Red cordial hour

Parliament has been like watching screaming queens bitch slapping each other. An here I am not referring to our ancient monarch Elizabeth Regina. But more coquettish rouged ‘ladies’ of the evening.

You resign, no you resign, I called it first, you are not a real women you should .... etc. Slap, oh you bitch. Slap. Oh Slap slap slap slap.

The Leader of the Opposition LO has his hands on an email, an email that suggests that the Prime Minster or at least the Prime Ministers Office wanted a deal for a friend of the PM. A friend that had loaned him the use of a ute. The LO then called on the PM to resign. Not for having a friend though that was news to most. For having mislead parliament. THe LO also called for The Treasurer to resign for the same crime. The PM called on LO to resign as he said that the LO facts were false. And it turns out that the facts are false. The damming email is in fact a fake. Parliament erupts in a day of name calling and hyperbole.

This sadly is what passes for parliamentary debate. Instead of any of the things that matter. GFC, Global Warming. An effective Carbon Trading scheme. What Australia gets is the deracinated ravings of our ‘leaders’ telling each other that they are not fit for the job.

Its like the hair pulling competition for 3 year olds after red cordial hour at the local kinder. Some adult needs to come in and give everyone a bottle and some afternoon quiet time.

Brave brave new Myki world

Same old stuff: Myki its a new system; You get less rights

Chasing through the maze that is the governments legal and regulatory framework for MyKi is fun. Fun in the sense that picking at a scab is fun, you want to, you know you shouldn’t, and the result is painful.

There is a long tradition with the introduction of new systems that the system provider ensures that most of the rights belong to them and few of the responsibilities. We saw this with the introduction of a variety of banking products, Credit Cards, EFT POS cards etc.

MyKi is a banking product. It is an interesting banking product. Myki is a stored value card that notionally stores a sum of money. This money can be used to buy travel on trams or trains and goods or services. Probably the goods and services will be coming in the future.

The MyKi system is then both a banking product, a ‘stored value card’ and a ticketing product. It is the bastard child of linking these two unlike things that present some interesting issues.

Essentially Myki cant decide are they a bank with a bugger the customers attitude or are they a transport company with a screw the customers attitude. Either way as a customer guess what you are fucked, but the dilemma is card as ticket or card as notional stored value. Sometimes reading the Myki literature the Ticket side wins other times the Banking side wins. At all times the customer, that’s you bub, looses.

For example

Under the Transport Act an Authorised Officer can take your ticket from you as evidence. The act suggest that AOs must have reasonable grounds for doing so,but in fact they always take the ticket. Under the MyKi system the AO will be taking whatever stored value is on your card, plus of course you will be required to pony up for a new card. The transport act and the ticket nature of Myki conspire to deprive you of the stored value on the card. Now the fact that this is the current practice doesn’t mean that it will necessarily be the new practice but it would give one pause. Should I really place any significant value onto a card that can be confiscated by officialdom. At their whim.

The MyKi terms of service are even more interesting. They say in part TTA is entitled to reject an application to redeem value loaded onto a Card if there has been a material breach of these Terms which I would take to read that if you have breached the use of the card, by say incorrectly swiping on and swiping off that the TTA may firstly take your card under the Transport Act, and then may not have to offer you the value that is stored on the card. Beautiful, screw you over then steal from you. All nice and legal. But they do help Grannies across the road. Oh no wait they don’t.

The ToU then go on to say that you the cardholder have no rights to the money stored on the card, and that TTA offers no Fiduciary duty to you. This suggests that the TTA want to operate a clever sort of Stored Value card. One in which they store value at their grace and favour. If things go wrong, then they are completely off the hook. Will things go wrong though is a very fair question. After all this is a system that is years late and millions over budget so maybe all of that time has been spent making sure there is a super system. Possibly, but MetCard when it was introduced was years late millions over budget and buggy as hell. So from past experience it seems possible that there will be problems with the new system. Luckily for the operators that have ensured that all of the loss will be borne by the public. That’s you bub.

The ToU do address the issue of system error. They say TTA’s records are, in the absence of manifest error, conclusive of the amount of stored value on the Card or I take that to read, our system is right and if you wish to claim it as being wrong then you will have to prove manifest error. And since we know that governments never make errors they sure as hell will not make manifest error. Again there is a loser and that’s you bub

It seems that the TAA terms of use tilt the balance heavily in the TTA’s favour

Fees and Charges

The ToU suggest that I could ring the MyKi hotline to determine what the fees and charges were. I did this and having got through the usual maze of button pushing I talked to an operator. They didn’t know what the fees and charges were, they thought I was talking of fares, again the confusion are they a ticketing agency or a bank with only one product. After some prompting they were able to tell me that a new card costs $5:00 which is refundable at the moment. There is a fee for a replacement card, and there is fee of $9:80 to transfer a balance from one card to the other, presumably if a card is lost. So I assume that if you loose a card, and need it replaced this will cost 14:80

According to the ToU any other fees are to be announced by publication in a newspaper. They of course grant themselves several waivers to do this urgently should they need to, and a waiver to charge whatever fees against a card ‘from time to time’.

So the skinny on MyKi

Its a ticket that you have to pay for, storing value on it. It can readily be confiscated leaving you with no recourse. Its not a fiduciary product leaving you with no protection under the banking act. The operators have no idea what the fees are. The language to describe everything reserves all the rights to the operator.

My advice.

Get an anonymous ticket. It just might protect your privacy.

