Interloper:weblog

Open Windows

In this week's New Scientist there is a short anecdote about the use of Windows in car engine management. This is a rather frightening development. But far more worrying is that the UK armed forces are also using Windows. Just imagine at the height of battle as you're about to launch your missiles you get the helpful message: Windows has performed an illegal operation.

ASDA depression

Today is 19 November and I visited my local ASDA store to be harassed by gnomes, fairies, wicked witches and (for some odd reason) a cowboy. There was even a furious looking young man dressed as snow white. He looked soooo unhappy. Yes, it's the annual consumer sales period, known as Christmas, (actually a whole month away till the day itself). I won't go on, there's enough people moaning about it without me adding to the pain. I don't often shop at ASDA; I hate the brash, bright clumsiness of the stores' layout and more than anything else the sodding blather of ASDA FM urging me to buy more, save more... Later I visited the congenial emptiness of the Co-Op store across town. No pixies or grumpy Snow Whites there. Thank the Lord and pass the tangerine.

Disclaim Aclaim

Nice to see a site that isn't afraid to unbalance the zeitgeist and be contrarian.

Kerb wobble

So there I was in the foyer of a large grammar school. The entrance door had locked behind me and the door leading into the school proper was similarly secure. In the 10 feet between the two doors was a stack of stainless steel lockers and a teacher giving a cello lesson to an embarrassed ten-year old girl. I smiled sweetly and suddenly found great interest in the patterned wallpaper as the girl scraped out her scales. Obviously space was a little tight this morning. Eventually the man I had come to see rescued me and I no longer had to endure the sweet sounds of cello murder. No. I had the far more impressive task of examining a wobbly kerbstone that had caused ��500-worth of damage to the underside of a car.

Whoosh, flash, switch off

There's this thing that television production companies do in their documentaries. I call it the 'whoosh-flash'. It tends to occur when the director wants to change scenes. It's just so 20th century to just cut from one scene to another, the same effect you get when you just look from one object to another with your own eyes. No, that's just too easy. I mean, you're directing a modern documentary. You've got all these qualifications from art and design colleges. You've got to jazz it up a bit, just show-off a bit, y'know. So what you do between cuts is have someone stick a whoosh sound on the soundtrack and then do a whiteout - just half a second will do. Hey Presto! Instead of a boring cut you have a 'whoosh-flash' cut! There is a slight problem with this, and I may be being a little picky, but for the viewer the whoosh-flash pretty soon starts to pale. It becomes irritating because it's unnecessary, it adds nothing to the imparting of knowledge and it simply detracts from the programme itself. It looks like a first year design student got hold of the tapes and decided to take the piss. One of the big culprits is the once renowned now derided Horizon, made by the BBC. It's become infected by the whoosh-flash, unnecessary dramatisations, inappropriate mood music and over-dramatic commentary. Just go and look at The World At War for the classic documentary and see why that works and the modern 21st century pap doesn't. Horizon and its ilk treat the viewer as a passive moron who needs a constant moving canvas and the occasional jolt for stimulation. The World at War treated the viewer with respect, with an attention span longer than two minutes.

Go East

One of the country's biggest insurance firms has announced plans to transfer more than 1,100 jobs to India over the next few years, sparking fears of a "crisis" in the UK. Royal&SunAlliance said it will save over ��10 million a year by switching call centre and customer service work to Bangalore. Chief executive Duncan Boyle said: "This move is part of R&SA's existing UK business transformation programme and is expected to deliver annual cost savings in excess of ��10 million. We are committed to providing our customers with value for money products and excellent service." [Insurance Jobs Head For India]

It's not the loss of jobs that draws my attention to this story but the use of language. The term 'business transformation programme' is typical of the vacuous, patronising nonsense we get from management and politicians. 'We are committed to providing our customers with value for money and excellent service'. Oh, and the shareholders ofcourse. So what does 'business transformation programme' mean? Perhaps, we are changing the company. And what about 'we are committed to providing...'? Perhaps, we want you to think we give a competitive service. R&SA - just another cost cutting exercise. Can't complain, they're just following the competition. But why dress it up in pompous language? This will only stop when they outsource the directors' jobs.

Kicking the cat

I think I might get myself a cat. Not because I want a pet or something to cuddle but so I can come home and kick it when I have a bad day. That's what I would have done last week after some bruising days at work. We have a part-time manager who insists on altering our reports even if he just adds a comma. Our system for actually getting these reports out of the door takes up to 3 weeks. Three weeks! First we dictate the report, it gets typed in draft, it waits for the part-time manager to approve and amend it, then it goes for re-typing and then it goes out. At least this week saw the release of TextMate for Mac OSX so I had something to play with when I felt miserable. Despite the many detractors I like TextMate and find it very easy to use. There are some howlers, though. Specifically, the lack of a Preference menu and no Print facility. A lot of tweeks are needed to make this competitive with programs like SubEthaEdit but I get the feeling that long term it's going to be a good one. So I registered it and became licence holder number 101, so at least 100 other people thought the same as me. And it hasn't crashed - so the cat's safe for a little while longer.

