Archive for the ‘Bi-polar diary’ Category

One door closes, another opens

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Frustrating late morning trying to do something for the daughter of our friends in Bath, who has to write her essays, using a combination of the knuckle of one hand on a conventional keyboard and a voice recognition system called Dragon Naturally Speaking. But when I was there yesterday I found that the Dragon software had been wiped and the wireless keyboard she was using had annoyingly stopped communicating with her computer.

So went into altkeyboards, the user group, which was inspired by August Dvorak, who not only designed a better keyboard layout than QWERTYin the 1930s, he designed Dvorak layouts for people with only one hand and for those with no hands at all, who used a stick, guided by their forehead. The last useful comment on voice recognition was in 2001, which is the Stone Age as far as the new technology is concerned. And I could find nothing useful at all about keyboards using a stick.

So I went into Google. Joy. The first reference was to MIT, which in my book is just about the best university in the world for computers. Sure enough they had a section on Dragon Naturally Speaking, the best in the world for PC’s, but NOT available for the Apple Mac. For the Mac the MIT lot suggested IBM Via Voice.

At that point I decided to give up, because yesterday I was sure that I was staring at a giant Apple Mac screen in front of the bed. Maybe I am suffering from the dread disease of too much early morning blogging.

So I opened the post. Joy. We have won the lottery for a beach hut. So off we went to inspect it, catching the beach superintendent just before he left for lunch. He gave us the key for the hut, which is the one he currently occupies himself. There is ample room for the kids’ buckets and spades. There is even enough room for a card table so that, if I am so minded, I can blog a pebble’s throw away from the ocean.

So my mood soared again. Maybe there are some Gods up there and maybe they do answer prayers.

I was too tired when I got back to do any more Googling. So I decided to take my cue from The Great Book. Ask and it shall be granted, or some such.

But just to hedge my bets I decided to put my question to the Blogosphere before I knelt down to pray.

Surely there must be some human being out there who knows of a viable stick type wireless keyboard and who knows whether Via Voice actually is a better alternative for someone with only one knuckle available to input a three thousand word essay.

How big companies treat us – O2

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

This post is along the lines of those I have written about BT and npower on the basis of my own personal experience in dealing with large companies. It is also included in the Manic Depressive Diary category. Because what is common with all three is that they appear to doubt my own sanity, grasp of the facts and ability to find out ‘the truth’. And they activate my paranoid fears that these all powerful giants might get me locked up in the looney bin, or cut off my electrity or hack into my mobile phone.

O2, the latest Goliath who I have been taking on with my catapult-like emails, is actually a split off from the even bigger BT company. It provides the service for my Sony Ericisson mobile phone, which I dearly love because it is a mind-boggling example of the wonders of the new technology. It not only enables me to make telephone calls, it enables me to connect to the internet, download games and send and receive emails. And it allows me to take photographs, which are almost as good as those I used to take with my equally beloved Pentax. And with something the size of a small pocket calculator.

This is a copy of their latest email to me. It starts with ‘Hello Bob’ and ends with their wish that I enjoy the rest of my day. So perhaps they do love me as much as I loved them. But it is what is in between that concerns me.

Hello Bob,

Thanks for replying to Paula’s email about the games that have been downloaded on to your phone.

We can clearly see from your account activity that you, or someone with access to your phone has requested and downloaded these games.

As a result as we’ve explained previously we’re unable to refund you the #5 you were charged for each of these games.

Under the Data Protection Act, you have the right to see any information we keep about you on your account, including call information.

If you’d like to see these details, please reply to my email with the following information:

- name

- address

- mobile number

- alternative contact number.

Please note that there will be a small administration fee of #10.

If you change your mind and would like us to resend these games to your phone, free of charge, please reply to my email to confirm and I’ll be happy to do this.

I realise that this is not the answer you were looking for, but I hope I’ve explained everything clearly for you.

Thanks for contacting customer service and enjoy the rest of your day.

 The story of how my love affair with O2 turned sour is necessarily long, but I hope not too boring.

Earlier this month we were driving on a beautiful sunny day to have lunch with my sister who lives near Kingsbridge in East Devon. A mini-bus dis-obeyed a stop sign and drove in front of us at a junction. My wife slammed on the brakes, but the front of our car was seriously scraped. I jumped out of the car and walked over to the minibus driver, a bit shaken, but fishing in my wallet for my insurance certificate. The driver shook my hand and immediately apologised for his mistake. But then my mobile phone rang.

