Undertaking.

The photo above was taken only a few minutes before this week's blog update was published; it shows volunteers from environmental clean up charity Thames21 and 108 Detachment Army Cadet Force using a couple of grappling hooks to pull a dumped shopping trolley out of the River Thames mud in front of the Erith Riverside Gardens. A clean up of this type is organised every May,  and there is always plenty of stuff to pull out of the river - idiocy never seems to go out of fashion - local scumbags chuck trolleys and stolen bikes into the river when they have grown tired of abusing them on the land. It is great to see that responsible youngsters are more than happy to help clear up the mess made by their peers - and they seemed to be having a lot of fun whilst doing it. They got a free lunch courtesy of local sponsor Morrison's (whose trolleys were being pulled out of the river). 

Despite the unseasonably cold and windy weather over last weekend, the 12th Bexley Beer Festival was the most successful yet. The festival was drunk dry by the end of the Saturday session - and this despite Bexley Brewery supplying an additional eight casks of "emergency top - up" ale. Reported attendance was up by a little over three hundred people over last year, making total numbers who visited the event in excess of 1,600 visitors - a record. eighty five different real ales and around fifteen ciders and perries were on sale. The event was organised by volunteers from Bexley CAMRA, who did an amazing job. The festival was held in The Old Dartfordians Rugby Club in Bexley Village; normally, when the weather is warmer, many visitors to the festival sit outside, watching a cricket match, but due to the wintry conditions, nearly all of the visitors were in the main club building, or in the large marquee tent where the beer was on sale. It was very crowded, and quite a tight fit, and very noisy as people were having to shout at each other to be heard over the noise. Nevertheless it was a well organised and enjoyable event - let us just hope that the weather is better next year. In an associated story, work on the forthcoming "The Kentish Belle" micropub in Avenue Road, Bexleyheath, next to the Co-Op mini supermarket, and close to Bexleyheath Station has begun. Until a couple of of weeks ago, the building housed a hardware and home goods shop; that has now closed and the builders have moved in - the whole structure is currently covered in scaffolding, and it looks like the building is being at least partially re - roofed. According to The Kentish Belle's Twitter feed, the micro pub owners are getting the keys to the retail unit on the 18th of May; it would seem that the building freeholder is using the gap in the tenancy to carry out some structural repairs before the conversion work begins on the interior of the retail unit to transform it into a micro pub. In my opinion The Kentish Belle could not be better placed - almost right next door to Bexleyheath Station and located in a relatively wealthy residential location that is also home to a number of decent restaurants. Speaking of which, the other empty retail unit in Avenue Road, directly opposite the William Camden pub that I initially incorrectly identified as the location of The Kentish Belle is now being converted from a tyre wholesaler and into an Italian restaurant that will be called The Glass House. It will have eighty covers, and has applied for a licence to have live music performed. No date has been given for opening, but when I checked on Tuesday afternoon, there was still extensive building work to be done - by the looks of it the place will not be ready to open for a couple of months yet. Nevertheless the addition of both The Kentish Belle and the Glass House will make the Avenue Road area of Bexleyheath an increasingly attractive location for an enjoyable evening out. 

Word reaches me that over the last couple of weeks, Google Maps Street View photographic cars have been re - photographing the roads in the local area; they do this periodically to keep the first person views of the roads up to date and concurrent with their latest maps. Coincidentally, did you know that Google Street View is ten years old this month? The project started as research at Stanford University, and then was transferred in early prototype form into Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page’s car. Taking photos of every part of the planet so that people could virtually travel the world from the comfort of their own homes or mobile devices is the hallmark of Google’s approach to the world around it and the evolution of technology. Starting out as a camera strapped to Page’s car, Street View technology has been added to vans, cars, tripods, backpacks, bikes and even a snowmobile. It has become the eyes of all of Google’s vision for how we view the world after launching on May 25th, 2007. From Larry Page’s car, the very early Street View team, which was comprised of a few volunteers from Google staff, threw some cameras into a van with a GPS and some lasers. The lasers were to grab data so that the team could know what the distance was between the camera and the facades of the buildings. That spacial recognition is what helps Google patch all of its images together and give it that 3D feel. The camera took a lot of pictures, the devices, hooked up to a bank of computers in the back of the van, and then this very unique dataset that is what makes Street View was amassed. Street View collects quite a bit of data. the Google Street View project team had to work out a way to scale these original vans to grab as much of it as possible so that they wouldn’t have to drive the same routes more than once. The team installed lasers onto the vans – four on each side – to get distance information, more GPS, collected wind velocity and everything in between.  How was this going to work outside of the original San Francisco test area though? There is now Street View data from more than 3,000 cities and 47 countries all over the world, so there was a lot of work ahead before this project ever saw the light of day. The GPS, laser and photographic data was collected by drivers who would fill up hard drives and ship them back to Google. The drivers wouldn’t send them in until they had five disks completely full. The disks would get shipped to a data centre, the information uploaded and then everything would get fed into its core database and go through a few processing steps. One of those processing steps was the blurring of people’s faces and car registration plates. These are seemingly obvious privacy issues that nobody thought of before the product existed, so Google had to invent the technology to do it systematically. Additionally, there are fifteen images taken for each finished shot and angle that you see on Street View today, and Google’s software takes all of these images and combines them together, adjusts the exposure for sun, shadows, colour differences and brightness. That’s the processing that goes into making “perfect” panoramic images. All the while, Google is detecting and extracting information from objects like street signs to feed back into the main Google Maps product. Google Street View launched officially in 2007 and was only available for San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver in the USA, and nowhere else. The cameras at that time were 5 megapixels, which is barely what most people have on mobile phones today. Now the cameras have a resolution of 75 megapixels. When you look up a street on Google Maps and click on the Street View option in future, you will have a better idea of the huge amount of work and financial investment that went into what you then are able to see and navigate around. Happy birthday Google Street View!

