BBC Gives Tiscali The Kicking It Deserves
It was wonderful to see Tiscali exposed on Watchdog this evening. For years it has demonstrated itself to be a company to avoid. It is so clearly focused on profit rather than on customers that its death wish is about to be fulfilled.
When will the dumb suits that run businesses like this wake up to real life? This is a tale of greed and disrespect for consumers – just like the banks. The company has consumed itself with avarice and aspiration rather than delivering a service
Paradise Valley
I’ve lived in Sutton Poyntz for six months now. A mile to the south is the sea. A mile to the east is Osmington and half a mile to the north but up a very steep hill is the “top of my mountain”. Walking my dogs around this wonderful area has fulfilled every dream that I dared hope for when I first arrived.
The Mysteries Of the East
We have perhaps half a dozen standard walks that we’ve learned, each one of which can be varied with diversions, extensions or shortcuts. Usually we walk for about and hour and a half. The one delight that is always there is a succession of dramatic and quite beautiful views. I never tire of these wonderful vistas across the valley, to the sea, the Isle of Portland and beyond.
I believe that being able to see some distance is fundamentally good for your psyche. Even in the midst of our ghastly capital city on the 12th floor of a vile 1970s tower block there was some consolation to be gained from
Go West Young Man
the view. In Paradise Valley the views move me every day as they change and develop with the seasons. Quite why just looking can make me well up and seems to touch my soul, I do not know but it fascinates me that the dogs will do the same thing. We reach the peak of a hill or come round a corner and they will stand on a wall or look over a hedge – and just look.
After one false start, spring is here. In the great national blizzard we got off lightly with merely an inch or so. A fortnight later though and we had our own intense Dorset storm and we woke up to four inches and twelve hours without power.
Taking In The View
Another fortnight on and the daffodils and crocuses are out. There is already some intensity in the warmth of the sun and all around gardeners are beginning to dig and to sow, to dream of runner beans and strawberries. Up on the hill they were burning the gorse. Quite why I’m not sure. Then this week they brought in a formidable machine which seemed to crawl up and down the sides of the mountain completely demolishing the gorse bushes and leaving an apparently smooth and fresh sward of pasture.
This required immediate investigation and so the dogs and I struck out for the top. Up closer we discovered a compact bulldozer on caterpillar tracks with a vicious flail mounted on front. The driver told me that it weighs 
six tons and guiding it across the slope sometimes it would slip and
slide and nearly give him a heart attack. He explained that the gorse needs to be cut back simply to keep it under control. He’s a braver man than me. Perhaps he doesn’t know that others deliberately throw themselves off the mountain underneath paragliders.
So in a deepening wamth, for the first time since winter took hold, I find time to sit. With the absence of movement, without having to worry about negotiating the hills and the fields, with time just to sit and contemplate, the valley bursts into life. It’s like sitting in a huge and magnificent amphitheatre but there’s not just the single focus of a sport or contest. Every single part of the valley throbs with activity. A family of deer watch the dogs in trepidation.
Countless beautiful, big, brown buzzards soar and swoop. A pair of kestrels hover over the gorse bushes. The biggest rabbit warren I have ever seen, a city full of bunnies, teems with bobbing white tails. The trees are developing that slightly misty look as millions of buds begin to swell and fill. The insect population is burgeoning and heading towards a total that must surely be in the billions, surely exceeding even the number of humans across the whole of our world.
Paradise Valley is blossoming and as it blooms with it will come ever more intense beauty and experience. This, surely, is one of the most beautiful places on the planet and I live right here. For me it truly is paradise.
Iomega – How To Lose Your Data
I’ve had two Iomega Storcenters now. The first was 1 TB and after about 18 months it failed for no reason I can understand and took nearly a terabyte of movies and backups with it. The second was 3 TB – yes, you may well ask, why did I do it again? That has failed now after about 12 months with about 2.5 terabytes of my data on it.
Iomega support is as useless now as it was the first time. I’d already tried everything they could suggest before I rang them. Being told in a thick French accent that the Iomega warranty does not cover any data loss and that I may want to contact a local data recovery expert just doesn’t do it for me. It leaves me extremely fed up.
The problem is these NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices are a RAID array of disks interrupted by a Linux subsystem so if anything goes wrong you’ve got no chance of using a Windows PC to do anything about it.
Having failed to learn my lesson the first time, now I know that I will never, ever even consider Iomega or NAS as a solution again. These are inevitable disasters in big shiny boxes just waiting to happen. I have seven SATA hard disks in my system that I can monitor and maintain under Windows. If the worst happens I know I can at least try to recover some of the data and will almost certainly succeed to some degree.
Stay well away from NAS.
Rugby Is Life
BBC News And The Fritzl Story
Now I am an “out and proud” news junkie. The BBC News channel runs on at least one screen in my house for at least 12 hours a day but even for me, the coverage of the Fritzl trial has been totally over the top: boring, repetitive and not even news.
The news all happened when this evil man was discovered. He pleaded guilty right at the beginning of his trial and was clearly going to be sentenced to life imprisonment. Why has the BBC gone over and over it, again and again?
Turgid would be a gentle criticism of this coverage. Most people can’t stand the degree to which I will watch the news so when you begin to bore and irritate me you really are in trouble!
Mad Men
It’s hit British TV already so I’m a little bit late but I’m delighted and enthralled by this “Desperate Housewives” about the Madison Avenue ad business in the early 60s. I think that the hiatus and hysteria that I participated in thirty years later in London was the fantasy fulfilment of those earlier years.
