Virtual Fitness challenge 2012

I have a fitness challenge for the year that is to cycle&row a virtual track from Bideford, Devon to Eiffel Tower in Paris. It's 500 miles of road and 23 miles of sea and the target it to get there before birthday in June. To track the endeavour I have a wall chart printed out A3 with a bike ikon sprite to track progress. Sample to the left.

The driving instruction have a cumulative mile count that makes tracking easy. To make progress any time I am out on road or mountain bike I use Runtastic application to collect the miles.

Going well so far with 57 miles chalked up this month.

The chart was built using directions from Google maps and In-Design to compose.

o2 new year network fail

Most annoying noise while on holiday ?

Take a moment out of your busy day to picture yourself on holiday. Think relaxing in the sun and snoozing by the pool as the world goes by. Which of the following noises would most disturb that calm tranquility ?
* Next door badly maintained gate opener clanking and screeching.
* Thuba, Thuba bass from a passing car,
* Distant car alarm,
* Truck reversing bleepers,
* Ambulance, police, fire truck siren,
* Very large truck with broken baffles exhaust note ( and burnt derv smell wafting through the palms )
* Kids electric truck with hollow plastic wheels rolling round on gravel scattered tarmac driveway,
* Tyre screening round a corner or from roundabout Grand-prix,
* V8 pickup truck doing domestic shopping,
* Small 2-stroke scooter being over revved going up and down road,
* Salvation army xmas collection bell tinkling from when supermarket opened and going non-stop the entire day from 1 Dec..30 Dec,
* Late night party (to which your not invited) including yelling, bad singing to 60s Disco hits from a knackered boom box,

No wonder it took a little longer to relax and chill out on recent holiday. Next time will take a bit more time to choose a villa that is more than 200 yards from nearest road and habitation.

Gannett

Best PC tools for Processor and Disk space usage

If you ever get the feeling that your PC is working for some one else ? or that HDD space has disappeared without a trace for no understood reason ? Take control with these utilities.

ProcessExplorer takes over when the [ctrl] [alt] [del] task manager leaves off. Process Explorers originally from Sysinternals provides graphical details of what's happening inside your machine. Its free, lightweight and will provide clear insight as to which processes are eating your machine. Each of the graphs provides a rollover tooltip with the process name causing the peek. This graph shows the cpu consumption of a screensaver recently deployed across our organisation. The large drop in cpu usage is when the user logged back in. Having Flash based screen savers such as shown here is a really bad idea; power consumption goes up and all those idle time processes become work time activities.



For C: and other disk drive space; find out what is eating your HDD is made clear by WinDirStat. Originally this drive visulisation tool was created on Linux but this free port delivers a reliable way to find what is eating your hard drive. The interactive bump map shows by size when the large files can be found. Hovering the cursor over a bump will reveal the file path and clicking will show the files place in the file directory hierarchy. Each of the squares of the bump map represents a directory contents.

In this example a data loss prevention utility decided to copy all data sent external hard drive to a location in /WINDOWS/vendor/software name/temp directory location.


Take ownership of your own PC know what happening inside with these useful free system visualisation tools. Other tools available for interior PC examination can be found on this link.

Pricing fail @ Morrisons

Bag says "Any 2 for £3" shelf ticket says all varieties £1 each. Seen at Morrsions 15 Oct 2011.

Credit card - tied interest rates - it's win/win for the bankers

Interest rates are at an all time low here in the UK. This low interest rate mostly applies to savers who are paid at 0.1 to 2 % per year. Credit card lenders are routinely charging 2 % per month and are currently working through changes that will increase those charges further.

The current Bank of England base rate is 0.5% per year. This rate cannot realisticly go much lower. This interest rate history contrasts credit card charges and interest rates that have been going up steadily for years.

A recent change announced by Lloyds TSB Platinum is as follows...

"We wrote to you in June about how we're linking the the standard interest rate on your credit card to the bank of England base rate after 26 November 2011.

If the base rate changes after this date, your interest rate will increase or decrease by the same amount from the last working day of the months in which the base rate changes. ......"

So when the interest rate goes up ( remember that the rate can't go down far from here) the credit card interest rate charge will go up to match. So your credit charge interest rate is now locked to something that that is only ever likely to go up and cost you more.

This is an interesting tactic that was never applied when interest rates were falling. The credit card maintained high interest rates saying that the costs were based on the "risk" of the loan. This increasing spread between borrowing and savings has been increasing for years; something that only benefits the bankers.

What's more with this new change the credit card company have an an excuse to "blame" the rate rises on an external factor. So it's win/win for the bankers, no change there then.

Gannett

Otto Says - Fashion, Not so easy this far from the catwalk.

Standing charges - the big energy rip off

Energy bills here in the UK are formed of two parts, the standing charge and the usage related charges. These charges are billed to customer in a couple of ways. Either the standard charges are separately listed on the bill or the first units used are charged at a higher rate compared to the later units. With the later method, once the standing charges are amortised into the higher price early units, the per unit charge decreases. Recently many utilities companies have moved from the higher price early units charging methods to the listed standing charges method.

We have been looking after an unoccupied house recently, and received a combined gas and electic bill that comprised of £19 gas and £1 electric usage charges and £80 of combined standing charges. The standing charges were £16 for the electric £40 for the Gas, £10 as a Non-Energy charge and £20 gas transportation charge. We had the central heating on low and used the lights occasionally so the units are reasonable. The standing charges are an outrageous rip off for lower usage consumers.

We were also upset by the change of fundamental contract, without agreement. When we took over the property it was on a split price units tariff but EDF changed the electric contract to one with standing charges without content and refused to continue the supply on the previous agreed basis.

When EDF was asked to explain the bill or at least provide some justification the following lies were included in the explanation :

1. It works out cheeper for the users of more units.
2. EDF was compelled by the regulator to change the tariffs to separately listed standing charges.
3. It's easier to understand the bills.

Those points are bogus because :

1. The standing charges are fully included in the cost of the higher price first units. Once the threshold to the lower cost units is crossed there is no difference between a bill that has separately listed standing charges and one that have higher and lower unit charges.
2. Consumer Direct, the government consumer advice service, said that tariff structures are within the energy companies remit to decide.
3. Bills that are bigger the more energy used are less confusing than paying large standing charges for almost no energy usage.

Minimum billing amounts only benefit the utility companies and penalise low energy users. Fixed standing charges give no possibility of an energy charging holiday, every bill will be at least the minimum standing charges amount.

Small quantity users are paying a disproportionate infrastructure subsidies for the larger users. Consider the user that has a small flat and goes on holiday a lot. The standing charges are the same every quarter regardless of the low usage holiday periods. In most retail business the infrastructure costs are folded into the prices. Would you go to a petrol station that charge £5 every time you drove onto the forecourt even when you only bought a small top up of petrol ?

How it should work, is the exact reverse of the previous high cost for the first units arrangement.

If standing charges are to be used then the first units should be set at lower cost, until a cross over point of average usage then uplift the fixed price units. After the unit price threshold is crossed the units are charged at a higher level to discourage profligate use.

Gannett