Mobile muppetry

I've been getting phone calls from T-Mobile support in the UK. They ring me on an autodialler and -- if I'm lucky -- they pick up to talk to me about my account.

The first thing they want to do, of course, is check that I'm actually me. The last thing I want to do is give away personal information on an unsolicited call when I don't know who the person is at the other end. So the conversation ends up something like this:

- Hi, this is T-mobile support; can you confirm your address for me please?
- No, because I don't know who you are. Why are you calling me?
- I can't tell you that unless you give me security details.
- I'm not going to give security details to someone who I don't know. Why don't you write to me?
- It's not our policy.

So I field half a dozen of these calls and end up emailing T-mobile about them, telling them that if this is actually them, I don't want them calling me constantly and asking me for my credentials. You can guess what happens next...

This morning I got a phone call from T-mobile customer complaints saying:
- We've recorded that you've made a complaint to us. Can you confirm your security details?

Football gossip

This made me laugh.

Earnest driving

Given my recent post about biofuels and how they might do more harm than good, here's an interesting article about how driving an electric car may still require fossil fuels. The article doesn't propose any real alternative, but short of getting on your bike I did find a car that doesn't pollute, although I'm sure the construction process can't be too green. It's also unlikely to go on sale in Europe any time soon, as it's even less safe than the electric "cars" currently on our streets.

Solid foundations

This building planned for Dalston really impressed me. It's supposed to be environmentally friendly and affordable.
I found the link via TreeHugger, but take a look at the Dezeen design magazine site, which has lots of interesting stuff.

Single points of failure

At what point is a train over-crowded? I think it's when people can't get on it, otherwise it's just crowded when you're packed in like sardines.
The new summer timetable on First Capital Connect introduced on Monday has obviously brought chaos to the system... each day this week that I've tried to catch a train it's either been late, cancelled or had only half the carriages.

Which makes me wonder: when you're designing an infrastructure for running a website, you try to eliminate single points of failure.
These are places in your network, your hardware or your applications where if there's a fault, you lose the service. This concept must exist in trains too, but how is it applied?

Most of these trains are actually made up of two units, that is two shorter engines hooked together each with their own set of carriages. This should give you fail-over: if one engine breaks down you can use the other to pull the train. Except it doesn't seem to work like that. You lose one engine, you get only half the carriages. So the solution doesn't restore the service, it just allows you to run a diminished service instead.

• How often do trains break down? Hard to say, but this is obviously an important consideration when trying to work out what's a viable solution. If a unit breaks down once a year, so that 40% say of passengers are delayed, then there's no real issue. But if it happens every week in summer to stock over 10 years old, then you clearly have a problem.


• How do you solve it? The level of investment is going to depend on how big the problem is, but having engine that are capable of running eight carriages rather than just four would be a start. Add to that the infrastructure required to decouple the units so that the right engine can be put at the front. Does this mean that you need an engine that has twice the power and therefore costs (probably more than) twice as much? I doubt it. Hybrid cars only use power from their petrol engine when they need it, so it must be possible to design an uber-efficient engine that runs on 50% of resources when doing a normal job, but can kick in to do extra work as required.

Of course, I may have got completely the wrong end of the stick and single points of failure really lie elsewhere. Most obviously on the track; if that gets impeded (by a fire for example) then you've had it, even if you can share parallel rails. This is one of those areas of risk with high impact and low likelihood. The system with high impact and higher likelihood of failure is -- for all you Northern Liners out there -- the signal system. I can't believe it's not possible to have a fail-over system in this environment that kicks in automatically when there's a failure in the main. This is what computer networks do all the world over and has to be worth the investment. It means you can take one system out completely for maintenance or improvement and still run the system, albeit at increased risk. No brainer.
I get to think about these things on my train-sauna, when I have no seat and have been delayed for half an hour, so forgive me for just spouting on about it now. If you're delayed on a train yourself, however, it may provide a few minutes of mental escape from the drudgery.

The perils of converged devices

When implementing new technology, there are always two angles: the technical side (i.e. does it work) and the business side (does it do what it's supposed to). My forays into converged devices leave me wondering about the success of the implementation.
Firstly, bloody Active Sync just doesn't work properly. It's different whichever PC I hook up to, and so many things go wrong with it depending on environment. On the laptop I use currently it sometimes works properly, sometimes throws up errors and sometimes just does nothing. What a git.
Secondly, there is an issue over perception. If you sit in a meeting with a PDA and a stylus, people will generally figure you're taking notes (even if you're just doing Sudoku). If you type into what looks like a mobile phone in a meeting, people think you're sending text messages.
Still, the browser's decent.

Dashboarditis

This is so true. And highly representative of where my former company thinks it's going to find a niche in the marketplace.

