Two Ideas for IT Sanity

I was thinking today that it is crazy that most companies employ people and let them use computers for most things but that very few insist on any formal qualifications to prove you know what you're doing. To think of the number of times something is saved in the wrong format, things that should take minutes take hours because somebody doesn't know the quick way and generally computers that should save loads of time take longer than pen or paper. I reckon any serious company should:
1) Insist on a formal qualification for the level of IT work required in a job (i.e. basic Office skills, Basic Database Operation or whatever)
2) It should be rammed home that if something is repetative and time consuming that it can be done faster using the right technology (even a few hundred pounds is cheaper than days of someones time).
One example of IT indeptness was when I used to work for a company where someone had to send out loads of letters to Doctors whose addresses were in a large book and that had to be looked up manually and typed into a template letter (100s of letters a week). I asked the person whether they had the details on disk and showed them how to mail merge. Hey presto, a 1 or 2 minute job now took 5 seconds.
Somebody told me the other day that somebody measured the productivity of a company before and after computers were introduced (over a 20 year period) and that the productivity was identical. That figures. People buy the wrong kit and don't know how to use it. To all you clever IT managers out there, work out how to use your stuff properly and you might save £1,000s!

Heating your house and saving energy

My energy bills are really low, I average £20 per month for gas and electricity. I have gas central heating and an electric oven. I wanted to share how my bills are low and suggest that many of these are within reach of a normal person in a normal house.

1. I don't run my heating to keep my house at 24 degrees. My thermostat is set to 20. I will wear a jumper before switching the heating on (although I am quite warm as a person). It might sound undesirable but honestly, it will save you a packet.
2. Make sure you have thermostatic radiator valves, the ones that are quite large and usually have red or green coloured numbers on them. They are no use if turned all the way up in every room but for instance, keep a spare room at 2, perhaps the bathroom at 4 and most rooms at 3. Why pay to heat a room you hardly use? Also, you might very well not want the bedroom at too high a temperature which will cook you when you are under the duvet.
3. Make sure you have a room thermostat that will switch off your heating when you house is warm. You might think that having loads of thermostatic radiator valves will do the job but if the boiler is still running when all the rooms are warm, you are quite simply paying to heat nothing. Honestly, this can save loads.
4. Make sure you seal any drafts around windows etc. They don't always make your house very cold but they can make it feel cold which makes you turn the heating on. Use curtains and draft excluders if required.
5. Make sure you have good loft insulation. It might seem expensive but it quickly pays back. The recommended amount is now about 250mm (almost a foot!) which can be annoying if you have a boarded loft but do what you can and make sure it looks cosy like a jumper!
6. If you have any cold rooms (or if you are like me) fix some rigid insulation to the inside of the outside walls and then plasterboard it and skim it. This works well on cavity or solid walls and can reduce some drafts as well as heat loss. It doesn't cost a massive amount and can be cheaper than cavity wall insulation (as well as not bridging the cavity and causing damp.
   

How to Calculate your Energy Consumption

It's the flavour of the day but saving the planet is all very well unless you have no idea how to work out things like energy consumption. For many people, energy consumption simply means whether the gas and electric bills are higher than expected. This is how you can calculate the energy consumption of your electrical appliances:

1. Look for a plate on the equipment that says what the maximum power requirement is. It might be in Watts, KiloWatts (1000 Watts) or in Amps.
2. If it is in watts, divide it by 1000 to find out how many units (KiloWatt Hours) it will use when running at maximum power. For instance, your fridge says 250 Watts. Divided by 1000 is 0.25 or a quarter of a unit per hour at full power.
3. If it is in Amps, multiply it by 0.23 to get the kilowatts and kilowatts over the course of an hour makes units. e.g. A 3Kw tumble dryer will use a maximum of 3 units per hour.

If you do this for a range of items, you might be surprised that things like tumble dryers and electric showers use vast amounts of power compared to things like TVs and mobile phone chargers. You might not.

After you have these, you need to work out how much is actually used. This can be hard for things like fridges which are always switching on and off and for washing machines, which only use large amounts of power when heating the water inside. You have two options to work this out:

1. For things like TVs, work out how many hours per month you use it and then multiply this by the power consumption. e.g. a TV might use 0.1 units of power and you might use it for 40 hours per month = 4 units. Again you might be surprised that low power things when used frequently add up to a lot of power.
2. For items like fridges and washing machines, their usage might be found in the instruction manual or otherwise you can measure it with the electricity meter. With everything else switched off at the mains (you can leave your clocks plugged in!) read your electricity meter and then go out somewhere for a while - do not open your fridge or turn anything else on. If your washing machine, you must obviously wait until it finishes the cycle. After the cycle finishes or perhaps 2 hours, read the meter again. Most of this amount will be your appliance (some might be things that you have not switched off like clocks, chargers etc). Divide this amount by the number of hours you have watched it for (fridge) or simply use it as an amount per cycle for the washing machine and you can then look down your list and find out where you can make savings in electricity.

Bear in mind that a washing machine uses much more power on a hot wash than a cold one so if you regularly use a hot wash, measure that and measure a 40 degree wash too.
For most people I expect that lights being left on, washing machines and tumble dryers being used too often and a poor quality fridge are where most power savings come from. I can't imagine your children will be pleased if you suggest a maximum of 5 minutes of TV every day!!

Government says no to encryption

I feel the need to rant again because of the stupidity endemic in our current government. I don't think it is a political disagreement just another example of incompetence. This article here relates how information obtained from RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers) does not require encryption as it is handled and passed around. According to our government, who of course excel in every area of IT, it would be "impractical" to require this burden and the existing systems of "physical security", "security procedures", "staff vetting" and "training" are considered suitable for the job. This again clearly demonstrates that the government have no idea what they are talking about. Most security leaks appear to be related to a common theme: humans make mistakes. They leave stuff lying around, they get their properties burglarled, things get dropped, mislaid and criminals who want this information often obtain it without any input from employees of these systems. In which cases none of the so-called adequate measures does anything. The only way to prevent accidental disclosure of information is to make it exceedingly hard to do (i.e. encryption or inability to move the data outside of a closed network). People disboey procedures to save themselves time, they often ignore the fit-for-purpose hardware and transport stuff around in the Demilitarised Zone and as for staff training and vetting, it doesn't really add security, it is small and cheap operation that actually adds very little benefit.
They also miss an important point that actually encryption is extremely simple even using free tools. Even if what they used was not US Military Spec, it would be better than nothing!
Maybe one day the government will emply someone who actually knows about the departments they are managing. I won't hold my breath!

No quality in UK industry

Apologies for organisations caught up in this generalisation but my experience sadly over the past 10 years or so is that by and large organisations have almost no quality control. Ironically at the same time, many organisations have achieved quality certification by standards bodies to 'prove' their quality but it truly isn't worth the paper it is written on.
Virtually everybody I deal with other than paper shops and possibly supermarkets seem to lack the very basics of quality control. Let me sum up quality in a simple sentence, "Quality control doesn't imply that you do not make mistakes but it does imply that they are only made once".
A few examples. Chasing a bank for 3 weeks for a bank card. After the first failed order, a process should have been kicked off and should have taken a very short period of time: was the card ordered incorrectly? Did the system lose the request? Was it sent and didn't arrive? This is major for a bank and should have been resolved, never to surface in the same way again. Quite obviously, nothing whatsoever was chased up, it was put down to a glitch and then it happened again and again. Halifax - hang your heads in shame.
Utility warehouse, I emailed in to change my direct debits and got a reply. Next month, the wrong amounts are taken so I call again and the old, "apologies Mr Briner.." of course, the same thing happens and I have to call again. Similar issues to the above.
It seems that every time I call a bank (I deal with 3), a utility company and just about anyone else larger than 5 people I assume that it will not work as expected, I assume a lack of quality. I am not interested in apologies that mean nothing and quality insurance that does not result in quality proves that as a company you do NOT understand what quality management is. Do these CEOs not understand? Are they inept? Do they employ incompetent quality management and then not have quality management of their own to notice this? Do they accept mistake after mistake and not have a problem with it? Do they not ask why 50% of calls to call centres are about mistakes?
For goodness sake people, can somebody not sort this out. Can we not insist on managers that can manage and quality managers who understand quality? This sort of stuff affects people's lives directly and to be honest will cause people to emmigrate to countries where people take their jobs seriously!