There has been a lot of press hype about the release of the latest film in the Alien franchise this week, with the opening of Alien: Covenant, which has been directed by original Alien director Ridley Scott. As anyone who knows me will realise, the first Alien, and its' sequel Aliens are both in my top five favourite films of all time. Ironically my worst film of all time is by the same director; the prequel to Alien - the film Prometheus, which I utterly hated. Let me explain why. Back in 2012 when Prometheus was released, I was expecting much - after all, Ridley Scott had set the bar so high with his 1979 low budget sci fi horror movie; he virtually reinvented the genre. I had heard some rather mixed reviews of the new movie, but I watched it with an open mind. To be blunt, "Prometheus" was a total mess. The story made little sense, the cast telephoned in their performances (with one exception - which I will leave for you to discover) and the characters act in a completely illogical manner. Without giving out any spoilers if you still have not seen the film (hint: - don't bother), the film is a confusing and sometimes contradictory experience. The crew of the Prometheus are at the centre of the story, in a similar manner to the original "Alien" movie. Unlike in Alien, where the crew were basically a group of working class manual labourers - space truckers, if you will, who were forced by circumstance to work together to defeat a common foe; in Prometheus they are a hand picked elite group of scientists and engineers - the best of the best. The problem is that the crew of the Prometheus act like a group of unruly teenagers - they disobey orders, smoke dope, drink copious quantities of booze, and generally act in a shambolic and irresponsible manner. None of this helps the suspension of disbelief; much of the time you are left wondering "just why did that character do that? It makes no sense". It is not like there is a reveal, making the uncharacteristic actions clear. Another thing, when the crew come out of hyper sleep, the ship has just made orbit around the alien world. You would have thought that the first thing they would do would be to survey and map the surface, and check the atmosphere - either directly, or by using robotic drones. But no, they just pile in to land, and guess what? They come up directly on the destination they wanted - the alien base facility. The coincidence is laughable - they had an entire planet to choose from, and they picked the right spot first time. All it would have taken was a crew member to say something like "The survey drones have located some kind of artificial structure - we are going down to take a look". Later, when the crew enter the structure, it becomes clear that they do indeed have semi intelligent mapping drones - why do the humans have to go inside what is clearly a dangerous structure, when the drones can do it all for them? Weak plotting. I could go on, but I don't want to give away what little plot there is even if you have not seen the movie after five years since it was released. I feel that there is a good film in there somewhere, but it needs some drastic re-editing; still, Scott is renowned for issuing cut after cut of his movies, and I gather that Alien: Covenant does go some way to recovering from the disaster that was Prometheus, but as far as I am concerned, I will wait until it is released by Netflix or Amazon Prime (of which I have membership of both) before I will watch it. Press reviews have been mixed to say the least.

Upper Belvedere featured in the London Evening Standard on Thursday this week. A driver was in the process of taking his driving test (as I have previously featured, Belvedere is the hardest driving test centre in the UK in which to pass your driving test). The young driver was driving down Nuxley Road towards the roundabout that leads to Bedonwell Road and King Harold's Way at a speed that was appropriate for the road and traffic conditions. All of a sudden the dashboard camera in the test car picked up a car illegally, and very dangerously undertaking along the pavement - as you can see in the screen capture above. You can see a full recording of the criminal offence by clicking here. The undertaking car came very close to hitting a young mother with a child in a buggy. Fortunately nobody was hurt, and the learner driver passed his test. The offending cars registration number is clearly seen in the dashcam video footage; I am certain that the driver will have now been visited by the traffic Police. 