Financial nuts and sledgehammers

Inflation is falling. That's good news after the Bank of England keeps telling us we're spending too much and using interest rate rises to batter anyone with a non-fixed rate mortgage.
I phrase it that way, because people who don't have a mortgage at all, who've already paid for their house, are way better off, with lots of opportunities for cash savings. People who got a fixed rate mortgage early enough are ok too. But if you have a mortgage at a discounted rate (if it's not discounted you need to renegotiate) then all these interest rises have been costing you.
Thing is, are the people with variable rate mortgages the same people spending money on credit cards and going into debt? Are these the same people having such an impact on inflation? And can we trust the inflation figures anyway, as they've been so tinkered with over the years for political ends?
My point is, if you want to stop people spending, then increasing the base lending rate isn't necessarily going to change it. Those with the fewest debts will continue to spend, while those with debts bear a greater burden. Wouldn't it be better to encourage people with debts to spend the additional amount they're having to pay to meet a rise on a personal investment instead? 20% of the population isn't saving any money at all, let alone investing it seriously. If we don't save, we'll always be in debt. No way out of it.
Wouldn't a more "outside the box" approach be to increase the amount of tax relief on pensions? So if you pay into a pension you get some more money from the government, rather than just paying it all back into a chain of banks? This encourages better personal financial practice and stops people spending frivolously.
Ok, it's no panacea, as the wealthier will continue to be better placed to take advantage. But it is an improvement on money going back into banks and people falling into heavier debt.
By the way, it's Credit Awareness Week this week, if you're interested.

Since when is networking anti-social?

Bloody tautologies.
I'm in a critical mood this morning because I was sleep deprived last night, but I've never liked tautologies. There were some other things I was going to complain about, but I thought I'd have a go at tautologies instead. I might have a go at repetition too one day.
Do you think tautologies are evidence of ignorance in the subject matter, as well as linguistically? I suggest they might be: as in "abseil down". Alternatively, they're just bullshitting, as in "social networking".
Take this blog entry as an example. Now I'm not encouraging you to join the mass-debators over at the Telegraph. I've nothing to say about the entry really. You can judge for yourself what news value this brings a newspaper (is this the web equivalent of abandoning the broadsheet?), what value it brings a blogger to be associated with the newspaper, and whether the article itself has any substance.

Look how tough I am

If ever there were any doubts about the new era that Nicolas Sarkozy will usher in, you need only look at the response to protests in France following the presidential elections. (See Le Monde).
A student who protested in Toulouse has been sentenced to a month in prison for aggravated assault on a police officer. Ok, so the protests were violent, but let's take a look at his crime: the assault was aggravated because the culprit used a weapon, which was an empty beer can. Although this was thrown in the general direction of the police, it didn't actually hit anyone. The student didn't deny his involvement and had no previous record for misdemeanours of any kind.
Sarkozy wants to show everyone how tough he is and wants this message relayed across the country via the judicial system. But what kind of justice will this bring? The parallels with early 80s Britain are there for all to see. How long before a repeat of Brixton / Toxteth / Handsworth, or a power struggle with a union that opposes his crushing form of "free enterprise", in the style of the miners' strike?

Salad days

Like Cleopatra, we are often green in judgement. But it's hard not to be green in intention and judgement these days. On the one hand you have TV documentaries purporting to be scientific but carrying a hidden agenda, while on the other you have genuine efforts to reduce the human footprint having a genuinely negative effect.
Take biofuels, for example. If ever there was a topic to assuage the guilty conscious of the liberal west, here it is. Developed by Papuan Soloman independentists, the major fuel companies have seen its commercial value. But at what price? It'll be more profitable for the nations that can grow high yield crops like sugar cane to do so at the expense of crops that feed their people. Why would they do that? Because as usual, this land is in the hands of the few rather than the many. The crops can be harvested easily without mass labour. The industrial world will drive up the price of biofuel but processing will be carried out by labour well away from the plantations. Trade agreements will impose higher tariffs on the raw produce than on the processed fuel, so Brazil will sell sugar cane to the US at a fraction of the cost it takes to get it back. It's another form of colonisation of capital.
Ok, so that all sounds like a bit of a rebarbative Marxist agenda, and I know that there's potential for generating biofuel without taking land that can be used to produce food (by exploiting algae, for example), but wait and see. Biofuels may answer one problem -- peak oil -- but they'll cause many others.

Dire-gnosis

Well, this happened to my dad: misdiagnosis of pancreatic cancer. How can anyone get it so wrong? All you have to do is have a biopsy before you tell people that they have an incurable and rapidly terminal condition.
A word to the wise: if ever you're in hospital for abdominal pain and they tell you it's a cancer, ask them how they know. If they tell you it's shown up on CT or ultrasound, ask them how they know it's not gall stones causing pancreatitis. If you continue to eat, the head of the pancreas will be so inflamed that it'll look like there's tumour there. The only way to confirm the tumour is to go nil by mouth (this may be for several weeks) until any swelling disappears, and then do a needle biopsy. It ain't pleasant, but it's accurate.
By the way, this is a particular problem for men over 50. I don't know the situation behind this particular case, but doctors may put abdominal pain and an elevated PSA count together and call it pancreatic cancer: 2 + 2 = 5. Now it may be that these are indications of malignant tumour, but you need to wonder where the other 1 in that equation is coming from. In this case, the diagnosis was clearly incomplete.

