Google Maps UK

Google Maps UK has arrived. Terrific! At first site this seems a great implementation and easier to use than the other street mapping sites. The route planning function is excellent, and fast. There are a few user interface glitches but these are relatively easy to work around, and no doubt will be ironed out in time.

Satellite maps are missing: hopefully they will come soon. IMHO, essential.

One interesting observation is that the route to and from our home treats Waynflete Road as one way, South to North. News to us, but perhaps Google is prescient as well as everything else. Local residents are well aware that Oxfordshire County Council has plans for the notorious Green Road Roundabout. Work has already started on the 'short term measures' part of this scheme--swapping the bus lanes on the London Road--which, in isolation, has been an unmitigated disaster so far.

The original scheme envisaged traffic lights at either end of Waynflete Road (i.e. at both of its junctions with Bayswater Road) which would have effectively killed off rat-running up Waynflete Road. However, in their ultimate wisdom, officers of the County Council have apparently decided that the more northern set of lights is unnecessary. What makes them think that they know more about this than the traffic consultants they hired at great cost to us ratepayers defeats me completely, but it now appears that Google has let the cat out of the bag and that the hidden agenda is to make Waynflete Road one-way.

There is a kind of argument for this that might hold sway: it must be miserable for the bus drivers (who only drive one-way up Waynflete Road) having to negotiate parked cars, traffic calming measures, and irate drivers (not to mention cyclists) coming in the opposite direction. How much easier would it be for them if the street was one-way in their favour?

Frankly, though, I don't think we owe them any favours at all. The buses the two rival companies now run are far too large, too heavy, and too frequent (they typically hunt in twos and threes, mostly near empty). The damage they have caused to the surface of Waynflete Road is considerable. It was resurfaced only a few years ago and is now dangerously defective, and potentially lethal to cyclists.

Addendum: I had hoped to illustrate the above rant about Waynflete Road with a map refereence to Google Maps, but this is not available at this time. So here is one from a rival.

Soffrito revisited: in the can

Skip Lombardi suggests that soffrito can be made in advance and stored in the fridge for up to a month. Sure, but why?

For certain, it will save time when you come to make the soffrito-based recipe, but you still have to make it sometime. OK, so you can make a big batch all in one go. But the effort (as opposed to the time) in making soffrito is in chopping the ingredients, and the more there are, the longer it takes. Skip neatly gets round this this with a food processor: pulse, pulse. pulse, and there you go. Easy. But I have generally found that food processors pulverize onions rather than chop them, releasing bitter juices that do not easily cook out.

Anyway, for me, part of the magic of making a dish that calls for soffrito is preparing the ingredients, letting them fry gently whilst infusing the kitchen with a lovely aroma as one prepares the rest of the meal...

Emergency blues

The Health Minister, John Hutton, today described a BMA report on the Government's A&E targets as "deliberately misleading". He must be rattled: the report is on the whole very supportive of the improvements that have been made in A&E departments—it simply highlights that going the 'third mile' is in some ways counterproductive, and may actually be harmful to (some) patients. It is certainly leading to a great deal of 'headless chicken' behaviour on the ground, and brings out the worst in managers, who are under extreme pressure to deliver the full target (98% of patients seen and dispatched within 4 hours of arrival in A&E). This cannot be in patients' best interests, Mr Hutton.

Tony Blair however was more conciliatory, agreeing that the four hour target may be too rigid. He said:

Most people would say the accident and emergency departments today are a lot better than they were...We feel, and maybe we are wrong, that one way we've managed to do that is by setting a clear target...But maybe we need to look at how we have sufficient flexibility in the targets."

Dream on.

Junket

I really can't believe this crap about trace amounts of Sudan-1 in certain foodstuffs being a health hazard. Rats have to be fed tons of this stuff for a few of them to get cancer. There is no evidence of it causing cancer in humans but, sure, its probably a good idea to keep it out of the human food chain if at all possible. However if a touch of it creeps in it doesn't warrant the degree of hysteria we are currently having to suffer: this is the precautionary principle gone mad. Just take the blighters quietly to one side and make sure it doesn't happen again. Anyway, anyone silly enough to eat the kind of junk it is appearing in shouldn't complain.

Do RRS feeds matter?

There's a discussion going on on one of Dave Winer's sites about Robert Scoble's recent lament about a Microsoft marketing employee who had completely missed the point about RSS syndication. It's a no brainer, as far as I'm concerned:

I don't see the problem here. If a site doesn't have an RSS feed, I probably will never visit it again. Period. If it has, and it interests me, I will add its feed to my aggregator. I track about a hundred sites with varying degrees of enthusiasm (and precisely which hundred changes over time). Some are straight news sites, some are informative, some educational, some opinionated, and so on. I don't read everything: my aggregator allows me to cherry pick (so for goodness sake make your headlines seductive). When I need to know something that my RSS network hasn't told me, I try Google. That's surfing, as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps you think I don't count, but can you really afford to take the risk?