I've been trying this out and, thanks to them giving me two weeks free rather than one month, crept over into the paying for it time.

Now, I started off on an 'unlimited' plan, in this case giving me one DVD 'out' at any one time, but with no limits on how many I have in a month. I switched to a cheaper 'four per month' plan on the 29th Feb because, in practice, that's how many I got: they'd send one, it arrived two days later, I watched it and sent it back same day (the joys of not having a day job), they'd acknowledge receipt a day or two later, say the next one would be sent "immediately" and then send it out the next day, typically after the usual last post time. Repeat. Throw in weekends, and you can work it out for yourself: one a week, basically.

But now I'm on a limited plan, for the first time ever the next one has been dispatched the same day as they got the previous one, and in the afternoon, not evening too. It may well arrive tomorrow.

I know I'm cynical, but doesn't that strike anyone else as a bit of a coincidence?

The announcements and posters at DLR stations today said something along the lines of "services will be suspended between Bank/Tower Gateway and Poplar/Canary Wharf stations on Saturday & Sunday and between Stratford and Canary Wharf stations on Sunday".

Answer…

As regular readers will (both) know, I've been recommending the Sansa e280 as a great alternative to the iPod nano et al.

L recently lost hers, so we got another one, and Read more

Well, the appeal was posted, via what the Royal Mail now call 'Recorded Signed For™' in the first week of February. It still has not, according to their website's Track and Trace page, been delivered.

This is odd, because they're supposed to return such mail after a week of attempting delivery.

So a complaint has been made to London Travelwatch, following the discovery via a set of their minutes that the particular appeals service is actually based in Portsmouth!

An FOI request to the Department for Transport confirmed that Southeastern never bothered to apply to change their scheme when altering (i.e. reducing in the vast majority of cases) the opening hours of ticket offices and also taking away all Permit to Travel machines from numerous stations.

I reckon they should refund the money to everyone given a penalty fare from affected stations throughout most of 2007…

A look at the FOI requests published on the DfT site also shows someone thinks First Capital Connect have been naughty with their scheme.

Might be NSFW (Latin name for body part mentioned)

When the prosecution in the case I've been asked to be an expert witness declined at a very late stage to accept a whole host of things, including my status as someone who's an expert on male sex work, the person concerned suggested writing to a group of people in the field.

As ever, not everyone likes everyone else in this area, and even the main umbrella group has organisations with fundamentally different approaches and ethoses… so it's been quite amazing to see the comments come in and the various 'sets' be completed (like every significant organisation doing work with male sex workers in London and Manchester).

I was also hugely amused to have a chance to see some communication between the defence team – they were considering a number of people, in particular including someone with a PhD in the field who I have immense respect for. They collected statements from all of us, and the result was "I have to say that I far prefer the witness statement of Ian…"

.. was getting issued with a Penalty Fare for the first time ever.

It is quite amazing to see the difference in how passengers are expected to follow rules, even when almost impossible to do so, but the train operating company thinks it can ignore any bits it finds inconvenient.

So, for example, the regulations covering such schemes insist they make sure that the signage at the station is "noticeable, easy to read and easy to distinguish from other notices and from the general surroundings". Was it? No – the sign was inside a locked room, behind a door with no window. (Shades of Douglas Adams!)

They're supposed to reapply when changing things such as the availability of Permit to Travel machines (when you can't buy the ticket you want, you should be able to buy a 'permit' to prove where you started), but I'll bet money that they did not do so when removing the machine at the station concerned last year.

They're also supposed to make available on request the scheme documents, which go into this sort of level of detail, but only supply a leaflet which could be summarised as 'if we say so, you have to pay up'.

Oh well, they've picked on the wrong person…

Some time ago, slightlyfoxed made a typically delightful post about contemplating a first edition copy of Dracula and thinking that it was now impossible to read it in the same way as the original owner: even children now know who Dracula is and there's no longer any 'he's a vampire!?!' surprise.

This has stuck with me, particularly when reading The Man Who Saved Britain, which is an attempt to look at the Bond novels and films in the context of when they came out. Read more

By coincidence, I was rereading one of the Flashman novels last night when the news of George MacDonald Fraser's death (I said 'his death' first time!) came on the Radio 4 news. It's not entirely unexpected, but still deeply disappointing – there are still large chunks of the 19th Century missing from the series.

Once the idea of following the career of the expelled bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays was conceived, what made them work so well is that most of the books was true, genuine history no matter how incredible it sounds now. GMF would move a quote around here or there (a quote from one general was made in a different battle, for example), make a judgement about which account of a particular episode was probably most accurate (like who was to blame for the Charge of the Light Brigade), and stick Flashman in it (in more than one sense!)

If you haven't read them, you really should.