Real leather

When I was 17 I got a small 4 stroke Japanese motorcycle. It went surprisingly fast and I think my mother was worried that I was going to hurt myself. As a result I believe she bullied one of our neighbours (a guy called Peter Allen, I think) into parting with an old leather motorcycle jacket he had. I don't think he was very happy about losing it.

I knew Peter because he kept ferrets and sometimes we went ferreting together, a rather ghastly and strangely pointless business (you don't catch many rabbits). But there's something to be said for country walks and the ferrets themselves, with their almost overpowering woody smell, were both fascinating and friendly.

Not long after I got the jacket (I recall paying Peter £7, though it may have been less) I tore it when I fell off the motorbike going round a corner in the rain. Evidently my mother was right. But 40 years later I could still wear it. The difference is in my teenage years I could put a full size cooked chicken (a perk of my job as a kitchen assistant in a fish and chip shop) beneath the zip, whereas the zip can only contain me now.

It's one of the few things I still have from my teenage years, even though by nature I'm a hoarder. But truth be told the jacket has seen better days. The label (pictured above) got removed when I had it repaired a few years ago. The neckline is cut open showing the lining. It certainly doesn't look as stylish as it did, but neither do I.

Sometimes I wonder if I should give it a decent burial (it is leather after all). Perhaps a Viking funeral? Pushing it out on a burning boat at the Hollow Ponds (Whipps Cross) might be nice, but I'm not sure the authorities would allow it.

I can't afford to get it fixed properly and don't want someone to do a hamfisted repair. So what do I do with it? It seems cruel to let it rot on a coat hook.

Red tape learns how to keep secrets from Google

Years ago when the dominant search engine was probably Yahoo, a young upstart company emerged offering a better search engine. Its name was Google. Bloody silly name, but there you go.

The main added value it offered was the ability to include data stored in PDFs so that searching the internet became a much more rewarding experience.

In subsequent years government has felt it imperative to store much of its data online, or at least to make it appear that such data is accessible to the general public. But appearances in the case of government rarely align with reality.

Secretive and defensive authorities (the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority or LVRPA is the one I know best) learnt the Google lesson. Instead of uploading conventional PDFs that can be scanned by anyone they started converting ordinary (ASCII) text into pictures and then turning it into a document.

This does not save online space. The resulting file is very rarely significantly smaller and may be larger. What it does do, and the only conceivable motive for doing this, is turn the apparently accessible into the inaccessible.

If you get a 30 page document and there's a few words on page eight about something significant, it takes considerable effort to find it. If, and this is the usual case, there are literally dozens of similar documents, it may be more or less impossible to find the relevant item.

Search engines can not help since they can not search pictures.

Some authorities go even further. The appalling London Borough of Waltham Forest (LBWF), my local authority, sometimes forces you to view 100 page PDF document one page at a time. Trying to download it becomes a nightmare.

Whilst this might seem like sharp practice by a sassy authority that knows how to restrict information because information is power, in reality it is nothing of the sort. Authorities need people sifting through the corporate vaults, finding and exposing nonsense. Exposure of these blunders simply makes for better, cheaper, more effective government.

In my view there are far too many laws and most new laws are an abuse of power because they are not properly resourced and new laws that can not be enforced simply bring the system into disrepute, even if the laws promote apple pie, fluffiness and motherhood. But one new law I would bring in would be an amendment to the Data Protection Act to prevent any government department or local authority from posting text as pictures on the internet.

Riot uniform

The police say they are sorting through CCTV images locating the perpetrators of looting and rioting on our streets last week. So CCTV saves the day? Well, perhaps not.

In reality the authorities are anxious to get past these incidents. There will be a few show trials (such as the two people who got four years a piece for trying to arrange looting on Facebook), but the prisons are too full to accommodate the vast numbers of people who were involved in the rioting.

It may be that any time there is unemployment of more than two million in the UK (it went up to 2.49 million in June) there is a high risk of summer riots. And it may be that Blackberry looting where people pre-arrange attacks on target businesses, is a 21st century phenomenon we just have to live with.

Of course the police should be attacking Blackberry not Facebook but in yet another demonstration of the weakness of the British state (and perhaps the state in general) Blackberry (based in Canada) is above the law and its traffic can not be viewed by the forces of law and order. Or at least, that's what they tell us.

And it may be that CCTV is a big part of the problem rather than the solution. Hoodies wear their hoods in order to avoid detection by CCTV. If it were not for CCTV the fashion would have died out years ago.

