Month: April 2013

The public World Wide Web is 20 today.
And here is how the very first website, back at its original URL at CERN, looked.
Ah, those were the days. And Google don’t even have a special graphic to mark the occasion.

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
– Richard Feynman

This Is How Your Brain Deals With Google And Facebook Ads.
Why you can’t ignore them, no matter how hard you try.
And, in the comments, how to see fewer. In case you haven’t already worked it out.

… I got a pretty card and a bunch of radishes.
We went down to the polytunnel
And Mr BW pulled them from their rest

That doesn’t scan quite as well as the original, does it? 😉
“I am your lady, and you are my man”

[New picture coming later. Just need to go down to the river sea to take it]
Later, shortly before my trousers and shoes got very wet:

“Love on the pebbles.”
Dunwich was lovely. Bracing, but sunny, and we had the beach completely to ourselves (give or take a few hundred cuttlefish bones).

Not even a ship on the sea. Maybe everyone else knew something that we didn’t: problems just down the beach in the opposite direction at Sizewell?
I may glow in the dark tonight.

Yes, you read that correctly: good service, twice.
Unheard of in these parts these days! Must be that the sun shining for at least part of each day for the past few days has had an abnormal effect.
On Sunday we moved the hens back up to their summer quarters in the orchard with the buzzy familiars. Soon after we noticed that the water in the 30 litre drinker (the new one we had to buy in a hurry when the previous one split just before we went out to South Africa in December) was flowing slowly out. On closer examination, Mr BW discovered that the top cap had cracked, which was allowing air into the system, and hence, without a vacuum, the water could not be contained until needed as the hens drunk from the water tray at the bottom.
We gave them a bucket of water and Mr BW removed the cap, cleaned and dried it and attempted to stick it with his super magic glue (which came from the Ideal Home Show recently, and really is super magic glue, but then it should be for the price it was).
But, nothing is ever truly reliable when stuck, and the consequences of the hen drinker failing again on a hot day would be too great (fourteen dead hens), so, on Monday lunchtime I emailed the website from which I’d bought the drinker, explaining the problem with the 4 month old purchase.
The email bounced back immediately. I had an internal dialogue with myself along the lines of ‘bloody internet sellers’, and then went to the website to see if there was a contact form or phone number. I discovered that the place I’d bought from had been taken over by another. I had another internal dialogue with myself, which this time contained stronger words than ‘bloody’. But, undeterred, I resent the email to the new address.
Within 10 minutes I had a very nice reply back saying that the manufacturer (in the UK) had already been contacted and would be putting a new cap in the post to us.
And sure enough, it was sent by first class post and arrived yesterday, 20 hours after my email. Can’t do better than that.
And secondly, we’ve needed a lot of pressure-treated timber recently for raised beds for the polytunnel (which appears to have hit 50°C yesterday, despite one end being open, and the plants are growing wonderfully – we should be eating the first radishes and salad leaves in the next week or so), posts for net screening and gravel boards for around the polytunnel. The prices in the DIY sheds scared me, so I found a Witchy Supplier: down a spooky little lane with very deep potholes, in the middle of nowhere.
The Witchy Supplier manufactures wooden fence posts, wooden fence panels and similar structures for farmers, individuals and (increasingly I’m told) landscapers. They are very helpful. They also have offcuts, and have told me before that these are cheaper than long pieces of timber. Yesterday I went along with my little piece of paper with Mr BW’s latest scribbled requirements. 16 pieces of 50mm pressure-treated timber, each 15″ long. The chap spent at least 20 minutes collecting offcuts and then cutting them carefully to size. And then charged me … four pounds. Uncut, the wood would have been nearly fifteen quid in Wickes, and probably more in B&Q.
As he was working, we were chatting (in between electric saw cuts) and I asked him if he was busy. “Yes,” he said, “fortunately we are. But, my next-door-neighbour, who is a long-distance lorry driver who used to leave home at 6am on a Monday and not come back until 8pm on a Friday, and often worked weekends too, is now home every night, and often by mid-afternoon.” He told me how the delivery driver who brings him supplies had told him that there are blokes at the docks at Felixstowe sitting around all day as there are no containers comng in from China for them to unload, and how several of the landscapers who bought panels from him were also doing shifts as taxi-drivers to make ends meet.
I made a comment about good service with a smile going a long way to keep local businesses flourishing, and he smiled. “No-one ever says that!” he said. “It’s so nice when people notice that we do try to go the extra mile for people.” “They may not seem to notice, but they appreciate you – which is why you’re busy when others aren’t!” I pointed out.
Anyone else had any good service recently?