What you may have missed

HG Wells and JRR Tolkein would be impressed. New Scientist reports great strides into invisibility. Do I understand how this works? Not really, but it should be magic.

May Day

No, not May Day as in m'aidez, which is where the Mayday call comes from, but May Day as in international workers' day. I came upon a little known (to me) history of the day's credentials for demonstration and representation. Indeed, as I type this, I'm sat in an office where I can hear public sector employees protesting, while onlookers blame them for working in the public sector and just being a waste of money...
Anyway, May Day has its origins in the United States, of all places. In 1884, unions protested for the right to limit the working day to 8 hours. The 1st of May was chosen as a day of protest because it was the start of the financial year for many companies. In 1886, the majority won their cause, but many were left disenfranchised. There were strikes and on May 3rd, a bomb at a demo that caused a dozen police deaths. By 1889, the annual May Day marches had spread to France and on the third anniversary, the army was called in. 10 protestors were shot. May Day then became a day of workers' resistance across Europe and following the First World War it became a state holiday in France and a number of other UK countries. Harold Wilson's government followed suit in the UK in the 1970s.
Is any of this right? I haven't checked. But I'm sure you'll comment wikipedia style as necessary.

Moments of paranoia and presumption

I've become used to questioning the motives of my employer with increasing diligence, some might say suspicion. I received notice yesterday that I can leave employment tomorrow, but couched in these terms: "Your last day of working ... will be 27th April 2007... your last day of employment will be 10 May". At first glance you might think (since the letter discusses this) that my employer is kindly calculating the holiday owed to me. Given that the company is probably aware of its precarious legal situation -- potential constructive dismissal and breach of the disability discrimination act -- I'm a little more circumspect. If I'm employed until May 10, how do I start a new job on Monday?
But my employer is presumptive and underestimates me, despite me telling them that they shouldn't.
Since my new job is a contract through an agency, I can still start Monday but my contract can start May 10. I still meet the end client's needs, but don't get paid for a couple of weeks. The agency doesn't care.
But I don't even need to do this. Check out the contract I signed. It doesn't say I can't work for anyone else, just that I can't engage in "business where there is or there is likely to be any conflict with the interests of [the company]".
And there's more.
"In the even of the termination of your employment you will be paid for any holiday that has not been taken on a pro rata basis." I take this to mean that I'm paid the holiday that's owed to me, without being employed any longer. So I'm owed money up to May 10 without being employed. Either way, I'm not in breach of contract for working elsewhere over this period (unless this was for a competitor to my current employer).
There's still more.
The company "undertakes to provide a comfortable, safe and creative environment to work in". Which they didn't. Isn't that breach of contract on their part?
Anyway, as I said, Friday is my last day, so you shouldn't have to put up with me harping on about work. I realise that I may have alienated my small readership, so I'll get back to talking about PDAs and politics again soon.

Blogosphericals

A couple of quick links: can you qualify for a maths degree? The BBC will test you.



If that doesn't stump you, then this image will. Just stare at it and you'll see it doesn't move at all.

Karate 2.0

The more observant among you, who actually go to this blog rather than read it via some feed aggregator, will have noticed a couple of extra features recently. I've added pop-up previews on external links, chat facilities and a featured video from the my double...
There's loads of free stuff you can add like this, with no mark-up required: from live data feeds to online Sudoku.
None of this is particularly new, but I mention it in case you hadn't noticed before and could find a useful application for widgetry, and to get me away from harping on about work.

More piss-taking

I'm not going to go into all the details, but my employers are really beginning to take the piss now. Went to a meeting to agree a leaving date, but we didn't. Then their response to my grievance said that I didn't do enough to ensure my own successful integration.
These people just don't get it. If they had talked to me properly from the start and made the assumption that I was their equal instead of some pushover, they'd have realised, like Aesop, that there's more than one way to skin a cat.
I may have to try the crane on them next.

Hardball or softball

Following my resignation, the offers keep coming:

• A more senior position in the company.
• A salary raise commensurate with that position.
• Charge of the graduate recruitment programme in consulting and research.

I've spoken to the Employment Tribunal Service however and they tell me that in only 1% of cases does the board believe that a grievance is sufficiently malicious for them to award employer costs against the employee. I also have an idea of costs for a legal representation through an employment tribunal.
The question I have to ask myself is, what would be able to let me stay? Is there a way I could draw a line in the sand and continue in employment here? Or do I want to burn all my bridges when I'm going to be looking for other work in future?
The easiest -- but least satisfactory -- course of action is just to walk away. I'm not prepared to do that:

• I don't want it said that I left because I just couldn't hack it, that I got a poor review and got arsey over it.
• I need to establish that they discriminated against me because of my cancer.
• Could I be really onboard for the graduate programme if I have doubts about the company?

