A post off the usual theme, but as I found myself spending a little over £100 last year to have the sewers under the house unblocked that turned out to be wipes and other lovely things several houses along this is one of those changes in law that everyone should know about.

Not sure why things like this that are good for you and me don’t get plastered all over the media but here you go.

Since the 1st of October 2011 all water companies are now required by law to clear shared blocked sewers free of charge, even on your own property,  the blockage on your property must be part of a shared sewage pipe I suspect.

I am in London so Thames water is my supplier info about this change in the law specific to them is here.

This is good news as it means the ownership and maintenance for private sewers and lateral drains were transferred to your water supplier, bringing peace of mind to you and clarity regarding ownership together with not having to pay for a plumber to do 10 minutes work for at least £100.

FWIW: Just got this email from Barclays Cycle Hire Head of Operations….

During the recent Meet the Managers online consultation, it became clear many customers were not aware they can get an extra 15 minutes of usage if a docking station is full when you come to return your cycle. So I am sending this mail to ensure everyone knows how to take advantage of this.

To do this, touch the ’No docking point free’ icon on the terminal screen and you will automatically be granted the extra time. The status of empty docking points at the nearest six terminals is always available on the terminal screen and maps are displayed showing their locations.

Please note that if you hired more than one cycle this request needs to be made for each cycle on hire.

So if you can actually get a bike when you need one, and find you can’t get rid of it at your destination, doing the above will give you 15 mins extra to race around looking for somewhere slightly further… and further and further to re-dock it…

I tried the hire bikes, found it to be a massive let-down. The gear ratio is too low so you have no hope in hell of going fast on one, waterloo is out of them in the morning, if you get a key for yourself and your wife on the same account, then everytime you borrow a bike yourself you get charged for two bikes (utterly retarded logic).

If you are a tourist and want a way to get around London, they are probably great, for commuting purposes.. no chance.

For too long now I have been thinking to set up a regular automated weekly shop from some online Tesco / mysupermarket or other shopping behemoth but can never get around to sitting there with some clunky shopping cart trying to work out which items are most frequently bought by us in the shop and would need pretty much every week on the week that would be substantial enough to justify the delivery cost.

I get around by bicycle and car in London so if this idea below were to come here or when it comes here! it wouldn’t be much use to me but the concept is fantastic for people that spend time on their commute just standing around waiting for a train or a bus while they need to also find time to get their shopping.

The idea is to use your smartphone to scan QR codes from TV advertising billboard shopfronts which then build the shopping cart on your phone application that you order to be delivered to your home.

This is a little test to see if my iPad will successfully post to my blog!.

Today creatively started with me building a solution in visual studio 2010 that had projects for…

• Downloading an affiliate window product feed
• Unzipping the file to the local file system
• Scraping content from the merchant site using the deeplinks in the feed to have a more comprehensive end result to this whole concept
• Using the parsed content via an agile xpath project reference to build a SQL compact DB
• Building an MVC3 c# site from the database and a theme based on an existing competitor that I know is doing well
• Automating all the above on a daily schedule…. I can see that my more appropriate, memorable domain name would do better, and the site has several obvious improvements that could be made.. Even things as basic as sorting the drop down list items..

However the usual daily drag got in the way and my after was wasted doing…

• Emails through a messy ticketing system clarifying what someone wanted until I got him to admit he didn’t even want the report in the first place…
• Working out why an access 97 DB is misbehaving… Yes.. Access 97 by a wannabe developer
• Being asked to fix something I fixed in the morning..but didn’t get told it was fixed and they had infact started talking about someone completely separate which they did not test when asked to do so a month ago….

There’s a big gap between what I want to do with my days and what I end up having to do…. Very frustrating…. If you read this.. And are based in London doing the kinds of things that are mentioned in the first half… PLEASE hire me!!!!!!!

P.s. iPad2 seems surprisingly fast to type on!

What challenges will tomorrow bring….

Having my brain hammered by the latest asp.net mvc3, knockout.js, c#5 asynchronous web apps… and azure cloud deployment… was quite a fast paced day.