Alaric's Lair

Lottery strategy

2012-01-30T21:46:00.001Z

When buying a lottery ticket, only buy one row on the card. The odds against winning are so remote buying additional rows doesn't make a great deal of difference. It's a bit like dividing infinity by two, it is still infinity. Your lucky day will either happen or it doesn't.

Now I'm going to suggest something contrarian. If you buy one ticket, always buy a second ticket but using exactly the same numbers for the same day as your first ticket. In that way if you win the jackpot you guarantee getting a greater share of the jackpot if other people also get the winning numbers. At the very least you can tell the wife that you have a winning ticket for the lottery in all good faith ....

Stupid Vendors

2012-01-23T22:08:00.001Z

It's been a really annoying past couple of days. The angst has been caused by stupid vendors and their idiotic approach to identity checking. The trouble started on Sunday when my wife tried to change mobile phone supplier and purchase a new phone. The phone was only £70 and the monthly contract was only £20 a month. She's already got an existing mobile phone service supplier, but has to change for external reasons, at her new offices only O2 has any real coverage and she's with Vodafone. So after waiting close on 20 minutes for an O2 shop assistant and another 15-20 minutes while he fussed over the paperwork while my wife gave full personal details banks, accounts, produced bank cards, etc the assistant finalises the order then peers at the screen and announces that my wife has to produce a passport or driving licence plus a utility bill. Why couldn't he have done that at the start?

We found it really annoying, I had my driving licence, but that was not good enough. We've lived in the same location for 29 years, own the property outright and have good high paid stable professional jobs. My wife didn't have a passport/driving licence with her, so we told they they'd lost the order and walked away. When we got home we placed the same order on-line with Carphone Warehouse and it was accepted, or so we thought. This evening we got an email from Carphone Warehouse saying the order with O2 had failed on a credit check!! We have do debt, we've never been late in paying bills. Carphone Warehouse cynically suggested we tried other vendors through them, but if we wanted to check the credit issue we should talk to Equifax.

To talk to Equifax we have to create copies of three identity documents and send them to Equifax, wait for that to be processed, create an account, purchase a credit report (using the same credit card rejected by O2) and wait until the report is delivered. If there is anything wrong on the report we can then "challenge" the record.

It was at that point I remembered getting a call from the ISME.com (a catalogue company) security department asking if I'd raised an on-line credit account with them. To which I replied "No, I never use credit accounts." After a couple of weeks they came back to say they'd investigated and realised that someone other than use had used our address and obtained goods on credit and then not paid for them. ISME put a marker on our credit file. We'd not done anything wrong, but ISME had been stupid enough to send goods to another address, because they'd never delivered to our house. So through ISME's poor procedures our home address has a black mark against it through no fault of our own.

O2 are probably relying on the Equifax report which probably has reference to the ISME screwup. It doesn't appear to be relevant to O2 that I already have two active mobile phone accounts with them registered to that same address. They'd prefer to mess my wife around with their crude credit processes.

Well, they will pay the price for their poor procedures. I always punish such bad service. They're going to lose one of my mobile phone accounts and that will cost them dear. If Equifax has the slightest wrong data on our files I'll be getting them to provide evidence in support or I'll be off to the Information Commissioners Office. O2 and their parent Telefonica will pay in the long term too, unless they come up with a respectable solution. I often get the opportunity to steer the telecomms business of some quite large companies in many locations in Europe.

To top it all Amazon's computer system insisted I use amazon.co.uk instead of amazon.com. It really screwed up the testing I doing for the release of a new book. Nice one Amazon, set your business policy on what Amazon execs want rather than what the customer needs.

Edit 26th Jan
My wife decided to bite the bullet and go back to the O2 shop with a print of her clean credit record, driving licence, utility bills. We were in the shop for 105 minutes as the shop assistants struggled through the O2 computer procedures to issue a £70 phone. It is unfortunate that O2 have a service monopoly in the PFI managed hospital where she works otherwise we'd have told them to get lost. However they won't escape my punishment.

Send to Kindle

2012-01-16T18:07:00.000Z

I've recently come across a free new tool from Amazon. It is an application which allows you to send documents from your PC to your Kindle device. It converts to either pdf or azw. The application can be found here. Here's some more information about the tool. It seems to work quite well with a couple of minor issues on font conversion which I'll investigate further.

It is definitely worth a try.

Story Plot

2011-12-23T18:10:00.003Z

It is amazing how just reading the daily news can give rise to plots for the next book. I was reading that the Eden Project has withdrawn from sale jewellery made with the rosary pea, sometimes called Crab's Eye peas. It turns out that the toxin contained in the peas is 75 times more toxic than the feared Ricin made from Castor Oil beans. Sometimes these peas have been found in ethnic baby rattles!

Ideal stuff for the bad/good heroine in my next book. The peas can be purchased openly through the internet, including Ebay!

Background to TFOH

2011-12-18T06:51:00.003Z

As part of my Adam Cranford series I've created a "Draft" of a member's handbook for the Foundation of Honour. I'd be interested to receive suggestions from fans of Adam Cranford to add to the text of the handbook. You can find it on Kindle .com and .co.uk . If you don't have an actual Kindle Amazon do a free reader for PC, Apple, Android which can be found here.

Fresh breeze

2011-12-08T16:32:00.001Z

There's a pretty strong breeze in Edinburgh at the moment. 164 mph on the Cairngorm.

Lansley's NHS

2011-12-07T07:40:00.001Z

Andrew Lansley has published his plan for privatisation of the NHS, ooops I mean health reforms. They cement my view that the concept of the NHS Walk-In Centre is thoroughly dead. There is no mention of Walk-In Centres in the Primary Care bit of the plan (item 44), the GP lobby in the Lansley advice coterie is getting its way. They are determined that the public will attend their [private partnerships] surgeries at a time convenient to the GPs rather than the needs of the public. People go to Walk-In Centres because they either can't get the service they need from their GP or the quality of service is so bad that they seek an alternative.

Meanwhile I've been contacted by a Nurse Practitioner (30+ year's experience, Masters degree in medicine) who tells me his future employment is so uncertain that he's stopped buying a season ticket for travel to work. He now only buys a weekly rail ticket.

Hospital A&E Walk-In Centres

2011-12-05T16:16:00.001Z

You'll have seen my earlier comments about NHS PC Walk-In Centres. In the main these are being closed, though sometimes a Walk-In Centre will be attached and managed by Acute Trust personnel rather than senior primary care medical staff. With the PCT WICs the emphasis is on successfully treating the person who walks through the door with subsequent follow-up by that person's GP. Where the need is serious andurgent the PCT WIC nurses will refer the case to the nearest A&E dept, usually following phone discussion between the WIC and A&E medics. The objective is to divert less urgent and less serious cases to the WIC.

When the WIC is managed by an acute trust and located close to an A&E department the nature of the service changes. The focus is much more dealing with unwarranted non-urgent patients to direct them away from A&E. The focus is reducing the queues at A&E rather than treating the patients.

There's a case reported in the Daily Mail web site where a person who should have been treated by an A&E doctors was turned away by an A&E receptionist and told to go the WIC next door. The details in the Daily Mail report are not extensive but it appears the poor chap left the WIC with just eardrops and subsequently died from blood poisoning and brain damage. Here's the BBC report. It is very sad and my heart goes out to his family.

I do wonder however what the outcome would have been had the patient initially attended a PCT WIC where the nurses are trained to work autonomously (on their own) and give a through examination. Any urgent/serious cases are then passed immediatly to A&E, if necessary using a blue light emergency ambulance. There are clearly defined medical protocols the nurses are trained to follow which provide "red flag" markers of serious conditions.

In any event, patients presenting with a medical condition should not be turned away on the word of a clerical receptionist.

Rats or Birds?

2011-12-02T16:39:00.001Z

One of the signs that something is wrong in an organisation is when several senior managers leave of thier own choice in a periods of a few months. A recent article in the Guardian Newspaper highlights a case in the Barts Hospital in London UK. The guy in question has worked at the place as a skilled surgeon for many years. Suddenly he finds it an unacceptable place to work! There have been several instances of senior administrative and clinical staff (5 out of 14 orthopedic surgeons) finding employment at an alternative location more attractive. Is it rats leaving a sinking ship or is it birds flying away before an earthquake? Has someone broken the spiritual backbone of the place? It is very difficult and expensive to repair a damaged corporate psyche. Maybe there is a programme of cuts using an experienced aggressive "Turn Around" Director?

The same kind of thing has happened in the North Staff's hospital. Now the administrators had to draft in Army Medics to keep their A&E department running. Professional medical staff such as surgeons and specialist nurses will be caution about joining to work at a hospital with a damaged reputation.

It is a pity, because BARTS does some good clinical work caring for the patient. For example they're the only hospital actually checking the safety standards of surgical instruments. See the worrying Panorama programme in July 2011. They also do good work in research in Prion infection on surgical instruments. Perhaps the problem is the way the administrators engage with the clinical staff? Is there a climate of bullying? Are we getting value for money from these highly paid administrators?

Rescue the economy - no income tax

2011-12-01T13:09:00.001Z

The United Kingdom is in financialtrouble. As a country we are spending more than we earn. Ourgovernment has to borrow money to be able to provide basic services.If your monthly income is £1,500 yet you spend on average £2,000 amonth you will very soon get into serious financial trouble.

The old financial tools deployed by theUK Government to deal with this situation just do not work in thecurrent global environment. They may try to stimulate the economy byreducing the bank interest rate. The idea being that lower interestrates encourage people to borrow more money and spend that onmanufactured goods, thus promoting growth. The problem is thatinterest rates are already at a record low level and the realinterest rates charged to the public remain stubbornly high. As thebanks try to recover from the losses of their previous toxic debt(casino banking) scandal and also raise their reserves they have noincentive to reduce interest rates charged to customers. The otherproblem with stimulating growth through low interest rates is thatpeople use the borrowed money to buy imported goods thus worseningthe country's debt position.

The lower interest rates alsodiscourages frugal people with spare money from long term savings.The is little point in saving if the actual deposit interest rate islower than the rate of inflation. People see their savings betterprotected by investing in property. This gives no net gain in thenational wealth and sees money sucked away from investment in UKindustry. The Catch 22 with "investment" in property is that it only works by forcing up property prices. People borrow more money to pay these increased property prices, when there is an increase in the interest rate it will suck a massive amount of spending money from the economy to pay banks. In 1989 the base bank interest rate rose to 15%.

Another Government tactic is to printextra money. This is not money that has been earned or borrowed, it ismerely a devaluation of the national currency. In effect it isdebasement of the coinage or clipping silver from the coins. It is atechnique usage for centuries when the rulers do not have enoughincome to meet expenditure. The current fashionable name for this isQuantitative Easing. The problem is that this reduces the value ofthe money held, in our Sterling currency, by overseas banks andinvestors. It is in effect a back door devaluation against othercurrencies. The problem is that devaluation increases the price ofgoods imported into this country. As we spend more on imports than weearn by exporting the effect is that we further increase theindebtedness of the UK by printing money. If anyone doubts the impact of a currency collapse look at the example of Argentina. Currency devaluation tends to increase interest rates as oversea depositors look to maintain the return on their loans to this country.