So, there's nothing that'll make me stay, because I've lost faith.

Updated:
Now I've articulated my position to the head of HR, things have turned a little more hardball. They're completing the grievance process at a subsequent meeting and will take the view that they've made every attempt to resolve the issue. I will say that they did this only once I'd resigned. They'll say that the process wasn't complete and that I could have appealed before I resigned, but chose not do do so. They told me the process was complete, but I have no witnesses to that, so it'll be difficult to prove. I'll tell them that I'm going to an Employment Tribunal. They'll say fine and won't do anything until they hear from the service, which means I'll need to pay hundreds of pounds for a lawyer when I shouldn't need to. If the tribunal sits, they will lose, but I won't win much because they'll claim I didn't follow the whole process. It's a stupid way of doing things, but they forced me down the hardball route.

Coursing adrenalin

I quit just now. There's a tinge of regret, no doubt.
My head of department admitted to me that comments in my appraisal related to my cancer and that he should have transferred me to the newly merged company at a higher level. So there's some concession there, but it's too little too late. I don't want to be a hard arse over this, but if I knew about someone else being treated as they've treated me, I'd be really pissed off.
The head of HR came to see me within about 5 minutes of me resigning, asking me to reconsider, so I'll spend tonight discussing with Helen and try to take as open a mind as possible.

A few silly links

If you have time to spare because, say, you're under-utilised by systemic failures, you may want to consider playing rock paper scissors with a colleague in a similar position. If so, this is worth reading.
I also thought I'd share this cartoon.
And I know that web design tends to be masculine, but this is ridiculous.

Charge your iPod, blow your mind

I love this. When are you most likely to make use of solar power? When you're sunbathing. So now you can charge all your USB-driven devices (maybe even a solar fan) with zero-carbon while tanning your hide.
I guess oil is used to produce the bikini however.
Also, if everyone switches to powering their gadgets through sustainable energy, will this reduce global warming and thus reduce sunbathing opportunities, so making this product less effective?

It's a mashed up world out there

This blog is turning into yet another whinge about work: YAWAW, or YAWN. It was never meant to be. So let me pretend that I'm saying something wider about society and the internet rather than just about my terrible employers.
If you're into things webby, you'll almost certainly have read about if not actually read Tim O'Reilly's call for (self-)censorship, which has made the headlines in a number of places. I think what's shocked the internet community is that someone with as much understanding of the web should advocate this approach, when the whole strength of the web has been its liberalism; I use the term with all its implicitly positive and negative connotations.
Generally the internet has grown because it is innovative and free form, permitting the majority of people with the financial means to post content little hindrance to do so. There are of course exceptions, but generally this liberalism has led to rapid innovation of diversity of content, business models and technology. This is particularly in evidence in the much rehashed concept of Web 2.0. Such innovation creates issues for the politically reactionary, but few in our industry would have expected Tim O'Reilly to form part of that group.
You wouldn't expect the leading internet agency in Europe to form part of that group either, but an email to staff suggests otherwise:

[We] have been asked to attend a brainstorming seminar at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on April 19th to explore the subject of how digital media can be used to defend against radicalisation.

The FCO tells us:

Groups such as Al Qaeda use the Internet and other communication media to great effect for propaganda and recruitment purposes.

Leaving aside my doubts about how much Al Qaeda is a cohesive group that distributes mass email and uploads photos of insurgent activities onto Flickr or terrorist mash-ups onto Facebook, let's just consider the company's reaction. It accepts without question that radicalisation is wrong and that the internet should be used to control it, then seeks to engage staff in telling the government why. So we're telling the government how to censor ourselves (coz they sure as hell don't know) while we tell our clients about how radical our thinking is in providing innovative solutions on the internet. We're provocative, we are. You can be too. Unless you're doing something that's not right. We'll be the judge of that though. So, we can create Web 2.0 style forums and develop some of the biggest mash-ups in the UK, but we're in favour of censorhip. That's because we're ethical. But we can still build sites for arms and cigarette manufacturers.
Wow, it's a complex world out there.

Hiding my glee

Do you judge people by the company they keep?

I've set up my own today, which implies:
1. I'm leaving my current company, which is deeply patronising.
2. I've won some business!

I have to hide my glee as I'm still in dispute with my current employers, but I'm over the bloody moon.

In case you need to get from Standford to Stockholm

Google advise on travelling from California to Sweden. Check out direction number 33.

