Minor town update, and pre-fab homes.

Ah traffic lights on Hartlebury Road, joy of joys. Of course this means that the traffic backs down to the island, which holds up traffic in Gilgal (which hardly needs the added help) and... well you should know the litany by now Vale Road to High Street to Bridge Street to Dunley Road to... I was lucky in that I got some fore-warning and left early; still only just got in on time too. No doubt there are people still trapped in the queue wondering what the hold-up is. Perhaps a weekly timetable of such events could be put up on the WFDC site or <gasp> the official Stourport town site

I notice that the CCTV camera post at the bottom of York Street (Lion Hill end) appears to be fully in place (finally) with a sticking out arm to hold the camera, it's difficult to see when you're driving so I'll head up and get some shots sometime soon. Looking at the bulk of it though makes me wonder where they're going to put one in Bridge Street, as I've already mentioned it doesn't make it on to the refurbishment plans and I've not seen any work started. For it to be overseeing the skate-park leaves a limited range; unless it's not a Bridge Street camera, but a Riverside one. I suppose I could delve back into the DC minutes and see if anything gets mentioned, but I won't hold my breath.

After the past couple of windy days the workman have re-wrapped the bridge ironwork in what appears to be dark binbags, presumably to protect the paintwork from the continuing construction on the roadway. I wonder why it couldn't have been left until last?

[Addendum] - The covers are off, a smell of paint is in the air, and of course it's raining. I also note the replacement bus shelter on High Street is going up, something I believe should have been done last week [Nope my mistake it was reported last week to start this week]. Of course the fitters have parked their truck in the bus-stop so the buses are having to park in the road, not good when there's a car parked opposite. Ah well the traffic wardens'll get them... oh I crack myself up at times.


The BBC were talking about the new Ikea pre-fab homes. Apparently they only take four days to build, a fact that had one wag call in to say in that case it'll take four months when they're assembled here. How cynical can you get :-P

Stourport Farmers and Community Market?

Being held every Tuesday from 9-4 means we've got one today. Lo Raven Street was closed off this morning and I saw one stall up and running as I drove past. According to my sources last week there was four, prior to that - one. Now I drove past again at 1pm and the road is no longer cordoned off and a large lorry had parked at one end with a couple of cars down the other. Oh dear what's going on?

Now I'd love to shop, or even look, at this market except well I'm at work when it's on; just like so many other people. Now of course if I worked in town I could pop over and pick some stuff up, except then I'd have to find somewhere to put it once I got back to work. I could go in on the way home...ah it closes at 4pm. Hands-up the number of people who normally work until after 4pm. Yeah thought I wouldn't be the only one with my hand in the air.

But that's us working-class stiffs, it's aimed at young mothers (okay fathers too) who stay at home and look after their young; yes those young people who can't cook and think vegetables grow shrink-wrapped... hmm perhaps not.

Thank gods for the elderly retired, they know how to cook and have time on their hands to potter about markets, of course they've been buying their greens from Grinnal's for donkey's years and we've three, four, five (?) small butchers in town to chose from. So I'm sure they'd welcome a market that sells the same things to um well okay maybe not.

Okay I'm being a little sarcastic and stereotyping (a little), I really think a market's a good idea provided a) it sells things that we can't pick up in the other small local stores that we've been patronising for years and b) it's held at a time to maximise pedestrian traffic; hell a Monday would have been better at least it would have coincided with the Bank Holidays.

Maybe I'm jumping the gun, maybe it's fall-out from the Monday holiday and next week the street will be packed with all sorts of stalls; I hope so I really do.

Why am I having to do this?

So a pleasant long-weekend in which I tried to do as little as possible gets interrupted by a call familiar to all who work in tech support "The internet's not working" yep that's right the vast system of interconnected computers, routers etc. had crashed... or perhaps not. No it was of course the 'I'm typing in a web address and it can't find it' problem.

So I went through the usual check-list, is it just that one site - no, is it connected - yes, can it get the server address and talk to it - yes and no. Oo what's the connection like - lousy. So probably a temporary routing jam or BT are fiddling with your main junction box, try it again later. (Lo and behold the next day everything was fine)

Later in the weekend I get another call 'The digital box is behaving oddly' It wasn't displaying any on-screen graphics. Now I know an Over-The-Air update had just gone out so had it updated correctly? The menu wouldn't even display. Oh joy! Try a full power off/on. Oo a message I'll have to paraphrase -

'Your system had been updated and a new tree added to the guide. Please leave your box in standby over night to check for availability to avoid seeing this message every power up. To check for availability now press the OK button or to continue watching the television press quit'

With an ominous timer at the bottom of the screen. Apparently this came up before to a result of - "What do I do, what do I do?", "Quick press OK quick quick before the timer stops" Doing so made the box turn off and "The box is off quick turn it back on again"

Yep they'd interrupted the cycle; pressing OK, watching it turn itself off and doing nothing was the correct course of action to take. The box then turned itself back on and all was well.

