Richard Mascall's Weblog

Security Gadget

Security of online accounts is a bit of a pain but perhaps it is a necessary one. For a new HBOS account I recently opened I have been sent a little gadget which display a six digit number. This changes every minute but when I logon to the associated bank account I am prompted to enter whatever it is showing at that moment. It lasts for several years before needing to be replaced.

It might be very secure but how would it work if you (a) had several financial sites requiring secure access and (b) each one had their own gadget ? Surely keeping track of which device to use for all of those sites would be a nightmare.

A What of For Sale Signs

Pam and I went out for a walk the other day direct from our home and found this clump of Estate Agent signs. It made us wonder what the collective noun for such signs might be. I found a list of collective nouns but unsurprisingly none of the entries are relevant.

My suggestion ? How about an optimism of for sale signs.

Snow Reason to Have a Movable Easter

Despite the dire warnings on the weather forecasts, this morning's snow was not too heavy. But it was a bit unusual to have snow on Easter Day at all. Despite what it said in yesterday's paper, I should welcome a fixed Easter, say the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April, as proposed in the 1928 Act. (Why didn't they say the second Sunday ? That would amount to the same six years out of seven.)

Street Fighting Man in FT

I could not believe my eyes when looking at yesterday's Financial Times. Who would have thought back in 1968 that symbol of rebellion Keith Richards, who seemed to reject everything the establishment stood for, would have his photo over a whole page of the paper ?

People of my age now were probably saying about him "What is the world coming to ?" - and now I am saying the same.

I subsequently found the story behind his appearance.

The Attraction of Housing

Another lunch today, this time with my friend Chris. Since this was up in town I took the opportunity in the morning of visiting the Housing Design Awards exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), in Portland Place.

The projects had to have a minimum number of four houses, so there was no question of seeing any "Grand Design" style houses. Instead they were typically public housing developments.

I was a little disappointed that there were rather few interior photos, which suggested to me an excessive priority being placed on the exterior appearance. Of course this is important, but for me what should come first is how the design works for those living there. To take an example from a different context, we might think a Formula One car is attractive, but it has been designed for its performance, and the attractive appearance has come as a fortunate by-product. Shouldn't that be the same with housing ?

A Discussion About Moaning

Excellent though the programme might be, "Woman's Hour" is not something I normally listen to. But when there was a discussion on there yesterday between Kate Fox, who wrote "Watching the English" (see my brief review) and Nigel Warburton, senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University (see my comment on his latest course at the Tate), I thought it worth making an exception.

The discussion was about "moaning". According to Kate, this is something the English do a lot. But she was at pains to stress that it is performed not because we are really negative about the world or depressed but more as a conversation piece, just as we are famed for talking about the weather.

The host, Jenni Murray, suggested that this meant the English were stoics but Nigel was quick to squash this, pointing out that the whole point of stoics is that moaning is the last thing they would do. Kate commented that the complainer should never be suffering really badly, nor should they propose a way of fixing the problem.

Nigel took a less sanguine view of moaning, saying that in some cases people find it easier to moan than to do something about the claimed problem. Kate countered with another positive aspect, namely that it can be used as a social leveller. This supposedly comes about when the speaker is discussing something which makes them seem better off than the listener, so to avoid any suggestion of being puffed up they will use a moan to reduce the gap between the two.

Nigel followed the interview up with some further thoughts about moaning on his blog here.

What Fiend Designs Plugs ?

The person mowing my mother-in-law's lawn borrowed our electric mower the other day .... and mowed the cable. So before I could do our own lawn yesterday, I had to make a bit of a repair. But what a palaver !

If you click on the photograph to enlarge it you might be able to tell that there are four screws but one pair requires a conventional screwdriver and the other pair a Philips. Why ? Then when I came to thread the wires into the metal tubes inside the plastic case, the tubes were only just a minute fraction bigger than the wire, thus making the process fiddly and time-consuming. Why ? And finally, the two wires of the cable had to follow a sort of rectangular Y-shape inside the case, but on such a small scale that the outside thick plastic casing for the cable pair had to be stripped back outside the entrance to the casing, thus exposing the thinner inner wires. Why ?

All three problems appear to an outsider to be caused by the designer not thinking about the ergonomics of putting wires in. And when you add in my natural incompetence with practical things (on one of the cables I forgot to put the exterior case on before wiring up, which meant I had to undo everything, put the case on, and then do all the tricky wiring again), it was a very frustrating one hour (yes, one hour) to connect two pieces of cable.

One Cheer for British Summer Time

Hooray for British Summer Time. The extra light in the evening more than compensates for the loss of light in the morning. Why, then, only one cheer ? It would be two if we had it all the year round. And it would be three if we moved to British Summer Time in the winter and British Double Summer Time in the summer.