Put a small amount of cash into it. That way if the system screws up. Or an authorised officer menaces you you only loose a small amount. Don’t follow my advice, expect to loose and loose large. And if you do the TAA Connex, Yarra Trams, the government and the people who help grannies across the street don’t loose. Someone does, that’s you bub.

Foggy Melbourne

It was foggy in Melbourne Yesterday so I got up bright and early to see. Except of course it wasn’t bright sort of dull and swirly and gray.

The Duck Pond in Carlton Gardens

Autum Mists

Tree Line

What I have learned from bank TV adds

Ok so its fish in a barrel time. I am bagging the banks and their adds. It is like shooting those poor fish. Who doesn’t hate their bank. Yes man in a red hat in the back row put down your hand. You are just the exception in the crowd that proves the rule.

Maybe one of the reasons that we hate the banks is their craven adds. The current crop in Australia are just truly appalling.

Which bank thinks humour sells their product, they think racism is funny. They think Australians find racism funny.

Westpac thinks we think they are a bunch of deranged cowboy gamblers that participated in the Global Financial Crisis; so they are telling us that they are really a little bit safer that the lollipop lady. It might work if you didn’t know that their provision for bad debts this year is 4.4 Billion and last year they reduced their dividend by 20%. They are not the lollipop lady they are those crazy gamblers their adds suggest they are not.

The ANZ is the stalkers bank. They have scary automatons to stalk you. Or could it be a bloke wearing an ATM suit. The add is trying to tell us that they have more ATMs. More than what, where, what sort. The sort that get skimmed or the other sort. The sort that charge me a huge fee to use or the other sort. If you are a stalker this add will excite you for the rest of us being followed by a computer that walks, a la the terminator but not quiet as fast is just creepy.

The last of the big four NAB is just too lazy or stupid or profitable to bother with TV spots. Or their adds are so asinine that I have never noticed.

Which bank adds feature a bunch of Americans that are an add agency, the bank has apparently hired the worst agency in the world. The agency would put out really bad adds if it were not for the rock solid bankers at the CBA who set the Americans straight. This has been the theme for a long running series of adds from the CBA. I think its supposed to be funny. But try this experiment. Replace the Americans with another group, say Aborigines. Suddenly you realise that what the bank is telling us is funny is racism. Yup that’s a thigh slapper.

But really these adds are more annoying that that. We are expected to be post modern enough to know that the add agency is not real and that we are being told ‘a story’ Very post modern, we know that you know, and you know that we know that you know. Yeah I get that. Yet if I am a little more looking inside the add that the witless creatives that came up with this puke I think. Hey here is a bank that is so sure that their customers are witless that they make adds about a pretend agency that I am meant to think is real. The CBA is pissing its money away on deliberately bad adds and somehow this is good.

If you want to do a fish out of water adds for a bank check out the NZ bank that has done this. Very funny. Its about one guy reporting back to his faceless overseas mentor. It is funny. In a banker kind of way.

All up doleful annoying stupid adds. I don’t know what to be more depressed about. The bank marketing departments that approved this crap. Or the agencies that came up with it in the first place.

Well enough bashing the banks. It has been fun though.

A simple proposal for the reform of Financial Planning

They say that a fool and his money are soon parted. Financial planners are supposed to prevent fools, or the financially illiterate from being parted from their money. All too often planners and the products that they recommend do just that.

To remedy this planners offer disclosure documents that tell you about the nature of the product, the planners relationship with the product vendor and so on. These are wonderful documents. You go to a financial planner to get advice, to simplify the process of investing and get given a many paged tome of dense inarticulate writing to go through. In other words you get given the very thing you went to the planner to avoid.

I have a simple remedy for this. First some simple structural changes to the way planning services are provided.

Firstly all planners should only be able to operate on a fee for service basis. This removes the chance that the planner is motivated more by the commission that they receive than offering good advice. This is something that is already happening and will come into the rules of the financial planners by 2012. There should be no commissions, no trailing fee, no fees built into products etc.

Each product should have its real risk explained. Suppose you use a margin load to invest in the share market. This has for good stocks a relatively straight forward risk explanation. But suppose it is a more complicated scenario, investment in a product using leverage that is itself leveraged and possible investing in further leverage. These kind of products work wonderfully in a rising market and as we have seen in the Global Financial Crash woefully in a falling market.

Having a way that determines the true risk proposition is important so that the naive and the savvy can compare products.

Planners should not have any relationship with the organisation they are investing in, except that they too can invest in the same product but are limited to a 20% maximum holding.

Planners should have a legal duty of care. Where a planner is offering advice like Storm did to bet your house. That immediately should fail the duty of care. The individual concerned and the organisation they work for should become liable and this liability should extend up the chain. It is manifestly unreasonable that the banks who finance such shenanigans can walk away untouched whilst people have been ruined.

Disclosure is good, vital even, but it needs to be simple and to the point. To this end I would introduce the 3 10s rule Disclosure would be limited to 3 sets of 10 points, it could be less. The first set would be desirable outcomes eg the 10 things that will happen if the product works as advertised. Now for most product there will not be 10 possible desirable outcomes there will be less, still the list is limited to 10 items.

The next list would be the set of things that could happen should the product fail in some way. Eg a margin call will be made in this circumstance. It will be this much and so on. This list is the 10 undesirable outcomes

The last 10 would be the 10 disaster scenarios. Planner goes broke, product goes broke, market goes belly up and so on.

