Leopards Don’t Change Their Spots
I’ve just had some spam, trying to get me to sign up to Coral Bookmakers.
As I have a betting shop near me and an on-line account, I don’t need another.
So who is the Chief Executive of Coral? None other than Andy Hornby, who is one of the HBOS Three.
Some people never learn, how to run a business!
You Should Check Your Tweets
This cautionary tale of an MP, who tweeted a link to a porn site by mistake, should be read by anybody, who just retweets, stories, that they are told to.
At least, as I do all my blogging from my computer, I can check what I point to, before publishing.
Why Do Web Sites Get Redesigned?
I’ve used the East Midland Trains web site, many times in the last few years and have found it excellent.
But now it has had a makeover and I had to have a couple of attempts to get my tickets for the Ipswich match at Derby.
I always book a return in First Class, with the outrun being timed to get to the destination by something like 14:00 and then a fetch after 17:00 to get back to London. Usually, this is because, I won’t find anything to eat in the destination and so go straight to the ground. As Pride Park is close to Derby station, this would definitely be the case at Derby.
But the site kept telling me, I’d put in the wrong times, as I suspect someone had got his checking wrong. It was only, when the site handed me over to the ticketing engine behind the booking site, did I get some sense.
In the end, I’m travelling from London to Derby and back for the extortionate price of £29. And that’s in First Class with tea and drinks! If there are any snacks, I’ll forgo them, as they won’t be gluten free.
I Don’t Care About Cookies
I look at a lot of web sites and every one seems to get more and more strident about asking whether I mind if they store cookies on my computer.
I wouldn’t use their web site if I minded would I?
An aside here is why isn’t the the form of mind, I used in the previous line, mound? After all it’s find and found, bind and bound and wind and wound.
Isn’t English wonderful!
A Survey From Marks and Spencer
I got a survey request apparently from Marks and Spencer this morning. If I entered the survey, I would have a chance to win a prize of £10,000 in my local store.
That sounded generous and as it would be difficult to spend that in the local store at either the Islington or Hackney stores, my spam filter kicked in with a strong positive.
I then saw that it was sent to my old e-mail address and not the one I normally use and it also came from an e-mail address that didn’t shout Marks and Spencer.
But it looked very genuine and professional and even had an unsubscribe link. I clicked that and got a feasible unsubscribe page.
But in Italian!
I have since phoned marks and Spencer and they will investigate.
The e-mail address it came from had clash and clnews8 in the address.
If you get any from these jokers, use the delete key.
P&O Cruises Wi-Fi
I can accept that wi-fi on my P&O cruise was expensive, but quite frankly it wasn’t the best.
They did put in a disclaimer that it was slow and again that I will agree with, as satellites aren’t the best way to connect to the Internet. I’ve used it myself in the past and even that with a dish fixed to the ground had problems.
But I will take issue with the login and the account, which I highlighted here, as it wasn’t the easiest one to connect to, if you accepted the speed. Typing the password on a small Samsung tab device is not easy, especially when it has to use a name it doesn’t usually use. It could have been a lot better, if I compare it with the systems on some of the train companies, which surely have a similar connection to the Internet problem, although they can use the mobile phone network.
I also found a couple of times, that the system didn’t disconnect properly and consequently, I lost some of the wi-fi minutes I’d bought. It didn’t worry me too much, but some will get angry.
If I went on a P&O cruise again, I wouldn’t use the wi-fi, but rely on the normal 3G coverage, I got in the ports, which was generally excellent.
The Same Name Problem
The two names I habitually use aren’t the most uncommon and I’ve met more than a few individuals, who use the same pair of names. I also own the .com domain for the names, which must give me a certain precedence.
But at registration for my P&O cruise, I found that I was not alone and because of this my account was changed to the first name that only my mother, my passport, HMRC and the DWP use. It worked after a fashion, although some staff seemed confused that I was travelling under a different name. But checking my statement after the cruise, there doesn’t seem to be any charges that I hadn’t made.
It did give me a bit of a problem with the wi-fi, as my Samsung tablet computer has my used name in its memory and always used that, which meant, there was a lot of typing at each login.
I have a feeling, that their system hasn’t had the requisite amount of testing.
You can always rely that when you program a computer, there will always be a set of obscure circumstances, that you feel will never happen.
But of course they will!
In this case of course they did, but no financial harm was done to any party involved. I just suffered the login inconvenience.
Unbreakable Passwords
Passwords are one of the things that the Internet and computer systems often get wrong.
How many times, does your chosen password, which is of a type that has been acceptable on Site A, been unacceptable on Site B?
There are two things, I really hate.
The first is sites that generate your initial password as a string of characters, which need to be cut and pasted into the logon. I’ve even found sites, that don’t let you change the password. Is there a better way to piss off your clients? There are several shopping sites, I’ve used in the past that think they are being clever and secure. In fact, they’re being stupid and I’ve never used their sites a second time.
The other is passwords that insist you use the shift key for at least one character. As I have trouble with shift and generally span my right hand to type upper case characters, which is not a reliable process, any site that insists on that type of password is out. So I never use a credit card with Verified by Visa on-line. This would be helped if all sites were like Zopa and allowed you to show the password, as you type it in.
