Monday, January 21, 2008
Signage industry
The road signage industry is really scraping the barrel now. Having sold HMG enough speed cameras to be going on with (I don't suppose they are going to need a serious upgrade for at least six months), the industry has come up with a requirement to plant no entry signs in the central reservations of non-motorway dual carriageways. Not exactly a high value item but there seem to be lots of them on the way to and from the West country, so I guess it helps to keep the production lines open. Not altogether clear what the rationale for these signs is as they appear in entirely uninteresting stretches of road - but they do add to the visual clutter and they do confuse. What is it that I do not have entry to? What is it that I am missing?
And I continue to be confused by the exit from the M3 onto the M25. The thing is signed as two exits, the first onto the clockwise carriageway of the M25 and the second onto the anti-clockwise carriageway. So one gets to the first warning sign and so far so good. But somehow, after several warning signs, one is very tempted to take the first of the two exits rather than the second. Something clearly wrong. HMG should be instructed to buy some psychiatrists who know about how senior citizens read signs with every batch of signs. That way they might get into the right place.
The good news is that I have acquired a third marine fender to hang at the bottom of the garden. So we now have one small red one, say about a foot across, one big red one and one very big white one, this last being the most recent and sturdily made in the USA. Unlike the other two it has a plug you can unscrew. All three now hanging from the large oak tree which overhangs most of the back of our garden. The small red one both swings the most and attracts the most green mould. Is the antifouling stuff built into the plastic of the other two? Does the green mould encourage swinging? Or is it just that the small red one has the longest rope?
Ex boy-scouts my be interested to learn that while hanging up the white one by throwing a mackeral line over the target branch and then bending the serious line onto it, I learnt that the trusty sheet bend does not work very well when joining thin red nylon line to relatively fat blue plastic rope - this last being the sort widely used by builders and farmers. Had to indulge in some trickery.
Minor moan about the owners of said tree who happily lopped a chunk off my very much smaller tree that happened to be overhanging their garden. Great life it is in the suburbs! Hedge wars rule. And they might be about to warm up. If the developers fail to snaffle the house next door for redevelopment, it might go to someone with a dog. Now the fence between us is down to me but largely not dog proof. So who is it down to to upgrade the fence to keep the incoming Rottweiler in? After all, a dog that size has to be allowed to exercise in the garden when the owners are out at work in the big town, but who is to pay for the six foot fence needed to keep it in? Are the sort of people who buy Rottweilers likely to be an easy touch on such a matter?
The DT continues its scare mongering coverage of the Northern Rock debacle. It talks of the £50b loan needed to keep this former exemplar of the enterprise culture afloat as if all that money is being poured down the drain. A significant proportion of the UK GDP for a year. Now while it may be true that the bean counters insist on it being scored to public expenditure in some way, it is not true that the money is lost. My understanding is that we are merely renewing the loans to those worthy Northern people who have mortgages with Northern Rock. And hopefully most of them will continue to pay, albeit at something of a loss. What might not be such a good idea is if having nationalised them, we were to continue to lend good money after bad.
And I continue to be confused by the exit from the M3 onto the M25. The thing is signed as two exits, the first onto the clockwise carriageway of the M25 and the second onto the anti-clockwise carriageway. So one gets to the first warning sign and so far so good. But somehow, after several warning signs, one is very tempted to take the first of the two exits rather than the second. Something clearly wrong. HMG should be instructed to buy some psychiatrists who know about how senior citizens read signs with every batch of signs. That way they might get into the right place.
The good news is that I have acquired a third marine fender to hang at the bottom of the garden. So we now have one small red one, say about a foot across, one big red one and one very big white one, this last being the most recent and sturdily made in the USA. Unlike the other two it has a plug you can unscrew. All three now hanging from the large oak tree which overhangs most of the back of our garden. The small red one both swings the most and attracts the most green mould. Is the antifouling stuff built into the plastic of the other two? Does the green mould encourage swinging? Or is it just that the small red one has the longest rope?
Ex boy-scouts my be interested to learn that while hanging up the white one by throwing a mackeral line over the target branch and then bending the serious line onto it, I learnt that the trusty sheet bend does not work very well when joining thin red nylon line to relatively fat blue plastic rope - this last being the sort widely used by builders and farmers. Had to indulge in some trickery.
Minor moan about the owners of said tree who happily lopped a chunk off my very much smaller tree that happened to be overhanging their garden. Great life it is in the suburbs! Hedge wars rule. And they might be about to warm up. If the developers fail to snaffle the house next door for redevelopment, it might go to someone with a dog. Now the fence between us is down to me but largely not dog proof. So who is it down to to upgrade the fence to keep the incoming Rottweiler in? After all, a dog that size has to be allowed to exercise in the garden when the owners are out at work in the big town, but who is to pay for the six foot fence needed to keep it in? Are the sort of people who buy Rottweilers likely to be an easy touch on such a matter?
The DT continues its scare mongering coverage of the Northern Rock debacle. It talks of the £50b loan needed to keep this former exemplar of the enterprise culture afloat as if all that money is being poured down the drain. A significant proportion of the UK GDP for a year. Now while it may be true that the bean counters insist on it being scored to public expenditure in some way, it is not true that the money is lost. My understanding is that we are merely renewing the loans to those worthy Northern people who have mortgages with Northern Rock. And hopefully most of them will continue to pay, albeit at something of a loss. What might not be such a good idea is if having nationalised them, we were to continue to lend good money after bad.
# posted by Jim @ 11:02 AM 