You may recall that some time ago I wrote a piece about the life of pioneering engineering genius Richard Trevithick, who spent the final years of his life living in the Royal Victoria and Bull pub in Dartford. Since then, further details of his extraordinary life have come to my attention. In 1801 Richard Trevithick invented the first full sized steam locomotive; physically Trevithick was an imposing man – he was tall and almost superhumanly strong. Over the course of his life, he hold something like 1,700 patents for a variety of devices – including steam dredgers, various forms of steam propulsion for ocean going ships, floating iron docks, the marine screw propeller, hot air heaters, and a very early  ice making machine. Whilst Richard Trevithick was an amazing inventor and engineer, he was a very poor businessman. He did not renew his patents when they expired after thirty years, and when this happened, Stephenson and other engineers copied, and in many cases improved on Trevithick’s designs - and thus the commercial railway industry was developed. Trevithick had his income dramatically cut when the royalties from his patents ended, and he found himself extremely short of money. In 1816 Trevithick took up an invitation from the government of Peru to migrate there in order to build steam engines to pump floodwater from the country’s silver mines – silver was one of Peru’s main exports. So important was this to the Peruvian government that they paid Trevithick a salary of £100,000 a year – equivalent to roughly thirty times as much nowadays. Over the next five years Trevithick built up a second fortune of around half a million pounds, making him one of the richest people in society at that time. He was then met with a second tragedy; in 1831 a revolution started in Peru, and Trevithick backed the government side, who then lost. His money was lost to the revolution, and Trevithick was lucky to escape Peru with his life. Making his way back to England in little more than the clothes he stood up in, he ended up taking lodgings in the Royal Victoria and Bull pub. Never discouraged, Trevithick started work on a completely new form of engine. He manufactured several prototypes, but these all succumbed to mechanical failure and exploded. His new engine design was what we would call nowadays a gas turbine – a jet engine. The reason that Trevithick’s engines failed was nothing down to the design; it was actually because of the lack of high tensile strength and low weight complex alloys meant that Trevithick’s designs were bound to fail. Materials technology was not developed at anything like the level it would need to be for such an engine design to work. Shortly thereafter Richard Trevithick died and was buried in Dartford. His gas turbine engine designs were given to the public records office, where in 1927 they were put on display. Engineering student and trainee RAF pilot officer Frank Whittle saw the drawings and realised their significance. He took Trevithick’s design, modified it and used it as the basis for his revolutionary jet engine. The power source for nearly all modern aircraft in essence dates back to a series of engineering drawings made by Richard Trevithick whilst staying in the Victoria and Bull pub in Dartford, where he lived in his penniless final years. 

The News Shopper have reported that a stabbing recently took place close to the Eardley Arms in Woolwich Road, Upper Belvedere and that four men, a 20-year-old man, two 22-year old men and a 54-year-old man were subsequently arrested. The victim was a 43-year-old man suffering from stab injuries, which were not life threatening. It is not the first time that The Eardley Arms has been mentioned in the same breath as other types of criminality. A very long time Maggot Sandwich reader recently reported to me that he was watching a friend's band who were playing in the pub. He went into the gents to find a group of men engaged in selling what appeared to be drugs, and others snorting a white powder. Apparently they were so casual about it that it would appear to have been a regular activity. I make no other claims about The Eardley Arms, but it does have a very poor local reputation. 

