Thursday, December 11, 2008

British Waterway mooring tenders

I placed a bid on a BW mooring this afternoon to see if I could get myself a mooring. I am in two minds about having a mooring at all, because I just feel if you pay a fortune for a mooring, you should use it.. but then that means your not cruising around the network visiting all those nice little village pubs and meeting lots of fellow boaters :)

So, my plan was to try and get a cheap mooring that I can use for the winter and for the odd month here and there where I want to keep Sirius local to my bricks and mortar home.. (yes, sorry boating friends.. I still live in solid ground most of the time)

There are moorings in Reading near the IDR (ring road bridge) which to be honest, are not the best moorings, obviously noisey from the bridge and also the area is not the best, I've often wondered if the boats there get any trouble... I guess I should really pop along and ask them.

270 people had apparently viewed the tender (probably 10 of those viewings was myself and my friends) and there was apparently no-one on the waiting list for the mooring, and, I was the only one to put in a tender.

BW say that the reserve price is set to ensure they cover their costs for the mooring, now what could those ongoing costs be at this mooring? There are no services provided, it's next to a public footpath which is presumably tender by the local council... so.. we're talking about looking after the rings that Sirius would be tide onto?! Surely these don't need a lot of ongoing maintainence?

So.. I put a bid in for £300 / PA yes, I know, it's about 20% of their asking price of £1500... but come on.. that mooring does not cost £1500 to maintain PA! And another mooring on the same site went for £752 and that was above the reserve price, so, any guesses what I should have bid?

If it was a popular mooring I could understand the price, but, it's really not...

Come on BW.. cut me some slack and let me have a cheap mooring so I can use it for a few months here and there... the rest of the time.. you already have my £1052 / PA license fee!

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Official Google Blog: Google Maps for mobile now with Street View and walking directions

Now this is pretty cool, Google Maps for mobile now has walking directions. The question is when will they buy a site like Canal Plan, who have a lot of photos of the canals and then produce a boating directions guide with boat eye photos :)

Official Google Blog: Google Maps for mobile now with Street View and walking directions

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Working on water :)

Hi All,

I've no idea how many people actually read this blog, maybe it's just my mum.. infact, maybe she doesn't read it?! Anyway, for those of you who have read it, thank you, and do leave some comments so I know your out there :)

As you will have seen from my previous post Sirius was broken into, since then I have tried to spend more time on Sirius, the problem is, as I work in IT I have a constant requirement to be online, so I needed a solution!

I have previously used various GSM and GRPS data cards and to be honest, none of them were really very usable compared to sitting at home connected to a broadband connection. This time around, my house mate Nick offered to lend me his Vodafone 3G data card, wow! What a difference! It was almost as good as being connected to a broadband connection and perfectly acceptable for working on Sirius, finally technology has caught up and floating working could become a reality :)

I was so impressed that the following week I signed up and bought one of the Vodafone 3G data cards. For those of your interested, I bought a Express Card version as they are Quad Band ( i.e. work pretty much in every country including USA ) and they support the full 7.2mb current maximum speed, where as some of the USB modem versions do not support the full speed.

If you are interested in getting one, go onto the Vodafone business site as they are not available in the consumer area. The costs FREE card and £15 / month for 24 months gets you 3GB of data per month. So far I have used about 100MB in 1.5 weeks, so it doesn't look like the 3GB limit will ever be a problem!

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Jerry Cans from Freecycle

A couple of days ago I ran out of Diesel, miles from a filling stop, so I thought I would try and get hold of a couple of Jerry cans ( the big 20 litre fuel containers ). I decided to put a note onto Freecycle to see if someone had one they would like to give away, and low and behold, 24 hours later, I now have three!!

I am going to use them to give Sirius a good drink and then I will probably give one or two of them to a couple of my boatie friends :)

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Boat vandals...

Sirius was unfortunately broken into twice this week, I think by some local kids from the Theale / Reading area. They were apparently spotted a couple of times, the first time was after they smashed a window for the second time, and the second time they were spotted they were again hanging around Sirius, looking like they were about to cause trouble.

2 white boys and 1 black... all on bikes.. unfortunately that is all the description I have, but if you moor around the Theale area along the K&A keep an eye out!

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Now who's going to help me translate my blog into 37 languages !?

I just noticed the following post on the Blogger Buzz Blog. You can now create your blog with the user interface in one of 37 languages! I thought I might post my next few articles in Manderin, Arabic and Jedi ;-)

Blogger Buzz: Three new languages and a whole new direction for Blogger