Each point would be required to be written in plain English and would be limited to a around 100 words. The total set of disclosures would therefore be at the most 3 to 4 pages and in most cases significantly less. Does this make it hard to explain really complicated products. Yes it would. But is that a bad thing as it would push complicated and hard to explain products from the market. These are the sort of products that are next to impossible to explain and next to impossible to estimate the risk.

How would this be enforced? Planners would be liable for loss if what happened was not described in their document. In the event something bad happens and a court decides that a reasonable person could have reasonably foreseen the event, and that this event was not described in the disclosure document the planner would be liable for the loss. All disclosure must be in plain English.

Similarly a lack of plainness and straight speaking in the disclosure would put planners on the hook.

Naturally planners will want to guard against being exposed to liability for investment losses so they will ensure that they write good disclosure documents. They will probably insure against such losses so their insurance companies will have an interest in validation the disclosures. Planners are busy people and they will probably push the issuers of products to come up with some of the disclosure material. This in turn will mean that those product creators may themselves bear some liability.

Furthermore as disclosure documents become simpler, and more understandable the ACCC will have a simpler job in looking at those playing at the edges of the disclosure regime. If the ACCC were able to make a binding determination that put planners on the hook. There would then exist a force that would make those who are shonky and offering poor advice instantly liable for loses. This stick would be corrective in the industry. Potentially it allows gulled investors to unwind their positions before too much damage is done.

This proposal may increase the costs of getting planning advice, it will decrease the likelihood of getting bad advice. It will leave disclosure as a useful matter.

These proposals will undoubtedly raise costs, they will undoubtedly make financial planning a less attractive proposition. Hopefully they make it less attractive for the venal, and those lacking veracity.

These ideas would make receiving advice clear and consistent. Leave it in plain English and ensure that both the advised and a stake in the successful outcome.

Harbinger of Doom

Oh look at all the loverly fines

Oh look at all the lovely fines. Authorised officers AKA Customer Diss-service officers must be having a wet dream. A new complicated system combined with their cruelty rudeness and intolerance.

No wonder the photo is blurry I was shaking in fear, when I saw this new device on my local tram.

Read all about the Myki system and how Yarra Trams plans to use it to drive away customers. And here is what the customers say

You may think that the forgoing statements are full of hyperbole, overblown, alarmist even. You may be right.

Trouble is having had dealings with Authorised Officers I can attest that they are overly aggressive, rude and overbearing. They are either by their training or because of their group culture very likely to turn an ordinary situation into confrontation, arrest, assault and a high level of violence.

I have never seen police violenty arrest people I am sure they do I have just never seen it. I have seen Authorised Officers do this on three occasions. I simply cannot ever believe that its is necessary for 6 men to pile onto one person and hold them to the ground over a 3 dollar fare. Over feet on as seat. Over the Authorised Officer having a bad day.

The actions I have seen seem grossly disproportionate. This must be a culture that the management of Yarra Trams and Connex subscribe to and encourage. The alternative of course is that they have unknowingly allowed a culture of victimisation and harassment to flourish. But given their repeated statements backing up their AOs it seems unlikely.

For this reason I am very apprehensive when a new ticketing system is introduced. We have a group of enforcement personnel that go the biff, with gleeful regularity. A group who are uniformly rude, aggressive and confrontational. This is not a group of men, and the occasional women who are going to transform themselves into helpful agents of change. The new Myki system is complicated. Like all new systems there will be a period of time where people have to learn the new system. The current enforcement regime if it continues will make this learning process a nightmare.

Here I might be wrong. Maybe the management of Yarra Trams and Connex can change their thuggish charges into angels. Maybe there can be a miracle on the 86. But I think that the balance of probability is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

It seems the Myki system has been designed to make criminals of us all. We must clock on and clock of each vehicle that we are on. We must have previously loaned the transport company money by putting it on our stored value Myki cards which we can then redeem on a trip. There is no facility on trains or trams to buy a ticket. Simply getting on a tram without a card, or without sufficient value on the card, you ae breaking the rules and risk being fined.

The transport company will let us link a ticket to our bank account and automatically debt should we lack funds, or we can have an anonymous account that we top up. Given public transports monumental inability to manage complex projects I personally won’t let these companies to my bank account. I would suddenly find that my rent had not been paid as Yarra Trams had billed me for 100s of tram trips between somewhere I had never been and another place I wasn’t going to.

Even lets suppose that Myki or Yarra or whoever runs this dogs breakfast are really good. And here I look at all of the utilities who periodically manage to over-bill. The power, the phone, any billing system that bills in little increments. So we either use an anonymous account or we set a special account that when Myki or Yarra or whomever screw up we are not financially ruined.

But lets not get distracted by the possibility that the Myki might have, may have, most probably will have, is almost certain to have, a cocked up stupid form filled bureaucratic nightmare of a billing system. See We don't want to give your money back and My card broke now what

Lets concentrate on the introduction of and the uptake of a new ticketing system. A system that will be managed by a hyper-agressive set of bully boys. Oh and bully girls.

