My review of the 38th annual Steel City Beer and Cider Festival, Sheffield.

This years Sheffield Beer Festival (38th annual Steel City Beer and Cider Festival) finished on Saturday night. This beer festival was located at Ponds Forge sports centre in Sheffield, this was quite east to find as its a large modern building near the City Centre. The Supertram runs down the side of it and its just down't road from railway station.
I did not go every session as we were at an Ultravox gig on Thursday night and a Dara o'briain gig on Friday night at the City Hall.

This is the first time we have seen the beer token method of payment. You swap your cash for £1 or 10p tokens at the cash desk on entry you can then pay for everything with these. You get your change in 10p tokens. This makes it better for the staff as there is no money to deal with.

The festival took place in the massive "International sports hall". The main beer bar ran down the middle and was double sided as you can see. The cider bar was in the corner near the CAMRA membership desk.
In the other corner was the funny T-shirt stand (like you always get at beer festivals) and a tombola. Next to this was the food area.
Down the other side was the stage for live bands, a pub games stand and the Beef Curtains stall selling beef jerky products. There were plenty of seats and tables for people which was a nice change.
The barmaid at the Cider bar said that all of the ciders she had ordered had been delivered and were all on ready to try.

The most unique drink ever tasted was the Gwatkins Squeal Pig Perry, this was actually sour ! but really nice, never tasted a perry like this ever.

 A panoramic photograph (taken with my iPhone) of the beer festival on Saturday night.

Panorama of the beer festival on Saturday night about 9pm

Two ciders in this years festival glasses :

A Gwatkins Squeal Pig Perry and a Broadoaks Premium Perry.

 There were quite a lot of beers on at this festival, this is just one side of the bar.

The beer kegs at about 2pm on Friday.

 The Beef Curtains were attracting a lot of attention :

The famous Beef Curtains stall.

This beer festival uses beer tokens like this :

Beer Tokens.

 A close up view of the Beef Curtains sign :

A close up of the Beef Curtains sign!

Free Wi-Fi was available throughout this venue, just connect your device to the open connection "Sports Hall".

Were you there?
What did you think to this years beer festival?

thanks
Andy

Video of Gyrating shelving system Dancing Stands

Here is my latest video of a hilarious gyrating shelving system. aka "Dancing Stands".
Do YOU own one of these unique shelves?

The video of the unique shelving system :

Do YOU own one of these unique bizarre shelving systems? if so please leave a comment on what you use it for.
Also has it ever gone out of control !

This shelving system the ideal solution for your priceless ming vases or Fabergé egg collection, Just make sure you put them on the static shelves !!!!!

This strange shelving system was in a shop window on St Peters Street, Derby, Derbyshire, UK.

Having done some research I can see these are called "Dancing Stands". They sell either 3 or 5 shelf systems.

I recorded this video in September 2010, the shop has gone now I think. Recorded on my iPhone 3GS in portrait mode, not something I would normally do.

Hope you enjoyed this strange video.

Thanks
Andy Savage

Video of Virgin Media Modem, led activity for Ambit E08C013.00 cable modem from power up to ready to use.

This is a diagnostic help video showing what you should see on your VM Broadband modem.
If you have a fault on your modem then watch this video via 3G or from an independant WiFi source.

In this simple video I have recorded what you should expect the leds on the front of the Ambit E08C013.00 modem to do from the point of switching on the mains supply to it being ready to use. I have listed the time elapsed in seconds from the point of power up.
I have also shown what the leds do when you run the speedtest app on an iPhone, note this is connected via WiFi to a netgear WGR614.

Here is the video:

Your model will be on the label on the underside of the cable modem.
If you are with the UK Cable broadband supplier "Virgin Media" then you will be familiar with the VM cable modem they give you. There are a few models, I used to have the Silver NTL100 model but that died a couple of years ago. I now have a Ambit E08C013.00 cable modem.

Note that I am currently on the 10Mb broadband package, this will be increased to 20Mb soon for free.
If you want to know when yours is going to be speeded up then have a look on here :
doublespeed.virginmedia.com
Just type in your postcode and for me it says "December 2012  and February 2013".

Depending what package you are currently on depends what speed you will get after upgrade. Some people will get 120Mb broadband!!!

If you want to test your broadband speed right now then use the speedtest website :
www.speedtest.net

The iPhone app you can see in my video is a free app that allows you to run speedtest using either your WiFi or 3G connections.

My broadband connection is not too good in the evening for the last month as you can see the speed is all over the place up and down, normally this is level and about 9.8Mbps. A fault resolution has been issued to sort it out.

My modem states :
Cable Modem : Euro-DOCSIS 1.0/1.1/2.0 Compliant

To find out technical information about your modem run a web browser and goto the address bar and type in : 192.168.100.1
This will show your Modem Configuration

You can log in using root and root. You may need this information if you are having problems with your connection.

Hope you found this of use.
Andy