tenthofjune

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

MART (Manchester Against Road Tolls) have finally got around to updating their website, include a new forum, so get over there and make your views known about the flawed Manchester Congestion Tax*.

Yes it is a tax – a charge is avoidable, a tax isn’t. Most people driving into Manchester have no alternative.

I’ve received an email stating that the eFax Free service is to cease as of 1st October 2008:

Due to pending changes imposed by OFCOM, the UK regulator for the telecommunications industry, we will no longer be able to offer eFax Free service for your number as of October 1, 2008.

Presumably this is because they receive a kickback from the 0870 numbers used and that is what funds the free service. It goes on to say that in order to keep my number I must convert to the paid-for service ‘eFax plus’. Err… no thanks.
Interestingly, eFax are still offering free numbers with no mention of the short life they will have. No matter, I haven’t used my free eFax number for several years; I now use a proper local number provided by my excellent ISP.

The toothless government regulator OFCOM has today suggested that the UK’s mobile users should follow the ludicrous US model of being charged to receive a call. Yes you read that correctly: pay to receive a call.

Hello, OFCOM, you are supposed to be protecting the telecoms consumer, not giving a blank cheque to the operators and free reign to cold callers.

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.

After moving to Leopard, my Canon LIDE 60 scanner was not working, however when I tried to reinstall the driver it just hangs. I found the solution however on the Throwable Blog where you can get links to a download to uninstall the old driver and install a new copy of the LIDE driver.