Category: Uncategorized

Great news, I was upgraded by BT during June to their ‘Up to 20Mb’ service, although not expecting to get anywhere near to the offered 20Mb, I have seen a good increase in the speed, including an upload speed increase from 385 kbs to nearly 900 kbs.

BT Support have said that after a few weeks and with now using the new BT Home Hub 2.0 I should see a steady increase towards 10Mb.

Sadly the same can not be said for my Talk Talk connect (I’ve explained why I have two connections in an earlier post). I am still waiting for a ‘Bar’ to be lifted from the line that has been their since early May! I have given up waiting so have today cancelled it, but of course we are now arguing about termination fees etc. Will update the outcome in another post.

TalkTalk is really the worst company I have ever come across.

Here’s the graph for my May ISP figures. Major issue at the moment is the TalkTalk has reduced its ‘Free’ broadband to 768Kbs and it will not connect past a single ‘contact us’ error page.

Despite many many telephone calls to their Customer Services, Sales and Customer option teams, nothing is resolved as of the writing of this post. This all stems from a cock-up with the direct debit payment Talk Talk being taken twice in one month and when reset, it did not take in the following month (May 2010)  and Talk Talk then put a bar on the Broadband service.

Although I rectified this two days later – when I found out about the Bar, it remains in place and now I’m in that ‘limbo place’ of being passed from one office to another with no one taking responsibility to remove the Bar and fix it. I could write pages about this, but why waste more time on the issue. so I have told Talk Talk to cancel my contract under non-delivery of their service.

Thank goodness I could not cancel my BT broadband on my second line, it had five month left on the contract – which I use for business when I got the ‘Free’ Talk Talk broad offer on my main line.

It’s a mess and I wish I had never heard of Talk Talk!

I’ve been away for a while and was in fact was also away last week working at a large Printing Exhibition (IPEX) at the NEC so did not get to see any of this years State Opening of Parliament.

So when I got back yesterday and saw some of the reports about the Queens journey to the opening I was staggered to hear that she was doing this for the 56th time!

How time fly’s by and you really don’t notice until something like this is mentioned and then you realise the years are passing  along. Someone at the NEC asked me which IPEX I had first came to, typically it is held every four years and when I had worked that it had been 1980, it dawned on me that this was 30 years ago!

I suppose these ‘regular’ events do provide some degree of stability over the years as they occur, especially with the Queens annual appearance at the State Opening and her other ceremonial events. Though I do have to say, they do seem to come around far to often!

I got a bit behind in posting these reports on my Broadband speed. I now have two Broadband connections into my house – how decadent!

The second one is curtsey of moving my domestic (I have always had two – one for business – lines into the house) line rental from BT to TalkTalk and as well as saving me over £6.50 per month over the BT costs, they also included ‘free’ broadband. The fact that it took over three months to have it activated is another story!

I have six more months to run on my BT contract and if the TalkTalk ISP runs okay without any issues I may cancel BT and rely on TalkTalk as the ISP provider – time will tell. Anyway it now gives me a chance to make a valid comparison text between the two lines and companies.

So here the March and April figures.

While the politicians work out their deals, the good old British system of First Past the Post (FPP) has thrown up yet another abomination of a result. After all the debates, poster campaigns and door knocking ( I actually did get a knock from John Redwood this time), we are still no closer to having a definitive new government.

For me two big issues, 1) again the Liberals are denied a fair result for the number of votes cast and 2) the sight of hundreds of people denied the right vote.

Surely this skewed election result finally proves FPP does not deliver a true representation of what people want and that a Proportional Representation system must be adapted for all future General Elections.

With regards to the queues of disenfranchised voters who could not cast their vote, yes the Electoral Commission have said that they will launch a full enquiry. But last time I looked, we were supposed to be the mother of parliaments as well being a country that  sends Election monitors over the world to check on other Countries elections. So how come we couldn’t seem to run what everyone knew would be a very important UK election. I hope that the report from the Electoral Commission does find out what went wrong and we never see these sorts of sites on the streets of the UK at election time again.

With regards to the way the vote went and what how many votes got what; I created this table. It shows very well what is wrong with the FPP system.

Interestingly if the turnout was 65%, that means 35% of eligible voters did not cast their vote, which in actual ‘person’ terms means that 15,900,000 people did not or could not cast their vote.

Also, if the Liberals only got 3% less number of votes cast than Labour, then how come they got 201 less seats! That means that 1.8 million votes cast (the difference between Liberal & Labour brought in 201 more seats for Labour!

Further, as can be seen from the votes cast, it seems that Conservative seats come cheap at only 34,967 votes per seat, whereas to gain any of the 57 Liberal seat over 119,000 votes were needed for each seat!