Over the past couple of decadesbusinesses based in the UK have tried to reduce their operating costsby moving their production processes overseas. While this may reducethe monetary cost of the product it increases the amount of goodsthat we import. Moving production overseas also removes paidemployment from UK employees. It means those ex-employees (and thecompanies on their behalf) no longer contribute to UK employment andnational insurance taxation. Unless that employee can find anotherjob he/she becomes a burden on the UK Government in terms of socialbenefit payments and reduced tax contribution. It also means that theindividual surviving on social benefits is less likely to contributeto the UK economy by purchasing UK manufactured goods. The lastLabour Government expanded the size of national and local governmentto create jobs, but this increases the national borrowing requirementto pay for the additional Government direct employees and outsourcedemployees.

At the end of the twentieth century theUK economy was bolstered by additional income from North Sea oil andgas, but that additional income source is rapidly diminishing. TheUnited Kingdom needs to take some serious steps to rebalance itseconomy. We need to start earning a lot more than we spend. We havesome massive debts to pay off. We cannot use the old tactic ofinflation and devaluation, that would just increase the repayments onour existing massive debt.

We need to make imported goods lessattractive to the UK population while at the same time make UKmanufactured goods much more attractive. This would help to rebuildthe UK manufacturing base as businesses are encouraged to producelocally. This can be achieved by applying a minimum 30% tax on anyimported goods, food stuff, fuel, service, raw materials to thiscountry. An import tax on food would also encourage farmers in this country to produce more food from their land, thus improving our food security. At present our food supply chain breaks down very quickly if imports are disrupted for any reason. With the prospects of global food prices increasing we need to encourage our farmers to produce more homegrown food.

To compensate for the increased price of goods in the shopswe should at the same time alter the income tax bands so that theordinary 95% of the population pay no income tax. There could stillbe taxation of the wealthy. Suitable balancing of the tax rates wouldmean there is effectively the same same life quality for the UKpopulation, but just that there is a greater incentive to buy locallyproduced goods and less incentive to use imported goods. That wouldboost the incentive for businesses to manufacture in the UK thusimproving the employment of people within the UK. As the employmentsituation improves the reducing demand on social benefits willfollow, reducing the demands on the public purse.

No doubt many of the currentpoliticians and economists will argue that using import taxes is abad thing. However, those people have had their chance and failed.Their theories, maxims and economic models no longer work. It is timefor a new direction. We should shrug off the colonial guilt of tryingto stimulate the economies of overseas countries. They've had theirstart-up, we now need to look after ourselves and prevent an economichangover for our children.

NatWest Bank Branch problem

2011-11-28T15:50:00.001Z

I've just had 25 minutes of my lifestolen from me by the NatWest Bank.

I used to have my main accounts andsavings with them, but those were removed to another bank long agofollowing poor service and dubious interest rate practices. My wifeand I have a joint account with the NatWest ever since we marriedover 30 years ago, but I cannot access it because the bank lost itsrecord of my date of birth. However that's another story.

My company currently banks with theNatWest, but needless to say that customer relationship is hanging bya thread. It is only the work required to notify our clients andsuppliers which protects the NatWest. We no longer leave anysubstantial sums of money in that bank. It goes elsewhere to where weknow our custom is valued.

I've taken a day out from my businessand was tidying some paperwork in my home office when I came across abunch of shares dividend and royalty cheques I'd overlooked. Mostly Iuse direct payment of dividend/royalties into my other bank, butthere are a few I still handle manually via the NatWest. I duly totted up the totalvalue of the cheques and filled in the paying-in book prior tovisiting the local NatWest Bank branch. As I'm in London at themoment it just happened to be the Lewisham branch. When I arrived at2:25pm I found a long queue snaking around inside the branch. Ichecked my watch suspecting a long wait would follow. Only twocounter positions were open.

I was not disappointed. It took 25minutes for me to reach the front of the queue. During the wait I'dseen fourteen people turn away from the branch when they saw thelength of the queue. By that time an additional counter position hadopened. The manager tried to make the claim that refurbishment workswould be completed within a couple of weeks and the queuing would nothappen. What total nonsense! The queue was there because there werenot enough counter positions open. In fact their refurbishment workis reducing the physical number of counter positions.

Perhaps the NatWest bank regards 25minutes as an acceptable waiting time for their customers? I mostcertainly don't. The rot started when the retail banks decided itwas a clever idea to remove Branch Managers. You know the type,they'd recognise you in the street and would have an idea of how muchmoney you owe/deposit in the bank. When things went wrong with theirservice you'd know who to complain to. Instead now the NatWestwastes its money on television advertising spouting propaganda thatthe NatWest is a caring bank or something similar.

Another senior nurse goes from UK NHS

2011-11-26T08:26:00.001Z

Yesterday a highly skilled senior Cardiac nursing sister left the UK NHS. She'd worked at a central London hospital for many years. During the period she self-funded BSc and MA degree qualifications in medicine. She was managing a ward of critically ill cardiac patients. Tired of the clinical nurse staffing cuts under Lansley, the excessive unpaid overtime (12 hour days) and professional bullying abuse from some doctors/managers she decided to leave. She could no longer tolerate the disrespect from her Acute Hospital Trust employers.
She's looked around and has found a senior post in a middle east hospital. She's instantly doubled her salary, has paid for accommodation and it is all tax free.

It is fascinating yet unsurprising that the Acute Trust Board discuss a survey on staff concerns and conclude that people are happy. In reality the medical staff are angry and frustrated. It is time for the board members to get away from the board room and go actually meet the workers. Such bullying can have severe financial consequences.

Death by attrition - Walk-In Centre

2011-11-24T18:58:00.001Z

I'm watching the death by attrition of an NHS Walk-In Centre:-

Buildings closing (scheduled to be demolished quickly after);
Alternatively buildings given to a GP practice; even though they are a private concern;
Primary patients directed away without treatment ("Go to your GP or another clinic such as sexual health");
Any vacant position arbitrarily removed, regardless of the reason for the vacancy.
Senior nurses bullied and excluded from management meetings to encourage them to leave;
Senior nurses made redundant;
Junior nurses told their jobs are being regraded (downwards) with no real consultation;
Overnight working in A&E (not primary care) imposed regardless of contract;
Nurses diverted to streaming duties in A&E;
Nurses joining a union for the first time ever;
Specialist computer systems for patient consultation records abandoned and no further maintenance paid.
Services like Emergency Contraception cancelled - "go to another clinic" even though it is closed and the patient would need an appointment.
Senior administrators making arbitrary clinical decisions
Budgets diverted away to other purposes.

All of this happens without consultation with the public and little warning to patients. All that is left is a deskilled shell nominally called a Walk-In Centre where a couple of nurses share a room somewhere in a larger department. The PCT or Acute Trust claim the Walk-In centre hasn't "closed".

I've now seen this happen in four different locations over the past couple of years. It is a sickening waste of the public money invested in the creating WIC infrastructure and in the cost of building and training a skilled team of nurses. The public are left with no improvement of services as a result and the workload (queues) in the local A&E increase as a consequence.

One point never successfully handled under if retaining the patient records. They are supposed to be maintained safely and accessible for at least 25 years. This is an enormous cost risk, with the nurses dispersed there is no one able to dispute a legal medical claim. It is another consequence of the Lansley blind bull in a china shop leadership.

This happening in many places in the UK

More about NHS WICs

2011-11-22T11:37:00.000Z

My blog piece on NHS Walk-In Centres has generated someinteresting, if uninformed, comment so I’ll extend the article somewhat.

The idea of the Walk-In service is that patients can walk infrom the street if they want medical advice, after treatment the patient walksout. The Walk-In Centre does not deal with A&E cases, though it is notunknown for ambulance crews to deliver patients to a Walk-In Centre where thecondition is minor. The general rule is that if the patient has broken bones,needs a stretcher or has chest pains they get directed to A&E.

The WIC consultation is designed to be a one shot process.To assess and treat if appropriate; the WIC procedures are not designed forfollow up sessions. If follow up is necessary the patient will be referred backto their own GP or to acute medical practitioners in an appropriate localhospital. The WIC may offer associated services such as a phlebotomy clinic (takingbloods), but not as part of their routine assessment process.

Mostly the cases for assessment and treatment are where thepatient presents with headache, high temperature, colds and flu. They are cases that would otherwise clog thewaiting areas of the local GP or A&E Department. The WIC normally has a qualifiedmedical prescriber present during their open hours, the usual route forpatients to obtain medicines is to visit a local pharmacy, but the WIC willalso hold a stock of common medicines for on-site dispensing. When the WIC practitioner recognises a seriousunderlying condition the person will be referred back to their GP or in urgentcases on to the local A&E department. These referrals routinely represent avery small proportion of the cases handled.

The Walk-In Centre is normally led by a senior primary care nursepractitioner (Matron). The lead nursewill usually manage both nurses and administration staff. Where appropriate thelead nurse /Matron will also employ a part time salaried GP to handle casesthat need the skills of a GP but patient cannot for some reason attend theirown GP. Most primary care nurse practitioners (PCNP) are qualified to MA degreelevel in an appropriate medical discipline with additional trainingspecifically to work as a Nurse Practitioner. They will usually have at least10 years experience of actual practice in the primary care area. They aredecidedly not “Practice Nurses.”

The nurses in the walk-in centre are trained in medicalassessment. They are expected to take comprehensive notes recording how theyreached a diagnosis in each case. Those records are personally signed as alegal record by the nurse. The WIC matron regularly audits the patient recordsfor quality for the nurses and the salaried GPs. Nurses are provided withdetailed written rules as to how to perform their work. They are not permittedto perform such work unsupervised until they’ve been given a written sign offof their competency. They are also encouraged to routinely consult with theirseniors when they have any uncertainty. A recent study in the litigious USAshowed that less than 2% of Nurse Practitioners were mentioned in medicalclaims. In the UK the training and supervision is more intensive.

The concept of the UK NHS Walk-In Centre was created in thelate 1990s by the Labour Government. It was a time when the public in somelocations found it notoriously difficult to obtain a consultation at their GP’ssurgery. GP surgery hours were limited and normal working people would have totake time off work for a 3 minute consultation with their local doctor whenthey finally achieved the minor miracle of getting through to the GPreceptionist phone. Most GPs are not directly employed by the NHS, they act assole practitioners or partnerships that have few actual constraints on how theydeal with patients or which actual hours they are available to patients. GPswill contract with a local primary care trust to provide services, but itremains the fact that GPs are their own bosses. The design of the Walk-In Centre service was to counteract that lack ofservice. WICs were specified to be open daily (364 days a year) from 0700through to 2200 and thus not just constrained to working hours.