How does Myki imagine that this will work. So far in the trials the error rate has been 10 percent. I have tried to verify that figure and I can’t Now it is unclear if that is 10 percent of trips or 10 percent of interactions. Each trip has two interactions. So at best for an ordinary commuter who goes to work and returns each day than once a week the system will have made an error. This will allow the authorised officers to fine you, insult you. Assault you and then lie about what they found. The current law in the transport act gives you no legs to stand on. So one day in 5 if the system works at its current level you stand to get a 167 dollar fine. Brilliant. If you complain you can or will be arrested. And if you are arrest you will be put in a pressure hold, forced to the ground and assaulted by Yarra trams or Connex goons. These ‘men’ if that is the right word to use for such thugs will lie to make everything legal. Think that I am being over the top. Read many customers accounts and a steady pattern of violence and lies emerges.

Of course the error rate of 10% may fall. Lets hope that it does. AO interactions of course do not lead to assault. According to AO spokesmen the AOs are simple doing their duty. The spokesman is correct, as few if any AOs end up in court for assault. I simple maintain that it is assault as the training that the AOs receive makes it likely that they will escalate an event. That the will take what should be a simple though unpleasant situation and turn it into something much worse. That this seems to be a consistent pattern of behaviour is why I term it assault. The courts so far take a different view.

I am thinking that this is going to be one of those epic fails. A public relations disaster. A complete catastrophe. I salute the executives at the head of Yarra trams. I salute the violence that they encourage, perpetrate through their AOs and condone, I bow down prostrate before them, a position that heir Authorised Officers have forced me to assume. 1.3 Billion dollars in public money and some thick thugs in greatcoats will cause it to fail.

Lets hope I am wrong.

The government has bet 1.3 Billion dollars that I am mistaken. Yarra trams has hired a few hundred men and trained them to be thugs, says I am right.

Addendum

Today pursuing my interest in Myki I went to the Myki demonstration site at Southern Cross Station. There a very helpful attendant told me all about it. Apparently she is to be called a *Myki Mate*, divine I say.

It would have been a great demo but most of the machines and all of the interesting ones were in her words “been broken for a couple of days”. For 1.3 billion running a demo site should be easy. They could pay someone to be the mechanical Turk.

One thing I learned is that you must swipe on and swipe off. If you forget to swipe off then you will be charged a full days fare. Seems to me a simple swipe in the moring and you are done for the day. I am sure that the AOs will have a different view.

More on the privacy aspects of Myki later. Yes big brother will watch you.

A camera project.

i love my big camera the Canon 5D. But big is the operative word. It is a huge camera, it is something that you deliberately take with you. Not something that lives in your pocket. So I go and take pictures but not always the pictures that are around me every day.

On the other hand I have an iPhone. It has a camera that has been roundly condemned. I read an inspirational post on using a Helga Camera, which sadly seems to be no more. This and a couple of others got me thinking. Rather than see the awfulness of the iPhone camera as a limitation treat it as the feature that makes photos interesting.

Borne of this is my Camera that you have blog.

Building a Stomp Box

An account of building a Stomp Box, a kind of musical instrument. Pete wanted a new way to extend his range, combining his love of music and mine of woodworking to make an instrument. Read More

Pictures

At last we have pictures.

Well not exactly true, there have always been pictures its just that they were hard. Gradually I stopped putting them up as it was too much work.

Not anymore. And to celebrate here is a picture of a flower.

Tulips taken at the flower show.

Stringing me along

This is a story of how a man got his string, how a designer failed, and how 40 minutes of my life was wasted by poor design.

I wanted cooking string, the kind of thing you use to tie up chickens, or a bundle of herbs. A bouquuet garni if you are being a smart arse.

The handy mac dictionary says

"The bouquet garni (French for “garnished bouquet”) is a bundle of herbs usually tied together with string and mainly used to prepare soup, stock, and various stews. The bouquet is boiled with the other ingredients, but is removed prior to consumption."

I went to the supermarket and I looked for string. I looked, and I looked and I looked, I gave up, the supermarket is big, string is small. Really small and everywhere if you believe physicists. But that was not the sort of string I was after. I asked a staff member who found out an aisle for me.

Great I had narrowed my search form the whole store to an aisle but an aisle in the supermarket is a big thing. I had already wasted 15 minutes looking for string. Now I was getting annoyed, and the more annoyed I got, the more determined I became. Strange that isn’t it. Sometimes an annoyance like that causes you to give up and almost the same annoyance can make you dig your heels in. Clearly this was a heel dug in day.

I looked around the spices, could it be filed with tying up herbs? No string.

I looked in the baking nostrums section, lots of patty papers, sparkly balls for baking, chocolate hail. Almost made me want to bake something, but no string.

I looked amongst the oils, the flours the specialty baking stuff. No string

I found another staff member who looked in the section where they sell knives and kitchen scales and weird appliances made on the cheap in China and sold for a trifle. The things that break in the bag on the way home form the store. Or maybe that just happens to me. He couldn’t see string, I couldn’t see string. He thought they must be out of string.

I looked again now that my search had shrunk form a whole aisle to just an area of aisle. Woolworths has a kind of crap kitchen stuff home brand. Everything is packaged in the same sort of packaging. Clearly they got there printing done by someone who had an excess of weird colours, or maybe they have a colour blind designer. I would try to describe the colours. Maybe the photo does it justice. Its sort of a green and sort of a fawn brown. I hope these colours aren’t the new seasons designer black, how silly would I be.

And there amongst the generic stuff was string. I had been fooled cause I was actually looking for string. I should have looked for a box labeled string, a box sitting as you can see amongst all the other boxes.

