The Barsley Brief

As I drove to Dover Ferry port at 3am Saturday morning I heard on the radio it was 100 years since the “heavier than air plane” first flight across the Channel by Louis Blériot in his Blériot XI plane.

(Source Wikipedia) 100 years ago he used the Blériot XI, which was a structurally strong but simple and manoeuvrable monoplane of his design, powered by a 3-cylinder Anzani radial engine with 25 horsepower and a 2-bladed fixed-pitch wooden propeller. He took off at dawn, just after 4:30 AM on July 25, 1909. He later reported, in a telegram to the Washington Post, that he accelerated his engine to 1,200 revolutions per minute, almost its top speed, to clear telegraph wires at the edge of the cliff near the runway field. Then he reduced his speed to give the XI an average airspeed of approximately 40 miles per hour (64 kilometers per hour) at an altitude of about 250 feet (76 m). Soon after, inclement weather began to form, with the Channel becoming rougher. Blériot lost sight of any landmarks, and rapidly outpaced the destroyer escort. He stated: “[f]or more than 10 minutes I was alone, isolated, lost in the midst of the immense sea, and I did not see anything on the horizon or a single ship”.[4]

The landing was in turbulent weather, causing problems for Blériot: rain was cooling the engine, putting it in danger of stalling, and the strong wind was blowing him off course. As Blériot reduced his airspeed for the landing, the gusts of wind nearly caused his plane to crash from an altitude of 20 meters (67 feet), when he cut off the engine. The landing severely damaged his landing gear, along with the propeller. However, the rest of the airplane was in good order and the landing was deemed successful.[6]

He flew 22 statute miles (36.6 km) from Les Barraques (near Calais) to Dover.[8] The trip took 37 minutes.

Arriving in France we drove along the roads around Blériot Plage (the renamed Les Barraques) and saw hundreds of people on the cliffs and ridges although the planned recreation flight wasn’t due until around 5pm.  We stopped briefly and saw a flypast of several modern planes, as we left again we suddenly saw the Blériot XI which came towards us and right over the car.  The plane (not the original) had a 100 year old engine in it and you could certainly hear its unique sound.  Also the plane was being sheparded by around 5 helicopters as it’s too slow for any other plane to be able to follow.

Probably because of it’s slow speed I managed to get off some good pictures (One include above).

I haven’t posted much lately so this post is a catch up to mention several things that have caught my attention lately.

Facebook introduces usernames

Facebook have now introduced usernames.  This doesn’t make a huge difference to the site itself but does mean that if you want to link people to your page you now can have an easy permalink such as www.facebook.com/CharlesBarsley.  It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next few months and if the site evolves more.  Get your  username here http://www.facebook.com/username/

TV Licencing

June is going to be an expensive month!  It seems most of my quarterly bills have come through plus my TV licence (which means I have physically lived in my house for a year) and car insurance.

I seriously considered not renewing my TV Licence.  I would not be a license evader I would just not have a TV.  The TV licence only covers live broadcast TV (Source MoneySavingExpert) and not prerecorded TV available on the BBC iPlayer.  I find I very rarely sit down in the lounge and watch TV.  Usually I watch most of my TV on my PC while checking my emails / surfing the net etc.  For example as I write this I am watching last nights “Have I got news for you” on the BBC iPlayer which doesn’t require a TV licence.

The only times I actually watch the TV in my living room are occasionally when I have breakfast / supper, I’ll watch BBC News or something on Dave.

However I will renew my licence for two reasons.

• Reason One – The hassle of trying to convince TV licencing that you don’t have a TV.
• Reason Two – I want a TV in my living room for the Xbox and DVD player which I am sure I use more than the TV channels!

I do like the fact that the BBC are advert free – especially for sports.  But I think it is a little unfair that it doesn’t cover the iPlayer.  Surely it should cover all BBC media outlets or none?

New TV?

On a related note I am soooo tempted by this Samsung TV.  40″ with a stand and 5 year guarantee all for £699.  If it was £599 I would snap it up but £699 is still a great deal for the TV just slightly more than I would want to spend on one.  I may wait and see what happens in the sales.

Competition time

As you may know I run the website www.brawngpnews.co.uk, a Brawn F1 fan site.  I was delighted to be contacted by Vodafone this week to create a competition on the site for it’s readers to win 3 day tickets to the British Grand Prix.  I am giving away a pair of tickets.  Its a fantastic prize and a great year to go with Jenson Button doing so well and the fact it may be / is the last time the race will be held at Silverstone.  Competition closes midday 14th June

I’ve been meaning to write a brief post for a while now on comment spam and a comment I received today pushed me over the edge, but more about that in a minute.

