Wembley Stadium Parking Revisited
Posted: Thu 9 July, 2009 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, D4D™, Music, Reviews(ish), Wembley Stadium Parking 1 Comment »Ten days ago (roughly) I was at Wembley Stadium, and at the end of the evening had a total farce of a time getting out of the car parks. The following morning, I sent off a complaint email to both CS Parking and Wembley Stadium’s “customer services” people.
In fairness to CS Parking, I got a response back pretty quickly from the MD of the company – impressive in itself – after which there was a fairly long email ‘conversation’ about what had happened. That all got closed off by last Friday (i.e. a week after the even) and was all fine. I still think the parking situation is
- Shit
- Unmanaged for people leaving Wembley Stadium
- Farcical
but I can at least now understand why it’s shit, unmanaged, and a total Grade One ClusterFuck.
Wembley Stadium’s customer services, on the other hand, have only just come back to me today, and their email is rather more of a “Not our problem, mate. Go complain to someone else” effort…
All event day parking is managed by a contracted 3rd party; City & Suburban Parking in partnership with the local authority Brent Council and the Metropolitan Police.
The official car parks were full, accommodating in excess of 3,000 cars and in addition there were approx 3,000 cars parked in unauthorised car parks and a further 1,000 vehicles collecting from the area after the concert. As a result of the high volume of traffic, there were delays clearing the car parks the main car parks were not clear until 1½ hours after the end of the concert. We do not believe that these delays are acceptable however the local roads are under the control of Brent Council, not Wembley Stadium. We will be reviewing the exit plans with Brent Council and the Metropolitan Police for future concert events.
Thank you once again for contacting us. We hope you will be able to visit Wembley Stadium again in the future.
Considering that I’ve since had comments here on D4D from people who had the same problem with Wembley Stadium’s Parking after the Take That concerts, I think it’s fair to say that you’re actually far better off if you can avoid using the car parking at Wembley Stadium. Well, either that or make use of the “pirate” car parks around the stadium, rather than the Stadium’s piece-of-shit “official” car parking.
Two More Years
Posted: Fri 3 July, 2009 Filed under: D4D™ 3 Comments »Gobsmackingly, this D4D domain name is now six years old – which means D4D has been going for seven years. (we had a year at destruction-for-dummies before Wiley’s tried sueing me for using it)
Lord only knows how long I’ll keep on writing this rubbish – I know it’s taken a bit of a dive of late, there’s still a post in drafts about that – but I’ve just renewed this domain name for another two years, so we’ll see what happens.
Still, I’m sure people will be pleased to know that this rot is here ’til 2011 at least. *cough*
2.8
Posted: Thu 11 June, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, WordPress Leave a comment »The new version (release 2.8) of WordPress came out today – and it’s already been installed here at D4D™.
I have to say, since I updated D4D with the redesign and brought the WordPress install up to date as well, one of the things that has impressed me the most (despite some of its potential security issues) is the ability to update WordPress or the installed plugins directly from the site. It makes life a hell of a lot easier.
In this case, even updating the core files for WordPress was a matter of a couple of clicks, letting the file download, then a final click when everything was completed.
All told, it’s a pretty impressive way of doing things.
As for the use of 2.8? Well, there’s certainly been some changes, but I still have to explore most of them, so I’ll write more about it sometime in the next few days.
Blocking Spammers
Posted: Thu 28 May, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky 1 Comment »Yesterday, D4D came under attack from a spammer using the name “Ebay Sniper”. They hit D4D with about 200 spam comments overnight, and they kept on trickling through during the day.
For whatever reason, Akismet was stopping them from displaying, but not blocking them completely. In addition, despite adding them to the discussion blacklist in the settings, the comments were still getting through.
So anyway, eventually I’d had enough of the crap, and ended up going to the big guns – blocking it by IP at source. So the server now blocks everything from the IP address where all the spam was coming from (and it wasn’t an IP used by any of my normal readers, thankfully) and redirects it to www.fuck-off-spammer.com . I don’t know if that site exists – but if it doesn’t, it should.
Funnily enough, since I put the block in place I’ve had no spam comments at all. Go figure.
Low Interest
Posted: Tue 28 April, 2009 Filed under: Animals, D4D™, Domestic, Writing Leave a comment »I know, a couple of quiet days here at D4D™ – for some reason my writing mojo has disappeared recently.
It’s annoying, because I’ve actually got a few things on my mind that could do with being splurged out onto paper (Hello, Google) or screen, just to get them out of my head. But the writing bug just isn’t there, so it’s all still just sat up there, taking up space and not doing much.
In other news, Hound was at the vets this morning – and most unimpressed about it – for some tests, including blood tests and shit tests. (Which has also meant Herself collecting bits of Hound shit in little plastic bottles over the weekend – we needed three days worth!) We’ll find out the results in about a week, but it’s another thing that’s been on the mind, for obvious reasons.
Ah well, I’m sure normal service will be resumed shortly.
Small Break
Posted: Mon 13 April, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Domestic 3 Comments »So, for once in my life I didn’t have the posts written to see me through a couple of quiet days with D4D™. Quite the rarity, I know.
Still, it’s been an OK Easter break – we got most of the jobs done that were on the list, and a few more besides, so could be worse. I’ve still got a ton of stuff to do, although there’s only a couple of “urgent” things for tomorrow, so I’ll get on with those in a bit. Procrastination, hallowed be thy name.
So – I’m sure it’ll be back to normal here tomorrow. But in the meantime, how was your Easter?
What’s That Book?
Posted: Mon 6 April, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Memory, Weirdness Leave a comment »Recently, my brain has been slightly locked with a question – one even the mighty AQA couldn’t come up with an answer to.
So I’m hoping that posting it on D4D™ might just find someone who knows what the hell it is I’m whittling on about.
Anyway – I read a book a while back, and I’m now trying to remember what the hell the book was. The scene I clearly recall involved one protagonist meeting the other for the first time in a school playground, where they were playing marbles. (At least, I think it was marbles – could’ve been tiddlywinks, or something)
Anyway, Person One knocks one of Person Two’s marbles out of play, and out of school grounds. As a result, Person Two throws one of Person One’s marbles out of the school grounds, and it degenerates into each one throwing the marbles out of the playground.
It’s a stupid scene, but I can’t remember where the hell it came from.
So help me, Interwebs, please…