Alton Towers :/

Recently I saw a quote; “Alton Towers, where the magic never ends! – Imagine my surprise at finding that it closed at 7pm” – given our experience last Saturday this should also be re-written as “Alton Towers, where the queues never end”… or some other witticism regarding the outlay from one’s wallet never ending.

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The place opens at 10:30 – we got there at 11:00 and joined a traffic jam which took us till 11:30 to get to a space in car park (car park K as it happens). Open exiting the car there was not a sign, map or single piece of information regarding where the theme park was. So we headed off vaguely in the direction we thought best. After walking several minutes we began to wonder if we were actually heading in the right direction, we’d seen some signs but non of them were for the theme park and we began to bump into other people who were milling around, also unsure which direction to go; then a cry went up that someone could see the monorail through the trees. Finally we arrived at the ticket office at the park entrance and joined a queue; it seems the booth we selected to stand at was having problems with the credit card scanner… but then non of the other queues seemed to be going any faster either. One hour after getting out of the car, we stepped into the theme park.

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And we were now (£38×2) £76 + £5.00 (to park) worse off for the experience. Wait a minute £5.00 to park, wtf is that about? They’re charge you the best part of £40 each to get in, then want to charge you £5.00 to park 30 minutes walk away at a theme park that is in the middle of nowhere: Out and out banditry?

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Having feeling suitable reamed at the experience so far off we toddled towards the first ride the…..  And we waited 90 minutes for the experience which lasted approximately one minute thirty seconds.

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We noticed whilst we were waiting that of the 4 seats in each carriage – only 3 of them were filled at any one time and there seemed to be two queues; one for couples and one for single riders. The single rider queue got on the rides considerably quicker than the couples queue and we weren’t sure why that was. We did pass comment that given 1 of the 4 seats in every carriage was empty, if they filled that seat then surely the wait for the ride would have been 25% less (i.e. approximately 22 minutes less). I’m sure there is a valid reason for not filling every carriage; it can’t be just because it caused maximum annoyance and they think people love standing around for 90 minutes to get on a roller coaster.

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Figuring it was just the way of things, we then scooted over to Rita the Queen of speed and being a bit canny (given our previous experience) joined the single rider queue. This did not move at all. It seems the slack-jawed inbred who was managing access to Rita was only taking people from the other queue (couples) and oblivious to the fact that we had stood for 70 minutes only some 20 people from the front of the single rider line. Then Rita broke down. Some serious looking men in overalls did stuff and after a short while Rita was going again. Thankfully the dim-eyed bint who was letting people on the ride was replaced by a chap who took people from both queues. I was quite pleased about this, as I was that frustrated I was on the point of committing violence to or about some unfortunate member of staff.

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It was now 15:30 in the afternoon; it had cost us £81:00 and we had been on 2 rides: An outstanding experience but for all the wrong reasons, which prompted us to stump up another £10 each to get fast track tickets on Air, Oblivion and Nemesis… so let’s just put that into perspective; we pay £76 to get into the park but then have to pay another £20 to buy tickets for rides that we’ve already paid for because the queue’s are so mis-managed. Excellent, KY Jelly anyone?

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And with said fast track tickets we did indeed get on Air, Oblivion and Nemesis in a lot less time than 90+ minutes of the first two. We also managed a quick go on the Rip-Saw just before the park closed. We would have liked a go on lots of other rides, but we had spent so long standing in queues that we ran out of time, we would have liked to meander around the gardens, or spend some time at the stalls, but it seems the magic does end at 6:30pm.

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So we walked back to the front gate and the mono-rail to be advised that there was a 45 minute queue to get on the train back to the car park: Totally unf*cking believable. So we then walked some 30 minutes back to the car, and then sat in a traffic jam for another 30 minutes trying to get out of the car park.

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Total cost of the experience £101 (plus 3 hours worth of petrol) for 6 rides – that’s £16.83 per ride. Total time spent on rides probably less than 10 minutes out of the whole day: Total time not on rides (excluding car time) – something in the order of 7 hours. Magic never ends my *ss.

