Day Jar View

A chap wanted to use “Lloyds is pants” as his banking security password, but a member of staff at the bank changed it to “no its not”. That’s guerilla staff loyalty at it’s finest, surely.

For some reason, Lloyds say the member of staff responsible no longer works at the bank. I would have thought they should be running it by now.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/england/hereford/worcs/7585098.stm

Just watching this bilge that is masquerading as a live broadcast of the GB athletes getting off the plane from Beijing.

I think they did a great job, but I’m sure that the last thing they need (or viewers want) is to see a dolly “interviewing” each of them with such bon mots as “how does it feel to be home?”.

Such insight gives ammunition to those who talk of scrapping the licence fee.

I know how much wholesale gas and electricity prices have gone up this past year, so this isn’t a criticism of the energy companies, as I’m not some Liberal sandal-wearer (although I do own some nice sandals) who thinks that companies who make profits are the devil’s work.

However, when you hear that the owners of the holiday complex that we are staying in might have to close their pool and spa complex next year because of rising bills, it starts to hit home how these 30% hikes can affect people.

My business won’t be directly affected by fuel price rises, nor will we have to wear extra jumpers at home, as there’s plenty that can go before we do that. But when your fuel bill goes from £8000 one year to already £12000 so far this year, you are looking at your profits disappearing fast.

He said he can’t charge customers extra as they are paying more themselves at home too, but I for one would happily pay a bit more if it meant they could keep it going. Because to be honest, if they hadn’t had the pool complex, we would have gone somewhere that did have one.

I hope they manage to keep it.

The launch of the new iPhone has seen a predictably hysterical reaction in the more media-friendly press. It promises much of the same as the original version launched last year, with the addition of 3G promising fast internet access, and a GPS receiver, allowing navigation software to run on the unit.

The software glitches that have blighted the launch of the new unit have been the focus this week, but I wanted to point out something that I think makes the whole thing more of a fashion accessory, rather than a useful tool.

It’s called the iPhone but, in reality, from the very beginning the phone seems to have been included almost as an afterthought, in order that it can be marketed as a genuine catch-all alternative to the already ubiquitous and ground-breaking iPod and your current handset.

I say this because the keyboard of the iPhone is still a problem in my eyes. The problem with most phones is that the keyboard does not lend itself very well to typing, simply due to its physical size. Compound that with the touchscreen technology, and you have a keyboard on the iPhone that is considerably slower and more error-prone than those with conventional keys.

In their haste to produce a thing of beauty (and in that respect, incidentally, I think they have succeeded), they have taken the iPhone down a cul-de-sac that has hamstrung its desirability as a useful communication tool.

Sure, it looks great, will play music and apparently even makes phone calls, but try and use it to email, blog or compose a document, and you will find yourself yearning for an old-school keyboard that not only collects dust and crumbs, but means you can work faster. Surely that should be the point of these things?

No doubt Apple will shift orchard-sized piles of these things, in spite of my nit-picking, and good luck to them. But I will be sticking with the decidedly and resolutely old-school keyboard of my BlackBerry Curve, in all its crumby, dusty glory.

Read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7501321.stm

Over the past few years, I have experimented periodically with trying to reduce my amount of exposure to all things electronic. I include under electronic basically anything with a chip – tv, laptop, PC, PDA etc.

The driver for this was never a fear of potential damage to my innards from stray electromagentic radiation, but a desire to try and avoid a potentially far more damaging end result – my ability to concentrate.

I find that trying to concentrate on any one thing – whether it be a book, an article, a quote or composing an email, is becoming increasingly harder the more devices and websites are running around me. The urge to check email on my tabbed browser or PDA is so strong that the only thing to do is to turn them off, and go and sit in the next room. But then when it isn’t close at hand, you spend probably every other paragraph thinking about what you might be missing. Sound familiar?

I’ve read about some people only reading emails between certain times of the day, or having one day a week off everything, so maybe I should try that. But I think unless someone physically removes the PDA, PC or tv from my immediate vicinity and then straps me down to the chair, I have a feeling I might struggle to stick to the new regime.

Check out – http://tinyurl.com/6zdzcf

I was amazed the other morning. Radio Five carried one of their usual tabloidy phone-ins, and the topic was the Olympics, and the Brits’ success.

Instead of blanket celebration, there were a number of callers who simply couldn’t bring themselves to bask in the reflected glory. Instead they came out with all sorts of crap about how the sports we had won medals in were “for the rich” or “elitist”.

Ask our current crop of athletes whether they have any money, and I think most people would be surprised what a struggle it is for most of their lives when they are training. It’s only when they achieve success (and even then, only in the blue ribbon sports) that they can make some decent money.

Only a Brit would look at our medal table position (currently 3rd) and say it was a bad thing.

This isn’t going to be some polemic on the outrageous cost of oil, and how dare the government take 60% of the cost of a litre of petrol in tax, and than have the sheer audacity to charge us VAT too! It isn’t going to be one of those.

In fact, I actually think petrol is still too cheap. There, I said it.

And before you say anything, I do drive; and it isn’t some feeble 1 litre Getz that does 300 mpg, which I only use on warm days when the traffic is light and the wind is behind me in order to conserve fuel. I drive a 3 litre diesel estate, which goes like the proverbial off a shovel, as well as fitting the missus and my daughter in the back (not the boot I hasten to add).

