Seven items per page

I met a very nice lady yesterday who had looked at my blog before she met me! I'm not sure whether that's fame or notoriety!

She gave me some feedback on the blog as a web site, rather than as a blog. And her suggestion is valid. "Only have seven items per page," she said, "Otherwise you confuse your readers."

I looked at the blog when I got a chance today. It is designed by Blogger's default settings to have seven items per page, and I haven't changed them. I hope she drops by again and gives me a clearer idea of what she means.

A fine Phlog

Recruiting salesmen

Costco, your UK Webmaster is insane

Yes, Costco, you heard it right. Insane.

You do know, don't you, that the www bit really is no longer needed and is just convention?

You do know that most webmasters today would direct costco.co.uk and www.costco.co.uk to the same place?

You do know that we really can't be bothered to type in "www."?

And you do know that we think folk are out of business when we get a "server not found" message?

Well, if you know all that, why the blistering blue blazes don't you sort it out?

I only went to your site to find the address of your Croydon store. And then I made another mistake. I clicked on the link to show me a map! How lucky I wasn't in a hurry!

Why, why, why, oh why do you present the map in a pdf file? They're slow to load, and this one hung Firefox. Use one of the many map providers and show me a real map, dammit. I don't need to know that you're clever enough to make a pdf!

All this is part of simple web based marketing. It's not rocket science. It's about knowing your customers and their needs. And one of my needs is not to have my time wasted by your webmaster.

None of this is hard. So get on with it!

My ex lavender hedge

Why should I display a link to Technorati any more?

Long, long ago, in the time of John McGinn... No, that was something else from an island in the Thames known as Raven's Ait. Long, long ago, when blogging was but a new craze, many weird and wonderful services started up to help the hapless blogger promote the exciting and wondrous words they vomited into the aether. I joined some.

Well, no. I joined loads. Driving traffic to the blog to publicise the frabjous words of me was what I wanted!

There were the ones you could spoof into giving you top rankings (eventually a boring exercise because it's only a blog's content that makes a difference to the visitors you get unless you're a celebrity, and we just have to read celebrity vomit, now don't we?), and there were the honest ones like Technorati.

I liked Technorati. It gives you a rating that depends on the number of inbound links to your blog. And it has a time limit to even things out, otherwise new bloggers can't get a look in ever. But note the tense.

Why am I using the past tense?

Well, I managed through no effort of my own, to climb up to a decent Technorati Authority rating. And then, through no effort of my own, I'm now down to an authority rating of zero.

"Ah," you will say, "That shows you, Tim, how this works. You must be writing rubbish nowadays and no-one links to you any more. It serves you right."

And you could be right. Except I've noticed a few things. Technorati seems to be very slow at registering that my blog has pinged it at all. I have to go in and ping the thing manually. And if I have to ping myself manually, others have to ping themselves manually in order that Technorati can see the updates. When you ping then it sees.

Now, since Techorati credits blogs that have been registered on it as inbound authority, and since others will also be deciding not to bother, perhaps, just perhaps, that has contributed to the fall in authority. Folk vote with their feet.

And maybe, just maybe, services like Technorati have had their day. It's only a vehicle for advertising revenue after all. It has no inherent worth to us as bloggers, only to the owners who receive advertising money. I wonder if that money is showing upward or downward trends?

Window smashing makes US Anti Proposition 8 campaign go viral!

A global retail clothing chain, American Apparel, has a campaign T Shirt "Legalize Gay - Repeal Prop 8 Now" a campaign that people either agree with or disagree with, a proposition that people either agree with or disagree with.



That campaign was never going to make TV news until the stores started to get their windows smashed and staff started to receive threats of violence, even death threats. But now the terrorist acts against the store, for that is truly what they are, have ensured that the campaign by this store has gone viral.

So, it's the right of freedom of expression unless I disagree with you and carry a baseball bat, then. Much as it always used to be in the days of lynch law, and in McCarthyism.

Photo-Me Why do you think I want an 0845 number to call you on?

Your photo booth isn't anywhere near my landline, and I have a mobile phone contract that gives me free minutes to real landlines. So why do you think it's customer service to make me pay extra to call you?

At least the booths have improved, but I have news for you. Waiting for 10 minutes on hold while paying for the call to get my £4 back "in seven to ten days by cheque" is ridiculous. Most of your booths are in easy landline or WiFi contact with you if you choose to implement it. Or stick a mobile phone system inside them.

We use your booths because we want a photograph, not a life diminishing experience. Me? I need to renew my passport, so, clutching my £0 I went, sat, added £1, £2 and two 50p coins.

"Add 50 pence" it said.

"No change given" it said.

Could I reject the coins? Could I heck.

Now you might argue that giving an 0845 low cost calling number is great service. It isn't. It's only good service if you give the landline number as well. I don't want an 0800 number, either. Vodafone charges me to call those. I just want the landline number.

And if you were WiFi or landline linked the customer service agent could allow the machine to take my damned picture. After all, you trust me enough to send me a cheque, and the costs of doing that are prohibitive. Just authorising a booth use would be so much better and so simple.

If you want to deliver great customer service, GET ONLINE!

A few months ago I was asked by Segun Osu of Indirectchannel to look at social media and marketing. He's pretty much a social media virgin and I'm a page ahead of him in the manual. I started with thoughts about pushing products and services, just like Dell does, or job adverts, just like Bracknell Forest Borough Council does. That's because I'm a classic marketing man. I believe in making the life of the sales team easier.

But I think that's wrong.

I don't use social media to buy stuff, or to get exciting special offers for stuff. No way! My time's more valuable than that. I do like the job advert idea from Bracknell, though.

I looked at the way I use my blog.

I get the most mileage out of disasters. So does TV news. Do you remember the last good story you read? Right now we've got swine flu, the tail end of financial meltdown and a load of bad things, and a few feel-good stories like the 15 year old brit, Tom Daley, who just took gold at the Diving World Championships in Rome (Way to go Tom, if you ever read this, which I doubt!).

I've recently done pretty well with Memeo and Vodafone. They've picked up my blog, almost certainly via Twitter or Facebook, or a combination of the two, and each has either solved the problem (Memeo) or is working on it (Vodafone). And I only started to use them both as an experiment!

Barclays, not so hot. That I had to solve in the branch. UK Information Commisisoner? Lost in the black hole that is inbound email right now.

And look at this guy, both videos, one after the other:

First the complaint - United Breaks Guitars:



And then the result:



The message seems to be "Kick hard and well online and they react!"

So my conclusion is that using social media for marketing works, but it only works if you use it for the right thing. And for me that right thing is Customer Service.

You have to have a presence on Twitter. You have to have services aggregate newsfeeds with your name in them and study them in order to make a response. You have to monitor the blogosphere, and you have to be seen to be putting stuff right.

"But we don't want to advertise our problems in public!"

"Too bad, because someone else will do that thing for you! Get over it and get your customer service team online!"

But you better do it right, because you're doing it in front of the whole world. And search engines have long memories!

118 800 went off the air on or before 13 July 2009. Is this terminal?

News reports said that their servers were simply overloaded, and that 118 800 went off the air simply because of meltdown. But if the UK Swine Flu line can cope with 2,600 hits per second as was reported yesterday, and has simply been given more horsepower, why can't Connectivity do that to 118 800?

Or has 118 800 died?

Just like Spinvox it looks like a load of fuss about nothing much. There are genuine concerns about where the data was collected from and what permissions were collected and validated with that data, but, once those are addressed, it looks like a simple service and worth providing.

Maybe Swine Flu is all a conspiracy, did you ever think of that?

Now just suppose... because that follows is all supposition. Not one word of this is true. Unless, of course, you know different. Just suppose...

Let's suppose that Swine Flu, in reality a pretty mild infection, has been started as a way of ridding the world of overpopulation.

"Ah," you are thinking, "If it's a mild infection, it won't work."

And of course it won't work. But that's the beauty of it.

Now let's suppose that, at least in the UK, we want to kill off the huge number of folk who try to buck any system, and that's why we've released a web based automatic system to let you have Tamiflu.

We've got to distinguish between those we want to keep and give them real Tamiflu, and those we want to lose and give them something altogether different.