CCTV

All these fact have been taken from a Wired Investigation in Wired Magazine (http://www.wired.co.uk), May 10th, by Heather Brooke

Not sure where I stand with copyright, but I’m just reproducing the facts here, and I don’t think you can copyright facts: Wired (http://www.wired.co.uk) is the most interesting magazine on the market, and it’s an excellent article from Heather, I recommend you go find it :/

The UK has more CCTV cameras per capita than any other European country yet figures released by the European Commission and United Nations showed Britain’s recorded rate of violent crime surpassed any other country in Europe.

A trebling of investment in local cctv has coincided with negligible impact on reducing crime

Falkirk Council in Scotland spends more than £16,000 per camera in the initial outlay. Add to this the costs of regular support, control room costs, staff, tapes, storage facilities, recording and monitoring software and retrofitting and replacing hardware/software.

Moray Council spends £10,000 per camera

Mid-Lothian £100,000

Edinburgh City £25,000

Edinburgh currently has 185 public cameras at an estimated £4.6 million – not counting monitoring, retrofitting and replacement.

Wandsworth in London has 1,113 cameras at an estimated cost of £22 million – the equivalent of 1,100 Police Officers at a starting salary of £20k.

The maintenance of Wandsworth’s control room is estimated to be between £350,000 and £400,000.

According to the CCTV Users Group the City of London (619 cameras) will have invested more than £12 million setting tem up and then £2.25 million a year to maintain them.

Freedom of Information request from the Liberal Democrats revealed that London’s cctv cameras have cost taxpayers £200 million in the last decade.

A House of Lords report published in January 2010 estimated that during the 1990′s the Home Office spent 78% of its crime-prevention funds (est to be in excess of £500 million) on cctv. Once they’ve bee setup the costs of support and maintenance falls on local budgets (council, police etc).

In 1991 : 5 local authorities had public space cameras

In 1994 : John Major announced the fist of four phases of investment in cctv – the initial cost being £20million

In 1996  : 167 local authorities had surveillance equipment

In 1997 : Labour Government announced a £170 million grant for cctv, followed by another £153 million distributed between 1999 and March 2002

There is little or no data to affirm their effectiveness in fighting crime

Whilst money comes from central government to implement these systems, the cost of running, maintaining, supporting and upgrading these systems is not.

Shetland Island Council has 101 cameras

Corby Borough Council has 90 cameras

San Francisco Police 71 cameras.

(Stating the obvious that means that Shetland has more cctv cameras than San Francisco)

The City of London’s 619 cctv cameras is more than the combined total of police cameras in Boston, Johannesburg and Dublin

In 2009 detective chief insepctor Mick Neville, head of the Met’s Visual Images, Identifications and DEtections Office revealed that only 3% of the capital’s street robbers are solved using sercurty camera footage.

Sycamore

After a few polite and sociable beers in Liverpool with Wife and friends, we decided to round the event off with a trip to China Town for some food:

Very nearly home with wife driving (fizzy pop for her for the day), friend snoring in the back, I suddenly started to feel all discombobulated in the digestive region; this wasn’t the normal grumbling nauseousness one might expect after a vodka and coke too many (and then a shed full of noodles). Nor the mild stomach curdling that can be laid to rest by sipping a cup of tea and slipping into something more comfortable, like unconsciousness. No, this was full-on, oh dear I think the noodles are coming back. My temperature rocketed, my sinuses closed up (a curiousness of my physiology when I’m about to throw up), my eyes began to water and I sat bolt upright, better to aid the full on lip flapping that was about to take place.

My wife spotted the signs and said, ‘Are you going to be sick?’

To which I replied, ‘Erm, good chance… I think I am, let me out, take Phil home, I’ll walk from here,’ which was a lot to get out in the space of screeching to a halt, undoing my seat belt and then throwing myself out of the car.

As I flopped myself down onto the bench we had conveniently pulled up aside, the only things I was aware of where the sound of the tyres of my wife’s car squealing into the distance, the thumping in my ears, how bloody cold it was given the sweat was slicking off me and the almost deafening silence that is our village in the early hours of a Sunday night. The silence did not last as the inevitable came upon me; adopting the ‘feet as far apart as possible’ splash control position I proceeded to throw up the contents of the day onto the pavement.