Expert, schmexpert

Here are the categories for our new company expert programme:

1. Multi Channel e.g. IPTV, Mobile, Tablet PCs


2. Emerging Technologies eg, Vista, Ruby on Rails


3. Transactional Merchandising


4. Social Computing & Networking


5. Convergence


6. Youth Market & Online behaviour


7. New Online Business Models


8. Information Management, Enterprise Search & Dashboards


9. Rich Media


10. Inclusive Design


11. Youth trends

These are the subjects where my company sees itself at the forefront of thought and wants to produce a PowerPoint each quarter to prove it.
Some notable absences from the list: content management, systems integration, CRM, business process improvement, scalability and performance, security. What I'd call the fundamentals.
I have two main issues with the list: firstly, there's no place for me to show expertise unless I appropriate information management as being a broader understanding of content management (which it isn't really) and secondly, it's so bloody assumptive. If you're some kind of futurologist determining strategy and saying these are the things we should be interested in, why do you assume dashboards are going to be valuable, when all the current user research shows how much people hate adopting them? And why are Tablet PCs in there? Is the act of clicking on a website with a pen on a tablet radically different to using a mouse with a laptop? Why are multi-channel and convergence different subjects? Why are youth trends and youth market separate?
Then there's the final issue, which is that for each subject, the company is going to nominate four experts from different streams to contribute their expertise. How can you talk about new business models and about social networking and then prescribe who you define as an expert? Have these people never heard of wikis? Oh yes, they tried to implement a wiki but failed to grasp the fundamental concepts: there are 19 company wikis, where you can't add documents, can't use HTML and which can't be searched across. Nice.

How long to hack into your personal data?

Interesting table showing how long it takes to hack a password. I'll be changing all of mine to 9 characters mixed case, I think...

Time recovery

Fed up with having lost an hour's sleep at the weekend? Take a look at the benefits of power napping.

Snippets of apocrypha

I don't drink alcohol much anymore these days, but I recognise that some people are still susceptible to hangovers. Where are they going wrong? Should they be drinking a pint of water before they go to bed or making themselves curried scrambled eggs when they get up the next afternoon? No, these are myths, in comparison with the hangover cure pillow. It appears that all you need to stand bright lights and loud noises are some Himalayan herbs wrapped in cotton.

On a separate, similarly mythical note, I refer you to a story which is quite feasible, given how much money Alen Boksic used to earn.

Six degrees of refrigeration

Today, the maximum temperature is 9 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is considerably lower than that, around 6 degrees. But I'm sat in my corridor at my new permanent seat with no heating to speak of and no insulation save a broken glass panel above my head that's covered with a bit of cardboard box. How can this be an appropriate working environment by anyone's judgement? Must stop now as my fingers are seizing up... (No, that's not an exaggeration.)

Just desserts

The Football Association has expressed its dismay that a Tottenham fan managed to get close enough to Frank Lampard last night to aim a punch at him. Interestingly, this is closer than Emmanuel Adebayor got and he still got a four-match ban. So what retribution should we take against this hooligan? He's going to get a lifetime ban from White Hart Lane, which is surely a blessing rather than a punishment. If he'd actually hit Lampard he should have got a medal.

"This is not a meritocracy"

Some 10 days after submitting a grievance to my company about the way I've been treated, I had a meeting with my head of department and HR rep yesterday. How enlightening it was too.
While it's difficult to go into the nature of the grievance in detail, suffice to say that following a merger I was assigned a new "level" in the merged company that I felt denigrated my contribution. This is one of many grievances I raised.
My moment of clarity came when my head of department explained that people are assigned a level in the company based on commercial need, so that even if they meet their objectives and the criteria for a level, they may not be promoted (the only way to receive a pay rise).
- Does that mean we're not a meritocracy, I asked.
- Yes, this is not a meritocracy, he replied.
Call me naïve if you want, but I thought the point of setting individual objectives was for people to be recognised and rewarded for meeting them.
Leaving aside any legal implications of his statement, how does it motivate me for my head of department to tell me that my promotion is dependent on plugging a commercial gap rather than on what I do? What are my prospects if no one vacates a more senior position?
These apparently arbitrary levels are used to allocate people to projects, so another point I raised was that I would be allocated to less challenging work than I'm capable of, so my potential value to the company is diminished. My head of department corrected me on this point too: the business director would request me because he knows I'm capable of delivering a project even though I'm not officially ranked at a higher level.
The (quite overt) implication is that the company will keep me on a lower-level rating at a lower salary even though I'm doing higher-level work which, if they needed to recruit someone to do, they'd have to pay a significant amount more to that consultant. So I'm cheap labour doing a skilled job. Thanks very much.
I was also told that the work I've done in management and reporting is irrelevant to any consultancy skills (even though it's a measure on the appraisal form). Not like we sell management and reporting is it? Oh, hang on, we do.
The meeting concluded with the company representatives telling me that I shouldn't feel that I'm being picked on. These kind of problems are an issue across the company: it's just that I've been affected more than others have.

