Category: Uncategorized

Appointed without any open election to the position Catherine Ashton has assumed the EU’s role as Foreign Minister.

Who is this person that speaks on our behalf?

Here’s a few background links about her:

• Who is EU’s Catherine Ashton?

• Catherine Ashton: ‘My Job Is to Keep Traffic Moving’.

• Ashton at centre of EU turf war over new diplomatic service.

• Catherine Ashton and her Barroso problem

With four presidents now in ‘charge’ of  Europe, one wonders where Europe if going? As was seen recently with Nigel Ferage outburst towards Herman Van Rompuy, there is still a lot that needs to be done to make EU appear to be heading in one cohesive direction.

Why, when Europe is considered to be so democratic , do we have a situation where the ordinary citizen has absolutely no influence of who gets these top jobs considering that they seem so intent on telling us what we should be doing.

The Four Presidents of Europe

José Manuel Barroso
Position: President of the European Commission
Powers: Head of the E.U.’s executive branch

Jerzy Buzek
Position: President of the European Parliament
Powers: Chairs parliamentary debate and represents Europe’s legislature

Herman Van Rompuy
Position: President of the European Council
Powers: Administrative or Executive?

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
Position: PM of Spain, holder of rotating presidency
Powers: Short term head of the EU.

I came across this article in last weeks Time Magazine that really does question what direction Europe is taking and what participation Europe will have in the coming years on World affairs.

With the USA and China seemingly the current strongest world players, Europe needs to get its act together and set out what it really wants from its current & expanding position in the world.

Here are my ISP figures for Jan. & Feb. 2o10. All seems to be stable apart from a slight glitch at the end of Feb.

Looking at the early figures for March, now seems to have settled down again.

Interesting add on to these figures. I finally received my ‘free’ broadband from Talk Talk after accepting their offer last October 2009 – five month!!!

This was part of a deal that Talk Talk ran last year for moving my line rental from BT to them – I had already been ‘calls’ only customer for some four years.  Anyway, thank goodness that I did not cancel my BT Broadband. Yes I am paying £6.50 a month less than with BT, but five months wait!!!

Anyway, why do I now have two broadband suppliers? I had my second BT line put in over 15 years ago (paid for by the company I then worked for) so that I had a separate dial-up connection without interrupting my ‘domestic’ line and of course it was converted to early broadband when that can along and gradually it has built up to what it is today.

I still use that BT connection today for my own business (working in Publishing IT and sometimes have to shift some fairly large files around) and it has  remained pretty reliable. If it took Talk Talk five months to deliver my broadband I wonder what the service and connection quality will be like?

So I will add that line to my testing for March and see what I get as results and make decision about retaining the BT line in a couple of months time.

It seems that the pundits are still predicting a hung parliament as the result of the forthcoming UK election. Will this be what we really want going forward?

See these results from the Guardian report.

I’d be interested to see what you say, complete the Poll on the right of this post and we’ll see what more of the public say.

This is test post to test embedding of a You Tube video. Following my reading of Damian Kulash Jr’s of the band OK Go, letter in the New York Times.

I was sent a link today about the winner of the 2009 Ukraine’s Got Talent contest.

We’ve all seen sand sculptures on the beach in the summer, but this is unbelievable.

My DVD packed up a short while ago, it was one of those low cost supermarket deals from a few years ago, but it did the job very well.

However, being out of warranty and costing more to repair than buying another replacement, I looked online to see about running DVD’s on a recently purchased Wii, surprisingly it does not do this out of the box!

After a couple of false starts I finally managed to get this sorted using a free download, this tutorial and a £5.50 4GB SDHC memory card. I should point out that this ‘update’ refers to a Wii that is running version 4.2 of their ‘operating system’ if your Wii is ‘older’ then you will have to follow links in the instructions for earlier versions.

This adds another feature to the Wii and with the BBCi Player installed I can see this box becoming a vital part of any future entertainment centre and if rumours are true and the next version of the Wii will include a Blue Ray compatible DVD player, even more so.

A word of caution, there are a number of warnings on the Internet against carrying out ‘updates’ to the Wii box, which I suppose you have to take some view on. However, I checked quite a bit and in the end after reading quite a deal went ahead and for me it worked out okay. Don’t take this post as any kind of recommendation either way, at the end of the day, its your Wii and your choice.

I came across this USA ABC video report tonight whilst looking for some other ‘stuff’. It shows that in the USA some tyres sold as new are in fact 5, 6, and in some cases, 12 years old!!!

http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/4ae8d36a3102598f/4b77209eba0e71de/4ae8d36a3102598f/d9153a15/-cpid/a22df91a81698c08

During the video report it mentions that a UK trade association – the British Rubber Manufacturers Association – has recommended that there should be an expiry date on all new tyres sold in the UK, so that no tyre ‘new’ tyre that remains on the shelf for longer than six year can not be sold as ‘new’.

If you want to check the age of your own ‘new’ tyres, you can check using this information (click on 4 for date info), it’s for Michelin tyres, but I have also included information for other tyre manufactures.

• Pirelli info
• Continental info – TBC
• Dunlop info – TBC
• Bridgestone info – TBC

I’ve studied codes these before but only for find out if they were suitable for size/rain/all weather/motorway driven. I never realised that there was any chance that they could be very old ‘new’ tyres.

Check your tyres tomorrow.

How did your MP vote on various issues over the last few years? How did any MP vote on various issues? Check on the Public Whip web site for the latest info.

What do MP’s do? Find out a bit more at the They Work For You web site.

Finally if you need to write to your MP (or local Councillor), then use this Web Form on the Write to Them web site. You will get a reply.

With news reports this morning that there might be an April Election, its important that everyone is ready to vote.

Here’s a link to the About My Vote web site from the Electoral Commission, it tells you everything you need to know about voting.

Worth a look and be pre-pared.