Supporting Englishness.

Now, when is *our* referendum?
Anyone sporting a patriotic red rose (or seen anyone who is), or going to a St George’s Celebration? No, I thought not…

Robin size and shape, sparrow coloured body and tail, dark black head and bib, white thin line encircling its neck. Eating from the seed feeder.
I’ve never seen one before. Bird books don’t seem to contain it.
Any ideas?

I went into town early. Despite it being market day, it was deserted. The last time I saw it so deserted was on September 11th 2001.
I got home about 10am. Never one to miss the making of history, and curious about the likely protestors, I turned on the TV and watched while I put the shopping away.
I made a nice cup of tea (Lady Grey) and then went upstairs during the first hymn. I had some fine sp1nning to do, and this seemed the perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
I don’t usually do fine sp1nning, and I don’t enjoy fine sp1nning, but the workshop at last month’s Rotating Meeting had been about how to blend exact quantities of f1eece into very precise colours. Therfore, I had 20 ‘shades’ of the three primary colours, variously combined, to deal with. Each carefully hand-carded ro1ag weighed 1 gramme, and I (a) hate hand-carding, and (b) hate mucking about with tiny amounts of f1eece. After all, there is no shortage round here, as I’ve just had 23kg of Northumbrian Best (from the last 3 years’ autumn northern jaunts) washed and processed commercially, which made 15kg of beautifully soft, clean fibre. That would make *counts on fingers* 15,000 one gramme ro1ags. Usually I work with a 40 – 60g drum-carded batt, which, spun chunkily, takes about as long to tun into yarn as one gramme spun thinly.
I also didn’t want to have to navaj0 ply the finished single, as it would reduce my final yarn length by three rather than two (who’s still with me here? Not many of you I fear!), so I split each gramme into two half-grammes, so that I could spin them onto two separate bobbins, before plying them together onto a third.
I set out the halved ro1ags into two identically sequenced rows, starting with the primary colours. Red, yellow, blue, then moving onto the secondaries, orange, green, purple, then the tertiaries. The Bishop of London was just about to begin speaking by this point (great address, I thought).
I picked up the first half-gramme from my lines. Red. It refused to spin. It repeatedly broke after a few turns of the wheel. Frusrated, I pulled it from the bobbin, and regarded the muddled and matted fragments.
And then I realised.
Red should not come before Blue during a True Blue funeral.
I started again, this time with blue, followed by yellow, and then red (hastily re-carded to get it back into spinnable form). No problems at all. Perfect result.

As expected, when I came to ply the two singles together into a finished yarn, the lengths of each colour on the two bobbins were slightly different, meaning that, by the time I got to the red fragment near the end (red was third onto the bobbin, out of twenty, so eighteenth off), the overlap of similar, rather than adjacent, colours was only 6 inches. Enough for my sample sheet, but it was rather telling that, despite it being last off, and despite the original weight having been exactly the same as all the other colours (one gramme), somehow there were eighteen inches of Blue.
My favourite quote of all the hullabaloo on aforementioned this week? From an education e-list I read: “The point is that the values inherent in ‘Thatcherism’ are alive and well (not least in the Labour party!).” So true.
I don’t care whether you agree or disagree with Lady Thatcher’s politics. What I do care about is good manners. A huge swathe of the ‘Great British public’ have shown in the last nine days (and particularly today: booing a funeral cortege?) that they lack basic good manners. People who fail to show respect don’t deserve to be respected. But then, from what I see on the internet and around me, I’m not convinced that many people have any self-respect at all, these days. If you don’t have self-respect, how can you hope to respect others?

