62 years ago at Aston Down

This is Air Marshall Tedder's Douglas Dakota KG528 with engines spinning at Aston Down.

From DakotaTour

Today the tarmac is mostly replaced by grass except for a car park area and the hanger is an industrial unit.

From DakotaTour

Yahoo Answers

I am pleased to have got to 49938 on Yahoo Answers. Although I am banned 4eva it is still crediting my old answers, about two or three a week. Also under some circumstances you get points for just visiting. Not long to the 50000 I am hoping.

Meanwhile lets review some of today's Yahoo questions from people that are beyond help:
1)
I'm trying to find a short in my car. I put in a larger fuse in the spot where a fuse keeps blowing out and some wire started burning.
2)
I am in love with my elementary friend. Is it possible that he likes me too?
3)
Can chemistry build on his part?
4)
Any Single Girls Out There?
5)
How do you zoom in phosphor?
6)
Will we ever again have a President as great as Ronald Reagan?

Robens Jibs

Robens Jibs look nice. And if you balance them up correctly like in this video you can spin your video camera around smoother than a hot buttered bannister. Link to Jib Video I know you all want one now, but oh dear, there isn't any address on their website. In fact there isn't any way of contacting this company at all except for one email address that you'll have trouble finding on Robens AV website
But never fear! Google Streetview to the rescue. It turns out that the demo video was shot at the same mill site as the dodgy Studio and Stage.

View Larger Map
So head on to Holmefield and make sure that any deal you do is in writing and not over the phone. I wouldn't want you to lose out to dodgy traders. Tell Richard that I sent you.

Ancestry.com Nuisance

Ancestry.com are not giving up easily. After ignoring all unsubscribe requests, all ancestry.com emails are now forwarded to my trash folder. But now a new email from
ancestry@ancestry-update.com
appears.

So that is also added to the delete immediately list.

Are ancestry.com desperately spamming or has a spammer opened a look-alike domain? In either case I don't care. All ancestry.com messages will be deleted unread.

Studio and Stage relaunch

Rogue traders,"Studio and Stage" have had a makeover. They have a shiny new website which looks very fancy. http://studioandstage.co.uk/

So lets deconstruct it. The title of the page is called "New Page 1". The subpages are called "New Page 2" etc. Hmm, Looks like they haven't mastered their web design software yet.

What does About say? It says come to our old website while we get this sorted out. Which is a blueyonder hosted website. Oh dear. Most unprofessional.

Then there are links claiming to have an association to Kuoni Engineering and West Yorkshire Theatre Company. These companies are so low profile as to have NO mention on Google whatsoever. In fact, this blog will probably come up top in a search for them.

Then there is Eric Robens the jib and boom manufacturer. The website looks less amateurish than Studio and Stage but it shares certain details. There is no online method of buying anything and no e-commerce set up. And lots of pretty pictures but no specifications. A dealer network is mentioned but not a single actual dealer. And no warranty information. And nowhere is mentioned the registered office.

If you buy anything from either of these companies you should ask them why this information is missing.

The technique is to offer tempting items but the only way to get any information is by phone. Then they will promise great things and low prices. Then they deliver a pile of crap. Then they won't give the money back and will employ all sorts of empty threats if you try and get it back. If you have given them money it may already be too late. My advice is to Google for "Visa Chargeback" and "Distance Selling Regulations".

What is the future for Studio and Stage? If they manage to stay out of jail then a career collecting trolleys at Tesco is well within their grasp.

Halifax e-commerce fail of the day

I haven't had an e-commerce fail for a little while but the Halifax breaks the lull. It used to be so easy to transfer money between accounts. Your accounts all showed up and you selected which one to wanted to move money to. Couldn't be easier. Then they changed it so you had to enter the account details. Why do this? Is it to increase the risk of making a mistake and sending the money to someone else's account. Then there is no indication afterwards that the transaction has succeeded or might do in the future. You have no idea when or if the money will be available.

Then just when you resign yourself to the inconveniences, the whole thing falls over and you get this message.

Service Interruption
One or more of our systems are temporarily unavailable.

This means that you will not be able to proceed at this time.

We are aware of the problem, and hope to fix it soon, so please try again later. We apologise for any inconvenience.

So I can't do anything with my own money. Fail of the day is hereby awarded to the Halifax.
--//--
The service did indeed return later but the transfer time turned out to be 48 hours. Is there a sensible explanation for why it takes two days to move money between a single user's accounts in the same bank?

Banned by Microsoft

I spent a while on Yahoo Answers. Finding genuine answers for really hard questions is a good way to keep your brain active and you end up learning a lot about subjects you might not have thought about. So a year on and I had nearly 50000 points and I made a single post that got me banned. No appeal. End of account. But I still get best answers as my older questions are resolved so I am now up to 49739.

What was this terrible answer that I posted?

If your PC fails without a recovery disk then how do you fix it? My answer was "download a CD disk image of Windows XP and use your license code to repair your installation". I thought that would be reasonable as you already have the software, just in a broken form. But BANG! Instant and final ban from Yahoo Answers.

I admit now that this was wilful and totally wrong incitement to break Microsoft's Copyright and I humbly apologise.

What I should have written is:

"Ditch Windows and install Ubuntu. You can install it as much as you like and break your dependence on Microsoft. Ubuntu is like Windows but without ever having to validate your license on the phone to a wretched foreign call centre when you change your graphics card. And you won't lose your freedom of speech for suggesting that you can download the operating system."

Nowadays Yahoo Answers has to manage without my expertise. So if your question today was called "C++ nested loop please help?". The answer is:

"Your month loop needs a pair of braces around the block of code otherwise it only executes the next line, and you left TotalRain uninitialised."

But you won't look at this blog so you will never know.