Millfields Estate boo-boo?

Another residents meeting and I'm informed that all is underway to have the roads brought up to scratch and formally adopted by the council. That's the good part.

The bad part is that there are three different builders on the site which may mean three different contractors bringing in equipment to do the work.

The next bad part is that Severn Trent Water examined a part of the area and found that they'd used 6" pipes instead of 9" pipes for drainage. So at the same time as that area is being 'fixed' it needs to be dug up to get those replaced, which means more work and more time spent.

On a final note it seems there's a small legal hiccup in the transfer of a different area. Once repaired both the roads, pavements and verges will be handed over to the council; this is fine except that this one small verge apparently is already owned by the council. The builders in question thought it was included on their site as did the council, but examination prior to hand-over shows it doesn't.

'What's the big deal?' you might ask, if it was being turned over to the council anyway that just means you don't need to do anything. Ah no possibly due to the way the deal is structured or the need for a paper trail of adoption the council needs to have the land in question registered to the builders, and will then have it re-registered back to themselves.

Now I find it important to note that this isn't some fly-by-night build with someone sticking a big shed at the bottom of the garden or a huge extension on the back of their house. This is a full housing estate off a main road with specifications to include it as part of the ephemeral Relief Road and look at the problems with it.

If this is a typical example of what we get when the council are supposedly involved in the building process, what the hell are they doing?

Freeview HD launched

The trials have concluded and Freeview HD as a service has been launched in London, Newcastle, Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow and central Scotland.Woo hoo everyone there's happy.

Well no not really because I guess less than 1% of those in that area can actually decode these new broadcasts.

As I said back in 2007 HD broadcasts use not only a different method of encoding but an entirely different method of broadcast to the current batch of Freeview tuners on the market. So how many DVB-T2 marketed tuners does Google Shopping show - 3. How many DVB-T2 marketed televisions does it show- 1. Or at least one manufacturer Panasonic. Oh there's more on the way, but as yet there's a big hole.

So congratulations to all those in these areas who have already made the leap (stumble) to Freeview you now need to buy something else. Sure that's the price to pay for being early adopters of technology, kinks get worked out and features added; except Freeview was launched in 2002 with a big fanfare of 'get this now before we switch off the old broadcasts'. There are people out there who have just turned to Freeview on account of having the analogue system turned off who had no opportunity to even buy DVB-T2 equipment who are now discovering that the money they've spent was pretty much wasted.

It gets better. In order to broadcast the HD channels they'll be using spare space on Mux B (it goes 1,2,A,B,C,D) until everyone gets settled and then they'll dedicate the entirety of Mux B to HD only. This will require a re-tune as all the existing SD channels are parcelled out to the other Muxes. So another re-tune so what? Well it means all those channels need to be squeezed in with the others and that means compressing them further, which in turn means a downgrade in quality spread over all channels on that Mux.

So a choice of putting up with poorer quality or shelling out for yet more equipment. Remind me wasn't Digital Broadcasting supposed to be better than Analogue Broadcasting?

A new PS3 Slim

Yep my parents have gone all Blu-ray with the purchase of a 250Gb model PS3 slim; still the best Blu-ray player out there at that price point and does so much more too. Well at least it would if I could set-up the bloody wireless connection.

What fun behind their television, took out the scart lead connecting their VCR to the Freeview box, the aerial lead, the power lead; then the scart lead and power lead to the DVD and then just added the HDMI cable and the power lead to the PS3; much tidier.

Of course the PS3 didn't auto-switch inputs on start-up until I told it to output via HDMI; um excuse me what the hell do you think you're outputting at the moment ;-)

Went through the language and user name malarky then tried to connect it to the router. Oh it found it all right but would it connect with the WPA key, course not. Doesn't help that the PS3 treats it as a password and thus asterisks it out as you type it in. Certainly not helped as it's hexadecimal and uppercase, and changing the case on the in-built keyboard also shifts the numbers to !"£$ etc. so you have to keep shifting back and forth.

Gave up in the end; I'll try it this weekend by turning the security off; if it can't connect then I'll check it's not some sort of router protection restriction.

Anyway continued on and tied the remote control to it; that was a piece of cake - tell the PS3 to look for it and hold down the Home and Start buttons at the same time until it says it's connected. After that it works just like a normal controller, but with labelled and dedicated buttons to perform disc functions.

Also made sure the CEC control between the TV and the PS3 was on; which means they can use the TV remote's disc function buttons to control the PS3 if need be.

Stuck in Star Trek to test it, and hey it loads faster than both my dedicated player and my old PS3; bastards. Also auto-switches to the right input; only took Sony until, what, the fourth model to add a feature that was available and should have been included with the first one.

Next up I'll load their photos onto the drive and loan my mother a copy of Burnout Paradise so she can crash things, heh.

So anyway they're happy and they get to watch both DVDs and Blu-ray on their shiny HD set.

As local so is national politics

Not a flyer, but a simple A5 sheet through the door entitled "Would you like to attend the first ever televised debate between the leaders of the three main political parties?"