In the past few years WICsclose to acute hospitals have been performing an additional function inreducing the waiting queues at the A&E departments. A skilled nurse(s) fromthe WIC would be stationed in the local A&E department adjacent to thewaiting area to perform first line triage of attending patients. Those withminor conditions are advised (not mandatory) to visit the near-by Walk-InCentre to receive quicker appropriate treatment

The death of the NHS Walk-In Centre

2011-11-18T07:02:00.001Z

One of the better changes introduced to the UK National Health Service (NHS) was the concept of Primary Care Walk-In Centres. They were located primarily in urban or city locations and were available to the public from 7am to 10pm for 364 days a year. In other words they were available at a time convenient to the public rather than a time convenient to local General Practitioners (GP).
The Walk-In centres were staffed by teams of highly skilled primary care nurses and led by autonomous Primary Care Nurse practitioners. The procedures and skills of the nurses, who were qualified to prescribe a full range of drugs and medicines, mean that they could deal with 98% of the cases without the need for a medical GP. For those few where the nurses could not handle a GP would be be employed on a part time basis by the lead Nurse Practitioner.
No appointment was necessary, people could literally walk in off the street and receive a medical consultation. Those with long term medical conditions would be given any necessary urgent treatment and referred back to their GPs for long term primary care.
The concept was extremely successful:

The costs were low. A WIC patient consulation was about £25 cost to the NHS. If that patient had gone a GP it would have cost at least the NHS at least £35. If the patient couldn't get to see a GP and decided to go to the local Accident and Emergency the minimum cost to the NHS would be £105.
Waiting times were good. Patients were seen within an average of 20 minutes or less in a fully staffed WIC.
The GP practices in the UK are run by independent contractors. They could turn patients away or close for the day at the whim of the GP Partners. The WIC teams were obliged to stay open, requiring permission from the local Primary Care Trust (PCT) and the Dept of Health before they could close.
The WICs helped to reduce queues in the local Accident and Emergency departments when patients with minor ailments were "streamed" away from the Hospital to the Walk-In Centre.
The WICs had a very low medical error/claim rate.

Sadly now most of the Primary Care Walk-In Centres have now been closed and their skilled teams of nurses dispersed. There are other reports on the Internet. In some cases the closures are hidden by the retention of a couple of junior staff and assigning them to a local GP or an A&E department. With the GP led Walk-In Centres you will see the daily open hours change from 0700-2200 to something like 0800-1900. In some cases the nurses are transferred to Acute Trust (Hospital) where the nurses role is subtly changed from being trained autonomous medical practitioners who diagnose and prescribe. Now they have to double check any decision with expensive doctors.

Originally the funding of the WIC team came centrally from the Dept of Health, it was ringfenced and could not be diverted to other purposes. Subsequently the ringfenced funding was merged into the general funding of the Primary Care Trusts. Opponents of WICs soon diverted the funding away from the WICs and the closures started. Remember the WICs often dealt with the failures of the GPs. They were seen as a threat to their profits. When the Conservative/Liberal coalition government came to power the scourge of the NHS in the shape of Andrew Lansley was released. He decided to wipe out the Primary Care Trusts and to hand the financial reins to the local GPs. GPs see WICs as financial competition. It signalled the end of the PCT funded Walk-In Centres. Some have been absorbed by the budget hungry Acute Trusts (hospitals) to act as a streaming front end to A&E purely intended to prevent breaches of the waiting time targets. The Acute Trust, typically struggling under the financial burden of a PFI project, gains the funding from the Walk-In Centre, but the public lose the benefits.

These facilities are closed without public consultation, possibly leaving a ghost service to protect against public follow-up. The health administrators hate having their closure plans examined in public. Hundred's of thousands of pounds will have been spent in creating each of these Centres. It is often wasted. In one case the building was handed over to a local GP (private) in another the buildings will be demolished to provide parking spaces.

The consequence of these widespread WIC closures in London will be felt with greater queues in A&E, particularly at the time of the Olypmics 2012. Some of these walk-in centres were due to provide support to visitors. Here's a BBC report of a typical example in Surrey. They used to have a local WIC but it closed. You'll see a similar pattern in Croydon, New Cross, Whitechapel (E1), Homerton, Canary Wharf, Liverpool Street, Victoria and many other locations such as Stapleford, Ashfield, Leeds, Derby, Bradford, Salford, Harrow, Nottingham, Kirby, Trafford, Bromley, Manchester, Southampton , Barnsley, Warrington York Haverhill (Suffolk) Loughborough

An attempt to close Peterborough WIC.

Update: Late Nov 2011 One of the Walk-In Centres scheduled for closure soon, as usual had a busy day as people attended for treatment yesterday. Many of those people would have gone to the local A&E Dept. Needless to say, the nearby A&E Dept managers are wetting themselves at the prospect of a 40% uplift in visits when the Walk In Centre closes. The A&E waiting time targets are going to be shattered, they already fail to meet waiting targets frequently enough as it is on present levels of patients.

iStockphoto Photo's

2011-10-28T09:01:00.000+01:00

We've occasionally used iStockphoto.com to provide photo's for presentations and advertising work. We've just received notice from them that they are "expiring" our credit because we've not used the account for a while. We regard that as theft. We don't care what their terms and conditions say, it is plain simple corporate theft. No doubt they'd take a dim view of anyone misusing the copyright material, but they have no problem with their own theft tactics.
If they do not want to continue to do business with us, they should just refund the outstanding credit.

They've now been added to our email blacklist and will no longer be recommended.

Political

2011-09-27T16:52:00.000+01:00

I wonder why the South African Government is delaying the via of the Dali Lama? The Dali Lama is planning to visit Desmond Tutu in South Africa. Some pressure from the DRC?

UK NHS reform GP cynicism

2011-05-09T12:05:00.001+01:00

The Royal College of General Practitioners are complaining the proposed government reforms may unravel the National Health Service. The general "idea" is to give control of primary care funding to local consortia of GP's whole then commission services. At the same time the government are proposing to introduce competition for the provision of health services.

We must not lose sight of the fact that most General Practitioners are independent contractors/partners. The GPs do not have a contract of employment with the NHS. The GPs are allowed to keep the profits they make from the fees they charge government for the provision of health services. To allow the GPs to commission their own services represents a gross conflict of interest. Their primary motive is profit. The GPs already receive a massive annual income, as a private contractors, plus many hidden state subsidies. Giving them control of the purse strings is utter lunacy.

The Royal Collage of GPs complain that competition will wipe out the NHS [reduce the GP profit], yet at the same time GP commissioning groups actively campaign to halve the staffing levels of the existing NHS Walk-In Centres. These places are nurse led, using highly skilled medical practitioners, and provide a service 365 days a year from 7am through to 10pm. They handle 90% of the cases GP's handle and in many cases treat the overflow of patients who are unable to get an appointment at their own GP. Most GP practices are open to the public for about 8 hours a day for 250 days a year. The cost per clinical consultation is at the highly available Walk-In Centres is about 75% of an equivalent reduced availability GP consultation. The GPs hate the exposure that properly qualified Nurse Practitioners can provide a good clinical service without the need for expensive GP's.

A telling statistic is the consultation duration in a Walk-In Centre is an average of 12 minutes per person. These Nurse Practitioners are very thorough. Compare that with your own visit to a GP. most of their consultations last 2-3 minutes. The error rates at Walk-In Centres are very low, which is good considering the staff have to deal with unknown patients who walk through the doors.

One of those GPs looking for closure of the WICs is a close advisor of the Health Minister Andrew Lansley. Indeed Mr Lansley has introduced him at public speaking events as a GP expert. That same person is actively involved in the management of a local new GP consortia who will commission health services including the GP practices where the advisor has an ownership/profit interest. Their recommendation is to break up the WIC in his area (about 100,000 consultations a year). The WIC has already had substantial staff cuts imposed.

Not good. These ill consider government proposals have already caused a lot of damage and unnecessary expenditure. Prime Minister Cameron promised to protect the NHS yet he seems to have put it under the control of unreformed self-interest groups.

Why we stopped using Google Adwords

2011-05-05T08:15:00.001+01:00

We used to use Google Adwords to advertise our business on the responses to Google searches by the public. We stopped using them.

Why did we stop?

It was not the cost;
It was not the hit rate;

We stopped because we could not get to talk/online chat with a real person in Google about the problem we encountered. We had the wording of an advertisement rejected without explanation by Google. The advert wording was not offensive, nor so far as we could see did it breach any published Google rules. We were in fact trying to correct an entry generated by Google about our business. We keep getting calls from Joe Soap consumers asking us to fix problems with their home PC's. We don't do that. We build trading floors and data centres and we charge high fees for that specialist skill.

The only "assistance" from Google was an automatic Catch-22 type of response referring us to the Google rules. We'd already checked those and needed to speak to a human being, but that appears to be impossible for Google. A typical response from a money rich global corporation who can afford to lose a percentage of customers through poor communication.

What triggered this blog posting? Google have emailed us an offer of £100 to start advertising with them again. The sender of the email - adwords-noreply@google.com!! Once again automated with no contact with a human being! What a waste.

Alaric

ps. I've just been told Google have sent a new email to our director increasing their offer to £150. To think they could have avoided this if they'd decided to make it possible for us to actually chat to a human being.

PC Maintenance Department

2011-05-04T20:40:00.001+01:00

I've just had one of those unsolicited calls from a bunch of crooks trying to convince me there is a virus infection on my PC. They were calling from an Indian sub-continent call centre over a very poor quality VOIP line. Their scam is to induce you to visit a webpage to check out your PC using their software. Typically your PC will become "Hijacked" until you pay some form on ransom to them to cure the problem they loaded on to your PC such as file encryption of all of your data & programs. Effectively your machine becomes unusable until you pay them. Even then there is no guarantee that your PC is left in a clean state.

Their pattern of operation is obvious:

A junior member of their team calls by phone and describes themselves as the PC maintenance group. They then feed you the line that your PC has reported faults and virus's to them. They'll suggest your machine is running slowly and erratically.
Next step is to get you to run a standard Microsoft tool already on the PC so you'll see routine status messages which occur (normally hidden) on every PC displayed on your screen.
The next step is to persuade you to visit their website to have it scan your PC to fix the "problem". If you do that you will cause a trojan program to load on to your PC and to commence it's evil work of corruption.
Then they'll tell you that you have to pay a "fee" to repair your PC.

I must tell you I hate these criminal parasites. I take every action possible to keep them talking on the phone (at their cost and time) while they try to persuade me to follow their instructions. I play the dumb user who makes loads of mistakes when entering their instructions. I don't tell them that I'm pretending my PC is running the old MSDOS 5 operating system which pre-dates Microsoft Windows. The result is that none of the PC commands they they tell me to use will ever work. This time I had them talking for 45 minutes, with a chain of six of their "experts" before they gave up.

Unfortunately they didn't call on a phone where I can record the conversation, but here's a typical extract from the conversation (remember I think I have a back and white character based display of MSDOS 5 whereas they think I have a standard Microsoft windows screen say - Vista.):

criminals: "...Do you see the start button on your PC desk top?"
Alaric: "No, I don't have a button on my desktop. It is just a standard office desk. There's the phone in one corner, a cup of tea in the other corner and my PC keyboard in front of me."
criminals: "Just click the Start Button and type..."
Alaric:"but I just told you I have no buttons on my desk top, it is just a desk. Ok I've pressed the button on the front of my PC and it turned itself off. Is that what you wanted me to do...?"

