Freedom of speech (or hassling your MP)

 Personal, Views  1 Response »
Oct 122012
 

I’ve been watching in horror over recent months as people are fined and jailed because they’ve made an offensive comment or joke online.

This is a worrying direction in which we are heading. Freedom of speech should be protected at all costs. I decided I would write to my MP expressing my worry and asking if this subject could be raised. I think you should do the same. If I get a response I will update this post or make a new one.

Dear Iain Stewart,

I hope this e-mail finds you well.

I am writing in response to the recent spate of heavy handed sentencing in regards to statements and jokes made on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

I hoped that the overturning of Paul Chambers’ conviction in the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’ would set a precedent in regards to to this subject but instead it seems that judges are continuing to hand out sentences that are grossly out of proportion with the supposed crime as a knee jerk reaction. Sentencing should not be affected by ‘public outrage’.

For example, I refer you to the recent case of Matthew Woods whereby a tasteless and insensitive joke has landed the 19 year old a custodial sentence. This sets a dangerous precedent. Should we really be legislating against bad taste humour? Who decides when the line has has been overstepped?

I also refer you to the recent sentencing of Azhar Ahmed. A young man who expressed an unpopular opinion regarding several dead British soldiers on Facebook. A comment on a website has got him a fine, 240 hours community service and a criminal record. Would the sentence be as tough had the soldiers been foreign nationals and the defendant white?

I can quote several other similar cases from the past year if required.

I am not defending the view points of these people. I am, however, defending the right to express a view that others may dislike or be offended by. Surely you agree that free speech should be a basic right of any British citizen? On a related point, is this seriously an appropriate use of police time in this era of austerity?

As my member of parliament I would greatly appreciate it if you could discuss this subject with fellow MPs and raise the debate in the house of commons.

Thank you for taking the time to read this e-mail.

Yours sincerely,

Louis Houghton

Voting in the Local Elections

 Personal, Views  1 Response »
May 032012
 

So the local elections are upon us and with them come the first time I have to actually choose a party to vote for. Previously I would have voted Lib Dem but since forming the coalition and going back on several key election promises I’ve lost all faith in them. I know local politics are fairly separate from state politics but the association is there and I’d like to show Cleggy how pissed off I am at him.

So this leaves me with the choice between the other lefty parties – Labour and the Greens. I reckon I probably will vote Labour when the next general election rolls round because it’ll be the only way to oust the Tories but in the local elections I feel I have a bit more choice.

I’m seriously thinking about voting Green. I support a lot of what the Green party stands for in regards to the environment but I’ve never voted for them before. Partly because it was always seen as a wasted vote but also because I fundamentally disagree with their stance on subjects concerning science. Today I saw this Reddit post in which someone with exactly my thoughts voted Green but then e-mailed the party to explain their stance. In the e-mail they write that whilst they agree with many of the Green’s policies, the party’s stance on nuclear power and GM crops for example is ‘naive and dangerous’.

This sums up my thoughts exactly and I’m leaning towards doing the same thing.

On a side note I thought I better add how disappointed I am with the amount of information available on the people we’re voting for here in Milton Keynes. All we get on the council website is a list of names next to the parties. I have no idea what these people stand for. I tweeted the @MKCouncil twitter account to find out if any of the candidates blogged or used Twitter but 5 hours later I’ve not heard anything. Googling their names doesn’t bring up anything interesting either.

It just means that people end up voting based on their ideological views of each party as opposed to proper policies. For all I know the Green candidate is opposed to a load of stuff I support. Maybe the Tory candidate and I have very similar views (I doubt it somehow). There’s no way to tell because there seems to be nothing about these people online.

Anyway, hopefully the rain will hold off long enough to walk down to the polling station.

Fibre Optic Broadband – Installation

 Fibre Optic Broadband  2 Responses »
Oct 042010
 

I was fairly sure that installing fibre to the home wasn’t going to be very straight forward. Vivaciti (the ISP I’m trialling with) advised the appointment would be around four and a half hours but said it would be better if someone could be in all day as it might overrun. And overrun it did. The engineers were here from 9am until gone 7 in the evening! Something tells me this might not be considered financially viable until they can think of some more efficient ways of pushing the fibre to the house.

It seems to me that the engineers BT have doing these installs are pretty new to the whole situation. It became clear whilst trying to discuss with them the placement of the termination box, use of wireless and the type of cable needed to connect the router to the fibre box that they had a fairly limited knowledge of these subjects. For instance they tried to convince me that 802.11N wireless is not affected by walls. This is, of course, completely incorrect. Yes, it is much faster and has better range than 802.11G but a thick wall will still cause signal loss.