Blossom Hill

Sounding like somewhere in north London, this beautiful wine just begs to be guzzled. I know sod all about the science of wine-making and I don't know why this stuff is described as White Zinfandel but I found it amongst the reds in my local supermarket because, well, it's red. What the heck, it's a smooth, sweet, fruity slurp and I've just bought 2 bottles *hic*.

20/20 bores

After great effort I found myself at Edgbaston watching the Twenty-Twenty semi-finals and final. A long day, this. You arrive at about 10am and finish at 10pm having watched 120 overs of cricket, a couple of mediocre pop groups and a bunch of skinny cheerleaders waving bunches of ribbons. The weather was stinkingly hot; I've never seen so many people lathering themselves with suncream, many of them men in their twenties. With over-priced alcohol and ��25 seats you want to get your money's worth. The cricket was good and Leicestershire were worthy winners. What wasn't good was the usual boorish groups in the crowd - overcome on booze and heat they just couldn't help themselves. Sadly. many of the noisy ones near me were fat, over forty and should have known better. One graceless git insisted in shouting obsenities at players he didn't like. The oaf is probably a middle-manager. I can hear him saying "work hard, play hard" to excuse his ladishness.

M6 hell, chaos, shock, crisis etc

If you live in or work in Birmingham, UK you'll already know the sheer damn misery of trying to use your car or public transport around the city. It's always been a busy place with just enough road infrastructure to cope. When things go wrong, like even a minor accident on a feeder road, the knock-on effects come quickly and suddenly miles of road and thousands of vehicles are caught-up with nothing to do but sit it out till the obstruction is cleared. The famous Aston Expressway, known to locals as the Distressway, is notorious for its daily hold ups. The Expressway is a conduit between the city and the M6 motoway and has a tidal flow system across 7 or 8 lanes which works most of the time. It's an aging bit of urban motorway and it's wearing out so the Highways Agency have decided to close most of it for 9 weeks and also close the slip roads leading on and off the M6. And they've decided to resurface the M6 nearby as well. And they're also doing a bit of the M6 further north. This work will last until Christmas. And they're still mucking around with the M42 motorway about 10 miles south of the city. Today was the first day when all this work merged. With so many roads effected and thousands of people trying to get in and out of the city the inevitable happened. Everything stopped. The Highways Agency say it's cheaper and quicker to do all this work in one go but local businesses are saying it's costing them ��9m a day in delays and they would have preferred the work to be staggered over a longer period.

Meanwhile, for those that want it there is an alternative; assuming you can get to it through the traffic there seems to be no shortage of space.

Dovetailing rather neatly is the next Big Idea to have lanes for car-sharers. I can't help feeling this idea just won't work when our motorways have only 3 lanes. Lane 1 for the car-sharers, lane 2 for the lorries and vans, lane 3 for everybody else. Lanes 1 will be under-used, lane 2 will be nose-to-tail with HGVs and lane 3 will have all the poor suckers who couldn't find anyone to share with in a queue 5 miles long. The arguing has just begun.

Vanity Fairy

According to her BBC 'biography' (or press release) Sybil Ruscoe is "one of the country's most experienced and versatile radio presenters". Incredibly she "was recently named as one of Cosmopolitan's 100 Most Inspirational Women for her work in sports broadcasting." So this is the same Sybil Ruscoe that presents a soporific radio show that's so anodyne drug companies want to patent it as a sleeping aid. I'm sure Sybil is a very nice, caring person but as a broadcaster she speaks mind-numbing drivel, chuckling away to herself as she does. Still, she does have human weaknesses, and lets us know, just so we can get all sympathetic; "... and like Sir Steve Redgrave is a diabetic." Pardon? No mention of Sir Steve anywhere else on the page except in that sentence. Surely they've edited something out! Surely they can't be trying to connect the vacuous inanities of a MOR DJ and one of the best sportsmen ever produced in the UK? Perish the thought.

Over the bar!

Over the last few weeks the country has been inflicted with mini England flags attached to car windows, plaintively flapping above grubby white vans, and gradually getting duller and duller as traffic grime impregnates the polyester. This was, ofcourse, because of some football championship. As is typical with the England team, they lost, they won, they lost spectacularly. A nation mourns. When the team were beaten out of the competition those little flags disappeared almost overnight. The country must have got up next morning and collectively smote the damn things to one side. To fly them now would be self-mockery, a realisation that England is good but not great. It's easy psychology, I know, but perhaps this is a paradigm for England and the UK; we're good but not great. If only we could accept our modest place in the world, realise that we can be a better nation through co-operation with others, forget the imperialist past, and lose the superpower pretensions, we might become a more progressive nation.