Y Safle

Plaid Cymru pushed a leaflet through my door today. The front page showed a picture of the party’s prospective candidate for the next general election – someone I know and respect, so I took the time to read the rest of the leaflet.

On the back page there was an article that quoted the Daily Mail (always a bad start!) saying that Mark Williams was all but invisible at Westminster.

Well in the information age it is easy enough to check these things. I went to the wonderful They Work for you website to look at my MP’s statistics.

Far from being invisible, the record shows he has spoken in more debates than average, has received written answers to more questions than average and has answered a high number of constituent questions quickly online. All this on reasonable expenses that are only slightly above average, and that because of travel costs, which considering the remoteness of teh constituency, is altogether reasonable.

One area that Mark Williams falls below average on is his parliamentary attendance. At 66% attendance at votes, he is a little below average here. But how much of that is related to the issues of distance, geography and relevance? So the immediate question – as Plaid Cymru is putting this information out – is how would he compare to Plaid Cymru MPs? Well again, a quick search of the Public Whip site turns up the information we need.

• Mark Williams MP, Ceredigion (LibDem) – 66.2%
• Hywel Williams MP, Caernarfon (PC) – 64.2%
• Adam Price MP, Carmarthen East & Dinefwr (PC) – 60.5%
• Elfyn Llwyd MP, Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (PC) – 63.5%

So to be clear, Mark Williams has a better voting record than any Plaid Cymru MP. A case of the pot calling the kettle black?

I don’t have a problem with Plaid Cymru. I often vote for them. But I do have a problem with misleading statements, and this surely qualifies.

In an off topic digression (my fault… did I mention I’m something of a pedant?!) on the Minthegap blog, a commentator called Anna wrote:

and as for your comment Stephen, I have nothing to say but that our definition of piracy differs. Burning a couple of CDs for friends is piracy. I don’t think its wrong, but tis against the law and is defined to be piracy.

It is against the law, but of your law actually calls it piracy, then your law is an ass.

Piracy is robbery committed at sea, or sometimes on the shore, by an agent without a commission from a sovereign nation. Seaborne piracy against transport vessels remains a significant issue (with estimated worldwide losses of US$13 to $16 billion per year), particularly in the waters between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, off the Somali coast, and in the Strait of Malacca and Singapore, which are used by over 50,000 commercial ships a year. A recent surge in piracy off the Somali coast spurred a multi-national effort led by the United States to patrol the waters near the Horn of Africa to combat piracy. While boats off the coasts of South America and the Mediterranean Sea are still assailed by pirates,the Royal Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard have nearly eradicated piracy in U.S. waters and the Caribbean Sea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy

Record companies want us to think of copying of music as a high crime, so they link it with robbery and pillage on the high seas. And yet it is clearly not. They include film clips and adverts that tell us that if we tape someone else’s music, we are contributing to organised crime and the drug problem. But we are clearly not.

There is an attempt at guilt by association here, and yet if you consider the issue, there is often not even any kind of theft except in some spurious legal doctrine.

Consider if someone takes a copy of an mp3 from someone else to listen to. That taking is a breach of copyright law. The content is not licensed to the person who took it, and thus the copyright owner may say that he has no right to do so.

But if that person would not have bought that music (and we must be very sure he would not have done so), then in what way has he deprived the copyright owner of his property? The owner still owns the copyright, and he is not out of pocket. So where is the theft?

Of course, with the ability to buy mp3s at very low cost now, the point may be moot. If someone wants an mp3, they presumably have means to get it themselves. The theft comes then in depriving the copyright owner of their payment.

But we should still bear this principle in mind when we consider license agreements on software with restrictive clauses, or attempts to otherwise skew rights in favour of the companies who have bought the copyright on works. Copyright is only legitimate if it works in the interest of the public (as are patents for that matter).

So what do we have? A crime that is not always morally reprehensible (except inasmuch as disobeying law is reprehensible) being deliberately compared to murder, pillage and robbery on the high seas, drug trafficking and organised crime.

And then the same companies pushing these unhelpful analogies manage to get a law passed in the US that makes it illegal for you to even point to a place that might tell someone how they might circumvent copy protection systems! So much for freedom of speech!

Someone raised an old bugbear that evangelists are in it for the money.