The knowledge of good and evil

Have you ever wondered what that whole Genesis thing is about? You know the bit where because of their disobedience, Adam and Eve receive the knowledge of good and evil. Why is this bad and what did this cause?
Well Adam and Eve's problem was that they either a) Didn't really trust God when he told them to leave the tree alone or b) They thought they could handle being disobedient (sound familiar).
Anyway, they disobeyed and what they received was autonomy, rather than have to rely on God for direction and discernment, God gave them the ability to discern and direct themselves. Not much changed there over the years. What we now have is the ability to decide what is right and what is wrong. That doesn't sound too bad except of course, that mechanism, as correct as it is, relies on an amount of knowledge about the situation - knowledge we rarely have.
For example, suppose you are a judge in court and somebody comes in for a serious burglary and you have to sentence them. You might well decide that the person seems sorry for what they did and give them a light sentence. With the best of your knowledge, this seems fair and square. A different judge however might decide that it is 'right' to make an example of them because the crime was serious. Note here that neither person is necessarily wrong. We would call this a grey area.
In life, we see this all the time. Debates, arguments and politics are all confused and corrupted by the simple fact that one person's right is another person's wrong (as well as deliberate and malicious intent). So we end up with what looks like an unwinnable situation. It is not a matter of simply saying, "It is up to person X to decide" because if we feel strongly enough that they are wrong, we feel the need to object as the numbers of Court appeals show. The best we can hope for is a strong consensus among people.
Well for believers, we have another recourse. God is still alive and kicking and He actually knows all of the factors. If He were judge, we would decide the correct sentence knowing exactly whether the person is sorry and whether the example would work on other people. What do we need to do then? Very simply, we need to defer most of our judgements and decisions to God and let the Spirit and the Bible direct what we decide. This is the nearest we will ever get to impartial judgement.

Creating God in our image

I realised the other day that many of our problems, both for Christians and people who don't follow Jesus, are caused by not knowing who God is. We effectively model Him in our image. We take our far from perfect humanity and make it a few thousand percent bigger. What we end up with is a large version of ourselves with all the insecurities, the boredom, the impatience etc and this makes it hard to understand what He is like. Since everyone in the world would do this in a different way, we end up with 6 billion versions of God even though He is one.
To understand God, we need to understand His character from first principles, from the Bible. As we read about Him and learn what He is like, we then see ourselves as broken vessels modelled in the image of God but with defects.
Imagine you owned a car worth £50. Busted seats, an engine that burned more oil than petrol and loads of rust. If someone told you that there was a Rolls Royce worth £200,000, you wouldn't imagine an expensive version of the same thing. You wouldn't think that for your money, you get more oil burning, more busted seats and more rust patches. In short you would not create the Rolls Royce in the same image as your cheap car. This would be obviously incorrect and illogical, it would lead to all kinds of strange conclusions about cars. Imagine however if you saw the Rolls Royce or at least had it described to you and then realised that your car was a broken cheap version of the Rolls. This would make much more sense, it would logically make sense and most importantly, it would give the Rolls Royce all the honour and credit for what it actually is.

The wonderful Sell-Off government

The government have announced they are selling off assets to gain £16 billion pounds "in an effort to reduce the growing budget deficit". Wonderful, wonderful idea. Oh, did I forget to say the man is a total idiot (Gordon Brown). Now I do not have a degree in economics or a related subject and only know a 'pub quiz' amount about governments and how they work but I again feel I have to spell out to these people the folly of this idea. It is this government who has been overspending for the past 15 years. Why make some terrible gesture like it is the "economy's fault" that this has happened. Anyway, down to details.
1) The amount to be raised is small pickings compared to the actual deficit.
2) The obvious answer when outgoings minus income is positive is to reduce your outgoings or to increase recurring income (or both). Raising cash is VERY short-term and does absolutely nothing to fix the underlying deficit. If you borrowed money because your gran was about to die and leave you something then it might make sense but why raise cash just for the sake of it?
3) Selling assets if they are not required is surely something you should do anyway? If you have a spare town hall somewhere, why not sell it and then you do not need to maintain it.
4) If you sell something like the Dartford crossing, you get cash into government but of course the travelling public will pay for it - the cost to run the bridge will not go down so add in some profit for a private company and q.e.d. the charge will go up. You might as well put tax up on fuel and sting everybody!
5) They sold gold before and it bought them nothing.

They haven't learned anything. They are robbing the country and not improving, I like the way one BBC viewer sais, "he has sold the family gold and is now selling the silver". Why does it take 15 years to realise you can't spend more than you have? Are they really that incompetent? This is really, really, really basic. Are they telling us to save, not borrow and then have a deficit of how ever many billions? That is a deficit, that means borrowing money (which incurs interest) because you are spending more than you earn. Why can't the queen invoke some ancient power to dissolve government and have done with it?

Average Speed Cameras and Road Safety

I was thinking of writing to my local MP about the standard of driving on the roads. I don't drive a massive amount, mostly just to work and back (20 mile round trip) but I do notice that there is a lot of shoddy driving. There is a basic problem with our system. The Driving Standards Agency run the Driving Test but people can keep taking it until they are lucky enough to scrape past and then that's it. They can drive any car they want (or can insure) pretty much forever. If they are bad drivers, it cannot be picked up until they have a serious accident and even then, not necessarily. In America, the land of the free, you have to take regular tests to renew your licence, something which although might be annoying is the minimum you could do to ensure people are safe drivers. Other things you could do is limit the number of tests somebody could take in one year or perhaps have an extended test for anyone who either fails too many times or fails in a major way.
I then came into work and saw that Wales are planning on using more mobile average speed cameras. Now generally we cannot complain about equipment that enforces the law but I want to compare two scenarios, one based on what I see on the roads and the other based on somebody speeding in Wales.
1) Mr A drives at an average of 40 mph in a 30mph limit at night when there is no other traffic or people around: Fined £100 and given 3 points. Insurance is increased because they are 'dangerous'
2) Mr B overtakes on blind corners, drives too close to the person in front, uses their handheld mobile while driving, doesn't indicate, straight-lines the roundabouts, pulls out very close to people causing them to slow down, doesn't really pay attention to what is happening around them and drives in an agressive manner although within the speed limit: Nothing at all. No fine, no points, no conviction, no insurance increase (unless you are the 1 in 50000 people who actually get caught by a police officer).

That is the problem I have with Police Policy that is aimed almost entirely on speed and speed cameras. Unless there are ways that the police catch general bad driving or put in a system that ensures that people at least know how to drive properly, there is a problem!

Ending GP Catchment Areas

Health Secretary Andy Burnham has announced his intention to end catchment areas of GP surgeries which restrict which surgeries you can sign up to. Part of the argument is competition which is supposed to drive up standards as people don't register at poor surgeries and part of it is to provide flexibility for people who might want to register, for instance, near their work or their child's school. It sounds OK and it might be the right thing to do but what really troubled me was the man's statement; "In this day and age I can see no reason why patients should not be able to choose the GP practice they want". The man said publically that he can see no reason not to change it. Well, since he is apparently not very clever, I will provide some, partly courtesy of people on the news article:
1) What happens with home visits if you are registered 40 miles away?
2) What happens when loads of people register near work? The local surgery might be left with stay-at-home patients with potentially a high percentage of ongoing and serious conditions to have to deal with.
3) Most council services work by areas, this might make accountability difficult.
4) If lots of healthier people decide to register elsewhere, it can cause a snowball effect because a struggling surgery now ends up with a disproportionate number of sick people who visit often and who are then even less able to deal with the work since they will get less money for their less patients but most of whom are now sickly.
5) There is no objective evidence that this technique, like schools and hospitals, actually drives up standards. The system is far more complex than that and it can be argued that the problem is related to the community being served rather than any serious incompetence on the part of doctors.
6) What happens if a surgery is oversubscribed because it is good and local people cannot register there and are forced to register far from where they live? This has already happened with NHS dentists and it was obvious there that this 'demand' did not suddenly force lots of other dentists to set up shop or to increase their staffing levels since as stated above, this is not a simple thing to do. The wage levels, general availability of qualified people and the simple practicalities of the work are big obstacles.
7) There is actually a danger that spare demand in an area is met with a practice that sets up to meet that demand with no track record in high-quality care and who might unecessarily put another practice out of business as people move to the new surgery.

There you go Andy, hopefully these few reasons why you might not want to end post code catchment areas will help you at your next meeting into the matter. I wouldn't want to think you go in uninformed and make a massive expensive cock-up on behalf of the tax-payers!

What is really valuable?

Who do you respect? If you could swap your life with someone elses, who would you have wanted to be? Edmund Hilary, Neil Armstrong, Mother Theresa, Michael Jordan?
We have a distorted way of judging other people. We think, "If only I was that person or had that person's money, I could...". What would you actually do if you had money on tap? Buy loads of junk like cars, houses, planes and yachts? Sure you would be able to do some cool stuff that you might not otherwise be able to but would that really be a wonderful life? You can't buy love but you attract a load of flies.
From a heavenly perspective, if you have led a single person to Christ, your life would be more fruitful and more valuable than any famous person who hasn't done the same. I won't name anybody because I don't know which famous people are or aren't Christians but how ever famous, rich, popular, talented or anything a person has been, however influential, whatever their famous legacy is, if they have not been instrumental in leading somebody from death to life, their life has had no heavenly value compared to your normal, run of the mill, average, obscure existence where you have actually led people to Christ. Can you imagine somebody like Simon Cowell with all his fame and fortune getting to judgement day and saying, "I wish I could swap my life with Luke Briner's so I had a lasting legacy" That doesn't seem like it would ever happen but in effect it will when we die and realise everything we had counts as nothing, only what we have invested in the Kingdom means anything!.
What does this mean? It means that the most glorious effect your life can have is taking people from an eternity in hell and leading them to Jesus who can take them into heaven. I would suggest you set your target at one person, always one person and then when they become Christians, target another. Don't try and save the world, do it one person at a time.

So Gordon is sorry then?