Apparently there's room allocated to an whole 4 members of the Wyre Forest constituency. Takes place somewhere in Birmingham on the... wait for it... 29th April. Otherwise known as a Thursday.

Yup just like our local councils holding events between the hours of 10 and 4 on weekdays so to is this debate scheduled for a standard work day. Yeah okay advance notice so you can take the day off, but damnit do none of these people actually work for a living?

Alcohol taxes and cider

A big fuss being kicked up on the rise in duty on cider; I'm not a big drinker but I do like cider so let's take a look at how it breaks down for the consumer. Here are the raw figures as supplied by HMRC

Alcohol Duties	2009-10	2010-11
Rate £ per litre of pure alcohol
Spirits	22.64	23.80
Spirits-based RTDs (ready to drink)	22.64	23.80
Wine and made-wine: exceeding 22% abv.	22.64	23.80
Rate £ per hectolitre per cent of alcohol in the beer
Beer	16.47	17.32
Rate £ per hectolitre of product
Still cider and perry: exceeding 1.2% - not exceeding 7.5% abv.	31.83	36.01
Still cider and perry: exceeding 7.5% - less than 8.5% abv.	47.77	54.04
Sparkling cider and perry: exceeding 1.2% - not exceeding 5.5% abv.	31.83	36.01
Sparkling cider and perry: exceeding 5.5% - less than 8.5% abv.	207.20	217.83
Wine and made-wine: exceeding 1.2% - not exceeding 4% abv.	65.94	69.32
Wine and made-wine: exceeding 4% - not exceeding 5.5% abv.	90.68	95.33
Still wine and made-wine: exceeding 5.5% - not exceeding 15% abv.	214.02	225.00
Wine and made-wine: exceeding 15% - not exceeding 22% abv.	285.33	299.97
Sparkling wine and made-wine: exceeding 5.5% - less than 8.5% abv.	207.20	217.83
Sparkling wine and made-wine: 8.5% and above - not exceeding 15% abv.	274.13	288.20

Simple yes ;-) Well no of course not this is the government we're talking about here. So let's play with some examples. Imagine a 1 litre bottle of pure alcohol, we'll class it as a spirit so it attracts duty under the first bold heading which makes it £23.80. If it was a 1 litre bottle of whiskey at 50% ABV then the duty would be half that £11.90; if it was a half-litre of pure alcohol it would again be £11.90.

So now let's take our same 1 litre bottle of pure alcohol and call it beer; that appears under the second bold heading, hmm hectolitres that's 100 litres. So keeping it simple let's up the bottle to the 100 litre mark; that makes the duty as with the spirit at the stated figure of £17.32, correct? Wrong because it's also by "per cent" and it's pure alcohol that would make the duty £1,732.00. Drop it back to our simple 1 litre bottle and that in turn drops it back to £17.32. Again we don't get 100% bottles of beer so 1 litre of beer at a strength of 6% and we get £17.32/100*6 or £1.04

[Note that with spirits it's assumed a starting point of 100% alcohol, but with beer you start with 1%; that's why if you have a 40% spirit you multiply by 0.4 (40/100) but with beer you'd multiply by the full 40 (40/1))

Now onto cider, and wow that's seems complicated but it's less so than all the others. Note that it's based on a hectolitre of "product" so if we take a 100 litre bottle of cider at the minimum of 1.2% the duty is simply £36.01; take the same bottle of 7.5% and it's still £36.01.

So unlike spirits or beer both wine (below 22%) and cider are split into alcohol bands rather than than taxed on the actual alcohol content.

So what if you took a pint of beer, a pint of cider, and a pint of wine, what are the results?

So it's still cheaper (tax-wise) to drink cider except if you pick the sparkling variety at which point the higher strengths jump to the equivalent of drinking wine. The justification given is "These are considered to be competing products of similar strength and are often sold in the same sort of packaging." Yeah right so let's watch the sales of sparkling cider plummet and the sales of still cider rocket.

Mephedrone wars

So the latest in the 'ban this eeevil substance' takes an interesting turn. Once again it seems that politics just can't stay out of science with yet another resignation in the ACMD as the government tries to add mephedrone to the prohibited drugs list and seek to control those from whom it is supposed to seek advice.

There is as yet no evidence that mephedrone is dangerous, none that it has caused death or even contributed towards it; yet our government seeks to prohibit its use. The results, as evidenced by every other drug on the banned list, will not to be cut use; it will not make the drug any less dangerous it but the exact opposite.

Dratted weather

Wasn't helpful last week. Managed to get the front gutters done on Friday (19th), but the back ones had to wait until the Tuesday; could have done it Sunday, but other plans got in the way. Barked the front lawn on Monday between light showers. Wednesday was a wash, Thursday managed to clean the back windows etc.and Friday trimmed the hedges between light showers.

In between times I kicked back and managed to finish Dragon Age: Origins as a mage; then restarted as a warrior... much more difficult without any decent long-range or area attacks.