So why the title of this piece, well I'll start with the internet bit first. "I went through the usual check-list" I said, so why am I doing this? What happens when your browser fails to connect - you get a screen up telling you to hit refresh, check the spelling of the address, click here to check your internet settings, or finally contact your network administrator.

First two no problem for your normal home-user; click here to check your internet settings? Okay now what am I looking at? <shrugs>. Contact my network administrator, who's that? The ISP at 60p/minute?

Let's look at what I did, first off I checked another site address - why can't the browser do this? What's stopping Microsoft's Internet Explorer attempting to reach www.microsoft.com, a site that should be always up. Can't get a name resolution for that - then it's unlikely to matter if you've spelled the address correctly or not you'll get the same result. Put up a suggestion that they check the connection. If that's okay check the trace; getting some time-outs along both routes, looks like congestion or some problems at the ISP, or with your phone line. Put up a suggestion to this effect and perhaps that you try again later. Finally if all that checks out suggest that the site might not be working.


Onto the digital box, the timer was stupid and is bound to produce panic. Updated "tree" what the hell is a tree and why is it in my TV guide, how in the hell is the average home user expected to understand that? Press OK to check availability or quit to continue watching - first problem no 'quit' button; second problem at the bottom of the screen, which shows what you can do, is the default icon for OK next to the word ': Quit'. Yep press OK to quit. Finally at what point does it tell you that not only will the box go into standby, but most importantly you shouldn't switch it off or on. It can be inferred from the message that it'll go into standby, but try picking up on that while staring at a count-down timer.


Both of these calls were unnecessary had the software been doing a decent job or been worded correctly. With more and more technology infiltrating ours lives sloppiness like this just should not be tolerated.

Voting, skate-park, and some other bits.

Well I was tempted to do a small piece for our American friends on 'Hey look this is how you count ballots' I'm glad I didn't.

The electronic counting machines brought into Warwickshire failed as they were "too sensitive". So why machines anyway instead of people? Well they're modern, quicker, less error-prone? Seems like they were trying to fix a problem that wasn't there, we've been hand-counting ballots for, well, bloody ages. Sure with complicated votes it might take <gasp> a whole day or even two to get the results, but are we really in that much of a hurry to discover the new make-up of the local council/district council/Parliament? I think the only ones who who do are the candidates themselves.

Then we get Scotland and the SNP who are so big on 'independence'. Fine give it to them; remove Scottish MPs from Parliament, give them their own mandate to create laws etc. oh and stop subsidising them and put the money back into England (and Wales). With the news of perhaps 100,000 spoiled votes being cast in Scotland, due to the complications of holding two elections at the same time (a factor that didn't seem to affect the English or Welsh) I believe they thoroughly deserve to enjoy the collapse of the country that their independence would cause.

The only upside is in the recounts which occurred with little fuss and in some cases have still managed to produce results before some areas 'primary' counts.


So after voting I managed to take a wander down to the skate-park just to see if it'll be ready for the Bank Holiday Weekend that starts tomorrow, and I must say I'm impressed by the level of work that's been done since last time I took pictures on the 22nd April.

Time to play 'Spot the difference' or 'What work has been done'



That's the 22nd April for the first one and the 3rd May for the other two. Can you spot the differences?

Yep that's right the coke bottle in the big pile of dirt bottom left has gone from half-empty to empty, the bag has blown onto the first small concrete square, and we've acquired a new fence panel on the ground.

If that's not enough there's more. Here's a clue



Can't get it? Here's a big clue



Yep they've put up warning signs, oh they've also closed the fence (next to the downed panel) hey didn't I point both of those failures out on the WFA looks like I did; well what a coincidence.

Now as Fran has stated that the work will be complete by Half-Term (that's the 28th) and as I doubt/hope they won't try and do any work over this Holiday Weekend that leaves them with... 3 weeks to get everything done. Now if they'd started just after the last Bank Holiday Weekend on 9th April they'd have had um... 4 weeks before this upcoming one. Anyone care to comment?

[Update - Oops apparently Half-term is the next week, so they've an extra week to work, but could mean that it'll still be a construction site come the Spring Bank holiday on the 28th - joy.]

