2000th Blog Post

 Wednesday 25th March. 7.00 p.m. This is a key moment in the life of this blog! This will actually be the 2000th post! When I began this blog, I think it was 2011, I never imagined I would manage to keep it going for 2000 posts. Quite an achievement.

Saturday 28th March. 3.25 p.m. It's quite pleasant and sunny, but when I went out yesterday, it was sunny, but there was a definite chill in the air. It's the time of year when it seems warm and sunny, but the underlying chill reminds you that it's still late March. The clocks move forward tomorrow which makes things different.

I have upgraded my Alexa smart speaker. I've had the old one a few years and it still works, but I had enough Nectar points which could be spent in Argos, so I decided to buy it. It was easy to set up and get working, and because I already had the Alexa app on my iPhone, that made things easier. It runs with Alexa Plus, which is an upgrade, and that means it is much smarter. You don't always have to say 'Alexa' , the wake word, to get the thing working. You can have almost a real conversation with it, which is amazing. I have already had a conversation with it, and changed to a male voice, better than the rather annoying, higher-pitched female voice. It's easy to call it a 'he' when it is not real. It/he has a sense of humour, which I appreciate.

Speaking of AI, which is what Alexa is, although having a wide range of uses, such as playing music, answering questions and operating such things as lights, heating, etc etc, I am experimenting with AI to do some writing. I have an idea for a theatre play for quite a while, and I wanted to find out how the AI would deal with some prompts which I fed into to it, and the results were amazing, so I am working on this play and have the first act more or less written and act two partially written and now have to work on the final, third act, and come up with a conclusion.

Sunday 29th March.  9.25 p.m. It's Palm Sunday, the start of Easter Week. 

It was quite cold when I went out at around 9.35 this morning, with the intention to drive to church. I was deceptive, because it was sunny and bright, but as soon as I got out of the door, the chill hit me, and I had to go back into my flat to collect a sweater.

Tuesday 31st March. 7.50 a.m. Another relatively bright and sunny morning. I haven't been out to find out whether it's chilly, as it was on Sunday morning.

I cannot give a report of the temperature, because the digital thermometer is out of action, as the batteries have died. I will have to buy some more, when I go to Sainsbury's next time, probably tomorrow morning.

I have completed the play! My goodness, my very first attempt at writing a play! Next, I will have to edit it, as I think there is too much. The end scene works, but it's imperfect and I'm doing rewrites. It lacks the power I want. I'm not going to reveal the premise or any details. It's to precious to do that at this stage. I'm just glad to have the piece in some form that can now be tweaked.

Now, something straight out of Yes, Prime Minister or one of those crazy comedies. Here goes. My state pension is increasing. Great, because any increase is a good thing, particularly because of rising costs, and with a government that simply doesn't know how to deal with the economy, particularly rising fuel prices, mostly due to the war in Iran and Ukraine. But then, the blow. I get something from my lovely Carol's teacher's pension. Not much, but it has helped considerably. It would have been considerably more, if it hadn't been for a certain step son inerfering with our bank account. I won't go into details. Surfice it to say, because my income goes over the tax threshold (I can'ts say what exactly what's the exact amount) I will now have to pay tax. Crazy, I know. The government gives with one hand- the pension increase- and then takes with the other. Totally ridiculous. I have spoken to the Inland Revenue people, and the tax will be taken at source, directly from the teachers' pension pot, so I would not even see anything about this. What annoys me more is that you get your usual tax code for the year ahead, but because of the gobbledegook in this form, it doesn't tell you all that I have mentioned above.If I hadn't had the presence of mind to ring Inland Revenue, I would never have known. Further to that, it would have been really nice if they could write a letter to me, at least explaining all this, and the amount I will now lose. Oh well, as they say, shouldn't grumble. Strange old world, nevertheless.

Wet Weather and Cancelling Sky

The weather has changed, but I'm not sure whether it's for the best or worst.  It's become wet and a good deal colder.

