Category Archives: Uncategorized

Snow, What Snow?

Confusing as ever, over the last couple of days, the Lincolnshire Wolds handed out another helping of its quixotic and capricious micro-climate.

Whilst the rest of Britain wears a white overcoat, the skies over the Wolds looked like this…

…and the ground looked like this…

…ok, a little bit of snow, and it was slippery down the (unsalted) hill to town. Indeed, the score on the journey out on Monday morning was:

An oil lorry stuck in the mud/slush in the grass verge
An articulated grain lorry that had slid to a halt up the hill – being rescued by local farmer and tractor
one lady who had parked her car up the nice new Miss-Marple style finger posts
a couple of dainty wiggles and balletic sideways moves from the 4×4

But we made it past the place where, a couple of weeks ago, I took a 180 degree flip into the mud and bushes (rear wheel drive that time), on the ice-sheet provided kindly by Anglian Water who have never fixed the leak from the hill-top reservoir, and past the useless grit bin at the top of the hill.

Isn’t there some sense of completeness in the Cosmos, in the fact that Wikipedia has an entry on grit bins (with pictures). Although this article and similar might give suggest some organisations have a rather more proprietorial attitude to their bins than Wackipedia might suggest…

The keener-eyed amongst you may be wondering about the pile of junk in the foreground – a legacy of last summer holiday. Unlike the sun-worshippers and other more conventional holidaymakers, I set myself the task of making a Pond Cam, to observe the comings and goings at the pond (and prove that I still “cut it” on a down and dirty bit of systems integration and soldering). And here it is replete with wireless infra-red camera and solar panel…

Well it works (day and night), which was a good result, but not without its challenges, like the relatively short range of the wireless transmitter, so this coming year I might just take a few days off in the summer to IP-enable the pond to close down the distance. Well, it is already mains-powered, so why not a little bit of powerline Ethernet, an IP Web-cam and some video streaming…

A bit of context here: It’s a wildlife pond so is intended to look a bit scruffy, with bits of old rotting tree stumps (no suburban goldfish here), and it does the job very well!

Roll on summer (or the promised, but as yet unseen 15cm of snow).

Crunchy Octopus, with Pesto Sauce

Life, media-style, is normally quiet in the nether regions of Lincolnshire, but having had an earthquake last year, it seems that the papers are thirsting for more excitements from the Wolds. So we have started the year with an exciting story “Tentacled Alien Destroys Wind Farm Generator”, pictured below just after the accident (a genuine photo, for sure)…

I have commented before about the impact of global warming, but I think having an ocean-going octopus visiting now is rather premature, and in fact any, extra-terrestrial cephalopods foolish enough to embrace a windmill is going to end up as sushi.

Of course, the alien story is a good way of diverting attention from the otherwise suffocating Credit Crunch

I was going to write something clever about “interesting times” here but when looking up the origin of the phrase it turns out that the alleged curse has very little provenance – the quixotic and capricious Wikipedia suggest it might be related to the proverb “It’s better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period” (寧為太平犬，不做亂世人; pinyin: níng wéi tàipíng quǎn, bù zuò luànshì rén).

Bubbles are always predictable with 20:20 hindsight, and make a nonsense of some of the great prognostications and punditry, when all comes crashing to the ground. Arthur C. Clarke summed up the dangers of prophecy as Failure of Imagination, and Failure of Nerve. To which we could probably add Failure of Intelligence to make an unholy trinity. Intelligence comes in many forms of thinking process as well as keeping a good look-out. Previous major failures of forecasting include the dot.com bust, of the prior forecasts for commercial trends were spectacularly off:

… and which also makes me think that, in the terms of control systems theory, that the whole global commercial and financial system is large and complex enough not to observable, let alone controllable (although the jury is out as to whether it is quantum indeterminate).

Which brings me to one of the classic, but flawed frameworks that are often used in the crystal-ball gazing process: the PEST analysis which attempts to scan important trends in Political, Economic, Socio-Cultural and Technological domains. Variants posited include:

PESTLE/PESTEL – Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal, Environmental;
PESTLIED – Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, International, Environmental, Demographic;
STEEPLE – Sociodemographic, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal, Ethical;
SLEPT- Social, Legal, Economic, Political, Technological
FARM: Feudal, Agricultural, Religious, Magical (for medieval lords, thanes and serfs, etc..)

OK I made the last one up, but it demonstrates that PEST is a rather basic cookie-cutter analytical tool, and certainly not MECE in its scope. Inevitably, the framework you use for forecasting is influenced by the current frame of reference and warps the lens with which you look at and filter the trends.

