Monthly Archives: August 2013

Review: Waitrose

Posted on by

Why am I reviewing a supermarket, you might ask?  Well, yesterday was the grand opening of the new Aylesbury store, so I thought I’d pop along and see what it was like.  The supermarket is around 21,000 sq ft so not too big and not too small either.   The building is brand new and has a car park above it, owned by the district council, which is a bit of a pain if you drive to the shops since it means you have to pay £1 per hour (max 2 hours) to park there and then spend at least £10 to get your parking fee back from the store.

There are plenty of checkouts, and some a few self-service tills, and a few “quick pay” ones for those people who want one of their credit cards.  I didn’t get time to try out the cafe, but it looks quite nice, so I might grab a “free coffee on production of your loyalty card” sometimes and give it a go.

There’s all the usual meat, cheese and other counters available.  I thought the counters were a bit small, but I wasn’t really looking very hard as I was in a hurry buying a few items on the way round.

Despite it being a relatively small store compared to (say) the big Tesco store in the town, it did have a small range of non-food items which is nice.  The aisles are quite wide, and the prices don’t seem amazingly worse than any of the other major supermarkets I’ve been to, as long as you stick to the “essentials” range.

So, all in all, only a quick visit to the store, but I think I liked it, and the staff seem friendly and helpful, as you’d expect from John Lewis.  Maybe I’ll do a weekly shop there next time I need to go shopping and see what it’s like properly then.

And just when you thought you’d heard the last of the Horse and Jockey traffic lights saga…

Posted on by

…the Bucks Herald are at it again, and as all regular viewers to this blog know, there’s nothing the BH likes better than whinging about traffic lights.  Their article at http://www.bucksherald.co.uk/news/more-news/updated-council-responds-to-traffic-expert-s-fears-over-new-aylesbury-lights-1-5355185 is frankly typical of their nonsense, which we all had to endure endlessly the last time that Bucks County Council stuck up a set of traffic lights.  This time a new set of lights have appeared on the junction of Tring Road and Oakfield Road (basically paid for and for the benefit of the new dairy) and apparently we’re expected to believe that drivers might get confused about what a green light means!

The Highway Code is quite clear on this one – “GREEN means you may go on if the way is clear. Take special care if you intend to turn left or right and give way to pedestrians who are crossing”.  Therefore, it’s safe to go as long as your way is clear, and if it isn’t, you should wait until it is.  Including turning right.

Of course, as the council stated, the whole reason they did it this way was to allow traffic to turn right off-peak when the road is clear – which outside rush hours is generally not a problem at that junction – as a large proportion of traffic actually does the turn anyway, much like what happens at the Horse and Jockey lights.  You might improve the junction by putting a yellow box junction in, but otherwise I can’t see what’s wrong with it.  If people are confused when traffic lights don’t have hand-holding green arrows for every conceivable direction any more, we really are in trouble.

I’m also not convinced by the opinion of their “expert” either…

Just wait until the next set of lights are finished a mile down the road; we’ll have a repeat of the whinging again in six months’ time no doubt.  Does this really sell papers?

ARIN reaches Phase 3, with only two /8s left

Posted on by

Today the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) reached the next milestone in its IPv4 exhaustion journey.  There are now only two /8s remaining left, and one of those is the “last /8” which both APNIC and RIPE are already down to.  By current estimations (and particularly Geoff Huston’s), we’re probably about a year away from reaching the final /8 at ARIN.  This, of course, depends on whether the current depletion rate is maintained (which is what happened in the RIPE region), or whether there is an APNIC-style “run on the bank” and panic sets in.  Either way, ARIN’s page on the subject is interesting, as it breaks down the number of contiguous blocks available between /8 and /24.  If any of the big ISPs want a really block, they’d better get in quick, since at the time of writing there’s only one /8 left, two /10s, one /11, two /12s, one /13 and three /14s.

Interesting times ahead, and it will be fascinating to see which way it goes.  Especially as ARIN does not appear to have adopted a “final /8” policy as APNIC and RIPE have done, so it really is a dog-eat-dog race to the finish, pretty much.