We have tried both of these before :- The BST all year round in 1968-1971 and 1946, and the BDST in 1941-5 and 1947. As I remember it, one of the main reasons the 1968-71 experiment did not become permanent was the Daily Mail's campaign against it, a good enough justification to stick with it, some might say.

But my reasons are, hopefully, less sour. It seems to me that most people get up and go straight to work or school and whether it is light or not is irrelevant. By contrast, when one finishes work or school, light can permit many activities which darkness would otherwise prevent.

I know there are lots of other claims and counterclaims, and also that in today's climate where no political party wants to propose too much of any radical change there is no chance of its introduction. But we can all dream.

Embarrassed To Be British

It's not often, I hope, that one can say that. But earlier this week I squirmed a bit when one of my fellow students on the Tate Modern course told me of her experience on Sunday night. The student in question was a most pleasant, very quietly spoken American in her twenties who is staying over here with her boyfriend while he works on an assignment for a major bank. She is using the time to see the sights, reasonably enough. Last week she popped over to Amsterdam with a friend but on her return she was detained by our wonderful (I am being sarcastic, in case it isn't obvious) immigration chaps ... for FIVE hours !

Why ? Because they thought she was intending to work here. The first officer was particularly nasty, apparently, but throughout the questioning was aggressive and accusatory. Of course it is difficult to prove a negative but there are ways of behaving and, by all accounts, our British immigration officers did not exactly live up to what one might expect.

I can understand why they might want to stop people without the appropriate permit from working here but five hours ! Was that really a good use of time ? Are they really so over-staffed that they can afford to use officers for so long on one individual ? What sort of job did they think she was going to do, I wonder - one glance would have ruled out working on a building site ! Could have intended working behind a bar, I suppose - where of course we have such a long queue of British people wanting to work (again, I am being sarcastic.)

NTL Good Service

NTL have had to put up with a lot of whinging over the years, but my broadband service has been trouble free. During the day on Saturday the lights on the modem, including the power light, all went off, thus cutting my access to the internet.

I rang the help line and was put through to someone within two or three minutes. While the conversation was a little laboured, within a few minutes they had arranged for an engineer to call round this morning. He came when they said he would, he fixed the problem, and access has been restored. So I reckon that's pretty good.

Thank you, NTL.

Hospital Car Parking Charges

Obviously while my mother-in-law was in hospital recently my overwhelming concern was for her well-being. But once it was over, other aspects of her stay caused me to think a little. One of these was the high cost of visiting her, as a result of the car parking charges.

We paid something over £80 during the ten days she was in hospital, £30 of which being run up in a 17 hour period. We are in the fortunate position of being able to pay this without any hardship but surely for many visitors it must be a real struggle. The rate is £1 per half hour, with a minimum charge of £2, which seems not too bad to me for an occasional visit. The problem comes when you are visiting someone who needs a daily visit, often for many hours. In our case, for example, we really did not know if any of our visits would be the last.

There is a maximum charge of £12. This would be bad enough if you have to pay it day after day but it turned out not to be the maximum for us. What happened was that we turned up at 1415 on New Year's Eve. During the late afternoon we were told that my mother-in-law might not survive the night so we decided to stay. About 1930 I popped home to pick up some blankets and food supplies. On leaving the hospital I had to pay the £12, having exceeded five hours. I returned about 2050 and we stayed until just gone 0700 on New Year's Day, when we went home to get some sleep. On leaving this time we were charged £18, presumably £6 for the 2100 to 2400 on New Year's Eve, and £12 for the 0000 to 0700 on New Year's Day. So our visit from 1400 one day to 0700 the next meant a charge of £30.

Obviously we asked about these charges and discovered that if you have reason to visit for more than two weeks, then for the third week onwards you can obtain a season ticket for £5 a week. This is to be applauded, of course, but note that it acknowledges that the charges can amount to an excessively large sum. So what about those people who have to visit for long hours over a short period, which again can generate a large sum ?

As I said above, from our point of view we were not financially embarrassed. Also, presumably the money raised goes indirectly to the hospital (I assume the hospital rents the car park out to a third party which in turn runs the car park as a commercial concern). But there must be many people who have to make some very difficult decisions as a result of this setup and I shall be writing to find out more, in particular whether overnight stays really should cost £30.

Why Blog ?

It's now six weeks since I started blogging and although the time pressures of Christmas have slowed my contributions down, I am still enthusiastic.

Blogging had seemed something for teenagers or people with too much time on their hands but my opinion first started to change when the OU lecturer of a couple of the Tate courses I attended during 2006 pointed me at his blog. Not only was it full of interest, there was a recommendation on there to read a book called "Blogwild". I did so and had my eyes opened to the special advantages of blogging for communication.

