Then and Now

Stonehouse Wheelers member number 2, Peter Coleman went to the boat graveyard at Purton in 1968 and took a picture of a Kennet barge called Harriett and part of the lighter Dursley in the foreground. The Stonehouse Wheelers went to Purton today and I thought that it was a fitting opportunity to capture the scene again. The top timbers have gone and the grass doesn't seem to be grazed any more. And no trace of the railway bridge remains. The success of the boat graveyard scheme in protecting the canal bank can be seen in how much land has been reclaimed from the Severn.
Today

From blogpics

1968

From Severn Railway Bridge and Purton

Ajax

Back to work after a fine holiday and some new technology to learn. The Google Web Toolkit is a mighty fine thing but the learning curve is steep. After spending two days of reading books and web pages I was not much wiser. Then I found Lars Vogel and his page at http://www.vogella.de/articles/GWT/index.html and the mist cleared. Thanks Lars.

Fail of the Day - T-Mobile

Every day comes a new tale of electronic incompetence and this one is awarded to T-Mobile. Going abroad we need to cancel voicemail. It can get expensive having voicemail bounced around the world and T-Mobile helpfully advises to call 150 before leaving.

Sadly this gets you into a maze of automated options of the "press 2 now" type, none of which actually get you where you want to be.

But one of the options is to "leave T-Mobile" and suddenly this seems more tempting.

We gave up and switched off all Call Diverts. I hope that works.

E-Commerce

Is it true that any company with "First" in the name is going to be incompetant? I present First Great Western as empirical evidence. The company in this case is First Assist Insurance who say "Our Web Sites have been designed in order to make transacting business simpler for both you, and ourselves.". They offer travel insurance on behalf of the Halifax.

I should have realised that things weren't going to be so easy when the web form didn't accept my postcode with a space in it. The web server at https://www.firstassistinsurance.com
accused me of having four errors
Error in house number
Error in street name
Error in Town
Error in Post Code
The form didn't even have an entry for town and street name. I removed the space from the middle of the post code and it worked.

But several pages of forms later I get

"An internal server error occurred. Please try again later."

Despite the website I managed to get a policy started after three retries.
Somewhat miffed I tried to send some feedback. The feedback form has two entries for
* Policy Number (if applicable)
but sadly none for comments!
Also the submit button fails to work in Firefox, and in Explorer while the button moves when clicked it it gives absolutely no assurance that anything else happened.
Here is the feedback Form

Then when the actual documents were generated they had to be retrieved by download from PDF but guess what. I entered the details exactly as requested and I got
"You have entered some of your personal details incorrectly"
I know my email address and my date of birth. The only other bit of required information was the password and that was in the email. So I had to phone the company so why bother with the web at all? What went wrong? Although I put my details in for some reason it wanted Tammy's details for the login. Why would it do that?

I hereby grant First Assist Insurance's e-commerce website the coveted "Epic Fail" award.

Banned Books

In these days of YouTube, TV and computer games, how do you make children want to read classic books? The answer is brilliantly devious. All that the school needs to do is to make up a list of banned books and let the kids do the rest. The best way to promote something is to ban it. One particular book list contained a fabulous selection including Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Mort, The Evolution of Man, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, The Picture of Dorian Grey. A stroke of sheer genius made the list look like it was chosen by an extreme right-wing creationist.
Students like to break rules so what happened was that one enterprising student set up their own secret lending library with 62 books so far (are there 451 on the list by any chance?). Students flocked to borrow a banned book.
Sadly, it seems to have been a hoax.
Original story here

Then and Now - Saul Junction

This is Saul Junction looking from Sandfield Bridge in about 1965. Not a car in sight.
The Shell Glassmaker tanker carries fuel oil to the Quedgeley depot or maybe the Cadbury's factory.

From Box-G3

Now the big trees are gone and cars are sneaking in on both sides and the Stables Café and Heritage Centre are new features.

From blogpics

Then and now

This is the water wheel at Owlpen Manor in 1964

From Box-G1

And this is it more recently

From Box-G1