Would You Disclose Your Name On Zopa?
Or any other financial site, that gave loans?
Zopa allows me to see who I have lent money to, their payment history and a few other details. Normally, the person is only identified by a code name. So you could lend to someone called MickeyMouse or Graham171.
In two cases though, I’ve been able to identify the borrower. One was actually someone, that I knew and the other is a reputable professional living and working in London.
Both incidentally, have had immaculate payment records, so they have nothing to hide.
But I do find it strange that someone would join a financial site and make it possible to identify them.
Job Scam – Hyde Park Hotel Revisited
In February 2010, I put up a post called Job Scam – Hyde Park Hotel. I’ve checked the hotel on Trip Advisor and there entry is here. it looks very little different to many hotels of this type in london.
My original post has since had a life of its own, if you look at the over a hundred comments on the site. And it is still regularly visited with page counts of
2010 – 1032
2011 – 541
2012 – 275
in the last three years.
It looks like the e-mails are starting to find mugs again, as I’ve had a couple of extra comments on the original post in the last couple of days.
This time though a figure of £210 is mentioned. So it’s obviously a worthwhile scam for those perpetrating it.
NatWorst Opens The Door To The Fraudsters
Natwest have brought in a system called Get Cash based on a mobile phone app. But according to this on the BBC’s web site, it’s all started to backfire.
It looks to me that the Get Cash app is just too easy a target for fraudsters and it appears to me as a humble programmer and system designer, that they used programmers and designers, who didn’t understand the criminal mind.
If my bank offers me a mobile phone app to do my banking or use a credit card, the answer is no, no a thousand times no!
Incidentally, the computer that does my banking, never leaves my house and sits behind a door with a powerful lock on it.
I usually only draw out cash from a small number of cash machines fairly close to my house or at the Angel.
The Times On Jimmy Wales
The Times drops its serious front today with a third leader about the marriage of Wikipedia’s founder; Jimmy Wales, in the style of the on-line encyclopaedia.
Now Lloyds And The Co-op Drop Us In It
Captain Mainwaring would not have been amused, as yesterday Lloyds and the Co-op seem to have had system errors, or as I prefer to call them programming bugs, in their computers. It’s here on the BBC.
It may have been unrelated but one of my credit cards wouldn’t work on-line yesterday and they asked me to phone them. They said they were just rebooting the computers, and it should be OK in a couple of hours. Do we reboot computers, as we generally give them a good kicking first?
How To Find Those Born On Your Exact Birthday
I was searching for those, who were born on or around my birthday and I’ve found a pretty sure way. Suppose, you’re looking for someone born reasonably famous born on the 30th September 1960. You just type.
wiki “born 30 September 1960”
into Google. Make certain you get the quotes right.
A Stray Airliner?
In my exploration of the Gospel Oak to Barking line, I decided to follow the line on Google Maps. All went well and I was able to see where the electrification stopped and kicked in around South Tottenham. And then I found this image, as the railway passes south of Seven Sisters station.
I wonder how many stray planes are available to view on Google Maps?
Can anybody identify the tail to determine the airline? Judging by the silhouette, it looks like it’s some variant of Boeing 737.
If you want to find it, type “Seven Sisters station” into Google and then select maps. The plane is just south of the station.
As someone, who has over a thousand hours in command of an aircraft, you are taught under Visual Flight Rules to fly with the line feature on your left. So it could be they’ve taken off from Stansted and they’re following the railway. But then, they wouldn’t be under these rules over London, except in very special circumstances.
Identifying the airline would help solve the puzzle!
Bank Transfer Traceability
One thing that annoys me about on-line banking, is that when you pay a bill like a credit card, you often can’t trace it at both ends, as often the reference doesn’t appear for some days. So now, I usually pay them making sure the last two digits are the day of the month. That way it becomes obvious, if the transfer has been made and what it was.
It really all comes down to the fact that banks do not provide full information on their statements. And when they’ve not got it, they don’t even give you a clue!
I would be ashamed if I’d designed such a poor system.
An Interesting Slant On Apple
I found this article on the BBC web site. I like this interesting snippet.
This is what happens when a company is too cheap to invest in research and development. Did you know that Apple spends far less on R&D than any of its rivals – a paltry 2% of revenues, versus 14% for Google and Microsoft?
I’ve run R&D and you must spend to keep ahead of the game. Perhaps, Apple are too interested in making money?
But mugs will still queue up for the iPhone5. I won’t!
Dwelling On Loneliness
I do think that people will admit that my life can be rather lonely.
Although, as someone, who has often worked alone in his life, my state is little different to where I have been before.
As a child, I used to spend hours with my Meccano or just with my father down at his print works in Wood Green.
I was also very much a solitary programmer for much of my working life. Or if I did work with someone, it was just with one person. The only time I really had someone to work with was when I was writing software in the few years after I’d left ICI. And that was our third son, George, who used to sit in his chair, whilst I bashed away on an old Teletype. Occasionally, he’d get taken over to Time Sharing in Great Portland Street and sometimes, the girls in the office would take him away and play with him.
I sometimes wonder what happened to all those girls; Maeve, Maggie and and the Australians; Crystal Hendricks and Marie Thorpe.
But then I’ve always discarded friends throughout my life. only a couple of my school friends are still in touch. But what happened to Sheena Findley, Susan Portch, Caroline and the other girls from my year at Minchenden? C was just as clumsy with friends, as her best friend from school, Ruth Mason, is just a name in the past. She got married and moved to Ruislip, but where is she now?
I did bump into my first girlfriend at Liverpool; Marilyn Garland, once at Swiss Cottage, a few years after leaving University. She had a baby then and is probably a granmother now.
Some of the Metier people I still know, as I must have got better at keeping in touch as I got older.
But I never really was a team player, and that has stood me in good sense, since the death of C.
I do many things I want to on my own. And in some ways, I like it that way.Although I do miss the company of a good woman. A bad one would probably be good to!
The Anonymous Widower 