What sort of crazy designer takes a nice distinctive thing, a ball of string and hides it in a box. Admittedly labeled string, no wait, its not, its labeled Cooking Twine. Hell its in a whole range of things that are all the same colour wise. Does anybody ever try and buy these home brand things in their horrid almost green almost fawn packaging.

What are these design guys thinking. If I hide the string no one will buy it and I will be able to corner the market. String is evil no one should buy it.

What is the string, sorry coking twine doing here anyway. Its a consumable, poor stuff, it is languishing in among the durables like graters and pepper mills and stuff.

Notice the string, see how stringy it is. See its essential stringiness. Package that into a box and its nature is gone. Design failure. Put it not where it is logical for it to be. Store layout failure. Put it in a truly horrible box, more design failure.

Causes of failure

What caused me to have to take so long to find string.

• Search space is very large
• Search space reduction was ineffecient
  • Hanging tag list is too generic for string
  • Staff didn’t know location of product.
  • Staff interrelationships are poor
• String stored in an illogical place
• Packaging is woeful
• String is called Cooking Twine

Search space

The search space, the number of racks, rows, and aisles to look in a super market is very large A small specialty item like string is going to be hard to find. After a first pass look I started to use the tools that the store provides to narrow my search. This store has a hanging list at the end of each aisle telling you were things are. This list is optimized to fit on a single A4 page so a small specific item wasn’t there. There is no more detailed list

Next I tried asking a staff member. Unfortunately for me he was a low status guy. When he found someone that knew the answer. A job that he did promptly, and cheerfully. The person who gave him the answer simple pointed him and therefore me to an aisle. Still a large area to look. I suspect that his status meant that the other staff member could blow him off with vague directions. This suggests that whilst the first chap had my customer interests at heart. This didn’t extend to other staff members. This might seem like an over-reach in analysis. But when I approached a second staff member the pattern was repeated. He too cheerfully went off to find the information, came back with more precise but still vague information relayed to him from a more knowledgeable co-worker. Once could be chance, twice ia pattern emerges. Junior staff don’t know things and the more senior staff that do know are not helping out the juniors, and therefore not helping out the customer.

Illogical Storage

String as I have mentioned is a consumable. I looked for it with spices, after its association with bouquuet garni. I looked for it in the baking nostrums section, sparkles, patty tins etc. I looked in the edge of flour territory, yeast bread improver and so on. None of these places were right but my approach was to pick up that the store groups like things together. The store had grouped it with like things. Like things that are packed in the same way.

The store is breaking its own meta-rule. It places like things together, flour, sugars, Asian grocery and so on. It doesn’t for example place all of the home brand products together, or all of green things together. With string it broke that rule and placed it with its ‘essentials brand’.

I am reminded of Gorge Luis Borges Chinese Encyclopedia, In this (possibly fictional) volume described by the writer, animals are categorised as:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others, those that have just broken a flower vase,
13. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Its wonderful, and nonsensical, and if you look hard there is almost a pattern, look harder and then there is not. String’s classification in Woolworths is the same.

Packaging

I have already mentioned the colours. Vile! The strange name. Not string but twine. How the packaging hides the nature of the product forcing the consumer to read the packaging rather than give a hint as to content. A ball of string, or twine is visually arresting, it forms a lief motif for things that are string. Its embedded culturally. Imagine cute kittens playing with a ball of wool. Search for string and countless images of spools of string and balls of string are shown.

The packaging ignores that and just presents a box. The typogray on this box the most important item is HOME essentials. Cooking twine is sandwiched between the ‘essentials brand’ and the new that this is a dispensing pack. In order to determine the nature of the contents I have to from this cluttter of information find the word Twine, the only word that gives me a clue to the contents. Out of two brands and 7 words 1 gives me a clue. And it wasn’t the clue I had set myself I was looking for string.

In closing

This seems like a long spiel on a simple ball of string. Its not really about the string. Its about how a series of decisions, poor packaging, poor placement, untrained and poorly supported staff, insufficient reference material, make it extremely hard to locate a simple product.

Imagine that this is repeated in countless stores and for untold products and this adds up to a lot of 40 minutes lost.

What moral purpose

Its Easter and its Easter Sunday. The holiest day of the Christian year, the day when we consider life and death and our response to it. Or we do if we are of a mind. Cardinal Pell tells us that condoms are not the answer.“that condoms encouraged promiscuity”. If that was what he said, we would know that he is what many of us suspect. An elderly demented power broker of the Church. But that unfortunately is not all of what he said, What he said was to back up Pious and Benedict and those other fathers of the church. He said that Condoms where not the answer to AIDS The only answer was to respect the marriage vows and not to have sex outside marriage. Condoms were never to be used. In fact this deluded pointy hat wearer went further and suggests that condoms were part of the problem not the solution.

Well excuse me holy fuckwit. If that were true and condoms caused promiscuity then there would have been less promiscuity before condoms were around. But it just ain’t so. In the world where I live. If a hot chick offers sex I am having a bit, and here hot is a very very relative term. And if the figures of many many studies are anything to go by; many women feel the same. Lots of kids 10%, 20, 30% take your study and make your stance,are born outside of the marriage. Abstinence and only sex inside marriage. Only a religion whose rule makers are all celibate and all men, would think abstinence is going to work.

That’s not to mention the problem of hemophiliacs with AIDS or the victims of rape. No Pell and the power mongers of the church want to hew to Benedict’s line. A moral purpose is better than staying alive. Pell’s morality is better dead, than protected. Yes its a great idea that we all stay chaste and love the one true wife or husband, we only do the naughty with them, not fort pleasure god forbid, just for procreation. It is a great idea but one undone by what we are. Humans.