Comments – Anyone with a blog loves comment’s, it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling to know that someone is reading your blog and takes the time to make a comment.  However 99% of all comments are spam!

Spam comments – What do you classify as a spam comment?  You may be surprised to know I get around 100 comments a week on each of my blogs and 99.9% are spam.  They range from the blatant examples of spam with a ton of links in the text and lots of random words, right the way through to people / spam bots who just leave a comment “great blog” and then you see their Website link is to a diet pill site.

Every web master has to have their own policy for dealing with comments, for me a comment has to be more than one sentence and has to add something to the post, not just say great post.  If it fits these two rules I will probably accept it.

Dealing with Spam – I use two wordpress plugins to deal with Spam, one is Akismet which comes with Wordpress as default.  I find this is right about 99% of the time at classifying spam.  But the other 1 % does worry me, I don’t want to miss a comment from a true commenter, so recently I have installed NoSpamNX which I think is a really cunning tool.  If a real human is trying to write a comment, every thing looks exactly the same.  But if a spam bot is trying to leave a comment, it will see in the page code an extra text box.  If the machine fills this in it will automatically classify the comment as spam, this is really clearing my spam folder,

For me spam is just a minor annoyance but I imagine other people spend hours sifting through it!

Manners on the Internet – So now the reason I wrote this post.  There aren’t many Charles Barsley’s in the world but I have found out today there is a relatively famous American with a name somewhat similar to mine.  I received two comments today from an American defence attorney.  I’m not going to name any names as I don’t know if they are actually connected with the famous person.

They left the comment (which I haven’t approved!)

Keep running your mouth about <details removed>. You will step over the line, and I will be there to ensure that you are brought to task, chump.

Firstly this is a defence Attorney leaving this comment, a company, not a 15 year old.  There is no need to resort to threats, just leave a polite comment.

Secondly I have never mentioned this person on my site or anything he is involved in!

Thirdly This comment was left on my Welcome to my blog post.  Just 30 seconds on my site would show they have nothing to worry about!

I then recieved another comment just 2 minutes later

If this is the <details removed>, then the above message applies. If not…never mind…

Come on – obviously you’ve realised I have nothing to do with this person, have some manners and make an apology, don’t just send another veiled threat!!

Conclusion

Rant over!  Sorry, I just really can’t believe that a company would write something like this.  If the celebrity individual is paying them for this I think they should pay more attention at how his money is being wasted!

Listening to Net at Night, Amber and Leo interview Link from the comedy duo Rhett and Link.  So I decided to check out their You Tube page and blog.  Their best videos in my opinion are either songs or commercials and they have worked with some big companies like Taco Bell to produce fun viral ads.  Here are a few of my favourites.

The Fast food Folk song was recorded for Taco Bell, although the employees at the branch they hit didn’t know this.  I can’t believe they managed to take down the full order!

The Facebook song, Very funny!

Pimp my stroller, a hilarious parody, I imagine some TV executives would seriously consider it.

How to sneak on the Grammy Red Carpet!  “Just follow someone recognisable!”  It’s amazing how far they get with no security check and then what the celebrities will do to be seen!

Find Rhett and Link on Youtube Here

Rhett and Link’s official site.

Seen something else good on the net, Leave a comment

On Sunday I signed up to the Lovefilm.com DVD rental service which I believe is the biggest in the UK with over 1 million subscribers.  They have over 65,000 titles you can choose from and also allow you to rent Blu-ray DVD’s and Computer console games.  So why did I sign up.  Well I don’t really go to the cinema that much, call me old fashioned but I remember when a trip to the cinema would cost £3 per ticket and now my local cinema is charging £8.50 per ticket while Video / DVD prices haven’t increased!  Also while watching at home you miss out on the effect of a huge screen and Dolby surround, you don’t have to put up with everyone playing with their mobile phones, kids, and lots of rustling popcorn!!  (rant over)

So why LoveFilm?

I randomly saw a Lovefilm return envelope on a colleague’s desk at work and this spurred me on to investigate the current rental market.  When I started I had no idea what the cost would be or how it works and I was pleasantly surprised.

What does it cost?