It was my sister asking what time we would arrive. As quickly as possible I told her that we were half an hour behind schedule, and tried to end the call. And failed, partly because I could barely see the screen in the bright sunlight, partly because traffic was building up from all four directions, with drivers honking at us. In rising panic I pressed three or four buttons, without success, and then turned the phone off.

I did not check my phone until the evening, when I found that three messages thanking my for ordering three computer games, and telling me that £15 had been deducted from my Pay as You Go account. I concluded, mistakenly as it turned out, that this was all my fault, as a result of my panicky pressing of buttons.

So the next day I rang O2 customer service, and explained what had happened. About the minor crash, which had made me a bit shaky, and had caused me to press a few buttons accidentally. I furthermore explained that I never played computer games on my mobile and that I had not used the internet facility. O2 insisted that games could not be down-loaded accidentally. And kept on repeating that, until I gradually realised that they were accusing me of lying. I patiently repeated my story, only to be told that I was not listening to what O2 was saying. By this time I said that their behaviour was a disgrace, and rang off.

The next day, when I had recovered my cool, I emailed them with a patient written explanation couched in the most temperate language. In their first reply, they said that their records showed that one of the computer games had been downloaded twice, so they were refunding me £5, but I must pay the other £10 because the games could not have been downloaded accidentally.

Before I replied to this I checked the file manager on my phone. There were no downloaded games there. I also checked the times. The telephone call from my sister was at 12.47 PM but the messages telling me I had downloaded the games, came at 4 PM. I told O2 this in my reply. Their second email to me asserted that it was not possible to download games accidentally, because in order to do so you had to press four keys in an ordered sequence. My reply repeated that I had not done this, and asked them for an explanation of what had happened, including the discrepancy in the times. Their reply is the one I have printed above.

It convinced me that I was not going to get anywhere by writing emails.

But the matter should not be allowed to rest. It raises questions about what O2, and maybe other mobile companies do, which are far more important than the £10 at stake.

The O2 reply above includes this sentence:

We can clearly see from your account activity that you, or someone with access to your phone has requested and downloaded these games.

 If they look into my phone and send me messages they must also have the ability to download games even if I have not asked for them.

So I am writing this blog, in the hope that some employee of O2, or some reader of mine, will come up with a more satisfactory explanation of what happened.

Has anyone seen Monck’s mind?

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

If anyone has seen the mind of Professor Adrian Monck, head of City University’s journaliism department, could they return it as soon as possible, in a jifffy bag packed with lots of bubble wrap. His brain may not be very big but it is the only one he has got. And every minute he is without it, he is a possible danger to himself, and and a certain threat to alll journalism students, and would-be journalism students, at City University.The news broke in the newsroom of The Guardian in London, when many witnessed the breakdown he suffered in a debate with the renowned philosopher, A.C. Grayling.But readers do not have to wait to see the evidence.The crafty Guardian hacks have buried it in the education section of their web site, under the misleading headline, of ‘Is the Renaissance scholar dead?’ Monck’s speech was not about scholarship, Renaissance or later. The thinking was mindless Monck polemnic laced with one reference to the gospel of Netscape founder, Marc Andreessen.

“Graduating with a technical degree is like heading out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife. Don’t miss that opportunity because of some fuzzy romanticised view of liberal arts broadening your horizons.”

Journalists, of ccourse, have to be kept away from knives and assault rifles, while they learn to rely on the pen when they want to put the boot in.

Monck says he does not want to shut down English departments and forensic science departments en masse. He merely wants this:

By all means let people study history, the classics, novels, the media. But let them do it in their spare time – not as a state-sponsored, loan-financed languor.

For a take on what Monck, who himself studied history at Oxbridge, might have said before he lost his mind, follow this link, to a blog from the Vice-Chancellor’s office at Macquairie University in Australia, That blog does say something about what the Renaissance was about and its relevance to today’s world and apparently it was written by Vice-Chancellor himself, a bloke called Steven Schwartz. Schwartz is a former vice-chancellor of Brunel University, whose great strength is in teaching engineering. But imaginatively. Schwartz argues that;

foresight, constructive dissent and creativity are the real skills that are in short supply.

Read it and follow his links..But don’t forget to watch your step. Don’t whatever you do tread on Monck’s mind.

It may be lying on a street near you.

Season under way in Charmouth

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

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 Breakfast on the prom, where my tranquillity was invaded by a large group with hard hats on. That part of the season which brings large groups of school children and university students. Mostly as part of geography or geology classes, for the beach is rich in fossils providing the evidence to support the theories of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins. But sometimes English and art classes; there is no better place on the British coast to inspire the young imagination to paint or write a poem.

