Week Thirty-Nine – The New Site’s Looking Fine.

I admit to feeling a little fretful and paternalistic about all the work put into Talk Audio magazine in the last three years, as we do a mega transfer in the background of all the stuff I have ever written from this site to the new Invision Power platform Content Management System. There is also the small matter of over 3.8 million posts and a gazillion threads going back ten years as the vBulletin forums become Invision Power Boards.
And yet I feel unworthy and useless as I read the utter bloody gobbledegook that Guru and Switchy are discussing in the deepest crypt of the current forum system as they do Modern Majicke. I believe it has to do with how the bits and things that make up a page actually look on all the different shaped screens and all the different generations and flavours of web browser systems, like Firefox and Chrome. All I grasp is that Internet Explorer 6 looks like it’s being left out in the cold. But in this day and age, fretting over that is a little like worrying about designing hand-crank ability onto the Ford ASBO as an engine start option…but I am deeply grateful for their efforts and I feel we must fix Switchy up with a night of strippers and beer at least. Or perhaps a nice tea dance with sweet middle class gels from Oxfordshire?
Meanwhile, my Trafficmaster Monitor system told me to resubscribe on Monday morning, part way to Birmingham on the M1. I came to the back of a hold up without knowing what it was, as I was off-air. (This system uses a full size dedicated TV monitor to show the whole UK traffic hold-ups on every road with those blue sensors on roadside poles or on bridges.) Without the little map and the red and orange pointy circle indicators with the delay shown, I knew nothing. I have become so used to it down the years as it was fitted forever ago and looked after lovingly by Trafficmaster ever since. When the subs run out and the map disappears, you feel ignorant. The other day, I was returning from the Highdown Car Audio and Security open day. A day of much motorcycle activity with dozens of super bikes going to Brands Hatch on the M25 and dozens of codgers codging along on vintage bikes to go pose in their thousands on Brighton sea front, all along the M-way to the sea.
I saw a both-ways hold-up on the screen.
No fewer than three 30 minute flags plus a 25 and 15 as well in each direction. A plume of smoke arose into the sky and I pulled off the road as a few bikes and choppers came chugging through the traffic.
Along with a Snooper Indago navigator, I found my way around the hold up and rejoined a different route as the same very distinctive chopper came across the same roundabout as me, six miles up the road! So I am hoping that they might let me have another year of free subs…. I gather this particular product has reached the end of its operating life and that Trafficmaster have a sexy new product that works on phones to talk about. Whatever happens, I’m going to find out more about it since we all hate traffic jams.
Plenty to do on the editorial front so as ever, I’ll go get on.
Adam Rayner – Online Editor