The question of cost was at the top of my mind, because you’re signing up to a monthly scheme (though a individual rental is available) rather than just popping to the video shop to rent one DVD I would want it to be worth while, as their wouldn’t always be films that I “have” to see.  If you only want to rent DVD / Blu-ray’s Lovefilm has 6 cost plans, sounds complicated but it’s not.  They are split into Light use plans and unlimited use plans.

The light plans limit you to x number of films per month, 4, 3 or 2 discs, and depending on the option you can have either 2 or 1 DVD’s at any one time.  I have signed up to most basic light plan which is 2 discs a month, 1 disc at anyone time for £3.91 per month.

The Unlimited plans as the name suggests allows you an unlimited number of discs each month, the difference in cost affects how many you have in your home at any one time (1,2 or 3 discs).  The 2 disc unlimited plan is their most popular at £12.72 per month.

How does it work?

You create a list of films that you wish to rent and prioritise them High, Medium or Low.  Then when it’s time to send you a film (when you return the one you have) Lovefilm will pick one from your list to send you.  This continues until you reach your monthly limit (if you are on a limited plan).  It couldn’t be simpler!

Choosing my list

I was surprised how hard it was initially to choose my list.  Lovefilm recommend that you have a minimum of 10 films (or TV shows) on your list at anyone time, this will make turnaround times quicker as it gives a much higher probability of them being in stock.  When choosing my list I wanted to make sure that I really want to watch and struggled to find 10, but then I relaxed slightly and used the features that Lovefilm have to help you choose films, I went through my DVD collection, rating the films in Lovefilm, then Lovefilm can recommend films much more suited to you (I assume based on other users choices).  I found this worked really well and soon had my collection up to 10.

I have managed my collection by keeping most films priority Medium and a few Low.  In a perfect world I would like to say “I want to watch this film next” or give a numeric order to the films I want to watch.  But with a million users I understand that if a new film comes out on DVD they won’t have a million copies of it to cover each of their users.  Quite helpfully on my rental list they indicate if their is a short wait for films.  Of 10 films on my list only 3 are showing “short wait”, surprisingly to me only one of them would I consider a New “Blockbuster film” that everyone would want, the others are quite old films.

My other concern is that if I keep adding films to my list does that mean that I will never receive my Low choices, or will they randomly send me a low even though I have several high’s?  Only time will tell – I think these concerns are more born out of a traditional approach to rental rather than fully accepting the internet age!

Speed

Well I’m impressed so far, I signed up Sunday, Monday they posted the disc (they include a freepost return envelope) and Tuesday it arrived so that’s first class next day delivery.  Talking to others who use the service they are very quick to turn around discs.

Other Features

Included in the price is Blu Ray Discs, and aswell as films they offer TV shows on DVD – Where (particularly TV series) go over several discs you can select to add all discs and they will send them in order (one disc at a time), or you can select a specific disc if you just want to watch one disc.

Games – for a small extra fee (they are different billing plans) you can have the ability to rent console games too.

Reviews -I have touched that you can rate films, which helps Lovefilm recommend films to you, you can also review films, and on the film’s page read reader and press reviews and see the trailer.

Multiple lists – I haven’t looked into this in detail but you can have multiple lists so you and your partner could set up a list each and if you are on a 2 disc (at any one time) you could allocate a disc to each list so you will both always have something you want to watch!

My first film

The first film I have recevied is “Michael Clayton” described as

Arthur Edens (Wilkinson), a lawyer defending an agro-chemical corporation against a class-action suit, is overwhelmed by guilt and cracks up. Michael Clayton (Clooney), his law firm’s “fixer”, is sent to sort Arthur out, but the corporation deploy even dirtier tricks to solve the problem.

It looks like a good film from the trailer but I’ll soon find out!  I’m thinking Friday night is Film night.

Sign Up Now

I honestly think the concept of DVD rental by monthly tariff rather than the traditional per disc DVD store concept is excellent.  I can’t understand how Lovefilm make money since my tariff works out at £2 per disc, once you factor postage, handling, the disc!  Though my sceptical side says they make their money from people who never return discs and therefore keep paying for nothing new.

If you sign up using my refer a friend link you can get your first 30 days free rather than the standard 14 days.  Click here to find out more and join Lovefilm

Leave a comment

I realise this post is very pro Lovefilm, and I’ll be honest that I am new to the concept of Online DVD rental so many of the above statements is applicable to other DVD rental providers but I think the price and service of Lovefilm makes them a good choice, agree or disagree?  Leave a comment with your view.

Also I’d love to know what DVD’s you recommend I queue up!  Let me know