I've also taken some pictures of the bridge paint job, plus some other pretty pictures they'll be uploaded to my Flickr account during the day as and when I get around to it.

[Update - which was a lot sooner then I expected, they're all up now.]

How much floor space, Stourport Bridge looking good, and a few bits and bobs

I'm still wading through the additional data from both the West Mercia Annual Report and Appendix B of the Sustainability Appraisal Scoping Report. The list of major stores in Appendix B (p67/(63 internally)) caught my eye. As is my wont I copied them over to a spreadsheet, oh no wait the document is protected, I ended up OCR'ing it instead to ensure accuracy; thanks WFDC.

The data's from 2005 so not completely fossilised, though it does show Waitrose as an occupant. What's most interesting is that it shows Gross Floorspace and Net Floorspace for all the properties listed. Now according to the Tesco planning application the site in Kidderminster is only 5,400 square metres. According to this report it's 7,590 ah but they must be talking net space which again according to this report equals 4,934 square metres, but is the closer figure and assuming internal restructuring is entirely plausible.

So playing with the data in various ways something interesting shows up, ignoring the obsolete and lone 'Town Centre' location of Waitrose, the properties in the 'Supermarket' category split between Out-of Centre (Sainsbury's, Co-Op, and Somerfield) and Edge of Centre (Aldi, Safeway, Tesco). Interesting because it's equal numbers, but more interesting when you check the percentage of net floorspace compared to gross floorspace.

Edge of Centre

Aldi - 780/1200 = 65%
Safeway - 2354/3621 =65%
Tesco - 4634/7590 = 65%

Out of Centre

Sainsbury's - 6116/7645 = 80%
Co-op - 2094/2618 = 80%
Somerfield - 1122/1403 = 80%

In the interests of accuracy there is some variance between them when you get to the first decimal place. Now let's look at the proposed Tesco in Stouport which would probably be classified as Edge of Centre

Proposed Tesco - 2403/5015 = 48%

That's a big difference and again asks the question - what is this store really aiming at.

For those interested the average of the percentages of used floorspace over all properties was 73%, median 80% and in the interests of fairness assuming Tesco's own figure of 5,400 their Kidderminster percentage rises to 71%.


They took all the protective sheeting from around the bridge ironwork some time ago revealing the new blue and beige colour scheme, I'm joking the beige is presumably the undercoat for the gold. It looks good, nice and um shiny, a good deep blue. Kind of ironic that after revealing it to the public they've now covered it back up in 'dustsheets' while they still working on the road.


I meant to get down to the Riverside to check out the continuing work on the skate-park or lack of work as the case may be. I may have noted the WFA comments, but the kicker is Fran's comment on 27th April with reference to the 16th

Have I missed something? This is NOT a Bank Holiday Weekend! The work is programmed now, or so I was told when I asked, to make sure it is ready for Half-term.

Quite correct there was no Bank Holiday then however Half-Term is at the end of this month and hey look there's one next Monday. I note no answer to my own "So is it going to be ready for the 5th?" yet.

Anyway I'd better confirm it's not all finished and so as I'll be walking up to vote in completely the wrong direction, I might as well get in some exercise and pop along tonight ;-)

Didn't report this, but the potholes on the Areley Common/Dunley Road junction were finally patched last Friday afternoon, meaning people can now turn right from the right hand side of the junction instead of swinging around to the left; yay! Sadly the ones in Dunley Road, particularly the nasty corner cut. have yet to be done and duh the bridge and Bridge Street still have there own unique form of speed-bumps in place.

Latest news - in an effort to keep small traders in Stourport the Co-op apparently have offered help in relocating the traders from the Indoor Market to other sites they own. With some scorn
being received for the offer. Nice that the council is trying to help and have offered a better range of properties including perhaps the old Severn Bar in Lombard Street not exactly a million miles from their current site. Um how about the original site of the market in Bridge Street, you know the one that's an eyesore in the town having been boarded up for, gods what is it now, 20 years? Sadly I don't think that the boarded-up Job Centre, also in Bridge Street, is large enough.

Tav's Police follow-through

A question about PACT meetings reminded Tav about a question he asked about finances and resources used back in 2005. He got a response, well part of a response - a pointer to the information on their website. Being the odd person I am I decided to go through the entire thing.


Page 1, Introduction from the Chair of the Police Authority -

It's good to know that West Mercia Constabulary have been "independently assessed as one of the best performing police forces in the country" so what top 5, top 10, and who did the assessing?

