Monthly Archives: April 2010

Souter’s firm bids for ferry route

“Brian Souter, the co-founder of the Stagecoach bus empire, is trying to take over the Caledonian Macbrayne ferry route between Gourock and Dunoon.” writes The Herald.

What caught my eye was the accompanying picture

Is that the only picture they could find of Brian Souter? Did they want him to look at least a decade younger than he is? Are they predicting the same future for the Caledonian Macbrayne ferry as Swebus? Stagecoach bought Swebus and then sold it at a loss in 1999. I guess the picture dates from time Stagecoach purchased Swebus which makes it around 14 years old!

Web site problems

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.