I read that Gordon Brown has apologized for the treatment of Alan Turing who was prosecuted for homosexual activity and committed suicide 2 years later. Gordon reckons that "while Mr Turing was dealt with under the laws of the time..." he also says, "his treatment, of course, was utterly unfair". Excuse me but who on earth is Gordon Brown to decree that all of the politicians and public petitioners of old who brought in these laws are all wrong and he is right? Why is it "of course" that liberal laws are correct and conservative ones are not?
Regardless of the actual law in question and whether I or he as an individual agrees with it, the job of the government is to execute government now not for the past. Unfortunately there aren't any of these people who died for whatever laws they used to have to appear in parliament and give Gordon Brown another tongue lashing like he usually gets in PMs Questions every week.
The government's ego knows no bounds. The wise man would have said, "sorry but what happened happened under another government in another time and I am not in a position to undo that".
Does Mr Turing deserve a posthumous honour for his work? By all means. The honour is for his achievements not his personal life whether that was 'illegal' or not but Brown, try running the country properly before muddying the waters of everything that comes your way!

Guilty till presumed innocent

Well, there is always plenty to moan about and today is no exception. Another hair-brained government scheme designed to protect child from paedophiles but which of course will cost an awful lot of money and no doubt do anything except generate more paperwork and more mistakes. The article here basically extends the criminal records check for people who drive for clubs like their children's football clulb. As if the farce of CRBs is not already understood, the problem is that the scheme has the appearance of something useful, surely we want to protect our children from abuse? Of course we do but the problem as always is in the implementation. I would like to see a cost/benefit analysis since I am sure it wouldn't hold up. Here are some scenarios:

1. Somebody has been accused of some sort of abuse and is barred from working with children. Well apart from the unacceptable presumption of guilt, it is a case of one or two false accusations and the rest of someones life is in tatters.
2. Somebody with accusations who is actually a danger (like Ian Huntley) might well not be considered a risk and be allowed to work with children which defeats the whole point.
3. The 99.99% of people who are not a danger have to pay and administer the scheme like people have to do currently for CRB checks for no reason other than a paranoid government making a paranoid society.

I would like to know exactly how many cases of abuse were caused by such scenarios in a way that this scheme would have definitively prevented. I suspect very few if any. I also do not like the line, "if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about" because it is patently not true in more than a few instances. If I get told I have to have an ID card to work at church with children, I will stop working with children because I despise a government who is sure they know what is best for everyone and muck it up so often!

The wasted money is sickening

Right, another rant I'm afraid, this one courtesy of no-one in particular, just general incompetence and the government's love affair with wasting money at a staggering level. First let me ask a question. If you were to suggest spending money improving school buildings for economical and aesthetic reasons. What would you do and how much would it cost? I would probably spend up to about a million quid getting a national team together putting together some computer models and working out some industry standard costings for things like double-glazing and room re-fits etc and then let councils use these to work out whether certain work is value for money or not.
Now, what would the government permit? Look here. They would tell councils to look into it and assume they will spend about 3% of the money on 'consultants' which they have done to the tune of £170M. Now, I don't mind big numbers to achieve big things. Investment and all that is good for long-term situations but honestly £170M? You pay people who know how to charge large sums for knowledge that to be honest exists outside of this exclusive club of thieves. To be honest, you could pay a local experienced builder even some quantity surveyors some money or better still, provide a contract job for someone in the industry which will cost, let's say £100,000 each county council and which will not add up to anything like the money spent. But oh no, because we are the government and we can promise ludicrous amounts of money to be magic'd up from nowhere we don't care about value-for-money. God help the next government have to deal with all the debt we have accrued from the happy-go-spending Labour party.

Karma?

I told a friend about my typical but crazy journey through the "computer controlled" traffic lights of Cheltenham going to Gloucester yesterday. I met 13 red lights and 6 greens (2 of which were pelicans). He said that it was karma getting its own back on me for my anti-traffic light blog. If I believed in karma I would agree but I don't which leaves me with the belief in incompetence at County Hall (whoops, nearly misspelled it to something rude but funny!).

More data loss, again, another time, etc.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/02/uk_eu_data_menace/
Nice, a story about another loss of important computer data, in this instance the supplier of a government gateway data system had a load of access codes on a USB stick and dropped it in a car park. Of course, the person will probably be sacked but again, I protest, that so-called system experts are missing the basics of data security. I have gone through them before but:

People make mistakes so design the system so they can't

Rather than the old excuse, "well never mind, mistakes happen" which gets touted a lot by the government (because they make lots of mistakes) we should build things in a way that prevents those mistakes or at least makes them unfeasibly hard. You wouldn't take all the windows out of a school building and then when a child falls out and dies say, "well never mind, mistakes happen". You put railings in because you know that mistakes happen, you might even put the windows back in!

Software and computer systems are no different. If you do not want people to take copies of personal data (and you generally don't) you only physically allow authorised machines to connect in and they have their USB ports and disk drives locked-out. You run in a terminal window so you cannot copy things to your local hard drive or you simply do not allow things like copy and paste. Not rocket science honestly. What happens then is that someone has to take a photo of the screen (unless you set the contrast low!) at which point you know they have done something totally unacceptable which is not the case with a USB drive ("I just needed to take this home to work on the login screen").

The principle of least privilege should be at work but I am still convinced that most IT companies don't have a clue about it.

M5 Roadworks, Tewkesbury

I wondered what these guys were doing on the M5 near where I work. They have setup major roadworks and we are talking a temporary base with about 10 portacabins of offices, lanes narrowed and all sorts of stuff. My mate told me they were strengthening 3 bridges but since these bridges are pretty rural types, I wasn't convinced.
Well, the truth is, they have planned 26 weeks for the work!! Yes, that's right, 6 months to strengthen 3 small bridges, all within a couple of kilometres of each other. Apparently one was struck by a vehicle (but is still in use) but please!
I've seen people replace railway bridges in a day and with cranes clever techniques, the obvious thing would be to remove the old bridges and crane in new ones, a couple of days of hassle for the people who usually drive over them (could have been done in the summer) and almost no hassle for the motorway drivers.
What is this country coming to. Goodness knows how much money this is costing!!

Living in the Spiritual

I thought it was time I stopped moaning about things that are unlikely to change and write something more thought provoking. Well, I have started reading a book about a guy called Rees Howells who was a famous intercessor and learnt very deep lessons about effective prayer and generally being totally submitted to God in every area of his life.
I realised as I was reading that I as well as many Christians are not even close to the sort of life and attitude that would make us really effective as Christians. When we pray, we often pluck prayer points off the top of our head and pray for all kinds of stuff, only to wonder why they are not always answered. If Jesus only said and did what His Father did, then shouldn't we do the same. These sorts of prayers are betrayed by people saying things like, "please keep them safe" when Jesus assured us that as Christians we would experience exactly the opposite since the world hates us (or should hate us). At best the prayer is pointless, at worse it damages our understanding of how God works and teaches those around us that God is the God of safety and comfort rather than suffering and discipline.
Another area where we often fall short is just in the day to day 'ministries' that we are involved in. If the spiritual world is more real than the physical and if the cross should be at the centre of our life, if we cannot please God without faith and if everything we do should be for the glory of God, why do we suppose that we can do 95% of it in human strength? We like to say things like, "God has given us common sense" or "I was led to do this" but what about the fact that God is not a God of recipes and tick boxes. What is correct for one person is not necessairly correct for another and just because God wanted you to feed the homeless yesterday doesn't mean that he now wants you to do that indefinitely. Do we honestly approach every situation in prayer? Do we even strive for it? Do we actually know what God's voice sounds like or do we rely on other people, emotional church experiences or theological knowledge to work out our next step in life?
I fear that we put too much emphasis on theological type learning and far too little on practical work related to hearing God's voice, dealing with blockages in our Christian life and learning how to be dynamic and Spirit led.
God be praised that He hasn't given up on us!!

Incompetents of the week - O2

Well, I had to share these guys stupidity with the world. Now don't get me wrong, people make mistakes which is fine but a company this size should either 1) Have noticed these problems earlier and done something about them or 2) provide a rock solid way of logging the faults so they can be resolved, neither of which are true in this case.
I got an email saying my bill was ready to an old email account so I thought I would update my details and point them to the new email. I clicked on the link in the emai but being a suspicious person, I decided to type o2.co.uk into the address bar and navigate from there. I got to the details page and first thing I noticed was that the mobile they had for me was some number I had about 10 years ago! (despite them sending the bill for my new mobile number to this address!). Anyway i changed them and tried their "find my address link" and got some error which promptly also removed the values I had just typed in (web development 101, always check that fields are retained when an error is displayed). OK, assumed it was not working so I free-typed my address, retyped the other fields and tried again, same error, "You must type in a house number or name". Wonderful, I had - idiots. (WD 101, test that any changes you make have not broken the functionality of the page). OK well most people would have thought, sod it, they have 10 year old information already, they might as well have 15 year old wrong data and waste my subscription money storing it (WD 101 - do not store personal data unless you need it and use it, make sure it is checked for correctness otherwise delete it).
I decided to give some feedback to the team who might, let us assume, already know there are website problems. Could I find a link? Nope. I tried searching for all manner of things and couldn't find it. I tried "asking Lucy" who kept saying she didn't understand the question, obviously they modelled her on a genuine call-centre operator. The contact us page was blank, even when Lucy said, "I don't understand, use these links to contact us" the links didn't do anything. Several of the pages looked like the layout had been broken even a link from google for web site contact went to some funny error page. A bad day for O2 online. Well I could have given up and give O2 the undeserved accolade of having no complaints about its shoddiness but I thought I would go the extra mile. I sent an email to webmaster@o2.co.uk, not sure yet whether that will work and then decided to call O2 and tell them I couldn't use the website. I called the Cust Services number and go something like 1 to change account details and billing, 2 to upgrade or leave 3 for something else and 4 for the iphone. Right, what do I select? I didn't press anything and got the message again. I thought afterwards it might register a problem and say, "please hold for an operator" (like they usually do) but no, I got the message again. Eventually I hung up and found an online form to feedback about the website to O2 which I filled in.
O dear. To fail in one area is understandable, to fail in 2 is sloppy and to fail in all of them is incompetence. O2, I don't care that you are part of Telefonica because your services suck. Sort it out!

