Monthly Archives: May 2011

Miscellany, Observational

Commercialism-as-a-Service

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I’m – believe it or not – beginning to get bored of the endless shuffle of stuff. The computer’s died, get a new one, the new iPhone weighs 15g less, get a new one, etc. It’s astonishing that some industries – I’m looking at you, Gillette – actually deliberately engineer products to fail sooner than the materials would require just to turn a dime. Depressing, really.

My pipe dream? Commercialism-as-a-Service. It’s a bit like the Abel & Cole veg box but for, y’know, everything else. I will voluntarily give information about my needs and shopping requirements to whoever wants it (Google? Facebook? Duke it out amongst yourselves), and you can just sort it all out for me, preferably on some kind of sensible lease/upgrade cycle. Cash for CaaS. Good for the environment, good for me. We can have some kind of sensible iterative process to refine what you give me and we’ll negotiate a sensible rate for outgoings.

Where do I sign?

Technology

Helpful Mac gestures and shortcuts for Windows users

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I’m still getting used to the MacBook, so discovering things daily. The below are my current most helpful shortcuts and gestures. What do you use? Tell me, Macfans!

Option instead of alt, COMMAND instead of CTRL. COMMAND-OPTION-ARROW (or COMMAND-OPTION-SHIFT-ARROW). Keep messing that one up.

Command tab – switch apps, etc. Command generally replaces CTRL. Command-` will switch between tabs in an application.

Enter to rename files (F2 in Windows)

FN-DELETE – forward delete (delete key in Windows)

COMMAND-SPACEBAR – Spotlight search (keep thinking it should be left-swish – probably will be in Lion)

Loads of cool stuff with Expose, the applicaton switching, erm, application – COMMAND-F3 shows desktop, for example, Expose shows all open windows wby pressing F3 (same as three finger gesture)

Cool touchpad stuff:

Two finger touch gesture – scrolling.

Four fingers swoosh down gesture – view all open apps (or swoosh up to show desktop)

Three fingers sideways swoosh – back/forward

Pinch to zoom

Rotate to… rotate

Internet, Miscellany, Observational

Digital ancient

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I had an email from Yahoo! the other day thanking me for being a user for the last 12 years.

I mostly use it as a spam-catch these days but find it astonishing that I signed up for it that long ago. In times before that – I had a Hotmail account (which I still use for IM) – that’ll be going back 17 years.

Holy heck, I seem to be old. Does this mean I’m no longer a Digital Native? Or that there’s some kind of ghastly Digital Native 2.0 out there?

As edgy and down with the kids as I try to be perhaps I should accept the crushing inevitability of it all, get a pipe and smoking jacket and start being irate at young people these days…

Technology

International broadbandness

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Because I’m curious about these things, I tend to make a cursory study of broadband connectivity wherever I travel (after all, in my professional life, I helped promote a global Broadband Quality Study three times…). All speed ratings are as determined by the Speedtest.net app on my iPhone.

– In the UK, we get an average of 3 mbp/s down and 0.8 mbp/s up. Mediocre, but serviceable. I’m considering BT Infinity when my contract is up in September – anyone have any insight into whether that might be a terrible idea? This is a suburban reading.

– In Malaysia, which for years has had a fairly consistently terrible broadband service, my parents have recently acquired a fibre optic cable service – resulting in synchronous 10mbp/s internet access for them. It’s amazing, although not massively cheap – at over 40 quid a month, in local currency. This is also a suburban reading.

– In Denmark, the speed as tested was more like 2 mbp/s down and 1 mbp/s up. Which is low, until you consider that somehow they manage to stream HD IPTV over the same line, at the same time, with nary a glitch or artefact. They have some clever traffic management stuff going on to make that happen, although aspects of the connection confounded sense: the router periodically stopped routing to random websites (including Google.com) and the original router supplied didn’t have wifi or switch features, so was tediously difficult to share. Thank goodness for the wifi upgrade Onkel and Moster got! This is a remote rural reading.

I didn’t check Finland – but that was a suburban reading which has been the cause for a little complaint.

