A Sweet Act of Kindness
Someone who used to work with me has just sent a card from the Lake District with an ode by Wordsworth on the front.
Intimations of Immortality
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore ;-
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
I like getting cards like that. It was a nice touch.
Ipswich Town’s Dual Fixture List
My father was a printer and liked to find simple solutions for printing problems. He would like this dual fixture list from Ipswich Town.
Dual Fixture List from Ipswich Town
The small wallet sized one on the right has been torn off the larger one on the left.
Simple and very handy.
The Shambles of the Regional Fire Control Centres
NuLabor wanted to bring in a set of nine reginal control centres for the fire services across the country to replace 46 control rooms. That was the theory, but read this article in The Daily Telegraph, which details the shambles. The buildings are ready, but the software is not, so they are just standing idle and costing about £1.5 million a month.
I was alerted to this by an article on the BBC local news about the unused centre at Waterbeach. The new government is now saying that councils can opt out of the new centres. In a way, that is compounding the problem.
Surely, one of the main reasons for having a network of identical centres, is that this woulds mean that if say an operator had to move say to another part of the country, they could then be reemployed if necessary at another centre without retraining. I once met a doctor, whose wife was an ambulance controller. When he had moved to Cambridge, she had taken a year to be retrained because all the systems were different. That is rediculous, as we need standard systems for fire, police and ambulance all over the UK. I have heard reliable reports of Chief Constables, who want the best system money can buy, as long as no other force has it.
It should be one size that fits all! As an aside here, when we designed Artemis, there was essentially one system, that could manage projects ofd all sizes. You just specified it with bigger discs and more terminals for larger projects. But then we knew how to design systems properly so they worked. When I see the words government and computer system, because of my bad eyesight, I always read it as a gravy train to disaster.
So these fire control centres should be got up and running as soon as possible and if they are late then the contractors should be liable for the losses. I suspect though, that that is impossible, as the idiot who specified the system and wrote the contract forgot to put in a penalty clause. He or she should be fired! But they won’t be!
A Bad Move by the BBC?
It has now been confirmed that the BBC is moving its flagship BBC Breakfast program to Salford Quays in Manchester.
It has also been reported that some of the presenters and broadcasting staff are not that happy.
I don’t think I am either, as will some of the more interesting guests bother to go up to Manchester, when they can get as much publicity by sitting on the sofa at GMTV in London? I will still probably watch the BBC, as I’m allergic to adverts.
To illustrate this problem this morning, where the Pakistan floods are dominating the news, they called in a representative of the charity, World Vision, which is based in Milton Keynes, who talked with great knowledge about the problem. Would they get the same quality of expert in Manchester, especially as most charities seem to be south-east based? It is also the day when many of the major banks are reporting. This would have to be an outside broadcast no doubt.
It is a bad move, especially as the guy in charge of it won’t be moving.
I actually think that if the BBC Breakfast program suffers badly in quality because of the move North, then there would be a gap for a high-quality, serious news program based in London, probably paid for by some means like a subscription.
The Anonymous Widower 