This went on for 45 minutes with them getting increasingly angry because I couldn't follow simple instructions. Eventually they gave up saying they'd call me back in a few minutes. Hopefully the time I spent on the phone reduced their ability to pester other people and cause real damage to those unsuspecting souls. Sadly with the British Telecom phone system it is nigh impossible to trace these criminals calling from overseas.

Don't trust your smartphone!

2011-04-24T07:48:00.001+01:00

I was reading up on a demonstration by Samy Kamkar on his web site where he accesses a database created by Google to map the MAC addresses (electronic hardware serial number) of wireless routers. Part of the data may have been collected by the infamous camera cars used to create Google's street view. Samy's contention is that every Android phone harvests the GPS position and the MAC address of every wireless router they pass by in the street. That information is then transmitted back to Google where it is used to update the database. On Samy's web site you can enter the MAC address of your own wireless router and get a response which shows the location of your building. It was accurate to within 50 metres for my building.

No doubt similar data will be gathered for the iphone population as well. Soon (now) advertisers and security forces will have access to a database where they know the physical location of every wireless router in the country. Snooperville is definitely here! As you walk or drive past a "known" wireless router your journey will be accurately tracked. That information can be tied into CCTV cameras which film your face or vehicle.

I'm currently working on a storyline for my next book where the bad guys use the MAC address of the victim's smartphone to track the good guys. This would be highly accurate and leave no trace on official records. I'm envisaging a business where couriers/messengers are paid to carry the smartphones of rich people to leave a false trail of tracking information.

Alaric

USA Companies canot spell

2011-04-14T07:18:00.001+01:00

I know, I spelt "cannot" wrongly! However it shows how basic spelling mistakes can distract the reader. Here's one from a web advertisement (love the UK english version) from the major USA power equipment company Emerson. It was captured today.

It makes me wonder if they are seriously in the business of reducing emissions.

Alaric

Boiler Room Scams

2011-03-29T05:29:00.000+01:00

If the profit sounds too good to be true and someone unknown to you phones you out of the blue then it is most likely a scam. You should be particularly cautious when the "company" making such an offer is not regulated by any government body.

A friend of mine who has a great deal of experience in investing and also investigating "Boiler Room" scams showed me me an example of a case (here and here) that matches those criteria. It is a UK Company registered in July 2010 called Nemesis Commodities Ltd who called him at home with an unsolicited call. In that call and several subsequent calls they made unsupported claims about a wonderful trading opportunities with natural colour diamonds.

The general idea is Nemesis buy certificated natural colour diamonds from investors, sell them to you based on the value of the certificate. Then Nemesis enter the diamonds as parts of batches into auctions at Sotheby's where other rich investors buy them at a high price and so you make a profit. They told my friend Sotheby's generously give a reduced them a reduced commission fee. Oh dear oh dear me.

They even sent him literature describing diamonds as being weighed in "carrots".

My friend's view was that anyone how gave Nemesis Commodities money would learn they'd chosen their company name well!

US Presidential conversations tapped?

2011-03-22T20:30:00.001Z

I was reading an article in the BBC news website when I came across the following statement:

"Nothing in a SCIF is allowed to operate on a remote control because that's a frequency that can be tapped," he says. "Much of what is distributed is done on fibre, not copper as fibre as yet can't be hacked into."

The SCIF is a secure tent used by the President of the United States to take confidential phone calls/conferences when he on tour somewhere. They are designed to prevent eavesdropping of the confidential information. However the follow up statement that Fibre cannot be hacked into is total rot. It is in fact very easy. strip back the insulation covering the fibre, bend it in a radius of about 2 cm and attach a laser sensor. Bob's your uncle, you can read the data traffic as if you are plugged in to the fibre. I've see this done live at a security demonstration.

Hopefully any such communication to the SCIF via copper or fibre will be end-to-end encrypted to defeat any such line tapping.

Alaric

The great US$ pricing rip off

2011-03-20T07:03:00.004Z

One of the great features of the Internet is it's truly global nature. A business can offer services without having to worry about geographic constraints. The electronic delivery cost are the same if you are Texas USA or Almaty in Kazakhstan. Coupled with credit card payment your company can have a global presence for no additional cost. For electronically delivered products you no longer have to worry about overseas shipping or warehouse costs.

It is regretful to see some companies attempt to take advantage of this Internet opportunity by giving differential pricing depending on your location. One example of this is a company called Brighttalk.com who provide hosting of online webinars and web presentations. They target the business world around the globe. However if you are located in the UK they attempt to charge you 149 British Pounds a month for their basic subscription. If you are based in the USA, their fee is 149 US Dollars per month. On today's rate of exchange they are charging UK customers 162% of the USA price. There is no excuse for this type of price gouging.

Brighttalk use a technique called IP Address Geolocation to identify where you are based. If you are based in the USA your web browser will be show a price in USD; if you are located in the UK your web browser will show a price in GBP. The geolocation technique detects the Internet IP address assigned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to your business. There are central lists of the location of the IP addresses assigned to ISPs. Those lists are used to translate into an approximate geographic location for your business. Unfortunately for them there are techniques which allow people to change the "geographic location" of the client PC; so we can see the differential pricing. They also embed location details in "cookies" stored on your PC by them when you access their website.

Of course Brighttalk are not alone, there are USA based software companies like Adobe conduct similar inexcusable price gouging on software downloads.

The company I provide consultancy services to has a programme of video webcasts for its marketing and educational services delivered by the Internet. Needless to say we will not be using Brighttalk. That company has been blacklisted by us for its I-gouging practices. We are not the only people upset by Brighttalk.

Alaric

Councils attack Scouts

2011-03-17T07:39:00.000Z

Under the the need to save public money Local Authorities in the UK have cut libraries. In some areas they've halved the number of branch libraries. These "savings" are disproportionate and politically motivated cuts aimed to punish the Coalition Government for reining in the excessive expenditure of the Local Authorities.

The reason for the national government cuts are because the the previous Labour Government was massively overspending while at the same time failed to regulate UK banks. They have left the country with massive debts and equally massive additional interest payments on the debt.

Now the local authorities are attacking voluntary organisations such as the Scouts Association by massively increasing the rents paid by scout groups for the "rental" of public rooms and halls. The Local Authorities know such fees will attract wide public concern. I do not need to provide any explanation of the useful social function provided by the volunteer charity organisation called the Scout Association. It is again a politically motivated decision.

At the same time we hear of over 2000 local authority employees paid more than £100,000 a year. Before increasing the fees to charities local authorities should be looking closer to home and cutting the excessive salaries of their own bloated bureaucrats. There were massive increases in Council Taxes over the past 10 years, way above the rate of inflation. What have they done with all of that money other than been profligate?

Alaric

Thinking of a USA holiday?

2011-03-17T02:30:00.001Z

If you go to the USA for a holiday think twice about using an ATM to get cash US dollars. The banks out there are looking to charge $5 a withdrawal. That is on top of any charge by your domestic bank for a foreign currency transaction. Now that is what I call price gouging by overpaid Banking executives.

The banks introduced ATM as a cost saving. It meant they could reduce the level of tellers at the bank counter. It now looks like they are now pushing the service as a revenue stream.

I like visiting the USA, but this type of price gouging coupled with the "reception" at immigration where you are fingerprinted like a common criminal does rather push the country down the level of attractiveness.

Alaric

Yodel with delight

2011-03-10T07:30:00.000Z

I have had an unexpected additional day/night in Geneva. I knew that would happen as soon as I approached their telecomms room. The dead table on the floor indicates the great care they bestow on their room. The ancient dusty ceiling tiles are another hint. This is just an initial glance of the greater horrors I saw later.

Their comms room

It contrasts a lot with the hotel room they booked me into for my stay. I hate to say it but if they spent the same money on their technology rooms I wouldn't have to be paying them a visit.


Hotel room

I'm surprised the normally so efficient Swiss workers allow this to happen, but life is full of surprises. Most of the stuff is fairly cosmetic and can be tidied with a few day's work. Their CEO was astonished when I took him through the obvious security errors in their set up.

Alaric

Your wireless microphone will be banned

2011-03-09T16:09:00.001Z

Amazing what odd snippets of information you come across while travelling. Apparently in the UK many of the wireless microphones will be banned in 2012. The radio frequency they use is being/has been sold off by Ofcom.

Searching on Google soon finds references to the issue. Here's one.

Channel 69 will be permitted in London in 2012 during the Olympic Games.

Alaric

Credit card Government - we are now seeing the bill

2011-03-09T07:11:00.000Z

The previous UK government made great use of a form of credit card spending called Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) to build hospitals and schools. The loved this method because it "hides" the actual committed expenditure from the normal measures of government debt/expenditure. The idea is to get private investment in return for agreeing to lease back the building/facility for a long time from the private company. These deals can last forty or fifty years. A good idea except that the actual long term costs are enormous.

Now the National Health Service is reaping the wind as a consequence. A BBC report gives just one example of this in a Hampshire hospital. The hospital was rebuilt using PFI. Now the local Health Trust cannot afford the charges from the PFI private company and wards are being closed. This happening throughout the country. Front-line clinical staff, nurses and doctors are losing their jobs as a consequence.

When the PFI contracts are set up the private companies borrow the money to finance the project (it doesn't appear on the government books). The cost of the loan is then charged back to the local Health Trust, plus any administration costs involved in providing the service. Unfortunately the contracts normally give the PFI company exclusive rights to provide the accommodation services for the long duration of the PFI contract. There are literally no limits to the charges levied. It gives rise to light bulbs that cost £85 when replaced by the PFI contractor. The private companies (and Banks) make an absolute killing on this racket.

One other trick is the PFI companies refinance the original loan at a lower interest rate than the original loan. They then pocket the difference in interest rate payments with no sharing with the NHS or tax payers.

We have burdened the next generation with enormous costs because the previous government was not honest about its true expenditure requirement. It would have been far cheaper if the government had borrowed the money themselves. The politicians who allowed this to happen despite warnings will retire on fat pensions funded by the tax payer. Their will be no penalty for their financial negligence.

Alaric

The joys of travel and lack of Acrobat

2011-03-08T09:00:00.000Z

Off to Zurich today then Geneva tomorrow. It's really annoying that just about all flights go via London Heathrow. It really adds to the journey time. It's amazing how you can get to hate airports. Still it is the essential part of our business in the financial centres around the world. I'd thought I'd got away from all of the travelling, but if the client says meet me for lunch tomorrow near Hauptbahnhof you just pack your bags and go. At least the weather forecast is good, normally it rains whenever I visit Zurich.

I mentioned I'd complete the story on Adobe software on my PC following the upgrade to 64 bit Windows 7. I might as well use the time while I wait for the flight call. A nice thing about Google Blogspot is you can update it from anywhere.

The "PC Mover" software did a great job of moving my application software, but the Adobe licensing schemes seem to be particularly devious and resisted the upgrade process. I guess I should have un-installed their products before attempting the upgrade. Part of that process allows you to move the product to another machine and then re-licence the product.

