WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[Bruff]

I haven't seen any of the good Professor's latest series; has it been any good? What was he on about last night?

Related I guess, the Nobels will be announced next week I think. A couple of British chemists might be in with a shot: J Fraser Stoddart and Steven V Ley. Not a joint award - they are both organic chemists but in different areas.

Richard Broughton

[Tardis]

Lincoln is a fabulous place to spend a few of days, wish the hill wasn't quite so steep

[Stanley]

Enthusing about British invention Richard and no doubt all of it new to many people who haven't taken much notice. Still a good reminder even if you have kept abreast.
Hartley, once again you're wrong. No dotage, no end of the pier, just more research and education. Read the articles and the LTP and reflect whether you know enough about local history then stop sniping and do something useful. Two more articles written yesterday.... Who knows, there may be more books to add to the 22 I have already written and published.....
09:30. Good reports in BET on cuts in council and police funding and Tony Greaves makes a good point when he highlights disparities between the treatment of Northern Councils and those in the South. Kevin Heys has written a pertinent letter about house prices and the fact that the headlines don't take account of inflation. Several people comment on the possible unintended consequence of charging for waste and large items for removal. Will the contribution balance out the almost inevitable consequence of tidying up higher levels of fly-tipping?
Reading of the items concerning cuts scheduled for the next three years reminds me that we haven't felt the full effects yet. Keep the tin hats handy.....

[PanBiker]

Yesterday, but the e-Passport gates at Manchester airport. Not seen these before as it's a few years since we have been out of the country, holidaying in the UK with Grandchildren in the summer for the past few years. I have looked e-passports up on the gov. website and see that the original version available since 2006 was replaced by a newly designed version in October 2010.

Four e-gates were in operation for returning EC Nationals from terminals 1 and 2. A much shorter line for the e-passports but nowhere near as quick as those checked by UK Border Agency Officers. I reckon the scan and face recognition operation of the e-gates took about 30 seconds per person, processing each person as an individual whereas the manual gates took couples together rather than individually and was processing the passengers from three incoming flights at about twice the speed of the electronic gates. Only a year to go on my old dumb passport so it looks like I will get a new all singing all dancing one next time round.

[Tardis]

The Fountain Inn has made it into the newly published CAMRA Guide to the UK, another business helping to put Barnoldswick on the 'map'

[Bruff]

Is The Dog in? It was last year.

Richard Broughton

[PanBiker]

The online DVLA site refusing to process my request for a new Tax Disc for my car. It says I do not have a valid MOT for the vehicle, (which I do), confirmed by the gov.uk/checkyourmot site and the piece of paper I hold which also has identical details of validity. Unusual for a Government department not to take every opportunity of taking cash off you! I'll have to do it the old fashioned way and present my documents at a Post Office, fine and dandy as long as their cross check doesn't come up with the same result!

I have just scored them as very efficient for processing a SORN online for my motorbike, current tax disc is winging it's way back to Swansea for a refund. I have had it up for sale but it's getting a bit late in the year for selling motorbikes now. I'll put it back on the road in early spring. MOT runs out in November so it can have a new one with 12 months on when I next put it up for sale.

[Stanley]

The fact that at 04:56 I lost the site in the middle of a post. Just prior to that Firefox told me it had blocked a pop-up window. Abandoned the site and downloaded the latest updates which seem to be a new version of the OS. (I thought I might have lost connection but it downloaded 70mb with no problem) Have restarted the FM and all seems to be well..... Funny stuff isn't it!

[Nolic]

Access to site was difficult for me this morning. PC fine and no problems with other sites. Glitch on One Guy???? Nolic

[Stanley]

I've managed to finish my morning trawl but the server keeps dropping out. Not us Comrade, it's the server. It comes back in if you wait long enough but I hope it perks up for when the sleepy heads log on later.... Off for a walk!

[PanBiker]

I noticed late last night that the site was experiencing one or two timeouts when trying to load pages. It could be maintenance on the servers which you pick up on as early birds. Most stuff like that tends to be done through the night. We'll see how it goes today and I'll have a poke round on the hosting site.

[Tardis]

Is The Dog in? It was last year.

Richard Broughton

If they have, they're not shouting about it.