The main issue they had was with blowing the fibre cable down the tube from the cabinet to the house. The weather was very wet and apparently this was causing the cable to snag; a situation that required them to disconnect the equipment from that end of the duct, reassemble it at the house and blow the cable back. Apparently it took them six attempts to finally get it through. Once connected we were left with this…

The cable comes from the duct into the box on the right. A cable is then fed into the box on the left which I am sure is meant to be on the inside of the house seeing as it has ethernet and telephone ports as well as a bog standard power supply. Luckily this is all inside the garage but the engineers tried to tell us it was water proof and they had already installed some outside! I can’t see how that is safe or secure.

Since installation we’ve had to run a 20 metre length of ethernet from the garage to the study where the router is kept. This wasn’t too much of a hassle for us but I can imagine people less technical would have trouble if an engineer just plonked the box in some hard to reach corner of the house.

So overall installation could be seen as barrier for both the customer and BT. If every house takes this long it just won’t be economical to do every house on the exchange, or even in the estate. The engineers seem slightly apprehensive to place the termination box too far away from where the duct comes through so there may end up being a bit of installing left for the customer as well. In my opinion this is a small price to pay for the increased performance over your average Milton Keynes internet connection.

Next post – speed tests!

Fibre Optic Broadband in Milton Keynes Very Much a Reality

 Fibre Optic Broadband, Geek  5 Responses »
Oct 022010
 

Back in March I mentioned that BT were planning on running fibre optic trials in my area (Walnut Tree, Milton Keynes). Details were fairly thin on the ground but I tried to post here whenever I heard anything new. Since May there hadn’t been much news until I stumbled across this broadband availability checker. It’s not one that I’ve seen on any other website and the only links I’ve seen to it are on forums. I entered my phone number and to my surprise I was informed that my number was enabled for fibre to the premises (FTTP).

Now that I was enabled, I just had to find an ISP that was involved in the trial. Easy! Well, not really. It seems like none of the major ISPs even know about it. Two names that kept coming up on forums were Plusnet and Zen. I e-mailed both but only Plusnet replied. They told me I had to swap my ADSL to them before I could be put on the trial. However, they couldn’t promise me that if I did switch I would definitely be put on the trial. After speaking with a rather rude representative on the phone I decided they didn’t seem like a company I’d like to deal with.

A few weeks passed by with not much more information until I saw this post on the Thinkbroadband forum by the company Vivaciti saying they were on the trial and to e-mail them if you were interested and in the enabled area. So I did and I got a very helpful reply with this information…

If and when you are accepted by BT for the FTTP trial, they will do a site survey to see if the house is suitable (you are not on the 12th floor of a tower block) then they will arrange for an installation date. We will supply you with a suitable router to use but the router remain our property at this stage.
We have no control over the service that is put in as part of the trial, so can not specify the 100/15 40/10 etc (although my understanding is they want the 100MB (sic) rolled out first)

During this time there is no cost to you for installation or rental/usage of the service.
The trial is due to finish at the end of December although we think this will be extended, but either way at the end of the trial you have a couple of choices, you can either cease the service at no cost or liability or once prices are released you can agree to stay on the service although at that point there would be a 12 month contract imposed on the service.

So as you can see, it was a bit of a no brainer. No cost, no commitment and no contract! I let them know I was more than happy to join the trial and after a few more e-mails I had a installation date for when BT would come and physically connect us to the fibre network.

I’ll save the installation details for the next post.

More on the Milton Keynes Fibre Optic Internet Trial

 Fibre Optic Broadband, Geek, Internet  No Responses »
May 102010
 

It’s not much but I’ve got a little more  information on the fibre optic internet trial that is supposed to be happening in Milton Keynes (Walnut Tree specifically) over this year. I thought I’d post the leaflet that can be obtained from the Openreach vans that are dotted around the area.

I went to the web address on the leaflet which doesn’t really give any hard facts. However if you look at the table detailing deployment dates it lists Milton Keynes as being fibre enabled in December 2010. This is a fair bit later than the June date that was being tossed around a few months ago. I’m hoping this is referring to the rest of Milton Keynes and not Walnut Tree as we are supposed to be getting it first. If we have to wait until December then I feel sorry for the rest of the city.

There is still no word on which ISPs are going to be in the trial which is annoying.

I suppose at least the fact that there are vans around and this leaflet is being handed out mean that something is being done. I just hope it doesn’t take too long.

