When I was a councillor on Lincoln City a total of three applications for phone masts came in front of the Planning Committee.
Due to a prejudicial interest I never took part in the discussion however I was pleased to see that the councillors understood the laws around the applications. Two of the applications were accepted without much fuss.
The third was from O2 at the Birchwood shopping centre. It was a retrospective for a 13 metre poll with 3g aerials on top. They had already got consent (via appeal) for a 13 metre poll with 2g on top, but put up a 3g mast instead (only real difference was an extra 10cm in diameter of the bit at the top). It was felt by the committee that the overall shape of the structure was detrimental to the visual amenity of the area, however the planning inspectorate appeal again overturned the committee.
Continue reading Phone Mast applications
eBay “free” listings
Good news acording to the eBay news feed:
Zero insertion fees on qualifying auction-style listings on eBay.co.uk
From 12th March 2009, there’s no insertion fee if you’re a private seller and you list your item in an eligible category in the auction-style format with a starting price of up to 99p. Don’t forget, your first picture is also free.
If your item doesn’t sell, you don’t pay a penny. All you pay for are optional listing features and upgrades
Sounds great, but lets take a closer look.
* The free listing fee is only for those with a starting price of 99p and under, any thing else still has the same listing fee.
* The final value fee has again gone up. Instead of a sliding scale starting at 8.75% it’s now 10% up to a maximum of £40.
With a bit of a back of a fag packet (excel spreadsheet) during my lunch I’ve come up with these figures.
An item selling for £1 will now have a fee of 10p instead of 19p (9p up).
£5 will have a fee of 54p instead of 50p (4p up).
£8 will have a fee of 80p, the same as before.
£10 will have a fee of £1 instead of 98p (2p down).
£20 will have a fee of £2 instead of £1.85 (15p down).
£40 will have a fee of £4 instead of £3.25 (75p down).
£100 will have a fee of £10 instead of £6.40 (£3.60 down).
£150 will have a fee of £15 instead of £9.02 (£5.98 down).
£250 will have a fee of £25 instead of £14.27 (£11.73 down).
£400 will have a fee of £40 instead of £22.15 (£17.85 down).
£750 will have a fee of £40 instead of £34.90 (£5.10 down).
Only when an item sells for more than £1090.05 will you end being better off again. On top of this, with the forcing you to offer PayPal, eBay can take a second hit at your money.
No, I don’t want to take your silly notes
This morning reading the Beeb website I came across this:
‘Legal’ bid over Scots banknotes
An attempt is to be made at Westminster to make it legally binding for shops and businesses in England to accept Scottish banknotes.
For those who have never ventured North of the border, may be suprised to find that the Scots don’t just have their own version of our notes, but 3 different versions each issued by different banks.
The reason why shops don’t accept them is that with any currency you need to know that the note is worth the paper it is written on.
I’m pretty good at spotting a forged twenty. The feel, the watermark, the silver foil, the bit that rubs off etc. But I have no idea what a scottish twenty looks like, and the same goes for many staff in shops outside of Scotland.
Forcing shops to accept them will just result in a large number of forged notes being passed around in the smaller shops miles away from the issuing banks.
Luckly this is a Private Members Bill, so hopefully it’s not going to go far in Parliament.
When will my bin be collected?
We’ve just moved house, not far from the last one (still in Park Ward) and tomorrow would have been our bin day. However I can see no sign of any bins out on the street. Remembering that I had seen something on the council website with a list of street names and days I tried to find it.
First I came across the GIS site run jointly with the County Council. This can tell me who is my MP, MEP, County and City Councillors, where the nearest Library, Doctor or Dump Recycling Centre is. However for the day of bin collections I just get a link back to the City Council website.
Trawling through here I can see that my bins should be out by 7am, if my bins should have been collected on Christmas or Boxing Day the alternate day I should have put them out, that the weekly large black bin trial has ended, if I have a real Christmas Tree it can be collected during the next two weeks, but nowhere I can find which day my bins will be collected on.
The closest I have found is on this page which states
To find out what collection services are available for your street, please refer to the Waste Collection Calendar (NOTE: This is currently being updated and is due to be available in March 2008).
As it’s nearly March 09, I really hope that it would be up by now.
I guess I’ll have to try the old fashioned way of working out which day the bins are, talking to the neighbours.
LibDemVoice Missing Back Up
I’m sorry to announce that LibDemVoice will be missing for the next few days whilst we work on a new hosting solution.
Edit: Back up now
We were having too many requests to the site for our shared server to cope and unfortunately caused a poor service for others.
If you have the technical knowledge of other hosting solutions and would like to volunteer your services please let me know.
Quiz Answers
For those who took part here are the answers to the quiz:
1. Chris Hoy
2. Fern Cotton
3. John Barrowman
4. Rachel Rice
5. Lily Allen
6. Chris Martin
7. Heath Ledger
8. Barack Obama
9. Lewis Hamilton
10. Peter Kay
11. Jeremy Clarkson
12. Paul Newman
13. Heather Mills
14. Kelly Osbourne
15. Tom Chambers
16. Katie Price
17. Boris Johnston
18. Davina McCall
19. Usain Bolt
20. (Robyn) Rihanna (Fenty)
21. Carol Vorderman
22. Melissa Joan Hart
23. Russell Brand
24. Robert Peston
25. Harrison Ford
26. Guy Richie
27. George Sampson
28. Fernando Torres
29. Paris Hilton
30. David Walliams
31. Judi Dench
32. Naomi Campbell
33. Miley Cyrus
34. Andy Abraham
35. Ian Smith
36. Seth Rogen
37. Laura Robson
38. Alexandra Burke
39. Alistair Darling
40. Rebecca Adlington
41. Jamie Oliver
42. Fiona Phillips
43. Luiz Felipe Scolari
44. Joe Swash
45. Amy Winehouse
46. Peaches Geldof
47. Jason Donovan
48. Gordon Ramsay
49. John Sergeant
50. Tina Fey
Congratulations to Ross Pepper who managed to get 47/50 correct.
Last Chance for the Quiz
I’ll be counting up the scores tomorrow evening of my Picture Quiz of 2008, so if you still want to have a go better hurry up.
Ryan’s Nana Picture Quiz of 2008
For many years at Christmas Mum’s side of the family would get together and in the evening we would play Nana’s Picture Quiz of the Year. It would take hours as we only had one copy of each page and it had to be shared around. By the end of the night if any of the teams had achieved 80% they did well.
This year, I’ve decided to do the quiz and have made a nice PDF version which you can either print out or just view on your PC.
There are 50 “celebrities” to be named and unless asked otherwise you are to give the full name of the main person in the picture, not their character name.
If you want to be scored, please complete your answers in an email to quiz@artesea.co.uk (please don’t leave answers in the comments!), with the picture number and the name eg
1. Michael Jackson
2. George Bush
…..
50. Wayne Rooney
Winners and all the answers will be announced after Christmas
The Internet – on the Internet
Thanks to the Elders of the Internet I can now bring you a video of the internet. (sorry no audio)
Banning Tobacco displays
As a non-smoker I was rather pleased with the ban on smoking in pubs. It made my life a lot nicer when I went out in the evenings. However the news that Tobacco displays set to be banned is just plain stupid.
I’ve never smoked, but that’s not to say I’ve never purchased a pack of cigarettes. And the one thing that I do know is that I can spend five minutes going “A pack of Rothmans”, “The blue and red ones”, “Up a bit”, “No to the right”, “Just a bit higher”, “20s not 10s” and fingers waving over the shop.
If they are going to be under the counter it’s going to be a lot harder.