This is all supposition, right?

So, let's suppose there's a key question on the site that lets the system give out a voucher for green Tamiflu, the real stuff, the stuff that makes you nauseous and makes swine flu last a day less (whoopee!), or red Tamiflu, the nasty concoction. Let's suppose.

So the good guys get better a day early.

The others, the folk from the planet Golgafrincham who would have been sent on the B Ark, they start, in a while, to get all sorts of weird and wonderful ailments. At the very least they're rendered sterile. Telephone Sanitisers, Middle men, advertising executives, they get cut off in their... prime. Or at least can't breed any more like them.

Let's suppose, in a few years, the statisticians find a link between the flu outbreak and weird ailments and sterility and red Tamiflu, assuming the records have not been impounded as a matter of national security, of course.

"What did you do in the great swine flu pandemic of 2009, daddy?"

"I sterilised more than half of the United Kingdom."

"Why did you do that, daddy?"

"I watched Idiocracy. Something had to be done."

What's the Spinvox fuss all about?

I spy a storm in a teacup. The BBC seems to have started this hare running about call centres in Bolivia or somewhere being used to transcribe voicemails to SMS messages, text messages to you and me.

Why do I care?

If I'm stupid enough to leave something too sensitive to be allowed out of my hands in a voicemail then I deserve all that's coming to me, including being sued by anyone whose personal details I let slip. The SMS message was always going to be insecure anyway, voicemail's insecure, so it's my fault. I can't blame anyone else.

I don't care if they use an infinite number of monkeys to type the damned thing. I don't care where it's typed out into text. I don't care if they use a computer to do it.

Ah. Wait a minute. I do care.

The idiot who registered the class of processing with the UK Information Commissioner stated that no data was transferred out of the European Economic Area. I checked it just now. It still says that. So Bolivia is out. Apart from Belgium, anywhere beginning with B is out, isn't it?

So I care, legally. I don't care in any practical sense.

Didn't they notice?

Yes, all I care about is the idiocy of registering in that fatuous manner and not then amending the registration when the processing was about to be moved offshore.

I'd like to thank the BBC. It's a break from news about Swine Flu.

Now, let's get the registration corrected and get over it!

Oh yes. It wasn't Bolivia after all.

Oh Vodafone, where is thy Customer Service?

I have now received perhaps 15 dials from 0845 245 3200. I answered the first and several others. And the first call met my needs completely.

I have, you see, a contract with two phones on it that is nearing renewal and Vodafone wants me to renew for 18 more glorious months. I don't want to renew the contract because I will be migrating one phone to pay as you talk and keeping the other on contract, but I will do that before 18 months is up.

So the very nice lady logged this on the file and I thought that would be that.

As you guessed, that has not been the case.

Some of the calls I've answered and they've been silent calls, made by a badly adjusted autodialler. Yesterday I answered call number 14 (or so) and was met by a very aggressive sales individual who gave her name as Angela, and refused point blank either to put me through to her supervisor or to give me her full name. She decided she was going to educate me and tell me with precision why I was receiving the calls I didn't want, and that it wasn't her fault, but was the autodialler.

She'd lost the sale the moment the dialler dialled my number, why did she even bother?

Angela decided that because I got fed up with her interrupting me, that I was rude and didn't deserve any customer service at all. Angela hung up on me. Angela has a lot to learn, and will, I hope, learn this at an employer that is not Vodafone. There are very few Customer Serivce problems that cannot be cured by using a P45.

Did I complain to Vodafone customer service?

Yes I did. But they gave me no confidence either. They weren't going to bring themselves to find out who Angela was, and I very much doubt they have placed any notes on my file.

My contract has been marked "do not call", though, which is why I was more than surprised and annoyed to get yet another damned call from Vodafone ten minutes ago trying to renew my contract.

How stupid do these people think I am? If I wouldn't renew it on call number one, why on earth would I do so on call number 15?

This time the nice young man (don't I sound old!) said he would set the Do Not Call flag. Angela the Incompetent should also have done that, now shouldn't she?

But it gets worse! Today's young man works for Vodafone. Angela may or may not. And the Do Not Call list only gets sent to the outsource community who call from the same 0845 number every 30 days!

That smacks of a very poor system to me. Every call, and I expect several, every call in the next weeks form Vodafone is going to get my anger level raised. Every call reflects badly on Vodafone. Every single call.

So, Vodafone, remember this: Your Customer Service is Marketing. And this direct sales campaign is very badly thought out. Get off my phone and stay off it. I'm grown up enough to know what I want to do with any contract with you.

I am now the official pet of the cute neighbourhood kitten

I just want to make it clear that I don't mean Marilyn Monroe. Anyway she belonged to the Kennedy dynasty [memo to self - never accept a lift in a car or a plane near water from that lot]. I mean the neighbourhood kitten.

In the mornings, just to make sure she is training me well, she hides under our birdbath. Not Marilyn, the kitten. Do keep up! When I come out into the garden she ~pings~ out and looks at me expectantly. It was easy to train me to approach her gently and to rub her ears.

Now she even lets SWMBO play with her, too.

She's very considerate about our diet [The kitten, not SWMBO]. She lets us hunt for our own food and often watches through the window to make sure we eat properly. And she keeps us in order while she makes us play with her by patting us with her paws to show approval.

I'm dreading the day she puts me in the person basket to take me to the vet for the chop, though. Luckily I don't think she can drive.

My bank thinks crooks are stupid. I bet your does, too!

Today's mail has delivered the usual envelope form my bank. It's addressed to She Who Must be Obeyed At All Times (SWMBO for short!) and I haven't opened it. But I know what's s in it and I know whom it's from.

SWMBO and I bank at the same place, that's how I know what it is. They've sent, by disguised mail a new debit card. It's in a C4 envelope, slightly stiffened with cardboard inserts, doubtless with another envelope inside it, and the card. Outside the envelope isn't a window envelope. Instead, in stylised printed script is her name and address.

Now, if I recognise the envelopes, do you think other people might recognise the envelopes too?

Marketing of Men's Health Knowledge

Men get a raw deal with the marketing of knowledge about health. Women? They get screened for breast cancer, cervical cancer, they have blokes put on miners' helmets and climb inside them with safety lamps and picks and shovels. But we blokes get... Nothing.

A friend blogged the other day about living in France and being checked for bowel cancer as soon as you hit 50. That got me to thinking. I posted a comment on his blog about my thinking, and then it struck me. He has two loyal readers. I have two loyal readers. between us we can reach four readers, which is, as we know, half the male population of the world.

Ladies, gentlemen too, come to that, if you care about your partner, this is for you, too. If he's too much of a macho prat to check, tie him to the bed (he'll think good times are coming) and then check him out.

Men can get breast cancer.

Yes, you heard.

Now it's a lot harder to clamp a man's breast in a vice and take an x ray than it is to do a woman's, but you can check for lumps. And you can take lumps to the doctor. That's still inside the breast, of course.

Men get testicular cancer. It's not hard to examine for, all you have to do is fondle the bollocks when the scrotum's hanging loose. Anything odd, anything present on one that's absent on the other, any odd heat or coldness, take your scrotum to the quack and have him have a fondle too.

Are you going to be embarrassed? The first time you get your tackle groped well, just maybe a little. Get over it. Would a painful death be better? Will you get erect? Not a hope in hell, however attractive the doctor is. More likely you'll shrink away to pre-puberty size! Get over it.

Men get prostate cancer. "But that's yucky, isn't it? I mean that means a doctor has to poke his finger up my arsehole. That's for things that come out, nothing goes in!"

Your great grandma wasn't that squeamish. When stuff went wrong down there (I do hate that phrase!) she used to get the enema kit out of the bathroom cupboard and sluice her kids out. The bottom held no fears for her, and why should it for you? Get over it! Didn't you ever play doctors and nurses?

Right. First the prostate's inside. It's not really for amateur diagnosis because you can't tell, yourself, if it's abnormal. So yes, if you're worried, you are going to have a medic have a firkle about inside your bottom. It can be pleasurable, too. Watch the sperm donation scene in Road Trip! But that's by the by.

