Walls have ears

Overheard a great conversation on the train today. In one of the seats behind me, a guy from a large and well-known systems integrator was talking on his mobile, evidently to a colleague. They were discussing a contract that they were working on for a major bank: apparently, the bank had cut down the contract by a million pounds, so these guys were working out how what parts of the contract to complete and what could be dropped (and what could be cut without the customer realising that they'd have to buy it later anyway). This sounded to me like commercially quite sensitive information. I bet the company in question has a really strict policy about copying sensitive documents to memory sticks and leaving them on the train though.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Sofia so good

Had an interesting journey into Sofia -- it was like being in a lazy sitcom about Eastern Europe. The taxi driver was chain-smoking Marlboro, listening to loud heavy metal (Zep, in fact) and really did overtake a horse and cart on the motorway.

It's nice here though, despite a guy in the hotel telling us that he'd been robbed in a taxi and that police snipers are executing mobsters in the street

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Guardians of our money

It turns out that the buffoons at Surrey County Council had £20m in Icelandic banks -- wow! sorry we're flying over the Alps right now and they look stunningly beautiful -- and will undoubtedly claim that they could not possibly have foreseen the problems on the way. Yet...

By March this year the situation was so worrying and so widely known, it was even featuring in the Daily Mail. On 16 March 2008, reporting on risky banks, they wrote:

[From Burning our money: How Were They To Know?]

What the article says is that "Credit insurance for debts at Iceland's biggest bank, Landsbanki, is priced at 610 points while that for Kaupthing is priced at a hair-raising 856. Given that these two have taken billions in UK retail deposits, it may be a sobering thought for savers to consider where they are putting their cash. These banks are now seen as the most unsafe in the developed world."

So it looks to me that they had a few months to get their money out of there and put it under the bed or in the Nationwide or something. For goodness sake Kingston -- get your noses out of The Guardian's public sector jobs supplement and pick up the odd copy of the FT or something.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Facing up

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I was on my way into Lloyds in the City of London when I saw

I couldn't resist trying to take an artistic picture to try and capture how beautiful the City looked in the fading light.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

What's in a name?

If you're hanging around bored at the train station, waiting for the next train to come along because you just missed your train because of a huge queue at the ticket office, you may notice that some of the trains that go past have names. In the quaint English tradition, they're always called things like "Duke of York" or "Pride of the West" or similar. Why don't South West Trains give theirs more up-to-date names in keeping with modern Britain? At Woking, the trains should be called things like "Black Hole of Calcutta" or "Survival of the Fittest".

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

XXX travel tips

Well, that's handy. I'm often surprised by the kind of shops I see at airports, but rarely as surprised as I was today when ambling around the duty free at Vienna airport. I was thinking about getting an outdoorsy watch for cycling, since my trusty old Timex has been annexed by no. 2 son (it has a very comfortable webbing strap) and generally pottering about, when I came across the Beate Uhse tax-free sex shop. Naturally determined to fulfill my mission to find things to blog about, and for no other reason, I went in. If I do decide to by myself an enormous sex toy in the future, I'll know where the bargains are. But I must be so old-fashioned, because while perusing the impressive array of devices, magazines and DVDs, I just kept on thinking "who buys these at the airport?" over and over again.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]