This morning’s group appeared to range in ages from about 14 to 22, some too young for university, others too old for school. In fact they were a school party, but from Munster on the border of Germany and the Netherlands. The Germans take their education seriously. Staying at school til 22 and completing an undergraduate degree at 30 is not uncommon.

Their subject was civil engineering. So I wish them well. My grandchildren will have need of them, to stop the cliffs around here falling into the sea and to combat the results of global warming.

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Only my computer understands me

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Just made myself a cup of tea. Emblazoned on the side of the cup, bought for me by one of my daughters, is the message above.

Which reminded me of several scare stories in the last few days suggesting that blogging is so bad for your health, it may be fatal. All based on the sudden death of two oldish people, who happened to be obsessive bloggers. Two personal tragedies, but as one commentator noted, two out of an estimated number of one hundred million bloggers is hardly statisically important. For a deeply serious consideration of the risks, read the New York Times story. Otherwise continue reading this light-hearted comment.

My family gets worried if I stay up half the night blogging, as I sometimes do. But my sleeping habits have always been erratic, and long before blogging began or computters were invented, I would write in the night, first with a fountain pen, later on a typewriter.

Sometimes then, if I did not feel like going to bed, or woke up in the middle of the night, I would play patience. Nowadays I play Hearts on the computer, which is quite as relaxing and much more fun, because I am playing against three personalities invented by the computer, who are better than most human card players.

They are certainly better than me, because Vista keeps a record of your score. And presently I have only won 43 per cent of the games I have played since Vista arrived on my screen in January.

Maybe it is going to kill me. Or maybe I will succomb later today when I have a healthy walk down to the beach, and a taxing walk climb back up the hill.

Hail to the mighty nature God

Sunday, April 13th, 2008

The mighty nature God must have been looking over my shoulder while I wrote the previous blog. She drummed on the roof of my bungalow half an hour after I had finished with some of his hail stones. And, as if to demonstrate her, super-human powers, she kept the sun shining, melting the stones as they hit the roof.

Not only that she messed around with my computer connections to try and stop me posting the story to the web. The screen told me that the computer could not find a connection to the internet.

I checked all the connections at the computer. All firm and fast. I got up the carpet to check the connection to the wire that leads to the socket in the hall. Equally firm and fast. I tried a phone in the last link before my computer. It worked OK.

So by now I decided that it must be the wicked Lord of Sky, Rupert Murdoch. The Sky server must be down, breaking under the load of serving the millions of customers who have signed up for its seductive package, thereby swelling the profits of Murdoch plc.

I was about to ring the Sky help line, when I remembered the First Law of Computing.

‘If a program stops working, and you cannot find the cause, turn everything off at the mains. Count from one to ten. Then restart the computer.’

This law has no basis in science that I know of. It derives from ‘trial and error’. Based on my own experience on the humble Amstrad PCW, which was the greatest achievment of Alan Sugar, and was the first personal computer that enabled the poorest Brits, not only to replace their typewriiters but to get on to the net. What a shame he now barks at people on the telly instructing them on how to make as much money as possible.

Many computer techies I have known also subscribe to this law. It seems to work just as well in the age of Vista, Google, and MySpace as it did in the days of CPM and the Amstrad PCW.

So if you get an error message on your computer. Remember the First Law. And remember the God of Trial and Error.

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Test your eyesight. Can you spot Portland Bill?

Long time a greening

Sunday, April 13th, 2008

treedaffs.jpgThis life-long townie is filled with wonder at his first spring on

Lyme

Bay. At how nature, the Great Conductor, summons each player in turn to awake from the long sleep of winter. She moves at a majestic pace. By this morning some of her biggest players, the oak, beech and apple trees were still displaying the stark bare branches of winter. But underneath the apple tree, the daffodils, already past their best, are surrounded by bluebells and primroses. The hawthorn and the elder trees are already wearing their summer green outfits. And the lawn is covered with daisies and dandelions. The camellia is now out, adding a splash of contrasting colour to the ivy and the brambles which are green all year.

Nature is also the Great Painter, who paints a different picture for us every day, no, every hour. Presently the skyscape is crowed with a mixture of dark grey rain clouds and billowing white clouds. The sea is a light green, merging into a band of dark grey in front of Chesil

Beach and Portland Bill. The sun is bright enough to pick out the yellow sand on the beach, even at that distance. And

Charmouth

Beach is bright yellow. The lady who owns the green hut café has thrown open the shutters, and put her tables and chairs outside, where it is warm enough for the Sunday strollers to take their coffee outside.

