ABC WednesdayA is for Alan Turing Way

Before the building of the City of Manchester Stadium, visible on the right, the A6010, the Manchester Inner Ring Road, ran along Forge Lane. When the area was redeveloped in 1994, a new stretch of road was built along the almost parallel line of Mill Street a little further West. Both Mill Street and Forge Lane disappeared during the creation of Alan Turing Way named after the mathematician.

In 1949 as deputy director of the computing laboratory at the University of Manchester he worked on software for one of the earliest stored-program computers, the Manchester Mark 1. His Turing test was a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence.


The river Medlock passes under Alan Turing Way after which it flows through a culvert under the stadium, built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games and now the home of Manchester City Football Club.


This view is looking back up the road past the entrance to the stadium towards the gasometer which was the area's iconic landmark prior to the building of Sports City as the stadium was first called.

For more about Alan Turing (1912 - 1954) I recommend starting with the excellent Wikipedia article.

For more A posts visit ABC Wednesday.

A brief hiatus

My computer crashed yesterday and it will probably be the middle of next week before I get it back.

I don't have any scheduled posts ready so won't be updating or posting new photographs until my own computer is back up and running again.

Guess I'll have to read a few books and watch TV for a while.

Hope to back before too long.

Is this Me or I?

They say that if you want to know about someone you should do a google. But beware, how do you know that the information is actually about the particular person you are interested in and not one of their namesakes?

Checking the first ten pages of a google-search on my name brought a few surprises, some pleasant, some not so.

First hit is my website www.geraldengland.co.uk/.

In at #3 is my page on the Famous Poets website.

Fourth is this blog and sixth is my Geograph profile.

At #7 is a link to Gerald England's Facebook profile. Now I do have a facebook profile but this one is NOT ME.

The eighth entry is for someone who was at Illinois State University 1973 — 1977; it ain't me.

At #13 is something about the Gerald England Track & Field Invitational. References to this crop up quite frequently. My father was an athlete but I'm not. I don't know who the GE was who gave his name to this regular event but it sounds to be well supported.

Another namesake appears to have a patent for "Measuring energy contamination using time-of-flight techniques".

Note the org.uk domain which bears my name has no longer any connection with yours truly.

At #43 is the first to cause me concern. The Zoom Info page lists four sources of information, three of which are about me and which quote me as the publisher of New Hope International, but it associates me with a different New Hope International which is a charitable organisation in Colorado with which I have no connection whatsoever.

I am not the GE on classmates who was in the class of 1952 at East Prairie High School, MO., nor am I a personal trainer specialising in boxing, weight management, muscle building and conditioning. I do not work for Blue Shield Of California nor am I the ex-reverend who visited Pinelands in 2008.

At #58 is another namesake's Facebook profile.

At #79 I discover (hope the link works as it is a long URL) translations into Romanian by Florentin Smarandach of some of my poems.

I also find a poem of mine in Processed World #31, Fall 1993. It isn't listed in my bibliography but I can't remember all the magazines I submitted to around then, so the original must have gone astray in the post.

At #99 I find a 123people page which has two photos of my son Craig and others which I suspect are of his namesakes. These are not public domain photos and have not been posted there with my permission. On investigation, however, I find the site is little more than an indiscriminate search engine and the photos no more than thumbnails. I don't care for the way it imbeds links within its own frames, but ...

enough searching for one day.

I must send good wishes to all my namesakes.

ABC Wednesday - J is for Journey's End

I started ABC Wednesday in round 1 with K is for Knott End on Sea and now at J in round 4 having done the entire alphabet three times, it is time to stop.

It is an appropriate time also because we are moving on ourselves from the house we have lived in for over twenty years and saying goodbye to the daffodils under the willow tree which we grew from a sapling.

Although all the wiring is in place at our new home, it will take British Telecom nearly three weeks to connect the line. So we shall have no home internet for a while.

I have scheduled posts on Hyde Daily Photo for the period while I'm offline and co-opted our good friend Rune Eide of Visual Norway to keep an eye both there and here to squash any malevolent bugs that might arrive in the comment boxes.

ABC Wednesday posts will continue on my photoblog sithenah.

We'll be starting a new journey shortly and will doubtless be back here in a bit telling you all about it.

For more J posts visit ABC Wednesday.

Blogger problems rotating images.

Is anyone else having problems with blogger rotating images?

I tried earler today to prepare a post for later in the week. When I uploaded the photo from my computer, blogger rotated it 90 degrees.

After other attempts I tried loading a rotated image hoping it might rotate that back to the correct position and it loaded that correctly.

I went into my picasa-album and deleted all the rotated files.

I created these test images and they load up correctly without rotating.

I'm going slightly bonkers here having spent in excess of an hour on this problem.

My phone is finally fixed.

Those of you who read my post I is for ice-cream and internet connection will be aware of our recent troubles with the phone and subsequent loss of decent internet connectivity. Instead of getting better, it just got worse and the telephone became unusable. I phoned my telecoms provider using my mobile phone and again they warned me it would be costly if they sent out an engineer and the fault was with my equipment. They agreed to send one the following morning. I wanted it fixed, whatever the cost.