Cheap Patents

I was reading about some farce situation in America where Microsoft have been sued and found guilty by a Court for infringing a patent and fined £175M and also ordered to stop selling MS Word in America. Why? because according to the court, MS have infringed a patent that covers using XML in computer documents like the new MSXML format used in Office (and also other formats used in suites like OpenOffice).
Personally I like to think of MS as the big bully of the software world like everyone else but in this instance, I think it shows up again the problem with the patent system. A patent is to legally protect a good idea. It has to be something novel, not just a play on an existing theme but here is the rub, it only has to be an idea. I can sit at home, come up with idea and do nothing with it other than patent it and hope someone else wants to buy the idea from me.
If indeed the company who filed the patent were commercial, they should have done something with the idea by now and not be allowed to enforce a patent. In software, it is easy to come up with ideas to patent. Why don't I patent using eye-movements to play computer games (except it probably already is) just because it is an obvious next step and then some company can buy the idea from me?
It needs to be overhauled. It's not like Frank Whittle patenting a jet engine which he is developing and doesn't want someone else to copy for a while but software patents? honestly. Let people maybe have a year or so to do something with the idea, perhaps develop it into something practical and if not, the patent is void!! MS, I hope you win the appeal against the stupid conviction.

How to get quality in Important Systems

One of my biggest gripes about British industry is our seeming lack of concern for quality and at least our inability to understand the basics. If you do not understand quality, why are you surprised when things get lost/stolen/broken?
Well here are some tips about quality, some baseline assumptions which you need to consider when planning a quality policy or just plain old development processes.

1. People make mistakes. It doesn't matter how experienced they are. People don't consider all possible uses and abuses of a system so make sure you have a way of checking work. This doesn't guarantee lack of mistakes but reduces the likelihood.
2. If you reduce the likelihood of problems over a whole range of 'attack surfaces' then you will massively reduce the likelihood of problems. For instance, if you have a web site, it is not enough to lock-down the web page itself. You need to lock down every level from the web site right down to the hardware running it. This allows someone to break the front end but still not get anything useful.
3. You cannot predict the future. Just because something works now, does not mean it won't be broken in the future by someone more determined/able/with faster computers.
4. Nobody is expert in everything. Get a range of people with different expertise to look at all the different facets.
5. Don't forgo testing. People who develop products rarely use them in the way that an end user would. They find problems that an end user wouldn't and miss things that would easily be found by basic testing in a real-life scenario.
6. If something goes wrong in the finished product analyse what happened and work out how you can change things to avoid it happening again. For instance, was it caused by someone too junior making the final decision, you might decide to run all ideas past someone more senior but ask honestly whether the problem would have been avoided rather than trying to blame people.
7. Listen to the people at the bottom of the pecking order. If they have ideas to improve things, honestly find out whether they would and implement them. Don't have that "manager knows best" mentality because they don't!
8. Spend time looking around for what other people do/use in similar cicumstances. Perhaps you need some training/tools/people.
9. You might have to spend money! Don't expect world class products on a garden shed budget.
10. Don't make loads of big changes. Quality should be incremental. Start with a decent foundation and then make small changes over time so that quality always increases. Identify redundant parts of the process and get rid of them.
    

The Great British Rail Ticket Farce

Buying train tickets should be really simple. You buy a return between two stations right? Well, if you want the cheapest tickets, it is not that simple. Here is a simple and general guide to saving money on tickets.
Firstly, there is a general balance between the cheapness of the ticket and its flexibility. In other words if you want to travel at any time on any train, these tickets will cost more than if you name a train(s) and travel after the rush hour so a good general rule is to try and book ahead as much as possible. Bear in mind that depending on other factors such as engineering works, you might not be able to book all of these advance tickets (since the company might not know if your named train is going to run). Generally more than 2 weeks in advance allows you to get cheap tickets on a first come, first served basis (some trains seem to only have about 50 available).
Secondly, after privatisation, the government decided to protect certain ticket prices from being overinflated by the train operating companies and pricing everybody of the trains. These tickets such as "saver" tickets and most season tickets are tied to inflation + 1% currently and are often good value for money. However, because the train companies don't like having their prices dictated, some offer single tickets that are cheaper than half a "saver return" to entice people from the government protected tickets (and perhaps one day get rid of the protected ones?). Always check on a return if two singles are cheaper but bear in mind that again due to availability, you might be restricted to certain trains if you want the cheapest singles and usually the singles are for a single train company and might restrict the route that you are allowed to travel.
The third and most bizarre condition is related to the way in which fares are calculate that run over more than one company's rails. Although the track is owned by Network Rail, for fares, it is treated as being owned by the main operator over that line who get to say how much it costs to run over that section. This can create savings for 2 reasons. 1 is that each company charges different amounts of money for similar routes and the other is that you are allowed to travel, using standard tickets, any reasonable route between two places. For instance, if you buy a ticket from London to Glasgow, you could travel from Kings Cross, Euston or St Pancras even though the fare will be based on only one route. The clever thing to do here is to "break your journey". As long as your train stops at a station (you do not have to alight) you can buy a set of tickets to cover the whole journey rather than one return ticket. This enables you to take advantage of off-peak returns (cheap day return), saver returns (limited in distance) and journeys over cheaper lengths of track. For example, suppose you need to go from Cheltenham to Weymouth for the day but you need to leave at 9:15. You cannot buy a cheap day ticket because it is before 9:30 so generally you would end up with a saver return which is about £30. You change trains at Bristol so by getting a standard return from Cheltenham to Bristol and then a cheap day return from Bristol to Weymouth, you save about £5. Note that the train must call where you "break the journey" but you do not have to alight at that station. With a bit of investigation, you can potentially save hundreds of pounds. The ticket office must sell you these sets of tickets but they will not usually offer them to you because they say it takes too much time.
Let me leave you with an example that Barry Doe the expert recounted on the BBC web site. You want to travel first class return to Manchester so the open first return is about £220 BUT you can alternatively buy a first return from London to Falkirk (yes in Scotland and which is set by East Coast railways) which is £100 cheaper and then you opt to choose the west coast route via Manchester and get off at Manchester. Bargain.

More wind power - I love it (not)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/22/wind_intermittency_study/

Not sure why but people who are practical about such things as saving the planet don't seem to given much of a voice or they are labelled as cynics or nay-sayers but unfortunately, it is the practical people who have the job of planning these projects for power generation into the next century and they cannot plan on airy-fairy ideas or idealism. It seems fair enough to say that England could benefit from a lot of wind energy. The wind is reasonably common here and we could tap it BUT, BIG BUT, it cannot be relied on 24 horus per day 365 days per year yet the energy requirement for the country although it varies, is still required all the time. The report mentioned above basically says you cannot have a large amount of wind energy making up your output, only as much as the other power stations can make up for if the wind dies. The only way you could use wind effectively would be to use it for things like water heating or battery charging where drops in the output would not have an immediate or drastic effect but people don't talk about that. In addition, you need to litter the countryside with these things and although they have an architecural elegance, you wouldn't build the Gherkin building in the middle of the Cotswolds so why build turbines? They are not massively powerful for their intrusive size and there is only so much energy available in the wind in the best case at the optimum speed. So overall, their output might only be 40% of their rated output (or less) over a year. This means installing 100Gw to get 40Gw on average (perhaps 100Gw some times and 0 at others!).
We need to forget this white elephant and look at more useful things like reducing energy consumption in houses (existing as well as new builds) and installing things like solar water heaters as standard which are massively useful to most people!
Bring the revolution.

