Somewhere to write, discuss, reflect, ponder, muse and mull over life, stuff, things and anything that takes my fancy.
It would appear that Wokingham council has caved into local pressure and put their plans for the redevelopment of Elms Field Park on hold.
It now looks like they will now reconsider their options and resubmit their plan at another time.
Perhaps they’ll now listen to some of the local comments that have voiced concerns about the plans.
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| The Big Dig becomes the Big Pour |
The new water reservoir project continues to make good progress, despite the recent bout of very wet weather.
As can be seen from the my latest photo, quite a lot of the base layer of the two new water reservoir cells are now complete with the rest of the base due to be completed during January 2014.
When you stand next to the excavation, you can get some idea of the amount of earth that as been moved to enable this construction to proceeded. Still on track.
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| The Big Dig continues. |
It looks like the progress on the new water reservoir continues with the pouring of the start of the base layer this week and despite the rain of recent weeks they seem to be making good progress.
Let’s hope that continues.
I was getting a bit tired of the old look so I’ve decided to change the template ready for some new posts, I quite like this one. Needs a bit of customising, then…
More to follow.
Seems I’ve not posted for a while!!
I’ve now been running the SamKnows Broadband Performance monitoring software for over 3 months, that’s long enough to see that there is a very good pattern of consistency to the speed (and other aspects) that BT is delivering to this part of Reading through their Infinity network.
It’s still below what they advertise and I think they could deliver, but that’s a discussion that I have had with them that I don’t think is ever going to change. Considering that this is for non-fibre optic connection to their nearest Infinity distribution box, I suppose can’t expect more, after all a pair of copper cables can only do so much.
Anyway, here is the latest snapshot of the SamKnows dashboard, I’ve run this from start date, May 15th through to today. Lets hope this quality continues for the future.
This will be the last time that I will be posting these figures in this format. Up until now I have been collecting the data manually, using a spreadsheet for collation and screen snapping an image to post into this blog. As you will see from the posted May 2013 figures below, much remains the same in that I am still maintaining a steady 32Mb (average) download speed.
Is there anything else that I can check that might be helpful?
I have used part of the Sam Knows website for many years as they have always seemed to be the one with the most up to date information about exchange configuration changes and service availability. In early May they emailed me and asked if I would like to participate in their Broadband Performance Monitoring Survey which allows them to build a UK wide picture of the sorts of broadband performance that we are getting from our Internet Service Providers.
To participate in the survey, you will need to install a ‘white-box’ in between your broadband socket and your router, the ‘white-box’ (mine is actually black) monitors the technical side of your connections performance – not what you are looking at or what files you are sending (we can leave that to GCHQ & the NSA!! Just kidding) and keeps track of a set of figures which can be reviewed via a dashboard or via monthly reports that are sent to you. Does this interfere with your connection performance? No, look at my figures.
The screen snap below shows the main dashboard display, which as you can see shows that the average download speed is much the same as I have been gathering via my ‘handraulic’ method, these figures are from first use in May till today.
What is also included in this dashboard view are figures that show Website Load Times, Latency & Packet Loss all of which will affect your on-line browsing experience.
A word about each of these…
There are other performance figures that can be obtained simply by altering the dashboard look.
Sam Knows will also send along a monthly report showing the main points of performance and if there are any issues, which can then be forwarded to your ISP if required. I would encourage everyone to sign up and participate in this survey.
I’ll be posting future reports here as I get the monthly reminder report cards and hopefully will continue to have an error free connection to the Internet.
My March & April BT-ISP figures seem to show a steady Internet connection.
Under proposed new legislation contained in the recent Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which received Royal Ascent last week, you may end up not retaining the copyright of all the photographs that you take.
Here’s some more detailed information about this from the BBC, Mashable and The Register. As usual, the changes to the UK Copyright Law are buried in the main act and only now are seeing the light of day.
What to do? I’ve written to my MP about the changes, you can do the same using the Write to Them website to make your feelings known.
It seems the UK government is more interested in protecting the copyright of large media corporations (mostly USA based) than UK individuals copyright.
This is not right and need to be changed.
Copy of Letter to my MP.
I am sure that you will have seen some of the press coverage about this yesterday and today, such as from the BBC, Mashable and The Register. I cannot understand why the UK government seems so intent dismissing the copyright of creators of photographs. Yesterday I took a picture of a plant in my back garden. That image is mine and will always be so.
However, now that I have loaded this into social media and some of the Metadata has been stripped off – by them, it may be considered an ‘orphan’ work by some and according to my understanding of the potential legislation, available for reuse and profiteering by others without a single royalty payment being made to me. Surely this cannot be right?
Why does the UK government want to take away my copyright, yet seems so eager to legislate for big media (usually USA based) organisations to keep their copyright. These changes to copyright law will put the UK out of step with may other countries and I cannot understand the logic in the changes.
I would appreciate your comments and feedback on this and if you agree with the intention to strip my rights to copyright away.
I’ll also post any reply I get.
I was at our local supermarket, ASDA at the weekend and gave some money to a charity promoting the use of Defibrillators. During a short conversation with the collection guy we agreed that there were too few of these in public places such as Supermarkets and on the High Street and that more of them need to be available to reduce the risk of people dying from a sudden heart attack.
What surprised me from the conversation was that he said that many of the Supermarkets seem uninterested in having Defibrillators at their stores, even when they could be supplied for free! Surely this is a public services that the likes of ASDA, Tesco’s, Salisbury’s etc. would jump at to show their involvement with the local community?
How is it that the French seem to be way ahead on this? You see them every where in France.
I see from some Internet searches that some individual supermarkets have taken the step to have one on their premises.
But it seems rather disappointing that the big ones seem not to be interested.
Let’s hope they change their mind’s soon.
Beasley's Place 