Blog of Hamlesh

Almost a year ago, I posted commentary up on a major BT outage affecting London, caused by works at the Olympics site.  Well theres now another outage ongoing, and I thought, as the last post had a lot of commenters, indicating to me that there wasn’t a lot of readily available information out there – I’d do the same this time around.

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Yesterday, the Open Rights Group organised a protest outside the houses of Parliament against the Digital Economy Bill (aka DEBILL). I went along and took a few pictures.

So whats the big deal about the debill, and why are seemingly so many “techies” and “nerds” getting their knickers in a twist about it?

Consumers and companies (including Google, Facebook and ISPs – your broadband provider!) alike are up in arms about the Bill, which proposes that an Internet connection could be cut off if there is suspicion that it is being used for the downloading of copyrighted content.

This is very disturbing:

• Although proof is required before disconnection, the evidence does not have to relate to you: you can be punished for the actions of a friend or even a neighbour who has used your Internet connection.
• Rights holders could have the power to demand that sites they believe to contravene copyright law be blocked by ISPs. Right now, we don’t know what the govrnment will propose, as they have yet to draft their new proposal
• As it is not the perpetrator that is punished, as you might expect, but the owner of the connection, and others using it, cafés and bars may have to stop providing wifi, no more BTOpenZone, FON, etc!

Regardless of what you do or don’t do, you could be punished for the actions of others because of laws put in place by the Digital Economy Bill: if you have unsecured wifi in your home, you could be punished; if you use the Internet at your local coffee shop or library, you could lose access to that connection.

Justice would not be completely out of reach: you could appeal, but you would have to pay for the privilege, and you wouldn’t be eligible for any legal aid.  Reasons for appeal are limited, and unlike in a trial, the onus would not be on rights holders to prove your guilt: you would be responsible for proving your innocence.

This is another example of badly thought-out government policy, pushed through by lobbyists, and constructed by people who just don’t know what they are doing, or what they are talking about.

There are better solutions to the internet download problem, including the record industry evolving its business models to keep up with changes in technology (think Apple iTunes).  Funnily enough, the music industry is thriving with downloads, its the record labels that are suffering – aww the poor “big machine”, its in pain as power shifts to “the little people”.

Those of you that know me, know that I am very much not a tree hugging hippy that believes the government is out to get us; I believe in free markets, I believe in capitalism, and I believe in equality for all.  It is possible for all of those to coexist, anyone that doesn’t think so, is, well, just wrong (and stupid).

If you want to know more about this stuff, I strongly recommend you watch the Panorama documentary recently released, titled “Are the net police coming for you“.

This post is a little on the ranty side, but there is a solution at the bottom

I really really really hate voicemail, I can’t even begin to find the words to describe how much I hate voicemail.  To me, voicemail is one of those technological advancements that should have remained in the last century, let alone the last decade.  Its an old solution to a common problem that still exists today.

This little extract from the Dilbert cartoons should explain part of how the whole “voicemail experience” makes me feel;

(All rights reserved Scott Adams, Dilbert.com)

This really does happen to me, people call me up and either;

1.  Leave long messages – which are better off conveyed in email.

2.  Leave short messages telling me that they’ve sent me an email or to check my email and call them back.

3.  Normal people leave short messages with their details and ask me to call them back.

Ok, so now you’re thinking leaving a short message can’t be a bad thing, and thats surely the point of voicemail… well its not.  Perhaps it used to be, but thats no longer the case.  There are much better ways to convey the information that I have missed your call and need to give you a call back – yep, a text message.  One would also be able to read the sms message and process the information in a much shorter time frame than dialing into voicemail and listening to the message.  Inefficient and stupid, simple as.

So i’ve tried a number of different things over the years;

1.  Turn off voicemail completely – only to get people whine that “oh, I tried to leave you a message but there was no voicemail”… thanks for informing me of what I already knew… yes, I turned my voicemail off, yes it was on purpose, and yes, if it was important enough, you’d have found SOME OTHER WAY to get the message to me.

2.  Explicit asking people to leave a “SHORT MESSAGE” – this worked initially, but people soon reverted back to leaving long messages.

I had pretty much given up trying to find a solution.  Then one day, salvation came, unexpectedly.  I was calling a customer and they were busy, but instead of getting asked to leave a voicemail message (which I don’t tend to do either!) a little recording started to play “this person cannot take your call, please try again later or send a text message”, on repeat.