To Privatise or not to Privatise

Was reading about National Express having their East Coast franchise taken back by the government for underperforming or something. Everyone blames everyone else. Government blames the company, the company blame the lack of people due to recession, the people blame the government for privatising it. I'm sure a lot of people don't actually understand the theory of privatisation and why it was done like it was so here goes:
Railways are expensive to run. Governments don't like spending money on anything other than expenses, hospitals, schools and the army so when people in the Tory government went over the papers, they didn't like the amount of money it cost to run them, especially since the public had to pay to use them so why were they still costing a few hundred million per year? Of course, it is because to provide a service, you have to have regular trains even when not many people are travelling. You hope that the rush hour pays for these ghost services but what if they don't? What do you cut? You cut a service and some people will stop using your trains which is even less income albeit with less services to pay for (ignoring the fact that you are probably still employing the driver and own the train). In order to avoid this, the government helps prop it up. Also the Tories thought (apparently incorrectly) that the railways were inefficient and wasteful. I have read however that for the level of subsidy from the government, good old BR were the most efficient in Europe and this despite the ups and downs of government investment. Logical conclusion? Run it all privately, the private companies can run stuff for zero government investment, charge whatever they need to (but kept in check) and then use their private initiative to make cost savings so everyone is happy. There were loads of problems with the system however, the assumption that it is possible to run a service that is both cost effective and convenient, both of which were required, is at best ambitious and at worst simply untrue. This is what happened in the 60s when the government decided that underused lines simply had to close to the chagrin of those affected. Secondly, to get competition to force people to keep costs down, you need capacity on the lines, something we basically don't have in many places, the monopoly of services on most routes means that there is little competition. Also, in order to tempt people who would not have invested the massive amounts required, everything was sold off cheap to the private companies and because they wanted competition, the government decided that they needed Railtrack to own the infrastructure and lease it back to the operating companies. Of course, they could charge whatever they needed to and since the level of safety etc was down to Railtrack, their costs were huge and the operating companies were paying hundreds of millions per year. It doesn't end. Buying trains is hugely expensive for someone on a 5 or 10 year lease so they get hired from leasing companies who again can make large profits without much come back.
What do I think? I don't know. Re-nationalise it and you risk government interference like you get in schools and the NHS (and the railways in fact) and you get variable investment year-on-year depending on the governments priorities. You also get that sad but true fact that public companies are generally unaccountable for waste and are difficult to keep productive. Not sure why but they are. What do we do? We need to look at it and decide what is the one best model for our situation and decide whether it will always be the best model so we can stop changing it all the time, we have had 4 eras of railways plus the war years and every change is incredibly expensive. Perhaps the government need to accept the thing is expensive and just pay for it.

Hypocrisy or not?

From BBC News:

It also said the [BNP] website asked job applicants to supply a membership number, which appeared to be in breach of legislation banning the "refusal or deliberate omission to offer employment on the basis of non-membership of an organisation". The statement added: "The commission is therefore concerned that the BNP may have acted, and be acting, illegally."

and in the same paragraph:

"On Monday, the Department for Children, Schools and Families said it was considering banning teachers in England from joining the BNP."

So will the Equality and Human Right's commission investigate the government and uphold teachers' right to join the BNP, which is after all a legal political party? Sounds like another case of, "You can believe what you want as long as we agree with it".

The cost of going to the airport.

I live in Cheltenham, I am going to Gatwick Airport on July 3rd for a 2 week holiday. Various return options:

Coach to Oxford and catch a lift: 5hrs 5m to Oxford (via Bristol) and then... forget it
The train via Reading: 3hrs 20m £148!!
A taxi: £120 each way 2hrs 30m
Hire cars: £110 2hrs 30m + hassle picking up/dropping off
Airport parking: £125 2hrs 30m + getting from car park to airport
Coach: £35 4hrs 30m
My car and park somewhere away from Gatwick and get a train in: £47 2hrs 30m

Guess which one I will be doing!!! What a joke, the train was ridiculous, wouldn't mind if it only took 5 minutes and you paid for the priviledge, I think you could cycle in less time (it's about 120 miles). The coach is not too bad but takes a long time (you have to go all the way off the M25 into Heathrow and wait 35 minutes to then come all the way back out, this must add at least 50 minutes to the journey time but fair enough).

MORE personal data lost

Well done Parcelforce, you managed to not only expose people's names and addresses but some signatures too!!
What is staggering is that despite this being a very easy thing to happen with a simple coding error or lack of checking of what people type in, there are no specific legal requirements for people who run these sites. They should at very least require accreditation that ensures there are processes and systems in place to adequately test any changes etc and ensure that by procedure, these mistakes are rectified. There's no point threatening action under the Data Protection Act since 1) It is rarely enforced anyway and 2) It does not address the base problem of having no enforced guidelines for websites and justs wastes money.
An organisation called OWASP are a community based organisation whose specific aim is to development and maintain standards for secure principles. It wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to make these mandatory in a particular way and what is shocking is that we have an office (OPSI) whose job is to look after this sort of thing and obviously doesn't have much of clue because this is only about the 100th time something like this has happened. I'm not sure if there is a government minister though although I don't know whether that is good or bad.

Elf and Safety

I was just reading a report about 'elf and safety' in schools and how many teachers felt that it was getting in the way of children's development - no surprise there. What still really irritates me is that Risk Assessments are quite obviously not being carried out for things that have been banned. There are different ways to assess risk but the most straight-forward is to mark 1-5 for the likelihood that something will happen and 1-5 for the seriousness of the injury that would result and then multiply them together. You can then decide at what score you would expect to mitigate the risk. An example would be falling from a building on a construction site when bricklaying. Likelihood quite high, let's say 4 and seriousness, well on some sites death would be possible so it would have to be 5. A score of 20 is very high and would (and does) require mitigation. Erecting barriers or fall-arrest systems and you could probably take the likelihood down to 1 or the severity to 1 or 2 which gives a score of 5-8 which is low enough to be acceptable.
Let us look conversely at something like "running in the playground being banned". OK, we need to be careful, we are talking about the most serious outcome which would be perhaps a broken bone so 3 and the likelihood (of THIS injury, not ALL injuries) perhaps 1. That gives us a score of 3 which does NOT warrant a ban.
How ridiculous that these people have the power the dictate people's lives when they appear to be lacking the brain-cells to work it out properly!! Let the children play!!!

Good logic, bad logic

The world sadly to say is still full of poor logic and poorly argued decisions. ID Cards, NHS computers, the Millenium Dome etc. are excused with shoddy logic and opinions with little or no backup information. Sometimes some faux data is used to backup an argument when the weakness is more than obvious to the casual observer. For instance, a recent survey of Teaching Assistants said that a high percentage of them were expected to carry out tasks they were not trained for such as medical work. The number of respondents was 150 so already the data is weakly representative unless it can be considered a good representation of the population (usually achieved by including both genders across a large part of the country in different schools). However, did anyone else assume that the sort of people likely to fill in the forms are the sort of people who are concerned about something in which case the results are likely to show a high cause of concern.
Another thing I saw today was review of an encrypted USB stick that automatically encrypts everything you write to it in case it gets stolen. The reviewer concluded that because it was so expensive, for a fraction of the price, you could simply encrypt the data yourself and write it to a cheap stick instead. Sadly that is purely an economic argument. Hardware encryption is faster but the key to this argument is that the user does not have to do anything special or run any extra programs etc. If it is used, it is basically foolproof and that is the key to a secure product. You have a DIY job and guaranteed the one time that the user doesn't have time to encrypt the data is when it is lost or stolen and once the data is out, it is out, it cannot be retrieved from the public arena and re-hidden!
I wish people would think more about stuff, be objective and expect people to backup their arguments with good data, then we can concentrate on the parts of the decision which are subjective and not waste time on what should be a no-brainer.

Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown said fast internet was now "an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water".

What an idiot.

Wind Power again!

I read this article about a proposed wind farm in Australia. It will cover a staggering 120 square miles and wait for it, provide electricity for 4.5% of the houses in New South Wales. 4.5% of the homes in one state. No offence but what a waste of space and money (even if they have loads of space). A massive amount of cost for such a tiny amount of power. For the techie aware amongst you, it amounts to approximately 4 watts per square metre of land area (maximum!) compared to the suns energy of up to 1,000 watts per square metre. Australia being where it is, you would have thought one of those solar concentration schemes or even standard solar panels or solar water heating systems would make a much bigger impact. Most energy in the home is used for heating so why not utilise what the sun does well?
For me, it is sadly another pointless chasing after some unattainable ideal in the wrong way!!

Money Advice in Hard Times

Lots of people I know say they have money problems and lots of these have never done the most basic thing - working out how much you spend on the essentials. Here is a simple exercise (use a spreadsheet or a piece of paper).
Write down how much money goes into your bank when you get paid (figure 1). Now make a list of all the items you pay out every month: rent, mortgage, bills on direct debit, petrol if it is fairly consistent, food, TV, Phone bill, council tax etc. Look at your statement to make sure you have everything. Include amounts for credit card/loan repayments a good amount over the minimum to make sure they get paid off. Add these together (figure 2). Now make a list of all expensive things you have to pay for less regularly: car tax, mot, insurances/bills that don't get paid every month. Add these all together and divide by twelve (figure 3) you might be surprised how high this is. Everything on your bank statements apart from random spending (going out, holidays, alcohol) should be in one of these lists.
Right, now subtract figures 2 and 3 from figure 1:
£1,500 - £800 - £300 = £400. This is your expendable income but don't get too happy yet. I then recommend you do the following:
1) Set up a standing order to pay the figure 3 amount into a savings account every month, this means all your big once per year bills are covered (after some time anyway).
2) Save at least something else into a separate savings account for holidays/unforeseen expenses etc, even £50 per month is better than nothing.
3) Decide how much spending money is reasonable for EVERYTHING else i.e. treats, eating out, going drinking etc. and withdraw this money in cash after you get paid. This is then the only money you will spend in the month, make sure it is not the remainder of your money or when you get a slightly higher food bill etc you might end up spending more than you earn at which point you will have problems again. After time, see how your finances go and you might either have some more money to put into savings for a treat/house deposit/new car etc or you might adjust your calculations if you get an insurance discount, lower rent etc.

