Hugh Laurie, who is currently starring in an American medical drama called House, has recently said of trying to sound American, “I have not identified a single word that is pronounced the same in America as it is in England. It is as if everyone else is playing with a tennis racquet and you have a salmon.”
Now I can understand this of most day-to-day words, but you would think that the trading names of multinational consumer product companies would be pronounced the same – not so: I was surprised to learn recently that the Americans even pronounce Nokia and Nikon differently to us. While we say ‘Nockia’, they pronounce the ‘o’ saying ‘Nohkia’. We say “Nickon”, they say “Nykon”. Even the television adverts for Nokia and Nikon pronounce it that way.
From today, the cost of sending a letter or packet in the UK is changing. Now I’m not getting involved in the reasons or justifications of this change, however, I can see it causing more than a few problems during the next few weeks.
There is much discussion about the lack of advertising regarding this change and that not all post offices are ready for it, but what happens from today for incorrectly stamped letters/parcels? Will the Royal Mail be applying surcharges to received post, or will it be returning it to the sender? What about those who don’t use the post office to send mail and choose to just go to a post box? I can see a lot of post being sent underpaid according to the new rules. Royal Mail say that “in the immediate post-introduction period Royal Mail will be flexible in terms of not surcharging customers who have underpaid postage”. Expect to get lots of cards through the door saying that the ‘local’ delivery office is holding an item of mail which requires payment due to underpaid postage.
This morning on a 30 mile motorway journey, there were three separate occasions where unnecessary congestion was caused when traffic was forced over into the third lane due to HGVs overtaking other HGVs.
Now I appreciate that HGVs have just as much right to overtake as other vehicles but on each of these three occasions, the overtaking HGV was not making any progress past the other vehicle, meaning that it was needlessly blocking the second lane and should have moved back over into the first lane. In each case, the road was clear after passing this blockage; none of these instances was on a hill either.
In this country we seem to accept this ridiculous situation, but the Germans have a much better idea on their Autobahns: On certain places such as steep inclines and during peak times, vehicles over 3.5 Tonnes are prohibited from overtaking. It works well and keeps the traffic flowing.
I’m always amazed at the number of vans and lorries I see with a web address such as www.abcsupplies.com but then right next to it is a mickey mouse email address such as abcsupp568@aol.com or abcsupp568@fsnet.co.uk.
If you’ve gone to the trouble of paying for and setting up a proper domain name, then why not use it for your emails as well?
There was a multiple pile up this morning on the M62 between Junctions 6 and 4. Unfortunately, according to the map on the Highways Agency “Traffic England” website, this section of motorway does not seem to exist. As you can see from this screenshot, they’ve even had to put the warning triangle hovering over an apparently non-existent motorway:
It also shows the M57 between junctions 1 and 2 as an A road (makes it look like part of the A5300) and the A5300 is shown as a stub. The correct map should look like this:
I have also taken a look around and according to this map the M65 only goes as far as junction 8. Junctions 9 through to 14 are missing. I’m sure the residents of Burnley, Nelson and Colne would disagree.
UPDATE: 26 Sept 2006
Noticed today that the M57 between junctions 1 and 2 is now correctly coloured blue. The M62 is still missing between 6 and 4 but it’s a start.
UPDATE: 15 Nov 2006
According to David Butler of the Highways Agency:
The reason these junctions do not appear is that they are maintained and repaired by the Local Authority – Liverpool City Council.
This means that the Highways Agency are unable to collect data for that section of Motorway , which in turn would provide the real time information for the Traffic England website.
But that doesn’t explain why the M62 between J4 and J6 is completely missing. Fair enough if they don’t have information to display, but they should at least show a greyed out road.
In order to assist European doctors coming to England to work in the South Yorkshire area, Doncaster West Primary Care Trust have issued a Glossary of Yorkshire Medical Terms.
Please note, if you are easily offended, don’t follow the link..
Further to my previous post about Powerhouse’s lack of support for any browser other than IE, I decided to check if they had changed their attitude, but it would appear that they have gone into administration.
“The youngsters of today have no respect for the police” is a phrase which is often heard today, yet West Midlands Police recent petty actions against a group of children playing hopscotch have done little to build that much needed respect.
According to the BBC, they have “asked parents in Spring Street in Halesowen to remove chalk markings after complaints about them.“. The police refer to these chalk markings as ‘low level crime’, and by tackling that “they could prevent more serious problems developing”. What?! I can hear the warnings now: “Don’t let your daughter play hopscotch Mrs Smith, the next thing you know, she’ll be into prostitution!”.
What they have actually done is the opposite, as this sort of action will cause the children to lose respect for the police.
Sky have finally got around to launching their Remote Record functionality on Sky+.
Basically there are three ways to remotely set your Sky+ digibox to record a programme.
- via Sky by Mobile, a small app running on your compatible mobile phone.
- by text message “Programme title. Channel. Date. Time.” to 61759
- and finally via sky’s web page, although this is not yet live
So far, I have only tried the first option. You need to register in the Customer Zone on Sky.com. Sky are then supposed to send you a wap push message to your phone including the address to download the mobile app to your phone, but nothing arrived, even when I tried resending it from the customer zone services area. I found a post on Digital Spy’s forums, which gave the download address for the 156 kbyte app. (the messages did eventually arrive about 2 hours later)
You then have to register your mobile number via your Sky digibox. Press the interactive button on your Sky+ remote and choose ‘Sky Active’. Then go to ‘My Sky’ and select ‘Remote Record’. Enter your mobile number and you should be set up. Note this step requires the phone connection on your digibox as it needs to dial in your registration.
The TV Guide has the same look as on the Sky+ EPG, however you cannot skip forward by typing the channel number as you can on the EPG. This makes finding higher channels a bit of a chore as the data is downloaded for each page.
When you set a program to record, a message says that it will be sent to your digibox in the next thirty minutes, but in practice it’s only a couple of seconds.
Not sure how well the text messaging option will work. What happens if you don’t get the programme name or channel number exactly right? Will the system guess? Also, this option atttracts an extra 25p charge for the confirmation text from Sky.
Two more cases of bad spelling and one of bad grammar.