Finally, there was a solution out there!  The bad news is that its a setting/option provided by their network operator.  A facility which my provider, Orange, does not.

No matter, I found another way.  This works on Orange, it may be different for your service provider.  Using AT&T’s text to speech demo I created this wav file recording “The person you are calling cannot take your call, please try again later or send a text message”.

Then within the Orange voicemail, there is the option for an “extended absence” greeting, now the major difference between this and a normal greeting is that you can opt to not accept voicemail messages while your extended absence greeting is active.  So using a pair of headphones right infront of the mic pickup on my mobile and some careful timing; now whenever someone calls and I am otherwise occupied they hear the synthised voice of Crystal, asking them to try again later or send a text.

Win   Finally!

Download the wav file: here

Or create your own: here

PS: Yes I know Google Voice would be the other solution to this problem, but its not available outside of the US, and I doubt they will bring the service to the UK, not for a while anyway.

I’ve heard from a few of my friends/readers in Canada that they’ve all been finding the UK’s total inability to cope with the recent “snow storms” absolutely hilarious, of course, looking beyond the mockery at our expense, thanks to the UK mainstream media, calling the recent snow a “storm”.

A lot of people have been enjoying the snow, and its the first time in many years that we may actually stand a chance of celebrating a “White Christmas” in the UK… although currently, its looking like the weather in yee old Blighty will return to its normal programming, ie, rain, and we’ll all enjoy a nice gray and slushy Christmas. It remains to be seen.

Personally I’ve not enjoyed the snow, beyond my initial school boy excitement, which lasted a whole 5 minutes, a long time considering. The snow “storm” has caused havoc on the roads, journeys that normally take 15 minutes have taken near on 4 hours recently. Apparently the warnings that the UK MET office had been issuing for weeks never reached the highways agency, and yet again they were “caught unaware”… as my girlfriend keeps asking, upon observing the competition ice rink style road conditions, “so why exactly do we bother paying taxes?”.

Humbug I say!

Ah well, on the bright side the snow did give me something to shoot.

If you are reading this post on a syndicated site, you’ll need to view the slideshow directly on flickr, here.

Three months after getting the wii chip and clip for my girlfriends wii, I finally made the time last night to install it.  

I’m currently ill with a whole host of things, and looking at a computer screen for long periods of time makes me ill – so I decided to undertake a fairly simple bit of modding.

I took the wii apart, and to my annoyance found this;

Zoomed in;

Yep, it looks like Nintendo have dumped a whole load of “black stuff” around the very chip that I need to attach the wii-clip to.

Very annoying!  It looks like I’m going to have to use the soft mod technique unless I can find a way around this.  I’ve asked the wii-clip makers for their comments.

Right, I’ve been dwelling on and battling with this “issue” for a very long time. In fact, calling it an “issue” I think is far too kind, it is, without a shadow of a doubt, a 400 year old, oak tree trunk sized, pain in the backside!

Yep, thats right, we all have it, you cant get away from it, and its name is email.

Over the next few days, although it may turn into weeks, I’ll make some time to chew the email cud, and throw out some of my thoughts and rant-ish musings on the subject.

Lets lighten the mood somewhat now methinks, with our friend, well, hes my friend anyway, Dilbert.

My personal pet hates when it comes to email

I realise these are my pet hates, but feel free to hate them too, the more people hating them, will lead, lets hope, to fewer people doing them, and onward to the victorious world of “better email”. Hmm, well, I guess anythings possible, right?

To start with theres little point talking about spam, and the fact that supposedly my girlfriend is unsatisfied in bed, or that some Nigeria prince, if there were such things, would like to give me millions of dollars. So lets not. Any intelligent person has by now discovered “the spam filter”, just deal with it, and live with it.

Technical side note: If everyone would just check the damn SPF records on all email/domains before relaying them, spam would for the most part, go away. End of said technical side note.

Now, I’ve not ranked these, perhaps I should, then again, perhaps I’d rather scribble (or type) out this post and go watch a film?

