Time once again for a sociable couple of drinks with The Bumpkin and his better half, and this time, Mr Sublimeproduct and his better half joined in. The day’s drinking is catalogued in Pubblog, the chief part of it being in Bilston. By god, we know how to show Mrs Sublimeproduct the finest sights in England- she has moved here from the US, we take her to Bilston….
I’ve recently read The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. The book’s been around for a good while, but as the discussion is primarily historical, it’ still relevant.
It sets out a world where a communications revolution is in progress: there’s hackers, online communities, encryption, cheats, commercial killings being made, huge technological leaps (and failures) happened, and many other aspects that we associate with the Internet. The operators were the hackers of their day, highly skilled, scathing of newbies, and in demand. The online communities of the 19th century were formed from their ranks- social networking in it’s infacy took place in the quiet times. They had aliases or nicknames and sign-off signatures, they developed their own languages and shortcuts. This was the world of the telegraph.
Government tried to control the telegraph, at least one battle was decided by it. Encyption was banned and then allowed again, and broken. Messgages were forged, but probably not selling Viagra. Link contention and congestion was an issue at times, but I don’t think any automated traffic managment or shaping was possible- but you can bet any internal messages has the equivalent of QoS tagging. Competing technologies and companies fought for control. One today’s scammers favourites came into existence.
The book’s a good read for anyone interested: so much of what we consider new was in fact at least 100 years old….
We had a day off today (and it was a very nice day for march 1st) so we took a drive out into Derbyshire and visited Calke Abbey.
It’s not an abbey. A priory once stood there, though. The name was given to the present house in 1808.
It’s a National Trust property, and is rather unique in that it has seen little change from the 19th century in places, and even less change since WWII. The house and estate was given to NT in 1985, to avoid £8M death duties, and before that many room shad been simply ignored for years. The trust has conserved, but not restored, the house, so it’s a time-capsule essentially, and it still appears as a house in decline rather than a shiny, restored one, which is actually far more interesting and atmospheric.
As I hinted at below, I need to whinge about travel agents and insurance.
I’ll start by being fair: the agents refunded our money, but not until after a lot of hassle and stress and hard work form my very nice neigbour Helen.
I’ll lay out the facts: Two Belgian commuter trains crashed. This casued chaos, includung to the eurostar service:
Screengrab from Eurostar site, 17-02-2010
You may like to note that paragraph:
We therefore strongly advise travellers between the UK and Brussel (sic) to cancel or postpone their journey
I called our travel insurance co, and they suggested that there may be a way to claim for the accomodation- Eurostar were refunding travel costs.
Their story changed the next day. Apparently, this counts as ‘disinclination to travel’ which is not covered.
I’m frankly shocked, though not that surprised, that when the Foreign Office refers to Eurostar’s advice, which is not to travel, that the insurance company say we must travel, then if we suffer a 12 hour plus delay or cannot reach the destination they will pay.
Strikes me as irresponsible, and double standards- we choose not to place ourselves in a risky situation they choose to not pay out. Still, that’s insurance for you, the fetid bastards.
Evil Overlord 21: An eternal rainy Sunday in Bracknell, with all of the pubs shut and no TV and cinema for the insurance industry.
Well, we should have been travelling on the Eurostar to Bruges with neighbours, to celebrate us turning 40 and them 50, rather than to hide out after a contract killing, but that all went a bit wrong, didn’t it. Here’s as close as we got:
Off to Bruges?
The travel agent was initially useless, as was the insurance company- this will become the subject of a future rant- but the short story was we didn’t go. This meant a quick decision was required, and accomodation had to be found.
We ended up in York. It’s not in Belgium, clearly, even though there’s some evidence of Belgian influence:
Belgian Specialities
Mmmm Beer
As things turned out, it was all very nice: York is quite affluent, but not up itself. The shops are a bit different, the building historic (mostly, and the pubs are not bad either in the most part- pubblog will tell all. We thought our bad luck was to continue when the Lexus’ electronics (Mike was chauffeur) had a sulk at the petrol sation when we’d got as far as Derby, but they soon recovered, and then there was an uneventful journey. Our luck seemed to turn: We did some sightseeing, eating and drinking (pictures in the Gallery).
