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Archive for the ‘UK’ Category

According to the Campaign for Real Conkers, there is a shortage caused by the dismal August weather, when many fell early from the trees and rotted on the ground. Most of those still on the trees will not be ripe and robust enough for the sport when the gales topple them.

A spokesman for the group, explained: "The conkers are nowhere near ripe enough yet and people won’t be able to get their practice in. When you whack a conker before it is ripe it will crumble to bits."

See also World Conker Championship

 1st and 2nd class stamps, currently 39p and 30p, are set to rise to 42p and 32p respectively next year.

The inflation busting proposals have been sanctioned by Postcomm in order to help safeguard Royal Mail’s universal service – delivery to every property in the country for the price of a stamp.

At this rate we will end up with a service like they get in the US!

TNS are reporting that the Brits are abandoning the indigenous strain in favour of French and American varieties. The smooth English cream is heat pure and simple, distilled to the point where it can send smoke out of the nostrils of the uninitiated. Whether it is served with roast beef, chicken or ham it can always be relied on to sharpen things up.

…and Coleman’s English mustard powder, not this ready made stuff (even when made by Coleman’s).  Fresh mustard in restaurants is increasingly less available and in my local supermarket only the small tins are stocked – what is the world coming to?  American mustard is OK on a hotdog but on nothing else I can think of – call me a grump but may Coleman’s last forever!

Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/

This statue is canalside by UMIST in Manchester in the Pink Quarter – see previous posts.

I love his service and would be pissed off it is withdrawn because of incompetence!

Speech to Text messaging company Spinvox has belatedly replied to the BBC news story and blog post from BBC’s own technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, with a post on its own blog.

The company says that the article posted on Wednesday contained numerous allegations "over its privacy standards, technology, evidence offered by a Facebook group and finances", allegations which Spinvox says are both "incorrect and inaccurate".

The in-depth investigation carried out by the BBC showed that Spinvox used a network of call centres outside Europe, in the Philippines, South Africa and Egypt predominantly, to help its main system, D2, carry out voice-to-text conversions.

But Spinvox rebuked the claims saying that these are partners that assist "in providing Quality Control to the SpinVox system" and are located both in and out of the EEA. The company also confirmed that it is fully compliant with the Data Protection Act 1998 and has a number of systems in place to comply with "all relevant data protection legislation".

The blog post which was issued as a company statement came as Christina Domecq, Spinvox’s CEO, told the telegraph that it would be "impractical for human transcribers to type up even a fraction of the messages sent by SpinVox’s 100 million global users".

Spinvox claims that its system, developed by the Cambridge Advanced Speech Group, “a highly qualified team of speech scientists working together with the world’s leading speech academics", has been used to process voice messages for more than 100 million users worldwide.

Yesterday was the start of the Whitstable Oyster Festival and the first event is the Oyster Landing and blessing which we attended yesterday on the East Quay – to be fair this event got in the way of Oyster eating and Oyster Stout quaffing but so be it.

We stayed at the Hotel Continental which is highly recommended for a bed with a sea view, great bar, great restaurant.

The Whitstable Brewery beer was very tasty: I tried the stout, bitter and lager.

And the Oyster Company restaurant was brill as was the Crab & Winkle on the Harbour side.

Britons are using half as many carrier bags as they were three years ago following campaigns by leading retailers to reduce waste damaging to the environment, a survey showed on Friday.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) said shoppers used 452 million bags at seven major supermarket groups in May, down from 870 million in May 2006.

The seven firms – Asda, Co-operative Group (now including Somerfield), Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury, Tesco and Waitrose – pledged at the end of 2008 to cut the number of single-use carrier bags used by customers by 50 percent by the end of May versus May 2006.

"These figures send a clear message: the voluntary approach is very successful and can lead to better informed customers and lasting change," the BRC said in a statement.

I really did not think this would happen so quickly.  If you had asked me three years ago whether I would take bags to the supermarket I would have said “life is too short” but it is that look from the check out girl when you do not have bags saying “it’s people like you who are ruining the planet” that converted me.

Beautiful day and Tunbridge Wells a great stop off before we get to the Kent coast.  We are staying in a hotel which used to be Victoria’s summer holidaying place before she got married to Albert.  Now the Hotel du Vin and very nice too.  We took the water at 50p a pop which tasted like any other spa water I have ever tasted but forgot my camera hence a decent photo!

I have been a bit silent this week – WORK gets in the way of having fun but we are off to Kent for the weekend to celebrate our 12th wedding anniversary so I will be on my best behaviour.  First night at the Hotel du Vin in Tonbridge Wells to view the Pantiles and then two nights in Whitstable which looks a pretty place with lots of fish.