"10% reduction in total crimes recorded" and a "5% increase in the sanction detection rate"

I had to go to Northumbria for a definition

Sanction detection rate - crimes detected by means of a charge, caution or taken into consideration (TIC)

Confusion. If a crime is reported then recorded and a charge made, does that appear as one item or two. Do reported crimes count at all or does sanction detection rate only apply to crimes picked up by the police directly? If SDR is applied to all recorded cases then that means crime is down and resolution is up - good. If it doesn't that they're picking more people up on their own, but reported crime is down, which could be bad depending on why it's not being reported.

West Mercia is the highest performing force, in its family of most similar forces, for sanction detection rates of the above types of crimes.

That's nice how many are in this family? (Looking elsewhere the answer is 8)

This represents an investment of £2.9 million in extra staff at no additional cost to council taxpayers.

Wow get me one of those money trees. No direct additional cost to council taxpayers would have been better, the money has to come from somewhere after all.


Page 2, What we have achieved -

Oo some stats from the PPAF Victims of Crime Survey, no link to the PDF about the contents of the survey so I've done that for you. This is the 2007/2008 version. Do I sound surprised when I mention that it's well written and quite precise? Again here's the link they don't provide which is a more raw version. WARNING this link has frozen both Opera and Firefox, opening directly from Word requests a password, when asked click cancel and load a read-only copy.

Both the DOC and the PDF provide some insights into how these things are undertaken.

Wow 90.1% of respondents were satisfied with their first contact with the police and 71.5% were completely satisfied... hold on that's 161.6%. Have they counted the "completely"'s in with the 'plain' satisfied? Sort of, looking at the PDF you're asked if you're satisfied or dissatisfied with the service and then asked a follow-up question. So that's 71.5% of the 90.1% or 64.4% of the total with presumably the other 25.7% split between "very" and "fairly". So to be more precise and assuming the 2007/08 guidelines were in place.

Satisfaction of victims of domestic burglary, violent crime, vehicle crime and road traffic collisions with respect to:	Dissatisfied	Very or fairly satisfied	Completely satisfied
A. making contact with the police;	9.9%	25.7%	64.4%
B. action taken by the police;	22.2%	31.5%	46.3%
C. being kept informed of progress;	38.2%	33.7%	28.1%
D. their treatment by staff; and	12.3%	23.7%	64.0%
E. the overall service provided.	21.4%	31.7%	46.9%

Still good results, but a little more um honest. The 38.2% dissatisfied for C. now stands out quite plainly. Except looking at the DOC where they're split into groups we get something that looks different. Take A. making contact with the police for the five types we get 82.9%, 76.1%, 59.1%, 85.3%, and 74.8%. Assuming those are the 'satisifed' averaging those we get 72.1%, which is a far cry from the 90.1% listed in the report. The results are close to the percentage of "satisfied" respondents who were "completey satisfied" though. Looking at the PDF guidelines they're changing how this will be reported in future, ironically a little closer to how I've done it.

Being located between the West Midlands conurbations and Wales, West Mercia’s roads are very popular with motorcyclists.

Okay, no need to explain further.


Page 3, Financial Report 2005/06 -

one police staff to 1.5 police officers.

Or two police staff of every three police officers as you can't have half an officer (well at least I hope not)

The resources available for the year amounted to £172.8 million. This was a 4.2% increase on the previous year and required a 4.0% increase in the Council Tax.

Tcch can't they get that from the same money tree they got the £2.9m from?

Okay £172.8m budget with costs of £188.0m and an income of £21.7m leaves £28.5m in reserves... oops sorry that's £6.5m presumably £22m was already there. Hold on £172.8m is 4.2% up on last year, so last years budget was around £165.8m or about £7m difference. So the budget was increased by roughly the same amount being stashed away in the reserves. Hmm now that's a coincidence.


Page 4, Independent Custody Visits -

Nope all clear 575 of 730 of the offered (79%) accepted.


Page 5, Ethnic Monitoring Data -

Oo we get several links to extra data at last - yeek 43 pages, 13 pages and a 404 not found.

Okay those'll take some time to go through, lot's of tables I'll need to look at this separately at some later date.


Page 6, Performance 2005/06 -

Ah the conglomeration of all the badly presented data, plus some extra bits and bobs.

First off "Satisfied" and "Completely Satisfied" get new overall headers of "Our Target" and "Our Result" respectively. Huh? So you were after a target of 90.1% satisfied and you got 71.5% completely satisfied instead. That tells us what exactly? Nothing it's nonsense. A satisfied target of say 87.9% (the national average) with a result of 90.1% is good and makes sense. This table doesn't.