Anyway I didn't migrate the licence. When I came to use Adobe Acrobat it refused to work with some message about Acrobat could not load the core DLL. The acrobat "printer" didn't work either. My heart sank. I didn't realise just how much I use the Adobe Acrobat product. Things were just as bad with Adobe InDesign. That wouldn't work either. Those products are just about essential for my author activities.

I tried un-installing and re-installing both products but had no success in getting them to run. The problem would not go away. I contacted Adobe. They wanted a prince's ransom for a support contract before they'd talk to me. It was time for some intensive Google work to see if other people had the same problem. Eventually I discovered for InDesign the Adobe licence file had become corrupted. There seems to be a hidden central licensing system installed on your PC whenever you install their purchased/licensed products. I managed to find a utility program buried in the Adobe support pages. After downloading the program and running it I seem to have fixed the InDesign problem.

The Adobe Acrobat problem was more intractable. After un-installing Adobe Acrobat again, I used CCleaner to tidy up the Windows registry file. Then, following some hints from the Google searches, I manually deleted all of the files relating to the previous Adobe Acrobat installs. Many of those were in hidden directories. One more run of CCleaner and then a new install of Adobe Acrobat 9. It finally burst back into life. It was frustratingly complex. It is annoying when software vendors do not pay attention to tidying up the PC when you un-install a product.

That seems to be the end of that story, at least I can get back to normal computing now, though I'm having great fun playing with the video effects on PowerDirector. It is amazing how much disk space these video files consume. My loyal laptop would stand no chance of supporting the editing.

Back to reality in the airport. I have a feeling that I'm going to be pleased I bought a good thick book with me to read while I'm waiting.

Alaric

The author in 64 bit video editing land

2011-03-06T10:53:00.002Z

The continued story of migrating to 64 bit computing for video editing...

In earlier posts I described the decision to use PowerDirector video editing software to help make promotional material for my book series. I'm now just starting to cautiously tip toe into that arena as the Microsoft Windows 7 (64 Bit) install disk whirs into life in the DVD drive of my PC. If things go wrong I might lose a whole computer load of programs and data. The process is amazingly simple. Just one question about whether I want to reformat the disk? No way! I want to keep years worth of data thank you.

The Win 7 Professional install went smoothly, but few of the original application showed on the screen. Remember I'd chosen a fresh install (but no reformat) so the process would not look for and activate existing applications. Time to get the Laplink PC Mover into motion. I found the PC Mover install file and installed it. Within a few moments it was hard at work rebuilding the application software links from the earlier created "Moving Van" file. When the Microsoft Win 7 install was in progress it had found the earlier windows installation and moved the relevant files to a folder called windows.old. PC Mover was digging into the old windows folder to find the applications. I did not need to intervene except to de-install the Kaspersky anti-virus software to prevent it interfering with the software rebuild (I re-installed it later).

Within a couple of hours my PC was back and working. I deleted the trial version of Cyberlink's PowerDirector 9 that I'd installed under Vista 32 bit then re-installed it from the original install file. The install software recognised it was in working in a 64 bit operating environment and installed a 64 bit version of PowerDirector 9 which was fully capable of addressing as many gigabytes of main memory as I could cram into my PC motherboard. Increasing the available amount of memory greatly improves the video rendering time.

I shut down the PC and opened its casing to install the new video card I'd purchased. I'd purchased a cheap (£40) Asus ENGT220 card. It comes with a gigabyte of its own memory and also 48 processors using CUDA technology. It was possible to buy a much more powerful card, but that would cost in the region of £200 and put a greater load on the power supply of my PC. I chose to avoid the expense. The key thing is that the PowerDirector 9 software can make use of the CUDA technology and offload some of the graphics processing work from the main processor on the motherboard to the 48 processors embedded in the video card. Hence even faster video processing.

When I restarted the PC Windows 7 recognised the new video card and started without major problems though the screen image quality could be better. Using the software driver install program supplied on the CD accompanying the new video card soon fixed that problem. Now any heavy graphics applications like internet TV are noticeably faster on my PC.

The PowerDirector software works fine on the upgraded PC and recognises the new video board. Editing videos is noticeably faster over the trial version running under Vista 32 bit with limited memory in the PC. One small snag arose in that my microphone had stopped working in PowerDirector. It was a basic microphone plugged in to the pink socket at the back of the PC. Some investigation (really geeky) led me to realise Windows 7 had installed some generic 32 bit driver software for the sound processing chips installed on the motherboard. A search on the manufacturer Foxconn's website revealed some 64 bit driver software for the sound processing chip. It was easily installed and the problem went away.

So there it is all complete; a powerful video editing configuration on an upgraded PC for a couple of hundred pounds sterling. I did have some problems with my Adobe products as a result of the upgrade, but more about that later.

Alaric

A step into the unknown

2011-03-05T08:38:00.001Z

After deciding to upgrade to Windows 7 64bit my first action was to order an extra 4GB of memory for my PC. With memory priced by the dollar it is quite cheap at the moment. A quick visit to www.crucial.com and £50 from the credit card soon had memory on its way to me. When that arrived it was a matter of a two minutes work to open my PC box and plug in the extra memory.

Next was the task I'd been fearing. I wanted to go from Microsoft Vista Home premium (32 bit) to Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (64 bit). This is not on Microsoft's automatic upgrade paths. It needs a clean install of the operating system with the joys of reinstalling all of the applications from their original DVD, CD's or downloads. Do you always keep those DVD's and their product key numbers?

Fortunately I remembered a company called Laplink produce a software tool called PC Mover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant. For £20 this tool takes a lot of the pain out of moving from an old version of Windows to Windows 7. You install the software on the "original" PC and set it running. Its first action is to examine your software and to create a "Moving Van" file. It stores almost all of your software settings in the moving van. Then you install the new version of Windows 7 on the PC but not allowing it to reformat the hard drive. Once the operating system installation has taken place reinstall the Moving Assistant. It will then use the "Moving Van" file to reconstruct the settings of your original application software and you are back in business.

But wait; I'm getting ahead of myself. On a major upgrade like this it is essential to take a complete backup of your PC and create a recovery DVD before proceeding with the changes. Then if things go wrong you have a chance to rebuild your PC without a loss of data. I have some disk backup software called Paragon so I chose to use that. It told me the backup would take 17 DVD's to backup the entire machine. I settled in for a long slow process of swapping and labelling DVD's. This where the problems started. After a few Gigabytes of data the backup would fail with an I/O error. The DVD's were effectively destroyed. I needed another solution.

It was time to spend some more money. I quickly located a suitable 320 GB external hard drive with a USB connection for about £50 from dabs.com. A moment's work with a credit card then I just had to sit back an wait for the post to deliver it a couple of days later. Once that was done the total backup of my PC using Paragon was complete in less than 3 hours. Another couple of hours to run PC Mover.

Now, finally, I was ready to install Windows 7 64 Bit. I slid the DVD into the drive door pushed it shut and took that step into the unknown... to be continued.

Reverting from author to geek

2011-03-01T21:06:00.004Z

In the last blog entry I described how I had the Digital Video camera communicating with my PC. My first trial of video clip editing started with Microsoft's free Windows Movie Maker software. This was already present on my PC, so I presume it had been supplied free by Microsoft. Using that tool I fairly quickly produced a complete video. I was able to remove video sections I didn't want and also play around with the sound. Unfortunately I could only get output in the form of a .wvm file which is a native Microsoft video file format or too a DVD. I was able to load the file onto Youtube without too much effort, but for longer term plans I need a wider range of output formats. It is a pity really because Movie Maker is really easy to use, but sadly has been discontinued by Microsoft. Its replacement "Windows Live Movie Maker" has far fewer features and was only worth a cursory look.

I decided I'd need something with better video/sound editing capabilities. plus a better range of output formats:

Adobe Premiere - fully featured product, with a steep learning curve and an even steeper price of £810 (equiv. to US$1320). You also need a powerful PC running 64 bit Windows 7; with a small range of recommended powerful "multi-core"graphics cards (£150 +). I've used an earlier edition of the software.

Adobe Premiere Elements 9 - a cut down version of its big brother Adobe Premiere, reasonable editing features but a more limited range of outputs. It can run on a reasonably powerful PC and costs £79 (equivalent to US$129). It runs on Vista, probably XP, Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit), but unlike its big brother it does not take advantage of the 64 bit processor's ability to a massive amount of computer memory.

Cyberlink PowerDirector 9 Deluxe - a well featured editor with a reasonable range of outputs. It has a better range of functions and formats when compared with Adobe Premiere Elements 9 and will run on similar PC hardware. The PowerDirector 9 can take advantage of the processors in multi-core gaming graphics cards and shifts a lot of the processing load from the main CPU (central processing unit). The limitation is that it uses 32 bit memory addressing - max of 4 gigabytes. Editing and rendering large video files would take a long time. It is priced at £60 (equivalent to US$98).

Cyberlink PowerDirector 9 Ultra64 is like the Deluxe version but makes use 64 bit architecture so it can use as many gigabytes of processor memory as you can cram onto your motherboard. This coupled with the ability to use multi-core graphics cards give much faster (video render) processing.

I also looked at Corel's VideoStudio Pro X4 and also Xara's Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 but was not attracted to them. Eventually after trying each product on their trial period (not Adobe Premiere - far too expensive) I decided to go for PowerDirector 9 Ultra64. I've ordered a packaged version of the software.

This will mean I have to upgrade the memory and operating system on my PC to Windows 7 64 bit. This is when my trials and tribulations start ... to be continued!

The trip from paper to digital media

2011-03-01T10:23:00.002Z

As part of my promotional efforts for my series of books (Adam Cranford) I’m beginning to look at the production of video material to be held on Youtube.com and other locations such as Vzaar.com. I’d discovered on investigation that my old Sony digital handycam provides a fast “Firewire” connection through it’s DV (Digital Video) link. My PC was set up using Microsoft Vista and has a powerful processor – 4 core Intel (it was on sale cheap "end of range" at the store honestly). Downloading DV through the Firewire should be straightforward!

First snag:

I’d lost the Firewire cable for the camcorder. Searching on the internet quickly sourced an alternative for a couple of pounds. It arrived two days later.

Second snag:

The firewire port was labelled on the back of my PC. When I tried to plug in the cable to the socket it felt very loose. A bit difficult to see in the dark under the desk what was happening so I sighed, switched off the PC and grabbed a screwdriver. After some rapid unplugging of various other cables, the PC lay on my desktop, its insides exposed to the eye of this author. Lo and behold! Despite the manufacturer specifications for the mother board it was obvious that no firewire socket had been installed on the motherboard or in the PC casing.

More rapid searching on the internet (after reassembling the PC) located a suitable four port Firewire interface card priced at a few pounds. It arrived a couple of days later. Despite there being no software CD in the package I was pleased to see it worked without problem. Fitting it into the appropriate motherboard PCI slot took a couple of minutes. The card was automatically recognised by Microsoft Vista and the appropriate software drivers were automagically installed. With no great expectations I plugged the cable into the back of my PC and into the socket of the digital video camera. As soon as I switched on the camera power a message flashed up on the screen announcing the recognition of the Sony DCR-TRV20E and asking if I’d like to download video using a standard Microsoft interface. It worked!