If you have trouble starting peeing, or have an unusually lowered pee rate, or you have never quite finished peeing, you either have a bladder infection or something astray with the prostate. Damp underwear on a bloke and a whiff of pee means "get the prostate checked out now." A sudden need to pee while standing in the cold, like when you fill your car's tank (with fuel, dummy!) means you need to get your prostate checked now.

Why do we blokes leave things for so long that, when we get to the doctor, we're terminally ill?

If this simple article strikes a note with you, spread it far and wide. Show the man in your life. Examine yourself, and get things checked. Doctors like seeing healthy people who want to make sure they stay that way.

And your dangly bits are just dangly bits. They really aren't special. Well, except to the person who loves you... probably!

Buzzword Recycling Department

I always knew that the part of marketing that used to be populated by the brochure huggers could get up to something new!

Gartner says that the cloud has burst for Cloud Computing, but I had no real idea what it was.

I finally bit the bullet and found out what cloud computing really is. Yes, it's a distributed model where you sell capacity and bandwidth to someone who wants it, for money!

Gosh.

Isn't that a fancy set of words for A Computer Bureau?

Then I got to thinking about outsourcing. You know outsourcing. It's where you pay broadly what you're paying now to lose people from your headcount and let someone else employ them and worry about making them redundant after a decent interval of a couple of months. Today we transfer our computing needs to people like Accenture, or EDS.

We still get to use the computers, but they and the people who make them work are somewhere else.

Gosh.

Isn't that a fancy word for A Computer Bureau?

Memeo vindicated. Excellent service and bug fixes have my confidence

Ok, now a week or so ago I posted hugely critical articles about Memeo. I've just come off a call with these guys. Exceptionally they opened up a direct support channel to the UK for me and escalated my case to top priority because I was obviously angry. But that isn't the full reason.

So let me start with one simple statement: all is resolved. They provded excellent customer service and met all of my needs.

Now let me try to explain what seems to have happened, only the explanation takes some believing.

I logged the call from my Gmail account in the same way I've done in the past and I was given a case number at once. The initial request after they digested my problem was for log files. And these I sent.

From my perspective it all went wrong at that stage. As far as I could see I had zero response. But, and here's the weirdness, from Memeo's perspective they responded to me properly and professionally.

But the email never arrived in my inbox.

Gmail has also changed and the SPAM folder has become invisible (Bad, Google, Bad!) and it took some figuring out where it was to be found (open the old version! How obvious that is I really do not know). But there was no Memeo email in the Spam folder. Like nothing at all.

I started to forgive them at this point, but I didn't blog about it then because we were speaking today and I wanted to deal with the whole call, not just the issue of the weird emails.

I gave them another email address on a server I control and asked them to resend the missing email, cc Gmail. And my server delivered and Gmail didn't.

I was starting to feel I'd been very unfair toMemeo, but it was understandable and even accidental. Why? because they had truly sent the email, but I had truly not received it. Part of our call today was to try to work out what had happened, but we can't.

Why not?

Well, Gmail delivers all emails from Memeo except the key emails I needed to receive. Go figure!

What they needed me to do was upgrade to the current release. before I got that email the Memeo software auto-upgraded!

Guess what?

Yes, the bugs and issues that I was so upset about have been fixed. The thing no longer corrupts the database when the machine crashes, the .htaccess files back up clean, and the only issue that remains is a damned great file from Kodak that's read only. I had it explained to my whey the thing can't back it up, and I have a different view, but that's a difference of thinking between professionals, and I'm going to bet they will soon back up read only files really easily.

So was my anger justified?

It was understandable, but, seeing what happened and how bizarre the loss of email was, no it was not. So I apologise freely and unasked.

See, they are as weirded out by this as I was angry. Something caused them to get a bad reputation by accident. That sucks. But how do you ensure that an email has arrived when the only email address you have is the one that may fail?

And me? Well, I'm back to loving the Memeo backup system. And yes, I will recommend it to my friends. My enemies can lose their data, though.

Memeo, you grasped the nettle, turned your angry customer into an evangelist and showed Customer Service Excellence.

July attracts phone spam from 01202 553537 - Ventura in Bournemouth, or so they said

Just so that anyone searching for 01202 553537 knows that others are complaining about them, they just called me on a telephone Preference Service listed number telling me that they were "something or other insurance in Bournemouth and we'd completed a holiday questionnaire".

We haven't

I smell timeshare selling.

When I asked the very nice young man to clarify what the questionnaire was about and when I filled it out he hung up on me.

I smell something nasty there.

I withheld my number and called them back. "Ventura!"

I asked for their company details and their address. They asked for my surname. I didn't give that and they hung up on me again.

Searching for Ventura reveals too many to count.

So I've lodged a TPS complaint and I've lodged a Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 complaint with the UK Information Commissioner.

Both are a doddle to do. I'm about to put the links in the left hand margin of the blog.

The UK Information Commissioner's Customer Service

I've been a customer of the United Kingdom Information Commissioner for a good many years. The first one, Eric Howe, probably the reason they are in Wilmslow since it seems he had a holiday home in North Wales and wanted a simple weekend commute, was unimportant to me, but, from Elizabeth France onwards, the office has been important to me. The Data Protection Act 1998 introduced Data Protection in a Business to Business environment.

With the dawn of email and SPAM in enormous quantities, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 effectively prohibited SPAM inside the UK. That which it did not prohibit it made unacceptable.

Throughout the past several years I've been one of the people that has helped the UKIC by providing work for his complaints team to do. And this is where their much improved customer service has shown up well.

In the early days they accepted written complaints, I think on a downloadable 'read only' form. This had to be mailed in. It was a tedious process and discouraged complaints.

They moved to a downloadable document into which you could type your complaint. Several versions of this over the years have improved it beyond belief. Better yet you could email it to them. Sometimes they decided to reply by surface mail. When they replied by email they also typed emails in Word and enclosed them so any conversational thread was lost, but it was still a great improvement.

Today there is an online form. You fill it in, attach relevant files and press submit. I like this best.

But there are still some serious holes:

1. The email arrives at their offices and sits in administrative limbo for several weeks, unacknowledged.
2. The new form is fine, but those of us who want a file copy of our complaint don't get one
3. Because of the administrative black hole, no ticket number or case number is associated with the initial complaint, and so any further information you want to send later has to be fired by email into a black hole, and you have to hope that a poor clerical grade can associate it with the complaint

So, Christopher Graham, I have some serious suggestions for you:

1. Allocate a ticket or case number at once. This is not hard. It requires a small investment of staff time, and you can use GFDL or similarly licenced free software to achieve this. A package called OTRS is a bit unwieldy, but is free and does the job. Get a team member to spend a week investigating which to use and to report back to you.
   
2. Email the person complaining at once with the case number and a login to see their complaint, to see all complaints if there is more than one. Make sure that the email contains a full summary of their complaint because they may be too inept to log in, or may choose not to log in.
   
3. With the case number, ensure that any further emails with this case number are automatically entered into the ticket system

The first step is a one time thing. It's low cost and will have a high positive impact. That clerical head can now be trained on to do less menial tasks and the extra value you receive will be excellent for us all.

The second and third steps are automatic. Emails are generated automatically to email complaints and the postal service will never have to be used again for them. Paper based complaints can have letters associated with them with ease.

Implement this and we and you will never lose track of a complaint again.

And you will have the time to become the Rottweiler that we need, not the Chihuahua role that you've inherited.

Update: Some parts have now been implemented

Lifeinsurance.co.uk thinks they got permission to email me from mortgages.co.uk

Ok, let's be totally fair to Financial Services Net and Arjun Panesar. Let's see what really happens at the Mortgages.co.uk site. I went to it just now to look at any permissions he alleges I granted when I mistakenly asked for a quote.

There are two screens you have to fill out. The first one is a happy little form that wants your potential loan details.

I like this form. As a marketing man I see it as uncluttered, and it has a very small number of questions. This is a form I can fill in.

The second form is good too.

Up to a point, it's good. It asks me for my personal details, which is fine. After all, the only way to get me a mortgage quote is to have those details.

It tells me what will happen next.

Or does it?

No. It doesn't tell me that Financial Services net is going to keep my data record and, at some random point in the future, try to shove life insurance SPAM up my bottom. Of my many vices, having SPAM shoved in there is not one.

