Isn't modern life surprising,eh?
Take Tv for instance in the UK we had four followed by Five free to air tv channels available by an antenna in the 1990's.
If you wanted more channels you'd either get cable which Cranford Central sure isn't an option or you'd subscribe to Sky TV a subscription based satellite service that provides packages which I had for several years changing from analogue to digital over that time.
The service wasn't bad, but it was expensive and you have to take all the subscription regular channels to get either sports or film channels. I wasn't in much to take full use of it.
I tried ONdigital which reception issues aside (believe you me I had to have the biggest most sensitive antenna fixed in the whole neighbourhood to get this part subscription digital tv via the antenna service with reasonable reception out here) wasn't bad as it gave most of the stuff I wanted at a reasonable price only to have it go in administration.
When the digital tv over the antenna service was reconfigured in 2002 to a very wide choice of free to watch channels from the likes of the BBC, ITV, Channels 4 and five, I stuck with that, just keeping the old sky box for a select few satellite only free channels I watch downstairs.
Imagine my surprise then to find it was possible to subscribe to the sports channel British Eurosport which I missed entirely online in HD widescreen for a mere £2.99 per month and having now gotten decent fibre broadband I had a fast clean connection to make it work.
Plus connection permitting I can use it on a tablet PC via Wifi anywhere!
With that I updated the M$Silverlight to the latest version on the laptop having deleted the old one and immediately set up an account paying via PayPal cos I don't like handing my card details out if I can help it.
It really works so with a combination of two British Europsport channels (with extra one offs) streamed HD anime from CR and my free to air tv channels I'm getting just the kind of tv I like at a price I feel is reasonable.
Thursday, 16 August 2012
Wednesday, 8 August 2012
MPs need to grow up!
While most of the UK basks in its very impressive standings in the 2012 London Olympics being currently 3rd on the medal table, a different kind of a game is being played out by the politicians on the streets of London.
There are two piece of legislation that the two parties in the Coalition want and each has something to gain from one but there's a problem with how it can be delivered.
The Tories want to reduce the number of Members of Parliament probably a good thing given how much is done in Europe and the Devolved assemblies of of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland but by changing the constituencies in way that generally favours them.
The Liberal Democrats want to 'reform' the second chamber - the House of Lords - by having nearly all the Lords elected for 15 year period because they believe that gives them a ' democratic mandate' to act.
The problem with this is simple: Ever since the 1909 Peoples Budget and the constitutional clash between the Lords and The Commoners, the Commons had the final say and the Lords was a revising Chamber where members with experience and no party system to make them vote along those lines examined and suggested improvements to bills and could introduce new bils but they had to go the the Commons for approval.
It worked well in practise even if the Lords weren't elected and some who were entitled to attend didn't but Tony Blair MP as Prime Minister half reformed it, removing some lords and putting political appointees in living it in limbo and creating a Supreme Court usurping some of the Lords former powers.
Now the one thing Commoners do not is a House of Lords that says "We represent the people" and start to challenge directly them so many Tories and a good many others who aren't Liberal Democrats have made it plain they won't vote for this.
In a pique of childish behaviour, the Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister has decided to block the changes in the number of MPs championed by the Prime Minister, Tory David Cameron.
To some as one who will admit to voting LD in the elections over here I find this stupid simple because of all the many pressing issues in modern Britain there's next to no interest by the public at large in changing how the House of Lords works. Actually outside of the Liberal Democrat supporters most would say they like it how it is.
If the Liberal Democrats had concerns about how the new seats proposed to reduce the number of MP's (and I can think of some affecting people near here ), then they should oppose them for those reasons alone, not childish tit for tac revenge.
Is there a grown up in the House of Commons?
There are two piece of legislation that the two parties in the Coalition want and each has something to gain from one but there's a problem with how it can be delivered.
The Tories want to reduce the number of Members of Parliament probably a good thing given how much is done in Europe and the Devolved assemblies of of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland but by changing the constituencies in way that generally favours them.
The Liberal Democrats want to 'reform' the second chamber - the House of Lords - by having nearly all the Lords elected for 15 year period because they believe that gives them a ' democratic mandate' to act.
The problem with this is simple: Ever since the 1909 Peoples Budget and the constitutional clash between the Lords and The Commoners, the Commons had the final say and the Lords was a revising Chamber where members with experience and no party system to make them vote along those lines examined and suggested improvements to bills and could introduce new bils but they had to go the the Commons for approval.
