The First Royal Baby E-Mail
I’ve just had an e-mail from the Zoological Society of London, entitled Royal Zoo babies. This is the first paragraph.
The Royal Baby has finally been born, but Will and Kate aren’t the only ones with a new arrival this summer! From a tiny tapir calf to miniature monkeys, celebrate the newest addition to the Royal family with a tour of ZSL London Zoo’s very own Royal Zoo Babies.
I’m a member, so I’ll probably go in a few days anyway.
But it is good marketing, nevertheless!
Who Needs Outside Investors?
The Sunday Times has two articles today about very successful companies that have become that way and financially secure, without any external finance.
I’ve known about the first, Martin Baker for many years and in some ways it’s surprising that they haven’t sold out, as anno domini catch up with us all.
The other is a Cambridge company called Real VNC, who provide software for virtual network connections. They have just won the MacRobert Award as is reported here.
I like the quote from Andy Harter, one of the founders of the company.
We need to persuade young people that engineering means the people who built the Olympic Park and the internet, and that it is a great choice of career.
I’ve spend a life in engineering and would thoroughly agree. I’ve even applied engineering principles to banking and finance. Bankers have needed me more, than I’ve needed them!
On the other hand when I needed a good banker, I found an excellent one in my friend David, who came to me because of the quality of my work on an internal project he started in the bank. How many bankers these days would recognise a good engineer or scientist? Only after he’s sold his or her company, I suspect!
And Now I Get Golf Spam!
With nothing to watch or listen to for most of tomorrow, as the sodding golf will be hogging the airwaves, what have I just received?
Several spam messages trying to sell me golf clubs!
To add to the many things that annoy me about golf, another thing has just suggested itself. I don’t think I know of a golf course, that I could get to easily by public transport.
Have Google Lost The Plot?
This morning, the BBC is running a story about revamping the West Hackney Burial Ground.
I’m not sure whether you would describe Dalston as West Hackney, but it struck me that it could be near where I live. If it is, then it would be worth a visit for before and after photos.
So I typed West Hackney Burial Ground into Google Maps and got a load of useless information and adverts for places around Hackney including Jury’s Inn Hotel halfway between the Angel and King’s Cross. If I were to score the information I got, to give it zero out of ten would be generous.
Google seems to be getting less useful as the years go by, as it concentrates too much on making money and inventions such as driverless cars. Incidentally, I could probably drive the latter, but here in London, I prefer the big red taxis.
Why Is This Page Being Viewed?
The BBC has a list of the ten most viewed pages on its News web site. But this one concerning Andrew Mitchell, dated the 20th October last year is listed as the eighth most viewed page.
Strange!
Freeing Up Disk Space On Vista
I found this useful article.
Getting Fed Up With Tax Refund Spam
For the last few days, I had several of that old chestnut the Tax Refund Alert spam message.
Obviously, it must work with idiots out there as why do they persist, but now it is just boring.
It’s a pity, there isn’t a simple way to get back at idiots like this.
For those who phone me trying to scam me, I usually say can you phone me on my alternative number and give them a suitable alternative, like the Fraud Reporting Office of the Metropolitan Police. They never phone back!
Banks Don’t Do Parties
It’s many years, since I had any hospitality courtesy of my bank. It was probably a meal from David, when we were getting each other out of various scrapes.
But last night, one of the peer-to-peer lenders I use, invited me to a party.
One important thing was said, which addresses one of the problems of the peer-to-peer lending market and that was that the major peer-to-peer lenders had asked the government to legislate and bring them under the wing of the Financial Conduct Authority. It will probably happen in the spring of next year, but as with most government legislation, who knows? How many organisations or groups of companies have actually asked to be regulated? I can’t think of one, even outside of the financial area.
There was also a feeling at the party, that the various high-profile payday and short-term lenders cause confusion in consumers’ minds and this didn’t help. Let’s face it, judging by the number of bus and television adverts for these higher cost lenders, the public might even think that peer-to-peer lending didn’t exist or was a very niche product
It would be interesting to know, how many possible borrowers, never check that they might get a better deal from a peer-to-peer lender than their current bank, simply because they don’t know of peer-to-peer lending or don’t know how to contact the lenders? For instance, it would also be interesting to know such things, as how many people with excellent credit ratings, who regularly borrow money, don’t use the Internet!
If I ran a peer-to-peer lender, I’d get someone like YouGov to do a survey! After all, the party last night was a convention of believers, so anything obtained there would be statistically skewed.
The party was also a great place to exchange ideas and investigate how your money was handled. When did your bank last explain to you personally, why they were giving you such a poor rate on your Deposit Account? No one, probably gets decent service out of their bank these days, until they pop their clogs, as only then will the bank lose the easy money they make from that customer.
Happy Hundredth Birthday To Isotopes
I was having a cup of tea in a cafe, when the geologist I was talking to, said that isotopes, were first discovered a hundred years ago, and that there was a bit of a celebration.
I learned about isotopes in my physics many years ago, but now all that I seem to remember is that two isotopes of the same element, have the same numbers of electrons and protons, but differ in the number of neutrons. Carbon for example has three forms, Carbon 12, Carbon 13 and Carbon 14. The three forms all contain six protons and electrons, but 6, 7 and 8 neutrons respectively. If you ever have heard of the Carbon 14 dating of objects, there is an article here, which describes the process.
I used the different isotopes many years ago, in one of the first pieces of decent software I wrote. I was trying to analyse the compounds in the output of a mass spectrometer. The samples contained lots of carbon compounds and I was told that the two common isotopes of Carbon 12 and Carbon 13, were in the ratio of ten to one, which meant that if you had a compound with several carbon atoms, you got a particular pattern. Experienced operators could identify the patterns. So I worked out how to calculate the patterns and match them to the compounds.
So that is how I learned about one of the uses of isotopes in the analysis of compounds.
This was in 1969 and the mechanics of writing the program on a machine with only 4 Kb of memory, were much more difficult than the methods involved.
A Clever Phishing E-Mail Supposedly From O2
I just received an e-mail supposedly from O2 asking me to change my user name. This is the body.
Hello ,
We recently asked you to change your O2 Username.
To change the username to email please click on this link below to confirm this email and finish changing your username.
To keep your details safe, this link will only work for 48 hours from the time it was sent, so please click it now.
Sorry, but we can’t write back to you from this address, so please don’t reply to it. If you need further assistance, please contact Customer Services.
I am a customer of O2, but I never access them on-line, so I was a bit puzzled to start with. I then noticed it came to an old e-mail address, I only used for support on a company I owned. I then checked the headers and found that the e-mail came from Turkey.
It didn’t fool me, but it does show that phishing e-mails are getting more credible.
The Anonymous Widower 