It's real simple so spend 30 minutes and you could avoid the hassle of always having no money. Knowledge is power!

Wind farms - the continued debate

I saw another article about wind energy and interesting reading it made too: here.
It is always the comments that interest me. There are far too many armchair experts who not only voice, let us say, healthy pessimism or support but who spit out massively dogmatic statements that to be frank are misplaced.
For instance, the author of the article says that the claim that the new wind energy site will supply 180,000 houses is misleading since this would be only if the windmills supplied the electricity, if they were to supply all the energy required, the figure would be more like 35,000 homes. That is very correct, a common spin technique exposed for what it is. That didn't stop the comments though about how the government never 'claimed' it would supply all the energy to the homes but of course that is exactly what people read and presumably what was intended.
It still agitates me that people spout such nonsense in what will end up being a debate based in nothing more than spin, rhetoric and witch-doctoring instead of pragmatic economics and science which it should.
One of the comments was along the lines of, "anti-green rubbish, presumably you are suggesting we use fossil fuels until they run out". What an idiotic statement. So pointing out the errors in a system is the same as ignoring the problem? Nope.
Someone else starts a tirade about the costs of "tropical storm damage and freak weather events" which is of course not only conjecture but again misses the point that the problem is not in question, just the wisdom of the solution.
Then other people start saying we should all be using peat or wood burners and then the problem would be OK. Yeah nice idea, can't see it working in an office block in Central London though!
It would be nice if the government employed more pragmatic people to shovel all this BS out the way to make room for the real arguments and then let the public know that they know what they are doing. We can only dream....

Performance Bonuses

I was reading that Iain Coucher of Network rail has decided to forego his performance bonus this year to avoid any criticism of NRs performance. I've suddenly thought how ridiculous the idea of bonuses is, certainly above a certain bar. In some ways I can understand the idea of a bit of money at Christmas etc because the company did well but why do we pay people for doing what they should be doing anyway? If I employ a Chief Executive and she spots some waste in the company and sorts it out, that is what she should do and what I pay her for. Why do I then give her extra money for this which implies that if I didn't, she wouldn't bother.
These people sometimes get a few hundred thousand pounds per year to manage large companies. Fair enough. Giving them extra - forget about it, let's change our culture back to one of hard work, honesty and proficiency and forget this nonsense we have introduced.

Sleep walking into the ID Card State

I was reading with continued disbelief today that the government are still pressing in with the ID card scheme amongst their totally unfounded claims on the benefits: That they will help prevent terrorism and keep illegal immigration under control as well as preventing fraud.
Why is it that our system of government doesn't allow somebody to tell them to stop lying and have a ruling that means they can no longer make misleading statements without independently having them verified. For instance, despite a lot of academic work, many creationists are considered charlatans and misleaders and they have done a million times more homework than the government. How can they be allowed to make statements based on opinion or biased reports, have we not learnt anything? We will sleep walk into ID cards despite the lies unless we make more effort to tell our MPs what we think of their hair-brained schemes.
Terrorism? Well I believe all the people who have committed serious terrorist offences in the UK either have permission to be in the UK or are known to police already. ID cards no use there. Illegal Immigration? Well even without ID cards it is easy to find these people with enough staff and willing, Oh yeah and the ability to deport when caught, none of which is actually true. ID cards make no difference there. Fraud? Well seeing as you will be able to get them made at thousands of high-street places, how on earth do you prevent somebody from doing a little sideline in dodgy ID cards? There is absolutely no way to prevent it. Legal deterrents as we all know do not stop everyone from committing crime, it might persuade a few people if they knew the sentence would actually be passed.
Criminal!!

Selfish Mobile Using Drivers

I reckon I see on average 2 drivers every day driving while using mobile phones on the 25 minute journey from home to work. Usually more in the morning than the evening but still on both journeys.
These include van drivers (DHL, I've seen you twice), skip lorries, luton vans even articulated lorry drivers and this morning, a tractor driver, as well as car drivers! In fact, I think it is only bus and coach drivers I have never seen using them although I don't see many buses and coaches anyway.
The police are hopelessly ineffective in this regard otherwise people wouldn't do it. Usually you can see the police a mile away in their helpfully reflective cars so plenty of time to hide the phone or hang up. Commercial vehicle drivers face a fine of up to £3000 since their vehicles are much more dangerous in a crash.
I'm now trying to work out if I can fit a hidden camera to my car and starting to name and shame people.
A hands free costs a few pounds there really is NO excuse for using the mobile so be warned. Stop now or have the police visit when they see your photo and number plate on this blog!!

The Best Drummer in the World

It is one of those real dumb questions, well meaning but misguided. "Who is the best drummer in the world". It is like asking who is the best footballer or who is the best sportsperson. There are so many different skills and types of drumming that one person is not best at all of them. What we need are categories that we can group people into. For instance: Fastest drummer; Most versatile drummer; Time signature master; most varied playing; most driving drummer; most flexible footwork; most musical drummer; best recording production etc.
Then we can decide who we want to listen to in order to be inspired in a particular way.
I enjoy rock drummers but I quite enjoy the jazz elements that add a lot of interest to drumming. Every now and then I hear something special and something with a lot of dynamics and construction rather than a steady plodding metronome of a drum beat. That is cool.
Anyway, I am yet to hear many people touch Gav Harrison on his general ability in many areas. At the end of the day, the music sounds great and the drums are a large part. I used to think Neil Peart was real top quality but now I find his drumming for the most part was quite straight whereas Gav's is varied, versatile and interesting.

The Reason we can rely on God

I was knocking together some thoughts the other day for a friend who is having a hard time with the whole "who am i" and "what is the point of life" type questions. They have a belief in God but they don't really know how it should pan out.
Anyway, I stumbled across a few things that I thought were really significant so I thought I should record them.
I don't have the space here to go into massive depth but one of the things is that we need to understand our position in Christ. We were sinners, we come to Christ, we do not become 'good people' we merely become vessels for Jesus. This means that God has forgiven us because of Jesus and it also means the important point is to allow Jesus to use us rather than thinking we need to 'learn' how to be better people. This is human religion and does not work. It also means that you do not have to be 'good' to be a Christian. It also means that you do not cease to be a Christian because you struggle with things.
Another point was that we need to remind ourselves why Jesus died. If we can become good people (even with Jesus' 'help') His death was meaningless. He could have helped us without dying. His death is actually for our death to sin. Only by this can we be free to allow Jesus to take control.
A major thing that I guess I hadn't thought of before was about how God has based our new life on the death of Christ and on our baptism as the mechanism to move into it. Why is that important? Because it is historical fact and not based on the current state of our life. (Well at least if you are baptised). This should give us hope because our relationship with God and our Christian new life does not come and go with the seasons or our mood or situation or our trials and temptations. None of those things change anything between us and God. It means we always have a foundation, a baseline, something to rely on in all situations and it means that we can forget that damaging thought process which says that because I am feeling distant or under pressure that my relationship with God has been damaged.
It is not damaged. It might be a bit quiet but it is based on only God's plans and not on us so it cannot be damamged by circumstances. This means that we are always a few seconds away from closeness with God again. It means we don't have to reject ourselves because of our situation since God hasn't!! Sweet.

What is Democracy?

I wondered what democracy is. You might have though that it is based on the fact that if the majority of people want something then it is made so. Doesn't seem to be true though. I heard today that the government are planning to flood Google search results with non-extreme Islamic sites so that hardline ones are harder to find. The government really don't understand do they? If people in certain Muslim countries want to be hard-liners don't they have the right to do that? Isn't that democracy (as long as they don't commit crimes in other countries of course). What if they don't want democracy and want a dictator to rule everything to keep order, are they not entitled to that? What about if we all don't want the Iraq invasion, is that what happens? What happens if Christians want to believe that evolution is not true in the sense it is often reported and that God created the world, can they not believe that?
The reality is there are lots of forces dictating exactly what you can and can't do, what you are allowed to believe and what influence you actually have on the government and society. The only difference between me and someone else is that they think they are free to do whatever and I know that people are sinful and try to fit their management or government to their own beliefs about what is and what isn't allowed.
This my friends is the knowledge of good and evil, the lack of asking God about what is what and simply deciding for ourselves. It's not like we really know anything about the world at the end of the day - whoever we are.

Indirect hot water systems

You may have found on your heating system that when you have the hot water switched on and the heating off, some or all of the radiators still get warm. It seems really wrong and you might suspect a leaking 3-port valve or similar but usually the problem is much more mundane.
It is caused by hot water in the return pipe from cycinder to boiler convecting up into radiators naturally. The radiators will heat up only slowly and once the water cylinder is hot, the boiler will switch off but it is still a bit of a waste.
What can you do? You can fit check valves to the return pipes on the radiators or ideally fit less of them right next to the main return pipe rather than one per rad which might be excessive. Make sure you point them the correct way (towards the return pipe) and I would avoid double-check valves since the single check ones require enough pressure to open that I wouldn't want to overload the pump.
I did it the other day on a 22mm pipe which was the return for 3 radiators and now they don't get hot unless the heating is on.
Energytastic!