It was glorious, it was epic, it was loud; it was a Jackson Pollock the like of which I’ve not undertaken in a long time. Some might say that I have a weak stomach, however I am quite confident I can throw the contents as far as the next man, and there aren’t many who make as much noise as me when it comes to disgorging and retching.

I am sure I woke up a good portion of the village, or was in some way intrusive on their dreams (of mating walruses with full on sound effects). Having roared, coughed, spat and cajoled the last remaining flecks of my dignity up, as the splash echo faded into the night, I wiped my eyes and looked about the deserted streets.

I found myself sat on the bench next to the patch of grass which leads down to the village green. Next to the bench are two plaques both commemorating previous years when we won the ‘Best Kept Village in the UK’ – ironic, I thought to myself that I should barf on such a grand scale at the foot of these plaques – I wondered if vomit on pavements would be considered a negative point when the Judges came around. Looking to my right I noticed another irony of the situation, the road leading away from where I was sat was ‘Sycamore Close’ – proving that God does have a sense of humour and also works phonetically.

Rising up on my trembling legs I proceeded to stumble the short walk home, by the time my wife came in, I’d downed a pint of water and was just about pulling the duvet over my head. A further 2 trips to the ceramic pot that night to squeeze every last quart of juice from stomach left me sipping water on the sofa for the next 2 days, to weak to even lift the tv remote. If I could remember the name of the Chinese restaurant we went to I’d make a point of not going back.

Use it or lose it

So we went to a friend’s 40th birthday party the other night, and she’d got this dj in to play the tunes we used to dance to when we went to our favourite clubs from 15/20 years ago. The dj was just some kid and I really don’t think he knew what he was playing: He’d start a track, see how many people left on the dance floor and just stop it and start a new one if no one was dancing, which was a shame because he canned a couple of really good tracks just because no one wanted to dance right then; so there were quite a few opening 30 seconds of one thing, which suddenly sliced into something completely different. But I guess his remit was to get people up

Having said that we didn’t dance much. We used to spend all night jumping up and down to The Cult, bouncing around to The Jam, sliding and whoozing to The Cure and The Smiths… lots of bands beginning with ‘The’ you’ll notice… now we’ve got dodgy ankles and knees, one of us has gout, the start of diabetes, our hips aren’t what they used to be, maybe even the start of arthritis in one or two joints or toes… It’s funny how age creeps up on you. Mentally we feel the same, but physically it’s all going a bit pear shaped. But back then, we’d go out several nights a week to a club, jump up and down for 4 hours till we were soaked in sweat. Now it can be months between us going out, and then it’s to sit around shooting the breeze. If you don’t use it I guess you do lose it.

Pizza Welding

Image via Wikipedia

Junior had six of his mates to stop over on Saturday night. All went well, no permanent stains or breakages. The inadvertently setting on fire of the oven was a minor thing and anyway, adrenaline rushes remind one that you’re still alive.

 

Wife and I were banished upstairs to watch movies, whilst him and his mates all screamed at the Xbox (and each other)… come time for food we were assured by Junior that we would sort it out, so we stayed were we were watching Gladiator (or it might have been Excalibur by then, I can’t remember). Some 30 minutes later he pounded up the stairs to tell us that the oven was on fire… it was then the smoke alarms screamed into action. By the time we’d raced down stairs someone had put the fire out by swatting it with a tea towel.

 

The whole of the down stairs was filled with a slight veil of acrid smog; wouldn’t say it was smoke filled, that would be an exaggeration, but there was a definite miasma in the air. The dark and devious ways of our combi-oven had seemingly confounded him. Or it could have been the fact the pizza ready signal was at in inconvenient time of game play; rather than dealing with the pizza, it seems running out, turning the oven off, running back to finish game was the given choice. What in fact happened was that when the oven was turned off, the grill was mysteriously and inexplicable turned on and to maximum rendering the pizza into something you could arc weld with. Or indeed set fire to the oven. Still all’s well that ends well, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger etc… I’m sure it was a learning experience.

BT = Bunch of Twats

And whilst we are on the subject of lag and crappy broadband I note in the news today that a Cumbrian couple who wanted to upgrade from the dial up service to broadband have been given an estimate for the work by BT of £45,000 – yes that’s forty five thousand pounds to get a broadband service.

