Dear blog I am so sorry I have neglected to post anything. I have been rather busy moving home but now that thing are settling down. I promise to post more frequently. Rory

Well we all know it makes sense and a lot of you have said how it would be such a good idea to watch on demand TV on your Xbox 360. If you can see it on your PC why can't you see it easily on your games console which is actually connected to your TV? Well Microsoft and Sky have finally seen sense and quite soon Microsoft will be offering Sky content on the Xbox 360. If you look at how Sky delivers its current offering called Sky Anytime PC, they are using Microsoft's Silverlight technology while everyone else (BBC, Channel 4 and ITV) are using Adobe Flash.  As you can see Sky and Microsoft are quite compatible on the technology front.

While Sky Anytime PC is a good service they do not offer all of their channels live through the service. The majority of the content provided is a catch up service for missed TV episodes (not bad) and for Box Office Movies. It doesn't (and I could be wrong here) look as if Sky will be offering their flagship channel Sky One live through this service, it would be great if they did.  In the ideal world I would like to see everything that is offered via my satellite dish also offered over an IPTV service including on demand content.

It used to be possible to view Sky Player content on your Xbox 360 but only using a Windows XP or Windows Vista machine as a proxy hopefully this should change all of that.

No doubt there are probably hundreds of articles on the Internet regarding this very subject. However I thought I would look at it from the start, trying to understand how some of this came about.

Do a few searches in Google yielded some interesting results especially on Google Timeline.

Go back to February 1996 and you find an interesting article about John Majors government wanting to move MP's into a new pay league. At the time there was a feeling that MP's were poorly paid  having a large sum of their salary docked.

In June1996 another article stating that MP's are set for a 30% pay increase. Even back then the idea was sneered at by members of the public and the work that MP's did was not considered as important some comments such as "part-timers" and "fly-by-night lobbyists" seemed to depict the mood at the time. The idea behind the pay rise was to sway MP's away from "moonlighting"  

In July 1996 when Tony Blair's Shadow cabinet was split over the issue. They feared that an increase in MP's salaries would anger unions and voters. An interesting quote from the article:

Chris Mullin MP said: "You can live quite comfortably on pounds 33,000 a year [the existing salary for MPs]. Having one rule for MPs and another for everybody else is going to be very damaging." - source The Independent July 1996

March 2001 An independent review board of cabinet members salaries stated that "Tony Blair must allow cabinet members to accept their salaries in full because Labour's freeze on ministerial pay is distorting the parliamentary pay system."

According to the article cabinet ministers were furious by the pay freeze allowing them to only take home £96,887 instead of the £114, 543 they were entitled to a year. It seemed as though Tony Blair at the time was trying to set an example in his own cabinet.

October 2001 An interesting article in the Guardian stating how Councillors' pay has rocketed by 60% over the past 5 months. Top local politicians salaries being almost on par with most MP's

December 2002 Moonlighting MPs double their Common's salaries with lucrative directorships of companies.  

At the time MP's were accusing striking firemen for having second jobs.

December 2004  Details of MP's expenses and allowances were published for the first time. The basic MP's salary at the time was £57,000 their total expenses claims totalled £80m in addition to perks and pensions. The public was invited to comment on this short article some of the comments were quite interesting. Some people defended it saying that we had to pay for good MP's while others could not understand why there was one law for MP's and one for the general public. Several commented on how MP's thought their jobs were more important than doctors and nurses who were on much lower pay. 

There was also a feeling back then according to the comments in the article that MP's were out of touch. Some people were already objecting to the second home and employment of family members as secretaries or general staff members to MPs. Some people also felt we had too many MP's

July 2008 MPs vote to keep pay rise below inflation despite the anger of back benchers who insist they should be paid more. MP's at the time were on £61, 820 a year.

Interesting quotes from the article:

Harriet Harman, leader of the Commons, told MPs at the start of debate: "We should show the same discipline in our pay increases as we expect from the public sector." - source Guardian July 2008

David Maclean, the Conservative former minister, said that, on their current salary of £61,820, MPs were paid the same as a "second-tier officer in a district council".

He said that he felt MPs should be paid about £75,000 a year. And he said that he was willing to speak out "so that I can collect most of the hate mail". -source Guardian July 2008

Sir Patrick Cormack, the Conservative MP for South Staffordshire, said he was "appalled" by the attitude of the government and the Conservative frontbench. He said there were people in the Commons catering department who earned more than MPs.- source Guardian July 2008

April 2009 David Cameron suggests increasing MPs salaries in exchange for cuts in allowances

What I find interesting is how this all begun. It appears it started with some pretty good intentions, pay MP's more so they are less inclined to "moonlight". Pay a good wage to MP's and you should get some pretty good people in government if you apply the same principle used in private business..right? It seemed early on that party leaders were already worried about the impact MPs salaries would have on voters. It would appear to keep MPs happy, they were given expenses to make up for the shortfall and MPs treated these allowances as part of their salaries. Almost as bankers treated bonuses as part of their salaries we discovered when looking at the credit crunch, some were pretty angry when they did not get their "guaranteed bonus". To many it felt MP's were hugely out of touch with voters, they are basically public servants right? And to many they act as though they are members of the aristocracy.

I suppose if you have people in government who suffer the same day to day hardships you do and the same burdens of tax, you are more inclined to trust them and believe they will do their best to improve things for the ordinary person. When elected officials loose touch with the voting public it can lead to some pretty severe consequences, I am sure party leaders are only to aware of. People who are disillusioned can sometimes steer to far right parties and before long you can end up with a revolution as history has taught us only too well. Let us hope lessons have been learnt and parliament takes a more humble approach when it comes to the public purse strings.  

