Finally took the big leap and moved the site off WordPress and onto Classic Press. There are several reasons for this with the primary ones being WordPress’s bloated code base and its jetpack plugin trying to basically make everyone else’s plugins obsolete. The other reason was Gutenberg – I hated block editing with a vengeance – It was slow and clunky and left my raw post full of junk. Also because it moved everything to react / Javascript it made maintaining the canalplan plugin impossible. I code for “fun” and having to learn a whole new programming language just to jump through WordPress’s lunacy just didn’t appeal.
I’ve also done two trips to Maine – for Thanksgiving in 2017 and Christmas last year. Both of those trips have given me good blog header banner photos. The first one is of Three Mile Pond, near China Maine
This second one was taken down near Dresden Mills, Maine
I’ve been working on various bits for Canalplan AC – basically adding support for importing and displaying of Canal and River Trust Stoppages. I’ve also been working on moving the Canalplan site off Google Maps after we got a rather large bill for serving map tiles.
I’ve also been working on my Canalplan Plugin for WordPress which needed quite a bit of work doing on it to keep up with the changes to the WordPress Editor.
I’ve also just been keeping the server ticking over -upgrading php and Apache to newer versions, and moving things over to HTTP/2 where we can.
In a couple of weeks I’m off on our traditional early in the year pub crawl round Market Drayton where a bunch of us from all over the country get together and have a good day catching up with each other and drinking beer in various pubs, before using the boat as a floating bedroom
The mobile browser news feed for Facebook includes a section featuring “sponsored” pages which they think you might want to like. You can’t hide this section but their selection criteria is totally crap..
So lets start with this – I drive a Volvo…. A super car it isn’t and I’ve no real interest in cars like this
Super Car Advocates?
I’m married – so no I do not need “Dating Advices” Facebook seems to have decided to push dating sites (Russian Brides etc.) to anyone it can… which I think says a lot about the morality of the people running the company.
Hopeless Romantic – or just hopeless?
I’ve no idea what Ceramic Pro Marine is. OK I have a canal boat but its a rather long jump from that to this.
Ceramic Pro Marine – Ceramic What?
Radio controlled aircraft for the serious hobbyist. Nope – that’s not me… that’s another page that has wasted money paying Facebook to promote itself to the wrong target.
Remote Control Aircraft
OK I said I was going to work on the electrics on the boat – but again one hell of a leap from there to this.
Electronics for Enthusiasts
No – I have absolutely NO idea how Facebook even thought of this one..
Because Everyone needs a portable sawmill
Its a holiday destination. I’ve never shown any interest in going and even if I had maybe putting out a page in English might be more sensible
We’ve got a pretty good routine working for flying to America.
It starts with driving down to Heathrow the night before the flight and staying in a hotel close to the airport – usually the Park Inn as it does park and fly deals where you can get a room and 15 days of parking for under £120. Doing this has several advantages:
Doing it by coach on Saturday morning would mean leaving Cheltenham at some very silly time in the early morning.
If there are travel delays you are pretty much screwed
An early morning start doesn’t fit well with a day that involves landing in Maine at 5pm EST (so 10pm UK time).
So instead we leave town after an evening meal, and after the commuter rush has cleared, and if there are delays on route it doesn’t really matter. We still have to get up early but 5am is a lot less ridiculous than 2 or 3am. We then hop on the Hotel Hoppa and it’s 10 minutes to the terminal with no major dragging of luggage down miles of corridors.
The only real gamble is the airlines… usually they’re pretty good but this time United Airlines let us down a little – UA 922 on Saturday was a tired plane, and apart from the wifi streamed movies via their app or browser it was like flying in 2001… a fixed set of movies running on a fixed cycle on a tiny seat back display and pretty uninspiring food (chicken curry or a pasta dish) and they’d managed to heat the butter up so you got a pot of melted butter rather and a portion of butter … However the cabin crew were friendly and were very pro-active in providing soft drinks throughout the flight and the legroom wasn’t bad for economy class.
New Yotk Liberty has a slightly odd layout – you arrive at the International Terminal (B) and go through immigration and customs.. then you drop off your luggage before getting on the Sky Train and going to another terminal (A) where you go back through security to get to the departure gates. But when you fly the other way you get a shuttle from A to B and don’t have to go through security again… seems very odd but that’s how it is.
The 50 seater plane to Portland Maine was basic as you’d expect and the turbulence that had wobbled the Boeing on the way down through Maine shook the smaller craft round quite a lot and the final approach into Portland was a bit of a roller-coaster ride.
Norwich might not sound like an obvious destination for a weekend away from Cheltenham as it’s not the easiest place to get to but it is a trip worth doing if you like Real Ale ( or “Craft” beers for that matter ).
We left Cheltenham on the Friday morning of Race Week and we decided to head out of town up the A40 towards Oxford, which at least meant we were going against the mad flow of traffic which was tailing back over a mile even at 10am.
The satnav decided that the fastest route was down to London and then back up again which seemed a little mad so with some minor tweaking we managed to persuade it otherwise and so we found ourselves in Woburn at lunch time. Woburn has decided that offering a large free car park is a sensible way to persuade people to stop and have a look round, and it obviously works as there were a lot of people wandering around.
Woburn village centre
We had lunch in the Caprioli tea rooms which was very enjoyable, before getting back in the car and continuing across country to Norwich.
We were staying in the Premier Inn right in the centre of city on Duke Street, which worked extremely well for exploring the city and its many and varied pubs, and when I say many I mean a serious number : the 2015 City of Ale celebration involves 50 pubs and that is only some of the real ale pubs in the city.
