tenthofjune

I’ve just found this gem on a Manchester Evening News Article from last year:

Oldham and Rochdale may not pay any congestion charges until Metrolink extensions to their town centres are complete. Other outlying areas – such as Stockport, which hopes to get a Metrolink line in the future – are also likely to avoid the charges for the first year.

Yet there is no mention of other outlying areas, such as Bolton and Wigan, who will NEVER get the Metrolink, yet are getting no such exemption.

Is it any wonder, Bolton and Wigan don’t want to be lumped in as part of Greater Manchester when they are discriminated against in this way?

As it happens, it would appear that AGMA have reneged on this exemption and only Trafford Park is getting a 50% discount until they get some more buses, but this clearly shows how some areas are considered more equal than others.

While browsing my RSS feeds, this one caught my eye on the Bolton News site:

A giant 200th anniversary
A MAGICAL open air-show will celebrate 200 years of Moses Gate Country Park on Saturday.

but when I checked the full story on their site, instead of talking about the Red Arrows or a Lancaster fly-past, it talked about ‘giant puppets, music and lanterns‘.

Then I spotted it – The lead should have read open-air show, instead of open air-show – two very different things.

Ah well, it did seem a little odd that Bolton Council would be staging anything so spectacular.

If you are getting a code 95 error on a 1769-SDN scanner card after extending the network, check your end-of-line resistors.

I recently had a false error code on an Allen Bradley 1769-SDN DeviceNet Scanner card. The card had been operating OK on a very simple network talking to a single device. The network had been extended to add another identical device. Once power had been reapplied, the scanner was showing error code 95. According to the manual, this was:

Flash Update In Progress DO NOT disconnect the module from the network while a flash update is in progress.

Since I hadn’t initiated any flash update, I feared that the module had suffered a spike from some welding that had been taking place nearby. Cycling the power did not help. Removing the connector from the front of the scanner correctly showed code 92 – No DeviceNet power. I could not even connect to the network using a PC and the 1770-KFD adapter. I checked and double checked the wiring, looking for loose connections and even belled out the network.

Everything looked OK, however I had noticed that the network LED on the front of the scanner went red as soon as I plugged the connector back in, suggesting that the scanner was detecting some electrical fault. I removed the new section of wiring, returning the system to its original state and everything was OK again, suggesting a fault with the new wiring. Returning to check the new wiring, I noticed that the end-of-line resistor didn’t look like the one on the other end of the network. The contractor who had wired the network extension had used a different resistor to the correct 120 Ohm one.

Rectifying this cleared the error and the network now functions correctly.

However, the red-herring of the ‘Flash Update In Progress’ error had wasted two hours of my time. So the question is, why does the scanner show this false error under this condition?

My daughter currently has chicken pox so I’ve been doing some on-line research, mainly to see when the contagious period ends. Having previously had it myself (unfortunately as an adult) I was interested in the connection with shingles.

I knew that you can only get shingles if you have previously had chicken pox, as shingles is caused by re-emergence of the chicken pox (varicella) virus which has lain dormant in your body, but I had recently been told that exposure to chicken pox can trigger an outbreak of shingles. This is not so and I was interested to discover from the NHS Direct website that exposure to chicken pox actually gives you a booster vaccination against shingles:

If the chickenpox vaccine were to be added to the list of childhood vaccinations, it is feared that there would be a greater number of cases of shingles in adults, until the vaccination was given to the entire population.
This is because adults who have had chickenpox as a child are less likely to have shingles in later life if they have been exposed occasionally to the chickenpox virus (for example by their children). This is because the exposure acts as a booster vaccine.

and the trigger for shingles is basically a weakening of the immune system, allowing the virus to re-emerge.

I’ve received a flyer from Sky to upgrade to their Sky HD box. The outside of the flyer looks promising:

Seventy five quid – not bad and possibly a price-point at which it’s worth upgrading, but once you open up the mailshot they hit you with the sting: £60 ‘set-up’ fee.

Now when I moved house, I had no problem unplugging at the old address and plugging in at the new address. The only difference with an upgrade to a HD box will be a registration stage – pressing a couple of buttons. If it’s possible to set up a home broadband router by yourself, why can’t Sky do the same? Also, why does it cost sixty quid, especially when new customers get it for thirty quid (another flyer arrived at the same time, asking me to introduce a friend).

They even have the cheek to say:

So, since the setup fee is non-optional, the real price that Sky should print is £135, but if you add on the ten pound extra per month for HD, the total cost of ownership for the first twelve months (on top of your normal, ever increasing, Sky subscription) is £255, a far cry from the headline £75.

There is a local street that is regularly used by dog walkers as a toilet for their dogs. Now before any dog owners get wound up, I know that most owners are responsible, but for some reason this particular street has a problem. The council have painted ‘no fouling’ signs on the pavements but, as you can see, some people just don’t seem to care, or maybe they have completely misunderstood the sign and think it means a designated spot for this purpose.

We’ve just had our post delivered today at ten to five! It does not appear to be a one-off either as I remember seeing the postman at a similar time earlier this week.

This is simply not acceptable. How is it possible to act on and reply to items of post that have only been delivered at the ond of the day?

Royal Mail seem to be doing everything possible to ensure that they lose their monopoly on postal deliveries

On my way to work this morning, I spotted the Google Street View camera car parked up on the A666 Bolton Road in Kearsley. Unfortunately I couldn’t pull over to take a pic, but this is what it looks like.

I was disappointed today to see yet another country road lost to the nanny-state council tactics of reducing speed limits unnecessarily. In this case the B5203 Blindfoot Road and Mossborough Road (between The East Lancs Road and Rainford) has been reduced from national speed limit (i.e. 60mph) to 40mph.

This is a farce – this is not an urban area, it is a country lane. When I was training for my Advanced Driving Test, this was a favourite road used by group observers to test driving skills, but councils and government aren’t interested in driving skills any more, they’d rather just make you crawl everywhere instead “because we know what’s best for you”.

I then turned onto the A570 Rainford bypass towards Ormskirk. For those who do not know this road, it is a high quality dual carriageway road, but St.Helens Council have seen it fit to reduce to 60mph. It’s obvious that the council is responsible – as soon as you cross into West Lancashire, you cross back into common sense and the road becomes de-restricted again.

You have to wonder how long it will be before the whole country is one big 30mph zone.

I had just gone out of the front door this afternoon when I heard an aircraft approaching – nothing surprising, we get a few planes and helicopters flying around here, but as I turned around to look I was treated to the rarely seen sight of a Lancaster bomber (PA474) flying over at low level. (There are only two remaining flying Lancasters in the world, the other is in Canada). According to this page it must have been doing a fly past at Crosby and was on its way home to Lincolnshire.