I have one word for you Darwin. We are not machines of the divine, vessels of holy spirit or any other mumbo jumbo. We are flesh machines for passing on genes. And a clever organism AIDS has co-opted that drive and is hitching a lift. Get over your manslaughter morality and understand a few of the things that have been known the last 200 years. Its time to interdict, its time to move on. Its time for growth here in the world during Easter.

To think that a pontiff can be so removed from our true human nature is to wonder at an organization that can be so out of touch. To think that you would rail against a measure, condoms that is effective in preventing not just AIDS but other STDs as well because you have a moral argument against contraception. Where do these men’s real values lie. Is human life so beneath their pervue, that it is less important than a moral principal. That is twisted.

The kind amongst us would suggest delusion, the unkind would find these men are monsters.

Its war she cried

It is wonderful how our media and politicians co-opt the rich imagery of war to support their causes.

We have the war on drugs, the war on terror from our politicians. Now forget the risible concept of a war on war ie the war on terror. Turning what are in essence police actions into wars is lazy and degrades the language.

Then we have the media, who tend to conflate simple criminal vengeance between networks with war. We allegedly have a bikie war, we have just had a gangland war. These terms make for great headlines, but in the process debase the language. Can a bunch of criminals killing each other in a tit for tat manner really be a war. Vengeance yes, murder yes, but war, hardly. These are people that deserve none of the things we associate with war, the good, like patriotism, honour, service and so on. Criminals killing each other shares death with war, nothing else.

War however disgusting and horrific has an import component that agencies give to themselves the legitimisation of violence and ultimately death. Pathetic patched up crims on bikes have no such legitimisation except in their own perverted world view. People using drugs have hardly taken up arms and started to kill those who would choose to prevent them. The criminal networks that are enabled by and maintained by the opposition very well might. War, hardly.

Start to use our wonderful language better. Leave war in its proper place.

It's alive

Ohmslaw was for a while dead, or deadish. But then my friend heysus, say it with a Spanish accent, brought ohmslaw back to a state of grace.

Thanks Dave; AKA heysus. He performed a transformation. A resurrection if you will and here we are looking more chipper than we were. more buff, more cut, more ripped. Weird how many ways there are of describing a body that has gained muscle and lost fat.

Hopefully the new ohmslaw is like that, the fat stripped away, the writing ripped and rippling.

pGal Lives

Its been a while but I have begun to resuscitate a friend. pGal is the CMS behind this site and a couple of others notable the Lorne Surf Club Site www.lornesurfclub.com.au. I have been the webmaster and site handmaiden there for a number of years. This is rewarding but also frustrating, frustrating as I have to make all of the content. As time has past there have been more and more people saying let me edit pages and manage things. I realised that pGal was not up to this task.

The bones of the system are great, but you need to know how the software is intended to work in order to use it. I decided that three things had to happen for the Surf Clubs site. First it needed a site revamp, the old look was sad, dowdy, like a mouldy old stuffed parrot that has seen better days. So item one was a site revamp. Item two was a change to a key pgal design decision. When I designed pgal I allowed works (a document, picture, ...) to be either a reference in the db and a file or contained in the db. This was probably a good decision at the time, but now with hindsight not such a good idea. It made managing those files hard. It means that a suite of things have to be backed up, the db, files, templates and so on. It made the user interfaces more complicated and error prone. It meant that authors had to know too much. So I made the decision, everything into the db. No more files. The third thing I added to my todo list was a reworking of the pgal interfaces to make it much easier to use.

So I have completed items 1 and 2, a reworking of the surf clubs website. It now produces compliant HTML and CSS. I think it looks much better than the old site, luckily now only available in the Google Cache

I have added the ability to provide pages via a markup language. I chose textile as the markup format. Not for any particular love of textile, It just happened that this was the first reasonably complete implementation of a markup that I found. Now documents are much more straight forward to author. 90% Just write them in textile in the db. Job done. the remaining 10% that are tricky, HTML. In fact for many documents an author need do nothing more than type.

Next problem that I needed to solve was to display the Surf Clubs newsletter on the website. The surf clubs newsletter is called the Lorne Mower. Yes I hear the thigh slapping from here. To make it I edit an HTML document and use the marvellous Campaign Monitor http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ to send emails. I build an HTML document and provide a zip of all of the images. Campaign Monitor picks this up and turns it into an addressed email. it a loverly system and I thoroughly recommend it. So I wanted something like this for the site. A facility where I could chuck an HTML page, a zip of images and hey presto it all gets imported. Well this now works, and works a treat.

That has meant that I could import Mowers for the last couple of years, as well as some of the other bulletins etc that have been sent to members. You can see an example here http://www.lornesurfclub.com.au/Photo?Gallery=235

In additon to these big features I have added a number of smaller things, Better editors for documents and the combined Gallery and Document, fixed a number of bugs, in particular a rendering bug that had driven me nuts but when finally solved proved to be simplicity itself.

So now I have plans to make pgal much easier to use.

Step one is to redo the edit navigation. Currently this is a bit hard to use, sort of like saying celestial navigation in a storm at night is a bit hard when compared to asking a GPS where the hell are we. Viciously primitive might be a better description.

