smeghead

I was sooth at the weekend, first petrol station I went past had fuel at 126.9p/Litre for Petrol 130.9p/Litre for Diesel. When I exclaimed to the cab driver how cheap the fuel was, she asked what price we pay and where we were from, after I explained we were from shetland and I got as far as "146/Litre for Diesel" she almost swore in disbelief at the cost.

Try going upstairs in the Lounge bar on wednesday evenings, usually a good selection of local musicians there from week to week.

How about an e-petition microsite linked to the SIC's main page, like the one on http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ It works in the same way as a poll but with registered signiatories, name, address, post code etc, with only the name/area displayed and all other info is hidden abiding by data protection etc. By using this method you do away with the anonymity/randomness of poll's, if people want action on something they should at least be willing to put thier name to it. Anyone can bring up a petition about any local matter they want the council to act upon or look into, people can sign to put thier weight behind it with constructive comments. This way the council can respond, and get the ball rolling if enough of the electorate are behind any petitions. Seemed to work pretty good for Number10, although we never quite managed to get Jeremy Clarkson for PM

If half the shops in town competetively priced thier goods then maybe they wouldn't see such a dramatic decline in trade. I know from personal experience that after returning faulty goods to a well known Lerwick trader, I looked for a replacement item online as it was for a christmas present, I found the item not only £15 cheaper but with free delivery and it wasnt from some high street behemoth either. (£15 is a huge difference in price considering the item was priced £54 locally) So if small as well as large companies from south can sell items cheaper with free delivery to Shetland, howcome local traders can't sell at similar prices? Does't that in turn mean that the local market is monopolised and the local traders are purely profiteering? akin to what they all accuse companies like Tesco's of doing. Which in my book makes them all as bad as one another. The only way people stay in business is to be competetive, not to force customers into paying over the odds, when that happens, people go elsewhere.

I can recommend PlusNET, im on 80gb/month with unlimited downloads from midnight-8am £19.99/mo, it was £11.49 for the first 3 months Offer is now 60GB/month, unlimited between midnight - 8am, free McAfee AV and a free wireless router if you sign up for a year. Almost always get decent speeds, only problems I've had is when BT's network goes down the pan, damned monopoly that it is, cant wait for shetland telecom

These council cuts are a joke, from what I hear every department has had to submit services/areas they can do without or cut back on. All these possible cutbacks are going to the full council and it'll be like a lottery. Surely by cutting 7.5%[This Year]+7.5%[Next Year] across the board would end up in a more evenly balanced council. The way the toon hall is going about it could mean one department has every single proposition cut, and another department doesn't have anything cut. E.G. cut winter roads maintenance / increase social care - so you employ more carers, who then cant get to thier work because the roads arent gritted. And that gets me onto another point, did anyone else notice the mass of social care jobs in the paper before christmas? Bolster the numbers by 5-10% so any future cuts dont affect overall numbers of staff, they can cut and not renew posts and still have the same staffing levels they had before. I can see some service managers seemingly have thier heads screwed on by pre-empting these cuts. As for cutting the black bags down from 100 to 52, this will only help in the short term. Why dont the council just scrap black bags in the toon and give everyone wheelie bins? Larger initial cost for the bins (£23), but you then dont have the recurring yearly cost of black bag supply and delivery (£15.50 per box + delivery costs). Keep the country areas with thier 100 bags/year until they get more areas up and running with wheelie bins and then apply the same to those areas. As for the recycling collection in the town and no collection in the country. There are recycling points thoughout Shetland, surely if they put more recycling points across Shetland including within Lerwick those who want to recycle can just goto a collection point and dispose of thier items there. Then you wouldn't have the need for a kerbside collection of recycling (could you mollycoddle the public anymore?), just get the truck to go round and empty the bins at the recycling points instead. Another effect of this would be not having to purchase and deliver millions of plastic recycling bags, surely the idea of recycling is to minimise waste not to produce more, especially plastic. As for management SIC have hundreds of managers, what do they all do? do we need such a large number of them? Other local authorities have cut from the top down, why is the SIC cutting from the bottom up? Less people out doing the work and more people planning it. These people are meant to be working for the public, by having a duty of care to run the best service possible for the least cost to the public. Seems to me that they are more interested in saving thier own skin by skimping on areas that are already heavily under scrutiny so they can ease financial hit to the areas that keep them in a job, all of which is just to appease the town hall mafia, which in turn keeps them in a job. I heard once that for every person out working on the street there were seven sitting in an office, I've always wondered just how conservative of the truth that figure is. /Rant

Just create another user on the ps3 and login to his psn account from it. Then he'll be able to access his profile on your ps3, just switch back to your user/profile when he's done

Or worse yet, the laws of the town hall. I don't usually agree with all of JW's sentiments but for once he makes sense, I thought it was a great idea when Clark mentioned it. STOP PRESS WILLS AND CLARK FINALLY AGREE ON SOMETHING Shame it's a year and several hundred thousand pounds too late! The only way it would be a success is for an outside company to do it, otherwise I can see another Viking Energy type company being setup with public money by councillors and SCT boardpersons who would then continually deny conflicts of interest all in a bid to further line thier pockets at the expense of the people of Shetland. Something of this nature would surely meet/exceed shetland demands? http://ogdcorporation.com/micro_refinery.htm Given it's a modular design, output could always be increased at a later date.

