Category Archives: General

General, Movies & TV

The Sky+ HD Experience

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We now have Sky TV in glorious HD, no thanks to Sky themselves – this song from the Simpsons seems appropriate to describe the quality of the install… (words here)

In the past I’ve had one or two issues with Sky installers, generally a drawn out discussion getting them to run cables where I want them, but I was fairly confident this time since all that was required was to replace our existing Sky+ box with a new Sky+ HD box – not much to do for the flat rate £60 installation fee. I’d already measured the slot for the box to go into in the cabinet – it fitted although it was tight, all the cables were there, simple you might think.

When I came home, the first thing was that the Sky+ HD was placed at a jaunty angle because “it didn’t fit” – thirty seconds of shuffling solved that. Then I turned on the box. BBC HD worked fine, but none of the subscription HD channels did – so he hadn’t actually activated the card for HD.

Okay, phone up Sky and go through the process.

This proved to be slightly confusing as the techie originally tried to guide me through the HD settings pages, whilst the box had the old style Sky Guide – despite the yellow sticker on the front asking the installer to do the over the air download, he’d not bothered with that either.

The techie quickly activated the remaining channels, so we sat back and waited for a programme to record, only to be presented with an error again asking us to call Sky – another few minutes on hold whilst a different techie activated the recording facilities.

Once that recording had finished I went through the over the air download procedure myself, and we now have the latest Sky Guide, plus ITV HD set up.

And then the final icing on the cake, when I sat down to try and make this blog posting, I discovered that despite not needing to touch it at all, the installer had pulled the network cable out.

So of all the tasks the Sky installer had to do today, the only one he actually did was deliver the box, all the rest I ended up doing, and I paid a grand total of £60 for this…

Having said that, the HD picture is really good…

General, Politics

Hearing Baby 2.0

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After tweeting that I was going to hear Baby 2.0, thanks to the sheet ice on the road, Beth went on her own to the surgery, and I only got to hear the recording.

However they do say that live is always better than recorded, and that was what we got today, with the first specialist appointment at Frimley Park. After the complications with gestational diabetes Beth had to have an appointment to get booked in for two glucose tests, the results of which will determine how many more appointments and ultra-sound scans we will have during the rest of the pregnancy, and ultimately when baby 2.0 is born. The due date is officially 14th June, but if the diabetes returns, as it is expected to, the birth will be induced early.

Having said that, it does look like the trips to the hospital will be a little bit less of a hassle as after leaving early to take account of the usual vast queue to get into the chaos of the hospital car park, we got in really easily, and even got one of the big spaces that make it a lot easier to get Lucy in and out of the car. At first I thought it was just that it was the time of year, but it turns out that it wasn’t only that…

As far as possible we’ve always tried to get morning appointments at the hospital, because you can usually get into the car park – although it’s often busy, you can usually get a space. In the afternoons it has always been absolute chaos, with the queue for the car park stretching out onto the road outside. The problem has always seemed to be around the couple of hours of visiting of an afternoon. Aside from one or two exceptions, all the hospital visiting is in two blocks, one in the afternoon and the other in the evening, so in the afternoon you have visitors cars and patients heading to clinics all competing for spaces. According to the sign coming into the hospital today they seem to have finally taken heed of the problems, and afternoon visiting is only available on the weekends, during the week visiting is limited to the evening only. We’ll have to see whether it helps as we go through this pregnancy.

And before anyone mentions the importance of visitors, and how inconvenient it will be to only have evening visiting, I am well aware of that, but short of building a bigger car park, or introducing park and ride – especially with parking charges for hospitals looking like they will be abolished, it is more important that patients are able to park.

General, Pictures

Baby 2.0

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First thing this morning, pretty well fresh off the plane from Canada, Beth had an appointment at the hospital. This is a picture of the reason – Beth is pregnant, with the baby due sometime in late May or early June next year.

Anyway, all three of us took a trip down to Frimley Park Hospital, which is where Beth has opted to go once again, and we sat and waited. Lucy is not surprisingly at her age, not really clued up as to what was going on. She had some fun playing with the toys in the waiting area, however moments before being called in for the scan she decided she was hungry and was signing both “milk” and “more”. Whilst the dimmed lights and images on the screen distracted her for a bit, her thoughts turned pretty quickly back to food.

Her new brother or sister seems to have already developed the same skill at dodging the scan operator as Lucy in that the operator had to chase around a bit to get the measurements, and the pictures she managed to get are not the clearest. In the pictures the baby is positioned with the head to the left, and on the third image you can just about see an arm in front of the face. As with Lucy, the subsequent scans should be clearer, again as with Lucy we’re expecting quite a few scans as having been diagnosed with gestational diabetes last time it is thought quite likely Beth will develop the condition again.

Following on from the scan, Beth also had a blood test, and then from there is was time to make the next scan appointment for twenty weeks (we have a consultant visit for the diabetes test later this month).

General

Keeping Cool

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One of the things about having a relatively new house, is it costs relatively little to heat, thanks to the modern insulation. The downside of course about being so well insulated is that in this weather, once heat gets trapped in the house, it is very difficult to get rid of, usually requiring windows open and a good breeze to dissipate. As a result, when we get weather like we’ve had for the past few days, where we’ve had almost no breeze, we’ve generally had to be very fastidious about opening and closing windows and curtains at the right time of day, and using electric fans to shift air around the house. Although we’ve been fairly successful, by the afternoon, the upstairs is often unbearably hot.

