6233, Duchess of Sutherland passed by Horwich this morning with the Cumbrian Mountain Express, the first ever Duchess to work north from Bolton to Chorley. The steps to the right of the picture indicate the site of Horwich Fork signal box.
It returned later on, passing through Blackrod Station in the evening:
Ironman UK 2009 was held in Bolton this year. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to the swimming or cycing stages, but managed to catch the frontrunners as they made their first pass through Horwich.
This is Philip Graves running through Horwich with almost a seven minute lead in the first part of the marathon section. He went on to win the event.
Apparently, the driving school BSM is to replace its basic vehicle for learners – the Vauxhall Corsa – after signing a deal with Fiat. The reason given is that the first car purchased by 70% of learner drivers (mainly young women it would seem*) is the same model as they learned in, although I rather think the discount offered by Fiat had more to do with BSM’s decision.
How things have changed. I learned to drive in an Austin Metro and would have never even considered such an awful car.
* obviously young men can’t afford to drive as they are discriminated against by the insurers.
I was recently trying to explain to someone how call-waiting works (Talk Talk had enabled it on her line without explaining what it was or how to use it, so she though the beeping was a low battery warning)
“Just press Recall (or R) when you hear the beeps”, I said.
“I can’t find Recall (or R)”
Surely all modern phones have a recall button (or so I thought)
“What model phone is it?”, I asked.
“a BT Freestyle 2010”
A quick Google later produced the user manual, and on page 23 you find:
assuming of course that the original and new callers haven’t both given up by now and hung up. Why is this buried in a menu? Surely the Recall function should be as accessible as the buttons for dialling and hanging up. Given that BT promote this type of calling feature they should make the phones feature-friendly.
I ended up explaining how to disable call-waiting (#43#)
While using the app “WiFiZone@UK” I got the error message “Low mem2” on the iPhone (3G OS 3.0). Tapping OK cleared the error message which repeated several times.
I haven’t seen it since and a Google search doesn’t help.
Has anyone else seen this or have any idea what this semi-cryptic message means?
Scientists from Imperial College London are asking that schools be closed in the autumn term to reduce the spread of swine flu.
What they fail to mention is that this will effectively close thousands of businesses and more importantly the hospitals vital to treating the more serious cases, as parents are forced to stay off work to look after their children.
Maybe those giving the advice don’t have children, or are paid enough to be able afford to have the nanny look after the children.
I’ve been cutting our old shed down to make a playhouse for our children. The new front has a small window, so for safety I wanted to use Perspex, or to use its generic name, acrylic sheet. Wickes wanted 15 quid for a 2mm thick sheet 1220×600 but I only needed something 420 x 385 and they don’t do anything smaller. 2mm was also a bit thin; B&Q do a 4mm thick sheet but for 24 quid. Screwfix, as ever, were cheaper (half the price) but you need to buy five sheets – fine if you’re building these for a living but not for a one-off.
I then turned to ebay, and found several sellers offering smaller sheets around the A4/A3 size. I found one selling a sheet 500×500 – almost perfect. The listing even mentioned cut-to-size and included an email address so I fired off a quick email and they quoted me a 3mm cut-to-size piece delivered (to my work address for convenience) for £2.69 + £3.50 delivery.
So if you are after a piece of acrylic (or other plastic material), I can recommend Retail Engineering Design Limited.
We’ve had an odd one today: Before installing a copy of Photoshop Elements 6 on a Vista machine, we thought it best to uninstall an older version 2 that was on the system in case anything got fouled up by the new version (or rather the old version fouled up the new install).
That was easier said than done. There is no uninstall option under Program files, so Control Panel was used, but it threw back the error that the “‘Uninst.isu’ file is not valid”. Reinstalling version 2 in an attempt to fix any corruption was also not successful, but we then noticed that the uninst.isu filedate had not changed.
After trashing the file, we again reinstalled v2 and uninstall then worked OK.
Setanta has lost the rights to their Premier League matches after failing to make a contractual payment.
I can’t say that I am surprised by this. While I don’t agree with Sky having a monopoly on coverage of a particular sport (or any other broadcaster for that matter), the European ruling that rights must be split between broadcasters was ill-conceived.
Prior to this, it was possible to pay one subscription to Sky and watch your team on Sky. When the rights were split, consumers (whose interest the ruling was supposed to favour) were faced with paying an extra ten quid a month to get the same as the previous season; Sky’s subscription did not reduce as a result. The European ruling completely failed to increase competition from the customers point of view; the only winners have been the rights holders as it has allowed them to split the rights packages and sell them for more than they would have got for the package as a whole. You have to wonder where the interests of those making the ruling really lay.
Competition requires the availability of a choice (such as a telephone company or electricity supplier) for the same service; Sky and Setanta were not providing the same service; you could not choose to watch the same match on Sky or Setanta.
Faced with this decision, only the most hardened fan would shell out another tenner (over 20% on top of Sky’s complete Sport/Film/Entertainment package) just to see a handful of matches, especially in a family household where the full Sky package is likely to be accepted by a spouse, but an extra tenner for sports would not go down well.
Even without the current economical downturn, Setanta were always facing a mammoth task to break even.
I got an email from TomTom proudly offering a free £8 voucher
so I thought I’d use it to get an additional voice, but since TomTom now force you to use the TomTom Home software to download voices and most other purchases that you would likely use this voucher for, the voucher is of little use as it cannot be used with TomTom Home.