In 2007 the Home Office introduced the requirement to attend a face-to-face interview with officials from the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) as part of a first-time passport application. Essy received her British Citizenship last month and immediately applied for a British passport and today she had to attend the interview. Getting the passport will mean we can pop over to France or visit my daughter in Italy without the hassle and time involved in getting a Schengen visa put into her Zimbabwean passport each time.

Just before we left for the interview I stumbled by chance upon an article from the Daily Telegraph of a couple of days ago. During the past 3 years the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has interviewed over half a million first-time applicants and as a result refused …… wait for it …… 8 passports! Just for clarity that’s ‘eight’.

The service cost £93m to set up with running costs of £30m per year. Therefore the total cost so far has been around £183m equating to a cost of £22.87 million pounds per passport refused!!

17 June 2010 update. Essy’s passport arrived today, 48 hours after the interview. Now we’ll have to christen it!

This is why …..

I was driving up this road (toward the camera) which is one-way with cars parked at the side of it. The other side of the road (over the ‘central pavement’) is one-way for cycles only. I was about where the camera was which took this ‘photo when a Ford Transit flat bed lorry came racing toward me head on! He braked sharply and started shouting things. I was a bit confused, here I was meeting a truck head on as it came the wrong way down a one-way street. Then he swung to his left and tried to climb over the central ‘pavement’ into the bike lane. He got the lorry jammed so that his back wheels were spinning, but by backing off a couple of feet and then doing it again he got over into the cycle lane. As he was alongside me he started spitting at me so that saliva was running down my window. He then climbed back over the pavement to my side of the road dragging his truck across the rear corner of my car. The car rocked around as it was hit. The truck driver then sped off with his wheels spinning. I was able to jump out and get his registration number. I thought I’d be OK once I got that. How wrong can you be?

I dialled 999 and reported what had happened. “Not very nice” was the initial sympathetic response, then they asked if I was near a Police Station. They wanted me to go and report the incident there rather than coming to see the tyre marks on the road, wet saliva running down my window etc. “It may be sometime before we get to you, much easier for you to go to the Police Station”! Reluctantly I went to the Police Station but they would not take any details or statement because I didn’t have my MOT with me! Can you believe it? I had my driving licence but without my MOT they were unprepared to record the incident. I’m intimidated, spat at, had my car damaged but without my MOT certificate the Police don’t want to know!

It can only have been shortly after the founding of gradwell.com that I opened a Developer hosting account with them. For the best part of 8 years they were technically the most clueful hosting company you could wish for. They had their problems from time to time but communication with their customers was always excellent and any failing on their part was readily admitted and consequently forgiven. However, over the last couple of years things have been deteriorating and slowly the original customer base has been leaving them. Here’s what another original customer of gradwell wrote a couple of weeks ago, he expresses everything I feel but in a better way than I can.

“I’ve decided that gradwell is too unreliable, too flaky, too unfinished to offer a serious service any more. It seems that every time I come to make a formal change in some aspect of my gradwell usage the framework has since changed and now there are new settings, something stopped being supported, documentation is out of date, you don’t do that thing like that any more. I’m sick and tired of it. ”

I’ve now opened an account with tsohost.com and they are everything gradwell were 10 years ago! Tech Support answer the ‘phone within a couple of rings, the longest I’ve waited for an e-mail response has been 8 minutes. And they guarantee 99.9% uptime by refunding the full cost of each month’s hosting in which 99.9% uptime is not achieved. If gradwell offered the same guarantee I’d not have paid them a penny in 2010!

Now to the fingers crossed bit, I’ve got to move the blog from gradwell to tsohost. I’m not looking forward to it but it’s got to be done, if things go quiet for a bit my feet will be paddling like hell below the water line :-)

If anything is to go wrong it’s always at the worst possible moment. Just before we went away in the caravan for our Easter break this blog didn’t appear as it should. My immediate assumption was that it was a problem with my web hosting company because I’d not changed anything on the home page for months. I sent support an e-mail which unfortunately wasn’t answered until we’d left and then said it was nothing to do with them! Where we were in the caravan (north of Weymouth) I couldn’t even get mobile ‘phone access so that was it, it would have to wait until I got home today. And, to be fair, the problem wasn’t my web hosting company it was yahoo.com The top part of this page headed ‘Bus Companies in the News’ used a custom yahoo.com news search rss feed to inject the latest news. Well, yahoo.com have pulled the service. The only custom rss feed I’ve been able to generated is one from google.com which is OK as far as news is concerned but it’s format is far from what I’d like. I’m tired now and don’t have the time to experiment further so it’s either the google feed or nothing. I’ll leave it up to you to decide unless I’m able to tune it better.

Last night we went to see Paloma Faith live – absolutely superb! Here she is singing New York

The supporting group were La Shark, you can hear some of their music on the link. I didn’t expect to like them but came away a bit of a fan!

Incidentally, and to keep this posting on topic for buses, there was a Jumbocruiser parked at the location.