And no, I did not enter any details to get to the next screen. Research is one thing, insanity is quite another.

So no, Arjun Panesar, you did not gain informed consent to market to me or to do anything else with my data. Your site tricked me into giving you details in what I believed to be a bona fide transaction, and then you chose to SPAM the hell out of me this week.

Sharp practice Arjun, sharp practice. I wonder that no-one has called you on it before.

Hmm. I might just ask that Chihuahua in Wilmslow if they have... The Freedom of Information Act is a wonderful thing. And the Information Chihuahua will give me that information quickly and easily.

Lifeinsurance.co.uk replied. Oh dear. They think they are right.

It's a weird thing when a spammer seeks to justify their spam. But let me be fair to this outfit. First their email to me:

Dear Tim,

Let me apologise on behalf of LifeInsurance.co.uk for your receipt of our email unexpectedly. According to our records, you agreed to receive the newsletter from ourselves or our sister companies when you completed our form on Mortgages.co.uk. Regardless, we apologise sincerely for your inconvenience. You won’t receive anything from ourselves in the future.

For the record, you are able to manually unsubscribe yourself from emails by clicking on unsubscribe which can be found at the bottom of the email.

Regards,

Arjun Panesar
Executive
Financial Services Net Ltd
arjun@financialservices.co.uk

Two, no, much more than two years ago I did go on to mortgages.co.uk's site. I wanted a mortgage quote. I believed I was on the site of a real mortgage broker, not an outfit that immediately shovels sales leads off to a large sample of random companies.

After I had pressed "submit", not before, the site told me that my personal details were being passed to a load of organisations and would be used for marketing purposes.

At once I sent them a prohibition for this use of my data. And I mean at once. But, the next day, I was standing in a letting agent in Dover and received a phone call from someone after this sales lead had been passed to them. Since this call was prohibited I think I even complained to the UK Information Commissioner at the time. I certainly explained to the idiot who called me that his call was unwelcome. He attempted to explain that he was entitled to call me. Not so.

So, when getting the email from Arjun Panesar this morning I suddenly understood where his organisation felt it had gained the right to SPAM me came from.

So, Arjun Panesar, let me explain to you in public what I have already explained to you by email:

PERMISSION HAS A SHELF LIFE

Yes, Permission expires.

So, even if you honestly believed that you had the right to SPAM me, you have not been in contact with me for over two years. Any right you believed you had expired after zero contact from you for six months. And I have had zero contact from you for over two years.

So, apart from already having been banned from contacting me, you think you had my permission. Not so.

And as for your unsubscribe link...

Letting me unsubscribe is not the same as NOT SPAMMING ME IN THE FIRST PLACE. Do I make myself clear? I choose not to unsubscribe. I choose instead to log all of your spam emails. You do not now, nor did you, except for ten seconds, have any permission ever to market to me.

My data was Old, Arjun Panesar, old. It was incorrect. You have not obeyed the Data Protection Principles that you must obey. And you have used this old, invalid data to spam me. This should have been weeded out under your data deletion and destruction policy. I wonder if you have one of those?

So don't give me your excuses. I do not accept your apology. Prepare to be licked to death by the UK Information Chihuahua.

Kicking Memeo hard got me somewhere

I just got an email!

It says:

Thank you for contacting Memeo Customer Service. Can we have your Phone number? Please let us know a Day & Time when you will be available for Chat/ Remote/

If you continue to experience difficulties or run into any more issues, please do not hesitate to contact us and please reply to this e-mail.

Yay!

Now would that have happened without the blog and Twitter and Facebook?

I've suggested Monday. I'll let you know what happens.

The message so far? Talk softly and use a big stick. Except, of course, the talk is the stick. Hmm.

Isn't it amazing how lack of customer service suddenly becomes marketing, too. I'm about to throw this software out of the window. So they'd better have some answers come Monday.

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Update: Please see how happy I am now

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Repeated SPAM even when expressly prohibited - Lifeinsurance.co.uk

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a customer of nor an enquirer to lifeinsurance.co.uk If hell were to freeze over you can rest assured that I will never deal with them, however reputable they turn out to be. If they do not want my business then they can have chosen no better way of showing me than by sending me not one, but three spam emails, the second and third despite my express and absolute prohibition.

Each of the three times I called I asked "how seriously does your company take the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications regulations 2003. Each of the three times I was told "very seriously, sir." The first very nice young man also said "If we did not then we would be out of business."

Today's young man said that the phone number I called - 0800 975 1204 - was created by an organisation that delivers sales leads to them. That means that the number was delivered to them by a sub-contractor, a Data Processor, and that the company itself is and remains the Data Controller.

The mailshot comes from lifeinsurance@communicatoremail.com so I tracked communicatoremail.com down: The whois record shows them to be in the DH4 area and called Communicator Corporation. They are a large email outsourcer in good standing. They will have sent the blast based upon someone's database. I have a call in to them to check how they operate. If it differs from this I'll let you know.

The Data Controller is in Coventry - oddly the very place I'd like to send them!

Financial Services Net Ltd
Dotcom House,
Broomfield Place,
Coventry,
CV5 6GY

I have, of course, complained to the UK Information Commissioner. I expect the Chihuahua will lick them to death in a month or two, after they've dealt with what appears to be a perpetual queue of work.

I think we should bring back trial by ordeal for spammers. I'm in favour of chucking them into a pond to see if they can swim. I know this is redolent of Robert Maxwell, the Dud Czech, and the way he fell off the back of his boat and drowned, but the theory is sound.

If they float they're guilty. They need to be punished. If they sink then they're innocent. It's less violent than the idea of a cage fight that I posted about yesterday.

Ok, I know this shows that dear old Bob must have been innocent, but no system is infallible

Memeo Backup and Customer Service

Yet another corporation which seems to pay lip service to customer service. And I do not mean that they kiss me! They can pucker up all they like, but their service is still poor, poor, poor.

Some time ago I bought a couple of Western Digital "My Book Word" terabyte backup drives. I simply can't afford to lose stuff. I need and enjoy the idea of automatic backup for my desktop machine, my laptop and She Who Must be Obeyed's laptop. And Memo software is included, bundled, with the drives. Not, I hasten to add, the "real" Memeo software, but a pale imitation of it.

I had problems with it and the Memeo support forum suggested I use the real, proper, kosher memeo software. So I did, I do. It's better.

But it still doesn't blasted well work.

Several things go wrong.

• It refuses to back up files like ".htaccess" except when it doesn't.
  
• It won't back up files with a full pathname greater than 256 characters - great when you're a tidy boy and file things well.
  
• And if you delete a file before it's reached it to back it up it tries to back the file that doesn't exist up for ever.
  
• Oh, and sometimes it decides that the backup drive is offline when it isn't.
• And the most annoying? Ah yes. When my machine crashes (Often enough, I blame Bill Gates) it sometimes corrupts the client side database that describes the backup, and the whole backup scheme becomes inaccessible until I follow some arcane instructions that I really don't need to know about, and then reactivate the old backup scheme, when it writes a fresh database - a task it could do automatically when the damned thing crashes.
  

So I opened a ticket with Memeo. I had no real hope, but I opened it on 22 June 2009.

They said:

Thank you for contacting Memeo Customer Service.

This e-mail is to acknowledge receipt of your message. We make every effort to respond to your e-mail within 1 business days for inquiries received weekdays, Monday through Friday, between 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. PST.

While you wait for a reply from one of our support representatives, you can browse the FAQ, User Guides or the public forums to look for answers.

I thought "yeah, right!" You see, I've been here before.

But then, the same day, I got this:

Hi Tim,

Thank you for contacting Memeo Customer Service.

In order for us to determine your issue, please send us your log files. The log files will allow us to study your case with further detail.

Make sure your system is set up to view hidden files/folders.

Your logs can be found in this directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\

Application Data\Memeo\AutoBackup\logs

The log files will be titled similar to "MemeoBackup.exe.log.".

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

So I sent the logs, and big files they are, too.

Nothing

Three days later, I gave them a prod.

Nothing

13th July I gave them a prod.

Nothing.

Bear in mind this is in their ticket system. It has a number, and is awaiting an answer.