York was full of other tourists, even in February half-term- We skipped the Viking centre, due to queues (advice here is to pre-book), but managed the Minster, Castle Museum, Railway Museum, and Nuclear Bunker, plus a Ghost Hunt.
We had thought of Hardwick Hall on the way back, but the snow put paid to that….
Do Centro
serve any purpose at all, apart from to put wanky adverts on TV that make our public transport sound worthwhile?
They’ve organised a consultation day which involves
A “meet the manager” session [which] takes place at the St Paul’s bus station travel shop between 7-30am and 9-00am
When I’m at work, or already committed to travelling there.
and a
chance to talk to operators aboard a National Express bus parked outside T.J.Hughes at the top of Park Street between 10-00am and 3-00pm.
When I’m at work.
Then there’s the Transport User’s Forum, which to be honest, I don’t really have any great desire to rush to, given the content. That goes along with other things that give you any input into services in your area: Police surgeries on a weekday, around lunchtime for example.
Does any of the public services actually consider the idea that many of us have to work to pay the taxes that eventually fund them?
Quite apart from the often used approach of shoulder surfing, or the modifications done to card readers, there’s a new flaw in chip and pin. Interesting attack- don’t know if it has any real-world danger *yet*, but chip and pin isn’t the flawless, super-secure thing it’s claimed to be. This particular flaw may be gone if signature verification is ended.
Suresignal is Vodafone’s wanky marketing name for a femtocell. I have one now, the excuse being evaluation for work. Vodafone’s network is overall very good, but as with anything radio, there’s holes.
The box itself is rather good actually. You attach it to your router, register it and the phones you want to use on it, and it establishes a tunnel somewhere into the depths of Vodafone, and gives you a full strength 3G signal nearby. It’s changed the patchy coverage in my house into fully reliable everywhere- but the biggest benefit is for people who have no signal at all in their home. The only slight downside was having to get in touch with Vodafone customer services when the registration played up, as they’re only slightly less fucking useless than Orange, who frankly, are such a shining turd of incompetence, it’s not even funny.
It’s supposed to only need 512Kbit/sec, and certainly doesn’t seem to be chewing up too much of my bandwidth. It does seem to get upset if the ethernet interface isn’t up when it boots, but otherwise works a treat.
The car in front is a Toyota. In front is probably best, as the throttle may be jammed open and/or the brakes might be dodgy [snigger].
That’s a pretty rough few weeks for Toyota. The first one, of course, is a pretty simple fault on a pedal. This could happen to anyone- it should be remembered that car manufacturers are just assemblers really, putting together bits that an OEM makes for them. Anyone remember the VAG/Bosch coilpack problem?
The second one, I think is a little more interesting. The fix is software- a flash of an ABS controller to change it’s behaviour. This is where things get a bit scary: software bugs in safety-related controllers. I’ve talked about electronics in cars before. They make our cars (generally) safer, faster, more economical, and more reliable, but they’re not infalible. There’s sensor failures, ECU failures (both of which fail-safe into hydraulic-only, non ABS mode), and then bugs in code.
Having said that, I have an inkling this might not be an actual failure, more of a calibration: ABS brakes are pretty simple, and well proven: you stick a sensor on each wheel, and if that wheel stops turning while others are still turning, you loose off the braking on that wheel for short time. I note that the reports are failures of braking on uneven surfaces:
The investigation will look into allegations of momentary loss of braking capability while travelling over uneven road surfaces, potholes or bumps. However it will not suspend sales.
Which is just the time when a wheel may skip off the surface and stop turning. I wonder if the flash just reduces sensitivity? When ABS is on, it feels like brake failure (and a good few new drivers (or those new to ABS) mistake it for that- not realising that without ABS they’d be merrily sliding along with the wheels locked…
Are The Green Mile or The Shawshank Redemption on permanent repeat by at leats one channel late at night?
Every time I’m up in the early hours (which is unusual- it only generally happens if I drive late at night, which I don’t do often, as I like to be awake to drive, then have trouble getting to sleep) one of the above films is on.
I have no problem with them: they are both fine movies, but it’s *always* the case that if I watch TV after midnight, they seem to be the best or only option.