My poor cat Willow is suffering from a limp in her front left leg. The vet gave us some anti-inflamatories for it but its not gotten better. The limp doesn't happen all the time and she doesn't act as though she is in pain. Although occasionally she goes and sits in a dark corner by herself. It looks like we may need to have her X-rayed has anyone else had the same problem with their cat?

My wife started to have problems seeing various web pages correctly on the Internet. For some reason these websites were not displaying images at all on any browser running on Vista. What made things even more confusing was they worked just fine on our XP and Mac machines.

The first one was PayPal where all of the images on the site didn't load. Because the site looked odd and she thought there may be a scam taking place she didn't want to log into the site. The second was not being able to see the images on the property website www.rightmove.co.uk.

The Problem

Being a tech savvy person I did all kinds of investigations and worked out that all of the sites she had problems with were making use of the Panther Content Delivery Network or PantherCDN for short (you can find out more here http://www.pantherexpress.net/).  Because these sites have so much traffic they make use of the services of Panther which specialises in distributing this content so you don't get the full load on your servers and the user gets a speedy service. However the one problem with the Panther network as I discovered appears to be an issue with IPv6 and I am not entirely sure why this is a problem. In Vista by default your machine may be setup with Teredo Tunnelling, this basically enables you to use IPv6 over IPv4 . For those not in the know, IPv6 is a protocol brought in to eventually replace IPv4. An IP address is used to identify yourself on the Internet, at the moment the version being used (since the Internet started) is running out of 'numbers' and hence the need for IPv6.

The Solution

So to cut a long story short I found I was able to view these sites again by disabling IPv6. You can do this by

1. Going into Control Panel
2. Select Network Connections
3. Here you should see your network connection in most cases many people use a wireless network from home. Double click on your connection and in the box that appears select properties.
4. You should see a list of connections properties find one called "Internet Protocol Version 6" and and deselect it.
   
    
   

Once you have done this you can now click OK. Wait about 5 seconds and then try to view those web pages again. I would be interested to hear from anyone else having this problem. I wasn't able to find much help about this issue on the Internet when searching on Google, most people appeared to have the problem but were not able to solve it.

The Guardian website has exclusive footage of Ian Tomlinson who died at the G20 protest being attacked from behind by a police officer.

To see the footage take a look here http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/07/video-g20-police-assault

Today my wife and I were in the pet store getting some fur ball treats for one of the little rascals, when the words "cat harness" caught me eye. It suddenly got me thinking, a contraption I could use to walk my cat as though it was a dog! How cool is that, the cats will love this I can actually take them out walking maybe the cat could even come running with me (a bit far fetched I know). Anyway I paid the £6.50 and when I got home I picked up my grey moggy Willow and placed the cat harness onto her.

As you can see from the picture Willow is less than thrilled with the idea. I suddenly realised what a stupid idea it was trying to get a cat to do . well anything! She made it quite clear that cats do not "do leads" she did this by sitting down in protest and later trying to bite the lead.

As you can see one of our other cats Lucy thinks its all very amusing.

Well what a waste of £6.50!

My friend Owen Twittered this interesting article on the BBC web site about how social networks are the "new e-mail". This is a subject I have found pretty interesting, partly because every day of my life since the Internet started to get popular I have been spammed excessively.

I have 3 personal email accounts which I am not very good at checking. The only email account that gets my full attention is my work email account. My work emails get sorted into what needs my immediate attention and items that are mildly interesting that I will file away and most probably forget about. There may be a few social contacts which I will probably set myself a reminder to deal with later in Outlook. To me email has become a real chore for every email account you have you need to sort the noise from your real contacts. It has become such an issue that sometimes I give up all together on my personal email account and sit down maybe once a week separating adverts, circulars and spam from genuine friends emailing me. In the old days email was not like this, when you received an email it was an exciting occasion, someone genuinely wanted to contact you. Email used to feel the same as receiving a hand written letter in the post from a friend, but now I find 1 out of 10 emails is usually spam.

Social networks help you separate spam from friend pretty easily. You usually have the option to not receive messages from people who are not in your social network and hence making your social messages and alerts easier to take in. The only problem I have found with networks such as Facebook is the excessive amounts of forwards and invitations to join certain groups or install certain applications. Without thinking about it I installed several Facebook applications just because friends forwarded them to me. I even ended up on a dating Facebook application, which I had no intention of joining and had great difficulty removing myself from. After awhile I started to find social networks just as tiring it was yet another "thing" that needed attention and soon my Facebook account started to become just as tedious to maintain. I found that the best way for people to get my attention or to get me to respond to a social events was via MSN Messenger, phone or actually meeting me and asking if I was attending something. Messenger is spontaneous and gets results. Then someone introduced me to Twitter and from there things started to change.

Twitter didn't demand the high maintenance of a social network and the noise created by spam in an email account was easily avoidable. Twitter kept things simple, you post a message in Twitter it can be anything you want and people can respond. If people start spamming you, you remove them from the list of people you follow on Twitter. Twitter is like a cross between blogging, MSN messenger and social interaction for me. Its also a great platform to put a question to the world and get a response from an expert in almost seconds. This got me thinking, if you keep things simple and they don't demand a great amount of your time, people will stay with it. It was almost as though traditional email should have had this built in. You can only send me emails once I accept your email account is allowed to send me messages which has been attempted before but requires you pay a subscription fee. I don't think social networks are the new email 2.0 I just think they are yet another way of communicating with each other. Each of these communication methods has its place.