By defining themselves as hoodies the young join an under class that is not exactly criminal but not exactly part of mainstream society either. ASBOs (anti social behaviour orders) so often worn as badges of pride, and exclusion zones that attempt to control perfectly legal activities people find to be a nuisance, complete the ostracism.

It is a small step from being harried by CCTV, exclusion zones and ASBOs, to crossing the legal line and looting when you get a message about an event on your Blackberry. Since there were thousands involved there is little chance that a large proportion of them will be thrown into jail, there simply isn't the room in the prisons.

There is a great deal to be said for the law. Blurring the borders between what is allowed and what is punished, never does any good in the long term as any parent will tell you. CCTV, or the monitoring and cataloging of perfectly innocent people, may seem inoffensive or perhaps benign. But if it causes much of a generation to adopt a uniform of disguise and disapproval it may be a much more powerful tool than we realise. And a tool that is not being deployed for our benefit.

Of course the rioting and looting might not have happened if there had been full employment and a widespread expectation that things were getting better. People who feel they have a stake in society are less likely to rock the boat, even when that boat is captained by an eccentric who issues strange rules.

Computers don't they make you sick...

OK I'm a geek. I've taken computers to pieces and put them back together again. I know about protocols, lots of software, operating systems, you name it. I've got the tee shirt.

But truth be told it wasn't always this way. For many years I was positively hostile to computers. When I was working for International Thomson Magazines I played a vital role in making it difficult for the management to pay us extra to use computers instead of typewriters. Not one of my better moves, perhaps.

I came to computers quite late. When I first got one (a second hand original IBM PC made at the silicon Glen in Scotland) the machines had no hard drives (just floppies) and Bill Gates was going round telling anyone who would listen that no-one would ever want more than 640kb of RAM. Yes, that's less than a megabyte!

My first hard drive (I added it myself) cost me about £150 (a lot in those days) and it was 32mb! But it was cavernous compared to those floppies.

When I got my first 1gb drive I thought I'm never going to need a bigger one than this. My Bill Gates moment, perhaps. The last drive I installed was 2TB (2,000 times bigger than that 1gb drive) and I'm still juggling between drives because of lack of space.

With RAM and processor power the stories are broadly the same, not worth the telling.

So I guess I'm a signed up technophile. But as Alan Greenspan once said, there's a flaw. The flaw is compatibility and the fly in the ointment is nearly always Microsoft and Mr Gates.

One of the most important things about computing is the ability to transfer stuff from one machine to another. The whole idea of the Cloud and 21st century computing is based on the principle.

But just try converting a full scale video (a Quicktime .mov file) into Microsoft format (wmv). It's a nightmare. My guess is Windows wants commercial control of wmv and so stops anyone from offering a converter.

But as a user you don't know this. When my video editor (a so called professional system) refused to produce anything longer than a 30 second wmv file, I went scurrying round the internet looking for a converter. It was easy to find software that would convert wmv files into sensible formats. They still looked bloody awful but you could convert them, if you had a mind to (though I don't have any problems playing wmv files on my Mac).

What you couldn't do (despite the fact that quite a lot of purveyors of the software suggested that you could) was convert from a decent format to the bloody awful wmv.

So it's possible to create quite a nice video and then you have to tear your hair out as the user at the other end tells you your video doesn't work because the Windows PC the video has to be played on will only handle wmv files!

This is monstrously stupid. Mr Gates could do a lot more good for the world by closing down his charitable foundation and using the money to buy out the various compatibility traps Microsoft uses for commercial purposes. The video problem is only the tip of the iceberg and similar traps for the unwary exist almost everywhere Microsoft has domination, or near domination, in software (like Word for example).

This lack of compatibility makes it more difficult for people to work together. It is like a sclerosis of the main arteries of the internet. It slows down development making people poorer and costing lives.

Will the shades ever fall from the eyes of the Windows users so that they install software to allow them to run sensible compressed video formats like DIVX? Perhaps, but probably not in my lifetime.

Guffaw? Well perhaps not...

Went to Guffaw at the Rose & Crown last night. It was unquestionably my worst ever night at a comedy club, and I've been to some stinkers over the years.

Yet you could say it was Walthamstow's finest and Susan Murray, probably the best compere I've seen and a local resident, was on sparkling form. So what went wrong?

Well firstly there was Paul McCaffrey, E17 resident and described as a fantastic rising star! He was dull but not all that bad. He had one or two flashes of adequacy (largely when he got off script and responded to noises from the road or whatever). His major concern seemed to be swans and truth be told swans do not figure in a big way in the dark regions of my soul. I do not need a comedian to salve the swan wounds or explore the swan issues for me, because, I don't have any swan issues.