In the spirit of improvement, albeit strapping wings to a pig, I can offer my own variant: PESTO. The “O” stands for “Oh sh*t”, that category of all other things that we didn’t think about in the other four categories, or plain just aren’t under the microscope, or even do not yet exist, be imagined or people don’t think can happen, and so on.

The Red Queen trumps Karl Marx – change is constant and things always move on, become different. Change is, not dialectical, sorry Karl, you backed the wrong horse.

The solutions to long term forecasting problems, is to think/work in short cycles, and react/respond quickly to keep up with the changes, and adapt to events as they arise. Be Agile!

Postscript: I cannot finish without acknowledging the death of my Uncle Edward in December, the last Gueritz of his generation, and remarkable with it. You can read his story here

GPS-enabled Road Pricing. Hah!

I recently had to to go to Kent at short notice, and since I was heading into relatively unknown territory on a long journey, I zero’d my satnav trip details, a rare event.

When I got home, I flipped to the trip detail screen and was tickled to see this trip record shown below…

The distance looks right, but behold, my Max Speed was apparently 242 mph – was I driving a Bugatti Veyron (top speed 258 mph)? – I think not!

This makes you think about how useful is GPS data as the foundation of a national road pricing system – the answer is probably in chocolate teapot territory!

Many people think that a satellite based road pricing system would work roughly like this…

Road pricing - how people think it works

…with the satellites somehow detecting the position of your car and then transmitting the data to the Big Computer that adds up the price of the the roads you have been sitting on, and then issuing a bill.

But of course the satellites don’t detect the position of the car at all, it is the Black Box in the car that does all the work, and so a GPS-satellite based road pricing system would really work something like this….

…with the car working out where it thinks it is, and then (somehow, by mobile phone, maybe) sending the data to the Big Computer that…well, you get the picture, don’t you…

If such a system were built, then once people twig the way things work, the little Black Boxes will be wearing tin-foil hats – to block the incoming satellite signal, and then to stop the mobile phone signal going out; result: No road travel data = no payment.

So the Power-That-Be would have design some sort of method of enforcement. What better way than using the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras that are sprouting all over the place.

All you need to do is cross-relate the journey data received from the in-car black boxes with the location of sightings according to the cameras. The system would look something like this…

Thinking a bit harder than maybe my satnav did, then you can imagine many points of error:

confused satnav systems
lost distances travelled in tunnels, city canyons, and inside little tin foil hats
black box failures, including maybe “failures” induced by sharp, stabbling screwdrivers
failed/partial uploads of trip records
misrecognised number plates
cars and drivers missing from the database
and more…

Aaaaaaaaaagh, a merry feast of error compounding upon error, a veritable panoply of tainted data, a concatenation of absurdity!

Multiplying up the error probabilities in this ordure-filled pipeline, and you will get a success probability in the mid-seventies percent. Not good…

I have previously mentioned the risk profile of Government IT projects so I won’t bang that particular drum again here, but you can always look here to remind yourself…

My trip would have earned me about 18-points on my licence, a big fine, a 5-year ban, and probably 6 months in chokey for apparently travelling at 182 mph faster than the National Speed limit.

So if/when we end up with a GPS-powered road pricing system, expect the worst!

Footnote: the charming and naively executed diagrams in this post where brought to you courtesy of a DigiScribble pen. It calls itself ” The Mobile Digital Note-Taker”, but using it underlined for me the fatal flaw of all write-only devices…you can’t see what it thinks you wrote until you upload – too late, way too late

SNIS – YAMFLA (Yet Another Meaningless Four-Letter Acronym)

The world of Information Technology overflows with its arcane jargon and acronyms, but it is by no means, the sole offender of creating inpenetrable and mysterious language.

I was recently driving along and saw this displayed on the dot-matrix on the back of a bus…

…and whilst admiring the rendition of the letters on the display and pondering dot densities and the like, I then spent precious minutes attempting to work out what it was actually trying to say, and where was the bus going?

There is a lot of talk about reducing street clutter at one moment, and then, again, increasing confusion within the driver’s mind to make them slow down

coincidentally, Hans Monderman , the proponent of “Shared Space”, died earlier this year, but that is another tangent

but this new FLA certainly did the latter, and none of the former for me!

As I overtook and looked in my mirror, Eureka, the bus was heading for the depot, and proudly displaying “Sorry, Not In Service” on the long display at the front.