As can be seen from the screen capture above, Scooter and moped related crime committed by young men in Greater London is very much on the increase. The photos above were taken in Belsize Park last Thursday - admittedly a very long way outside of the Maggot Sandwich coverage area, but it serves to illustrate how the serious problem is now spreading. In an article earlier this week in the London Evening Standard, a serving Police officer who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons was quoted as saying:- “Frontline officers are all as frustrated about this as the public are, believe me. We don’t like these kids having one over on us.” A spokesman for the Motorcycle Crime Prevention Community called for the police to be given greater powers to pursue offenders on mopeds more easily and without fear of prosecution. Mike Butler, co-founder of the pressure group We Ride London, said police were hampered by budget cuts, bureaucracy and fear of prosecution by the police watchdog if they were deemed to have used “disproportionate force” in an arrest. he also warned that young thieves consider themselves untouchable because of lenient sentences and Scotland Yard’s unwritten policy of “no helmet, no pursuit”.  In the last few days Kent Police have reported a series of very worrying incidents - Moped riders are reported to have been terrorising pedestrians with fire extinguishers in Greenhithe. Kent police received two separate reports of moped riders spraying fire extinguishers into the street over the last month. Personally I would have thought any force that was used to arrest and detain these scooter riding, thieving. violent scumbags would be proportionate. Fortunately another recent case shows that the Police can triumph against such criminals. It would appear that at least two local moped and scooter thieves have been caught in a fairly spectacular manner. In the early hours of Monday morning, a large section of Wickham Lane in Plumstead was closed to traffic and Police and other emergency services as two youths had climbed onto the roof of a house and refused to come down for over three hours. A spokesman for Scotland Yard said they were initially called to the area on Sunday night after reports four men on mopeds punched a 15-year-old girl in the face after trying to steal a mobile phone. In the early hours of Monday morning, police spotted two rider, both accompanied by pillion passengers, in Wickham Lane. The four suspects abandoned their vehicles and ran away on foot; After a search of the area, which included help from police helicopters, two men were seen on a nearby roof at about 12.30am. Almost three hours after the stand-off began, the two men, aged 17 and 20, came down from the roof and were arrested on suspicion of theft of a motor vehicle. From the photographs of the incident, the Fire Brigade were on hand; why they could not have blown the two criminals from the roof with high pressure water from their fire hoses, I do not know. What the whole operation cost is mind boggling, but I am pleased to see that the scumbags got caught. my only hope is that they get a suitable penal sentence. 

The historic photo above (click on the photo for a larger view) was taken in Erith High Street in July 1969, very shortly before the old high street shops were demolished to make way for the much hated brutalist concrete shopping centre. The bus in the photo was operated by the coach and transport company Margo's, whose head office was located at 45, the Broadway, Bexleyheath. The pictured bus is an ex Southdown Leyland Titan PD2/12 with Northern Counties bodywork built in 1955 and acquired by Margo's in 1969. the photo is used with the kind permission of photographer John King - you can see more of his excellent transport, nature and historical photos by clicking here. It is great to see an unusual shot of old Erith; I know that I am far from the only local resident who regrets the passing of the old town centre - though I was too young to remember it; my only terms of reference are historic photographs such as John's above. My own feeling is that if the planners had sympathetically restored the old town centre instead of demolishing it, we could now have a tourist attraction similar to Whitstable, but located on the banks of the River Thames. One only has to look at the excellent work that international management consultancy the Aleff Group have done to conserve and restore the Cross Keys to imagine what it would be like if the whole of the old town had been so sympathetically curated. What do you think? Leave a comment below, or Email hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Crossrail construction at Abbey Wood station has reached an important milestone as all platforms and new tracks have now been built. Building work is expected to finish this autumn, when the new station will open to Southeastern trains. As well as that, Transport for London has confirmed a £1.1 million contribution for a scheme that will redevelop Abbey Wood for the coming of Crossrail. Work began in March on the project in areas around Abbey Wood Station and the Harrow Manorway Flyover. In a News Shopper interview earlier this week, Sam Monck, Head of Borough Projects and Programmes at TfL, said: “We’re committed to making London’s streets more attractive, accessible and people-friendly and by working closely with Bexley and Greenwich Councils we’re about to see real improvements around Abbey Wood station and the Harrow Manorway flyover. This will include better walking and cycling access to the new station, improved lighting and more seating and trees, which will transform the area in time for the Elizabeth line launching in December 2018.” From December 2018, the new Elizabeth line service is due to run through the station and halve journey times into central London. As well as finishing the two new platforms and new tracks, Network Rail have finished building the structure of a new ticket hall, with work on the internal hall underway. Work is still continuing to install overhead electrical equipment and signalling, seating, customer information screens and CCTV. The new station will also include an open concourse leading onto a forecourt to connect the station to the Harrow Manorway flyover and six lifts to provide step free access to every platform. In an online interview, Surface director at Crossrail, Matthew White, said: “Construction of the new station at Abbey Wood will complete later this year. The new station will provide an improved experience for the thousands of people who use the station every day.” The Elizabeth line will stretch 60 miles from Reading and Heathrow in the west, through tunnels under central London and across to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the South East. Trains will stop at forty stations, including Canary Wharf and Stratford, and ten of which are being newly built. According to Transport for London , it is expected the line will carry over half a million passengers every day, and around 200 million every year. Below you can see a recently released time lapse video showing the latest phase of construction work on the new station. Leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

The Scrunch Test.