It worked well in practise even if the Lords weren't elected and some who were entitled to attend didn't but Tony Blair MP as Prime Minister half reformed it, removing some lords and putting political appointees in living it in limbo and creating a Supreme Court usurping some of the Lords former powers.
Now the one thing Commoners do not is a House of Lords that says "We represent the people" and start to challenge directly them so many Tories and a good many others who aren't Liberal Democrats have made it plain they won't vote for this.
In a pique of childish behaviour, the Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister has decided to block the changes in the number of MPs championed by the Prime Minister, Tory David Cameron.
To some as one who will admit to voting LD in the elections over here I find this stupid simple because of all the many pressing issues in modern Britain there's next to no interest by the public at large in changing how the House of Lords works. Actually outside of the Liberal Democrat supporters most would say they like it how it is.
If the Liberal Democrats had concerns about how the new seats proposed to reduce the number of MP's (and I can think of some affecting people near here ), then they should oppose them for those reasons alone, not childish tit for tac revenge.
Is there a grown up in the House of Commons?
Wednesday, 1 August 2012
Surrender
HP wireless Lan on, that's a good start to blog I think sat in front of the laptop today.
Well, over here we're in awe of the Olympics with some events taking place in nearby Manchester despite all that London 2012 stuff, it's much wider than that and I'm thinking back to the first Olympics I recall watching, the '76 ones in Montreal, QE.
That takes me back to an artist who was jam hot back then, Diana Ross and specifically the 'Black Album' that helped rise the bar of emergent disco with the classic Love Hangover seguing from soft soul to full on disco as well as tracks such as Do You Know Where You're Going To? and her cover of the Charles Chaplin song, Smile. Well recently the specialty arm of Univerrsal, Hip-O reissued it with alternative mixes and previously unreleased songs all freshly re-mastered on 2 cds.
That's no bad thing as a number of those early Motown cds do sound at best mediocre and some downright edgy and for years they've been the only ones on the market. This double issue of Diana Ross (1976) is a big improvement on the old 80's American cd and comes close to my original UK Tamla_Motown lp with more transparency and presence.
I also got a number of other titles issued over the years in this series by Hip-O although one - the Expanded edition of Last Time I Saw Him - is out of print on cd so I went to my favourite download store, 7Digital and bought a 320Kbps download of it. You don't have install any fancy software on your computer as you can get the 'Zip file' download option, and using the extraction tool built into Windows, extract to the Music library to ply or share with your digital music player.
I'll proceed to annoy the audio purists by saying in my opinion, the download did sound really good being better than a number of cds I've bought new!
The titles so far In I have are, Diana aka Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Everything Is Everything, Surrender including the UK#1 I'm Still Waiting, Touch Me In The Morning, Last Time I Saw Him (Her country flavoured set) and Diana Ross. I hope they tackle Baby It's Me as my old cd suffers from 'sticky top syndrome' being made by Nimbus here in the UK when this accident was common in the late 80's and I'd love to replace it.
Well, over here we're in awe of the Olympics with some events taking place in nearby Manchester despite all that London 2012 stuff, it's much wider than that and I'm thinking back to the first Olympics I recall watching, the '76 ones in Montreal, QE.
That takes me back to an artist who was jam hot back then, Diana Ross and specifically the 'Black Album' that helped rise the bar of emergent disco with the classic Love Hangover seguing from soft soul to full on disco as well as tracks such as Do You Know Where You're Going To? and her cover of the Charles Chaplin song, Smile. Well recently the specialty arm of Univerrsal, Hip-O reissued it with alternative mixes and previously unreleased songs all freshly re-mastered on 2 cds.
That's no bad thing as a number of those early Motown cds do sound at best mediocre and some downright edgy and for years they've been the only ones on the market. This double issue of Diana Ross (1976) is a big improvement on the old 80's American cd and comes close to my original UK Tamla_Motown lp with more transparency and presence.
I also got a number of other titles issued over the years in this series by Hip-O although one - the Expanded edition of Last Time I Saw Him - is out of print on cd so I went to my favourite download store, 7Digital and bought a 320Kbps download of it. You don't have install any fancy software on your computer as you can get the 'Zip file' download option, and using the extraction tool built into Windows, extract to the Music library to ply or share with your digital music player.