More insanity in the made-up numbers department

I was just reading this about people claiming the amount of global cybercrime outstripped the international drug trade by $1T against $400Bn. As the reporter pointed out, do they expect us to believe that the global cybercrime trade is higher than Saudi Arabias annual domestic product of $555Bn from 2007. As if.
What particularly troubled me was the comment by security firm Finjan about justifying the touting of these numbers: "In our Q1 2009 report on cybercrime, for example, we revealed that one single rogueware network are raking in $10,800 a day, or $39.42 million a year," it said. "If you extrapolate those figures across the many thousands of cybercrime operations that exist on the Internet at any given time, the results easily reach a trillion dollars."
Can anyone else see the problem here? These people are supposed to be experts and not even their statistics make any sense. I am not a statistician or an economist but let us expose the error in their logic.
1) The example they used of a company taking in $11K per day would not have been making this every day for a year. They would more than likely either been tracked down and shut down or their source of revenue would have dried up as virus-checkers are updated or stolen credit card details are blocked.
2) This example of a company would be at the high end of cybercrime. Most people who write worms either don't make any money or certainly not as much as they might want and certainly not $11 per day. How many people would really make that much in a day amongst the 'many thousands of operations'? Not many!
So the evidence that was probably "company X made $11K in a day last year" becomes "every cybercrime company makes $11K every day of every year" it has been multiplied by 365 and then by thousands. To think these people probably get paid!!

"people with nothing to hide wouldn't be so opposed to them"

I read the title in an article about Polygraph machines or 'lie detectors' and it reminded me of similar things I had read about ID cards, routine DNA testing and just about everything else that a government churns out for 'our security'. The problem is that the phrase is so common, most people won't notice that the logic is very much flawed.
The logic to the statement is based on the assumption that the piece of equipment or system is 100% foolproof. If indeed a lie detector was 100% accurate then surely only a liar would be concerned with taking one (ignoring people who might *have* to tell lies like security services or government officials protecting the public). Of course the problem is that none of these things are foolproof.
Take a lie-detector for example. Suppose you were interviewed in a murder investigation and failed a lie-detector test. The information was then presented in a Court alongside other circumstantial or inconclusive evidence. You might very well be found guilty. Take ID cards, there could be any one of a number of technical errors that might make your card read as a fake or that would enable someone to copy it and make it look you were somewhere else to where you actually were etc. Imagine the DNA information from your routine test is mis-entered or polluted into the system and 'your' DNA is then found at a crime scene. Can you imagine getting out of that by accusing the system of a defect somewhere?
Quite honestly the original statement is nonsense and I for one will ensure I do not agree to any of these man-made systems that somehow promise our security at the expense of liberty, annonymity, money and security.

Wind Energy the Truth?

I've talked before about truth. Truth is absolute in most cases but what do we base our truth on? Most of the time it is based on other people's ideas, conjecture, experimentation or even lies and what a great area to visit this than wind energy. The reason I thought about it was after stumbling across http://www.windenergy-the-truth.com/ and reading through it. The good thing about a well thought out and presented treatise of the subject is you can then try and find any holes in the logic.
It is not enough for somebody simply to say, "wind farms are a good idea" or "wind farms are a bad idea" you need all the information. You are not just talking about potentially lots of money spent on something that is less than useful but electricity supply itself and all of the industry and services based on electricity, i.e. 99% of everything. We cannot afford to be blaze about something so important and I would invite others to read the article and comment on whether the man's conclusions are reasonable or not.

Walkers Crisps Competition

I have now tried all 6 proposed flavours of Walkers crisps and can safetly say the only ones I would buy are Fish and Chips. Builders Breakfast should be called Dogs Dinner, Chilli and Chocolate is NOT a good combination, Cajun Squirrel is OK but tastes just like Barbeque flavour. Onion bargee is OK but quite bitter, hoisin crispy duck has an accurate flavour but made me feel sick.
What I thought of was going to the Walkers site and saying that as well as liking Fish and Chips the most, I also wanted to deride some of the other entries. Polls are a bit rubbish in that regard which should be surprising since there are people who have degrees in things like marketing and information systems. A poll should allow negative as well as positive voting. If it was a general election, you might expect people who vote Labour would 'un-vote' the Tories and vice-versa but compare the following two sets of data, which would appear to demonstrate two quite different opinions:

Traditional Poll shows labour clearly more favourite
Labour 53,000
Tory 40,000
Lib Dem 20,000

My Poll
Labour 53,000 for, 120,000 against
Tory 40,000 for, 30,000 against
Lib Dem 20,000 for, 100,000 against

What would that tell you? That the opinion against is much more signficant than the opinion for. Who should be put into power with the above statistics? According to the first poll, Labour, according to the second, probably Tory. Makes you think.
On a similar note, remember the 2012 Olympics proposal. Many people I spoke to were either indifferent or opposed to the hassle or particularly the cost of staging the Olympics despite whatever feeble assurances the government gave (and which, surprise, surprise, have already been shown to be grossly wrong). When the bid was being put together, they showed a few hundred people in Trafalger Square going nuts when it was awarded to the UK. What about the other 60,000,000 people who either didn't want it or weren't interested? How were their views taken into account? In short they weren't. Just proves that the system does not want to know the truth, they want to spin whatever they can to conclude whatever they want.

Between the floors!

Have you ever thought about what is between your floors when you are doing building work? They are very important spaces so here is some wisdom:

1. Do not leave wood shavings in the gaps when you drill joists and floorboards, think how well that would go up in flames if you had a fire or electrical fault! Vacuum is your friend.


2. If you drill significant holes into a plaster ceiling, you have compromised its fire stopping ability and the building regs say you need to mitigate this. If you drill downlighters into the ceiling, either you must use the closed back ones which block fire (and cost more!) or put in a false ceiling to drill into or use a fire blocking device above the downlighter to prevent any compromise of the ceiling due to a fire.


3. If you can, fill the spaces with 'rockwool' type insulation which helps keep noises to a minimum, provides heat insulation so that warmer rooms are not heating up cooler rooms unintentionally and also it reduces the effects of drafts on potential fires - floor voids are wonderful places for fires because there are often drafts from leaky brickwork which if left un checked would feed a fire.


4. Make sure you know what you are allowed to do when notching or drilling joists for pipe and cables. You are not allowed to drill too large or too close together so find out from the building regulations guidelines. You do not want a joist to give way, especially one under a water tank, wall or bath which would go very quickly.


5. If you are pulling in cables or flexible pipes, invest in some fibre-glass pull rods. You can pull through voids that are perhaps 20 feet or more long without having to pull up any floorboards in the process.


6. If you drill outside from a floor void, close the gap afterwards with fire-rated expanding foam both to reduce chills from drafts, prevent vermin getting in and also reduce the effects of fire.


7. Watch out for noggins. They are (usually) blocks of wood which cross the void in an X shape and are to stop the joists twisting under load and over time. They can be a pain when pulling cables and pipes through. If you can raise an odd floorboard, do it near the noggins. Try and consider avoiding airlocks as well by passing water pipes under the noggins rather than over them (like I did!)

Heating, Thermostats and TRVs

I was fitting some heating controls last night and wondered about the best position for a room thermostat so did a little web search and found some big argument about whether a room thermostat (RT) is a good idea or not. Interestingly the Building Regs say you need one (or probably need one?) to comply with Part L (conservation of fuel and power) so you don't really get to decide if you want a legal house! Anyway, I dug a bit deeper and it is a good example of 'flawless' logic meets the big bad government when in reality the logic is flawed.
Most people were saying something like, 'how can a single RT add anything to heat sensors (TRVs) effectively in each room?'. Although someone suggested that TRVs are not very well positioned or accurate etc. it was correct that they could always be turned up to a suitable number which might be higher in one room for the same temperature as another. It was worrying that apparently even some plumbers are ignorant of the purposes of the RT and would appear to be suggesting not bothering until fortunately, someone who actually knew what they were talking about appeared on the forum.
The reason you need a RT is for the following situation. What happens when all your rooms are warm enough and the TRVs all close? You will either have a single radiator with no TRV as a bypass or a pressure operated bypass valve which allows the water to go somewhere when no radiators are open. So for a period of time, which in the warmer spring/autumn months would be longest, the boiler is STILL heating water and this is going round a certain amount of pipe losing its heat for no reason and not giving the boiler a rest. When the temperature of the water drops too much, it will fire up again and simply waste gas. The RT job is to literally switch the boiler off when the whole house is up to temperature so that zero gas is used until the house gets cooler. This of course begs the question of where to put it.
Do NOT put it in a room that always gets warm because of sunlight or because the radiator is turned up high (bathroom, kitchen). Do NOT put it in the lounge if either you have the lounge turned up high or you have another source of heat in the room (open fire etc) that would otherwise switch the thermostat off and let the rest of the house get cold. Do NOT put it somewhere that is often cold such as a back lobby or near the door of an entrance hall which might never get warm enough to switch the thermostat off. My own suggestion is to use the lounge if you do not have any alternative heat sources or otherwise the upstairs landing which is a reasonable indication of the overall heat of the house. You can set the temperature slightly higher (a couple of degrees) than you would otherwise have it for that area to ensure that the rest of the house gets enough time to heat up. If you find that it works perfectly while some rooms never get warm, you will need to balance up the system. Ideally, the rooms should all warm up at the same rate although some will switch off earlier than others. If when you turn the heating on, one radiator or room gets noticeabley hotter quicker than the others, turn down the 'close down' valve (the one on the other end to the TRV) by about 1/2 a turn. If a rad never seems to get warm or as hot as the others, open its valve up by 1/2 a turn. Over a few days, you should notice a much more even heating up.