Keeping up with the MySpacers

A couple of posts about work this morning, which doesn't reflect the intended balance of this blog but for which I'm unapologetic.
Our company is launching a new corporate website to reflect its brand, the work it does, complete full service bla bla bla.
The site is (obviously) in Flash and quite funky. But does it work? Let's send an email out in an open source software style to the company and tell them there's a "PHAT" prize for the person who can find the weirdest error they don't yet know about.
There's a bit of a rumble of contentment goes around the office as any automated test produced 100s of errors. Then people start picking the bones through the site and finding more user-journey based errors (ever tried going back in a Flash animation?). So people compare and contrast what they've found and email it back to the project team.
About a week later I got an email from someone in the team saying they couldn't replicate the errors I'd found in Firefox. The team is using version 1.5. Why? Version 2 has been out of Beta for months. And the team have never heard of AdBlock, even though it's the most downloaded Firefox Add-On. Then I discover that this isn't from some bussed-in tester, but from a bleeding "Program (sic) Manager", that is one of the most senior people responsibility for delivery in the organisation.
Is it just me or is this company fucked?

ASBO 2.0

I quite liked this cartoon representation of networking sites. If you use the social sites in question, however, you'll probably have already seen the link...

PDF to happiness

I've been doing some work for Dresdner Kleinwort recently, who conduct some interesting macro-economic research. One of their stars is a guy call James Montier, who writes about behaviours involved in investing. He's written a particularly interesting article on the psychology of happiness, which is well worth the read even though it's in a PDF.

Underlying insecurities

If you read Bruce Schneier, you'll already be familiar with this story about terrorists trying to bring down the UK internet from the Sunday Times. If you don't, I thought I'd bring it to your attention for the wealth of ignorance about how the internet works.
The comments are particularly funny, on both sides of the coin. Is Telehouse bomb proof? I went to assess it for a central government client in the UK and of course it isn't, but it's pretty secure. Could you take in the twenty or so 4U servers and pack them with semtex as one commentator suggests. Absolutely not. If you've ever tried to pick up a 4U server or seen a data house loading bay you'd know why. Basically, I'd read the article and comments and assume that whatever is said is the opposite of the truth. Apart from a comment by someone called Jon which just says LMAO. That was pretty much my response too.

Too taboo to be true?

What are we to make of this story from Yahoo News? What kind of fascism is this? In the old capitalist days you simply cut any funding to people who were carrying out research into things you didn't like...

Pushing the envelope

This is an interesting story, which you may already have seen, about how to clone the new UK passport. It particularly annoys me when ignorant fuckers like Peter Hain and John Reid get up and tell the world that these things can't be copied, that they'll provide extra security and solve the populist xenophobic agenda of middle England when this technology will do nothing of the sort.

Free speech or safe trial?

The Guardian has succeeded in publishing a story the BBC failed to, citing public interest and press freedom to overturn an injunction. This is very positive as for once, it's a subject we should know about. This is a case where it is alleged that people sold the highest legal power through sitting in the House of Lords, in exchange for support in the highest political power through supporting general election campaigns.
However, let me put a slight dampener on the Guardian's success. What is more important: the paper telling us that this has happened or people being brought to justice? If the trial fails based on prejudicial material available to the public, what will the newspaper do then?
We can hope that the judge who refused the injunction did so safe in the knowledge that this would not affect a subsequent trial, but how confident can anyone be of that? The cynical among you might look at Shirley Porter and say this will never come to court anyway...

Finally done it

So I submitted my grievance today to my HR rep. Of course, I had to go to the HR department to find out who my HR rep was...
21 grievances listed. I also suggested 6 things that would fix them.
I'm not sure what they're going to come back with, because it's so unpredictable. I can quite easily imagine that they do nothing for the next couple of weeks: sit on my complaint until I go to harrass them again. Alternatively, they may get bolshy about me not having followed proper channels: not that these have been explained to me, of course. And I wouldn't put it past them to agree that I have a case, but then find some other way to make my life difficult. I saw them really stick the knife in two of my colleagues through some legal shennanigans they'd contrived. I'm open-minded about it, but not expecting too much.
What most annoys me, however, is that I feel forced into this position. This company, for all its faults, represents a really good opportunity for me to learn new skills and work on interesting projects. But if they're forcing me into a position where I can't actually work here, then what choice do I have?

Thinking outside the box?

A number of broadcasters, notably Fox, have got a bit tetchy with YouTube recently for failing to protect their property adequately. People have uploaded entire series of The Simpsons and 24 just as they're being aired.
Auntie Beeb, has taken another angle by signing a deal with Google's video service to promote shows. The mentality seems to be, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Except when you take a slightly more cynical perspective. How much dross is now showing up from YouTube in BBC broadcasts? We now have "news" that a pensioner's video blog has more subscribers than Paris Hilton, or that a couple that imitated Dirty Dancing at their wedding reception. It's just a short step to making video clip shows of stuff that's been uploaded, for people who can't be bothered to go to the site themselves: in fact, I've already seen this on Swiss TV (don't ask me how).
So now, if I'm desperate for TV at any time, I can sneak a preview of what I'd like to watch on YouTube; not sure why I'd rather go there than use the BBC site, which must have enough infrastructure to support this. And if I'm desperate for some user-generated content all I need to do is turn on my TV. Is this what they call channel convergence?