Today I am sending them a prod and a link to this blog item.

Do you think anything will happen?

I rely on this system. Luckily I am PC literate, and I can cope with the fact that it's unreliable (great for a backup process, that!) and that support is non existent (great for a backup company, that!). And they just don't care!

Or do they? Maybe they'll reply here. I've also told them on Twitter and Facebook. It's case 63587, by the way.

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Update: Please see how happy I am now

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YES! Oh yes! Yes! What a challenge to a spammer!

Sad me, I was twittering, and one guy I'm following tweeted this:

Bob Donovan, You Sir (and all the Other Spammers), May Kiss My Ass! http://is.gd/1zQyd

Now both of you regular readers know I hate spam with a vengeance, and I loathe spammersl John takes it further. He's challenged one to a cage fight! On live TV!

Bastille Day has good omens for the future

Today is Bastille Day. I know this because, 30 years ago, I was walking up the aisle of St Mary's Church in Great Dunmow in Essex to take my place to wait for Melanie to arrive.

We'd met, she and I, at a party the previous October in Addlestone which neither of us were going to go to. My (about to be) Best man Paddy Maley and I had been at a party in Weybridge and he suggested we move on, So we piled into his Citroen Dyane (Paddy, you always had a weird choice of transport, but I suppose the Morgan would not have held the three of us that night) and bimbled off a few short miles to a bungalow in Addlestone where there was an exceptionally quiet and boring party going on. I remember that someone had put his elbow through the wall, but that's pretty much it.

There, sitting bored on the floor, was a pretty girl. I noticed her but passed her by. She looked bored rigid.

A short while later, Paddy's friend Parvinder said "Tim, you must meet my friend Melanie, she's nice," and she was dragging the pretty floor ornament to meet me.

I hate introductions like that. They make me cringe and want to run away. But I was polite and chatted.

And chatted.

We chatted until about 4am when we all called it a night. Melanie gave me her number and went back to university. I went to get my car and went home.

That was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

On Monday afternoon I had a job interview in Staines with, I think, a large computer bureau. Today we call them "outsourcers" and they're back in fashion. It might have been BOC Datasolve as I remember they were then, somewhere near the bridge in a black glass windowed building that's probably not there any more.

By the Town Hall there are two red phone boxes. I dialled her number from the left hand one and, when I got through to the hall of residence and found someone to go and get her, asked "Are you doing anything tonight that you can't cancel?"

So I saw her on the Monday, saw her again on the following Saturday when we went in her Morris Traveller, Daisy, to Caesar's Camp in the woods very close to where we live today.

As we walked in the woodland the light caught her hair and her face was alight. The whole impression was gold shot through with red. I told her "I think I'm falling in love with you," and she didn't run away.

Back in her room in Wessex Hall, I suddenly heard my voice say "Marry me!"

I didn't even know I was speaking! I opened my mouth and there was more in there than I expected, and it somehow came out.

It's been 30 years. We're aiming for another 30. We fight, of course we do. On paper it could never work. But it does, and that's the important thing.

We don't celebrate anniversaries, we never have. No cards, no presents, no special meals. Tonight will be a quiet night in. We'll go away to celebrate us, not the anniversary, sometime in the summer, after term ends.

But, right now, and in public, Melanie, after all these years I still love you just as much as I did that day near Caesar's Camp. You looked beautiful in the church and my eyes filled with tears that day, just as they have now as I'm writing this. You are still beautiful.

"Safe phone sex is just what you need"

That's what the SPAM email said just now. And that got me thinking.

How do you have unsafe phone sex?

HawkTalk

Always on the look out for new and relevant blogs, I just added HawkTalk to the blogroll.

It's the organ of a long time Data Privacy guru, Chris Pounder, and I was immediately drawn to his in depth analysis of whether IP addresses used to visit web sites may be considered personal data. The full discussion is a free discussion paper at the foot of the article (his, not mine!) , and it's worth a careful study. Chris makes a convincing case - unsurprising with his background!

I'm going to have to read it a couple more times before I can decide if I agree or disagree with his thinking.

118 800 signs off, at least for now

118 800 caused controversy when it launched the UK wide mobile phone directory service. People immediately cried out "Breach of privacy!" and then rushed to go ex directory.

Look at their site today. It's a pale image of its former self. So many folk have opted out that the service has ground to a halt.

The thing is, I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. My own mobile is TPS registered, so cold calls are barred. Rogue offshore telesales companies call blocks of numbers until they hit pay dirt anyway, so they're just a pest, not an intrusion, and, dammit, I want to be found!

When I first got a cellphone, back in the days of the analogue house-brick, I bemoaned the fact that there was no UK directory of numbers. I'd have been in it like a shot.

So why is this directory suddenly controversial?

Probably it's because it's an opt out service. "You are in unless..." is not really good, is it.

A bit like B4USearch's electoral roll search facility this one has probably gone to the wall. I'm glad about B4USearch, I'm not so sure about 118 800. After all, you had to enter the full address, and it didn't publish a number anyway. It sent a text or made a call you could reject.

"I was just looking, thanks"

I've been looking at a new web analytics package, Woopra.

A quote from their website:

"Woopra enables websites with both “proactive” and “reactive” chat functionality. Webmasters can remotely initiate sessions with visitors, or embed “Click-to-Chat” buttons within a site to accept inbound requests. This breaks the virtual wall between visitor and webmaster. Customer service sites could offer personal service directly through the Woopra interface, with no installation of software by the visitor. Woopra breaks down the barriers of the static web."

So I envisage a situation where I am happily looking at my favourite clothing store and the thing starts to talk to me and ask if I'd like to buy the socks that go with that! But that's why I shop online - to avoid the shop assistant!

Seriously, I see some privacy implications here. Is it just Paranoid old Tim again, or do others think there might be an issue, too?

And can you imagine the interactive use with visitors to a porn site? My mind has started to boggle.

Andrew Mackay (MP), it's time to go. Now.

I no longer feel represented by my MP.

Mackay, savaged at the town meeting in Bracknell, finally decided to quit after the expenses scandal, but he's clinging on until the general election, presumably because he wants the gigantic payoff to offset some of the cash he's going to have to pay back.

But what use is an MP who is under a cloak of shame? Just how represented are the people of Bracknell right now? I certainly don't feel represented.

As you can tell, I am one of Mackay's critics. I've written to David Cameron and Eric Pickles (Tory Chairman) saying that Mackay and others like him must go and go now. They don't seem to believe me. But it's essential that those who abused the expenses system, whether within the rules (what a wonderful excuse) or not get kicked out and kicked out now. Keeping them in their jobs is cronyism.

Consumer productivity stinks

When I was a kid the dustmen used to walk up our drive with their own bin and empty ours into it. They walked back down and filled their bin lorry with the refuse and walked on. This was good service, but the bin was unwieldy and they had to carry it everywhere. They became more productive by taking our bins to the lorry, but they had to walk twice the distance.

I'm guessing, but do not know, that strike action or the threat of strike action caused a productivity agreement to be reached in exchange for higher pay. We had to take our bins to the edge of our property and the bin men emptied them into the lorry, dropping our bin wherever possible and walking far less far. Their rounds could be performed faster. I'm betting that fewer hours were required in our borough and the bin men discovered that they earned less.

We, the customer, were more productive, but no-one paid us for lugging the bins to the end of the drive.

Time passed and some bright spark had the idea that bin bags were the way to go. We now took bin bags to the end of the drive on rubbish day. This was probably a new productivity agreement based on not wishing to lift a metal bin. Fling a black bag of detritus onto the bin lorry and you could go about your round faster and for less effort. Less effort and more money sounds great for the bin man.

We, the customer, were more productive, but no-one paid us for our increased productivity.

More time passed and a sales rep for a plastics company got together with a bin lorry manufacturer and sold the first council on the idea of wheelie bins and trucks to suit them. The council spent a fortune on equipping every household with a green wheelie bin (that's green for landfill, not green for recycling). We had an ok bin to handle and we became more productive. The bin men use the lorry's mechanism to empty the bin into the hold, and no-one lifts anything.

We, as usual, were more productive, changing our working practices to meet the new technology, but no-one paid us for our increased productivity.

