You get tired and irritable, your children annoy you. You tell them off about everything and stop them from doing the things they want to do. Your time with them becomes wearing and you long for some time to yourself. When they are finally in bed you are so glad that you stay up late enjoying your freedom instead of having the early night you need. Next day you wake up tired and irritable. Several life-times pass.
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From Wired - Umberto Eco, the Italian semiologist, once famously compared Macs and PCs to the two main branches of the Christian faith: Catholics and Protestants.
The Mac is Catholic, he wrote in his back-page column of the Italian news weekly, Espresso, in September 1994. It is “cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the Kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed.”
The Windows PC, on the other hand, is Protestant. It demands “difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: A long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.”
The postmen are going on strike, and the news story about it didn’t really say why. On the postal union’s site there was a Message to the Public which I didn’t find persuasive. They talked about how they were faced with the prospect of arriving at work and being told to do a completely different job to the one they usually do and of having their hours of work changing from day to day. These are things that I and many other people have been used to for years. They also talked about how Royal Mail want to reduce their pension benefits and increase their retirement age. At the moment the Royal Mail pension scheme is so expensive to run that Royal Mail have to pay an extra 730 million pounds a year into it in addition to its member’s contributions. The CWU are in the enviable position of having the government underwrite their pension scheme if Royal Mail eventually go bust. Meanwhile final-salary pension schemes are closing in most companies in the UK.
So I don’t really feel very sympathetic towards the postal workers. In attempting to explain their grievances they have simply highlighted how out-of-touch with the real-world they are. Since their members’ pensions are protected if Royal Mail become insolvent maybe they’re calculating that it would be better to protect their cushy benefits and drive the company under than it would be to negotiate a less advantageous deal. It is of course the job of a union to protect its members’ interests, but sometimes that involves looking at the long rather than the short-term and even the CWU recognises that the current pension scheme is too expensive.
The amazing popularity of online shopping should have been a bonanza for the Royal Mail but instead they are in deeper trouble than ever. This may well be because the management is useless, or it may be because the organisation is bureaucratic and inflexible and many of the people who work there are unimaginative jobsworths, I have no way of knowing. In any case, this strike won’t help their situation. Like Millie Banerjee of Postwatch, I find it hugely disappointing to watch a great British institution tear itself apart. But on the other hand, maybe the demise of the Royal Mail will create a brilliant opportunity for a new, much better mail service. Here’s some things I’d like them to offer:
- Destination tracking - Every time a parcel addressed to me is processed they should check to see if it is too big for the letter box or if it needs a signature. If that’s the case they could send me an email or text asking if they should deliver it the next day or on some other day when I am going to be at home.
- People who are at home all the time could act as mini local post offices. Big parcels for anyone in their street would be left with them at the start of the day, outgoing parcels could be collected at the end of the day.
- Tracking the delivery man. It would be so easy to put a GPS receiver on each delivery person and then track them so that I could see an ETA for them.
- Smarter redelivery. I’m going out for the day but I still want my eBay parcel to be there when I get home so I go to their site and ask for all today’s mail to be delivered to my friend up the road.
- Parcel aggregation. It’s daft for several delivery companies to all be calling at the same address. Why don’t they set up a clearing-house for data and then they could all deliver each other’s parcels.
Crikey, I could go on all day with this. Anyone fancy going into business?
My American cousins always used to think that the name of my home town, Leatherhead, was hilarious but not as extremely amusing as nearby Dorking. Now George Clooney has made a film called Leatherheads, it’s about American football. So my home town will be famous as a film title. This is bad news, but it could be worse, I suppose. At least Clooney’s not a complete idiot. At least it’s not a Disney movie.
OK. It’s fine for other children’s parents (2 today) to phone up asking me to collect their children, or deliver their children, or whatever, even if the reason is so that they can indulge their seedy money-making enterprises in property ownership and even though I had to skive off work early today just so that I could collect my own children. It’s a bit annoying that they want me to call them back on their mobile phones, at peak rates, to discuss the arrangements. It’s more than annoying when they won’t allow the conversation to end quickly because they feel guilty and want to blather on about this and that to make themselves feel better, at my expense. Flame off.
It is so irritating to read that Northern Rock ‘managers’ are now whining that the government should have done more, earlier, to prevent everyone from taking all their money out. The company’s own response to the problems has been unbelievably useless. On Friday, when I went to their site to see what they had to say about their situation, there was absolutely no mention of any problem at all. I found that very disconcerting so I cycled down to the Maddox Street branch to take my money out before it was too late. There was a queue, in part because only two out of the three counters were open. If there hadn’t been a queue I might have felt reassured, but since there was and since I’m English I obviously had to join it.
Once I’d closed my account I checked the Northern Rock site to see if online customers were having any luck logging in. I couldn’t even get the log-in page to open. It continued to be unavailable every time I checked, over the whole weekend. This must have been unbelievably frustrating for all those customers who had online-only accounts and couldn’t withdraw their money at a branch. By Saturday there was a very small link at the top of the home page leading to a mildly reassuring notice. By Sunday the link had got larger. On Monday they finally got around to replacing their front page with a big apology note. It they had done that on Friday, and if they’d thought to send all available staff to the counters, and if they’d properly managed their online account access then maybe there would have been no queues, no panic and no hours of frustration and stress for all their customers.
I am delighted that I’ve closed my account, it was only paying 4.8% and I would have closed it earlier if I’d noticed, but there must now be thousands of people who’ve got a whole load of money that was in a tax-free ISA and will now have to go into a tax paying account instead. They are victims of a combination of greed and incompetence on the part of the management of Northern Rock and those managers should now be committing Hara-Kiri, not whinging about how the government should have bailed them out sooner.
My iPod has played a track by The Prodigy on every journey I’ve made by bike recently, but never when I’ve been travelling by train. How does it know to do that?
The heavily trailed report to Congress by Gen David Petraeus about how well the ’surge’ is going was given a special 2.5 hour programme on the World Service. This is what happened when the General got up to speak.
Is that hilarious or what?
And now, this advert has appeared in the Washington Post:
Ever since mankind discovered that the Wii remote uses Bluetooth for its wireless connection nerds people have been trying to use it for doing music. There have been some PC based drum instruments and of course the performance artists over at Cycling 74 had someone who was controlling a fancy sample playing looper thingy. I wanted something simpler, as easy to use as the Wii itself, so I wrote a straightforward monophonic string drum playing thing. It’s hard to describe, I’m going to record myself playing it and put it up here later, but to be honest if you’ve got a Mac with Bluetooth it’s probably easier to just download the program and have a go yourself. I’ve given this project its own page (or just click on the KS-3ii link at the top of the blog), with instructions, downloading links and room for your comments and suggestions.
The incompatibility between cartoonists and Islam is inevitable. Cartoonist are very frequently irreverent about everything and resistant to censorship. Some muslims are very touchy and, I’m afraid to say, authoritarian. There’s also the fact that many strands of Islam don’t allow representative art so the whole issue of cartoons is never going to be popular in the first place.
This weekend the Washington Post and numerous other American newspapers have refused to publish their regular cartoon strip Opus. Berkeley Breathed, the writer of the strip, announced on his site that the strips had been witheld from publication but he didn’t say why. The subject of the no doubt soon-to-be controversial strip is a young American woman on a spiritual odyssey who keeps trying out crazy religions. Last week she was trying to teach nude yoga to the Amish, this week she’s a “Radical Islamist”, complete with veil. It’s August, there’s not much news about, let’s see what happens.
You can see the possibly offending strip at the excellent Salon magazine.