Feedback regarding the recently opened Riverside Fish and Steak restaurant has been uniformly good, with many extremely favourable comments regarding the decor, the quality of the cooking and the excellent, friendly service. Local resident Mrs. B wrote the following mini review:- "On Wednesday 14th December 2016 I visited the new restaurant in Erith, with my sister and brother-in-law, my daughter and her one month old son (who slept throughout the whole proceedings in his pram), for a late lunch.  When we arrived we were the only diners in there and had our choice of table.  We were warmly greeted by a charming member of staff who made us feel very welcome.  We weren't too sure about the background music but she quickly changed this to a compilation of our choice.  I had warm chicken breast on a salad, and the other three in our party had fish and chips.  There was a little bit of a delay but this was fine as we were enjoying chatting in pleasant surroundings, and when the food was served it was beautifully presented and delicious.  The desserts were a work of art and were wonderful.  Including drinks, the two course meal for the four of us came to just over £50, as far as I recall.   A few other tables filled up while we were there and I gather that there was a large group booked in for that evening.   I would definitely go there again, and I wish them every success". One constructive comment has been made - and that is that if you Google search for "Riverside Fish and Steak restaurant", the result that comes back is for the Riverside Fish Bar in West Street, Erith. This was reviewed a while back by Maggot Sandwich restaurant critic Brian Silk, and also got a glowing review. It seems to me that the new restaurant needs a proper web presence - a dedicated web site for the up - market eaterie, rather than just a Facebook page that it currently has. Image and corporate identity are an important factor to the success of any business. 

Bexleyheath made the regional and national news over the holiday period - but for all of the wrong reasons. A chap was standing outside of the Primark discount clothing store in Bexleyheath Broadway on Christmas Eve, when he noticed a rat in the shop, very close to the windows. He filmed it on his mobile phone and sent the results to the London Evening Standard. You can see the video and read the account of what happened by clicking here. What surprises me is that so many people are surprised by the incident. I am pretty certain that every single shop and residence in Bexleyheath has had rats or mice at some stage or other - as is the case everywhere in the UK and to be honest most places around the world. Rats and mice occur wherever humans are; they are two extremely successful species - it is said that in London you are never more than an average of twelve feet away from a rat - it is just that in most circumstances humans very seldom see them, as normally they are reclusive and secretive, and most of their activity is nocturnal. The rat featured in the story above is untypical in this respect, though its lack of fear of the human filming it may be readily explained; rats have very poor vision - they rely far more on their sense of hearing and smell. The Primark window display was very brightly lit, and it was dark outside - it is entirely possible that the rat saw little through the window, and any noises and all smells would have been blocked. In any case it is now academic; from the statement issued by Primark, pest controllers were soon called and the rat destroyed. 

On Christmas Day morning I was in a cab (a very nice, one year old Mercedes Benz E220 Estate) being driven along Manor Road, on a trip up to visit my Mum in Upper Belvedere. A scrote on an illegal off - road motorbike, no registration plates and of course no crash helmet came pelting up the other side of the road, towards the cab; the teenaged rider suddenly swerved as he lost control of the bike, and he headed directly towards the Mercedes with me and the driver as targets; the cab driver braked and swerved - miraculously avoiding a collision. Whilst the teenaged illegal rider would most definitely come off worse in the event of a collision, the £40,000 (with a couple of options) Mercedes would have been seriously damaged. The cab driver was understandably shaken up and very annoyed - he was a big chap, and I get the feeling that if he had not had me on board as a paying passenger, he would have turned the car around and gone on to chase the scumbag. Many of the local illegal bike riders belong to a large gang called Bike Life TV UK, which was the subject of a BBC documentary which you can watch by clicking here.  Bike Life TV UK are a notorious gang who operate all around the UK, but seem to have their primary base in and around Thamesmead. They not only ride en masse in public areas on unlicensed, stolen and uninsured motorbikes and quad bikes, usually whilst not wearing helmets. As I written in the past, the not wearing of helmets is a deliberate tactic – the Police will not chase a biker not wearing a helmet, as they are concerned for the safety of the non – helmeted biker. This is a difficult issue with many different factors involved – the trouble is the scumbags know that they are effectively immune from any form of recourse, as they wear masks with the deliberate intent of making themselves unidentifiable. This aura of untouchability that members of Bike Life TV UK have fostered has got to be forcibly changed. Members of the public are losing patience with the Police, who seem to be powerless to stop them. I know that in reality this is not the case, and certainly in Bexley, the Police have got illegal bikers as one of their three highest priorities. I feel that the problem in part comes from central government and the Metropolitan Police leadership, who effectively hamper the actions of the officers “on the ground” with excessively restrictive rules of engagement. What I really fail to understand is why the bikers are obsessed with wheelies – they seem to spend as much time as they are physically able to on their back wheel. Why? What is the point? It would be just as effective and considerably cheaper to have “I am a complete pillock” tattooed across each of their foreheads. Bike Life TV UK don’t just ride around intimidating other road users and pedestrians, I understand that some of their members are involved in other types of crime. I have heard it said (but not confirmed) that some gang members move drugs around Thamesmead and Plumstead using junior gang members as couriers. Body building and Mixed Martial Arts are also popular with gang members – I have also heard to date unsubstantiated rumours that they have a trade in illegal anabolic steroids. This might well explain the extremely violent nature and short tempers of Bike Life TV UK members – who may well be suffering from “Roid Rage". The London Evening Standard covered the gang and their illegal activities a while back. you can see the article by clicking here.