DIY Bathroom Top Tips

My bathroom is close to being finished after many months. It was quite difficult because I was installing it into a room that was previously a bedroom (no pipes) and the fact that I was changing the hot water system quite drastically at the same time. Anyway, most of the issues you will come across can be avoided with some simple tips.

1. Plan, plan, plan. Get some graph paper (there was some on the back of a Wickes bathroom booklet I had) and get the measurements of the suites you are looking at. You will be amazed at how things fit or don't compared to what you assume. Go and look at some of your friend's bathrooms to make sure you haven't forgotten something like a towel rail or a toilet!


2. If you are trying to meet existing soil pipes or the like then ensure you know how much space the pipe fittings will take up. For instance, your toilet cannot go right against the soil stack because there will be no room for the fittings. The toilet soil fittings will be the worst because they are the largest but don't underestimate the annoyance you can get with a waste pipe that is perfect for the room but somehow has to get past a load of wood under the floor or such like. The builder didn't design the house around your choice of bathroom so some thought at this stage will help a lot.


3. Curved shower trays or baths can cause fun with the floor tiling. If, for example, you are using natural stone tiles you will need a special cutter to make the curves. Are you sure you want to choose them?


4. Shop around. There is loads of stuff available and savings to be made. Also, you will find some items in certain stores that are perfect for you that might not be available in other stores. Web sites are pretty good for trawling these things.


5. Before you install anything, plan where all the pipes and wires are going to go. There is nothing worse than thinking you will worry about a certain pipe later when you install the bath over all the floorboards you need to lift up!! For the most part you should install all services before even thinking about putting in the furniture.


6. Most of you will not have the luxury of a false wall to hide pipes behind and it is unlikely that all the walls you will use for the bath, toilet and sink are external for quick exit of waste pipe. Think VERY carefully about where the waste pipes will go, you do NOT want to be cutting loads of 40mm holes in floor joists and most of you won't have a drill that will fit anyway. Also, trying to fit wastes from bath too pipe next to joists can be difficult so measure where the bath and shower tray wastes need to go and check that you will have plenty of room to move the waste around to fit. Under my bath, the waste was too tall and I had to cut floorboards away - be warned.


7. Run the pipes and fix them if required as close as you can get to where they need to go. You can use flexible hoses from pipe to taps and toilet cistern if you want so don't worry too much. If you are reusing pipe, you will need to make loads of measurements to see whether a flex-hose will do the job or whether you will need to do some more major modifications on the existing pipework.


8. The bath and shower tray should usually go down on the floor before tiling (unless it is a free-standing unit that sits on the main floor) so these can go in first. Adjust the height of the bath so that you get a full height tile or two up to the window sill if you have one. You don't want 1.75 tiles from bath to sill!! Work out roughly where the tiles need to come to with an edging strip to correctly meet the horizontal tiles on the sill because it is much easier adjusting the bath feet that mucking around with slivers of tiles. In my case my sill had a lot of room for play because it had no internal sill so I can pack it up to suit my bath height.


9. With the bath in the right place, ensure it is spirit levelled in both directions (L-R and Front-Back) and then draw a line under it against the wall. Fix a length of 2 x 1 timber up to this line so the bath can sit on the wood (as well as its feet) and not flex (cracking the tile joins).


10. Ensuring the bath will not have to come out for any other work, glue it in with silicone or similar against all walls it is touching. Do not move it for 24 hours to give the sealant time to go off.


11. The shower tray needs to be plumb level. I wouldn't worry about the floor being slightly off true but if it is fairly bad you will have to level the floor. If it is the ground floor (i.e. concrete), you can get levelling compound which is like runny mortar which will do the job. Levelling up a wooden floor can be a pain and might involve some 12mm plywood and various wedges and packers to make it level. A little work here and you won't suffer from water pooling in the tray and smelling after a few days! Make sure the tray is fully supported as per the instructions. You do not want your tray cracking from movements it is not supposed to make


12. Depending on the flooring, you might want to put the toilet and sink (assuming it's floor standing) in first and worry about the floor later but if like me you are planning to use ceramic floor tiles, you will want to tile first and then plonk the things on top of the tiles. Cutting ceramic around curves is not fun. That said, you will have to cut around a curved shower tray. Before you start any tiling, lay out a row in each direction in a cross and make sure you do not have any tiles that will need to be very narrow. If you start from a wall and work to the other side, you might need strips of 25mm x 300mm which looks rubbish and is not always easy to cut either. It would be preferable to cut the tiles on both ends of the row and something more like 140mm + (rest of 300mm tiles) + 135mm. Also do not assume that your room has square corners. If you start in the corner and work outwards you might find the wall coming in slightly and you will not be able to get the tiles to line up. Again, lay them out and check before you stick anything.


13. Tile adhesive likes to crack to make sure your floor is solid and flat before laying tiles. Put down some 9 or 12mm plywood as a base to tile onto but if your boards are very uneven, you might need strips of laminate floor insulation board, which is very thin, to make the plywood stay rigid.

Porcupine Tree

Porcupine Tree are my current favourite band. I will not call them a rock band - although this would be the closest description - since their palette spans several genres from acoustic right up to heavy rock. They are however still great. Why?
I first heard one of their songs on a local radio station about 18 months ago and it grabbed me straight away. Not many songs have ever done that. It was cleverly constructed, the bass and drums were tight and clearly produced, the vocals mysterious and the band were obviously very talented. The verse was sparse and the chorus melodic.
I was wondering why, despite there being many bands with talent, do only some really stand out. I then thought about the types of other artists that are considered great and all of them have something in common. They all are masters at their arts while at the same time making it approachable to the casual user. The people who make you feel close to their art despite their being at the top of their game. The people who seem to want you to come closer and listen/look/enjoy rather than push you away so they can be noticed.
There are plenty of vids on Youtube that show their prowess and I would recommend In Absentia and Fear of a Blank Planet albums as a good entry point to their music.

What socks do you wear

The type of socks you wear say a lot about the sort of person you are (in my humble opinion). Do you wear thin socks or thick socks? Do you wear bright socks or muted socks? Do you wear white sports socks with your black shoes?
Once, we were discussing whether it is right to wear odd socks. Myself and a girl I used to work with were adamant that it was wrong to mix socks of different types. Perhaps at a push, if I lost one of a pair, I might match up socks that were basically the same. Another girl we were talking to said she didn't match socks up at all and simply pulled two out of the drawer - this disturbed me greatly - but I don't have OCD or anything (or do I?)
Anyway, my latest discovery is 5 pairs of thin black socks from Tescos which have the day of the week embroidered on them to make them easy to match up. This way, I spend an extra minute looking for the correct socks for the day! Would I ever choose the socks from the wrong day and wear them? No way!! Or - perish the thought - mix up the days on a pair and wear them? I shudder to think of it.

The myth of TV standby power consumption

One of the things that annoys me as a bit of a purist is when people talk authoritatively about things that are clearly not true. This is particularly true of emotive subjects such as ecologically sound power and the environment. Depending on who you talk to, either it is mandatory or it is foolish to rely on wind power another debate might be whether going on holiday or not will actually affect the number of flights that will take place etc.
The one that used to really get my goat was, "If you leave your TV on standby, it will use almost as much energy as if it is switched on" - nonsense. Perhaps in the days of some tube TVs, standby was used to keep the tube warm so it didn't take ages to switch on. This need gradually reduced over time as tubes got better. Anyway, nowadays, flat screen TVs are different. I picked a random Philips 32" TV and looked at the power consumption. When it is on, it takes 290 Watts and when on standby? 0.15 Watts, yes 0.15 Watts. In other words, if you left it on standby for an entire year and never watched it, it will still only use 1.3 KWh - 1.3 units - about 20p in cost and the equivalent of what a fridge uses in a single day or the washing machine/tumble dryer in about 20 minutes or a heater in the winter for 20mins-1 hr. In other words - almost nothing. The problem I have with it? It distracts people from real issues and things that make a real big difference like turning your thermostat down a degree or two and wearing a jumper. Or insulating your loft so your heating doesn't go out of the roof, or switching your lights off when you are not in the room or not washing clothes after they have been worn once (unless they are pants or socks!!).
The problem is people hear it, and they say it, repeat ad-infinitum (or is it ad-nauseum!). If only people would be able to separate truth from untruth, we might progress a bit quicker and not wonder why our effort to switch our TVs off hasn't made a blind bit of difference to the energy requirement.
(p.s. The same is also true of mobile phone chargers)