The Prague spring

A lovely day couple of days in Prague. I think I heard on the BBC that there hadn't been a government here for seven months, which may be one of the reasons why it is so energetic and prosperous. Went out to dinner at a super restaurant overlooking the river and the castle and had my first Czech food: some kind of meatball soup that was delicious and a steak in cream sauce with cranberries and dumplings -- just typing it out is making me swoon. When you have some really, really nice meal that you've never had before, it's what passes for excitement at my advanced stage of life.

Technorati Tags: travel

Traditional London street scenes no. 1

Ah, spring is almost here. It's a lovely day down at Waterloo Place...

A bearded gentleman looks on while brightly decorated policemen search his car, assisted by a friendly golden-coated bomb squad sniffer dog.

The voices may not be real, but they do have some good ideas.
[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: moaning

Identity card rant

The government here has decided against building a new national identity id card system. Instead, the Home Office and their management consultants decided to knock one up from some old databases they happen to have laying around at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the Home Office and the immigration and passport service. That would be the DWP who were responsible for the biggest computer crash ever in the U.K., the Home Office that has spent ten years building a computer system for the police that is still not working and the Identity & Passport Service where staff have already been sacked for looking through personal records. I started to think about this today because on the BBC there was a piece about the DWP sending 26,000 people's personal details (including bank details) to the wrong people.

Still, not to worry. The government says that all of the data from DWP database will be checked again before it is put into the new "National Identity Register". The architecture of the system is rock solid and completely secure because according to Peter Wilson, a spokesperson for the Home Office, "It's rather like a filing cabinet that DWP owns and maintains... We have our own shelf, which is empty, and which we will populate with our own records and which we have our own key to." What could possibly go wrong?

One or two other aspects of the new architecture are a little surprising. I found a comment from Graham Titterington from Ovum. He points out that the role of biometrics appears to have been downgraded. There is no mention of iris recognition, apart from a brief sentence, and the report talks in general terms about 'biometrics such as finger prints' and appears to have given up on creating the 'gold standard of identity' originally proposed. He notes that "Whilst, the government is still placing heavy reliance on the role of biometrics in preventing a person from making multiple registrations in the NIR, this objective seems unlikely to be achieved without the use of iris scans".

I've seen some commentators call the new Home Office strategic action plan to introduce ID cards from 2009 a step in the right direction. I disagree: it's a giant leap in the wrong direction and it will make the current situation (ie, no ID card) worse in almost every respect. This is very disappointing for people like me who think that a properly thought out identity card would be a good idea in the modern world.

How can giant projects like this rumble along without any inspiring vision of how they are going to deliver 21st century services that will transform the lives of citizens rather than half-baked, crappy, "computer says no" emulations of the 1950s?

The voices may not be real, but they do have some good ideas.
[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: technology

Suburban Saturday morning

As The Telegraph notes today, councils have decided to justify higher council tax charges by reducing rubbish collection, which is about the only useful service they provide for the money, since everything else isn't under their control. Woking is no different. As a consequence, our house is occasionally surrounded by bags of rotting garbage because the council has decided that recycling the odd bit of cardboard (which we did anyway) is more important than preventing outbreaks of bubonic plague around Knaphill.

I'm quite unable to determine what it is that we pay our enormous council tax bill for. In the old days, the council came around and took away rubbish every week, while I put newspapers and cardboard in my car and took them round the corner to the recycling centre once every couple of weeks. Now, the council takes away the cardboard and leaves me to pile stinking garbage in the back of my car and take it round to the tip myself, effectively outsourcing half of its garbage collection council taxpayers. So many people were doing this at the tip today that there was a queue to get in! It's the new suburban Saturday morning.

Perhaps the council is assuming that middle class residents, having a basic understanding of public health and a passing knowledge of history, will continue to do their own rubbish disposal whereas in other parts of the district the Black Death will return to decimate the population, thus solving the problem of unemployment for a couple of generations as it did in the 14th century -- and that's on top of the inevitable increase in our environs following the closure of one of the major accident and emergency departments in Surrey (at the Royal Surrey Hospital in Guildford). I imagine a council sub-committee is working on new, politically correct, sumptuary laws even as I write. These were required because of the boom in the effective minimum wage (a natural consequence of the death of a third of the population) to stop the masses from spending too much of their money on luxuries (eg, sugar, salt, crisps, 4x4s). Surely, though, today we will simply replace the missing millions of workers with eastern Europeans, so the council's plan may not be a smart as the microchips they've put in our bins.