This rant is like the ones folk put up about not gettin thier rubbish collected, at the end of the day its only a black bag, why do people worry so much about stuff they're dumping? The essy guys and the recycling fellas have christmas too. And as for your going by an old timetable when the council have clearly issued an update to that schedule, ... Merry Christmas (*** Mod - personal remarks removed ***)

Hi, You missed the tiny 0.9p in the upper RH corner of each price display - 143.9 & 140.9 Effectively £1.44 & £1.41. ouch.... glad I filled up last week. I filled up last week aswell, but what we've saved in the short run by getting fuel before the scum raised the price again, is little to savour considering we'll be paying the same as everyone else next time we fill up. When everyone in the UK blockaded the depots in 2008 due to fuel prices the price of oil was us$140-ish a barrel, as of today it's gone down $0.14 to us$91.41, so howcomes we're paying more for fuel now than we did then? It's a disgrace that the goverment turns a blind eye to it, just because they get more from price fixing through tax. We all know the vat/duty on fuel has gone up 2.5%, but the price we pay in the uk is grossly inflated by the oil companies before it hits the pumps. The fact we have europes largest oil terminal and most probably europes highest fuel prices is just a slap in the face!

I wonder how long it'll be before someone snaps it in half like last year

going by those photo's your feeding them WAY too much, no wonder your havin' a rant about bird food being so expensive!

Yesterday Sound garage put thier price up from 135.9 to 137.9, This morning it was sitting at 140.9 aka £1.41 thats 5 pence in two days. Shocking.

count me in

Leasks aka Scottish/Highland Fuels put thier prices up to 136.9L for Diesel. I won't mention the expletives that came out of my mouth when I read thier sign today. It wasnt too long ago they put it from 131.9 to 133.9, then 132.9, then 135.9 (for a day) all within the space of a week, and finally it has sat at 134.9 for a few weeks now. I was in Orkney a few weeks ago and fuel there was 5-6p/Litre cheaper than Shetland, yet both isles are serviced by the same fuel boats, as are the Western Isles, who have cheaper fuel than Orkney. What amazes me is the fact the ship travels further to get there, yet the fuel is cheaper??. So who says they dont have a monopoly eh? turning a blind eye to it wont make them drop thier prices, blockade at the depot anyone?

Great idea, except the shetland wind would surely deploy those bags around town. Aye, except they don't follow them, as I spotted one last week who'd clocked a dog doing it's business, he watched and then instead of going over and dealing with said dog's owner or scooping it up, he promptly walked in the other direction. Whenever they do find random dog poo's they note down where it is and pass the buck to another department. You would think having a little common sense, their manager(s) would have equipped them with more than just a notebook and pencil to remove said dog poo. Surely if the council are having cutbacks they shouldn't be paying people to walk around in red jackets scribbling in notebooks, pretending to keep the place tidy.

Have the police just paid thier fuel bills and renewed thier insurance, as they seem to be flying around a helluva lot these past few days. (Yes I ken aboot the drink/drug driving purge going on) I have seen them in the small van going for a bit of sight seeing along seafield turned n drove back in the road apparently for no reason. As well as just about the entire shetland fleet of vehicles motoring about in Lerwick. I also saw a lone policeman in the fiesta booting it up the south road (way above the 30/40mph limits) with no lights or sirens on, for them to be no where in sight going past Gulbertwick, only to meet the same car coming the other way at Brindister. I'm thinking of signing up, so I get a go of a car with fancy illunimous paintwork, flashy lights, sirens and a licence to drive like a complete twat. Oh, better not forget the fancy uniform to hide behind too.

The sky package that you get in shetland isn't the all-singin-all-dancin' one with phone + super-duper-upto-20meg-internet for a fiver. You can get thier phone service and thier non-LLU broadband, which works out quite expensive compared to people who can get/are in LLU areas on Sky. I've also read on some broadband forums that the non-LLU broadband is, for want of a better phrase, utter crap, compared to the LLU broadband, which by all reports is meant to be pretty good. NB - I was going to get the Sky package deal but once I found out they dont do LLU up here I ran a mile. LLU is up to BT to sort out, not the ISP's. LLU is Local Loop Unbundling, which basically means that once an exchange is LLU-Enabled other providers can get access to the exchanges and install thier own equipment. Personally I have BT for the phone, PlusNET for broadband, and Sky for tv. I may pay slightly more than for a bundled package but at least I know it all works fine.