My mobile phone is a "pay-as-you-go" with T-mobile. I don't use it much. In fact I'd topped it up with £10 in April 2004 and by December 2007 I still had just over £2 credit left. You have to make a call every 180 days to keep the phone active though and I missed it by a day. I was told I could reactivate it; it would cost me £10 and I'd regain my £2 credit. Alternatively, if I wasn't bothered about keeping the number, I could go online and buy a new sim-card for just 50p. This I did and on my tarriff, calls are 15p per minute compared to the 30p on my previous tarriff. What I didn't know (and the information was nowhere to found on T-mobile's website) that calls to 0845 numbers are 40p per minute, so my call to report my faulty phone cost over £2. I've subsequently discovered that even calls to 0800 numbers (free from any landline) are also charged at 40p per minute.


On Wednesday morning, a BT-engineer dutifully arrived. The fault lay with the cable outside the house. It seems that when a tree by the telegraph pole was chopped down last year, it had frayed the cable and allowed water to seep into the connection. As the cable crossed the road he had to call in assistance to replace it.


Afterwards I plugged my cordless telephone/answering machine back in as there was obviously nothing wrong with it. It still took until Sunday morning though for my internet speed to get back up to near-normal.

ABC Wednesday - I is for Ice cream & Internet Connection

ABC Wednesday - I is for Ice cream & Internet Connection.

My apologies first for my inability to comment on more than a handful of blogs at present. The reasons for this will come clear, if you care to read the rest of this post.

As those who saw my early-posted piece for last week will know, I was on holiday in Paignton last Wednesday which is when I took this photo of an Ice Cream Kiosk on the beach. It wasn't there the day before. If it had been put there much earlier it would have probably been blown away by the gales that pounded these shores on Sunday night. A kiosk on the pier was blown over and much sand was deposited on the promenade.

Whilst in Paignton I battled my way through the stormy winds to the local library where, as a vistor, I was allowed half-an-hour's free internet access each day. I could keep abreast of my emails, and since I always get email notification of comments made on my blogs, I could keep up to date with what was being said. I couldn't however visit any blogs as Torbay in their wisdom have put a block (though they call it a filter) on all blogspots. I could visit wordpress and aminus3 blogs and even blogger profiles but no blogspots! There was a link, supposedly to a page explaining why the sites were filtered, but the page had a javascript error or something that prevented it being displayed.

Ah well, no huge worries, one can't do much more in half an hour than check emails, dump the spam and reply to the more urgent messages and check the weather to see that back home it was just as cold but a little less windy.

After we had arrived home on Thursday, I switched on my router. When I tried to access the internet, I discovered that my DSL connection was down. After fiddling for a while, I phoned my ISP. At least they answer quickly, use a normal, geographical number, do not keep you hanging on and will phone you back if they are busy. They said there sounded to be a lot of noise on the line and to ring BT on 151 to get the line checked.

But I'm not with BT and pay my rental to another telecoms company. I had to phone a premium number and go through two menus to get to someone who sounded as though they were based in a different continent! They said that before they could get someone out I needed to plug a corded phone into the socket and try that first. Well of course I didn't have one!

For a short period in the evening I found my router had kicked in and I got some access to the internet but it was running at around 100kps instead of the normal 5Mbs. Later it failed again.

On Friday I had to wait for the postman to deliver the week's mail that had been "kept safe" before I could go out. He turned up at 12.30pm. So in the afternoon I bought a new old-style phone for £7 and on my return home phoned my telecoms provider again. They had me unscrewing half the socket off the wall and connecting inside the socket. They said that if I requested an engineer to come round and the fault lay with my equipment it would cost £120.

I tried again with just the router and corded phone plugged in and I got online at treacle-speed. I phoned my ISP who got me to run the BT speed test and give them the result. The line profile is 135kps instead of 6000kps. It would appear that the fault lies with my old (18 months?) cordless phone. They say that now the cordless phone is disconnected and a corded phone attached, the line should stabilise over the next three days.

On Saturday evening I lost the connection altogether. On Sunday morning I messed about a bit completely unplugging the bits and pieces of the cordless phone and unravelling all the wires. When I phoned my ISP they moaned at me (in as nice a way as possible) saying that I shouldn't have disconnected the router from the line and that the three day stabilisation period would now start over again.

All of a sudden at 10.45am on Sunday it kicked in, still at only around 100kps but at least I could get a few things done. At 6.30pm I lost the connection again. When I got up on Monday morning I was back connected again. That is still my position as I write this Tuesday evening. I have a dismal 100kps internet connection, an old-style phone, no answer machine, no caller-ID, no portable handset.

I can do quite a bit on the internet but visiting photo-heavy sites is painfully slow and video-clips are unwatchable. We shall see if normal service is resumed soon. If not, I fear for my blood pressure!

Links to other ABC Wednesday I posts can be found at Mrs. Nesbitt's Place.