The point is that if you as a company, an organisation, or even an individual wish to communicate to several people, in recent years you could do this via either a website or via email. Both of these are low-cost and fast, compared with the traditional methods of paper and post, but both have disadvantages.

With a website, how do you tell people what you have recently updated ? Yes, you could have a list on your home page, but the relative rarity of such lists is an indication of how impractical this is.

With email, there are two problems : (i) potential readers of your information have to tell you that they want the email and (ii) even then, they will receive the email at a time which suits you, not them. Yes, they can leave the email in their inbasket until it is a better time, but that might be sufficiently long that they never bother.

But blogging gets round these problems. As a reader of blogs, you simply say once that you are interested in the blog. (This is done by clicking on the relevant icon on the blog website and copying the URL into the blog reader function in your browser). Then whenever you feel like catching up on the blogs you just click on the reader in your browser ("Feeds" in Opera, "Favourites" in Internet Explorer , though it has to be version 7) and you see a list of all the new blog entries. If any of them are of interest, you click on the entry to see the full text.

The other feature in blogs which looks of potential value is the Comment facility. Since this can be controlled by the blog owner, anyone can submit their comments but you don't have to suffer some of the less worthwhile contributions because the blog owner can filter them out. So hopefully a fruitful discussion can take place.

I am particularly interested in whether there might be value for our Parish Council. But perhaps that is a topic for another day.

Down With Christmas Cards

Well, perhaps not all cards. But I think it might be worth thinking about why we send them. The number one reason must be just to say, "I want to keep in touch". A secondary reason might be to say, "Here is an update on what I have been up to".

Those reasons seem pretty good ones to me, but if they are the only two then there seems little point in sending a card to people you have seen fairly recently, such as a work colleague or a neighbour. And isn't that where so many cards go ? So let's restrict our card recipients to people we have not seen for a while. (And let's not send them until nearer Christmas. It would be tilting at windmills to suggest that shops should start their Christmas activity nearer the date itself, but we at least can do our bit to reduce the smearing out of the festive season.)

While I am here, can I speak up in defence of the "Round Robin" ? Simon Hoggart of the Guardian has produced a couple of books which consist simply of extracts from the letters that people enclose with their cards. Having seen examples in his column I must agree that some people do use the circulars as excuses to boast about what they, or their children, have achieved during the year. ("We were so proud when Justin finished his copy of Plato's Republic before his fourth birthday. We hadn't thought his Greek was up to it yet." That sort of thing.) Others sometimes just let you know a little too much about some disaster or illness.
But I would much rather read even a rose-tinted account of someone's year, rather than nothing at all. It seems quite reasonable to me for people to overlook the mundane and to concentrate on the successes. Yes, in an ideal world, we should communicate more frequently than just at Christmas but given that we don't, surely the next best thing is to have an annual report, and when else is it likely to happen than at Christmas ? And if sometimes the effect is not quite what was intended, how many of us can claim to write perfectly ?

Talking of which, I had better have a stab at writing my report now.

Let's All Split The Infinitive

There's a most thought-proving blog I read (www.nigelwarburton.typepad.com) by an OU lecturer in philosophy called Nigel Warburton. I have also bought a couple of Nigel's excellent books and attended two of his courses at the Tate. He is running one of these again in Spring 2007 ("Seven Ways Of Looking at Art") and I can highly recommend it.

Yesterday he wrote a piece on the intolerant aspects of religious funerals. Although a fellow atheist, he made one or two specific points which did not seem totally right to me and I was about to put a comment on his blog to that effect.

And then I noticed something that actually offended (slight exaggeration here) me : Nigel used the phrase "In order actively to participate ..." . Now normally Nigel's blog consists of elegant English but I am afraid I find non-split infinitives the height of ugliness. In my opinion, the correct phrasing would have been "In order to actively participate ..." which to my ears sounds so much less jarring. Whether or not it was true in this case, I suspect that usually writers use the split infinitive and then say to themselves, "Whoops. Mustn't split an infinitive so let's move the words around."

I am not one of those who thinks that anything goes when it comes to the use of English. On the contrary, the correct use of grammar, punctuation, and spelling greatly helps understanding, and since most uses of language are about communication, this correct use is highly desirable. But these rules are a means to an end, and they should be broken if they deflect us from achieving our end. (In George Orwell's 1946 classic essay, "Politics and the English Language", he gives five rules of good writing, the fifth one being "Break any of the others rather than write something barbarous".)

As it happens, I have read that the "do not split infinitive" rule is false anyway. But whether it is or is not, avoiding a split infinitive almost always leads to clumsy phrasing which in turn distracts the reader from the point being made. Let's all resolve to consistently split infinitives whenever we can !