First the good news

I just thought I'd drop a positive post in, amid all the crap I've been putting in before. After four and a half years of cancer, my interferon treatment is doing the trick and cancerous activity seems to be on the wane. It's too early to say whether existing tumour mass is receding, but all the latest scanning technology hasn't picked up anything new. My thanks to the medical team looking after me.

Cut to the core

I'm not going to be buying one of these, but this another nod to all those Apple-heads who think they're so cutting edge. Competitive advantage is about establishing a product or service that's in demand and difficult to imitate. This is quite hard to achieve when a competitor beats you to it.

I don't mean to bleat...

Company results came out today, so a company meeting was scheduled. I say it was scheduled, but...
Originally the meeting was scheduled for Thursday, but someone thought it would be better to deliver results on a Friday afternoon. So we cancelled the venue we'd booked and sought one for the Friday. Then the CEO put his foot down and said company meetings shouldn't be on Friday afternoons, so we went back to the venue and tried to move it to the Thursday. They'd already booked it to someone else while we'd been changing our minds. Never mind, we'll hold a two-hour company meeting in an area of our office with 20 seats for 400 employees.
Ah, better book the seats then.
It's snowed, so loads of people haven't turned up, so we'll reschedule.
Which is a good job, because the CEO who wanted the meeting today and is presenting the company results had booked the day off work.
I think you're beginning to get an idea of some of my frustrations, particularly if you follow the work keyword for this entry.
Am I doing anything about this? Yes.

Knowing me, knowing stuff I shouldn't

With due deference to El Reg's BOFH, let me tell you about some things that have been going on at work.
I'm participating in the KM project, an initiative to improve knowledge sharing largely through a portal (aka intranet) through which you can find relevant documents and people from the constituent companies in our recent merger. I've been drafted in to give the initiative some direction and some impetus; in other words a kick up the backside, though I may have mistaken this location with the teeth.
So today the portal was launched. Shortly afterwards, Client Partner (basically a sales director) comes back and says:

CP: I can access all the staff salary information on the portal.
Me: It's not on the portal. That's the point, it's a portal. It's just showing where you can access it on the file server.
CP: It's a disgrace. The portal's broken. It must be closed down at once.
Me: If I close the portal down, you'll still be able to access the salary information. You need to change permissions on the file server.
CP: Are you questioning me?
Me: Look, I can stop people finding this through the portal, but you're not solving the problem. You have a problem on the file server that existed before the portal did and will exist afterwards. Anyone with a mapped network drive can search using Windows search and find classified data. You need to fix this.
CP: Bring the portal down.
Me: Ok, so there's two-year old salary information available. Is that so important?
CP: It's a security risk. The portal shouldn't be able to access this information.
Me: I agree, but the search index runs as if it were any employee, so if the portal can access the data, so can anyone else. We checked with your office what should be indexed and they told us to index these folders. We have, now it's broken don't blame us.
CP: Well you obviously didn't check or we wouldn't have the problem.
Me: Here's the email that says index all the folders from your office. By the way, this problem doesn't exist for any server at any of the other offices. Doesn't that point to the problem being in your office rather than with the search tool?
CP: That's because you're from the other two offices and you don't understand how we have things set up.
Me: That's why we asked you what we should index the first time. Fine, we'll start again. We'll bring down the intranet, send you a list of all the folders that we index, you can tell us which to exclude, we'll reindex the server.
CP: I'm glad you've seen sense.
Me (to developer): Change the CP's profile so that every time you hover over their name, an appropriate message appears.

Obviously this is a stylised representation of fact, with CP representing a conglomerate of dickheads. If it had been just one idiot instead of half a dozen it wouldn't have bothered me so much.

Are you a poseur?

While not necessarily tackling the fundamental debates around OS -- security, user interface, mime type definition, efficiency -- this article does address the most important question about using a Mac. Given that Apple inc has just dropped the "Computers" part of its company name, I think this assessment of Macs is quite valid.
Normally I link to the print version of these articles, so that they render more easily on small-screen devices. But this time I thought the comments were quite funny, including the author's own, so be sure to follow the article to the end.

Twixt brewery and piss-up

To continue on a theme, the image above is illustrative of what I have to put up with in this place. Isn't there someone competent enough, or even just willing, to make PCs work across different domains?
I can't connect to any printers, see anyone else's calendar, see most shared folders let alone write to them, use the timesheeting system, I don't have a phone, filing cabinet, allocated desk, mouse, or screen, I miss out on most company emails, don't get any departmental messages, haven't been inducted into any of the HR processes, and haven't had my appraisal, even though it's a fortnight overdue. I'm a little frustrated. But since there's no channel through which to complain (I'm either ignored or told it's someone else's responsibility, who then ignores me) I turn to the blog.
Professional services my arse.