Word processing has become so ubiquitous on personal computers that many people don't realise that originally "Word Processors" were dedicated hardware machines, operated by trained users; they were not general purpose computers, but instead all they did was edit and print text. In the early 1980's this began to change with the invention of relatively affordable personal computers. At this point many software companies created word processing programs for a variety of proprietary platforms, most of which started to quietly die off as the PC began to dominate the computer market place. The dominant word processing program for personal computers in the 1980s was DOS-based WordPerfect. Microsoft Word for DOS, which had been released in 1983, was an also-ran. That situation changed dramatically with the introduction of Microsoft Word for Windows in 1989.  By 1993 it was generating 50 percent of the word processing market revenue, and by 1997 it was up to 90 percent. Clearly there was something extraordinary about Word for Windows. Part of its success was due to Microsoft’s marketing acumen. But it was also a stunning technical achievement, and its ability to run on ordinary PCs created the first popular vanguard of the new graphics-oriented style of document preparation. Remember, this was a time when a typical personal computer might have an 8 Mhz processor, 1 megabyte of memory, a 20 megabyte hard disk, and a floppy disk drive. How did Word accomplish so much with so little? It was down to some extremely clever programming. At that point in time, most word processors - like WordStar and Wordperfect 5.1 (remember those - I do!) were not capable of displaying the document on screen in the same manner that it would finally be printed on paper - this caused all sorts of problems - the only way you could tell what your document was going to look like was to print it out - which could cause a lot of wasted paper, if your document was an academic thesis, or a chapter of a book. The emergence of WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) word processors changed all that. The screen showed what the final document would look like, and keyboard commands you used changed the look of the text, not a programming script. One of the first such programs was BRAVO, created in 1974 by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi and others at Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, for the groundbreaking Alto computer (I have written about the Xerox Alto back in July 2011 - you can read all about it by clicking here). Simonyi later said, "It was clear that quite a beautiful editor could be written for the Alto. Remember, the Alto had a black and white bitmap display. It had a mouse. It had an un-decoded keyboard. It had all the ingredients that are necessary for WYSIWYG. And, of course, then the network came around. The laser printer was coming alive. So all the components were there, except for the software…. We set out to write an editor and we finished it about three months!" Like much of the other innovative Alto software and hardware, BRAVO was never sold as a commercial product. After nine years, Simonyi was frustrated by Xerox’s inability to turn great ideas into products. “I lost faith in Xerox’s ability to do anything” . In 1981 he left and joined Microsoft to lead a team in creating application programs. The first, already in progress when he arrived, was the spreadsheet Multiplan, a VisiCalc competitor. Simonyi was well-suited from his Xerox experience for the next assault on the competition: to unseat MicroPro’s popular WordStar word processor. He hired Richard Brodie, a brilliant programmer he had first hired in 1979 at Xerox PARC. The fact that Brodie had no college degree wasn’t an issue; Brodie said later that “He asked me some programming questions and he liked the way I answered them.” In the summer of 1982 Brodie began working with others at Microsoft on a word processor to be controlled by a mouse. It was finished just over a year later, in October 1983. “I had pretty much a free hand. It was a pretty small program, and I was familiar with word processing from my work at Xerox PARC with Charles.” It may have been a “small program” but it had some sophisticated features, including support for style sheets, multiple windows, footnotes, mail-merge, undo, and the proportional fonts that the newly emerging laser printers would be able to use. Microsoft founder and president Bill Gates was impressed. “One thing that just blew Bill away was an optimization of the display speed. We actually formatted as you typed. Every time you inserted one character, the screen would update to show exactly what was going to be printed.” Free demonstration copies of Microsoft Word for MS-DOS were bundled with the November 1983 issue of PC World magazine. But it received mixed reviews, in large part because it was so different from what most people were used to. The 1984 BYTE magazine review said it was “clever, put together well, and performs some extraordinary feats, but extremely frustrating to learn and operate efficiently. …Word’s developers seem to be trying to completely reinvent word processing.” That is precisely what they were trying to do. Although it was inspired by the earlier work at Xerox, few people outside the research community had been yet exposed to the new regime that would eventually predominate. Microsoft Word brought WYSIWYG to the masses. Over the next years Word was continually improved. The first version for Microsoft Windows was released in late 1989 at a single-user price of $495. It received a glowing review in Infoworld that didn’t flinch at the price: “If your system is powerful enough to support Microsoft Windows, at $495 it is an excellent value.” This might seem quite strange now, when $495 would have been more like $1000 in modern terms, but you have to remember that this was an era when the cost of commercial software running on a business PC was often far higher than the cost of the hardware itself. It is ironic that Microsoft Word is now the defacto standard for word processing, even though Microsoft continually changes the way that formatting data is stored in each version of Word. This means that in years to come, it may be impossible to read or print out documents produced in older versions of Word. Personally, if you would like to try an alternative to Microsoft Office that is one hundred percent file compatible, but is free and open source, I would highly recommend Libre Office which is available for free download for the Windows, Apple OS X, and Linux operating systems.