John Wesley (when asked to give an account of his taxable assets by a tax collection officer) replied that he had a silver teaspoon, but beyond that he did not think he had any such assets.

There are still many people with a like attitude today, but unfortunately all our attention is constantly turned towards the brood of vipers who spend every last minute begging money from their professional multimedia operations.

I don’t think they are really radicals in any sense: they do exactly what politicians do, and what the entertainment industry does. They package and sell a product, “guaranteed” to make you happy and prosperous, but when you part with your money and remove the trimmings you find you are left with nothing.

That is not Christianity. It is not representative of the Church, and many Christians openly oppose these people, but I guess that turning the tables on the moneychangers is old news (and the moneychangers have lawyers now).

In the UK, no matter what ISP you use, you pretty much always end up dealing with BT engineers. This is really really bad, because BT Openreach engineers are so variable.

Today we had one of the bad ones. He calloed when I was out of the house, so he thought he would bamboozle my wife with his brilliance. After first refusing to do the actual line test he was sent to do, he told my wife that the reason we can only get a quarter of the ADSL line speed is because of our house wiring.

“But we had our wiring checked by a qualified BT engineer” my wife interjected, but he would have none of it. He told her that we were syncing with the exchange fine from the master test socket.

Well of course. As we had explained, we can always sync at 8Mbps or thereabouts. The problem is that when we use the BT speed test page, using the dedicated speed test account over the BT network to their test server, we get much lower speeds.

His answer to my wife: “People always blame BT openreach, but the problem is the ISPs”.

No Mr BT engineer (DJ), the problem is the BT network. Notice what we had already established:

1. The wiring is fine
2. I used the test socket to test the connection using the BT account. Our ISP network was not part of the equation, and nor was our wiring.

But, of course, the engineer refused to do this test. He merely tested the sync speed, and surprise surprise got the same results as us.

Why did we even have an engineer here when a previous engineer had already been out and tested everything successfully? Because we had the temerity to ask when BT would fix the Aberystwyth Exchange. This exchange has been underperforming for months, and every time BTs deadline to fix it comes up, they just extend the deadline. Thus our ISP wanted to know when the work was *really* going to be carried out. BTs answer was to send us an engineer that we did not need, did not want to come and tell us a load of rubbish.

Some more choice nonsense from this engineer. He said that we could not get faster speeds because we are using USB modems. “No we are not”, replied my wife. “We have a router – a BT router at that”.

Oh, thinks the engineer quickly. Okay, the problem is that you are using wireless. This slows everything right down. (although actually when I run tests I do not use wireless). He asked: “What speed wireless. Is this 100K or 54K”.

“It is IEEE 802.11g” my wife replied. (She hears me speak about it often enough that she knows the numbers).

“Yes, but is that 54K g or 100K g?” Replies the engineer, implying my wife is stupid for not knowing.

Now for anyone that does not know, IEEE 802.11g runs at 54Mbps (although allowing for protocol overhead, you probably only achieve 30Mbps, which is still much faster than the ADSL line). The 100Mbps standard (not 100K) is IEE 802.11n, and the slower standard that I think he must have alluded to is IEEE 802.11b.

802.11b is the 11Mbps standard, which with protocol overhead would likely achieve less than the ADSL’s 8Mbps (especially if signal reception is poor). But my wife had answered correctly. We were not using wireless that would slow down the network path (except perhaps for some initial latency which is more or less unnoticeable).

So having betrayed his enormous ignorance, he decides to do so once again.

“You probably do not have computers capable of running at 8Mbps. You need dual core for that”.

I am flabbergasted. How, for instance, do we explain the fact that we had 10Mbps ethernet connections which actually *achieved* that speed at least as far back as 1997 on consumer devices (before that, often network cards could not actually manage the full 10Mbps, even though the networks could).

How do we explain that we regularly achieve 100Mbps over the house ethernet? (perhaps he did not spot our ethernet!)

And worst of all, how dare he insult my computers. We have at least 10 computers in the house, and two of them have dual core technology.

This is the worst kind of buck passing ignorance that I have heard since… since…

Oh, since this debacle with BT.

