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!
Farewell Alex Higgins!
I always like to think, that I programmed in my pomp like Alex Higgins played snooker in his! That may be arrogant, but I can remember when he won one of his World Championships, I followed the final to the bitter end, whilst I was sorting out the scheduler in Artemis. It was always the scheduler, that caused me such grief! I can remember punching the air, as the last ball went in!
Now Alex has been taken. Probably by the Devil, who needs more tips on how to live a life of excess.
Snooker will never be the same again!
What worries me, is that he was younger than me! I hope he jumped the queue!
Why Guided Bus?
Go to the Guided Bus page in Wikipedia and there is a list of guided bus systems around the world.
There aren’t many and what you notice is that about half have been discontinued; Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Mannheim for a start. So why were these systems discontinued? You can’t be sure, but some were short distance systems to get round bottlenecks, but probably they just didn’t get the ridership they needed, that justified the system.
So why is the government pushing guided bus?
I don’t know.
If we take the Cambridge system, it is now so over budget and late that no matter what happens, it will not be a financial success. It is a classic project that really has failed because of poor specification and bad project management. I would love to have one of my Artemis mates look at all the details. Big George would have a field day. But then so did Atkins.
Perhaps with hindsight, we should have designed a completely different system.
Cambridge’s biggest transport problem for those like me, who live outside the city is Addenbrooke’s Hospital. I have gone a lot recently and although the multi-story car park usually has spaces, it is expensive. But how else can you provide space for everyone who works there and has to visit?
However, the railway passes to the rear of the hospital on land that will eventually be developed as a large medical campus to compliment one of the best hospitals in the world. So why haven’t they for a start created a proper transport interchange there with a new Addenbrooke’s station and lots of parking for the hospital, park and ride to the city and those that want to catch the train.
Note that, it is virtually impossible for people like me to catch the train to London from Cambridge as car parking is bad in the city. So I usually drive to London. That is bad for all sorts of reasons. Remember too, that with the completion of the Hitchin flyover and other measures capacity on the Cambridge London line will be increased.
I have also been an advocate of another station at Chestert0n Sidings to serve the Science Park and the north of Cambridge. The two stations should probably be linked by a tram, or dare I say it a guided bus, going through the city. The trouble is that fitting it through would be difficult unless it ran with all the other traffic. But it has been done successfully in other cities all over the world. On the other hand if a tram run through the city every five to eight minutes from large car parks how many people would still want to take cars into the city?
But it won’t be done! Certainly not now!
Just Like Old Times
Years ago, when I was writing Artemis, I was always to be found at the computer from about five in the morning or even earlier. My late wife would be snug in bed.
But then when I wake up I get up. And guess what, it’s now just before five and after waking up from a strange dream, I am now at the computer.
Am as I as productive as I was in the 1970s?
Probably not, but I still have the stamina to program for twelve hours a day. On the other hand, there are a lot more algorithms in my mind now, so I don’t have to spend time finding them!
BP’s Oil Find
BP seem to have struck oil. Or is it gold? But the technology to get it to market will be awesome.
Many years ago, I remember when they found the Forties Field and how they said they’d never get that oil ashore. They did then and the Project Management System that I wrote at the time, Artemis, was a great help in the planning of the whole of the North Sea. It certainly helped us go from a little company to one with global clout. The strange thing though, is that we probably made a lot of sales because our systems didn’t need the installation of the large mainframe computers everybody used at the time.
So when I see a find like BP have made in the Gulf of Mexico, I smile a bit and thank Aberdeen and its oil industry for my success.
This is what the Guardian said about the find.
BP has reopened the debate on when the “peak oil” supply will be reached by announcing a big new discovery in the Gulf of Mexico which some believe could be as large as the Forties, the biggest field ever found in the North Sea.
The strike comes days after Iran unveiled an even larger find of 8.8bn barrels of crude oil, and the moves have encouraged sceptics of theories which say that peak production has been reached, or soon will be, to hail a new golden age of exploration and supply.
BP, already the largest producer of hydrocarbons in the US, said its “giant” Tiber discovery in 4,100ft (1,250m) of water was particularly exciting because it promised to open up a whole new area.
I tend to agree that the forecast of oil running out is based on doom cults, rather than sensible science.
If you look at a large oil field, it is not actually that large in terms of area, so when you look for it, it’s very very difficult. And in BP’s latest case, even more so, as you are at depths higher than Mount Everest.
So it’s my belief and this has been confirmed by BP and Iran, that there is a lot of coal out there, but we just don’t have the technology to look for it.
As an aside to this, the Selby coalfield was one of the largest in the UK. But it was only discovered in the 1960s and that in a country which is probably the most explored in the world.
The Anonymous Widower 