more cargo than its predecessor, it also has a myriad of improvements to the cabin and many differences to the pilots’ control systems as well as the usual new-aircraft fuel efficiency improvements. It may all sound very good, but I’m rather disappointed that forty years of aviation development has given us a tweaked version of the original jumbo. Take in contrast two cycle mending brothers developing a powered aircraft barely able to fly 100ft and less than forty years later a 450mph jet powered fighter aircraft (the Wright Brothers ‘Flyer’ 1903 vs Heinkel He178 1939).

Hence when I saw the headline “Boeing to produce giant Blended wing aircraft” (as linked above), I was rather suprised and excited. At last something fundamental was changing! Alas on further inspection of the article it seemed false, no list of sources, no ‘real’ details. Fantasy perhaps and one that a few thousand people now believe.

Yes the whole world is doing it and as exams are looming it seems even more logical. So here is my first attempt at a blog.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLOG