Traffic planning.

Whilst this in no way refers to the situation in Edinburgh, it is not far wrong for London - even after Herr Livingstone's new congestion charges.
However, the powers that be in Scotland's major city felt that they too should have what they saw as the prestige of a congestion charge scheme. "Good enough for London, good enough for us". The good people of Edinburgh told them what to do with their revenue raising scheme. Now, in a fit of pique, new Edinburgh traffic routes and movement prohibitions have been introduced which, in most areas, have just added to delays and confusion. It takes real genius and application to turn a beautiful city, with wide roads, easily defined routes to and through the centre and relatively low traffic volumes, into an approximation of London that has narrow roads, no defined main routes in and out and massive traffic flow.

Midday walk today was at the picnic place. Weather overcast with low cloud. There was a constant weak drizzle - Ireland's 'soft weather' - and no wind. The river was attracting hordes of swallows and there were many dipper. I suppose the weather was good for midges and small flies. Up on the hills around us were what I think were curlews. I need to get close to birds to identify them properly but we held off - we being me and dog, as we did not want to scare nest-makers away. At one stage I got bombed by the swallows but could not see why this was in that particular area. The dippers were really cheeky, sometimes landing on rocks right alongside the dog. She can knock low-flying birds out of the air like a four-legged shotgun but seemed to have a truce with our friends at the riverside.
The parking space indicators on the car work really well although we sound like the corporate dust cart reversing. Sable is unfazed by the beeping noise which surprised me as I thought she would jump quivering into my lap the first time she heard them. So, another success story.

I got rid of the Mozilla browser Fire Fox as it seemed to be causing more trouble than enough. I don't know what caused it to turn nasty but it must have been something to do with one of the updates I downloaded for long-established programmes. The e-mail FireFox is still OK. I tried Opera as an alternative browser and found it quite good but I would not pay significant money for it. I'm back to the bog-standard BT Yahoo thing and that - touch wood - sems to be working satisfactorily. Looking at the advances in technology over the past few years, it surprises me that we cannot seem to get the basic, long introduced and well tried, applications to run on a 100$ 24/7 basis.