 

Only three weeks ago, the Great Conductor, summoned her most powerful player, to perform a mighty crescendo, which rained the car park at Charmouth, with pebbles, driftwood and assorted plastic bottles and boxes. This morning she is playing the slow movement. Yesterday’s chilly and gusty wind has been displaced by a gentle breeze. The sun has already demonstrated that even in Britain in April it can raise the temperature to a level warm enough even for Americans reared in centrally heated homes. But the sun has not had it all his own way. There have been light refreshing showers to quench the thirst of all the players in the orchestra as they emerge from hibernation.

 

On mornings like this I can understand why people like Tony Blair and George W Bush and all those fundamentalist Muslims, believe that all these wonders must have been created and orchestrated by an all powerful God or Allah. And I lose patience with Richard Dawkins, who I think gets near to making science into an all powerful God.

 

I wish Dawkins would take more account of the kind of truths discovered by great artists and poets.

I am content with William Wordsworth who urged us all to get out and let nature be our teacher. That leads me to respect the findings of Charles Darwin and his successors, including Richard Dawkins. How could I not respect their findings, because the evidence for those findings is all there in the fossils of Charmouth

Beach, which I can see even as I write this?

But I wish Dawkins and his ilk had more respect for the things in nature, and in human nature, which are not yet explained by science.

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Did they conquer England?

Friday, April 11th, 2008

To a talk in the village hall this evening by Peter Press on the history of Charmouth, which to most visitors is a place they can stay by the seaside, if they cannot get into Lyme Regis, where they can pose their wives on the Cobb to the background which became an iconic image when Meryl Steep, let her hair blow in the wind in the French Lieutentant’s Woman.

But, as I discovered this evening, history started before Hollywood. And when theRomans marched into Britain just over two thousand years ago, they did not even notice Lyme Regis, (which got the Regis bit of its name because a later ruler of England, a German immigrant, liked to holiday there.)

The road they built goes from Winchester, past Thomas Hardy’s birthplace, near Dorchester, and within a whisker of my bungalow, to link up with the Fosse Way, which reaches the sea at Axmouth, then a viable port. As I write I can hear the tramp of Ceasar’s soldiers, pacing a route which in part follows that of the present A35. They marched on regardless of the local sniper fire. And they were probably moving nearly as fast as the twenty-first century holiday makers, driving their cars which are capable of doing twice the legal speed limit, but reduced to a crawl, because where they are going is where thousands of other people want to go; once, the season starts.

In the Doomesday Book, which was the survey conducted by England’s next conqueror in 1066, so that he could collect his taxes efficiently, Charmouth is recorded as a thriving little agricultural community. It earned its bread from tilling the soil, and its soil was richer than that at Lyme, two miles away. In those days the tourist industry was not a major factor in the economy.

In the hall tonight there was still some pride in that heritage. And in the Cistercian monks who nourished it, long after the solidiers had departed. They were devoted to their God in the Sky, but when that God talked to them, he told them to take of their cassacks and do some hard work, to set an example to their flock, rather than pontificating about how they should live their lives.

But of course the Romans did conquer England, even though it took a later continental army to force the English to measure in centimeters. And William did win the battle of Hastings; King Harold is dead, not gathering a resistance army in Argentina.

They certainly won the battles, just as surely as George W Bush scored with his recent surge. But history tells that the English, after they had licked the wounds of defeat, went on to establish British rule over countries that Ceasar and William the Conqueror did not know existed.

But that was quite some time ago. And today’s reality, is the ‘natives’ are governing themselves. Including Robert Mughabe, who came to power, with the support of the majority of the his own people in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia, a country named after Cecil Rhodes, who captured chunks of Africa for the British Crown and for British capitalism.

And, in whose honour, legions of Americans come to Oxford to study as Rhodes scholars.

Mughabe won his particular war. But he has not been able to manage the peace. His poor are amongst the poorest of the world. Many of them don’t have enough to eat, let alone the economic power to get fat and unhealthy on the junk food of American capitalism.

One of the placards held up by Mughabe’ s marchers after the election, whose results we still do not know, was something like, ‘We will never be a colony again.’. That is the spirit with which those who risked their lives to fight with Mughabe in the bush were imbued.

But that was twenty-eight years ago. The younger generation want him to move on to the challenges of today. Mughabe has not made the transition from ‘freedom fighter’ to ruler, that has been made by Saint Nelson Mandela and, less successfully, by Fidel Castro.

It tookk a few hundred years after the Roman and French invasions for the English to move to ‘democracy’.  Time is truncated in the modern era, but change takes time. Anything that the west says about Mughabe is suspect. It smacks of the old British colonialism or of the American neo-colonialism of George W Bush. We need to stand back.

