A bad day

 Yesterday was not a good day in a few ways.

It started in the morning when I tried to log on to  my bank account, I won't say which bank as you never know who reads this sort of thing. So thought I should change my password, so did that, though that took longer than it should because I try to use some non-alphabetic characters but it didn't like that. so finished that and it said phone some number. So I did!

  Then the trouble starts, you wait for a few minutes press a few numbers, give them the code and then eventually talk to someone. So she asks me for my telephone banking security number. I don't do telephone banking so I don't have one. You can't proceed without one. But I don't want one, eventually I ask for the supervisor, she is just as useless. I try to explain that it is nothing to do with security, There are other ways to check. For example if I want to set up a standing order they give me a number and then phone back to check, big deal. If you lose a credit card they ask when did you last use it etc.  No I  have to have a number, they will put it in the post for me and I must tell anyone. Though I suppose I would have to tell the banking people so they will know!  It would seem likely that anyone who was trying to get into my account, knew my account details and was phoning from my house would know everything else!

All went reasonably well till I was trying to decide whether to go to a meeting, it is held at the most inconvenient time at a place I have to drive to and there was no agenda and the meeting had been rearranged so I wasn't sure it was happening, in the end I decided to do something else useful BUT it did involve the van. It wouldn't start and it seemed like the battery, so I called our breakdown service and they were quite prompt and we put jump leads on and it started OK. But now I am worrying will it start this morning, so I had a fretful night worrying about the van and what is wrong if it won't start this morning ! And worrying about a few other things like writing a book

 Also I went into CAB , I mentioned some blogs ago that there was this new database system that was failing. Well the companies who did the work, Microsoft & Logica have admitted that it is not good enough and have put a high-powered team on the problem. We will await further developments. Sometimes people think if you go to a big private companies you will get a good service, private bad public good?
 

Playing Bridge?

 I used to waste a lot of time playing bridge during different times of my life. I blame it all on my brother who taught me when I was quite young and so when I went to university to study mathematics it seemed a natural way to waste my time. Once during my first year someone asked me if I was resitting my first year. I was a little puzzled by this  so I asked why. He said that I seem to spend so much time playing bridge & poker that he thought I must have done it all before!

  After graduating  I didn't play much bridge for about 10 years and then started again. The trouble is that by that time I was living in Norwich. Norwich is a lovely place BUT everywhere else is a long way away so once you start playing more then just locally it involves a lot of travelling, With two young children going away for  weekend seemed a little hard on both the wife, the children and me. So I stopped playing.

  Also I enjoy playing but not very competitively, mu favourite form of bridge is teams of four and I perfect evening would be when the scores end of level because everyone has reached the optimal score. A bridge partner of mine was once shocked by this admission, he wanted to win. 

  There must have been some reason for all this rambling, well the person who sent me on my fruitless quest for perfection at the bridge table, my brother has just written a short book on defence. It is called t "The essence of defence" and I recommend it to you all. It is available only directly from him at m-camina@o2.co.uk.  I expect everyone to buy a copy now!

Pensions

Here are some  thoughts I wrote in 2008., I believe nothing has changed. The politicians, pension industry and the economists just do not ant to think clearly about it.

Do we want those who are no longer economically active to live lives with dignity, if we do then these are the ideas we need to develop.

http://www.uea.ac.uk/~h320/pensions.pdf

A family weekend

 Just had a family weekend. It was my granddaughter's 5th birthday so we we all went camping. It could have been a nightmare and I am sure some people could have made it so but we all had a really good time.  

  We stayed at a good campsite  run by very friendly people , Jacky & Penny.  Here is its website http://www.fakenhamcampsite.co.uk/. Beware there is another campsite in Fakenham at the racecourse but that is not the one I am talking about, it might be nice but I have never stayed there no need when I already know a very good one. During the course of the weekend there were about 12 adults and 9 children which is not a bad ratio and there were no arguments and major tantrums. There may have been but I am slightly hard of  hearing so if there are I didn't get to hear of them.

  It also went well because the mother of the birfday girl organised it brilliantly so that the kids were kept entertained and busy. The weather helped and on the Saturday morning beach fanatics made a trip to the beach, the campsite is in easy reach, by car or bike, of the sea. My main role seem to involve making omelettes, which I must boast, I do very well, the secret it seems to me is to keep it simple. My view is that good cooking is simple but brilliant cooking is very difficult, if that sort of makes sense.

  On the Saturday evening some of us watched Tangled, I thought a very clever remake of the Rapunzel story, mind you some of the adults were quite boisterous and badly behaved. This morning they did a performance of their version, the kids that is, not the adults.   Anyway I think everybody enjoyed themselves but being 70 sometimes makes it hard to keep up with the kids when they are playing games involving chasing.

When I get the pictures I might even upload some especially as my wife had brought some clothes she had kept since our kids were very young and seeing the grandchildren wearing them was cute. We even had a coat that was made by an uncle of mine for my nephew when he was about 1.

Is Tolstoy right "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."?  We were certainly a happy family this weekend.

 

How do geeks get it wrong?

   I have spent a few days trying to use a new software package that has been developed for a large charity in Britain. The Norwich office had been told that the system would soon be going live,. So the idea was that some of us would be trained and then train the others. All very simple, except the system is very unstable.

 How have the geeks who designed the system and wrote the software screwed up so badly. One possible reason is that it is based on a Microsoft product, this is not a good sign. The other issue is always that it is test by experts in a small localised environment, when it goes live it is being used by lots of people, probably more than the system can cope with.  Surely anyone working as a computer scientist know about combinatorial explosion, when things grow exponentially rather than linearly. For example with 10 people using the system that is the possibility of about 1000 subsets of people do the same things make that 100 people and the things go batty, that 2^10, which is astronomical.

