Let me start by saying that this is what I have been told by someone who has been on the receiving end of unwanted attentions of the alleged murderer and the man hasn’t been convicted yet.

At the beginning of this month a woman was killed a few miles from where I live.  She was 27 years old, had two daughters and was strangled to death.  A 37 year old man who lived on the same street has been charged with her murder.

I am told that the man was a stalker – he took photos of quite a few women without their permission and very publicly and his home was found to be full of pictures of these women, including his murdered neighbour.  I believe he had been reported to the police for stalking but I don’t know what happened about it – presumably nothing as he’s only in custody now for alleged murder.

Just before the murder he was talking to one of the women he had been stalking.  Looks like she had a lucky escape.

The estimated bill of hosting the 2012 Olympics in London has been put at £9bn – a huge increase over the original estimate of £2.35bn.

The estimated cost was revised recently when the European Federation told Gordon Brown he had to charge VAT on the construction costs when the Treasury had initially agreed to waive the VAT bill.  The amount of VAT each member state collects affects the annual contribution to the EU so we can expect our bill to increase yet again.

However, the revised £3.4bn bill looks like it was grossly underestimated as the cost of commodities, regeneration, security and contingency funds have all risen bringing the total to estimated cost of hosting the Olympics to around £9bn.  The bill is likely to be split between the lottery and the taxpayer with the amount of money available from the lottery for charity reducing as a knock-on effect.

Wimbledon is to offer the same prize money to women and it does to men.  Currently it is the only open event that doesn’t pay the male and female winners the same prize.

It’s good that women tennis players will get the same prize but surely they must also play the same number of sets to earn their prize?  Female players don’t play the same number of sets as male players yet last year the female prize was 95% of the male prize.

Took Mrs Sane to the cinema on Wednesday night (Music & Lyrics is a really funny film and Drew Barrymore looks great) and the two eldest kids on Thursday morning (Charlottes Web is also a good film, brought back memories!).

We paid £7.50 for the posh seats – enough leg room so that your knees aren’t in your ears and the back is high enough for someone of average height not to get neck ache (I’m 6’1″ tall though so not high enough for me).  I think £7.50 is a bit expensive for a film but it’s nice to get out of the house and it’s not the same watching films on the telly.

So what did I get for my money?  Good films?  Yep.  Clean cinema?  Yep.  Comfy seats?  Yep.  Fifty minutes of adverts, trailers and FACT warnings?  Yep.

I kid you not – 50 minutes over the two sittings.  A FACT advert that aims to dissuade viewers from buying copied DVD’s by showing you how bad they are – small picture, member of the audience walking past the screen, fuzzy, grainy, poor sound, etc.  Personally, I’ve never seen a copied DVD that fits that description and I can’t see FACT convincing anyone with a dodgy advert at the cinema!  Anyway, loads of trailers and adverts for all sorts of people with glowing references from advertisers.  But I don’t want to watch adverts, I’ve paid to watch a film.  I don’t mind the trailers so much but I do grudge paying to watch adverts.  If I wanted to watch adverts I’d watch a film on ITV.

A coroners inquest has ruled that a motorcyclist killed on a Telford road a year ago was killed because the driver of a lorry drove down the wrong side of the road whilst following duff instructions on a GPS sat-nav system.

In his report, the coroner has called for improved signage to stop it happening again.  Telford & Wrekin Council are going to stop it happening again by … reducing the speed limit!

Telford was built for motorists, public transport is abysmal but the council still insists on pursuing a vendetta against car drivers.

The BNP were only narrowly pipped at the post by Labour at the Nuneaton & Bedworth by-election yesterday.

Labour managed to retain the seat by the skin of their teeth with the Tories getting a dismal number of votes – not much over 50% of what the BNP got.  The Illiberal Dums got about half of what the Tories got, the EDP got 75 votes, a local NHS candidate got 46 and last an unfortunately least, UKIP got 8 votes.

I’m told that there wasn’t much support by local UKIPers for their candidate and that the BNP have a lot of followers there, fought the election hard and even produce a regular magazine in the area.  Not sure what the reasoning is behind the Tories poor result but well done to the EDP – ever the under dogs but rarely at the bottom of the results table of late.

Normally I like snow although the cold does play havoc with my arthritis.  Generally though I like to see a couple of inches of the white stuff on the floor (stop sniggering at the back, I’m still talking about snow).

However, today is taking the piss.  We’ve had a couple of inches of snow but the council didn’t grit or plough the roads.  The result?  Mayhem.  It was taking people an hour to get out of the commercial park I work on.  It’s about 300 yards.  Getting off the estate wasn’t the problem (apart from the people driving sports cars and real-wheel-drive BMW’s but they deserve it for being poncy) but once you got off the estate the whole town was at a standstill.  The police were directing traffic at one point so the estate wasn’t blocked in.

Anyway, I was at work at 8am today and I left at 6pm.  There was no point sitting in traffic for an hour or more – I didn’t have enough petrol to anyway!  It took 45 minutes to drive home, 25 of which was getting off the damn car park and onto the road.  We saw one snow plough smoothing the snow off the ice underneath – it wasn’t even gritting – and that was it on a 45 minute journey.

I’ve been with 1&1 for a while now and until recently they’ve been great, if a little expensive.

For weeks now email has been up and down like Paris Hilton’s knickers.  I can retrieve some of my emails at the moment but Outlook can’t delete them off the mail server so they keep downloading over and over again.  I can get into webmail at the moment but I can’t delete emails from webmail – 500 server error.

I’ve had enough, I’m ditching them and changing to Servtec who I have West Midlands NO! with.

CodeIt.Right (Beta) – no need to correct your .NET code manually anymore?

First public Beta of the new code quality and refactoring tool. Helps to ID code and performance problems, fix them automatically, keep your naming consistent and will guide you through most common coding patterns and best practices. The site also provides complementary Coding Guidelines ebook for download.

read more | digg story

Traitor Blair has just bought a fifth property bringing his total mortgage liability up to an estimated £5m or 25 times his salary.

How does our glorious leader propose to pay £20k a month in mortgage payments when he finally does the decent thing and resigns later this year or even if he ends up doing porridge for (allegedly) taking bribes for peerages?

The latest property in the Bliar empire is a mews house behind their latest home in Connaught Square which the taxpayer is likely to end up paying to renovate in the name of “security”.

Sitting at my desk this morning and my colleague says “Tony Bliar’s coming to Telford today at 1.30”.

Too much of an opportunity to miss so I phoned around some CEP contacts.  Unfortunately, only one person I could get hold of that was able to turn up but luckily he had a 30ft “English Parliament Now” banner.

About 20 PCS union people were there with their placards and there was me and Derek with the huge banner that we could barely hold up.

A reporter from the Shropshire Star turned up (we missed the photographer unfortunately) and sidled over.  “I know you” I said, “we’ve spoken on the phone”.  The result is that he ignored the PCS people and spent an hour talking to us instead.

Couldn’t convince the reporter to join the CEP but we Princess Tony certainly couldn’t have missed the banner!