Now the council has asked us to be more productive still. We must store the refuse for a week extra because they have chosen to collect it every other week.

Yes, you've guessed it. We are more productive...

So why does this all lead me to supermarket checkouts?

My local Tesco and my local Sainsbury's want to save money. The only thing they can cut is staff, and they obviously are. Checkout assistants have become more and more productive over the years, with bar coding allowing the greatest productivity gains. But they can only go as fast as we can pack and pay.

So they're introducing self service checkouts.

The novelty value is great. We can become checkout assistants for a fleeting moment of pure self indulgent happiness. Ok, I'm wrong. We can fight the damned things to try to get our goods paid for quickly. They're pretty much all beta releases and awful.

We have become more productive. And machines tell us that there is an "unexpected item in the bagging area" because we've used our own bag. This necessitates a bored person authorising our bag in Sainsbury's. Tesco can cope. If we buy a bottle of wine someone has to authorise the purchase because of licensing laws. And every item must be placed at once into the "bagging area".

Is there a debagging area?

One languid youth can now manage six checkouts. The supermarket is more productive because we are now more productive for them. We're scanning and packing our own goods. But we don't get a price reduction for doing that, oh no. And the machines ask us to "enter the product code manually" in SatNav style voices. "In 20 seconds please enter the product code manually. Then place the item in the bagging area. I won't tell you again."

We use these checkouts because the supermarkets now have queues at the regular tills. We see no queue and don't think "I know why there isn't a queue, it's because the experience will be unpleasant", we fool ourselves into thinking it will be quicker.

The other day, in Sainsbury's, I had a trolley full. And I used the exciting self service checkout with a belt. I was going to scan first and pack second. But no!

"Please clear backed up items from the belt" the patronising automatic bitch yelled at me. There's not enough capacity in the packing area, you see. So I had, as a newly productive work unit for Sainsbury's, the exciting job of walking down to pack and then back to scan and then down to pack and then back to scan. So I called the languid youth (who was stolidly facing away from the checkouts) over and said "I would like assistance in packing, please."

"This is a self service checkout, sir. You do it yourself."

I decided to repeat myself. Eventually he realised that I was no longer a productive work unit for Sainsbury's and wandered slowly off to find a very nice young lady who gave me assistance in packing.

Sainsbury's and Tesco and refuse collection seem to require me to become more and more productive.

What I want to know is, What's In It For Me?

Trust me, scanning my own purchases is not the best fun in the world. Nor is being patronised by a recorded bitch who talks down to me, and does it loudly enough for the entire store to know that I must be retarded because the till has refused to function.

Life insurance spam is more than annoying

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a customer of Lifeinsurance.co.uk I do not allow this email address to be used commercially, and am clear that i do not give, nor have I ever given any organisation that sells lists any authority whatsoever to trade in my data.

So, when I got their spam email yesterday I called 0800 975 1210 and delivered them a section 10 and a section 11 notice under the Data Protection Act 1998. The nice young man (I must be getting old!) too my email address and said it would be suppressed at once.

Imagine my surprise (irony mode) when I got another email today trying to shove the same life insurance quotes up my bottom!

I called again and asked the how seriously they took the data Protection Act and the Privacy and Electronic Communication regulations 2003. "Very seriously, sir. We could be shut down if we didn't"

I explained that they had broken both pieces of legislation, and that a third time would mean a formal complaint to the UK Information Commissioner and potential a suit in the county court for damages for the time I have spent in dealing with their trashy approach.

Are you being pestered by them, too? Let me know in a comment, here.

Talk Talk dumps Phorm too

Where BT leads, Charles Dunstone follows!

Now there is an advertising slogan and a half!!

But, today, Talk Talk dropped Phorm like a hot brick. Phorm's share price tumbled from 475 pence to 233 pence at yesterday's close according to reports in Brand Republic today. Brand Republic quotes the Talk Talk announcement as pushing the Phorm shares down further to 192 pence, followed by a recovery to 205 pence. A sad day for investors, and I hope my pension isn't invested there, but I can't bring myself to cry any tears over this.

A Phorm press release in April 2009 makes much of Phorm''s legality:

The EU Commission has announced today that it is starting infringement proceedings against the UK Government concerning the alleged failure of UK legislation to conform in certain respects with EU e-privacy and personal data protection rules. This is obviously a matter for the Commission and the UK Government.

However, in so far as the Commission's announcement references Phorm's technology, we should like to make the following points clear. Phorm’s technology is fully compliant with UK legislation and relevant EU directives. This has been confirmed by BERR and by the UK regulatory authorities and we note that there is no suggestion to the contrary in the Commission's statement today. We do not envisage the Commission’s proceedings will have any impact on the company’s plans going forwards.

Furthermore, Phorm's system stands out from other online advertising systems in that it does not store personal data, or browsing histories. Finally, consistent with UK and EU legislation, and in anticipation of any changes that may be made to the law in the future, our system offers unmissable notice and clear and persistent choice to consumers.

This release clarifies any misunderstandings that may have arisen following the Commission's announcement.

I'm glad Phorm has clarified any misunderstandings. Someone should mention Lady Macbeth to the PR team who wrote that one!

Still, according to Brand Republic again, "Phorm said it is continuing to make "excellent progress" in focusing on overseas opportunities and its live trials with Korea Telecom, South Korea's leading ISP, "remain on course"."

Phorm has also made an operational update to the London Stock Exchange.

Well, that's Ok, then

An open question to Alliance and Leicester

Dear Alliance and Leicester,

You very kindly put a leaflet through my door yesterday offering me "The only current account exclusively for the over 50s" the Premier 50 Current Account

First I want to thank you for not putting in an apostrophe between the 50 and the S. That was excellent.

So, this account earns me 6%AER interest, fixed. I like that. As a current account that's awesome. Ok, it drops back to 1% variable after a year, which is more than a little poor, but I'm a big boy, I have a diary, I know when to close it!

You also charge a £10 per month fee, for which you state I get a shedload of benefits that I really don't want. But you probably think I'm already in my dotage anyway and I won't notice that I don't want the benefits. But do you think I can't do arithmetic?

Just to make sure, I called your 0800 number and asked, "If I deposit £2,500 today, which is the balance on which I earn 6% (it drops to 0.1% on balances over £2,500), how much interest will I earn after tax each month?"

"About £12.50, sir."

"For which I am paying you a monthly fee of £10?"

"Yes, sir."

"So, what I really earn is £2.50 per month?"

"Well, sir, we do give you loads of benefits... [she listed the benefits, the ones I do not want]."

"That's pretty poor, isn't it? I don't want any of those but you take a huge chunk of my interest to pay for them?"

I was also thinking that, after a year, when it goes to 1% variable, the monthly interest paid to me would be about £2.08, but I'd be paying out £10, so I'd be £7.92 worse off each month! A real treat, that!

"Well, sir, if you don't want to pay us a monthly fee, you can always use the Premier Direct Current Account."

Now, to do that I have to pay in £500 per month, but, when I get to £2,500 the interest on the excess still drops to 0.1%. The only way of managing that account is to deposit £2,500 today, and each month withdraw £512.50 (that includes the interest, naturally) and redeposit £500.

That sounds like a lot of hassle to earn £12.50!

Of course, I won't be doing that. After all, I'm over 50. And, as we know, our brains start to fall out at 50, so we'll never spot the catch in any of this stuff.

So, Alliance and Leicester, my question to you is this: "Why don't you just offer something simple?"

"You spent a lot on delivering this campaign to the ABC1 residential areas, you have billboards in strategic places too, you want my money, so why not provide me with a product that I really want?"

"Or do you really think I'm stupid enough to fall for this gimmickry?"

Is the state guilty of child kidnap?

I've borrowed the headline from Christopher Brooker's disturbing and excellent article in The Daily Telegraph a couple of days ago. This is an areas that has concerned me for some considerable time, not just since the Haringey failures came to light with the death of "Baby Peter".

In the aftermath to young Peter's death we have been venomous in requiring social workers to "do the right thing" and to take youngsters away from their parents where there is the slightest doubt about their safety. In the same way that the ignorant hurled a brick through a paediatrician's window "because it sounded like 'paedophile'," we, the ignorant and opinionated, have taken what we hope is an isolated lack of professionalism and tarred all social workers with the same brush.