A revamped navigation page will allow me to hang off of it all of the creational activity. This in turn will provide for a more work flow like approach. Currently pgal has no work flow, you just assemble all the parts, and provided that you know the order of assembly, what is produced works. Of course if you don’t know the secret sauce, then great weeping and whaling and gnashing of teeth are in store for you.

This is one of the reasons that I have been reluctant to open up pgal to others to edit on it. The reason that I am chained to being the web-master for eternity.

Revamped navigation and the moving of some key tasks to that navigation area is going to make lots fo things much simpler. No more renumbering pages by hand to get their order right.

Step 2 is the idea that you can attach templates to an area. Currently templates are global. Fine for a simple site where you may have only a few templates, but in a larger site there may be many different areas of the site, each of these may have several templates. Currently the surf clubs site runs to 35 templates, which means that choosing the wrong one becomes very easy.

Oh I hear you ask, what is a template, a template in pGal provides the layout of a page, it takes various resources that are passed to it and renders them, A simple example might be a page that renders a document. The template provides the look, the gallery and the document the data. and meta-data to render the page.

By attaching a template to an area I can then provide an area manager, more on these later, a limited set of templates to choose from, oh and a a default template. Templates know how to render a part of the site, currently you have to know what a particular template requires. that is say for example a template needs a document and 3 pictures, you need to make these resources and tie those four objects to the gallery (AKA directory) and apply the template and vola it works. Clearly in the current model getting the right resources for a template is just another thing to screw up. So as well as attaching templates to areas each template will have a set of resources it needs, it will use these resources to drive the editor and suddenly we are looking at workflow. So Area has Templates Template has Resouces, template has an editor for making a page. I have a warm glow.

All of this leads to step 3 which is t provide access control lists to areas. An access control list will allow the system to specify an owner and editors that own a directory, and its children. This feature will allow the boat rowers to edit their part of the site, and the p2p people their part and so on. Getting here allows me to hand over content creation to others.

There are a few other things I want to do. Currently all graphics are held in one giant directory, this system is hard to manage and files get renamed in perverse ways to ensure that there are no name clashes. That in turn makes editing harder. I want to move all graphics so that the source is stored in the DB. Its going to make the DB much larger but it will mean that there is now only two things to back up. The db, and the template area. It will also mean that all graphics can be squirted out as required, resized and all that good stuff.

To make managing graphics easier I intend to have each site directory create a parallel website directory in which any resources, graphics files and so on are stored. This makes file names easier to manage and makes moving things, and deleting them easier too. No more shared graphics and all of the complications that that creates.

Finally when I am at this point I can add the other feature I have wanted for a while. Current each URL in pgal looks something like /Photo?Gallery=3 hardly the most memorable of URLS what I would like is for that to be /MySite/Trips/Kimberly a much more descriptive URL.

All in all this is quite a bit of work, but the first few steps have been taken, and they were fun. Even if it was a bit of a pain to have to visit 5,6,7 year old code and realise that it was not as good as it could be. Thank goodness for IntelliJ re-factoring tools.

Stay tuned for the next instalments of the pGal story, and what the programmer did next.

Paul Newport Video

Toward a better power supply

Toward a more stable power network
When it gets hot the power goes out. This can be for several reasons, equipment failure usually due to heat and demand, or the need of central authorities to shed load. Load shedding is a bit of a euphemism, it means cutting power to an area fro a period of time so that the entire network remains safe.

When its hot the load is mostly power used for air-conditioning. But more is coming, the first electric cars are just on the horizon, Everything consumes more power, big screen TVs air-con, now cars, businesses etc.

The proposal for managing this that was muted when power was sold off was to institute an economic model. In this model power would be sold in 15 minute blocks, blocks would be priced according to the cost of supply using maths so complicated that the company that runs this system had to be given an unpronounceable name (NEMECO)

The big downfall of converting the domestic tranche to 15 minute power blocks was the need to retrofit every house with a smart meter. These are expensive, around the 1500 dollar mark. That’s the best figure I can find. Most of that cost is not the meter, its the installation.

For this reason the new meter model failed.

I think I have a better idea. In this idea all houses would be equipped with smart meters, these meters would be selling power in 15 minute trances, but they would also be able to turn on and off remotely various classes of devices.

The classes of device I think that could be usefully turned off remotely are
1) Air conditioners
2) Water heaters
3) Electric vehicle recharging

The way that this would work is that on days where ‘load shedding’ was required then different areas would have some of these devices switched off. This might be for 1/2 an hour or so. The pain could be shared around. This type of load shedding allows lack of supply to be shared around. It also allows load in areas with equipment that is critical to be shed. For example suppose that a particular substation component is close to tripping because of temperature, load could be shed keeping the network alive, keeping food in fridges, leaving computing and telephony services intact.

But this load shedding, and smart meeting could be extend. Provide differential pricing for general classes of supply. Allow people to choose when their meter turns off particular classes of device. Say I decide I don’t mind sweating a bit. I set the price I am prepared to pay for aircon, and if that price is exceed then my aircon goes off.

This is a nice set of features, I can provide economic input to how i consume power, the supplier can ultimately protect the network in a better way than just shedding load. With some cleverness this protective feature can be extended to network components.

Now the rub, we have only a few really hot days a year, on average around 1.3 days a year over 40. This is a lot of expense to plan for these hot days. We have 10 days a year on average over 35. This is around the sort of temperature where load shedding becomes a possibility. I don’t here have the capability to estimate how much of the system would have to be metered like this before it became useful. I can’t really conduct a useful cost benefit analysis. But I think it would be worthwhile to try and do that analysis.

