tenthofjune

The people who brought you Metcheck have come up with a traffic website: keepmoving.co.uk.

It looks a very exciting venture, but I think they need to iron out a few bugs:

Today there is a major incident on the M6 Southbound with the motorway closed. Now while keepmoving have a column on the left of their page showing this, and the graph on the right shows that the M6 is far and away the most requested information on their phone line, the motorway specific data in the centre shows no problems. Click here for a larger screenshot.

Just got to have one of these…

UPDATE: Now available from Firebox

Check this video out:

My mother-in-law has always been with Freeserve on Dial-up and does not use the internet enough to warrant paying for broadband. When Dixons sold Freeserve to Wanadoo in France (part of France Telecom), she was none the wiser, except that she didn’t understand why her homepage had changed to wanadoo.co.uk.

Now that France Telecom have decided to merge the brand names under the Orange brand, her homepage has changed again, still with no explanation. Since her homepage is still actually set to www.freeserve.co.uk, this redirects to www.orange.co.uk. Surely, it doesn’t take much for Orange to spot the redirections and display a banner explaining the change.

Now the really crap part: She started getting a message saying she had to change the number her computer dialled. The POP server also started refusing connections, refering her to the same page. Not exactly much warning nor much explanation to someone who just wants to check her emails and log in to her bank.

The automatic ‘download new number’ option does not work, even when logged in as administrator, but then again that’s Windoze for you.

Previously, she had dialled 0845 079 6699 (1p/min weekday eve), but the new number is 0844 058 7000 (2p/min).

There is no valid reason for doubling the price, especially as most people won’t realise this.

According to the FAQ on the changes:

Why is the number changing?
We’re asking you to change to this new number as the old one is out of date and will soon be closing.

What utter Bollocks! If you need to change it, change it to another 0845 number. The real answer is that Orange don’t like dial up customers and have therefore chosen to fleece them.

When did you tell me about this change?
We emailed you about 30 days ago explaining what the number change was and what you’d need to do.

No you did not! My mother-in-law received no such email.

So basically, no warning, no valid reason for the change in price. Shame on you Orange.

Further to my post on Royal Mail’s new charges, my wife took a letter to the post office, but despite it being an A5 envelope, which fit through the slot on Royal Mail’s new postage guide and weighed less than 100g, (thus qualifying as a small letter) she was charged 44p (large letter rate) not 32p.

It would seem the post office doesn’t even understand the new rules.

This little creature’s built an impressive web in the front garden.
Even managed to catch something.

According to the BBC, a report commissioned by Tesco has shown UK youngsters to be amongst the most lazy in the world. Now while that doesn’t surprise me, what is annoying is the opening paragraph of the BBC’s report:

The survey found UK children spend an average of 9.4 hours a week playing computer games or watching TV, but less than one hour a day being active.

On the face of it you are hit by two figures of 9.4 hours and 1 hour. Quite a difference until you realise that one is per week and the other per day. To be fair we need to normalise these figures to either: 9.4 hours per week playing computer games as compared to less than 7 hours per week being active, or 1 hour 21 minutes (non-active) versus less than 1 hour active. Doesn’t look such a huge difference anymore does it?

The BBC is supposed to be reporting this impartially, but they have given undue emphasis to the time spent playing computer games or watching TV, no doubt in the interest of sensationalism.

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.