Quelle surprise…

It started with a report on the BBC News website that told us that:

“The Greater Manchester Police officer crashed the £33,000 VW Golf R on Wharfside Way, Old Trafford, at about 01:50 GMT on 15 December.

The driver was taken to hospital and treated for a back injury.

A Greater Manchester Police spokesman refused to reveal details of how the crash happened.

He said that “as a result of the incident, GMP is reviewing its policy on officers test driving cars”.

The officer, who has recovered from his injuries, is currently suspended from driving duties while an internal investigation takes place.”

The photo of the car shows just how much damage was done: not just a little bit of superficial damage as you might expect from a shunt on an urban road.

It'll polish out with a bit of T-Cut

Now Section 19 of the Road Safety Act 2006 amends Section 87 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 which grants police an exemption from speed limits when a vehicle is being used for police purposes. “Police purposes” is a pretty wide-ranging description but you do have to wonder what on earth this officer was doing at that time of the morning at the sort of speeds he must have been doing to cause that sort of damage whilst, apparently, testing the car for possible police use.

But the story gets better: apparently the driver was PC Paul Fletcher who was regularly seen on the TV programme “Car Wars” doing high speed chases.

PC Paul Fletcher on "Car Wars"

And GMP stated that no other vehicle was involved, despite emerging reports that in fact the whole thing was caught on camera by another high performance car out at the same time on the same piece of road when PC Fletcher – a trained driver, remember - lost control on a roundabout. Hmm. Racing each other, perhaps? That’s surely what the police would say if you or I were doing the same thing?

Greater Manchester Police are, supposedly, reviewing their policies in this regard but surely testing a vehicle would be better done on, say, the MIRA test facilities which are purpose-built for such testing?

Maybe next time I get a pull for speeding – at a significantly lower speed than that which would have led to a car being written off so badly as the Golf – I could just say I was testing its suitability? Ah wait: I don’t have the exemption they’ll be hiding behind whilst driving as dangerously as they do…

Another year when they fail to deliver, due to their using that complete shower, Parcelnet/Hermes/Home Delivery Network/Yodel/Any Other Name We Can Think Of for so-called Premium Delivery.

Last year, they “lost” the packages of chocolates I was having delivered to my London office for the receptionists and Ops Director and Thorntons had to re-order.

This year, I paid for premium, next day delivery, so that delivery was due to take place on Tuesday, 13th to our SE1 offices. Guess what?

He must be lost.

Here’s the second package’s current tracking details:

Crap, eh?

iTunes Match

If you want the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. It’s built right into the iTunes app on your Mac or PC and the Music app on your iOS devices. And it lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve imported from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. For just $24.99 a year.²

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it on any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

This I decided was a ‘must-have’ feature, so when I installed IOS5 and was prompted to set-up iCloud, I religiously upgraded to 50GB of storage for an additional £70 a year, thinking this would include iTunes Match.

I was misled.

iTunes Match was due to be rolled out by the end of October 2011 but Apple has missed this deadline. Oh and compare and contrast the US iCloud features site and the UK version. See what’s missing? Yes, that’s right: no iTunes Match.

Apple. Epic. Fail.

HP’s Connection Manager software allows you to chose the connection speed: 2G or 3G or Auto for either.

All this is fine.

The trouble is when the coverage is dodgy: the HSPA connection automatically switches to UMTS but Windows doesn’t like this so your ability to use the connection is in effect removed. You have to then disconnect and reconnect.

Very annoying, especially when it happens multiple times each day!

Changing the Connection Manager to only 3G doesn’t help as it classifies both UMTS and HSPA as 3G.

Grr!

Some dabbling seems to be spreading around their hotels when it comes to the Premier Inn “eat as much as you like” breakfast: whereas before it was all freshly cooked to order (or at least it seemed to be that way), now they appear to be rolling out a hot buffet style. I saw this for the first time recently at the Premier Inn, Norwich Central South where there was plenty of food laid out but invariably it wasn’t piping hot, the beans and the eggs were drying out under the hot lamps and it just looked generally not as fresh as one cooked to order. OK, if you ask, they’ll do you poached eggs and vegetarian sausages especially for you, but even so…

And as of this week – much to the chagrin of the chef! – the Premier Inn Wigan (M6, J25) is doing the same thing. I was told that they used to do this if there were 40+ guests staying, but today, for instance, there were only 15 people and of course the restaurant is open from 7am until 10.30am. The buffet therefore has to have sufficient food cooked and on display but of course it dries out or cools down and of course there’s the wasted food to consider.

I suppose the benefit is that a buffet is quicker for guests in a hurry, but for those of us who plan enough time to eat our breakfasts, the quality of the food suffers.

Oh and whilst I’m moaning, it would be nice if the Premier Inn published nutritional information for the food it serves. I was told that because the restaurants are operated by different groups, they couldn’t tell me, but that’s rubbish as the breakfast menu is the same at every location.

To end on a positive note for Premier Inn though: of the budget hotels, they’re by far the best. Travelodges are atrocious and appear to me to be generally tatty – I went to one where the leg of the bed was broken! – and the buffet breakfast I had at the Hilton Express in Norwich was simply dire.

They’ve announced that within a few weeks I won’t be able to log in to my online banking unless I use my Secure Key. Now, at the moment if I want to log in to my online banking account, I simply fire up a web browser, enter my twelve alphanumeric character user ID, then my date of birth and then three of six numbers from my security number. Easy-peasy!

Soon, I will have to have my Secure Key with me when I want to log in. I’ll enter my user ID into the website, then put a four to eight digit PIN into my Secure Key, generate a code, enter the code into the website and then enter a keyphrase into the website. Phew!

Much more hassle and a potential inability to access anything if I don’t happen to have yet another credit card-sized device with me.

Grr!

This has been causing lots of congestion for a while with traffic usually backed up onto and around the roundabout by the Rotherhithe Tunnel.

So can someone explain the thinking behind the decision to close the Rotherhithe Tunnel to Northbound traffic for the period from 21:00 on Thursday 21 April to 05:00 on Tuesday 26 April? This is to allow refurbishment works to be carried out on the Blackwall Tunnel, but traffic that would ordinarily use the Rotherhithe Tunnel to head North will be diverted over Tower Bridge …which means they’ll also be diverted along Jamaica Road!

I’m glad I’ll be away!

Yes, they’re at it yet again and it’s getting really tiresome.

And what’s worse is that these fecktards can’t even operate their phone system properly, constantly hanging up or dropping calls.

“1&1 Accounts: The Home of Special Needs”

I live in London, so not exactly rural or out of the way, and my telephone line is a BT line. BT suggest – via their website – that I can get up to 2Mb download speeds but nothing greater than that. And of course the actual truth, as confirmed to me today by my present broadband providers, O2, is that:

“We’ve estimated that your maximum download speed is 0.5 meg. This is based on information BT gave us about your BT line. The reason why you can’t get better speed is because of the distance between your home and your local exchange which is about 5930 meters.

So, there’s nothing that we can do in this instance. At the best you can realistically hope for speed up to 1Mb download speed. Therefore, we’re unable to provide you with better speed.”

Great, eh?