Be Er – at The Rose Inn
Looking at that list shows that over the weekend we barely scratched the surface of what the city has to offer in terms of pubs and beers. But what was as equally astounding was the fact that pubs selling more than 6 real ales were quite common and some had an extremely impressive range – Fat Cat (12 hand pumps plus gravity), The Duke of Wellington had over 20 beers on hand pump and on gravity and over the course of the weekend none of us had a pint of beer that wasn’t in extremely good condition. Throw in some Bar Billiards at The Kings Head and The White Lion and an excellent curry at Spice Paradise and you have the makings of a good weekend.
But there is more to Norwich than beer – it has a lot of history too and on Saturday morning we went for a long walk which involved doing a large portion of the Riverside walk which mixes the new riverside development ( the ‘Riverside Quarter’ ) near the Novi Sad Friendship bridge 1Norwich is twinned with Novi Sad
Novi Sad Friendship Bridge
with the old further up river near Pulls Ferry, where a stream used to leave the river and was used to transport stone used in the construction of the cathedral, and Cow Tower which got it’s name because they used to catapult cows from it 2This of course is NOT true
Pulls Ferry and WatergateCow Tower
There is, of course, also Mustard and the Coleman’s shop and museum in The Royal Arcade is well worth the visit and you can even try a variety of mustards before buying them.
Actually Norwich has several museums and Stranger’s Hall is a fascinating building and well worth a visit – but check the opening times as the website and the museum seemed to have different ideas on just when they were open.
The main entrance to Stranger’s Hall {the door at the lower level is the tradesman’s entrance)
But we couldn’t spend all the weekend in pubs drinking so on Sunday Morning we went over to Great Yarmouth and went for a walk along beach – it was extremely bracing.
I’m sure it doesn’t look as bleak when the sun is shining
I looked at what was over on canalplan blogs and decided that actually pulling the couple of live blogs over to here and closing down that site was the best thing to do.
So I exported and imported the posts along with the images and put a .htaccess rule to force 301 redirects over to here for my blog.
Once I’m sure things are working OK I’ll move the other blogs over.
One minute it was the start of January and the next it’s suddenly February and I’ve not posted anything anywhere.
I suppose the only positive thing I can say is that actually I did do a few things in January, the biggest was the now traditional annual pub crawl in Market Drayton with various friends. It’s a tradition that started many years ago when we kept the boat at Upton upon Severn and now its a pretty well planned event which usually takes place on the “Burns Night Weekend” and involves a lot of good beer, cheese, port and to wrap it all off a fry-up breakfast on the Sunday morning with various Scottish and Irish delicacies before everyone heads home.
So it’s 2015 and I thought that maybe I should start blogging properly. I’d already got my blog over on canalplan blogs but I got to thinking that maybe I should separate the two and make a blog site that any member of the family can have a blog on.
Although I should be working on getting all the data loaded into the Canalplan Boats Database I’ve not been making a lot of progress on getting the new data and the old data mapped into a new structure which I wanted to use to make the data better.
As well as that it’s been a continual battle against the scum who just want to break servers and use them to post spam, send spam or compromise their websites.
Ecatel Limited seem to be a company who delight in hosting scammers and criminals. They had several machines in several different IP address blocks all hammering the xmlrpc.php file on this server. Doing some research into this shows that this problem has been going on for over 18 months and Ecatel do not seem to do anything about it. Emails to their abuse department went unreplied which seems to be pretty much par for the course. So their CIDRs have been firewalled.
The Shellshock attempts continue from various places and although some companies have replied quickly others simply haven’t.
You do wonder how much better the internet could be if people building websites and on-line systems didn’t have to devote significant resources to stopping scum from attempting to break things. All these stupid attempts against servers are also using up resources that should be being used to serve real data to real users.
I just posted this to EE’s wall on Facebook. I expect they will delete it… they are a company in complete denial.
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Well its time to say goodbye to EE. I’d like to say I’m sad that I’m leaving but that would be a total lie.
The last 2 years with you have been a complete and utter farce.
I pay over £36 a month for a 3G service which constantly fails to deliver. The signal in my home post code has now been downgraded to “Your phone should work in limited outdoors and indoors areas. This is a guide only and not a guarantee of service, coverage will vary by location.” – and I live in a large town so this is hardly acceptable in 2014, although you apparently think it is as you seem totally unwilling to admit that there are any problems, or give any details for plans to improve the service. I have a phone which will sit on the coffee table and not ring but then buzz and tell me I’ve missed a call and then when I try to return the call simply refuses to connect, which frankly is useless.
For 2 years my bill has, every month, informed me that I have charges outside my plan. In 9 out 10 cases I didn’t have any charges outside my plan but I could never actually view my bills properly on line, and frequently I couldn’t even get into the billing system at all.
You put up the cost of my contract – but as I only had a couple of months to go till I was out of contract I didn’t bother doing about it but frankly that stinks, as does your latest scam – the “Pay us money and we’ll answer the phone”. If you got your contract prices wrong then that is YOUR problem… accept that you miscalculated things and take the hit rather than passing your mistakes onto your customers.
Customer services are useless and incompetent – Oddly enough it only took me 15 minutes to get my PAC compared to over 1 hour to renew my contract ( and another 2 hours when somehow you managed to send the phone to the wrong address ), plus the 3+ hours I spent trying to get you to restore my data connectivity when you removed it from my contract ( and tried to deny that I’d got a data enabled contract and wanted me to BUY a data bundle ) … and don’t get me started on the stupid things they’ve had me do to try to fix my on line billing which you must have known was completely broken.
So here I am the end of my contract with a locked S3 which you’ll want me to pay to get unlocked (By the way – other mobile providers don’t lock their customers phones ) – not that it’s worth it because the S3 you sold me has barely lasted 2 years and Samsung no longer support it. If you are going to lock people into 2 year contracts how about making sure that not only are the phones actually built well enough to make it through the 2 years but that the manufacturer will actually provide software updates for that period