An announcement from the local Police:- "Please see below for all local Police Safer Neighbourhood Surgery/Street Briefing dates for January and February 2017 for the North End Ward in JAN/FEB 2017 are listed below:-

TUESDAY 03/JANUARY/2017  1000hrs  FOREST ROAD CAFÉ
THURSDAY 05/JANUARY/2017  0830hrs OUTSIDE PEARESWOOD PRIMARY SCHOOL, PEARESWOOD ROAD
FRIDAY 06/JANUARY/2017  0830hrs  OUTSIDE SLADE GREEN PRIMARY AND HABERDASHERS SCHOOL, SLADE GREEN ROAD
MONDAY 16/JANUARY/2017  1500hrs  OUTSIDE PEARESWOOD PRIMARY SCHOOL, PEARESWOOD ROAD
TUESDAY 17/JANUARY/2017  1500hrs  OUTSIDE SLADE GREEN PRIMARY AND HABERDASHERS SCHOOL, SLADE GREEN ROAD
TUESDAY 24/JANUARY/2017  1100hrs  SLADE GREEN LIBRARY AND COMMUNITY CENTRE
WEDNESDAY 01/FEBRUARY/2017  1500hrs  OUTSIDE PEARESWOOD PRIMARY SCHOOL, PEARESWOOD ROAD
THURSDAY 02/FEBRUARY/2017  1500hrs  OUTSIDE SLADE GREEN PRIMARY AND HABERDASHERS SCHOOL, SLADE GREEN ROAD
TUESDAY 21/FEBRUARY/2017  1500hrs  OUTSIDE PEARESWOOD PRIMARY SCHOOL, PEARESWOOD ROAD
WEDNESDAY 22/FEBRUARY/2017  1500hrs  OUTSIDE SLADE GREEN PRIMARY AND HABERDASHERS SCHOOL, SLADE GREEN ROAD
SATURDAY 25/FEBRUARY/2017  1100hrs  FOREST ROAD CAFÉ
MONDAY 27/FEBRUARY/2017  0830hrs  OUTSIDE PEARESWOOD PRIMARY SCHOOL, PEARESWOOD ROAD
TUESDAY 28/FEBRUARY/2017  0830hrs  OUTSIDE SLADE GREEN PRIMARY AND HABERDASHERS SCHOOL, SLADE GREEN ROAD"

I got a copy of the popular book "Radio Caroline - the true story of the boat that rocked" for Christmas, and I sat down and read it in a single sitting (I am a very fast reader - the book is 256 pages long, including quite a lot of photographs). It was written by a chap called Ray Clark, who worked for the station in the mid 1980's - a couple of years or so before my time. I would recommend the book to anyone with even a passing interest in offshore radio, or indeed social history over the last fifty or so years. I feel that the book does have a few flaws though - in my opinion in covers the 1960's in minute detail, recounting quite a few stories I had not heard before. However the subsequent chapters covering the 1970's and 1980's feel somewhat rushed, and I feel that a lot more detail could have been included; I have stories that I feel would have added to the enjoyment of the reader, and I am pretty certain that the same could be said from many other former members of Radio Caroline staff. There is most definitely scope for a revised and extended version of the book in the future. Incidentally, should you be interested, you can see some of my photos from my time with Radio Caroline by clicking here. I also came across an edited, off - air recording of me doing my early morning radio show during a force 9 gale with thirty foot high waves battering the ship, which someone has uploaded here - click to listen. And yes, I do sound about twelve years old, I agree! Comments below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