No grand conclusions to draw from this except to point out that the fibre experience was almost magical next to the increasing creakiness of DSL broadband, which gets proportionately worse the further you are from a city. My hesitation around BT Infinity stems as much from concerns about how effectively the copper and in-house wiring will carry an increased broadband quality, how crappy the BT provided VDSL modem/router is likely to be… as well as the cost, which is double what I’m currently paying with O2.

I’ll continue to fight a broadband crusade – we need Next Generation Access in the UK sooner rather than later – and look forward to seeing what the likes of BT and Virgin Media do about it. I can’t believe that the Malaysians have managed to provide such a good quality of service, but it’s early days for the product there so imagine TMNet will soon eat its own tail in contention ratios.

Any other International broadband experiences to share?

Dadblogging, Internet

Curious Emily

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In a strange sort of way, I’m looking forward to Emily getting to the "But why, Daddy…" phase of child development.

30 years ago, when I was growing up, my parents invested heavily in encyclopaedia. How else to satisfy the curiosity of three precocious children? Other than providing the best answers possible to the extensive and occasionally tedious litany of questions about the world.

Tony Buzan, when we met him a few months back, made a big thing about the intellectual capacity of children being disproportionately greater  – before traditional education systems (and probably tired parents) drill it out of them. I don’t want that for Emily if we can manage it – I’d love for her to continue to be curious about the world for as long as possible.

Which is reason #3984 that I’m grateful for the Internet. It’s amazing and probably taken for granted that we now have persistent access to the world’s knowledge. All you need is an understanding of how to search and how and when to trust information (not trivial in itself), and virtually any (likely) question can be answered. Unless she proves to be a philosopher or particle physicist, in which case she’ll find more questions…

I just need to be careful that I don’t shortcut my answers too much… "Because, the Internet," might turn her into a Daily Mail reader*….

 

* If this doesn’t make sense now, keep hitting refresh on Chris’ Daily Mail headline generator until it tells you the Internet causes cancer, or some other ill. I think that headline actually happened earlier this year. Mental.

Travel

To the management at Southwest Trains

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Dear management team at SWT,

Thank you. For the privilege of furnishing me with a ticket to travel on one of your luxuriant trains. For the economies made when I purchased, at a cost of over 3000 pounds, an annual travel card. The ‘gold card’ privileges, I’m sure will furnish me with lavish and extreme comforts at some indeterminate, difficult-to-conceive time in the future.

Thank you for your convenient and spacious parking facilities. It is helpfully located, just far enough away from the station to result in a complete drenching in the event of one of England’s frequent and persistent bouts of precipitation. I find it remarkable value at over 7 pounds a day. Simply remarkable.

Thank you for the morning rush. There’s nothing like the swarm of tired, grumpy people first thing in the morning to kick start your day. It provides the perfect dose of adrenaline to get the blood boiling ahead of a day in the office. Thank you also for refusing to add additional capacity to the line – where would we be without natural selection? And after all, sitting is bad.

Speaking of which, thank you for providing such inadequate seating. It hones my hunter/gatherer skills as I cram my way past elderly ladies in search of a perch. It has made me more appreciative of what I have; I am piteously grateful when I can find a broken fold-down seat next to one of your curiously fragrant toilets.

Thank you for your cracked cooperation with the other rail operators. It is a rousing challenge when, every month when my railcard fails to be read by a barrier gate and I seek a replacement, I have to go to a SWT office and can’t be helped by your partners elsewhere in the British rail network.Truly, Nationalisation is a terrible evil.

Of late, I’ve noticed that you seem to have employed psychic train drivers… they are inevitably and persistently late when I am anxious to get home and invariably punctual when I’m running more than 15 seconds late for a train. I can only assume you have some ingenious mechanism by which the punctuality of a train is in some way powered by the collective unhappiness of the people ahead of or behind it. In this respect, you have adapted the powers of the slime from Ghostbusters 2 as a power supply and should be applauded for it.

Thank you for the disruptive modernisation works you are soon to be carrying out at Basingstoke station. Whilst I don’t immediately see the logic in modernising the perfectly functional ticket hall, in which no regular commuters spend any great period of time, I’m sure there’s a sound strategy behind it and its not at all an enormous, bloated waste of time and money.