And hope that the other new leaders of Africa will be able to persuade Mughabe that now he has won he needs to start thinking about how to govern. How to give his people enough to eat. And also how to give them as good an education as they might get if they won one of those much coveted Rhodes scholarships at Oxford.

Snow in Charmouth

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

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Snow fell for the first time this morning on my bungalow in Charmouth. And a neighbbour stopped by and told us she had abandoned a walk up Stoneborough Hill because of a blizzard. The gardener reported that his side of the town was white when he left. It almost restored my faith in the newspapers who have been full of the news that Britain is suffering its second spell of Arctic weather this spring.

Almost.

By the time I sad down to write this blog my study was baking hot. I went to turn the central heating only to find that it had not been turned on this morning. The heat was coming from a blazing summer sun. The back garden is awash with colour. The lawn is covererd with white daisies and yellow daffodils. Around the apple tree, showing its first buds, there is a girdle of bright yellow primroses, bluebells and daffodils.

The snow flurry lasted ten minutes. None of it settled. As I write now another flurry has begun. But the sun is still shining and melting the flakes before they reach the ground.

So I decided not to voyage the web looking for evidence that this weather is being caused by climate change. Instead I shall have a look at what is actually happening in Zimbabwe. Is Robert Mugabe really going to cling on to power by using bullets to overturn the the verdict of the ballot boxes?

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Better no training at all for journalists

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

In my last blog I took issue with the Rottweiler, Jeremy Paxman, for telling a City University student, that they were wasting their time doing a course. All you needed to know in journalism could be learnt in three weeks. Since then Geoffrey Cox has died. He was even older than Robert Magabe, aged 97. But he has not been trying to go on running the News at Ten, whose continued existence owes more to him than most of the founding fathers.

The battles he had to fight were to get the News at Ten extended from 15 minuties, which was what the advortisers wanted, to half an hour. After Cox departed from the scene, the advertisers shifted their attack, by moving the News at Ten, to another time. To suit the needs of their advertisers. After many battles the News at Ten has been re-instated at 10, by Michael Grade.

And the avuncular Trevor Macdonald, who is even blacker than Barack Obama, is back there with lots of credibility. And a pleasing alternative to the Beeb, most of whose non-whites, are rather fetching females, and young enough to be Trevor’s grandchildren. But the battle is far from won.

Geoffrey Cox, did not have any journalism training at all.

He was, like Robert Magabe, a colonial. A New Zealander who did a hiistory degree in one of our far off colonies inhabited by sheep farmers. But, because he got a first, he went on to do a rather posh degree at Oxford, the BA in Philiosphy, Politics, and Economics. But he set his own agenda.

This from The Independent obituary.

A convivial and highly intelligent man, Cox was also a brave and resourceful correspondent. In 1932 he had entered Oriel College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand, where he had gained a first class degree in History from Otago University. At Oxford he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and travelled widely in Europe during the vacations. Challenged by a German Rhodes scholar in 1934 to see the true face of Nazism, Cox served for three weeks in the Arbeitsdienst, the Nazi youth service, draining marshes and drilling with spades instead of guns. An article he wrote on the German labour camps led the Sunday supplement of The New York Times and was also printed in The Spectator. This in turn helped him to secure a reporting job on the News Chronicle.

So although Cox did not go a journalism course, that is how he learnt his journalism.

It got him a job on the News Chronicle, so that he learnt his journalism, not in covering weddings and funerals, but in covering wars, at which lives were at risk.

 Including his own.

Which is the present reality for all journalists out there. Including John Simpson, who is reporting from Zimbabwe, although he is not supposed to be there. Including the New York Times reporter, who has been arrested and is now in jail, and an unamed British reporter, who is presumably being helped by the British embassy. But they have not told us yet, even who he (or she) is.

These reporters are risking their lives to tell the world what is happening in this former colony. Like Geoffrey Cox, when he went off to cover the Spanish Civil War, they did not go there in a gung ho frame of mind.

They believed in the myth of journalism. That journalism is worth doing because journalists try and convey to the folks back home, what it is like on the front line.

That is what Geoffrey Cox stood for.

We should honour his memory.

And we should work to nurture those young would-be journalists. Whether they be on journalilsm courses, or like Cox, learning journalism in their own way, to follow in the footsteps of those who have tried to interest the public in matters which are rather rather crucial to the nation and the planet.

Cox, if he were reporting today, would be trying to put Mugabe in historical context. A tyrant, yes, but one produced by the coup d’etat by Ian Smith, the white leader who went for unilateral independence for what was then called Southern Rhodesia in 1965.