It’s been quite a while since I reported on my golf….

For the last few weeks I have been playing pretty well and last week I managed to win the club Stableford.

At last.. Since leaving North Wilts for the Island my golf has been nothing but a downhill battle, just recently though, I have been striking the ball well and this has shown up in some decent scores. In fact I was getting a bit embarrassed, taking at least some of the money each week from our pound, pound, pound competition (for non-golfers: that means everybody pays a pound into a kitty for the best score on the front 9 holes, the back 9 and overall). Well, I won with a score of 44 points (22 on each half) which meant I took the lot from our group and the first prize for the club comp. to say I was pleased is something of an understatement!

Let’s just hope it continues – the club cut me by two shots, which means I am now playing off 18, not great but at least I’m heading in the right direction..

That covered unlimited broadband, phone calls and a BTVision package with Sky Sports 1&2. Until a week or so ago I have been very happy with it as it meant predictable monthly cost and a half decent service. Unfortunately, as is the way with these things, when things go wrong they go spectacularly wrong!

I recently realised that I hadn’t seen a monthly bill from BT for a while – I went on line and checked only to find that my monthly costs had increased by some 50% which meant they had reached a level completely unacceptable to me.

On calling BT I find that my contract had expired and that I had been put on to their normal rates. Now, the only reason I stayed with BT last year was the offer they made to keep me – a great price and a decent service.

Trying to reinstate my old contract conditions is proving difficult to say the least, the only way BT can provide a comparable price to last year is to remove the Sports package (the only reason I stayed with them before) so I am now faced with finding a new provider or with the forlorn hope of discovering the one person in BT who either cares or can do something to get me back where I was 7 days ago.

Strange that when you don’t want an auto-renewing contract, you always get one and when you do you can’t!

Update: It seems that nobody at BT can get me back to where I was so I’ve just canceled BTVision. The reduction in monthly payments mean they now get 50% less that they did when I had what I wanted.

Not much to report really, I just thought I’d better get a new post in and bring things up to date a little.

No matter how I try I can’t seem to get my office/workspace clear of  a seemingly ever growing pile of old PCs and bits! As fast as I get rid of a pile of old machines, a couple of “new”  broken ones appear. I meant to photograph the current pile and put an ad on FreeCycle but haven’t got around to it – 3 old laptops, 2 PC desktop cases, 4 tower cases, an HP scanner, 2 printers and a bunch of PSU, oh and a partridge in a pear tree!

The pile is now big enough to raise eyebrows at the local tip as I’m sure they’d think it was commercial dumping so I think the FreeCycle thing is the only way to go.

I hope there’s not another one on the way as I just had a call from somebody who fell for the phone scam where the caller reckons he’s from Microsoft Support. He says he has detected that your PC is infected with all sorts of nasties and eventually convinces people to allow him remote access to assess the damage. Unfortunately, my friend allowed him online and only realized the scam halfway through. He immediately shutdown his PC but is rightly scared about what has been done by the intruder.

More later I suspect….

OK, so it’s the first day of general release for the new page but I am really surprised that they have removed the options for me to customize the page to show only the things I am interested in. All I can do now is set my postcode so I see the latest weather and news for my area.

Instead of being presented with a set of options in a relatively small screen space, I now find I have to wade though half a screen filled with irrelevant (to me) pictures, football news, and the latest Strictly rubbish etc etc.

I hope they improve things…. Meantime, I’ll give the new look a 1 out of 10!

Update:
Well it’s been a few days now and my opinion of the new BBC pages hasn’t changed. Please go back to the previous version…. This new one grates more each time I visit, oh, and please make links from the iPlayer or Listen Live open in a new tab as it’s far too easy to overwrite the page with a new link.

The quality isn’t great but it’s certainly worth a watch to see if you can recognise any of the holes after 60 odd years.

You can use the controls at the bottom to go full-screen which may help make things a bit clearer (although I think it looks better as it is here). Oh and the sound is now working – unfortunately it’s just a “lift music” type track as I suspect those old cine cameras didn’t have sound recording.

Google to the rescue; I found a great offer on a shiny new TomTom Via Live 120 European version which had all the new bells and whistles and was a lot smaller and lighter than the original – it was also a lot cheaper at £152, the original costing over £250 if I remember correctly. In addition the Pixmania website (which offered the best price I could find) also had a “flash” on the product picture stating “£30 Cashback”, so a total price of £122!

Pleased to report that it works very well though so at least TomTom have lived up to expectations – it even knows where Southampton is

After just a quick look, I heartily recommend it to anyone even slightly interested energy consumption and climate change – written in an extremely easy to read style it manages to explain the concept and dispel the myths. For the techies, the second part of the book gets stuck into the maths, but even then a decent secondary level understanding should get you through it.

Take a look… You can download the pdf from the link below (the file is free for personal use)

Sustainable Energy – without the hot airby David MacKay

• Golf de Omaha Beach Le Mer
• Golf de Omaha Beach Le Manoir
• Golf de Cabourg Le Home
• Golf de Caen Le Vallone

Rating them, in order of personal preference:

1. Golf de Omaha Beach Le Manoir
2. Golf de Omaha Beach Le Mer
3. Golf de Cabourg Le Home
4. Golf de Caen Le Vallone

For a change, I managed to play them all reasonably well and Le Manoir well beyond my expectations (38 points). Overall, I shared the top place for the challenge with Paul Hawkins and it seems like my game is beginning to show signs of improvement

As usual we had a great trip, in no small part due to Pete Rush’s meticulous organization, thanks Pete!

We’d better start saving for next time

Quoting from the site:
“Welcome to the WPtuts+ WP101 tutorial series, the perfect beginning spot for those just getting started with WordPress!
It’s also a valuable resource for designers & developers who are teaching your clients & colleagues!”

There will eventually be 17 tutorials; but for the moment only the first 6 are available:

• Part 1: The Dashboard
• Part 2: Creating a New Post
• Part 3: Edit an Existing Post
• Part 4: Using Categories and Tags
• Part 5: Creating and Editing Pages
• Part 6: Add Photos and Images
• Part 7: How to Embed Video
• Part 8: Using the Media Library
• Part 9: Managing Comments
• Part 10: How to Create a Link
• Part 11: Changing the Theme
• Part 12: Adding Widgets
• Part 13: Building Custom Menus
• Part 14: Installing Plugins
• Part 15: Adding New Users
• Part 16: Useful Tools
• Part 17: Configuration Settings

Have fun!

There are though some  cons compared to the satellite system:

1. Less channels
2. No BBC iPlayer
3. No HD (high definition) channels

Well as of yesterday, BT finally brought the iPlayer to the Isle of Wight (and it works perfectly!) so now,  I guess, I just have to sit tight and hope the FreeView network adds the extra channels and switches on the HD channels…