Boris Gets Everywhere
Boris Johnson is to open a new Wrightbus factory to make chassis for the New Bus for London. This is a paragraph in the report.
Each bus costs around £354,500 and has an estimated lifespan of 14 years.
I don’t have any doubts on the cost, as that is probably an official or contractual figure.
It’s the fourteen years, that I think is wrong. Just look at some of the trains we have in this country. Take the Class 455 that works out of Waterloo to the south west of London. They were built in the early 1980s and Wikipedia has this paragraph about a recent refurbishment. Included is this sentence.
This refurbishment was so comprehensive that many passengers thought the refurbished units were new trains.
Who’s to say that in five years time or so, that New Buses for London will be refurbished and will continue to serve for many more years. London Underground used to do this type of operation with old-style Routemasters at Aldenham Works.
If you look at the design of the New Bus for London, it is very much a series of modules and components bolted together with a small diesel and the other motive power components distributed around the bus. For example, the battery is under front staircase and the electric motors in the rear wheel hubs. All of this makes continuous refurbishment and improvement a realisable prospect. In fact, I read somewhere recently, that LT1, the first New Bus for London, is off the road at the moment, as it is being upgraded to production standard. I must admit, I haven’t seen it lately, but I only note the numbers, when I pass one and I generally only do that a couple of times a day at a maximum.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these buses outlive me.
100,000 Downloads And Still Counting
The 3D-printable gun has now been downloaded over a hundred thousand times according to this report on the BBC. Here’s part of the report.
Californian senator Leland Yee said he wanted a law passed to stop the manufacture of 3D-printed guns.
“I plan to introduce legislation that will ensure public safety and stop the manufacturing of guns that are invisible to metal detectors and that can be easily made without a background check,” he said in a statement.
According to Defense Distributed, most of the 100,000 downloads have been in the US, followed by Spain, Brazil, Germany and the UK.
The blueprint has also been uploaded to file-sharing site the Pirate Bay, where it has become the most popular file in the site’s 3D-printing category.
Calls to make such a gun illegal and stop the downloading, will fall on deaf ears. After all to create an illegal gun factory, all you need is a few thousand pounds or dollars to buy a quality 3D printer. Many aspire to have a weapon for personal protection or to settle scores with rivals or neighbours.
This gun is still crude and what worries me is not this gun, but the follow on designs, that will be possible as 3D printing gets more affordable and a lot better.
How long will it be before a crime is committed using a gun, that has been downloaded from the Internet and printed?
Now That Is A Bank Raid!
There are reports from the United States about what must rank as the world’s biggest bank robbery. The story is on France24 here. Here’s the opening paragraph.
Cyber thieves around the world stole $45 million by hacking into debit card companies, lifting withdrawal limits, and helping themselves from cash machines, US authorities said Thursday.
It just shows how you should carefully monitor your bank account.
I think it also shows, that your money is probably safer in an account or securities, where it is working hard. After all, suppose you have money in a deposit account, in the same bank account, as your main current account, a crooked bank employee could perhaps hack your account, move the money to your current account and get his friends to withdraw it from cash machines with forged bank cards. It may seem to be an unlikely scenario, but when the truth comes out from this mega-robbery, it might be only one step away from a scenario the banks believe can’t happen.
A bank is only as secure as its weakest link. As we’ve seen over the last few years, they have found a few of those. But how many more are there?
Lost In Kings Cross Station
The new Kings Cross station may look very good, but the Underground station seems to have been designed as an incomprehensible labyrinth.
Tonight, I got on a Victoria line train at Oxford Circus and needed to change to the Northern line at Kings cross for the Angel. Unfortunately, I tiook the wrong exit from the platform and ended up walking a lot longer than I should down pedestrian tunnels and up and down stairs.
But I eventually made it and got a 38 bus at the Angel to bring me home.
I’ll be glad, when Crossrail is finished, so that I can get home a lot easier.
American Express Password Problem
I should say first that it wasn’t AMEX, who had the problem, but me, as I’d forgotten, what my login to their site was. I never write anything down or store it on the computer, so I had a problem, as the Mark One brain had forgotten it.
But their site is very professional in the way it dealt with someone like me.
Firstly, it asked me to enter my card details, and then it sent me a temporary password to login to the site.
This password was a six character alpha-numeric code, with the alpha characters in upper case.
On typing this in to the site with my customer ID, I was able to get in and change my password.
AMEX passwords are simple and must be a mixture of alpha and numeric characters, where case is irrelevant.
All very simple and as it’s AMEX, I suspect it’s a lot more secure than it looks in the first instance.
If all websites had such good security and simple passwords, on-line systems would be much more secure.
Two Capital Ships In The Pool Of London
I then moved upriver to the Pool of London, where HMS Edinburgh had moored alongside HMS Belfast.
The Royal Navy is present in London for the celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic. There’s more about the celebrations here on the Royal Navy website.
HMS Illustrious At Greenwich
I took these pictures of HMS Illustrious at Greenwich.
Apparently, she is going to be preserved for the nation, as is reported here.
To Greenwich Under The River
I’d never been through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, when I used it to get from Island Gardens station on the DLR to Greenwich Pier, so I could get pictures of HMS Illustrious.
As the pictures show, I shared the lifts and the tunnel with a party of extremely well-behaved Primary School children. I mentioned to the teacher in charge, that I’m surprised Health and Safety let children into the tunnel. She said things were getting better and the children loved using the tunnel.
The First Asparagus Of Summer
I bought some fresh English asparagus yesterday in Waitrose.
I just fried it in a little olive oil, with some seasoning for five minutes. It was delicious.
It’s certainly one of those ‘posh’ foods worth eating!
Keira Knightley Gets It Right
It is reported in the Daily Telegraph, the the judge; sir Paul Coleridge, is praising Keira Knightley for her low key marriage ceremony. Here’s the first bit of the article.
Sir Paul Coleridge said he hoped the marriage, which saw Miss Knightley, 28, driven from the wedding with her new husband in a Renault Clio and guests wearing flip flops, would encourage other young couples to get married without having to worry about spending thousands on lavish ceremonies.
Sir Paul, who has launched the Marriage Foundation, said he felt the costs of weddings in Britain had got out of hand recently, with the average price tag to tie the knot now £20,000.
I can remember C, who was a barrister specialising in sorting out the details of divorces, chuckling as she saw details of the latest celebrity wedding in the papers. often saying, “It won’t last!” I think she said that about the Beckhams, but it was the only case I can remember, where she was wrong.
Our own marriage was a small affair in 1968, on the only glorious day in an awful summer. As it lasted forty years, is there a lesson there?
The Anonymous Widower 