rich951

I think a little later than that - we noticed at about 8pm. She could have gone a little before that, but probably not enough to get to a vet in Rotherham by 6

Our little dog Billie managed to get out of the back garden last night (Ball Road/Taplin Road area), and hasn't returned. We've called the pound, vets etc with no luck - sod's law, she is waiting for a new name-tag on her collar after the old collar came off, but she does have a bright yellow plastic tag saying "please scan me". So if she is taken to a vet they will be able to call us. She is part chihuahua so fairly small, but also has plenty of some other dog in her. She is mostly black, with some light patches on her tummy, neck and feet. She is very loving, but also very excitable, so might not come to you. We're hoping someone took her in and hasn't managed to get to the vet yet, but our four year old girl is desperately upset, so if you think you've seen her please let us know - ideally phone Rachel on 07725 972075, but I'll keep an eye out for PMs too. EDIT: photo uploaded to: http://www.birthpeacefully.co.uk/billie.jpg

Sounds like you're sorted now, but if Hutchinsons is just down the road it's worth calling Hawleys on Holme Lane - not sure if they will do it, but can't hurt to try.

The obvious question here is: if you didn't live in Sheffield (with the blinkers to its faults that this thread rather suggests), would you come to visit its city centre? I certainly wouldn't, and I have a lot of love for the place.

Nowadays I'd suggest LibreOffice rather then OpenOffice.org - it's the fork where most of the developers went after Oracle got involved. http://www.libreoffice.org/

No worries In fact I thought I should do some marketing for them, as they don't seem to be doing it themselves. Last year when I rang them to check if we were enabled yet, I said they should try putting flyers through doors because I only found out by chance. By the reaction you'd think I was a sales and marketing genius

As I said earlier, at work we are on the Digital Region albeit through a different ISP, and a recent speedtest gave 39 down and about 9.5 up. I can see the cabinet from my office window though My dad (not in Sheffield) is on a "conventional" FTTC connection - he got well under 1 Mbps from ADSL but now gets about 25 (from a cabinet maybe half a mile away). I think you have to be lucky to get as high a speed as I have, but the handful of people I know all get over 20.

Depends where you live. Some exchanges in Sheffield are enabled for FTTC - but I think only one or two. Not that many ISPs can connect you via this, but there are a few. http://www.eclipse.net.uk/fibre-broadband/product-and-pricing/availability-map has a nice map, no idea if it's accurate or not. The Digital Region people have dug up all plenty of the parts of Sheffield I drive through, between S3 at work and S6 at home. But they've been amazingly bad at publicising it - if I was cynical I'd say they were more interested in milking the EU funding to put the infrastructure in than selling it afterwards

Bearing in mind we were looking at a business connetion, we very nearly didn't sign up as I wasn't very impressed with any of the "affordable" ISPs (it seems to be a requirement to not answer the phone or if they do, not to get back to you). A friend in the know told me DRBSY were the best one but I couldn't justify the £100 (ex vat) per month - however when I did speak to them, they passed me on to a reseller so we get it for about 2/3 of that. You can get it considerably cheaper, but we wanted the full 10 Mbps upload and also decent support etc. I haven't had a problem in the 3 months we've had it, so I can't really comment on that It's via http://www.duocall.co.uk.

No, it's VDSL which basically means "ADSL but faster" so it comes down a phone line. Virgin cable is completely different technology.

For anyone stuck with rubbish ADSL speeds, have you checked whether you can get FTTC connections through Digital Region? At work (S3) we manage to improve our 5 Mb/s ADSL to the full 40 down and 10 up possible with fibre... Not sure what coverage is like at the moment, but they are supposed to be eventually reaching most of South Yorkshire. (and at home I get the full 50 that I pay for on cable )

Is this a good solution or just unnecessary? A friend was telling me the other day (by coincidence) about their local buses in Ipswich which don't give change, but if you overpay you get a credit ticket you can redeem later. http://www.ipswichbuses.co.uk/fares.html Wonder if they have a black market in machines for printing fake tickets

So what are the estate cars that have Paramedic written on then? They've done well to get to our house in five minutes if they've come from outside Yorkshire

I'm not sure any new cable services will ever be laid in the forseeable future - it costs a fortune and there isn't the money for investment. You're probably stuck with either a phone line plus ASDL (or FTTC via Digital Region perhaps), or mobile broadband - and personally I wouldn't touch the latter unless I was moving house every other month. In terms of suppliers, it depends whether you want good, or cheap! And whether you're planning to download lots...

As I understand it, in theory these sort of implied contracts are perfectly valid. The issue most people have is the way it's communicated, the amount charged and the way the companies conduct themselves. And of course there are legal loopholes such as it being perfectly legal to refuse to identify the driver and therefore the person who the contract is with. If the private parking companies were about keeping parking fair rather than raising revenue, and did it with large clear signs etc, they'd probably have won huge numbers of cases. Devil's advocate: judging by experience last night, the standard of responsible parking at Cineworld has dramatically increased since the cowboys were brought in. Good thing or bad?