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!