FPP seems a very wrong system to me and the sooner it is changed to give a better representation of truer voting in the UK, then the better democracy will be for it.

I’m going to look in more depth at the figures, the Guardian newspaper has been collecting a lot of interesting information about this election, which I think I will delve into later.

I caught up with some TV tonight by watching the final episodes of the BBC’s Five Daughters TV Drama. Stephen Butchard had a tough task on his hands to to take this sensitive subject interjected with actual TV coverage of the real live incidents and make a watchable TV drama. What a really good job he did.

This was without doubt one of the best home produced TV dramas that I have seen in a number of years. It brought together the circular world of drug addiction and how users raise money to pay for their habit – in this case by prostitution and the risks (fatal in some cases) that the girls take when going out at night.

It really is tough viewing and contains many upsetting scenes as well as contributions from a number of the families involved in this very sad tale.

However, I was glad to see that although these events ripped apart five families, this tragedy has resulted in a number of local projects involving many agencies that between them claim to have almost eradicated drug related prostitution off the streets of Ipswich.

Well done the BBC for tackling a really tough subject and making such a milestone piece of TV drama.

A number of reviews have been written here and here and in case you still want to watch it on the BBC-iPlayer click here.

I saw the old name of Rhodesia appear this weekend with news that Bishop Abel Muzorewa had passed away. I am not sure why, but his name has always remained in my brain along with that of Ndabaningi Sithole who died in 2000.

Maybe it’s been the loose connection of visiting RSA a number of times in my youth courtesy of the Royal Navy when the dreaded Pass Laws were still in effect in the 60’s and participating in the UN backed Naval blockade of oil from getting to the port of Beira – the Beira Patrol.

I am sure before he death that Abel Muzorewa would have been very sad about the way the situation has ended up in what is now Zimbabwe and that it was one of his early compatriots, Robert Mugabe who has driven that country in to the ground.

It now seems that a replica of what happened in Zimbabwe may be appearing on the horizon for the RSA with a rise in the power of a certain Julius Malema and his ANC Youth League – linked to the recent murder of Eugene Terreblanche.

Rian Malan, a controversial figure himself (for his AIDS denial statements) cites an growing power struggle with the ANC where Julius Malema seems to suggest following Mugabe’s ‘economic’ program of wealth distribution.

Yes there is still massive inequality in many parts of Africa including the RSA (and in fact around the world), but there has to be a better way to sort this out than the example that Mugabe unleashed on a once vibrant and prosperous country.

The  inequality has still not been removed, it’s simply transferred from one ruling elite to another!

Maybe they will and maybe the won’t, how long it will take could be down to who wins the election? But an interesting article in the Guardian.

Anything that helps to lower the cost of these calls would be a good thing.

For a number of years when I was in the Royal Navy and was old enough to vote, the services always ensured that where ever you were (or going to be) there was always a possibility to cast your vote in any General Election.

Clearly times have changed and it now seems that many current service personnel will miss out on the chance to vote in what for everyone will be an important election.

According to this article from the Times (will I have to pay for this link after June 2010?) the issue on the surface seems to be about the changes in the military postal service and a number of ‘changeovers’ of units.

Could there be some ‘deeper’ reasons that many of our Forces will be denied the right to vote?  According to this Independent article, it is about the logistics of getting voting paper out and back in the allocated time. Last time I looked, the military have some of the fastest methods for moving ‘stuff’ around, surely with a bit of planning it should be a ‘no brainer’ to sort this out within the time frame allowed.

However, might it be that if many of the forces personnel were to vote Conservative this time (as Andy McNab says in the Times article above) and as many of them come from some of Labour potential marginal seats, their votes could add to the impending ‘hung’ parliament that everyone is predicting and deny Labour of an outright win.

Would this government stoop to such a low tactic to ensure victory?

Having to deal with what your enemy is trying to do to you is one thing. But worrying about what your government is doing to your rights behind your back is another. Lets hope that this gets sorted out as soon as possible.

Anyone who watched last nights Cutting Edge C4 program must have sat transfixed as the stories unfolded in front of us, I know I was. It was so sad to see how damaged these lads were, both mentally and physically.

Certainly this program more than any other report I have seen, brought home another hidden truth about what is going on in Afghanistan and well done to C4 for getting this out in the open.

Another aspect that was evident was the tremendous care and attention that the medical crew gave to their patients on the long trip back from the ‘front-line’.

We can all only have a deep appreciation of the service and sacrifice that these lads have given to protect us. I know I do.

Latest info from the MOD on the Casualty figures.