The voices may not be real, but they do have some good ideas.
[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: moaning

Nothing says corporate slave quite like a Blackberry

As probably the only person in Britain, if not the entire world, who has stopped using their Blackberry, I've discovered an interesting new emotion, a sort of cross between smug, self-righteous superiority and sneering. You know how ex-smokers feel when they see someone smoking? No? Well, as an ex-smoker myself I can tell you. When I see someone smoking I feel really glad that I gave up and I still feel some of the resentment against cigarettes that I felt when I finally quit. But I understand why they do it, and I know that if I'm not vigilant I might one day fall off of the wagon. For all the good, intelligent and wise reasons for not smoking cannot mask the fact that there were times when having a cigarette was really, really nice.

But when I see people using their Blackberries on the tube, as I did this morning, I don't feel any of that. Using a Blackberry was never nice. Perhaps I'm just not important enough: after all, what kind of e-mails do I get... "the liver is ready for transplant"... not. Most of the e-mails I get are either "can you give X a quick ring about Y" or "can you have a look at this document". If it's the first kind I can read them on my phone perfectly adequately (my K800i has a good IMAP client on it -- for that matter, it has an RSS reader as well) and if it's the second kind then I'm not going to do it on the tube.

The woman I was sitting next to on the tube this morning was going through her messages, which were almost all (as far as I could snoop) either of the first kind ("call me when you get in") or of the corporate sort that I am generally spared ("please respond to let us know that you have recieved and read the new holiday entitlement rules addendum covering years in which the easter holiday..."). I won't say what the actual message was as that wouldn't be right. But she did respond in the affirmative and I bet she was lying.

The temptation to both read and respond to messages using the Blackberry was just too great. Instead of simply ignoring irrelevant e-mails (where I've been copied in on something that I'm no longer involved in or I've got something from some web site I used to visit four years ago) you find yourself going through them to delete them and free up inbox space. Worse still, you find yourself replying to e-mails in a frantic and ill-considered way, not giving the sender the respect of thinking things through properly.

Sometimes, only sometimes, I have a slight pang of jealousy when I see someone light a cigarette after a meal and a glass of wine. But I never, ever feel jealous of the guy on the train who thinks I'm impressed that he's e-mailed Julie to send the copy invoices to Martin instead of just telling her in the morning when she gets in.

The voices may not be real, but they do have some good ideas.
[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: moaning

I haven't the foggiest

Went to Heathrow for a flight to the States. On the BBC news on the radio, Heathrow was reported as being in complete chaos because of fog, three-hour queues just to get into tents to wait to get into the Terminal etc. Yet on the way there was no traffic, when we got to Heathrow it was emptier than I have ever seen it, and the wait in the tent was 10 minutes before they called the flight number and asked people into the terminal. Because of on-line check-in, it was straight to the bag drop and on through security. I guess the deal is that if everyone else's flights are cancelled and yours isn't (it was all UK and some European flights that were cancelled, not the long-haul flights) then Heathrow is actually a convenient and efficient airport!

Technorati Tags: travel

Am I the moron?

I fly quite a lot for business, often three or four times every month. We travel a lot for leisure too: our household probably buys half-a-dozen international flights per annum for holidays, visiting relatives and so on. In the old days, all of this business used to go to British Airways, but now our purchasing in more mixed. For example, the family went to the States at the beginning of November on United. But I generally go to BA first, out of habit I suppose. But not any more. When we booked a flight to the U.S. last time, we got a blank web page back after entering a credit card number. We assumed that something had gone wrong -- now, in retrospect, I suspect that it was trying to display an error message along the lines "sorry, we're a bit new at the web thing and our programmers are too stupid to figure out how to make something that works on Apples as well as Windoze" -- so we just called BA to see if the booking had done through. After waiting on hold for 15 minutes they told us that, no, no booking was in the system. So we went back to the beginning and booked again. A few minutes later, there were two confirmation e-mails in the in box. Aaargh! Still, no problem. We'll just give BA a quick call and they'll sort it out. We called and we were held in a queue (on an 0870 number, which costs us money) for 55 minutes. When we finally got through, the guy told me that it was the wrong number, that my executive club "help" desk couldn't help with web bookings, and that he would transfer me to the right "help" desk (which had 31 callers ahead of me). Meanwhile, my wife had gone to run some errands. When I finally got through, they wouldn't help me because although my wife's credit card is supplementary to mine, I was not the named card holder. When my wife got back, she had to start all over again by phoning the 0870 number and sitting on hold again, at our expense, to get through. We should have just cancelled the flights completely and booked another airline, but we didn't. No wonder the service is so bad in the U.K. -- it's our own fault for putting up with it. Next time, it's United again. (Virgin's seats are too cramped). But it has given me an idea for a New Year's resolution: I will refuse to do business with companies that make you call an 0870 number for their call centre rather than an 0800 number. Conversely I will reward companies with 0800 numbers and good call centres. I'll begin with Morgan Stanley: I have one of their MasterCards and whenever there's been a problem I call an 0800 number and get through to a helpful call centre (which I imagine to be in Scotland) and things get resolved quickly.

Technorati Tags: service, travel