Email from me, to credit card company:
Could you please arrange for me to receive paper statements on this account? I cannot find where to do this on the website.
Thanks
BW
From credit card’s email response unit:
Dear Mrs BW
Thanks for contacting us.
I am pleased to confirm that your account has now been registered to receive paper statements.
To ensure you are aware of the terms & conditions relating to your statement preference please go to ‘Your settings’ and then ‘Statement settings’ where you can change the way you receive your statements and review and accept the terms & conditions.
If you have any further questions please get in touch.
Kind Regards,
Customer Service Advisor
From me:
Thank you.
But – I can’t see any T&Cs in the place where you have directed me.
Could you copy and paste them for me please so that I am clear what they are?
I do find your whole website very inaccessible, and often I cannot find what should be where it is supposed to be. Also, the paperless statements only print out with the first two items (on any of the print options), hence why they are useless to me.
BW
From credit card company:
Dear Mrs BW
Thanks for your message.
Your feedback is important to us and all comments will be used to shape future development of the site. Your comments have been noted.
May I inform you that we are unable to copy and paste the T&Cs.
As there are several details we need from you regarding the problem you are experiencing in order for us to effectively resolve this issue for you, please call our helpdesk 0844*********. For reasons of security, these checks cannot be performed via e-mail or post. Therefore, we will need to speak with you directly.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused and trust you understand the strict security protocols we have to follow.
Alternatively, may I explain that once you’re logged in, just go to Your settings and then Statement settings – underneath Your contact details, it’ll show you’re receiving online statements – go to Change your settings there, and then click Paper – this is where you pick either a text or email to tell you your statement’s ready – click Save, and the terms and conditions will display – have a read through, and click Yes when you’re ready.
I hope this clarifies our position for you and please accept my apologies for the inconvenience caused.
Kind Regards,
Customer Service Advisor
From me:
It’s fine, I don’t need to use the online bit now you have enabled the paper statements that I couldn’t enable myself.
BUT I obviously do need to see the T&Cs about paper statements (and there is nowhere on the website where you say it should be where there is anything about this) so please send them to me in the post, as you say you can’t copy and paste them. Alternatively, if they make no difference to anything on my account, then don’t bother.
Why does everything have to be so complicated these days? Why can’t you just copy and paste them into a message? Whatever happened to customer service?
I don’t want to be forced to ring up on a premium rate number. I don’t want to spend hours going through the failings of your website on the phone, I just want the service I used to have from you. It’s not much to ask that you give me the T&Cs for paper statements in a format I can access!
Disappointedly
BW
From credit card:
Dear Mrs BW
Thank you for your e-mail.
I am extremely sorry to learn of your dissatisfaction with the level of service you have received from us recently. Please accept my sincere apologies for the inconvenience that you have been caused.
I have tried to contact you today by telephone to discuss your complaint further; however I was unfortunately unable to reach you on the telephone number held on our records.
May I confirm that as an organisation we are happy to receive customer feedback about any aspect of our products and services. Any expressions of dissatisfaction are recorded and sources of dissatisfaction are measured and improved upon whenever possible. As such, I would like to thank you for the feedback you have provided.
I would like to thank you for taking the time and trouble to share your disappointment about the service you have received from us. Your comments are important to us and we are sorry if you feel let down. By complaining you have given us the opportunity to put matters right for you and to improve our service for everybody.
With regards to your concern, may I inform you that there is no terms and condition to switch on to paper statement from paperless.
Having reviewed the circumstances, I have credited your account with £10.00 for the inconvenience caused to you and credit for this will appear on-line under ‘Recent Transactions’ in within 24 to 48 working hours.
Should you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact me again.
Kind Regards,
Customer Service Advisor
From me:
“With regards to your concern, may I inform you that there is no terms and condition to switch on to paper statement from paperless. ”
Hence why I couldn’t find it, presumably!!!
If you could just offer further training to the first operative who replied to me after switching on paper statements as I requested (because there was no button to do this on my screen in the place where it should have been) who told me that I needed to read the T&Cs, and then to the one afterwards who told me where to find something that didn’t exist, then I would be grateful. I’m sure other customers with similar issues in future would be grateful for not being sent on a pointless mission too.
Thank you for your assistance
BW
You just couldn’t make this sort of stuff up. Well, I couldn’t, maybe you could. I do wonder sometimes if it’s just me who gets this sort of rubbish, with almost every interaction I have with large companies. What’s amazed me, of late, is that if I keep going back to them they invariably offer financial recompense, without even needing to be asked. I guess that’s because it costs them £500 for every case that gets to the regulator.