So could we come up with better passwords, we’d always remember, that are totally unbreakable?
Here’s a few ideas!
My first car was a 1946 Austin 8. I still remember the registration, which was three letters followed by three numbers. Not long enough for some sites and rightly so, but this would be totally unbreakable, as how many criminals, would know the registration of the first car you owned. If you were someone like me, getting towards the last few decades of your life, it could be a good password. You could even have the simple password hint of “First Car” If I wanted a secure password, who could break it, if I used the registration number of the first Porsche I owned! I doubt that even my son, would know that registration.
And then there are memorable phone numbers and addresses from childhood. I doubt, there are few people, who don’t know these from where they grew up. Certainly, I was told to memorise them, so that if I got lost, I could find my way home.
I can also remember the address and phone number of my father’s print works as 38-44 Station Road and Bowes Park 2165.
The great things about passwords like these, is that you can write them down or put them in something like Outlook as say First Car or First Married Address and nobody will know them, except perhaps your partner or child.
There is a password strength checker here on Microsoft’s web site. It rated bowespark2165 as a strong password. It’s also easy to type.
In my view passwords must be easily memorable, as suppose you want access to say your credit card account in an emergency and you have to do it by using the memorable data, you don’t want it to be something you can’t recall.
The Banks Dismal Record On Innovation
I’ve worked on and off with senior banking professionals and those that think about their banking since the early 1970s.
In that time, I doubt, I’ve seen much really good clever innovation, that would have been to the benefit of either the banks or their customers.
I’ll start with a classic from the Midland Bank.
I was putting together a finance company in the late 1980s and the Midland Bank were keen to be a source of bulk money. We of course, had a beautiful little spreadsheet in the format of the time, Lotus 1-2-3.
The guy we were dealing with at the Bank, then said that he had no in-house facilities to examine the data. In their wisdom, the bank had provided those with a multi-user system based on a PDP-11, so they could run their own spreadsheets. Unfortunately, there was no way of uploading your data to their system. The guy we were dealing with had actually bought himself an Amstrad PC so that he could run them at home. Needless to say, we didn’t deal with Midland Bank. But what idiot in the bank, decided that PCs were a fad, when virtually all of their customers were thinking of or actually using them to run their own businesses.
The second is from the same time and applies to all of the banks.
My accountant at the time was pretty good and for years, he’d felt that one of the banes of his life was the lack of connection between the banks and small business accounting. His ideas, were that you could put a two digit code on all of your cheques in a space by the numbers along the bottom. You might put 67 for electricity, 68 for gas etc. These would then appear on your statement, so all the accountant would have needed to do was split everything down in his accounting software, especially if it was possible to get the statement in a simple electronic format.
He felt that any bank enhancing their service in this way, would have been very profitable to themselves, as they could have offered a simple accounting service. He did of course realise it would have lost accountants like him a lot of business.
But banks have done nothing to move into this area, which would have seen them offering a simple and much-needed service.
And then there was Lloyds Bank and their Cashpoints.
I was still doing my management accounting work for Lloyds as I was writing Artemis and someone there, asked how the bank could use a system like Artemis. As they were installing Cashpoints here, there and everywhere at the time, I said Artemis would be an ideal system to plan the roll out of the terminals. I did suggest, Artemis might be used to predict the cash flow and generate the budgets for the program.
I was then told that banks didn’t have cash flow problems as they used customers money and anyway, all of the Cashpoints they needed for the several year program, had already been delivered and were sitting in a warehouse somewhere. How about that for good management thinking?
The Management Accounting software I wrote for Lloyds wasn’t revolutionary in its own right, as any decent programmer could have written it, but the methods under it were far from conservative. An outsider, who had been the Chief Accountant of a major company had been recruited to try to get a hand on the bank’s costs.
It was truly innovative, but it never got beyond a trial, which seemed to end, when most of Lloyds’ staff were moved to Bristol.
One day, I’ll write up more on that work, which probably had a major effect on the design of some of the parts of Artemis.
Why Can’t I Sort My On-Line Bank Statement?
Often at the end of the month, when my current account has too much money in it, I transfer the excess I won’t need to Zopa.
This morning, I wanted to check, that I had put all of these payments into my Excel spreadsheet, that tracks my Zopa lending and calculates the rate I get.
So I logged into my bank account and looked at the on-line statement. I could of course look at it on a page-by-page basis, but where was the feature to sort all of my bank statement entries to bring direct debits to Zopa together?
No-where that I could see! There isn’t a select either to just bring up the debits to Zopa.
It is just not good enough, in this day and age, where a good proportion of the general population is familiar with handling sets of dat in programs like Excel.
I remember in probably about 1990, I was talking to a senior programmer, at one of the big banks. They had made a proposal to senior management to enable customers to get their bank statements on floppy discs. It was technically feasible and they felt it would have been taken up by customers and professionals, who needed to get the data into their personal computers.
These days, it should be second nature for a bank to offer a simple download of your bank statement in an Excel format.
Why doesn’t my bank offer this facility to everybody?
The Anonymous Widower 