Unsurprising, then, that some imbecilic folk treated 'Mr and Mrs Jones' as they did.

If we go back a few years, to Cleveland, we saw allegations of alleged Satanic Ritual Abuse race through the social services world like wildfire, causing children to be separated from their parents and to be placed into care because some idiots over-reacted. Research the topic for yourself and form your own judgment.

After Cleveland was proved to be horribly false it's likely that social workers back-pedalled and under-reacted for a while. Real abuse will have lain undiscovered. No-one listened to the children.

No-one listened to the kids in Cleveland when they said with clarity that they had not been abused. No-one in Jersey listened to the kids who have stated that they were abused at Haut de la Garenne (hasn't that gone awfully quiet recently?) Kids are used as pawns in the games played by the bad social workers.

There are GREAT social workers. I can't say that clearly enough. But the service employs people, and people can have bad days, or just be lousy at their jobs but great at looking as if they are good.

But the case in The Daily Telegraph reminds me of the time when our son was born, in 1985. Those of you who follow this blog at all will know that I am one of the very many men who are both gay and married happily to women. But, back in 1985, the world was not tolerant. It "went without saying" that gay men molest children. It was the major flag waved by the alleged moral majority against us and was used to paint us all as evil.

So I was terrified about ever allowing so much as a health Visitor into my home. I am a man. Men have penises (I know I do. I can pee standing up and sometimes hit the bowl) , and a penis means that you will abuse your baby boy, if you are gay. So went the logic of the time. No-one considered that the majority of men, the heterosexual men, those with daughters, might be any danger at all to their daughters! Irony is everywhere in the politics of sexuality.

Today this is not so. Today gay men may adopt either as single parents or as couples. While some idiots still think that we will bugger everything in sight, this is not so, and especially not so for the kids that we adore and nurture and guide to safe adulthood. But back then it was unheard of. One of the reasons I learned to stay firmly in the closet was fear of having my family ripped from me. I'd love to have been a campaigner. With glorious hindsight I'd love to have been a campaigner. But I could not be. I had to stay in the closet. Seeing London Pride this last weekend for the first time overwhelmed me with emotion over all the folk, the ordinary folk, marching and applauding.

And the spectre of having your children ripped away from you by the state because some petty official believes you to be a weirdo is still very much there. We've just changed the type of weirdo today.

My message to social services? It's simple. Look for real, true danger. Look for real abuse. Find it and deal with it before another child gets killed. And leave ordinary people alone.

Internet content linking to be a breach of copyright?

This flies in the face of all the Search Engine Optimisation out there. Pretty much every webmaster except for news media actively wants deep links to their sites. Deep links create incoming traffic and good search engine reputations.

As a webmaster I encourage links to my sites, and I also am happy with short excerpts to be published with attribution and a link. But what I am about to do now will break future copyright law, in the US at least, of an influential judge gets his way:

Here we go:

In an article on 1 July 2009, Dan Kennedy in The Guardian wrote:

Those who wish to keep the internet free and open had best dust off their legal arguments. One of America's most influential conservative judges, Richard Posner, has proposed a ban on linking to online content without permission. The idea, he said in a blog post last week, is to prevent aggregators and bloggers from linking to newspaper websites without paying:

Right, that's the end of my "future crime", which, oddly, will become a crime retrospectively if Posner has his way. I've quoted The Guardian, and linked to its article. What I've done is driven traffic to the paper's site and exposed that traffic to advertising. That has to be desirable.

That's desirable even if I have adverts here, on my blog, which I do. It's desirable because it draws attention to the target article, and it provides a link. I'd love you to click my adverts. The Guardian would love you to click their adverts, but we truly do not care whether you do or not. They're simply there, like all adverts, and your job is to ignore them or click them as you choose. But this is a way in to other sites that Posner wants to close.

I'm a news aggregator, too. I aggregate news on sports and teams that have balls in HaveBalls.Net. When I do it I have explicit permission of the bloggers and services I aggregate, because I take the full article for the most part from their RSS feeds. That site would fall outside Posner, but imagine the chaos if this guy gets his way

I also run wikis like Train Spotting World and Plane Spotting World. A lot of their content, like Wikipedia, relies on the principle of Fair Use. So Posner wants to kill Wikipedia off, too. And he might just manage it.

The USA had a lucky escape this year

I understand every word she says. The problem is that, when used in the order that Sarah Palin uses them the entire speech makes no sense at all.

Can you imagine if McCain had been elected, died under the pressure of office, and this weirdo became President of the USA?

And she was a Governor. I know Alaska has almost no-one living there, so she really doesn't matter there, but how shallow is the gene pool there that elected this one?

If we saw her as a Grotesque at an End-of the-Pier-Show we'd not even know when to laugh.

"I am a student. I want to work with children and old people and work for world peace!"

"And next, after the evening wear round, we have the swimsuit part of the contest. Thank you Miss Alaska!"

Yup, that's where we've seen her before.

Luckily the US electorate had the good sense to see that this one was barking mad. Now, let's all watch Dr Strangelove.

BT drops Phorm's targeted advertising system

I'm happy about that. BT got into hot water for trialling it in secret and should, frankly, have dropped it like a hot brick back then.

I don't even care if it's a lawful service. I'm heartened by the Computer Weekly article that says:

BT says it wants to devote its resources to other services, but said it would be watching to see how the use of Phorm's technology develops with other internet service providers (ISPs). Phorm says it is focusing on overseas markets such as South Korea, but it will continue to develop the service into a form that UK ISPs find useful.

Interesting that Phorm is not concentrating in the strictly regulated Data Privacy area otherwise known as the European Economic Area, then.

I asked Phorm to give me their side of the Webwise story at last year's ad:tech, but all they did was send me a load of bumpf and expected me to interpret this in their favour. Frankly it did nothing to persuade me that their service was one I wanted to be part of. I chose my perosnal ISP on the basis of the answer to the question "Do you deploy Phorm or Webwise?"

They said "no", so I chose them and have no hesitation in recommending them:

For domestic use:

For business use


[edit]
After Phil's comment below I decided I really ought to distance the Eclipse recommendation (above) from any ISP adverts below or to the side. I love the irony created by randomly selected adverts!

A wholly enlightening Saturday in London

Now I know it was The Fourth of July. I usually manage to convince a few of my US friends that we Brits celebrate Thanksgiving on that date, too, but that was not the enlightening thing. Instead it was a trip to London. To discover why it was enlightening you probably want to have a look at a page on my website which details attitude changes over time in schools. Well in one school. Or you could just read on.

I was in London with my wife and one of her good friends from school. We went to meet our son at the Royal Academy to see their Summer Exhibition. And what an amazing exhibition of people who can't paint or sculpt it is! And such depressing pictures. I suppose they're meant to be "edgy" or something. I am obviously the only one in step, but I am minded of the Emperor's New Clothes, which would have been a valid title for the show.

On the way in along the A316 an overhead sign told us that there was an event in the West End that would cause road closures. I scarcely noticed it. We were taking the train from Richmond anyway.

Nothing exceptional apart from Regent Street being closed when we got off at Piccadilly Circus, and we made our way to the RA, saw the mind-numbing art, and met Al. Then we meandered off to Chinatown for an excellent lunch of dim sum which Melanie thinks were akin to cat food in steamed dumplings. How lucky that I was fed in the UK private school sector and thus have developed an affinity for cat food! Odd how that suddenly reminds me of Heinz and their Deli Mayo fiasco this time last year! Search the blog for Heinz and you'll find it.

Over lunch we decided upon the National Gallery, possibly followed by The Tate if we were not totally over-arted by them.

Going Trafalgar Square-wards we saw a parked police van and started to wonder, well, I did, about protests and kettling, but, as we drew level we saw a happy, fun street party. Yes, we had arrived at Pride London, not something I had expected to do.

After the gallery, where I found the art much more to my taste, we walked out on to the square and into the enclosure. A large sound stage, a throng of people, people of all races, all sizes, all shapes, all with similar hopes, fears and aspirations, some with same sex partners, others, like me, with wife and family, some with little kids, some with big kids, but all smiling and happy.