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It seems BT want to use this money to pay for putting in the infrastructure to provide the rest of their village with broadband… Erm wait a minute, so the service provider, responsible for providing said service is effectively over charging one customer the cost of the infrastructure upgrade for an entire community? Who on earth thought that would be acceptable at BT?

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At the moment they are on a 56K line and even after spending £45k they would only end up with a guaranteed speed of 512Mb (?) – a long way from the promised 2Mb minimum promised by 2012 by the Government. I’ve got friends in the frozen wastes of Northern Norway who, live miles from their nearest neighbour who have 100Mb to their desk.

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What kind of retards are BT employing, or are they truly living up to their acronym of a Bunch of Tw4ts?

Modern Warfare 2

Another session of MW2 spoiled by speed freaked adhd teenagers and lag. To be fair some of it is how people play the game and some of it is the chronic infrastructure that BT seem to think is appropriate for 21st Century internet access. Two out of four games were ruined by people just constantly running around stabbing people; they never stopped running – at bionic speeds no-less, how do they run so much faster than the normal player can run? There’s no point, no thinking, no strategy, just kill as many people with a blade as quickly as possible and move on looking for the next person. I’m sure it’s called a first person ‘shooter’ for a reason. The way to fix this would be to prevent the instant death from one strike of the knife… change it so that it slows people down like a flash bang or something instead. The carving up of the map by people sprinting around at superman speeds then stabbing everything in their path just makes for a very dull game.

Add to this the seemingly x-ray vision of some people who can see and shoot through walls. Then a hefty does of frustration when you have clearly nailed your opponent, but they seem impervious to your bullets and instead pop a cap between your eyes and single shot you means you end up screaming at the game more than is necessary – this latter problem could be caused by the half-*rsed way in which the game hosting has been implemented or could be the fact that our entire village seems to be serviced by a single strand of copper wire for its broadband connection.

Dr. Finkelstein and the killer but mainly vegetarian robots

Finkelstein; there is a man, a Doctor of Robotics, called Finkelstein working for the USA military, to develop battlefield robots which will harvest ‘material’ to use as energy…. It sounds like the plot from bad sci-fi movie, but then reality is stranger than fiction.

Apparently this is old news, it first appeared some six months ago, but I caught it on Radio 4 yesterday, there was a preview in the morning, then the main show last night…. In it Dr. Finkelstein described his creation as being ‘mainly vegetarian’ – what the f*ck does that mean? Seems to me to mean that the option of not being vegetarian is very definitely on the menu; when pressed about the concept of this thing eating dead soldiers, Dr. Finkelstein replied that it was illegal for a robot to use dead bodies as an energy source, desecration of the dead is a war crime under article 15 of the Geneva Contentions… He then went on to say that if it was not on the menu, the robot wouldn’t eat it. This implies that the menu can be changed such that what ever was available could be used. And since when did morals and ethics get in the way of the military (especially the USA military) and people making money? At no point dead he say categorically that his robot would not consume the dead (or badly injured).

He was then further pressed on who would be held accountable if one of his battlefield robots did accidentally commit an atrocity, it’s not like you can punish the robot; and rather worryingly he couldn’t actually give a straight answer to that; instead we got flim flam, weasel words and vagueness the like of which would be worthy of any politician. Put this man in the same room as Sarah Palin and we are all as good as dead

And we gave up on 24 last night… 10 minutes into episode 3.

There were some niggles in episodes 1 & 2 – primarily the new boss of CTU is an overbearing prick who couldn’t find his arse with both hands and a diagram to help: Completely ridiculous to have what is supposed to be such an important department in charge of national security controlled by a man of such low mental agility.

And he really did let Jack take a gun (and ammo) from the armoury – what don’t you have to fill in some paper work to get that kind of hardware? Not even sign for it?

Then Jack goes to a house and finds a policeman and his wife shot dead… plot credibility was stretched to breaking point when after Jack was tasered: The cop whom he’d told he was working for CTU investigating a plot to assassinate a world leader did not say to his partner whom had just used the taser, no wait, he’s working for a Govt Agency, he’s on our side… we shouldn’t take him back inside the house cause you think he’s a cop killer…. he’s a secret service agent or something! No he just helped carry Jack back inside. I’m sure the people of Washington are re-assured to know they have such a dumb-fuck working on their police force.

