Archive

Archive for April, 2008

Horwich Morris Men’s Pavement Parade

April 26th, 2008 No comments

The Horwich Morris Men performed their annual parade around Horwich today to celebrate St.George’s Day, but thanks to the sad compensation-led state of our legal system, Police will no longer organise rolling roadblocks, so roads must be closed ‘for safety reasons’.

Horwich Morris Men
Horwich Morris Men make their way down Church Street from the Brown Cow

Fortunately, rather than canceling the event, the organisers decided to continue but stick to the pavements.

According to the Bolton News, teams who were due to take part included: Wrigley Head, Mossley and Saddleworth morris men, Ripon City and the Britannia Coconut Dancers, from Bacup.

Saddleworth Morris Men outside the Bridge, Horwich
Saddleworth Morris Men performing outside the Bridge Inn

New Classic Rock Station for Manchester

April 24th, 2008 No comments

106.1 Rock Radio ManchesterThere’s a new classic rock station starting in Manchester – 106.1 Rock Radio. The good news is that it is currently in test broadcast, so it’s playing classic rock back to back without any adverts. Unfortunately, that luxury will end on 5th May at 6pm when the station officially launches.

Categories: Misc Tags: , ,

What value TomTom Traffic?

April 22nd, 2008 No comments

CarsIt’s coming up to renewal time for TomTom Traffic, and I’m wondering whether to bother.

My journey to work involves a motorway and a number of A roads. Depending on traffic, the first part of my journey (on the A6 to the motorway) can take me 20-25 minutes (6 minutes without congestion). That is a considerable delay, yet TomTom Traffic has never flagged it. Similarly, delays on the A666 are never reported.

The only delays that do get a mention are on the M61, but even then the information is next to useless: regardless of the actual amount of traffic or delay, TomTom Traffic will always report the same delay over the same fixed length of motorway i.e. between junctions. These figures are:

Section of Road Delay reported
M61 J5-J4 16 minutes
M61 J4-J3 22 minutes

The traffic could be stationary or just slower than normal but TomTom Traffic cannot differentiate, so the reported delays have little use.

On longer journeys I’ve often been in the middle of a traffic jam before TomTom warns about it, or the location of delays or roadworks are often several miles out. Considering TomTom Traffic is supposed to use the same source as keepmoving.co.uk, the two sets of information rarely tie up.

Categories: Uncategorized Tags: , ,

Cellars

April 15th, 2008 No comments

While reading Specifier Review, I came across this advert for Surespan:

Cellar Hatch from SurespanSurespan accesses fine wine
A jersey home owner can now access their wine cellar via their kitchen thanks to a specially designed hatch manufactured and supplied by Surespan. Designed with a recessed lid to accommodate the matching the matching stone floor, it is virtually unnoticeable when closed and operates electronically to reveal a hidden wine cellar.

Great, I want one!!

Just one small point – I don’t have a cellar and neither do most people in the UK.

In an era when builders seem to want to cram as many houses as possible on to a plot of land (no doubt encouraged by local councils, eager to maximise the number of council tax payers), most houses with garages have never seen a car; they are instead used as extra storage rooms to make up for the lack of space in today’s houses, or even converted into another living room. Why then, is it not part of the building regulations or planning controls that all new houses should be built with cellars? Straight away, you have a ready made laundry room, work room and extra storage, all for the same amount of land usage as now.

You could even put your car in the garage. Wouldn’t that be a novelty?

Categories: Misc Tags:

Mozy Backup goes crazy

April 7th, 2008 10 comments

Mozy LogoI noticed this morning that something had been uploading data overnight. I saw that the Mozy Backup status icon showed it was still running, however, when I checked the status (see below), I was surprised to see that it had decided to try and back up 435GB of data! It is only supposed to back up around 9.3GB of data, so what the hell made it decide to to do that?

Mozy Trying to backup up everything

Unfortunately, I was unable to find out, because whenever I tried to run the Mozy config, it just sat there and locked up. I had to force-quit it, but something was still hammering the processor. A quick look using ipulse showed it was a process named ‘MozyBackup’. I killed it, but immediately it fired up again. Repeatedly killing it resulted in the same firing up. It was almost behaving like some kind of malware. I ended up rebooting, but it started hammering the processor again, so for the time being, I have had to uninstall Mozy.

Mozy for Mac is currently at 0.9.3.1 and Mozy recently asked its users whether Mozy for Mac was ready for being called version 1. I think this sort of episode shows that they have some way to go.

Update

Following Dan’s Comment below, I have now re-installed Mozy, and he is looking at the log files amongst others to diagnose the problem. I will post back here with the outcome.

Categories: Uncategorized Tags: ,