The reason I think petrol is still too cheap is that it is only in the past few months that my nearest petrol station has started charging me more for my petrol than my corner shop does for my milk.

I pay 55p per half litre for milk, which equates to £1.10 per litre, and I pay around £1.30 for diesel.

I don’t remember ever seeing anyone protesting about the price of milk, except those on the receiving end of our reluctance to pay a proper price for it: the farmers. Why not? £1.10 is more than 30p per litre higher than petrol was at the height of the fuel protests in September 2000.

Now, I’m no scientist, but I don’t think you get milk from the ground; I think it comes from a cow. And cows produce it with little or no engineering, other than a bit of grass-grinding with their teeth, and presumably some amazing alchemy work in their four stomachs. Sounds pretty cheap to me.

Oil, however, comes out of the ground, and it takes an amazing amount of time, money and effort to get it out. And it isn’t going to be replaced, at least not in our lifetime. Of course, over millions of years it will gradually be replaced by rotting vegetation and sedimentary activity, but we are gulping it down too fast for that. Milk, on the other hand, is limited only by the number of cows and the amount of grass around, assuming the government doesn’t build on all of it.

So here’s my suggestion. Unless you know where an untapped oilfield is, and you know how to get the black stuff out of the ground, and you can afford to develop the site, pump it out, distribute it, process it into the various fuel grades, and then distribute it again, I would keep my mouth shut about the price of it if I were you. Or by all means moan, but then please spend an equal amount of time working out what we are going to replace it with.

And in the meantime, think about organising a milk protest and see how far you get. Count me in!

In 1992, NASA decided that the old adage of “Better, Faster, Cheaper – pick any two”, would no longer apply to them. With admirable chutzpah, of course underpinned by comfortable funding from Congress, they embarked on a series of missions with predictably mixed results.

For example, the Mars Climate Orbiter mission (cost $125 million) failed because the contractor, Lockheed Martin, failed to convert imperial units to metric units. I’m no engineer, but I think in anyone’s language this can only be descibed as “piss-poor”.

At the peak of the Apollo project, NASA’s budget was around 4% of US GDP. Every piece of hardware was so over-engineered that I seem to remember that out of a million components in the Apollo spacecraft, only a handful failed. Can you imagine if today’s cars were engineered to that degree?

This can hardly have been a surprise to those with an engineering background or, indeed, any experience of managing projects of any size. The fact is that most clichés have at least some basis in fact, and trying to do something better on less money is bound to end in tears.

I was reminded of Better, Faster, Cheaper this morning, when I woke up to blanket coverage of the Olympic Games opening ceremony day, that kicks off the 2008 Games in Beijing.

It has been said that the Chinese have spent around $40bn on the Games, the majority of that on new construction projects, including the famous “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium.

In the course of this massive project, over the past seven years the authorities have displaced thousands of people living in the shadow of the main buildings in shanty towns – ostensibly to clean up the city for all the visitors.

In addition, people have been told how to behave in public, there are stories abound of internet censorship for foreign journalists staying in the city, and a generally over-zealous attitude from the police has been reported.

So it may be Faster, and it may even be Cheaper if the Chinese recoup in revenues and overseas goodwill from the sanitised view of their country that will be presented to us. But is it Better?

Can it be said that the Chinese population will benefit from the Games to even some of the extent that, say, the inhabitant of the East End will surely benefit from the 2012 Games in London? Would any of our lot willingly give up their house for the good of the Games?

The Games is supposed to be about fair play, competition, inclusiveness and the celebration of the coming together of nations from all over the world. But it is hard to ignore the oppressive cloak of smog hanging over the city, that in some way represents the way in which the Chinese have gone about putting on these games, and the subservient way in which leaders of the free world have stepped around the human-rights issues that China has conveniently swept under the carpet for this event.

All that said – I am a big fan of the Olympic Games, despite the problems that invariably arise when the focus is put so sharply on the host country every four years. I can’t wait for the weightlifting, which for me offers the purest form of effort and performance over the 3 weeks – the characters are great, the exaltations when the bar is held aloft inspiring.

On a selfish note, one good thing that may come out of this competition is that it will finally persuade me back into the gym after 6 years of getting steadily softer around my middle. Three weeks of exposure to the finest specimens on earth (women pole vaulters especially), will both titillate, enthral and instil guilt – how many things on TV can you say that about?

It’s that time of year again. The time when the airwaves and news sites are dominated with footage of 16-18 year-olds celebrating their success at GCSE/Highers/A-Levels/Sudoku.

Every news item will feature a group of girls who will be, and quite rightly, ecstatic about their 7 A* Grades at A-Level. They will be performing some kind of Gap advert dance, and hugging each other in between jumps.

This is all fair enough, but what has always puzzled me is not that they are so excited, as I would certainly have been if I had got 7 A’s: but that they are all far better-looking than any of the girls I remember from my school days.

Where are these schools that they find these groups to film? Do they even exist? And if so, can I go back and take my A-Levels again?

If I could go back, I’m not sure I would be allowed in, as nowadays it seems that in order to gain entry you must be:

a) Female
and
b) Good-looking

One or other won’t do – it has to be both.

As I am neither of those, I think I might have to enrol in the male/ugly women schools of which there must be a few around somewhere – maybe Doncaster has one.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7542176.stm