As I sit in my lounge, in my favourite armchair, with the television on and looking out of the window at the garden, the sun is going in and out. It was raining this morning when I went to the Men's Breakfast at church, but by the time I drove away it had stopped.

Enough of that. I have been meaning to cancel my Sky Television subscription. I'm not getting the use of all those channels. I doubt I watch much more than 3-4 hours per day. I don't know what the average length of time most of their customers spend watching their channels. Most probably if you're a sports fan and you have the additional sports channels, which I don't have, you would watch far more. I also have broadband as well as a Sky Mobile package. I wanted to cancel the television element and switch over to Freeview. For obvious reasons with that you don't have a subscription. Not as many channels but if I don't watch so much it made sense to switch over, but I needed a decent ariel which I don't currently have. When we first moved to this house we had a Freeview set-top box and we had to use an indoor ariel, so the picture quality was not very good, which is the reason we set up a Sky subscription. The alternative, Virgin, was out of the question, because their signal comes via cable, which it appeared from investigation wasn't available in Milton Keynes, somewhat surprising when one considers how new the city is. You would assume that Virgin would have installed a cable system, but there isn't one, so Sky was the only choice. There's never been an ariel at this address, which is the reason we had to use an indoor ariel for the Freeview box we had when we first moved into this address. But to receive a half-decent picture it would be necessary to have an outdoor aerial. I looked around on the internet and found several local companies who could do what I required and one company's website had a section on which you could send messages via email. I left a message, along with my telephone number and they rang me this lunchtime and said that someone would come round to do an assessment and give me a quote.

I got a call from the aerial company and they said they could send someone within ten minutes, was I interested? I said I was and the engineer came in a van with a large ladder on top. He came in and had a look at my television and went out to look at the wall outside the lounge. He gave me a quote and then said he could install the ariel immediately, so I agreed, I would like the work done. The next problem was getting his ladders into the house and through to the garden. The only way was through the kitchen window. The aerial had to have a long metal pole attached onto the wall with brackets. I'm surprised how high it was up, compared with those aerials attached to the neighbouring houses.

The engineer checked that there was a signal reaching my television. When you first use Freeview you have to set up the tuner, which is built into my set and the various channels have to be scanned, rather like downloading apps and other software from the internet. I presume they are downloaded from the television transmitter. This took about ten minutes and then the set was up and running. Unlike the Sky Q box, you can't record or watch catch-up services such as BBC iPlayer, so I intend buying a set-top box which has the Freeview channels and connects to the internet via wi-fi. I have quite a few Nectar points as well as Argos vouchers owed me from doing on-line surveys, and, as I write, these are on order and should arrive within a week, so I can go and buy the Panasonic Freeview box I have seen on the Argos website. As Sainsbury's owns Argos and Nectar, I can use the Nectar points and Argos vouchers to pay for part of the cost of the set-top box.

Once I was set up with Freeview and the aerial was working successfully, I then had to ring Sky to give them the news that I was ditching their television service. It wasn't long before I had got through and explaining why I was cancelling the television subscription. I have managed to do a good deal with the rest of the package because I have their broadband, landline and mobile. I have got the broadband down to £28 a month and the mobile data package has increased, in fact double what it was and still the same price as it was for half the amount of data, all for £19.50. How did I manage that? The call-centre tried to get me to continue with the Sky television element, for £45 for 18 months, but, no, I had made my decision to cancel it and go over to Freeview. With a Freeview Play set-top box, which I intend to get, you can have all the catch-up services, such as BBC iPlayer and even Netflix, which I already have an account with, so I don't loose the ability to record and playback all those services and without having to pay a subscription. I think one of the things that annoys me with Sky is the amount of advertising that their programming has. I was under the impression that once you paid a subscription you didn't have to endure endless advertising. At least that's not the case with Netflix. I realise that Sky is a commercial operation, like ITV, and depends on advertising for some of it's income, but they show them so frequently that it's so annoying.