Just to be fair – the previous BT engineer we had out was excellent. He seemed to know his stuff, and he actually carried out the tests he was sent to do. Not everyone at BT is as bad as DJ. But enough are that it is no wonder broadband takeup in the UK is now languishing.

The BBC carries an article about call centres returning to the UK. It seems that there has been a consumer backlash against outsourced support centres, with a mere 4% of those surveyed having had a positive experience of one of these.

Quite right too. I have cancelled all my contracts with BT over their abysmal customer service, exacerbated by hours on a call begging that a fault be escalated with them (and not with Microsoft as they stupidly suggested I do – see my letter to BT here for the gruesome details). These call centre staff are on a script, which perhaps works fine when the problem you have is something the script resolves. They are like Microsoft help. Sometimes it does help, but usually you go through trying suggestion after suggestion until you get “Microsoft help was unable to resolve this problem”.

And then, if you are lucky, they will finally escalate your fault. But don’t hold your breath – my experience is that they unstead just forget about you, and when you phone again, the cycle starts over again.

It is not just BT. Wanadoo, Tiscali, and various other companies have put me through this kind of telephone tennis. But we fool ourselves if we think the problem is resolved simply by bringing call centres back to the UK.

The problem is the whole concept of outsourced support and centres. Whether they are in Bombay or Birmingham makes little difference. If the call centre is not in a position to actually resolve your problem then they are just in the way.

Pipex Homecall has UK based customer support, but a look at Their gripe sites shows that people are not enamoured with their customer support either. The company seems to have a policy of deliberately preventing customers from speaking with people who can make real decisions, and the response is stories of people standing in the rain to get a mobile signal whilst they beg, scream and cry for the company to send an engineer to fix their fault!

So I am not holding my breath for great improvements in customer service. My best tip is to patronise smaller comapnies, where customers are important to the service providers. Small is beautiful, so they say.

Most work calendars these days start a week on Monday, and shuffle Staurday and Sunday to the weekend. As pragmatic solution as this may be, I find it annoying in that it does not recognise that the first day of any week is Sunday.

The UK moved to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, which involved changes to
the current day of the month, but the week days were left unaffected.
Thursday, September 14th followed Wednesday, September 2nd in 1752.

It is therefore probably best to consider the week days as divorced from the
calendar itself. They do not fit neatly into a 365.24 day year. They
are a more granular measure of the passing of time, but not truly
calendar markers.

So the question is, which day of the week comes first?

Businesses group Saturday and Sunday together on a calendar for convenience, because then you can group working week and
weekend quite easily in two locations on a calendar, but they are
strictly speaking incorrect to do so.

You see, the seven day week is of Persian/Chaldean and Judeo/Christian
origin. In all these cultures, a seven day week was observed, and the
week days were named for the seven visible heavenly bodies, starting with the
most dominant: the Sun.

Thus we have (in English and Welsh, but other languages show the same pattern):

The day of the Sun (Dydd Sul – Sunday)
The day of the Moon (Dydd Llun – Monday)
The day of Mars (Dydd Mawrth) (Tuesday is named for the Norse God)
The day of Mercury (Dydd Mercher) (Wodan is Norse)
The day of Jupiter (Dydd Iau) (Thor is Norse)
The day of Venus (Dydd Gwener) (Frida is Norse)
The day of Saturn (Dydd Sadwrn – Saturday)

In the Biblical account of creation, it can be shown that each stanza
of the creation hymn takes up the astrological significance of the
gods associated with the days, and shows that the God who is one God
created the realms considered to be the domains of these other gods.
Thus the creation hymn can be seen as being in direct opposition to
Chaldean (and later Babylonian) belief. The message of the hymn is that the almighty God is ruler high above all others.

In the first century AD, the seven day week was introduced in Rome,
under the influence of Persian astrologers. When Rome became
Christian, the Christian view of the seven days was conflated with the
Persian influence, but both had the same common root.

Thus the week began on the day of the Sun, and ended on the day of
Saturn (the day God rested). Saturday was the true week end.

However, the Resurrection took place on a Sunday morning, and in
honour of this fact, the “Lord’s day” was taken to be Sunday.
Christians thus began the practise of meeting together to worship on
the Lord’s day – the first day of the week.

