Technology That Works
The postman came about five minutes ago.
He delivered two pieces of post that mattered amongst all the old junk; a new card for Sky and a Voter Registration Form from St. Edmundsbury.
The card had been flagged up on my Sky system for about a week now. A simple message just told me that the card had been posted and could I check the post. I took out the old card and entered the new one. It worked first time. As it should.
The Voter Registration Card had only one problem. The URL was rather complicated, especially as it included St. Edmundsbury, which is not the easiest word to type. But after a couple of pages and a few clicks, I’d updated everything. Or in my case, just told them that a very lonely man, who spends a lot of his time blogging is still alive!
Seriously though, life isn’t that bad all the time.
But both systems worked without a hitch and with the exception of the URL couldn’t be faulted.
An aside here, is that if you’re developing an on-line system, make sure that the URL is short. There are lots of six and seven character ones available. I even recently acquired mx73.com. Short and memorable.
I just wonder how less stressful our lives would be if so many of the other things that we have to do in our lives were just as simple. We’re getting there, but not as fast I would like.
One thing that works round here, is that when my wife died, the Registrar informed the council, so that I got an automatic Council Tax discount, after I signed and dated the form they sent me. A very civilised piece of joined up thinking.
Do all councils work this way?
And then we have the excellent system for Vehicle Excise Duty, that has cost the Post Offices so much money, as who in their right mind queues for an hour to buy it.
Berlusconi Sues
So Silvio Berlusconi is going to sue the media all over the Europe for the reporting of his life in the last few years.
I did have rather a laugh at this story, as although I might like to be seen in the company of large numbers of gorgeous bimbos, or in Berlusconi’s case is it bimboni, but I really am not the man to do that. I’m just too short at just 1.71 metres or five foot seven and a bit in Imperial units, which everybody still keeps using, to attract them in more than odd numbers. And anyway, I’m too busy writing software to try to organise my life around bevys of young ladies.
But it got me thinking. Am I really too short?
And then I found this web page. When I looked at it, it had an advert for elevator shoes!
But I’m taller than Berlusconi (1.62 m.), Sarkozy (1.65 m.) and Putin (1.67 m.). I was surprised about the last one, so perhaps that’s why all those action man pictures show him by himself. Or on a pony!
So perhaps, I’m in the wrong job. I think though most British Prime Ministers are fairly tall. I remember being in a lift with John Major in Athens and he towered above me. So I’m out! And who’d want the job anyway.
My late wife did her first barrister’s pupilage in libel chambers. Her advice to Silvio would have been don’t sue. You’ll only give lawyers a lot of money and make matters worse. Even if you win!
I’ll end with a quote from Mrs. Merton to Debbie Magee – “So Debbie, what first attracted you to multi millionaire Paul Daniels?”
A Legal View on Megrahi
My posts on Megrahi seem to be getting a lot of hits, as obviously and quite rightly people are concerned and interested in the case.
I found this post by Jonathan Mitchell, QC. It covers the law and some of the reactions in detail. This is the opening paragraph.
If Megrahi was indeed rightly convicted of mass murder, which I doubt, it is not in doubt that he acted on the orders of the Libyan government. He was a senior member of its intelligence service. Yet both the UK and US governments have for some years been on friendly terms with the people who, they say, ordered the destruction of PanAm 103. They dine with them. They have cocktails with them when they meet at mutual friends. The week before Megrahi’s release, as reported in the Washington Post, a delegation of four American senators led by John McCain met with Colonel Gaddafi to discuss the sale by the US to Libya of military equipment. In April, Hilary Clinton welcomed another member of the Gaddafi family, the régime’s National Security Adviser, to Washington. She said “We deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya. We have many opportunities to deepen and broaden our cooperation. And I’m very much looking forward to building on this relationship. So, Mr. Minister, welcome so much here.”
Read the full article.
Defence Spending
A report in The Sunday Times says that British defence spending is out-of-control and actually harms the efficiency of the armed forces. A few damning paragraphs.
The author of the report, Bernard Gray, a leading businessman and former special adviser to Labour defence ministers, writes: “How can it be that it takes 20 years to buy a ship, or aircraft, or tank?
“Why does it always seem to cost at least twice what was thought?
“Even worse, at the end of the wait, why does it never quite seem to do what it was supposed to?”
Was it though ever any different? I have been involved in planning defence projects since the early 1970s and I’ve heard complaints of this nature all the time. And not just from the British, but from high-up engineers in a major US defence contractor.