Oo "E"

Proportion of police recruits from minority ethnic groups compared to the proportion of people from minority ethnic groups in the economically active population.

National Average - 5.0% Recruits with 8.0% population, West Mercia - 1.8% with um don't know how many.

The percentage of police officer time spent on frontline duties.
National average - 62.3%, West Mercia - 65.94%. Wow who knew half an officer could do so much especially when number of hours sick is 81.9 compared to 70.9 for officers and 79.8 to 72.6 for staff. They're sicker and still get out more - well done.

Next table and a bit more coherent, well sort of.

Domestic burglaries per 1,000 households. (Our original target for 2004/05 as published in our 2000/01 plan was 10.7)**

So why the change? Check the "**" reference, well you could if there was one.

Apparently we are also missing national averages for several types of crime. Odd I'm surprised domestic burglary is lacking stats, perhaps they're still being compiled and will be added in later.

And a final laugh (cos it's either that or cry)

Number of people killed or seriously injured in road traffic collisions.

Our target - 800, result - 692; you're obviously not aiming well enough.

Post, pig tarts, clueless about technology, and PS3 1.70 Backwards Compatibility

I got stuck in a queue on Vale Road/Gilgal and arrived one minute past nine to work, driving in I passed the Post Office van, gave a wave and then thought "He's early. Ah no doubt a special delivery they've done that before" Then it hit me - we were expected a special delivery. Yep a card through the door timed at 8.57 telling us that we weren't in for a signature and we'd have to pick it up from the Post Office tomorrow. Okay first point I passed him, I know him, he knows me so why didn't he stop? Second point we have two other offices around us that open at 8.30 and people were moving about around them. We've had parcels, packages and all sorts of miscellanea signed or unsigned left with them for years.

So the one time we actually want the contents of this letter, they don't leave it with the 'neighbours' and we can't even attempt to get it until tomorrow.


As it's made the TV you may have read about the story concerning the renaming of pig tarts. To summarise a baker has to rename her Pig Tarts, Robin Tarts, and Frog Tarts as they contain neither pig, robin, nor frog respectively. As per usual the media are going into hysterics at this jobworthiness and making jokes about Rock Cakes, Shepherds' Pie, and Cottage Pie. So let's get the facts shall we. Trading Standards are not stopping her from calling them whatever she likes provided she notes their true name or ingredients next to them. So Pig Tarts would be 'Pig Tarts - tarts filled with strawberry jam topped with a novelty icing pig' Wow how nasty of them to make her tell you what's in them <sigh>

Oh and it's Shepherds' Pie as it's a pie eaten by Shepherds. Cottage Pie, Rock Cakes, Fairy Cakes Toad in the Hole, and Bubble and Squeak are all fair game though.


Being one of the technorati you tend to forget at times just how clueless some people can be about technology, this was highlighted by a question on GMTV this morning from one of the presenters regarding digital TV

"Will I still be able to watch films on my VHS?"

Um yes the switch in transmissions won't change the connection between your TV and video, a bit like asking if it'll alter your game console set-up. The reporter they were talking to answered correctly then mentioned you'd need a digital set-top box for each video recorder as they only have an analogue tuner. Correct, but feel free to mention that you can buy new ones with a digital tuner, that you can buy hard-drive recorders that have such tuners, oh and feel free to definitely mention that without said multiple tuners you'll only be able to watch and record the same program.

The roll-out is interesting too, start at the top of the country spread down into Wales then slowly push South East towards London. Now forgive me, but when things like this normally happen it generally starts in London then slowly migrates elsewhere. So why the difference, are we beta testing the system, getting the kinks out so that all those important Londoners won't loose their broadcasting, or is the more benign fact that there's a greater population in these areas and it'll take them a while to get off their asses and get a new tuner and they don't want to fielding all these questions?


So a new update for the PlayStation 3 came out pushing v1.6 into v1.7. It comes with some minor changes one not mentioned being that it's altered the PlayStation 2 backward compatibility list. Having failed to grab the 1.6 list I lucked out in finding one at techstatic
I then imported the 1.7 list and ran a comparison.

v1.6 had a total of 1,782 games, v1.7 upgrades 234 of those and adds a new set of 259 making a grand total of 1,940 playable games. No I've not got my sums wrong, what I didn't mention was the 101 games that have been removed from the list. Oh and that 103 have been downgraded.

Yep that's right update your system and you could find that the game you've been playing without a hitch no longer works. Way to go Sony.