While rediscovering the Geograph website that I mentioned yesterday, I was reminded that, no matter where I’ve lived, and no matter where I go on holiday, I find myself needing to buy more than one OS map, as my location is usually within a grid square or two of the edge of the sheet.
Yes, the OS sell custom maps these days (which can be centred on any location of your choice), but, at £16.99, they’re not cheap. And, no, it’s OK, I don’t want a teeny weeny version on an electronic device as my Witchy eyes can’t see it and my Witchy hands can’t manipulate it. I like the feel of paper. I love the smell of old maps. And I like the challenge of seeing how long I can get a new map to last before I have to Magic Tape the folds.
With use of sat nav and mapping/map extracts on smartphones now so prevalent, there will soon be no national idea of proximate location. The ability to map-read is an incredibly useful skill that has also brought me enormous pleasure over the years. I fear for its future.
Do you live on the edge too? There must be someone, somewhere who lives mid-map?
(especially given that the OS Explorer Map (Scale: 1:25 000) has a ground area coverage of 20km x 20km, and the OS Landranger Map (Scale: 1:50 000) 40 km x 40 km.)

If anyone needs a distraction from the demonstration of the Very Worst of British that is currently sweeping the country (with large regional variations), then here’s a much better view of Britain, Ordnance Survey grid-square by grid-square.
The thing that amazes me is that most people these days appear to have no view on politics, not to care about economics, and only to see the world from one egocentric position, but yet these same people appear to believe that they have an informed and fair view of the past. Some (dare I say, most) of them could do to check their facts. Here (the archive of Margaret Thatcher’s papers, including her speeches on particular subjects – which are often not as widely remembered) would be a good place for them to start.
Some of the people currently putting the boot in weren’t even born at the time of the events they are decrying, and have a very limited understanding/desire to view the events in the context of what they were following, or where the world was up to at that time.
So, forget all the negativity, view Britain in all its Beauty, here.

Cryptologist and security expect Bruce Schneier (Chief Security Technology Officer of BT) says “we as a society are heading down a dangerous path.”
This article quotes him as follows:

What I’ve Been Thinking About:
I have been thinking about the Internet and power: how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. Increasingly, those in power are using information technology to increase their power. This has many facets, including the following:
1. Ubiquitous surveillance for both government and corporate purposes – aided by cloud computing, social networking, and Internet-enabled everything – resulting in a world without any real privacy.
2. The rise of nationalism on the Internet and a cyberwar arms race, both of which play on our fears and which are resulting in increased military involvement in our information infrastructure.
3. Ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, either to prop up their business models (copyright protections), enable more surveillance (increased police access to data), or control our actions in cyberspace.
4. A feudal model of security that leaves users with little control over their data or computing platforms, forcing them to trust the companies that sell the hardware, software, and systems.
On the one hand, we need new regimes of trust in the information age. (I wrote about the extensively in my most recent book, Liars and Outliers.) On the other hand, the risks associated with increasing technology might mean that the fear of catastrophic attack will make us unable to create those new regimes.
It is clear to me that we as a society are headed down a dangerous path, and that we need to make some hard choices about what sort of world we want to live in. It’s not clear if we have the social or political will to address those choices, or even have the conversations necessary to make them. But I believe we need to try.

Now, none of this is dissimilar to my own thoughts on the subject, which I’ve been bleating about here intermittently since 2003 (and much more intermittently of late as I’ve become more and more aware that most of you don’t give a damn how much non-anonymised personal information you give away, and the purposes to which it could/will be put).
The difference is that this chap is an expert on the subject, and has evidence – the place I saw the article has links, lots of links. And Schneirer’s blog has enough sensible detail (eg) to make anyone who wants to shout “conspiracy theorist” change their mind…

Here’s what we did yesterday.
We were 1.33% of their visitors (well, I hope I’ve done the maths correctly on that…). And I was the first person through the door when they opened at 10am.