Yes, the transport types have invented a new word-thing and foisted on us unsuspecting general public who really didn’t need it and shouldn’t be spending our time working out what it means. This particular word-thing should really only be used amongst consenting transport types and anoraks, and I don’t really mind if the bus people use it as a verb,

“OK, guys, we’ll SNIS this bus and bring on the relief”

just as long as they don’t do it in front of the children.

In my humble opinion, this display below would have worked better, and would probably have meant more to a large part of the world that uses the Roman alphabet…

Fool Us? More Fool you!

I stayed in an bizarre hotel in Kensington last week and was rather struck by the immense length of the central corridor, and odd green-ness of the lights, creating an institutional, Soviet/Stalinist feel to the place, and the sense that you could walk and walk and never find your room…

…which brings me, of course, to carpets of which this place had many, many hectares.

Carpet stores have always seemed to me to be one of the last hangouts of stone-age man, well, stone-age marketing anyway.

Apart of the never-ending sales, and boring adverts, they seem to harbour troglodytes who have not worked out that it might just be better to treat their customers with a little bit of intelligence. The most insulting manifestation of this is the latest wheeze, the “cut, and then cut some more” sale pricing.

Carpetright have a great deal advertised at the moment at the local store…

An interesting aside is that if you go to the Carpetright website and right-click your mouse, instead of the normal menu, you get a big Copyright notice, not obvious what they have to protect so assidiously

50% and then 20% more is, of course, supposed to make us think they are cutting prices by 70%, but, no, by a clever trick of arithmetic it is only 60% (the 20% only applies to something already cut in half).

“Carpet Stupidity” more like…

Mobile madness

Over the weekend, I was very nearly forced to hand out an “Unhappy Voucher” after a foray into Mobile madness.

Not quite in Norse saga territory, but after getting my daughter’s mobile phone replaced three times (cracked keys, random turning-off, etc., etc..), I finally gave in, consigned the not so old phone to Silicon Heaven, bought a new model on some cute subsidised deal, put the SIM in the Box of Many Identities, and handed over the new toy.

So imagine my surprise, when, a week later, I was ambushed whilst staggering to the kettle for the first coffee of the day: “My phone’s dead, the display has gone”….. I said “Hnnh”

So there I was, standing in the shop, bristling……….it had all kicked off after the Sales Slug had rejected my reasonable replacement request, and I asked to see the Manager, and Dismal turned up…

Me: ….phone broken…..screen blank……Slug……packaging……not necessary…..in the bin. Please could you replace it for me?
Dismal: Sorry, we can’t replace the phone without all the original packaging
Me: …gone in the bin …
Dismal: Well we can’t replace the phone without the original packaging
Me: Yes, you can
Dismal: No we can’t
Me: Yes you can
..
Dismal: We could go on like this all day. You’re not listening to me
Me: Yes, I am, I just think you’re wrong
Dismal: Are you calling me a liar? – Great customer service, this, I thought
Me: No, just mistaken

(Dismal taps on keyboard)

Dismal: I’ve typed here – advised customer of policy, blah, blah, .no packaging, need to order a handset and battery – OK so they can replace the phone without the packaging, but he’s going to make me wait a long time

(Tapping, more tapping, grunt, much more tapping, visit to the stockroom, more tapping, another visit to the stockroom – comes back with new phone in box looking unhappy)

Dismal: We haven’t any handsets and batteries in stock, so I will have to take a new phone out of its box and send back the old one…

Yesssss!

Humanity – 1, Forces of Customer Service Evil – Nil

The Maths of Pointless Numbers

In an idle moment in a place I cannot recall, but may have been the local takeaway, I read the Daily Express, an unusual event. And I read an article entitled “CANCER RISK OF JUST TWO GLASSES OF WINE A DAY” which demonstrated exactly why not the read the Daily Express if you wish to retain your sanity.

This is how the Express sensitively rendered the story…

The particular issue raised by this non-news story has been rolling around the back of my brain for a while, however the creative forces have been battling with perfectionist tendencies, fending off a full research project on the many different life risks, probabilities thereof, and the mechanisms of converting annual probabilities into life-time ones, and all manner of analytical delights.

So to break the log-jam (and get a life in between), I have crayoned the issue, rather than the full Powerpoint…

You can find all sorts of stats around the web about the probability of different life risks if you look – here and here, for example, and tease out interesting, contrarian nuggets. Such as, drowning is much more likely than a fatal dog attack, yet there are many strait-jacketing laws on dangerous dogs, but no UK inland rescue force to save people who fall in the water, which paradox seems to defy common-sense.