  Another reason is that there are three main sets of people involved, the managers, the programmers and the users and often they don't talk to each other. This is made worse by the interference of salesmen. This goes roughly like this, the managers, who probably know nothing about computing, say we want to buy this. The salesmen say we can do that for you this quickly at this price in order to get the contract. Meanwhile the computer people know that this is not possible but who cares about them, the salesman want hsi bonus.

  So the project gets delayed, meanwhile the managers eventually talk to the users who naturally want all sorts of modifications. The managers have no idea what is practical and what is by now not feasible. They got back and the company, who is now worried that are going to make a loss, say we can do this but it will cost a lot.  Even if the organisation has its own geeks they will be ignored because they obviously know less than the consultants from the  firm who are doing the software, cause they cost so much!

  In the end the software is delivered late  doesn't work too well AND if you area charity a lot of volunteers walk out because they are pissed off.  Mean while the salesman has pocketed his bonus and with luck the other senior managers of the software company have looked after them selves.

Finally do not forget Microsoft who will pocket the licence money whatever happens. My simple advice is don't buy Microsoft and never trust a salesman and certainly never believe an outside consultant.

Loan sharks

I am being interviewed on local radio tomorrow morning about a new collection point that Ketts Credit Union is opening. So I thought I would do some research on borrowing money. I checked that if you borrowed £250 for 12 months from us it would cost £266,48, at an interest rate of just under 7%. Provident would charge you £455 at an interest rate of 272%, that was taken from their website.

It is horrifying and the government would not do anything about it, whu not because some these companies make big donations to the Tory Party. It is funny when they complain about the influenceof the unions on the Labour Party.


Also credit unions will pay dividends but only if they make any money and their are no fat cats sitting at the top taking large salaries. It is sad that even the chief executive of the Nationwide which is still a mutual, took home over £2,000,000, who needs that to live on?

Alternatives to banks

Sometime ago the Governor of the Bank of England said that we need some alternatives to banks. He is right and they exist, they are called Credit Unions and they are owned by their members. Many of them, like the one I am involved with, http://www.kettscreditunion.org.uk/, are local and have local collection points.

They help everyone because they are local and try to keep their roots in the community. If you consider our big banks like Barclays, which was once local to East Anglia, is now run by an American who just wants to make as much money as he can for himself. Of course he opposes the Vickers report, it might reduce his salary and profits. He probably thinks having to pay 50% tax is outrageous but sincehe does it by gambling with other peoples money it seems quite low to me.

So get along to your nearest credit union, http://www.findacreditunion.com/, join get involved and help.

The wonders of the web

I am trying to teach myself various things about using web pages. Every time I think "How do I add a button?" I go to Google and type in "How do I add a button?" and lots of people tell you.

Most of the people tell you for nothing, are most people really good and it just the shits who get to the top so we get a distorted view of humanity.

During the recent trouble, I am not convinced they were really riots, we only saw pictures of people behaving badly BUT I am willing to bet that there were lots of kind things happening but nobody took pictures of those. Recently the police said they were looking though 20,000 hours of CTCV footage. I wonder how much of it contains absolutely nothing of anyone doing harm.

So you are trying to do something, probably quite simple, and you ask the web and lo and behold people want to help, no gain for them. Which leads me, quite naturally, on to the issue of these economists saying that if we tax rich people they will go away. Would it matter, how many of theses rich people, earning over£150,000 a year actually worth and are they contributing that much to our economy. I reckon the ones who would leave will do more good leaving than staying, perhaps they are the ones we should be sending home.

This is taken from http://www.hidden-london.com/lyrics.html

"it’s the poor what gets the blame
A traditional cockney expression of lamentation, taken from a music hall song that dates from the late 19th or early 20th century. The song’s title is rendered either as ‘It’s the Same the Whole World Over’ or ‘She Was Poor but She Was Honest’. A 1930 version by Bob Weston and Bert Lee was regularly performed by the comic entertainer Billy Bennett (1887–1942). The lyric exists in varying forms, and has been lewdly adapted for drinking songs, but the gist is always of a country girl who is seduced and abandoned by a wicked squire. Fleeing to London, she receives similar treatment from gentlemen in positions of authority. Finally she throws herself from a bridge into the Thames at midnight. In one version she drowns but in others she is rescued and rises to her feet to repeat the chorus:

It’s the same the whole world over,
It’s the poor what gets the blame.
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure [or ‘gravy’],
Ain’t it all a blooming [or ‘bleeding’] shame?"

I have always known the following which I feel expresses a truth and one verse I seem to recall has the lines

" The working class can kiss my arse
I have got the foreman's job at last"

That's why we can't tax the rich! Whilst most people get on with their lives the rich spend their time screwing everyone else.

Do the sums

It always amazes me that people just don't do the sums.

There was an item in today's Guardian about the "broken families". Apparently there are 120,000 such families, we have to assume that this is some estimate and rounded figure. Now the government say that they are going to spend £100 million on them with a further £40 million coming form private sources. It sounds promising but how much is that per family?

It is abut £1000 per family, what can you do with that sort of money. There is an excellent charity ATD http://www.atd-uk.org/ that works with families in difficulty. One of the things that have found helps is to call on the families to help them get their kids to school every morning. Wouold this money cover someone going to call on 120,000 families every day.

Now considser the bonuses paid out the city slickers! I can't remember the exact figure but lets say £12 billion. That would give you roughly £10,000 per family. Now you could do some serios good for those "broken families".

If you do the sums you can see what is really going on. What do you expect from a Prime Minister who says there is one ket fact we have to remember the two things are.