Strada Milton Keynes

 Food, Restaurants  1 Response »
Apr 062010
 

The Hub in Milton Keynes is an odd place. Central Milton Keynes never really got the whole restaurant thing. There were a few chain Italian places, one really nice Malysian place and a whole load of horrible family restaurants. That was meant to change with the opening of The Hub. Here were some up proper restaurants in a swanky location that should impress even people not from MK that are actually used to decent eating. Of course they are still all chain restaurants but at least we’re trying.

The location is nice and it makes a change to the frankly quite frightening Theatre District. I imagine on a summer’s night it looks quite trendy with everyone sitting out in the central court yard.

Last Friday we decided to try out Strada. We had a table booked but were still asked to wait at the bar whilst one was found. We were only there five minutes but I always feel awkward just waiting around holding my coat (there was a hanger but it was accompanied by a sign proclaiming Strada’s lack of responsibility if my coat was stolen).

Once we sat down the service was fairly average. No one asked if the food was OK or anything which was annoying as Jordan wanted to mention the unripe avocado in her salad.

The food was alright. My gnocci starter served with a cheese sauce had bit of a skin which made me think it’d been sitting out but at least it tasted OK.

My chilli and broccoli pasta was really tasty. I really hate over cooked broccoli so I was happy when I was greeted with a satisfying crunch.

The main issue I had with the place was price. Now I’m not saying it’s an expensive place at all but I just feel that it was a little overpriced. This may be because I used to live in Brighton where we had a small chain of Italian restaurants that provided really tasty, authentic food for very little money. I don’t know… I’ve eaten some really good Italian food so maybe I’m picky.

BT’s Fibre Rollout

 Fibre Optic Broadband, Geek, Internet  No Responses »
Mar 302010
 

Today BT announced a load of extra exchanges that are being fibre enabled over the next year and a bit. This is slightly different to the Fibre to the Premises that I wrote about a couple of weeks a go. Rather than piping the fibre directly into the home they will connect the street’s cabinet to the excange via fibre optics and then leave the final run to the same old copper we are using now. This leads to much improved speeds (Up to 40Mb) due to the hugely decreased distance the signal has to travel on low quality copper cabling. The released pricing doesn’t even look too bad.

Now the good news today is that two exchanges in Milton Keynes (Shenly Church End and Wolverton) will be fibre enabled. This is very good news to me as these exchanges cover the two areas in which I would happily live if I were to move within Milton Keynes. This means I won’t be too sad to see my (future… figures crossed) 100Mb connection go.

On the subject of the FTTP plans for my area I have seen a fair few Openreach vans around Walnut Tree. I have spotted a few parks on the H9 Groveway road between Walnut Tree and Kents Hill. They have also been spotted by Jordan on Dunchurch Dale which is only about 30 metres from the back of my house. I still haven’t heard anything concrete from BT about it all but from the activity that I’ve seen and from what people on the Think Broadband forums have reported it looks like it’s all going ahead. Lets just hope it lives up to expectations.

Openreach Fibre Optic Broadband Trials

 Fibre Optic Broadband, Geek, Internet  4 Responses »
Mar 162010
 

I’m not sure how I missed this when it was announced last year. Maybe because I was living in London… Anyway, it seems that my BT exchange has been chosen for a FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) trial. This will hopefully mean speeds of up to 100Mb/s.

To put this into perspective it is important to look at the history of broadband in Milton Keynes. Due to the price of copper when the city was being built, aluminium was used for telephony which is fine for telephone but awful for internet. The city is also fairly spread out with the cables running along the city’s grid road system which increases the distance yet further. This means that many people get awful internet connection (mine is 2Mb/s but was 512Kb/s up until around a year a go) or no broadband connection at all. There is even a group set up to raise awareness of this issue – BB4MK.org.

I am hoping that Openreach use this opportunity to provide a super fast fibre connection to people, like myself, on the outside of the exchange’s frontier rather than the closer people already receiving a decent connection.

The advantage of this system over say Virgin Media’s fibre network is two fold. Firstly the connection is to the home as opposed to the cabinet road which provides faster connections – up to 100Mb at the moment but Korea, who use the same system, are trialling 1Gb connections this year. Secondly the service will be provided not just by BT, but by several ISP just like the current ADSL system. This means competition with price and fair usage policies. If left up to B.T. I could imagine them charging over the odds for a package with a 10GB usage limit. I just hope Be (the best ISP I have ever used) decide to get involved.

I have added Thinkbroadband to my RSS feeds so I’ll hopefully get an update when more information is available. The trial is scheduled to start this summer but I can’t find much information at the moment.