Then the blond woman who works in CTU – which I assume is a fairly high powered, stressful position, a key position in a department responsible for nation security, handed her door key over to the psycho ex boyfriend telling him, you can have a key but you must be out tomorrow – that was just piss poor plot line, just terrible.

What she would have said is… sod off or I will kick your ass, then my hubby-to-be who is some sort of elite commando squad leader will kill you and bury the body were it will never be found: Or had him framed as a terrorist and whisked off to some black ops CIA prison for ever and day.

Instead we plumbed for the deliberately emotive, dire, emotionally tortuous plot twist of doing something completely irrational and illogical when you have alternatives available… crock of shit.

Soon as she handed the key over, we turned over…

Why do the writers of these shows seem to think it’s ok to place people in such high-powered positions then expect to keep any credibility when the characters behave like village idiots? It’s the same with our national obsession with soaps – the way the characters behave is completely removed from real life – people would not do, the things they do… they only reason such events unfold is to make the story line deliberately emotive, highly charged and contrived. A bit more respect for the intelligence of the viewing audience wouldn’t go amiss.

So we voted with the off button – 24 sucks.

S’no Joke

It normally takes me approx 30 -35 minutes to drive to work. Yesterday (in the worst snow storm for 30 years) I gave up after 3 hours. It took me 1 hour 30 mins to get even near to the nearest town, something which would normally take about 6 or 7 mins. I then encountered a HGV going sideways in front of me up a hill, it finally came to a rest blocking the road and then couldn’t get any grip to move.

After watching this truck driver try and manoeuvre off the ice for 10 minutes, I set off on an alternate route. As I got near the motorway the snow was approx 8 inches deep, it was passed the centre hub of my wheels, I was literally ploughing a furrow through it and would have struggled to open the car doors without hitting snow. I pulled over in a garage forecourt to phone my son who was with my wife in her car to see how they were doing and suggest that driving through 8 inches of snow was perhaps unwise and we should all turn around and meet back home.

I happened upon someone at the garage who informed me that the nearby motorway was closed due to snow on the carriage way… So I set off across country to find the A59 into Liverpool, on route I stopped to let an ambulance pass coming the other way and watched in horror as the ambulance got to within 100m of me, a car shot out of the a side road and smashed into the side of the ambulance. Nobody was hurt, the front of the car was mangled, and the body panels of the ambulance were bent onto the back wheel, such that it took quite some time for them to move out of the way so I could get by. I took the worst snow in living memory, the sliding HGV’s, the t-boned ambulance, oh and going across the Moss crab-like at a weird angle but still retaining forward motion as signs from God to turn around and go home.

I then got a phone call from my wife that she had gone off-piste in the car, nothing damaged nobody hurt, and some nice men who had just dragged the previous car out of the shrubbery at the same spot, dragged her out as well: Decisions made, everyone home. So I made it to the A-road, the traffic heading into Liverpool was stationary, but I didn’t care, after 3 hours, numerous near misses and the wife scooting ditchward, I was going in the opposite direction. The traffic was stationary heading to Liverpool for approximately 8 miles.

Once home I found my wife at the bottom of the road unable to get her car up to our house; finally managed to get everyone back home safe and unhurt – though a little stressed.

Today I would normally get up at 06:30 but we left in the same car at that time, blankets, flasks, food & shovel in the boot. It took us 2hour 30 mins to get to work, it too my wife another 45 mins from dropping me off to get to her work. So this morning my commute was 2 hours longer that it should have been. But we made the effort, we sucked it up, stepped up to the line, risked our lives to get to work. To find that my manager has taken a days leave off me for not making it to work yesterday; Investors in People, Improved Working Lives, Staff Charter, Valuing People, our staff are our most valuable asset, nope I think the policy you are looking for is ‘our staff are a piece of sh1t’ and ‘f4ck you and the horse you rode in on.’ Not even a thank you, how was your journey, kiss my rse or nothing.