The issue in the case of the Australian report is that the risk that is being increased by 75% is diddly-squat to start with, and (Diddly-Squat * 1.75) = Sweet FA (in the Maths of Pointless Numbers). It is undoubtedly bad if it actually happens, but the probability is not something you can, or should, let dictate your life.

I suppose headlines like “Medicos issue report about irrelevant statistical findings that don’t matter” don’t sell papers, so there must be people who enjoy a little frisson of fear, panic and anxiety over their breakfast corn flakes, and prepared to read the Express to get it….

Of Washing Machines and Software Errors

The human brain is constructed so that it is very good at seeing patterns (even where there are none), and so “coincidentally” after my previous spat on the same topic, I have been suffering my own version of Call Centre hell this week – just trying to book an engineer to come and mend our ailing tumble-drier.

Last year, just about this time, I fell for the pitch of Domestic & General who sold me a three-in-one policy for kitchen equipment breakdowns. And so it came to pass that the Tumble Drier started thrashing itself to pieces, just after the renewal letter came through.

All should have been smooth: “direct debit”, “you need to do nothing”, “renew automatically” were the comforting phrases in the letter. Tchah!

To cut a long story short I lost a few precious hours of my life listening to on-hold music and all that other stuff, and then when I got through it was “that fine, just call blah on this number, oh, thats strange the policy has been renewed but the equipment shows it is lapsed, let me put you on hold”…

So clearly the renewal process had gone all agly, creating an insurance curate’s egg, in fact.

But the cherry on the cake was when I received a very cheerful automated email from D&G below…

Renew for a penny? Hmmm, aha, the light dawns, something has gone wrong with their arithmetic. Last years price was £119.88, nicely divisible by 36 (3 boxes x 12 months), this years price (up, of course) is £131.88 – oh dear, divide that by 36 and you get lots of 33333333333333333333333333s on the end. Add in a bit of truncation and you have a nice little problem building up. If they had charged me £131.76, maybe things would have turned out differently.

Nothing as serious as the Patriot missile failure, or crash of Mars Climate orbiter (Imperial/Metric System confusion), or others of that ilk , but my very own personalised, computerised, automated rounding error.

Aside: Spreading the cost of the £0.01 by direct debit. I laughed so much I nearly died….

I clicked on the button, of course, I had to, in for a penny in for a penny, so to speak; to see if I could make the whole problem go away, but a “technical error” on the web-site prevented me from completing the transaction!

So here is a little sign for the D&G development team to hang from their office wall to act as a reminder as they ply their daily toil…

Beating the Cost Crunch

We’ve all been through it and know how it goes…
((((ringing))))

Welcome to British Tap. Please listen carefully as the following options have changed,

Subtext: You’ve not called us before so you wouldn’t know that and it makes no difference to you, and all we are doing is wasting your time whilst the call routing system finds somebody who might be able to answer your call

.
Please note that calls may be recorded for training and quality purposes

Subtext: Because we really don’t trust our agents or our customers for that matter and we need to be able to go back and find out what you said and then tell you that you were wrong and that you didn’t say what you know you said.

Please select from the following options.
Please dial 1 to buy a new widget, please dial 2 if you would like us to try and cross-sell you some insurance for the widget you bought from us last week, Please dial 3 to report a fault with your widget

Your call is being held in a queue and will be answered shortly.
Our agents are busy answering other customers calls

Subtext: The people in front of you who are more important than you and were given a better phone number to call.

Your call is being held in a queue and will be answered shortly.
We value your call.and would love to answer it as soon as we can

Subtext: but we have not staffed our call centre properly and things are getting a bit out of hand because we are operating on the cheap.

Your call is being held in a queue and (click)

(((((ringing)))))))

कॉल करने के लिए धन्यवाद British Tap . मेरा नाम Nigel है . मैं आज की मदद से आप कैसे हो सकता है ?

Eh? Oh? My boiler is leaking.

我很抱歉，您所谓的Whistle的热线电话，我会转移你向锅炉热线。请稍等

Sorry, what did you say?

(((((ringing)))))

Yes, of course, that old cost-cutting gambit of the offshore call-centre.

Indeed, whilst the overseas call centre pendulum has been swinging back on-shore in the last year or so, now with cost crunch following credit crunch we can expect that trend to reverse somewhat.

