Safety On Zebra Crossings
Every morning, when I go to get my newspaper, I have to cross a zebra crossing twice, that has a very busy and sometimes dangerous mix of cyclists and pedestrians. Sometimes, if a van, bus or other obscuring vehicle is waiting for a pedestrian to cross, cyclists will undertake the vehicle and then find a pedestrian is on the crossing.
Perhaps a convex mirror placed at the correct angle under the beacon, might make it easier for cyclists and pedestrians to avoid each other. The cyclist could see across the crossing and the pedestrian could see behind the obscuring vehicle.
Zebra Crossing Beacons
There’s plenty of space on this pole.
Nationwide Login Problems
I like to login to my account at Nationwide each morning to see if there are any payments or credits, and that what are there are what I expect.
However, since Sunday, I have been unable to login. Each day, I got a message saying that the system would by back by 06:00.
Due to essential maintenance work some services will be unavailable on Tuesday 20/03/2012 between approximately 00:01 and 06:00 – we apologise for any inconvenience this will cause.
It’s now well past that time.
This is just not good enough.
Update on 21st March 2012
I have since found out what the problem was. I use Google Chrome as my default browser and have done for a couple of months, when I had problems in internet Explorer, whilst using WordPress. This behaviour only showed up in this browser and when I used Internet Explorer everything was fine.
This morning Google Chrome is working fine.
I may have found the solution, but how many customers of Nationwide use Google Chrome and don’t have the computer knowledge I do. In fact because of the WordPress problem, I’m a bit suspicious that all browsers don’t sing to the same hymn-sheet. It does mean that web designers must do a lot more testing, so they don’t get bad publicity because of unforseen changes to the design of browsers.
From both the web designers and the customers points of view it’s a nightmare.
The only way to spot this sort of problem early is to test sites continuously and analyse the web logs every day. The Nationwide problem might have been picked up from the latter, by indicating that there were a lot of login failures with Google Chrome.
A Government Income and Expenditure Statement
I proposed one of these years ago. It has been reported that they might bring in an Expenditure statement for taxpayers.
You’d be surprised about how much and how little some taxes raise.
An Expenditure statement is useless without an Income one.
The Anonymous Widower 