Iain @ Internet

What a wonderful software application this is ….used for storing and sharing information about your books, videos, DVD’s and games.

It not only looks great, but the built in gadgets are excellent – you can scan in the barcode from a book for example using your webcam and the applications runs off to pull the data back from Amazon web services. Wonderful…..the future of personal data capture.

I think this is going to become a bit of a recurring theme on this blog – suppliers designing processes that ‘work’ for them, failing to note (or failing to care) that what they do wastes the time of the individuals they are dealing with. Some do so deliberately (to reduce their costs), others are just not good at designing processes.

One example of the latter…… HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs). If your call volumes are so high that you have to ask me to call back then a) don’t make me wait for a load of speel before you tell me that, and b) put more people on duty.

I’ll keep this short and not so sweet – the Parc 55 hotel in San Francisco is vastly over-rated and not worth staying in at present.

Apparently it used to be a Marriot but has just been taken over, I can only assume that the good staff left.

Dingy rooms and 25 minutes to get my car back from when I gave the ticket to the valet man – not good enough. That said, my overall experience of San Francisco hotels has never been that great – time to look for some new options I think.

I was thinking of of commenting on how smoothly the acquisition of Holmes Place Gym by Virgin Active has gone……It has, in the main, but today I was not able to sign in to the Edinburgh gym with my new Virgin card – something i’ve done 40 or so times before with my old Holmes Place card.

So – what’s to blame, un-communicated policy change, or bad IS/ IT deployment; my money is on the latter.

…..no i’m not going to rabbit on about XRI, Liberty, SXIP or any of those identity technologies that attempt to enable digital identities with some functionality; this is a far more practical issue that is troubling me.

As i’ve mentioned, i’ve kicked out British Gas, and replaced them with EDF Energy as my gas and electric provider – or at least i’m trying to. The problem is an identity one, namely the identifiers for my gas and electricity meters. In order to make the change, EDF need to know these numbers, and needless to say British Gas are not that interested in giving them to me.

I think i’ve finally got them after much hunting around and several phone calls.

The underlying message – individuals need to have much better access to the unique identifiers required to run supplier relationships, and have somewhere to store them…….i’m working on that!!!!

Here’s a nice new toy from UK Government – a personal inflation calculator.

Perhaps i’ll now be able to see why my fixed personal expenditure increase feels like it bears no resemblance to the published 3% inflation figure.

Here we go again, another leaked proposal from government attempting to justify building a huge great database of personal information. This one is supposedly about ‘improving access for citizens’, that almost takes us back to the old entitlement card proposal – you know, the one before the ‘better statistics one, the better security one.

…I wish they would just come out and be honest with us citizens and say they want to save a lot of money in running the country. On the other hand, that does not sound sexy enough to outweigh the massive increase in privacy invasion that will go along with it.

No doubt this one will rumble around for a few months with lots of posturing and no significant discussion of the actual underlying issues – the cost/ benefit to the individual of data on them being shared across government (and beyond).

I just read this article saying that bike theft in London has increased by almost 30% in the last year 0 the fastest rise ever.

This is hardly a surprise to me, i’ve had 4 bikes stolen in the last 5 years and one about 5 years before that – all were locked up with mid range locks (and I just remembered the time I got a wheel on its own stolen…).

Reporting them has been a complete waste of time other than to make an insurance claim, and in fact the last theft (from Kings Cross bike rack 5 months ago) I did not even bother to report or claim – so how much higher than 30% growth are the real statistics?

Of course, the whole farcical situation get rammed down your throat when you go into the bike shop and say ‘i’ve had my bike stolen’. ‘That’s terrible (they say), so what kind do you want to buy now……and of course you’ll need a lock, insurance…..blah blah blah). It is pretty well known that some of the less reputable bike shops will resell stolen bikes, and could be involved in them being stolen in the first place. But even the better bike shops, and the manufacturers themselves benefit considerably from the bike theft ‘industry’; so how much incentive do they have to slow it down or stop it?

I have no doubt that the technology exists to at least slow down the rate of theft – some is out there at present, but highly priced and so out of the reach of the average punter. Insurance is obviously an option but that does not prevent the theft itself and the accompanying hassle. The cops are not interested, they are too busy to spend hours filling out paper for something they don’t have time to look for anyway. We already have tons of CCTV cameras in London, i’m not sure that any have prevented a bike theft or enabled a return – not that i’ve read about anyway.

…..so if anyone thinks that this problem is going to go away any time soon, think again – the people with the remit and ability to change things have no incentive to do so.

Yes, i’ll have one of those please – as soon as it becomes available.

To be honest, i’d have bought one whether it was good, bad or in-different; thankfully what was shown at the launch looks to be pretty good.

For me the thing that most commentators under-stated was that the phone runs on Mac OS X – a full on operating system if ever there was one. So, in many ways, the iPhone is like a very small laptop – just needs a bit more memory over time (which will inevitably happen anyway).

…..bring it on!!!!!

I’ve just encountered a little bit of madness buried within the London Congestion charging rules, a shame because otherwise the scheme seems broadly okay. Or to put it another way, it does nothing to reduce volume on the roads so far as I can see, but at least it raises funds that have to be re-spent on improving public transport (*).

Anyway, the madness relates to the rules for residents discounts. I live inside the zone and have just bought a car, and thus registered for the discount. Apparently, I get a 90% discount, but can only pay for 5 days in a row. But……I never drive five days in a row, usually I drive no more than once a week during the charging period. I phoned up to ask why, and was told that it is because the transaction costs mean that it is impossible to charge for one day at a time….

Other than being a pile of nonsense on the transaction costs (80p should be more than enough if the channel choice is right), then surely it is crazy to effectively incentivise me to drive more than I would have. Even if transaction costs were not coverable, that should be covered by subsidising from revenues rather than enabling people to drive more than they would have done.

(*) I see that the mandatory 100% spend on improved public transport expires after 10 years since scheme inception – no doubt there will be plenty of politicians with their eyes on that money when it becomes available.