[Stanley]

Radio 4 was good this morning. An account of research into cosmic rays by those pesky scientists which described the facility near Harrogate to which we used to deliver water from the Kell Well at East Marton as it was evidently ideal for their purposes and we had clean stainless steel tanks because of our normal duties delivering bulk milk. The in 'Something Understood' there was information I have never heard before about an Indian ruler who was advocating religious toleration and the use of reason as the ideal basis for a state. This at a time when we were burning 'heretics'. Pity we weren't listening to him!

[David Whipp]

The sunny scene on Barnoldswick's Town Square yesterday afternoon.

Tom Scothern and Tom Richardson were busking in the background with the market and hanging baskets creating a colourful scene.

Here''s one of my pics from yesterday.



I've put more pictures on the Visit Barnoldswick site: http://www.visitbarnoldswick.co.uk/expl ... ploreid=58

[Stanley]

No site drop-outs this morning. Good!

[hartley353]

Site has been completely unavailable for two days, when on line remedies were tried the system said there was no response from the server when pinged, see Panbiker my posting loss was not fantasy, the time out problem has been around for several days now, and has occured on other sites.

[PanBiker]

Site has been completely unavailable for two days.

A sweeping statement which is not correct. Site has been experiencing intermittent timeouts. Plenty of posting has gone on over the weekend and if you look on the Announcements section on the Index page and at the top of every thread you will see an explanation for the membership regarding the problem. Out of our control but the hosting company has been made aware of the problem.

[Tizer]

Site has been completely unavailable for two days, when on line remedies were tried the system said there was no response from the server when pinged, see Panbiker my posting loss was not fantasy, the time out problem has been around for several days now, and has occured on other sites.

Hartley, have you tried taking a scientific approach to the problem?

[hartley353]

Nothing especial Tizer, but a couple of minutes delving threw up all sorts of site details including a site valuation of $2,600. but all site ratings were in the red, so maybe not a good buy.

[hartley353]

Site has been completely unavailable for two days.

A sweeping statement which is not correct. Site has been experiencing intermittent timeouts. Plenty of posting has gone on over the weekend and if you look on the Announcements section on the Index page and at the top of every thread you will see an explanation for the membership regarding the problem. Out of our control but the hosting company has been made aware of the problem.

Nothing sweeping, Just a fact. There was no access from any direction that I tried. On some attempts the portal face would come up, but no activity could be undertaken. I have five machines that can offer internet access, I tried them all to no avail. I confirm that others posted I could see the activity on the portal page when it came up, but on majority of attempts I got unable to connect.

[Thomo]

I experienced much the same over the weekend, I could open the site, but not access the topics, I ran system restore and went back to the 26th of September, this cured the problem immediately.

[Tripps]

After a similar experience, it's all working again now for me, and I didn't do anything.

[PanBiker]

I think a little bit of clarification is required here in order to set the record straight, the problem has not been with the website itself despite the varying experiences.

The site is hosted with 1&1 on it's servers which are situated in Germany. Anyone accessing the site will do so via a multiple router path which eventually ends up at the server hosting the Oneguyfrombarlick website. Some of these routers will be owned by the users own service provider until the path wanders off into the global internet infrastructure and ends up over in Germany with 1&1.

A typical route from the UK will involve about 10 hops from router to router until destination.

The dropout problems we have been experiencing are solely down to the last link in the chain of the last 5 hops which are all on 1&1 hardware. This is where the timeout error occurs. I have run various network diagnostic tools which all give the same result.

The service providers have been informed and they, (as of yesterday) are running diagnostic and cleanup routines on the servers that host this site. I have been asked by them to monitor for a couple of days and report back if there is no improvement.

There is a shortened version of this in the Announcements on the Index page and at the top of every thread.

[hartley353]

When this first occured I thought the laptop had got a software glitch, but before messing with it, I tried the Mrs machine and failed to make contact as an online search, later in the day on saturday I tried from the office again as a general on line search, and received the message site unavaiable. On sunday I tried again from smart phones same scenario with the exception of the portal page on the screen but no control, and the url bar still scrolling. This morning after taking my e/mails I tried again on the laptop to find all problems gone.

[PanBiker]

It must be pure coincidence that all your attempts to access the site co-coincided with a dropout occurrence. My experience while diagnosing the problem was that the dropouts lasted anything between 20 seconds and a couple of minutes, no more than that. Frequently the site would be up for periods of 10 to 30 minutes between the errors, very annoying but not unusable with a few retries.

It's looking good so far today from my time on the site.