You can shove your iPhone up your UMPC

I want one of these.
Ok, so it doesn't appear to have HSDPA -- unlike my current mobile phone -- but it's running a proper OS on a tiny machine that you can then plug into a keyboard, screen, mouse. It's a better spec. than my laptop but would fit in an albeit large pocket.
You'll probably need large pockets to pay for it, as previous models in this range have been c. £1,000, but since Sony have given this UMPC the same model name as a camcorder, it ain't easy to find the price on the web.

It's not just their tails that they lose...

What happens if you give an iguana Viagra and it overdoses? The Belgians seem to have found out.

A white Christmas?

As temperatures drop to brass monkey levels, the chance of snow lingers, just in time for our company Christmas party this Friday! So it could be a white Christmas after all...
Why are we having a Christmas party in January? It's not calendar iconoclasm (more's the pity). The official line is that when we merged this year, we couldn't anticipate how big the company would be when booking a venue. The real reason is a combination of tight-fistedness and incompetence. We always knew the merger was happening, but didn't book anything early enough and balked at the prices of the venues that remained.
I'm steadily beginning to appreciate the gap between brewery and piss-up in the merged company's competencies. Example.
I've been trying to push an internal knowledge management initiative. We were almost ready to launch a new portal providing access to all our documents and people in time for the aforementioned Christmas party.
Then "technical support" got their mitts on it.
Their contribution was to:

1. switch the domain name settings so now a quarter of the staff can't access it;
2. move a third of all our documentation to a new file server without telling anyone; it then broke and it'll take 4-6 weeks to fix.

The adage of "if it ain't broke" rarely applies to the systems administrator mentality. But it appears here that the idea of fixing broken things doesn't apply either.
*** Updated ***
And there's still more... having sent the content authors a user guide telling them how to add content, one has now come back telling me that some people can't see the content he's entered. Did he enter it into the portal? No. What am I meant to do with these people?

Yet another take on Big Brother

Amid the media frenzy elicited by journos' attempts to provide ever more insightful (and inciting) commentary on racism in Big Brother -- and it is unquestionably racist -- haven't we lost sight of a fundamental problem with this sort of media?
So she's getting paid to appear on the show and should've had some idea of what she might be in for, but this is TV based on abuse. Channel 4 and Endemol do themselves and their audience great discredit by continuing to broadcast this shit. What sort of sadism is this? Are people really entertained by watching someone be abused in this way? I'm not surprised that they've been so many complaints.
Of course you can try to justify some aspects of this broadcast: racism is now (temporarily, I'm sure) top of the tabloid agenda, while the show is exposing issues we have in the country as a whole which we rarely want to face up to.
But remember that the whole point about racism is that it's not just the individual in the direct line of fire who is suffering abuse. There's collateral damage to everyone who's visibly ethnically different and who has experienced similar behaviour.
The broadcasters, by not even warning the offenders over their behaviour are condoning it, almost certainly for the sake of money. It's a slap in the face for an audience presumed to be psychotic voyeurs, and a kick in the teeth for anyone who hates racism.

Unbearable?

Quick update: an amusing story that could be serious... be sure to check out the video link.

Premise of innocence

I don't want to always whinge about stuff, but isn't there a worrying tendency for the erosion of justice going on? Just take a look at how the government now wants to seize people's assets and place them under house arrest in case they commit a crime; and if that doesn't disturb you, just think of the children!

In ourselves we trust

All right, so this is a little old, but the trends identified in the Edelman Trust Barometer are still worth considering and point to how information will be received in 2007.
The biggest finding of the Trust report -- and it's a continuing trend -- is that people have confidence in people like them rather than subject experts. This explains a lot about trends relating to how content is presented both on the web and in other media:

• Increasing use of folksonomy-led news-sharing sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Furl, or Clipmarks; i.e. what people call Web 2.0.


• The emphasis that all media are placing on User Generated Content (UGC) and blogs. Newspapers are relying on columnists who fill space in the demotic of their readership, while TV programmers believe that serious issues need to be commented on and even fronted by their audience, or people like their audience: witness Panorama dropping Robin Day / Dimbleby-like figures of austere knowledge giving way to more vox pop features where people complain about how difficult some part of their life is and demonstrate little hard evidence.


• Why Jeremy Vine's radio show is the worst piece of broadcasting you can imagine: the least-informed sections of society rant about irrelevant matters, interspersed with horrendous middle-of-the-road music.

There's good reason for promoting the people like me angle: you can develop a sense of community, foster ground-up collaboration that business in particular often loses out on, and target relevant markets more effectively. There is one big drawback however: people who are ignorant will increasingly rely on other people who share similar, comforting ignorance, as Richard Dawkins points out.
There's a reason people are experts: they've invested heavily in discovery and have demonstrated a talent for it in their particular area. If we just trust people like me, we risk stagnating in a stew of ignorance and self-righteousness.
And yes, I am aware of the irony of how this has been communicated.

The final straw in the GM debate?

Through a GM process, a food technology company in the States has managed to turn celery into a "tweaked" straw, allowing you to add to the taste of a Bloody Mary.
Take a closer look...