I'll proceed to annoy the audio purists by saying in my opinion, the download did sound really good being better than a number of cds I've bought new!
The titles so far In I have are, Diana aka Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Everything Is Everything, Surrender including the UK#1 I'm Still Waiting, Touch Me In The Morning, Last Time I Saw Him (Her country flavoured set) and Diana Ross. I hope they tackle Baby It's Me as my old cd suffers from 'sticky top syndrome' being made by Nimbus here in the UK when this accident was common in the late 80's and I'd love to replace it.
Wednesday, 25 July 2012
Communication breakdown
Getting hot don't you think?
The day got off to good start when my digital set top box that thing that feeds my old school tv decided to expire. I mean I woke up earlier with it still being warm at 4:30AM putting on the BBC's news channel to catch up with the latest G4S disasters, dozed back of to sleep only to wake up at 5:15 to an alternating black screen and white noise from the old built in analogue tuner in the TV itself!
I bought this around late October 2006 when my old STB a Nokia left by ONdigital, the worlds first Digital tv via an antenna company, was liquidated in 2002 and I've a fair idea of what happened. It's most likely to be power supply issue involved a couple of capacitors that have gone short circuit having leaked. It's a very common problem in consumer electronics as to keep costs down, they use underrated components assuming by time they've failed, you'll sent it to landfill and buy another. I just might unscrew it and have a go fixing it although I found a dirt cheap replacement in a local charity store that's a deadringer for it using the same chassis but just different switches and a marginally different remote.
I'm tempted to look for a FreeviewHD USB adapter for the laptop instead as it can handle 720P pictures.
Sunday saw a big fibre trunk outage that made using the internet for chat rooms a pain as it was taking over a minute for a few words you typed to come back. From what I read while at work, it covered Devon up to Manchester via Birmingham as as somehow they internet things I'm in Wolverhampton of all places and they'd get their feed from Brum, that's what happened running through midnight Sunday. It's been fine afterwards but after over a week of well nigh perfect broadband and darn quick uploading, it left me a bit down.
This afternoon I'll watch the Women's soccer on the BBC the first pre Olympic event.
The day got off to good start when my digital set top box that thing that feeds my old school tv decided to expire. I mean I woke up earlier with it still being warm at 4:30AM putting on the BBC's news channel to catch up with the latest G4S disasters, dozed back of to sleep only to wake up at 5:15 to an alternating black screen and white noise from the old built in analogue tuner in the TV itself!
I bought this around late October 2006 when my old STB a Nokia left by ONdigital, the worlds first Digital tv via an antenna company, was liquidated in 2002 and I've a fair idea of what happened. It's most likely to be power supply issue involved a couple of capacitors that have gone short circuit having leaked. It's a very common problem in consumer electronics as to keep costs down, they use underrated components assuming by time they've failed, you'll sent it to landfill and buy another. I just might unscrew it and have a go fixing it although I found a dirt cheap replacement in a local charity store that's a deadringer for it using the same chassis but just different switches and a marginally different remote.
I'm tempted to look for a FreeviewHD USB adapter for the laptop instead as it can handle 720P pictures.
Sunday saw a big fibre trunk outage that made using the internet for chat rooms a pain as it was taking over a minute for a few words you typed to come back. From what I read while at work, it covered Devon up to Manchester via Birmingham as as somehow they internet things I'm in Wolverhampton of all places and they'd get their feed from Brum, that's what happened running through midnight Sunday. It's been fine afterwards but after over a week of well nigh perfect broadband and darn quick uploading, it left me a bit down.
This afternoon I'll watch the Women's soccer on the BBC the first pre Olympic event.
Wednesday, 18 July 2012
Olympic blues
This week here in the UK, we've been getting ready for the upcoming Olympics and what an interest week it has been for some of our companies providing services starting with the missing or otherwise lost bus drivers who are meant to take the incoming sports stars to their accommodation. Like how does it happen in a Capital that prides itself on driver knowledge for its Taxis can people get so lost for four hours or more? Every modern bus has satellite navigation aids, most of the drivers are experienced and the Olympic lanes are marked on the asphalt.