It was now time to start looking at the software needed to produce video clips...

Story continues...

Cuts to the UK police budget are not enough.

2011-02-08T09:17:00.000Z

News of a recent officialdom intrusion into normal family life convinces me that the police have too much idle time on their hands. Clearly they have a lot of spare capacity if they can waste their time and public money in issuing a mother with a caution for leaving her 3 year old child in the care of their 14 year old son for 30 minutes.
It seems to me the cuts to police budget can be more extreme if they can waste their time on cases such as this. At the very least the mother should receive a full public apology and a complete expunging of records relating to the case. If 14 year old Laura Dekker can be allowed to sail around the world ...

Here's the BBC report on the case.

Get rid of the Public Library Priesthood

2011-02-06T09:58:00.000Z

There's a great fuss at the moment about the closure of public libraries as spending cuts are imposed by central government. Much of the ire is misdirected.

People have stopped going to libraries because the book stock is poor. Libraries have instead tried to change their purpose, in effect setting themselves up as cyber-cafes for the general public. All this costs money. That money has come from the book stock funding. Get a grip people! The library is there to house books, not as a social security depot.

The librarians themselves are highly paid for what they do. Much of the process of purchasing, cataloging and labeling is outsourced (even more expensive) to third-party profit making companies. Meanwhile self-publishing authors are locked out. The salary of one librarian could buy an awful lot of extra book at a branch library. In effect librarians have become a form of priesthood with elaborate rituals, but no great contribution to the process.

Let's get some barefoot librarians who will go out there and do the job of providing interesting books for the public.

Alaric

Excellent investment

2011-01-27T22:01:00.002Z

I had one of those "excellent investment" calls today. You probably know the routine. An excited young man calls you at home unsolicited and totally out of the blue to offer you the opportunity to make well above average returns for your money. Of course it will involve investing about £10,000 and you have to make a decision soon or you'll lose the opportunity. This time the marvellous opportunity was in real estate in Natal in Brazil. I won't bore you with the detail, but his arguments soon started to fall apart when I probed a bit.

Sadly for him I wasn't busy at the time. I kept him talking for an hour before he realised he was going to get nowhere. By the time the call ended he realised my scheme for investing in Natural Colour Diamonds would be far more profitable for his money.

ps I wonder why women never make these calls.

Software Price Rip-off - Adobe

2011-01-22T11:53:00.000Z

The major software companies moan about "pirates" copying/using their software without paying for it. There are of course other organisations who charge unfairly for software. The current ex-tax software prices for Adobe software products are a case in point.

If I download Adobe's InDesign CS5 while sitting in USA/Canada the price will be $699 US; however if I perform the same download from the UK the price will be $952 US. This 36% uplift on price is totally unacceptable. It is also bad business practice for Adobe. They'd actually get more business from me if they priced their products fairly.

Alaric

Failed politicians

2010-12-07T10:51:00.000Z

It always amuses me when rejected politicians try to re-write history. For an example:"Shadow education secretary Andy Burnham said: "Schools improved under Labour, and more students now leave with good results. People forget how bad things were: in 1997, half of all schools failed to reach the basic benchmark of 30% of students getting 5 GCSEs graded A*-C, including English and maths - that number is now fewer than one in 12." " from the BBC website.
Andy - all I can say is the British public are no fools. We realise the secondary schools public examinations have been allowed to be dumbed down during the last government. Kids on average nowadays have the same intelligence level of kids twenty or thirty years ago. The exams have got easier. Stop trying to kid us otherwise.

Blair Lane closed on M4 motorway

2010-11-16T14:01:00.000Z

I'm pleased to note that the Bus/Taxi's only lane on the final stretch of the M4 motorway into London has been closed by the new government here in the UK, the road space will be released to normal road users. It earned the name the Blair Lane when the police used it illegally to give Tony Blair's motorcade priority over other users; classic politburo government. It was in effect a monument to the Nu Labour style of management. "We know we cannot really justify the reduction in road availability, but our ideas are the correct ones. We will fine you if you have the temerity to break our rules."

We have enough problems here in Edinburgh with the trams, but in London it is a lot worse with the bus lanes. The local transport authority (Transport For London) have got it in their mind that more people will be forced into buses if they can slow down the speed of other legitimate road users. To achieve this TfL have hijacked a major proportion of the road system in London and declared it to be "Bus Lanes". Motorists who stray into the bus lanes will be fined heavily by operators of an expensive CCTV based enforcement system.

So the idea is "Reduce road capacity to reduce traffic congestion". It is a totally crackers idea! Insane!

The hours of enforcement of the bus lanes designated by TfL appear to be unrelated to the actual usage of the bus lanes. These bus lanes can lay unused for 99% of the day while motorists suffer delay and queues in the unclaimed areas of road. The other crazy decision of TfL is to project bus stop bays out into the road, thus forcing the traffic to build up behind the bus as it loads passengers. In the good old days the bus would pull into a bus stop and avoid delaying the traffic.

I ask who are the guardians of the public interest when it comes to the arbitrary and authoritarian decisions of the bloated Transport for London?

Excess spending in the NHS

2010-11-12T10:28:00.000Z

The UK National Health Service is one of the largest employers in the world in terms of number of employees. It has an enormous wages bill. It is also quite inefficient, part of the reason for that is that it is almost impossible to fire someone from the NHS. The process of industrial tribunals is unfairly and heavily biased toward the employee. Decisions are made by the tribunal panel with no responsibility for the additional cost to the public purse (i.e. you and me; the tax payers). I've come across the case where a candidate lied at the recruitment interview about his availability to work shift hours. The specific question was asked at the job interview by the the recruitment interviewers "Do you understand the hours of employment? Is there any reason why you cannot work those hours?"

When the new employee arrived he announced, within two days, that he could not work the shift pattern. He requested that the shifts should be changed to meet his personal family needs.The hours changes could not be met without imposing additional burden on the existing team. After consultation with the local HR department it was decided the man should be dismissed because he could not meet the contractual conditions (which he'd agreed to at the interview).

The man called in the union and the case was taken to Industrial Tribunal. The tribunal chairman ruled that because the hours had not been explicitly laid out in the job advertisement (it had stated "shift work"), even though they'd been explained in interview, that they found in favour of the employee. So the local Primary Care Trust is landed with a bill for a "compensation payment", plus expenses from both sides and the cost of agency staff to cover the gap created by this liar. Subsequent off the record enquiries revealed that the person concerned had an appalling reputation in his previous job, but of course that was not reflected by the references provided by his previous NHS employer.

It is small wonder the NHS administration is over-cautious about removing failing or dishonest employees.

Where has the student money gone?

2010-11-04T11:13:00.001Z

I've just been reading the latest news on university fees for students in the UK. The present government is to allow university fees to rise to £9000 a year per student. The government will then allow students to borrow money (interest paying loan) to pay this education tax.

When I was of university age the situation in the UK was an absence of course fees and a grant for living expenses. Students from non-rich families could go to university without incurring a mountain of debt for themselves or their parents. In the near future students will now accumulate a debt of close to £70,000 to attend university for a degree if living costs are taken into account. Surely in my day the would be student would have to study hard to gain good qualifications (which I didn't, my own fault) in order to gain entry to university, but at least everyone had the opportunity to go to university if they were academically up to scratch.

My big question is: "What has happened to the money?" Why are University fees so high and why has government funding of university students dried up? Have the government reduced the proportion on GDP once dedicated to educating our students? Are the University professors and establishment paying themselves so much that they pricing themselves out of the market?

I foresee students taking advantage of Internet distance learning University Degrees from places like India, where academic standards are high and costs are much lower. Why should students direct their tax payments to the costly inefficient UK Universities?

I'm really surprised that students are not out on the streets in revolt. Can they trust the politicians anyway?

Alaric

Tragic foresight in the Dangerous Donkey book

2010-10-10T11:53:00.002+01:00

I’m feeling a bit sad today. I was reading the Sunday Times article about Linda Norgrove. She was the aid worker in Afghanistan who was kidnapped by the Taliban or other locals. Linda died during a rescue attempt by

USA

Special Forces. There were reports that a suicide bomb had been detonated during the rescue attempt.

She was a British national, working for USAID, helping to improve water availability in North East Afghanistan.

There are some eerie parallels to the plot in my book “Dangerous Donkey” where one of the heroines is taken hostage in Afghanistan while she is performing private aid work for the local farmers. It is not the main plot, but it did send a shiver down my back. I feel sympathy for the Norgrove family.

Alaric

Mr Bean at the Bank of England

2010-09-27T21:02:00.004+01:00

When I heard that Mr Bean worked at the Bank of England I naturally assumed that he would not be the bungling fool played by the actor Rowan Atkinson. Sadly I fear I was mistaken. This afternoon I read in the London Evening Standard and also on the Press Association that Mr Charlie Bean (Deputy Governor) was urging savers to spend their savings to help the economy.

This stupid fool deserves to be shown the door! Fired! Thrown out!

It used to be prudent to save for one's retirement, to put money aside for a rainy day. A responsible citizen would ensure they have enough money to tide them over economic problems. No, the Bank of England proposes fiscal irresponsibility by the savers. Go on a spending spree and buy more imported goods? How on earth will that help the UK economy? Is he not content with punishing savers with artificially low interest rates? This man favours the people who spend spend spend with money saved from their ultra-low mortgage rates.

The printing of money (quantitative easing) by the Bank of England will effectively devalue our savings by devaluing the pound, now the absolute buffoon wants us to fritter away the money put aside for our futures.

The man is a Brownian Dinosaur and should be removed from post.

I'm so glad I moved my money into gold when the Bank of England was selling our reserves. Now it is "worth" four times what I paid for it. More realistically it is a glaring measure of how much the pound has fallen and how poorly the idiots at the Bank of England and the previous Labour Government managed the economy.

Alaric

Some common sense over children at last

2010-09-27T07:03:00.002+01:00

The UK coalition government are showing some common sense over the vetting of adults who make contact with children other than their own. The BBC reports on it's web site there is going to be a proper review of the overbearing draconian rules developed by the previous Labour government and its Vetting and Barring Scheme.

The clue is in the title of the scheme, it assumes all adults are guilty until proven innocent. It would have been an expensive and ineffective scheme that would help destroy the trust between adults and children. Predictably the boss of the children's charity Barnardo's, Martin Narey says the scheme is needed. That self appointed guardian organisation does more harm than good. Instead of being a well paid lobby organisation it should go back to its roots and actually provide care for orphans.

In my Teen Valour series of books I take care to show how children can develop without the need for government interference. The officialdom of the previous Labour government has help prevent good honest people from volunteering to help lead children to their development. Hopefully some balance will be restored.

Alaric

The consequences of Terry Jones

2010-09-10T12:46:00.000+01:00

Pastor Terry Jones in Florida announces the planned burning of the Koran. The cost of his ignorant blind intolerant irresponsible actions:

Bad feeling against hundred of thousands of Christians;
Recruiting Sergeant for Al Qaeda;

Shot & Wounded in Afghanistan - 3 people
Shot & killed in Badakhshan - 1 person

How much blood does this stupid man want on his hands?