I know how those post boxes feel.
Mr BW wants to know whether (/why) Morris had the monopoly on all early sales of post vans to the Post Office. It certainly seemed as if they did, from those on display.

Review sites: waste of space, populated by marketing bods or people bigging up their own companies, or a good way of getting genuine feedback on a product/company?
I have a suspicion that it’s not worth ever trying to leave negative feedback on a product or on the customer service you’ve received, on the sites of big retailers (Argos, M&S etc etc) as it will not be published (or will be deleted). And as for eBay sycophancy…
I think that online reviews are often very misleading these days as the review sites have all been hijacked, and retailers only allow positives. What do you think?

When will the weather improve?

We had snow again yesterday, and it settled before melting in late afternoon. Today is grey, grey, grey again.
Nice date though.

My email these days is almost entirely marketing junk or spam.
There is little I look forward to receiving, and I could happily do without it.
One of the few emails that delight me is when the International Space Station emails to tell me it will be passing over The Coven shortly, and where and when I can see it. You can sign up for this free “Spot the Station” service (it can text as well as email) here. Did you know that the ISS the third brightest object in the night sky, after the sun and the moon?
And, if you don’t already know about it (over 608,000 already do), one of the current men in orbit has a Twitter feed here. Amazing photos and surprising facts. If only all Twitter feeds were as coherent, informed and educational (it even has correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation!). On the subject of Twitter, who noted Clara’s throwaway hilarious comment on Doctor Who this week? The line where the Doctor described the situation as, “…human souls trapped like flies in the world wide web, stuck forever, crying out for help,” and Clara responded with, “Isn’t that basically Twitter?”
As I’ve written before, I’ve always loved everything space related, and still have my scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings of the Apollo flights and Skylab. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of the 1969 moon landing.
Part of Mr BW’s job involves keeping up-to-date on where their extremely-high-technology product is being used. In doing his rounds, he spotted this yesterday.
A lovely picture of the first sample of powdered rock extracted by NASA’s Curiosity rover’s drill:

But hark, what did Mr BW’s keen engineering eyes spot? (the link above includes the original image which is clearer):

It’s a multi billion dollar project. One bit of dust in any part where there shouldn’t be dust could mean curtains.
Surely those ties are not what they seem?
In other tech news, the first mobile phone call was made 40 years ago yesterday, 3rd April 1973, by Marty Cooper (still alive, now 85). Motorola, eh?
And finally, I love this article(iPads in education: not actually evil, but pretty close)’s description of an iPad as a “reassuringly expensive fondleslab“.

The ploytunnel cost three spades, a fork, two trowels, a pickaxe and several other things that I’d sooner not think about.

Mr BW was clearly competing with Helper Mr BW, a strapping lad of not quite 16, to see who could be the most destructive. Mr BW has a long history of tool abuse and testing equipment to destruction. And tools definitely seem to have got weaker over the years.
Anyway, I bought some new tools – two for the price of one. Except that they were half the price in a different garden centre, so that was quite clearly nonsense. They have a lifetime guarantee, so I have carefully kept the receipt and labels. But, it fails to specify whether the lifetime is the owner’s lifetime, or the tool’s. If it’s the tool’s, then surely it is dead when it bends, breaks etc? I suppose they bank on the fact that only one in a million people will keep the documentation, and remember they have it when the tool breaks.

They are now all nicely delabelled (why do manufacturers use such sticky labels?), oiled, and neatly ranged in some special clips, five for £2.99 from Lidl, on the potting shed wall. Now all I have to do is keep Mr BW away from them. Ah, wait…
Talking of garden centres – I heard on the TV news the other morning that they reckon only 10% of what is bought in them is plants! They are fast becoming a good day out.
Not for me they’re not (I’d sooner have an extra plant than a drink and a bun, and screaming kids just shouldn’t); give me a good old fashioned nursery any day. Not that there are too many of those left, sadly…