Ah, train travel. One of the most idyllic ways to travel, and a remarkable innovation. Every time I stand perched for an hour between a drunk banker and an aromatic systems architect, I marvel at the elegy that is Britain’s rail system. I look forward to the hot, sweaty summer days ahead; to desensitising myself to empathy and building my lower back strength as I stand for the two hours a day I travel with you.

Thank you.

Software, Technology

Trialling Disqus

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I’ve been thinking for a while that this blog needed tighter social integration into Facebook etc., and came across Disqus ("discuss") whilst researching commercial spam filters for a client. Am trying it out here – it’ll allow you to comment on posts by logging into your Facebook, Twitter or Disqus account and hopefully diminish barriers to commenting marginally, not to mention make for a slicker, more interactive commenting experience.

Thoughts appreciated.

So far, all I’ve really had opportunity to notice is that the set-up process was fairly seamless and I had to do remarkably little hackery to get it to take the place of the native WordPress commenting engine, and that it syncs into the WordPress DB so even if Disqus someday goes bust (always a worry for Silicon valley start up services) – I’ll still have all the comments here.

General update, Observational

The routines and rhythms of a country gentleman

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I seem to be turning into a country person. My surprisingly enduring passion for running has been joined by a not-insignificant-interest in gardening (at least insofar as it results in food), instead of drinking I’m more often driving, BBQs have become a regular occurrence, and every room in the house is fast acquiring its own ‘project’ – whether its painting a wall, putting up shelves or insulating.

Is this a mark of middle age? Maybe. Am I embracing it? Hells yeah, this is massive fun. Maybe at some point a year or two after we moved in we’ll ‘finish’ but the received wisdom seems to be that these things are endlessly cyclical…

There are limits to this, though. I don’t own any tweed, will never own a gun, and don’t plan on taking up hunting or fishing. Golf, however, may happen again at some point…

Travel

Airline delays and corporate cheekiness

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We had a couple of significant hold-ups when travelling, the worst of which was a four hour delay leaving for Finland on ‘BlueOne‘, an SAS airline. A pilot friend indicated to me that when they reschedule or delay flights, they often do it for the minimum possibly window they can to avoid a fine under EU law – which is three hours. Sure enough, the flight was rescheduled by 2h55m and they should have been in the clear… However the flight was delayed a further hour and so I thought I’d write in, checking for compensation.

It turns out, that as the flight wasn’t postponed for commercial reasons – i.e. the airline hadn’t put us onto another, more full-up and therefore more commercially viable flight – but had rather been delayed because of a shortage of cabin crew. The check-in girl told us they were “tired.” This amounts, as far as I can see, to bad planning on the airline’s behalf and if anything you’d think they would have to compensate us… but no, not required to at all, apparently.

It was reasonably astonishing shoddiness, but at least SAS’ customer support desk had the good graces to feel bad about it – to the tune of a token 100 euro gift voucher.

If anyone needs to know the low-down on your entitlements, MoneySavingExpert has a good article on it. The airlines won’t volunteer it, that’s for certain, though, so you have to be proactive in following up an issue yourself!

Miscellany, Travel

Airport snow and dodgy landings

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An older thought, but one I wanted to capture. When visiting Finland – still covered in a blanket of white in mid April – we wondered why Heathrow seems to collapse at the slightest dusting of snow.

It seems it’s partly due to the lack of expertise, equipment and manpower to clear the snow – but given that aeroplanes are overengineered to cope with adverse weather conditions (as you’d hope), there had to be another reason – and after all, Heathrow could learn its lesson and buy a few more snowploughs for next time!

One reason, it seems, is conservatism on behalf of BAA – with every airline in the world flying into LHR, it hardly matters what standards Boeing manufactures their planes to, or the quality of BA’s training. It’s the maintenance staff at Air Qumran and the risk posed by its hungover pilot who’s never even seen a snowstorm, much less landed a plane on an icy runway slick with a fresh dusting of powder.

I don’t blame them on that front. After all – we all learn defensive driving these day so we are prepared with other driver’s competence – why not manage an airport the same way?