Connecting the NotSpots

2010-09-05T07:47:00.001+01:00

The welsh village of Erbistock had been quoted a price of £550,000 by British Telecom to connect them to the Internet. Rutland Telecom will deliver the same for £50,000 according to a report on the BBC website. It seems that BT is not the super-efficient public guardian of the Internet that it claims to be. From my viewpoint it is still a bloated monopoly charging high fees for poor service, its latest price increases are a clear example. They chose a Chinese manufacturer of network equipment over a British one to supply the network equipment for the upgrade of their whole network. It seems it is a massive corporation which feeds off our nation rather than investing in it.

I well remember in the early days of the Internet when two BT Account Executives came to my office in the City of London and offered a dialup 16K internet connection at a special price of £150 a month. It was such a special bargain I laughed in their face! I already had in my home the same service (via Demon) for £10 a month.

It seems like history repeats itself.

Alaric

Has Barnardo's lost its way?

2010-08-27T09:11:00.000+01:00

I note this morning that the children's charity has chosen to pass comment on the school selection criteria. This venture into the political area is dangerous ground for the charity. The schools policy is something for the government to resolve. The government which was recently elected by the UK electorate. The Barnardo charity was set up by Dr Barnardo to look after the welfare of orphans and abandoned children. The charity no longer provides orphanages for these children, but has chosen to designate itself as as an un-appointed mouthpiece for all children. It is now largely an irrelevance which sucks in charity donations to keep itself running. They should either revert to their roots and focus on orphans/abandoned children or close down.

Alaric

Lewisham Council - Park land care

2010-08-17T11:08:00.000+01:00

I've just visited my publisher's home for a coffee. It is located in a pleasant part of South East London (SE4) and is blessed with a large open park area nearby. The park is called Hilly Fields. He took me for a walk in the park with his dogs. Our peace was disturbed by the noise of large mechanical diggers and graders gouging out the ground in the middle of the level ground used by football players. At weekends the local soccer club uses the area for providing training of around 50-60 children. That soccer club has been active for at least 15 years. During the week a lot of people use the area for casual football playing. The place is a valuable social asset for the crowded urban area.

So why has the council allowed the football area to be dug up? Well, at the end of the school summer holidays and the real start of the soccer season, they are allowing the construction of a cricket pitch! No doubt to avoid damage to the cricket pitch they'll ban the use of the area by footballers. Football is far more popular than cricket at the site. I wonder who was consulted before the work was allowed to destroy the football area?

My publisher tells me the Council has also given the local girl's school to annex part of the public park land on Hilly Fields for the purposes of building "temporary" classrooms. In fact it is not the school but a limited company who own the school who have been granted permission to move in the bulldozers and take over the public parkland. Good for their profit potential, not so good for the public park land obtained for the whole community over 100 years ago.

It seems to me that Lewisham Council are being rather careless in their management of this public land. Once lost it will never be recovered. There will be some feeble excuse like "We'd really like to restore the land, but unfortunately there is no budget this year.." The public money was probably wasted on building a cricket pitch, which few people want, over the ground used by the much more popular football.

Alaric

Google Adwords

2010-08-08T16:15:00.004+01:00

We've been running a Google Adwords advert for the second book Company Mole. The click-through response rate has been low and even those click-throughs have had a poor conversion into sales. It's been costing in the region of only $30 a month, so we let it runfor a few months to see if things improved. It hasn't. We thought we'd improve the advert by providing a direct link to the Amazon Kindle page where the book is on sale..

The Google editorial staff have decided that the shown URL link and and destination URL link are not related, though if they'd taken the effort to actuually check they would rapidly realise there is a very strong link.

Given the poor performance of the Adwords and Google's careless rejection of the revised advert we've as a business have decided to give Google Adwords a miss for a while. It's their loss, not ours. We're diverting the advert funding for this and our other Adword adverts to other marketing.

Alaric

Dumnosity Quotient

2010-08-08T08:21:00.000+01:00

At the start of the year some elderly relatives were visiting the UK. One of them suffered an injury which necessitated an immediate operation and a hospital stay. Fortunately reciprocal government health cover arrangements covered the cost of the treatment. What wasn't covered was the cost of the accommodation whilst this elderly relative had to fully recover before being able to fly home. The couple had sufficient funds, but no credit history in this country. To help out I purchased, on their behalf, a SIM only monthly mobile (cell) phone contract. It avoided the complexity and expense of setting up a land line for a phone to their rented accommodation when they had no credit record. I gave them a spare mobile phone handset.

Things progressed well and the couple were able to return home about a month ago. I was in the position of being able to cancel the mobile phone contract with 30 day's notice. I tried to log onto the mobile phone company web site to cancel the contract. Even though I'd regularly been able to use the site before I couldn't because they'd chosen to impose the requirement to enter a verification code which they'd sent to a switched off mobile phone buried in a suitcase the other side of Europe.

So I telephoned the Help Desk at the mobile phone company and said "I want to cancel". After a couple of security questions I explained the background and said I was giving 30 days notice. "No problem Sir. We'll send you a final bill in 30 days. By the way would you be interested in Broadband to your home?" In reaction to their polite handling of the query so far, I said: "Not really, I already have two DSL links, but your guys can contact me and discuss. My own personal mobile phone is still remaining with you guys." The Help Desk clerk said someone would call me the following day and we finished the transaction there.

I didn't receive any calls about broadband from the mobile phone company, not on my home phone, my business phone nor my main mobile phone. The mobile phone company has all of those numbers. No! The dumb sales guys called the mobile phone I'd cancelled. How do I know? I called the relatives and asked them to switch on the mobile phone for ten minutes. It reported five "missed" calls from the mobile phone company the day after the cancellation. It looks like their dumb Help Desk system ignored/couldn't record my warning I'd not be using the temporary mobile phone again.

It deserves a high Dumnostity Quotient Score.

Alaric

Amazon Kindle - publisher commission

2010-08-02T21:31:00.000+01:00

I've just noticed the commission rates on Kindle Amazon.com. If we load up an e-book in Kindle format on Amazon.com we can retain 70% of the sale price. The remainder goes to Amazon. As a consequence we were able to bring the e-book price right down and still maintain a reasonable margin. However if someone from outside of the USA downloads the same e-book we as publishers are only given 35% commission on that sale.

The "effort" on the part of Amazon for the sale is no different if the customer is based in the UK or the USA, there is no logic with their pricing.

Ho hum, I guess we'll have to increase the price of the Kindle versions of the book to make a reasonable recovery rate. So the customer suffers. There are other e-book distributors who do not play games with commission rates, we'll make the lower price version available there in other e-book formats. Amazon should learn that in the digital book world the logistics equation is rather more flexible.

Alaric

Similar Terms

2010-08-02T08:11:00.004+01:00

It looks like David Cameron touched a nerve with his comments on Gaza being turned into a prison camp by the Israeli blockade. The ageing Shimon Peres has shown a similar lack of diplomacy when he confuses anti-Israeli sentiment with anti-Semite activities. They are similar terms, but have very different meanings.

I have a number of Jewish friends, but the activities of the Israeli's in Gaza and other occupied territories appals me. No amount of Israeli spin is going to change the evidence on the ground.

Alaric

Notes on Dangerous Donkey

2010-08-01T15:04:00.000+01:00

Dangerous Donkey will be loose on the streets soon. No doubt it will attract reviews. Some of those reviewers may have read the two earlier books in the Adam Cranford series; Teen Valour and Company Mole. One of the first things to note is Dangerous Donkey is considerably shorter than the two previous volumes. It is not for want of plot ideas in the book. There were many more concepts and scenes I wanted to add to the book. However feedback from the readers of the two earlier books was that the younger readers would prefer a shorter book. We decided to meet those observations.

As always, a lot of research went into this book to find some of the tools and apparel used by Adam Cranford. I’m considering writing a separate companion book giving a lot more detail on the underlying technology and the design of some of the buildings, but as always that will depend on reader reaction. If there is enough interest I’ll do that.

In this third book we see a darker side to Adam as he becomes more familiar with his new power and wealth. Toward the end we see the Council of Elders beginning to wonder what kind of beast they have created in the shape of Hermes. In the book I examine how a teenager might react if his family was subject to attack from his enemies. Finally you see Adam manipulating other people in order meet his view of the world. In a way he is beginning to lose his innocence. I also take another swipe at the Banks, their rocky business foundations and lack of morals.In the victory of good over evil I suggest ways we could help the poorer countries of the world avoid producing more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

Add to the plot the greater exposure of his female friends as heroines.

Alaric

Royal Mail - A cut too far!

2010-07-31T05:40:00.000+01:00

I was reading a BBC News report this morning on a Royal Mail proposal to drop county names from the postal address in the UK. They've cut collections and deliveries by half during the past few years At the same time they have increased postal charges way above inflation. Now they propose to cut counties?!

Using just a post code and street name/number may work in majority of cases, but it is a recipe for wrong and delayed deliveries. What on earth do Royal Mail gain from this latest idea?

Alaric

Technology ghosts

2010-07-30T05:43:00.000+01:00

It spooks me every time it happens. I know what is happening, but the ghostly voice still sends a shiver down my back. I refer, of course, to my TomTom satnav device. Nowadays I'm mostly to be found in the centre of a city and usually use public transport to get around. So, I don't often have to often use the satnav device for my car. However, if I go somewhere unusual I'll take the satnav unit into the car, plug it into the power and let it quietly tune into the satellites as it recharges its batteries. Sometimes I use it to check the route if I'm uncertain. Once home I'll switch it off and chuck it on a shelf for a few weeks until the next trip requiring navigational assistance.

It seems that pressing the off button does not totally power down the satnav unit. It will continue to operate in an almost quiescent mode, but showing no signs of life. As the internal batteries drain they gradually get close to a level of electrical exhaustion. For some reason at that point the satnav unit autonomously switches itself back on and attempts to navigate the last chosen route. Suddenly while I'm quietly working in my study, a ghostly voice will drift down from the shelves above my desk advising me to: "Turn left at the end of the road".

This suggests a plot for a future book... people being monitored in their own homes by devices they thought they'd switched off.

Alaric

A first order for Dangerous Donkey

2010-07-26T12:01:00.000+01:00

My new book Dangerous Donkey (ISBN 978-1-907250-07-1) is not due to be released as the printed version until the middle of next month. We had the first pre-order drop into our email box this morning from one of the major book distributors in the UK They are not Amazon, who order their stock of my books direct from Lightning Source. You can of course already by the book via Lulu, but their Print on Demand prices make that an expensive option. I do have some copies available for reviewers.

Strangely enough we also have had a surge of orders for Teen Valour (the 1.3.1 edition) via Lightning Source. It is good to see things moving.

Alaric

iPad replacement for $35!