Mad Men is the story of Donald Draper, a handsome creative director (in the days when they wore suits!) who has everything: a beautiful, adoring wife; a beautiful, adoring secretary; a beautiful mistress who kicks him out even before he gets his breath back and a host of adoring colleagues and staff. He seems to have just one skelton in the cupboard: a long, lost half brother who he doesn’t want to know any more. The story is still unfolding but, thank heavens for the internet, I have the whole of seasons one and two waiting to be watched.
You have to be an ad man to get all the in jokes. If you don’t understand the significance of the DDB VW ads then you’ll miss out on much of the point of episode three. The indolence and last minute, off the top of the head ideas are the truth about the ad business as are the enormous quantities of alcohol and the pampering and pimping for clients. The almost constant cigarette smoking by every member of the cast is the truth about the 60s too.
So who put these ideas down on paper and sold them to the production company? It’s Matthew Weiner, writer of The Sopranos and, as far as I can tell, no background as an ad man so all credit to his talent as a researcher. It’s a great show and demonstrates the sort of quality TV that we just don’t do in the UK.
Women Are Violent Too
The latest strictly politically correct announcement totally overlooks, again, the violence perpetrated by deceitful, wicked women against men. I should know. I spent five years locked in an abusive relationship with an apparently charming and sophisticated “lady” who would frequently beat me with her fists and anything else she could lay her hands on.
I vividly remember the day I retreated to a mutual friend around the corner who received me hesitatingly, sceptically and then with horror as I revealed a fresh, massive bruise covering half my arm. “But she’s so sweet and gentle!”, she said. “I can’t believe it!” but there was the evidence in front of her.
On one occasion she beat me with a baseball bat until the blood drenched my hair and ran down my face. On another she chased me from room to room with a pick axe handle and an X-ray later revealed a fracture of one of my vertabrae.
So it makes me very angry when the media and the police talk about domestic violence as if it’s always men attacking women. Being a “battered husband” is much more common than I believed until I started talking about it. Women get away with it much more easily. They lie and weep and if you put your hands up to defend yourself then you’re the one who’s being aggressive.
Any violence is unacceptable but it would be good to see a more even hand smartly applied to what actually goes on in relationships.
World’s Worst Banker
http://www.worldsworstbanker.com/
I urge you to go to this site and sign the two petitions listed there.
The first is about the reduction of his pension. Personally, I think he should lose it all. I would have no objection to the introduction of the Fred Goodwin Pension Confiscation Act 2009. As the Prime Minister endlessly repeats: “These are extraordinary times…”
The second is on the Number 10 website and calls for the removal of his knighthood “for services to banking”… cough, cough, choke, gag, choke, cough…
Pundits talk about whether the future of democracy is in online participation. There’s no doubt that it is worth making the effort and signing these two petitions.
Cannabis
God's Herb
I have smoked cannabis since I was 14. There have been a few breaks, some of a few months, some of a year or two but those apart, I have smoked cannabis every day of my life for nearly 40 years.
I have come to regard weed or hash, in all seriousness, as the Rastafarians do, as “God’s herb”. It is a sacrament, a truly positive, honourable and precious thing in my life. Something that I thank God, I did not miss.
I grew up with smokin’ dope. It was a fundamental part of my adolescent culture with the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, with a heady summer living the love and peace dream in Amsterdam. LSD blew my mind in those days but a joint was always a sustaining experience. Something I held onto.
As I grew up and got interested in business, I relished the delicious and maverick escape that I enjoyed. I took it seriously and wrote a 40 page report for the Home Affairs Committee entitled “An Unaffordable Prejudice”.
The prejudice, misinformation and sheer nonsense has continued throughout my life. The idiocy of downgrading cannabis to a Class C drug and then, just two years later, back up to Class B is only outdone by the crass stupidity of failing to decriminalise it completely. Prohibition has proved time after time to be an ineffective solution. Worse than that, the law makes a complete ass of itself by sustaining the criminal supply and distribution of a product that is never going to go away.
Regulation is the only viable solution and would provide the framework to care for those very few who may suffer from cannabis use.
What are the dangers? Clearly any intoxicant offers more potential for harm when used by the young, when the brain is still developing. Despite my own experience, cannabis use should be for adults only. In adults it has been proved to be one of the least harmful substances known to man time and time again – despite the fact that most have actually set out to prove the opposite.
Recently the popular argument has been against skunk, a strain of cannabis that can be up to 20 times stronger than that previously known.
To claim this is a recent development is simply wrong. For at least 20 years it has been difficult to buy anything but skunk and other F1/F2 hybrids of the plant. There are many others: Northern Lights, Haze, Blueberry, etc. In my teens it was difficult to buy anything but Lebanese or Moroccan hashish. In Holland where the market is partly regulated there has always been a wide choice of grass or hash from all parts of the world grown and/or processed in many different ways.
The latest suggestion is that skunk is causing psychoses in adolescents – yet the incidence of psychoses in adolescents has remained constant since records began. This is just the lastest scaremongering. 60 years ago it was said that cannabis caused young women to be promiscuous with black men. The standard of the argument has not improved.
It really is time that this hopeless policy against a benign, natural herbal product was stopped. Hemp is one of the most ecologically friendly, sustainable crops in the world. As regulated cannabis it would pull the rug from underneath a great swathe of criminality and produce billions in additional tax income. As biofuel, building materials, fabrics and cattle feed it could help to revitalise agriculture and many other businesses.
Peter Reynolds 