How different from the 1960s where the Stonewall Riots (this year is the fortieth anniversary) were yet to take place in the USA, where sexual acts between consenting 21 year olds in private in the UK were only accepted in law in July 1967, and where such a gathering would, without a shadow of a doubt, have been repressed with brutality.

I was pleased to see it, yet slightly bored. I was please to see Mayor BoJo make an address on the big screen wholeheartedly and enthusiastically supporting the event in the way that only he can do. It's hard not to like Boris as a man whatever you think of his politics. And we left, heading along Pall Mall, towards the tube for, not the Tate, but The Victoria and Albert Museum.

And we found the carnival procession.

I love carnivals. As a little kid I loved the Tenby carnival, hanging out of our hotel window to see it. I took part in the Herne Bay Carnival once, just collecting the pennies folk lobbed into the road. In an official collecting tin, dammit! I was in the Birmingham University rag week carnival on more than one occasion, clinging to the back of an artic as he sped back to the campus! I adore carnivals.

I was expecting to enjoy some of the floats, wonder about others (Why was Amnesty International there? What is it to do with prisoners in unpleasant regimes? Oh I suppose I can work it out), love some of the costumes, be mock-horrified at others. I never knew there was a London Gay Symphony Orchestra! Just past the Institute of Directors, as a huge truck containing gay youth was negotiating a difficult turn, Al (son) and I heard booing. We each wondered why. The driver was doing just fine!

As the truck cleared the turn we saw why.

A small, pathetic bunch of nasty little bigoted alleged christians waving placards "Be sure your sin will find you out" and some other low life in the crowd had decided to have a hissy fit and try to spoil a good day. I hadn't expected to be angry. My reaction was to want to leap the railings and make a few martyrs out of the idiot bigots. I've always been sure that christianity needs a few more martyrs, and these seemed best placed to achieve it. Of course I can see why that isn't advisable, but I do feel that my right to freedom of expression could be best deployed with the performance art of a little action painting with real blood.

I blame The Royal Academy and its exhibition of depressing stuff, I really do!

What I had been totally unprepared for was my whole reaction to the procession. Emotion had been absent in Trafalgar Square, all that was there was curiosity, added to amusement with the idea of the SCUBA group the Gay and Lesbian Underwater Group, or GLUG. Whoever thought of that needs a medal!

But, as I walked on the pavement against the flow of the procession I found I was fighting back real, hot tears, and was unable to speak in case I broke into sobs.

The entire place, with the exception of low life christians, of course, was smiling, laughing, happy. Families with kids were enjoying a day out and the moral majority was also watching a Gay parade and applauding. Kids were on shoulders to see. I saw every race, colour and creed, gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, trans, all represented by happy smiling faces. My own family was there and happy.

And all the wretched hiding of my childhood years and my working life set against this happy, open, public display of ordinary people, people just like me, expressing their pride in being simply who they are, whatever they are, made me cry.

I could have stepped into the parade myself. I almost did, but this was the tail end of the procession and I was there on family business, different business. I would have felt guilt at leaving them when they have supported me emotionally for so long. So I felt simply great pride in those who were marching, and those who were applauding, and those who were simply watching, caught unaware by a simple yet great event.

Perhaps now is the time to remember the top of this article and read about attitude changes over time in schools.

Things which were terrible back in the 1960s still seem terrible to those of us who were firmly in the closet then. It's hard to shake the fear of discovery. This article is hard to write, and pressing "Publish Post" will take me a while even though I am no longer hiding. But, today, in many nations in the world, we gay people can be ourselves at last. I can be myself at last. Gay kids can be themselves at last. Some People are Gay. Get over it!

Let's knock the competition! That works

When I was a baby salesman I was taught "Never, not ever, knock the competition. Knock their products and services with our comparative benefits, but never, ever criticise them as a company or their sales team."

I can't say with honesty that I stuck to that advice.

What I can say is that, when I did knock, that came home to haunt me because I never got a deal where I'd tried it.

Yesterday I was busy not taking calls from a sales rep who'd had an email from me saying that I would not be using her organisation. Heck, no means no. A major reason had been that calls from her always said "withheld" and I have a normal policy on my mobile of avoiding such calls. I like to know who is calling me. But I pressed a button on the phone while getting it out of my pocket and it answered the call.

My needs are pretty simple. I need a debt collector to trace the guarantor for one of my tenants and to give him a nasty surprise. She was evicted owing me over £4,500 and I want it back from her or her guarantor. He's moved on. I can't trace him. A collection firm can, and we can get an attachment order against his earnings.

But the failing sales rep said "I hope you are not using [named firm] because they have a habit of quoting one fee and charging much more in loads of different and mysterious ways."

Even if she stood a chance before she lost it for ever for her firm with that statement.

I happen to be using the named firm. I checked their contract and discussed this conversation.

The losing firm? I am judging their customer service on their sales rep. I've got nothing else to judge them on, so that will do just fine. I know I want a touch firm, but I want one that plays it straight, too.

How to make a telesales agent look stupid

I am getting more than fed up with offshore telesales companies calling my home in the evening. The score this week is "Tim Trent 3, rest of the world nil"

My current gambit is to be a little old man.

"I'm sorry young man, I am very deaf. Please speak slowly and Loudly"

"Louder, please?"

"Louder, please?"

"Louder, please?"

"Louder, please?"

I usually manage to get them yelling down the phone until they realise at last that I am probably playing with them. The air can get quite blue at that point. They are yelling from their call centre and look truly stupid.

Three so far this week.

And yes, they are fair game. My number is Telephone Preference Service registered. If they were not offshore I would be lodging complaints with the UK Information Commissioner.

Barclays and the Call Centre

I know it's my fault. Jackie Wyeth, my local branch manager says it isn't and that I've done everything right, but I know it's my fault. I had accounts with Barclays. I closed them in December and I'm trying unsuccessfully to get a certificate of tax paid on the money on deposit so I can submit it to HM Revenue and Customs. This should not be hard.

So, today, when I received a letter telling me that I had closed my account in December 2008 so could not receive a tax certificate for the tax year closing in 2010, I decided that the whole place was peopled with aliens from the planet Fuckwittia. And I called, yet again, the call centre.

Now this is always hard. Remember, I have no accounts, so I have no way of typing in account numbers on the phone keypad. Even so they require a 16 digit number to be keyed in.

Usually, this one works: "**** **** **** ****" That is 16 stars. You usually have to enter them twice because, the first time, it doesn't understand them. The second time it realises that you must be too stupid to answer the question, so puts you through to the front line staff.

Today I got through to the front line who took my details, could see my closed accounts and put me through to an alleged manager. At the end of the call, one where I was substantially assertive, the clown of a manager (remember the planet name?) said "have a nice day!"

Barclays is not an American bank. I checked with her, despite knowing this to be the case. She thinks "have a nice day" is polite. She thinks it is part of Barclays Customer Service Policy to say it. And she was more than surprised when I complained about that, and she handled it badly. So badly that she "managed" to cut me off instead of putting me through to the complaints team.

I dialled again. This time 16 stars got me through to India, not the UK. And India had no access to my account. They also have, naturally, no understanding of UK geography, so my explanation that I was in Bracknell located me in Brackley, which they said was in Yorkshire, not Berkshire. She could not put me through to complaints "There is a very long hold" and said that in the branch "no-one answered the phone, they must be out" (10:45am - go figure) and "you must go to the branch"

So I gathered up my loin cloth, two days' supply of food, a tent, found my camel and went into town. Sorry, we're having a heat wave here!

Jackie was aghast.

Trust me, I know this could get boring and repetitive, so I've cut a lot out. But there are loads of folk at present who would like jobs in Customer Service, and Barclays really ought to have some empty positions soon!

I wonder when they'll learn that:

1. Their call centres really suck
2. Really, their call centres suck
3. Centralising things in call centres that suck is a bad, bad idea
4. Did I mention that their call centres suck?
5. Call centres outsourced to India suck worst of all.
6. Barclays have very sucky call centres.

Probably in a few years time.

Meanwhile Jackie will solve my problem for me.

Oh yes. Why is it my fault?

Well, I opened an account!