Whilst it is a rare occurrence here, Beth is well used to soaring summer temperatures from her life growing up on the prairies, where the kind of temperatures we regard as a heatwave over here are pretty normal for the summer. As a result Beth’s parents house is somewhat better set up for coping in summer heat, whilst being even more insulated than our house here to cope with the plunging temperatures in the winter. Although we obviously can’t do much about mimicking the shady location of the house in Canada, we have often talked about duplicating another feature, which is having ceiling fans, which do a much better job at circulating the air around in the house than the small fans we have been using. Needless to say it’s always been one of those things that we’ve thought about after the heatwave has gone. But this time around we managed to get fans sorted in time for the heatwave, even if we couldn’t find an electrician to fit them until today!

After having a look around, whilst you can pick up a cheap fan from a local DIY store, the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that you wanted something well made and reliable, as the fans need to be properly balanced to work efficiently, and most especially not wobble. It just happened that the sole UK importer of one of the top US brands was based locally, so we gave the Hunter Fan Company a call.

We actually opted for their own brand fans, rather than any of the American imports, not least because they were cheaper, but as I said they turned up on Monday, and the electrician came out and fitted them today. Even more impressively he didn’t even need to get the balancing kits out of the packaging as both fans were perfectly balanced and wobble free as delivered.

Here is a short clip of the fan in our bedroom:

And this is the one installed in Lucy’s room:

Having had them installed and turned on, it was a definite case of wondering why we hadn’t got them sooner. From a room temperature of almost 30 〬C, and the room unusable, it brought the atmosphere in the room down to a level where Lucy was able to nap in the room, something she hasn’t been able to do because of the heat. Certainly a worthwhile investment, and good enough that we might just have to invest in one for the living room as well!

General

Losing Your Marbles

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I didn’t set out to get a Marbles Credit Card, I sort of got sold into it.

A few years back we changed around our credit cards, in particular we took the advice of the Money Saving Expert site and swapped to credit cards that provided benefits or perks. It has definitely been a good move as we get a steady although small cash back on one card, but the other, which gets us frequent flyer miles has now taken us twice to Canada and back on free miles. The only downside was that on one of the old cards in particular we had built up a pretty good credit limit. Whilst we never came anywhere near needing to use it, it was reassuring that in a crisis we knew we could use that card.

In order to keep the account ticking over, I had a monthly charge of £4.75 going through on the card every month, which with the repayments cover of 4p a month for that size of balance was a grand total of £4.79.

A couple of months ago we got a letter from the card issuer saying that they were getting out of the credit card business, and that they had sold all their accounts to another company, who were “reassuringly backed� by the Bank of Scotland – although that is perhaps somewhat less reassuring considering what a mess certain other parts of HBOS are like… Alongside this, the new owners seem to have transferred all of their customers like us onto the Marbles brand credit card that they had also brought. The transfer was all automatic, so largely I wasn’t expecting to have to make any changes.

Then yesterday the first bill arrived, for £5.54. A quick check found that I was now being charged 79p for the repayments cover about 16% of the outstanding balance rather than less than 1% – not a problem, I’d just phone up and have it taken off.

I phoned up the call centre who said that unfortunately they couldn’t take the repayments cover off, and to have it stopped I would have to contact the insurance company that provided the product. (The joke here is that the same customer advisors at Marbles can add it onto the account themselves without a problem, they just can’t remove it.) The customer service operator then provided a phone number for me to phone. Unfortunately they were closed for staff training last night, so I had to wait until this morning. However when I phoned this morning before even answering the call there was a recorded message saying that this number could not remove insurance products and that you needed to talk to the card issuer. When I eventually spoke to a real person they said that they were quite frequently getting calls from Marbles customers who had been redirected to them by Marbles.

Phoning back the Marbles call centre, they double checked, and this was the number they were being told to give out.

At this point I was starting to get fed up, so I phoned the company that were making the monthly charge, and within about two minutes swapped it over to another source, and then went back to Marbles, and I think I ended up with a trainee.

He started off okay but once I’d prompted him over the right questions to ask, he then, with my customer record in front of him showing that I’d phoned five minutes before, proceeded to ask me whether my contact details had changed since I’d last called – probably not the best question to ask when I’d spent about twenty minutes bouncing between call centres with the problem. “Not in the last five minutes they haven’tâ€? I retorted. I then asked him again whether he could terminate the charge to which, as with all the others he said no, they couldn’t do it, so I just told him to terminate the account. There was a short pause, at which point he said “But you’ve got an outstanding balance.â€? – I told him that I wasn’t proposing not to pay that, but that the one regular charge on the card had been moved, and that since they were incapable of terminating a simple charge I was terminating instead,  at which point he agreed to close the account without any further argument – in fact it was remarkably quick to terminate the account unlike the multiple phone calls to try and terminate a simple repayments charge.

One interesting little post script is that a colleague at work half jokingly suggested that maybe the front line call centre staff are told to say that they can’t remove the charge, as since the charging structure for the repayments insurance is 79p per outstanding £100 or part thereof, it is a bit of a money spinner. The introduction message on calling the Marbles number goes to great pains to highlight that other cover is available, but certainly it seems that getting rid of the cover once you’ve got it is rather difficult, and I’m not the first person to encounter problems if the agent at the insurance company is to be believed. I’m perhaps not quite as suspicious as my colleague, so maybe it’s just a mistake somewhere in the process of handing over the card accounts, and one that will be ironed out in the future. Suffice to say as an ex-Marbles customer I won’t be around to find out.