1. Emails with no subject – I’m going to just start deleting emails that come in without a subject from now on, or add the subject, “OI, YOU FORGOT THE SUBJECT”.
2. Long emails – its always good to hear from friends with long updates, and those aren’t really what I would call “day to day” emails, nor the long emails that I hate. How many times have you had emails for meetings, outlining the agenda, and all the points to be covered, with a little breakout on each point? Well, if we’re going to do the whole thing on email, I may as well stay in bed, whats the point of going to the meeting. Its not complicated people, email to outline high level points, then pick up the damn phone or fire up a video call, or arrange a meeting (although unnecessary meetings are another pet hate, perhaps theres another post in there somewhere).
3. Emails reminding me about your email – its in my process queue, I’ll deal with it on *MY* time, unless of course you’re paying for the privilege of an immediate response.
4. People who treat email as an immediate form of communication – *phone rings* “I sent you an email asking you to call me 5 mins ago, and I’ve not heard from you”… well, was it that hard for you to just call me? It cant have been, as you managed to work out what all the scary buttons on the phone do in 5 minutes.
5. Responses from people, where they haven’t answered my original question or addressed the original issue that I had emailed them about in the first place. Come on!
6. When a reply contains anything that looks like, or could mean something like, “I sent you another email about that stuff earlier, see that email”. Clearly you have time to waste! You could have simply replied with the answer to my specific issue, but instead you refer me to a previous email. So you spend the time sending a reply and typing out words, but don’t bother actually being any help, what-so-ever… links to point 5.
7. Signatures – you only need to send your signature with all your info, your logo, measurements, blood type, CV, family pictures, your corporate disclaimer and whatever else you’ve decided that you need to share with me; *ONCE*. If you’re initiating the communication, include it on your original email only, theres no need to stick it on every single reply, or is there? Perhaps you’d be so kind as to explain why to me, no, really, I want to understand this. To be fair, until recently I was guilty of doing just this, until it dawned on me, just how utterly pointless it was.
8. That stupid, irritating, and more useless than the right honorable Gordon Brown when it comes to fiscal policy; please consider the environment “tree logo” – who the hell thought this thing up?! Its an email, I’d only need to print it if I *NEEDED* a hard copy, i’ll press print if I need to, I don’t need to be reminded by a silly little green tree asking me to “consider the environment”.

Righto, that’ll do for now. I know there are many many more, and perhaps one day we shall all work together to compile a big book eBook (the little green tree logo people got upset), and pass them into law, or should that be eLaw? Perhaps we could call it “the ebook of knowing how to use email, and if you break them, we’ll break your internets” – people are always complaining that the “internet is down” anyway, therein lies a rant for another day I think!

Watch out for the follow up to this, which will be more useful, I’ll go into how I actually deal with the masses and masses of transactional and business emails I get on a day to day basis. It’ll be worth it, you’ll see, email management is becoming one of the most important soft skills that you can have these days.

Anyway, for now, Hamlesh out.

I quite liked this, mainly as it challenges some of the stereotypes brought about by Apple with their PC vs MAC adverts.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi1se9rH7S8[/youtube]

I had issue with the old Apple adverts, mainly as they are framed in such a way to suggest that “PC” is “Microsoft”, where a PC is actually a hardware/computing platform running soime form of operating system.

Anyway, an old arguement that doesnt need rehashing.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_kGL3M5Cg[/youtube]

Southpark version, and again, the guy that made it doesnt realise that “Computer” is a computing platform, and that his MAC is also a computer – unless thats a general “Computers Suck” message at the end of course!

To clarify – I use MAC OS, Windows XP, Slackware, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Debian and a whole load of other operating systems on a daily basis, so I’m not being a biased “interweb idiot”, just sharing some funny/interesting vids

I’ve never really liked Porsche’s, never seen the point, overpriced, no passion, yada yada yada. Sorry, bored thinking of something to say about them…

My views of our Fuhrer; over tax the car, cars are bad although short haul flights are worse for the environment, congestion tax is about reducing congestion and not about revenue generation, yes you should use public transport, although its more expensive than driving, even with my brilliant congestion taxing policy/revenue generation/tax, and I use taxis to get around, use public transport, not for me thanks, Ken Livingston… *breath*

The car park I use on Park Lane is also a transit location where cars that have been evading the congestion tax are clamped, picked up and taken to. Walking from the car park to the office this morning, this made me feel all warm inside.

Begs the question… is the Westminster council on a mission to rid our streets of crappy Porsche “cars”… I feel ill even associating the word “car” with P…