Another guy followed. I can't remember his name.

Then there was Michael Kossew. Now MK could genuinely be a fantastic rising star. He has stage presence, an attractive manner and chutzpah. There are few comedians (successful or otherwise) of whom you could say these things. But his material, if material it could be called! People are often described as misogynist simply because they are disrespectful or chauvinist. Not this guy (or his persona). He really does appear to hate women and did not spare us the gynaecological details. Two women in the audience were moved to protest. One asked "why is this funny?" MK didn't seem to be able to explain. Lenny Bruce, you might say. But Lenny Bruce had an agenda. He was foul mouthed, rude and offensive but he was campaigning for freedom. If Michael Kossew is campaigning for freedom I'm not sure it's a freedom I really want. Maybe I'm getting old.

Topping the bill was Ian Cognito. I've heard about him before but never seen him. Of course, he's professional, but his cheerful cockney routine seemed odd in the Walthamstow Theatre Pub, the Rose & Crown. Is this what the punters who are prepared to pay £3.50 a pint really want? IC came out as Walthamstow born and bred. The climax of his act, for me anyway, was when he bled over my shirt. Don't think I can wear it again. Maybe I can sell it on Ebay?

A dreadful night and the Guffaw Comedy Club at the Rose & Crown, Hoe Street,Walthamstow, will be thanking its lucky stars that few people bothered to turn up to make up the audience.

Decimation

There is something terribly wrong with the decimal system. Suppose you've swum 29 lengths (you get time to mediate about things like this in a pool) how many more lengths do you need to swim to get to 35? Five! No six!

Thirty five, it turns out, is the sixth unit in the fourth group of ten (yes the thirties are the fourth set of ten numbers: teens second; twenties, third and thirties, fourth! I told you there was something wrong with the decimal system).

In any logical system of numbers 31 would be the first of the thirties and the set would end with 39 then 30. Of course, 30 should be 39 plus one and 30 should be followed by 41.

To fix the system, nought should be assigned a value (ten) and should follow nine rather than hanging about uselessly at the beginning of the number set. The system could then be called the Noughties rather than Decimal or Denary.

There'd still be the problem of the groups of ten being out of sync. One solution might be to abolish the numbers nought to nine and start with eleven. But the difficulty with this idea is that 100 would consist of only 90!

The obvious answer is to put nought to nine after 90. So the system would go 98, 99, 90, 1, 2 etc. Of course the problem then is that nought (now representing 99 units) would go immediately before 100.

But there's got to be an argument for putting 100 after 199. Then the progression would be 8, 9, 0, 101. Much clearer think!

Like the concept of replacing the decimal system with my noughties system, or not, you have to admit that there are severe problems with decimals.

Bad theatre

I live in Lea Bridge Road, one of the most dangerous roads in London. One year we had five murders or sudden deaths, in the road. In 2008/9 there were about 650 homicides in the whole country.
At one this morning I was awoken by a young woman screaming. When I went to the window to look out I saw a woman, or young girl being held down on the pavement by two police officers. She was screaming, over and over again, "I ain't done nothing" in best Dickensian form. If it had been a performance, I'd have said she was a ham and needed to go on an acting course. After a while she screamed "I'll call the police" to which the officer (a woman) who was holding her thighs responded "we are police officers".
While all this was going on a woman was sitting almost motionless close to the scene pointing a mobile phone at them. I took it that she was videoing the proceedings.
The woman on the ground continued to struggle and evidently caused the male officer who was holding her shoulders, some difficulty, because he started to kick her. She then yelled repeatedly "why are you kicking me". The woman continued to video and the police officers did not ask her to stop, so I twigged that she too must be a police officer.
This went on for several minutes and then police cars started to whizz along Lea Bridge Road with sirens blaring. I thought "my goodness, there must be a major incident, perhaps these officers will release this young woman and go to the incident'. Several police cars sped past. But then they came back. Evidently the police don't know how to use their sat navs.
Eventually there were ten police vehicles of various kinds parked outside my house, including one which was the supervision vehicle, suggesting that an officer of some rank was in attendance.
They took the young woman away. No doubt she was charged with assaulting the police or some such offence. Perhaps she will be sent to prison. But Lea Bridge Road is a pretty tough road and it is difficult to see how much damage a young woman can do at 1 a.m. Perhaps she was taking drugs, perhaps she was touting for prostitution. I don't know.
Next time I see a police car speeding down a road, siren blaring, I will not imagine they are headed towards an emergency tea break. I'll think of them converging ten vehicles to gang up on a young woman held prostrate on the pavement.