Oh, joy... Vodafone's been borked :-(

Seems Vodafone's been burgered by thieves today. Would be the day my other half is moving homes, of course.

Seems the burglars knew exactly which place to target - and unfortunately for us Vodafone punters, it's a major data hub at Basingstoke, used by Vodafone to route all manner of calls and data across the network. Needless to say, it's stuffed up everything six ways from Sunday and then some.

Question is, how come the tea leaves who raided the place could access it so easily? I thought these data centres were the Fort Knoxes of the telecomms companies, being the heart of their businesses, so to speak?

Someone definitely needs a kick someplace sensitive on this one - is there a Director of Security at Vodafone, perchance? Someone who can be held to account for this appalling lack of security to a point so vital to the network, perhaps?

We shall, no doubt, see.

Ouch, and then some...

Well, some people were complaining why my bus was cut earlier.

To summarise, though, someone had the extremely poor fortune to have a rather serious road traffic collision (RTC) just before I was due to leave the western stand on my first trip of the afternoon.

First on the scene were the London Ambulance Service, closely followed by the London Fire Brigade (LFB), and then, lastly, once the traffic had achieved logjam proportions, the Police, to block roads, wave their arms, and generally state the blindingly obvious ("There's been an accident, the road is blocked, we'll dig you out before long".... Yeah, right, of course you will... not...!).

The LFB had to cut the person in the car out, and the whole mess took about three quaters of an hour to remedy, but it meant that I got run light (Read: Empty) to the eastern stand, to make up the lost time.

Luckily, most of the light-running route avoids the acual route, but for the fist half mile or so, we have to drive along the live route itself - and running light means that prospective passengers tend to ignore the route/destination blind that says "sorry, out of service", and stick their hands out to stop the bus.

Naturally, when said bus then drives past without stopping, they tend to get a tad hacked off.

And take it out on the next "service bus" that stops for them.... I've been on the receiving end of that crud before, too.

So, just another day in funland, I guess!

Well now...

This is disappointing... I had a gadget on this blog, on the right column, displaying "instant UK traffic". It hasn't worked for well over a week now, and it appears that it won't ever again - Google, who hosted the gadget, couldn't help, and the Blogger system recommended removal as it "doesn't appear to be working". I can't even get access to the site that provided the service, now (Error 504, gateway timeout, meaning that the server isn't responding).

So, regrettably, I've removed the gadget. Apologies for the inconvenience: I'll try to replace it with something similar in the next couple of days.

heh... you don't see this every day...!

This made me chuckle, whilst stuck in traffic...

Hope it gives you a chuckle too