I’ve also spoken to senior military men, who have always had good reasons to believe that the armed services never really get the equipment, they need to do the job. Usually it is over specified to do too many roles and hence so costly, that we can’t afford enough of them.
We need much better value for money and equipment that is much better suited for the job.
Prudence Stays Silent
Gordon Brown has said nothing so far about the Megrahi affair.
Is he being Prudence?
I think though it is interesting to look at reactions on both sides of the Atlantic. Here we put the emphasis on justice and as I said in a previous post, I don’t think anybody got that. But a lot of the comment in the US seems to ignore the truth and put the emphasis a lot more on vengeance.
Megrahi for Oil?
I said in the previous post, that according to The Times, that Megrahi might be being released to improve relations.
Now in this piece from the BBC, Gaddafi’s son has said that was true.
Of course Gordon Brown has denied it. Let’s hope that Prudence is the biggest casualty.
Kenny MacAskill
Kenny MacAskill is the Scottish Justice Minister at the centre of the Megrahi case.
I didn’t know much about him until I read this profile of him on the BBC web site.
He is an interesting character and judging by his anti-English views, he is not the sort of person, I would get on with. It may have been to a appreciative audience, but his views on the England football team as “The Great Satan”, was a bit much.
Afghanistan
I have two views on Afghanistan; we should stay and we should come home.
It’s difficult and I think that whatever we do, the number of casualties we are suffering in the country, can’t be sustained for ever. Although rightly, we focus on the number of dead, there is also a real problem in the number who are injured. Wikipedia gives a lot of details.
One telling figure in the article is that between January 2006 and June 2009, we have had to medically evacuate 2,192 personel from Afghanistan for medical reasons. That’s an average of just over 70 a month. Almost three times as many troops have been admitted to UK Field Hospitals for reasons of disease or non-battle injuries, than for those caused in battle.
Can we sustain those losses? And how long before everybody in the UK knows someone who has been killed or injured?
Whether politicians like it or not, we are getting to the point where we have to negotiate our way out of Afghanistan.
The Corby Scandal
The word scandal is rather mild for the issues surrounding the cleaning up of the steelworks in Corby.
With echoes of Thalidomide and the toxin problems in California exposed by Erin Brockovich, the Borough Council has fought every inch of the way and they have now lost a battle in the Court of Appeal. Incidentally, the News page on the Corby web site is blank. Could this be because they are still in denial over their role in the scandal.
I’ll now put my statistical hat on.
The geographic cluster of the birth defects would appear to be obvious. So why did the council try and find what the problem is, rather than bring up a whole battery of legal defences?
If I lived in the town, I’d make sure that all the councillors responsible would be voted out.
I’ve also worked on chemical works for a company, ICI, that cared a lot about health and safety. From what I’ve read, the precautions taken as the works was dismantled were not of the highest standard. Why? And have the workers suffered any ill effects?
I suspect that we will hear a lot more in all sorts of directions about this scandal.
Is Publishing Statistics a Good Idea?
Statistics published today about heart operations show a very strong increase in success. This is despite warnings from the medical profession, that publishing statistics on success rates, would lead to conservative procedures.
This is a real result for openness.
I believe strongly that publishing information responsibly is always for the better. I think too that politicians are finally getting round to this belief, with David Cameron wanting all government and political expenses to be published on the Internet. He’s right, but he doesn’t go far enough.
What would I do?
The Health and Safety Executive has set a small precedent by publishing reasonably detailed lists of fatal incidents on their web site. But they don’t go far enough and the data is not published in a form that can easily be downloaded from the web site. This would enable analyses to be made to see if there are ways of increasing safety.
Obviously, databases of this type should be desensitised before they are put on line. For instance, I might be described as male, white, between 55 and 65 and living in St. Edmundsbury.
But suppose the following databases were available on-line and in a form such as Excel that was easily downloaded.
- Births by sex, post code, multiple birth etc.
- Deaths by sex, age, cause, smoker etc.
- Serious road accident by vehicle involved, post code, road type etc.
- Crime by type, post code, victim, clear up, sentence etc.
- Prisoner by sex, offence, age, prison etc.
- Illegal immigrant by country, sex etc.
This would remove much of the speculation beloved of the tabloid newspapers, who publish a statistic that proves their bigoted point of view.
The government and industry might like to try to keep hold of this data. They will cite confidentiality, security and other spurious reasons. However, as precedents are set, it will be extremely difficult to keep things confidential.
We will all benefit through access to these databases.