Thus the weekend as we now have it conflates the Jewish Sabbath (or a
day off at the end of the week) with the Christian Lord’s day (or a
day off at the start of the week).

Secularists want to regularise the whole thing and call both days the
week end, but they might as well try and rename Monday to something
less pagan, or choose a five day week instead of seven! The fact of the matter is that weeks start on Sunday –
they always have. It is only the *working* week that starts on Monday.

However, if you want to arrange your calendar to start on the first day of the
working week, then feel free to do so. As I have said – weeks do not
strictly fit into the calendar in any case.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has denied he is running out of steam as he faces his final months in office, insisting: “I want to finish what I have started”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6307541.stm

Well what Blair started with was a government stressing its commitment to education (but failing to stop rampant A Level grade inflation, and with little ground being made in actually pushing our children up the education league tables); Labour was committed to saving the health service – the service that nearly collapsed last year and started the year laying off thousands of staff; They were also committed to an ethical foreign policy – and now live with the reputation of being the first government to deliberately abandon an ethical foreign policy.

But never mind, because the one issue that defined Labour over John Major’s bickering and grandstanding Tories was the sleaze issue. At least the new Labour party would avoid all that cash for questions style sleaze.

Well, that is until they offered honours for unaccountable party loans. With the arrest of one of Bliars most senior aids, and the prospect that he too will soon be interviewed under caution (which, frankly, would have already happened if he wasn’t the PM) – it is time for this lame duck to step down and let the law catch up with him.

Blairs time in office has the same legacy as John Major’s. Failing public services, crippling levels of personal debt, poor pension provision, sleaze and corruption, poor investment in educashun (and poor returns on the investment).

Indeed we have worse: a deputy prime minister (who between affairs) gets driven 100 yards in a car to deliver speaches on climate change, criminalisation of more and more people, wholesale destruction of civil liberties and fundamental rights, constitutional vandelism that never materialised into any positive constitutional change!

Although to be fair, devolution was a great success. Maybe Blair should have left after one term (like he promised Gordon Brown). But as it is, the only thing history will really remember Blair for is his disasterous foreign policy in Iraq.

Three things really annoy me about conferences and meetings with presentations:

1. An agenda that tries to squeeze too much in to too little time!
2. Speakers who, having been allotted 20 minutes to speak, decide to drone on for 45 minutes (and it is always the droners who do this!)
3. Chairs who do not cut the said speakers off!

Bah humbug!

This just in from CNN:

Map of England.

You really don’t want to have someone at CNN teaching you geography!

If you can’t see the problem. Look here:

Map of Wales.

Last week I was made to sit through yet another PowerPoint presentation in which the presenter had decided to enliven his turgidity with the help of the Comic Sans typeface.

I have sat through too many Comic Sans presentations (indeed, if I had only sat through one such presentation, that would still be too many). What is it about the typeface that causes presentations to become so unforgivably dry?

Actually, it may be the typeface itself. It is not a novelty typeface. It is a bog standard run-of-the-mill but hard to read typeface that slows down word recognition (and thus reading) whilst introducing too much pretty stuff to distract from the actual content.

It is a badly written typeface, derivative and unprofessional. And yet there are people who write stuff like this (okay, they are the creators of this abomination at Microsoft):

Comic Sans is the groovy script font which comes with the Windows 95 Plus! pack and is now available for the Apple Macintosh. Although it might be seen as a novelty typeface, which is great for titles, it’s also extremely readable on-screen at small sizes, making it a useful text face.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/fonts/comicsns/default.htm

Groovy? I’m not sure that Microsoft know the meaning of the term (see their Zune product for example!) Great for titles? Titles of what??? I have never seen a title that was improved for being written in Comic Sans. Readable on screen? I beg to differ. I read comic sans text significantly more slowly than other text (if I bother to read it at all).

If you want to be taken seriously, just don’t do it. Don’t use Comic Sans typeface.

The above site goes on:

These pages are designed to be viewed using Microsoft Internet Explorer, with Comic Sans MS and Comic Sans Bold installed.

Ah.. I see. The reason this typeface looks so bad is that I don’t use Microsoft’s insecure browser. That about sums it up really.

Again I beg to differ. The page is irredeemable. No combination of browser and font is going to help it – because the writers really do not have a clue.