In closing how could such a system be rolled out.

I suggest a set of triggers that would require the installation of a smart meter, and a set of carrots that would induce people to install one.

The triggers could be
Meter installation of any sort.
Installing aircon
Installing hot water
Rapid charge system for electric vehicle recharge

The carrots could be
Cheaper power for those who install meters

The power system is going to have to adapt going forward Electric vehicles are almost here, global warming is here and will continue to impact, people are installing more aircon, using more power, increasing their consumption in all sorts of ways.

We need to do something to manage the network better, we need a way to ensure that there is security of supply. This proposal might be a way

Power nap of death

Why do all my devices gobble so much power. Even on standby? Most devices could benefit form a really simple model, a scheme that I am calling the 'Sleep of death", catchy huh.

All devices have a power down mode when after a period of inactivity they start to go to sleep.

When the device goes into power down mode it switches off the mains supply. It monitors whatever turns it on, keyboard for a PC or remote for a telly using energy stored in a capacitor. The capacitor would be sized so that there is enough storage to keep monitoring going for 5 days.

After 5 days if the device has not been used then the capacitor looses energy and the device is truly powered off, the sleep of death. To wake it from such a death like state you have to go and hit the start button on the device.

The aim should be that devices that are sleeping should consume 0 watts of power, and if they are not used for a few days they stop using power altogether. So some of the things that flow from this is that the traditional wall wart will die. This kind of device can't be powered off they still sip power event if there is noting on the other end. Don't believe me, just put your hand on one. It will be warm even if the wall wart is doing nothing.

I have just walked around my hose and found that I have 17 devices that suck power to provide some sort of instant on feature. Most of these devices are not in use most of the time. Given that we are worried about power use and CO2 emissions or should be, its about time this vampire power was fixed.

For most of the devices I have this is going to be a superb system.

Lets enumerate things in the house that could use this model, and a few exceptions where this might be a truly BAD idea.

TV Obvious gimmie, if you haven't used the box in 5 days a walk to the unit to power it up is not going to kill you.

Settop Box/PVR/DVD Player. Yes yes and yes, most of these sit idle for me most of the time. Would be really nice if the TV knew that these peripherals existed and could tell you you needed to power them up if they had gone to the sweet sleep of death. My TV Stereo DVD PVR system sucks enough power on full power on mode to be a good mini heater. On standby all of this gear is still noticeably warm. Warm is a lot of power, a lot of power when I am down the pub, sleeping, working. Activities that consume 20 hours of my day. Currently much of this gear seems reluctant to power itself down or off.

Computer and its brethren.

In my set-up I have

• Desktop
• Laptop (several, don't ask why I have more than one)
• External speakers
• External Disk
• Printer Colour and B&W
• Router Modem hub, bane of my existence, dlink piece of crap

Desktop, this model would work well. For me I use my desktop as one of the locations to backup several remote machines so it would never power off completely.

Laptop, model works well

External speakers, provided that this was engineered so that I didn't have to go into the wiring hell under my desk should be OK

External Disk: Not such a good idea as machines tend to get a bit grumpy when a disk they used to see is not there. It would be great to have this type of device notify itself to the computer that its connected to. Then during the sleep of death the computer could then say, hey user, the following external devices have gone to 'sleep with the fishes', or whatever this should be called. You need to wake them this device by 'clicking its power switch'. Actually that would be great for printers too.

Printer see external disk. In fact I now turn my printer off fairly regularly as I really don't use it that much. Its a bit annoying how often a network connected printer will accept jobs queued to it but will do nothing to let you know that it is in fact not on the network.

Router. This could be problematic. I suspect that most of the time I could figure out why there was no wireless when I used my laptop, but could my mum? I am not so sure that this could be made simple enough. But maybe routers could be configured like this.

Sleep of death model.

Repeated sipping, in this model it still uses a capacitor to store power but just as power is about to die the device powers up enough to fill up the capacitor and the cycle repeats.

Actually even this might not be enough for routers as they may need a massive capacitor to keep wireless or whatever working.

Things that should not have a standby mode at all.

There are lots of devices that have a standby mode, a stupid stupid standby mode so that they are ready whenever we push a button. Things like dish washers, washing machines dryers and so on. All these devices should do their task and ten switch themselves off. You need to switch them back on to get them working.

• Dryer
• Washing Machine
• Dishwasher
• Microwave
• Stoves

Things that have batteries that we would like to be charged.

There are lots of things that have a battery, dust busters, cordless tools, toothbrushes, etc etc.

All of these should be required to power themselves off and only power back up when the battery is at 50% and then repeat the cycle. It should be simple to have these devices last a huge amount of time consuming no power at all. For example my battery drill takes 2 months to discharge half its battery, well as near as can be judged from the winking lights on the recharger. For myself I leave my drill unplugged but quite a few people are not prepared to have everything not available all the time.

One cordless tool will not save the world but the millions out there all sipping away at power just might.

Some things that you might not want this model for.

Conclusion

So just using myself as the testbed it seems as though there are a lot of devices that could benefit from the Sleep of Death. Of course for the model to really work, some devices like TV's and computers would need modification to help users out.

Its time that the Energy star criteria was revised. Revised so that when items go to sleep eventually they sleep and die as suggested here. We should insist that all new devices follow this model. Every single item that uses a mains power but is mostly off.

Oh and in the meantime, swithc off all the things that are not really in use.