British film director Ridley Scott has two major films coming out in the next few months - a sequel to the classic "Blade Runner", and "Alien: Covenant" - the sequel to 2012's "Prometheus" - the film I consider to the one of the worst that I have ever seen - and overall I am a big fan of Ridley Scott's work. Prometheus has not inspired me with confidence in what will be delivered in the next "Alien" film. Much had been promised with Prometheus, which was a direct prequel to the original (and many would say the best) "Alien", and as such I was expecting much - after all, he had set the bar so high with his 1979 low budget sci fi horror movie; he virtually reinvented the genre. I had heard some rather mixed reviews of the new movie, but I watched it with an open mind. To be blunt, "Prometheus" was a total mess. The story makes little sense, the cast telephone in their performances (with one exception, which I will come to later) and the characters act in a completely illogical manner. Without giving out any spoilers in case you have not already seen the movie, the film is a confusing and sometimes contradictory experience. The crew of the Prometheus are at the centre of the story, in a similar manner to the original "Alien" movie. Unlike in Alien, where the crew were basically a group of working class manual labourers - space truckers, if you will, who were forced by circumstance to work together to defeat a common foe; in Prometheus they are a hand picked elite group of scientists and engineers - the best of the best. The problem is that the crew of the Prometheus act like a group of unruly teenagers - they disobey orders, smoke dope, drink copious quantities of booze, and generally act in a shambolic and irresponsible manner. None of this helps the suspension of disbelief; much of the time you are left wondering "just why did that character do that? It makes no sense". It is not like there is a reveal, making the uncharacteristic actions clear. Another thing, when the crew come out of hyper sleep, the ship has just made orbit around the alien world. You would have thought that the first thing they would do would be to survey and map the surface, and check the atmosphere - either directly, or by using robotic drones. But no, they just pile in to land, and guess what? They come up directly on the destination they wanted - the alien base facility. The coincidence is laughable - they had an entire planet to choose from, and they picked the right spot first time. All it would have taken was a crew member to say something like "The survey drones have located some kind of artificial structure - we are going down to take a look". Later, when the crew enter the structure, it becomes clear that they do indeed have semi intelligent mapping drones - why do the humans have to go inside what is clearly a dangerous structure, when the drones can do it all for them? Weak plotting. I could go on, but I don't want to give away what little plot there is - in case you have not seen the film. I feel that there is a good film in there somewhere, but it needs some drastic re-editing; still, Scott is renowned for issuing cut after cut of his movies, as anyone who has bought multiple versions of Alien, Aliens and Blade Runner can attest. Normally I can suspend my disbelief during a movie, but with Prometheus I found myself shouting at the screen - with one exception, the characters continually act against their motivation. The exception is the character of David, the robot or "synthetic human". The role is excellently played by actor Michael Fassbender, who manages to impart a understated and subtle menace to the character; there is a very nice nod to the fact that the Alien and Blade Runner universes are one and the same. You will have to look carefully though - look for the scene with David's finger prints in macro close up. Overall I would still recommend you watch the film, if you have not already seen it; the photography is beautiful, and the CGI top notch, even if some of the special effects makeup is surprisingly ropey at times, and the ending of the movie is pretty much ridiculous. I understand that I am by far from the only person to find multiple faults with Prometheus - indeed I understand that one of the reasons that Ridley Scott has taken the best part of four years to produce a sequel in what was intended to be a trilogy was that he had to rework the story arc to remove many of the elements the audience found unbelievable or ridiculous. The trailer for Alien: Covenant does look far more like a "conventional" Alien film - which ironically may also turn off an audience who may well feel that the new film is just a rehash of stuff that has been done before. Time will tell - I would love for the new film to be great, but I am not holding my breath. The first Alien, and its sequel Aliens are amongst my absolute top favourite movies, and any new addition to the canon has a lot to live up to. 

As many readers will be aware, I am not a fan of Bexley Council - and I know that I am not alone in that sentiment. One area however in which they do very well is in their levels of recycling, which are amongst the best in Greater London. They have just published information regarding the disposal and recycling of Christmas based waste, such as old Christmas trees and wrapping paper. One piece of advice which was new to me is regarding how to test old wrapping paper to see if it is suitable to be recycled. They write:- "To check if your wrapping paper is recyclable give it the 'scrunch test' - if it stays crumpled it can also go into your paper and cardboard recycling container. Any wrapping paper which 'springs back' after being scrunched up is plastic based and cannot be recycled".  You can read more about what to do with your Christmas leftovers and rubbish by clicking here. 

The end video this week is a bit of a curiosity; it shows a trip to the least used railway station in Kent, the tiny and mostly unknown Swale Station - see what you think. If you have any questions or comments, leave a message below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.