Then there's the great G4S fowl up who were given the job of providing security both at the stadia and also at the accommodation effectively placing them in lockdown only to find less than a quarter of those selected show up, those who want to haven't been told when they're wanted, the senior execs are very late founding out what is really happening and the Taxpayer pays twice providing the Army and Police to fill the gaps. The Home Secretary knows nothing and her opposite number is more interested in political point scoring when these contracts go back to when they were in office, a period I'm regretting with every month of fresh disclosures. Then there's the small matter of the M4 Highway cracking up that links London Heathrow and the venues that wasn't picked upon regular inspection.
It's such a pity when everything else was carefully checked and rechecked months ago with everyone looking forward to the opening day.
Then there's the great G4S fowl up who were given the job of providing security both at the stadia and also at the accommodation effectively placing them in lockdown only to find less than a quarter of those selected show up, those who want to haven't been told when they're wanted, the senior execs are very late founding out what is really happening and the Taxpayer pays twice providing the Army and Police to fill the gaps. The Home Secretary knows nothing and her opposite number is more interested in political point scoring when these contracts go back to when they were in office, a period I'm regretting with every month of fresh disclosures. Then there's the small matter of the M4 Highway cracking up that links London Heathrow and the venues that wasn't picked upon regular inspection.
It's such a pity when everything else was carefully checked and rechecked months ago with everyone looking forward to the opening day.
Saturday, 14 July 2012
Sunshine girl
Downpours, eh? We sure had them in the last few days here with me doing a drown rat impression while catching the bus to walk or strolling down toward the corner store and as I commented to the Nurse a week back, it sure gets me down not being able to go out.
Still, today at long last we have sunshine so much so that my idea of great stuff to put and and sit out in is more like this:
Exactly! Modest, comfortable, and ideal should you still have a mania for jumping around water be it a pool or playing with water pistols as that sure would cool you off.
The internet got changed over this week without incident and so far I've only had a one minute dropout which is so much better than what I was experiencing before and that's before you take into account the radical improvements in download and upload speeds which makes watching or listening to streamed service a much better experience. So much so I was able to listen to the HD streamed audio of the First Night of the Proms classical music concert in better than FM quality last night.
I'm streamlining some of the programs on my old desktop before it inevitable makes it way to the scrapyard in the sky as some like Thunderbird while being an excellent Email program, is something I haven't used since switching to webmail in 2008, I no longer use the sector to sector cd copying program EAC and I no longer have many office documents to deal with so I've replaced OpenOffice.org with AbiWord that just does word based documents. Having a Google account, I have web access to Google Docs for more if I really need a spreadsheet or database.
I may try installing and running CCCleaner to remove the rubbish that gets stick in the registry over the years.
Still, today at long last we have sunshine so much so that my idea of great stuff to put and and sit out in is more like this:
The internet got changed over this week without incident and so far I've only had a one minute dropout which is so much better than what I was experiencing before and that's before you take into account the radical improvements in download and upload speeds which makes watching or listening to streamed service a much better experience. So much so I was able to listen to the HD streamed audio of the First Night of the Proms classical music concert in better than FM quality last night.
I'm streamlining some of the programs on my old desktop before it inevitable makes it way to the scrapyard in the sky as some like Thunderbird while being an excellent Email program, is something I haven't used since switching to webmail in 2008, I no longer use the sector to sector cd copying program EAC and I no longer have many office documents to deal with so I've replaced OpenOffice.org with AbiWord that just does word based documents. Having a Google account, I have web access to Google Docs for more if I really need a spreadsheet or database.
I may try installing and running CCCleaner to remove the rubbish that gets stick in the registry over the years.
Saturday, 7 July 2012
Downpours!
I don't know what happened to "Flaming June" but July sure isn't shaping up into anything better having gotten drenched from visiting my Doctors yesterday. Fortunately most of this district hasn't been subject to flooding although some twenty miles south of here some people have been flooded out of their houses when the rivers overflowed and the back roads here need to be treated with a bit of caution as the fields do flood frequently.
As it was sunny when I got up first thing, I decided to get my long walks in early as the forecast for the afternoon wasn't good at all and nothing but nothing is gonna stop me from exercising! And as my blood pressure is a tidgy bit high it's as well to continue with it as I've lost so far over 1 stone and 2 pounds.
As it was sunny when I got up first thing, I decided to get my long walks in early as the forecast for the afternoon wasn't good at all and nothing but nothing is gonna stop me from exercising! And as my blood pressure is a tidgy bit high it's as well to continue with it as I've lost so far over 1 stone and 2 pounds.
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