Call centres and the customer experience that go with it are not the only things to get crunched when belts are tightened, discretionary project spending is one of the first things to be reduced,with projects either being deferred or cancelled. Whilst this is a very hand tap to close, by turning off spending on projects willy-nilly, as snuffing boring, run-of-the-mill sustaining projects, genuinely innovative activities also usually get the chop.

Conceptually, the unfettered application of cost-cutting measures looks something like this…

… with good stuff getting damaged at the same time as cutting off all the bad, spendthrift behaviours.

In particular, undiscriminating simplistic cost-cutting can be quite short-sighted and have unforeseen effects down the line. Indeed, this process of cost-cutting can accelerate an overall competitive cycle of pain…

…where declining profitability is met by efforts to increase efficiency through cutting costs, implementing new technology or whatever, which drives greater competition, which leads, to, oh dear, declining profitability, ad absurdum. “The Banking Revolution: Salvation or Slaughter?”>

However, innovation is one of to primary decelerators of this cycle

So the conundrum is how to go about reducing costs without killing the good stuff, thus…

…to take out cost and building competitive advantage through innovation and better customer experience.

The solution generally lies in being more analytical about the cost-cutting process rather than simple “slash and burn”, such as:

Careful prioritisation of projects, for example, choosing to favour of genuine innovation efforts over the projects that just sustain the existing business;
Taking a system-level view, e.g, over the customer life cycle, and using joined up thinking to ensure that simplistic, functional cost-cutting does not cut across and destroy customer experience, or in the IT software development arena, taking the whole productivity equation into account (rather than focusing solely on daily rates)
Keeping a focus on profitability, rather than just the bottom-line, so that the overall financial health of the enterprise is improved

Meanwhile, back to the phone…

(((((ringing)))))
(click)

Благодарим ви за свикване на British Tap бойлер гореща линия. Казвам се Tony. Как мога да ви помогне да днес?

Oh, !$R£W”Q^%$£&^%$£&%$£”%^)*&%)(*^%$%^£!!!!

From Zip to Tikka

I have previously talked about the use of my observational superpowers to analyse the geo-cultural variations in traffic lights. Indeed, with many years experience of driving I would like to regard myself as a sort of professional Gentleman Amateur in the general sphere of traffic management.

You know the sort of thing: new developments are appraised with a cynical eye and a firm grip on the steering wheel, each new disaster greeted with a reproving glare, a sigh and shake of the head, the all too rare improvements grudgingly admired, and gone in a flash as you pass down the road (at the prevailing speed limit, naturally).

And so, In my many miles of driving, with sometimes too much time on my hands, I am moved to muse on the solutions to many apparently intractable problems – one such topic being that of the strange behaviour of drivers when they reach a sign like this:

For many people, this is a command to form a single orderly queue about 5 miles out from the offending road works, and then fume/gesticulate/weave violently as a small number of other drivers (possibly acolytes of the Bavarian blue and white propeller) exercise a modicum of common sense to save a few minutes by driving up to the lanes towards the red blocks, and try to ‘merge in turn’, gasp, horror, don’t frighten the horses!

(There are yet other people that think this is a sign for a picnic area at the beach with cheap red plastic tables under palm trees, but we’ll leave tham for another day).

The ‘zip merge’ is a respected means in other countries to speed the traffic through the taper where the road narrows, as you can see from the diagram from New Zealand…

..yet it was allegedly considered sufficiently un-British to be excluded from the Highway Code until it finally made it in 2007.

Of course, pondering on how best to solve this problem of irrational bahaviour, I came up with what seemed like a useful solution to level the playing field at the Taper’s End. I won’t bore you with the details because I discovered the much more bizarre and entertaining fact when researching this topic: there are web-sites out there where such matters are discussed amongst consenting adults.

You’ll find them if you look at places like Pistonheads, DigitalSpy, UK Roads Portal (Society of All British Road Enthusiasts) , Pathetic Motorways – I do have to admit a sneaking affection for this latter site, as it does nicely demonstrate some of the more farcical antics of road planners.

Side bar…

What did the users of these sites do before the Internet? Hang around the Transport section at WH Smiths or the local Public Library? Publish grubby Roneo’d newsletters and round robins? Hold earnest discussion groups on a Thursday night in the “snug” at the local pub? Flock with cameras to major road openings? Wow, what a life!

So having having discovered that my great idea was not especially original, I have now moved on to a new problem to solve: the near extinction of the Chicken Tikka sandwich on the roads of Britain. Thanks to Smffy.com, I found a picture, but at Ginsters, nary a one!

The truth must be told – why has Britain fallen out of love with the Chicken Tikka sandwich?

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