2010-07-24T09:07:00.000+01:00

An interesting development reported in the BBC news. The Indian government has announced a touch screen tablet computer that will cost $35. From the news article it looks a little bit primitive, but it is early days yet. This announcement reminds me of back in the 1970 when we were amused by the cheap cars by an obscure Japanese company called Honda. If this type of technology is available becomes available at those prices it will be another nail in the coffin of the printed book publishers.

I understand the new device will work for left-handed people too.

Alaric

Teen Valour review

2010-07-23T23:58:00.005+01:00

I've just seen an interesting review of Teen Valour by a young lady. She rightly spotted the editing errors of the early edition in her free review copy. Those faults have since been remedied. However, she then went on to question the realism of some of the action scenes. She questions whether being at sea some 150 metres away from a dangerous overfall in a fast moving tidal channel in a small open boat in the dark of night would be terrifying? She possibly needs to gain some maritime experience before making such comments. Sound travels a long way at night over the sea and no one who has experienced it would treat the powerful sound of sound of an overfall lightly. I've been in that situation; you know the danger is there, you can hear it but cannot see it. There are powerful currents of water moving over underwater obstacles. It is a boat wrecking environment. She should check out the Corryvreckan some time!

Alaric

Printed publications for your business

2010-07-23T12:11:00.001+01:00

My publishers Oaksys Tech (OTL) agreed to publish my book series because they were interested in having the capability to print manuals for their clients. There were a variety situations where they have found this useful. Their business is the design, creation and operations of financial market trading floors and data centres. During such projects OTL are often asked to produce formal printed operational manuals, training material and procedure manuals. There has also been a requirement to produce documentation for Business Continuity Planning (BCP). The usual response, depending on the client, was to produce photocopied binders and/or electronic documents such as pdf files either on a CD or on an Intranet Web Site.

The principals of OTL decided that in some circumstances there was a strong business case for a properly printed and bound book. Typically this was when there would be a wide range of geographically dispersed recipients, such as in branch offices of banks and insurance companies. It is further characterised by the need to have the potential to supply high volumes at short notice to dispersed locations to a closed community.

After some investigation OTL have settled on two suppliers for printed book production. These are Lightning Source and Lulu. Lulu is targeted more at the low end market, it is easy to use and has zero set up cost other than an implied commitment to buy a proof print of the publication. For small runs Lulu.com is ideal. However its print cost per page is higher than Lightning Source. Lightning Source has a much commercial/industrial feel to its business operations and they do charge set up fees which total around £100 (GBP) per publication and the publisher is expected to stand on their own two feet when preparing print ready material. Print costs are around a penny per page for black and white. There are a range of book binding options. In the end the choice of printing company comes down to the size of the print run and the physical size of the book you want to produce. You can use both Lightning Source and Lulu to provide distribution of the printed books at a reasonable cost; you don't have to hold stocks of the books in a warehouse or store room as they both operate a print on demand business model.

If you want to sell the publication both suppliers have arrangements where the large book vendors order direct from the printer without the need for intervention by the publisher. The printers pay you the difference of the wholesale price less the the print (and distribution) costs.

Alaric

Kindle fixed

2010-07-23T07:23:00.000+01:00

The missing Kindle volume (Teen Valour) was promptly and politely fixed by the Amazon DTP support staff. Three cheers to them. It is great to be able to offer my books with the print cost stripped out.

Alaric

Complaints from readers & Libraries (UK)

2010-07-22T16:45:00.000+01:00

Recently I've been having complaints from the reading public that none of my books appear on BookArmy. I was quite surprised as the web site has a good reputation. Sure enough none of my books appear on the site, even though they appear on Amazon, Google and other book sellers site. I've had a delve around and seen that there do seem to be gaps in the publishers they allow to be displayed on their site. Perhaps there is a bug in their publishers feed handling. I've made a couple of enquiries with them and they say that it normally takes a month or so for a book to reach their electronic catalogue. I don't think they are showing any bias towards any particular publisher, but it would be good for them to confirm that they don't.

In the UK it is very difficult for new authors to get books on the shelves of libraries. In many cases the selection of books to be displayed is not actually the decision of the Library staff. In many cases this process is outsourced to external commercial organisations. These external organisations have a choke hold on the supply of books to libraries. Their published "discount" rates demanded is often higher than 50% of the list price. In fact I've seen one set at 65% of list price. In that case they demand a £10 (list price) book is sold to them for £4.50. Deduct the cost of paper, printing and distribution and you see the profit(?) margin left to the actual publisher, The publisher might then give 10% of their margin to the original author for their royalty payments. You don't often get to see new author's on the library bookshelves as a consequence of this restrictive market.

I've queried this with a couple of librarians at branch libraries and they freely admitted they have little control over what reaches the library shelves. Apparently this 'outsourcing' saves public money. I doubt it. As a trial my publishers offered the books at less then cost price to the libraries. The publishers were turned away and told the library would only take books through their book sellers "regardless of cost".

Not good! The public are losing out and local librarians are over-ruled.

Alaric

Kindle problems continue

2010-07-22T08:53:00.000+01:00

We've now got past the formatting of the books by the Kindle conversion programs, essentially by taking steps to avoid and bypass their formatting process with the use of only .mobi input. However now we find that some books, which have been previously uploaded and attracted sales, are not included in search results on the Amazon Kindle sales pages. We can see the books from the publisher pages and they are marked as "live", but the public cannot access them. The books just dropped off the (Amazon) market after a reload of an updated text body file.

We await the response from Amazon support.

Alaric

Company Mole reloaded

2010-07-20T08:41:00.000+01:00

I've just checked out the e-book version of Company Mole on Amazon Kindle. It was one created using the Amazon file conversion tools - in effect the old regime. Sure enough it contained formatting errors; so this morning I've reloaded a .mobi file prepared in the way described in yesterday's post. Hopefully in a couple of days the updated version will be available to the general public.

Alaric

Howto go from Indesign CS4 to Amazon Kindle ...

2010-07-19T17:06:00.000+01:00

So how did we get on with migrating printed documents to Amazon Kindle via Adobe's InDesign CS4?

This is a summary of the eventual route we took. It seems to work ok.

We created new versions of the books in InDesign. The books and chapters are free standing copies away from the printed InDesign versions.
We stripped out most of the formatting of text:
a. Chapter titles were reduced in size
b. Chapters were allowed on the next page (no odd/even setting)
c. We removed page numbering from the books
d. We removed the contents pages
e. We assigned new ISBN codes on the verso pages
f. We removed tables and converted to lists.
g. We created new InDesign paragraph styles for the e-books; this helps to eliminate stray styles when you load the pages into the “template”. You delete the old style and assign one of the new e-styles.
h. We eliminated special fonts like Drop Capitals at the start of each chapter.
We set up the books to a page size roughly equivalent to the e-book display size so we could get a feel for how it will look on the eventual device.
We exported to pdf for an eyeball check of the format of the new book.
Once we'd worked out all of the formatting bugs, we exported the books to .epub format from InDesign CS4
Then we imported the .epub book into Calibre software (fee/donateware) and converted it to the .mobi format using Calibre.
We then used Amazon's (free) Kindle-for-PC viewer to view the converted .mobi book (Calibre). We scanned through each page looking for formatting problems. In some cases where we'd over-ridden a style in InDesign we'd find it would not accurately convert from the indd format to .epub. The over-ride formatting would be applied to the whole paragraph. We also found some corrupt characters; these seemed to be tied to left/righthand quotation marks in the original Microsoft Word documents, but it was not consistent and had not shown up when the books were printed. We needed to delve into the innards of the epub files to fix this; this is not as hairy as it sounds!
The .epub file is essentially a bunch (directory) of HTML format files all compressed (zipped) together in one .epub file. If you can get at the HTML files you can edit them manually with HTML editing software (we used Dreamweaver software) and re-compress the files.
First rename the file extension from .epub to .zip then double click on the resulting file name in windows explorer. Windows will offer an option to expand all. Accept that ant give it a suitable place to store the expanded files. Once that has been done follow the directory tree for the expanded document a couple of levels and look in the OEBPS where you'll find the XHTML files corresponding to each of the chapters/sections in the InDesign Book.
Start up Dreamweaver, or similar editing tool, and load the XHTML file corresponding to the chapter you want to edit. Make the changes and save the file.
Continue with each chapter needing change.
Recompress the expanded directory to reform the .epub file. Change the file extension from .zip to .epub and you should then be able to reload the file into Calibre (go back to Step 6... until editing is fixed). Windows provides a free compression utility, from the file explorer right-click on the name of the directory you want to compress; select send to ... and chose the compression option.
When you are satisfied with the .mobi output from Calibre, upload it (the .mobi file) toKindle, wait two days and your e-book will be ready for sale.

InDesign CS4 to Amazon Kindle

2010-07-18T19:44:00.002+01:00

What a tortuous web we weave. My books are prepared using Open Office Writer and also Microsoft Office Word 2007. My editor works on them in Word 2007 and then returns the file for final editing and review. We then take the .doc files and import them (place files) into the templates in Adobe's InDesign CS4 to provide the typesetting in preparation for printing. When we are ready to print we use CS4 to produce a pdf file which is then sent to our printers. They work from the pdf file to print out book blocks. We use CS4 because it is great at producing accurate output and it also is great at getting rid of the various print fonts that Microsoft Word seems to want to maliciously slip into the body of your text without your knowledge and consent.

That all works fine.

Now we decided to publish an E-book version of our publications, Boy, does the immaturity of this branch of technology show or what?! Eventually we decided to use Amazon's Kindle format as a distribution platform. It takes a wide range of input formats and converts them to a Kindle format of e-book. The process is pretty slick, but has some bugs.

Firstly there is no point in using the pdf files prepared for a print house. The e-book readers are no great at handling all the different styles employed in paper printing. The book layout really has to be much more primitive. InDesign CS4 nicely produces an e-book format called .epub. That format is used by many ebook readers, but it isn't used by Kindle. So the first thing we did was to produce a different edition of our books for the e-versions, We stripped out text justification, tables etc ready for the ebooks. We removed things like always starting the next chapter on an an odd-numbered page. It just isn't relevant for modern day generic ebooks. Sure you can do this type of formatting for e-book readers, but you'd be tied to the physical screen size of a particular reader.

Great - now all we have to do is to zap out a pdf file and upload it to Amazon, then wait 2 days and Voila your e-book is available to the public. That is what appears to happen, but it doesn't. Your pdf file can look just fine on visual inspection, but when it is shredded by the Amazon conversion programs, odd things can happen. (I think the cause of this lays back somewhere in Microsoft Word.) We had Chapter headings mysteriously disappear from the e-book. When I inspected downloaded files from Amazon, the xhtml code generated by the Amazon programs things started looking worse. Lines of text that should have been continuous were terminated with a [br /] html code for a new line. In some cases where the [p ... /p] paragraph markers were expected they wouldn't be present. What was worse was that there was no apparent pattern to the failures. The pdf & InDesign stuff looked fine, it certainly printed okay.

Amazon's help files suggested that you manually edited the HTML code and then reloaded it on to their site. If your book is 180,000 words long that just isn't workable.

After a Sunday spent investigating a way around this we think we've found a way through!! I'll resubmit the upload to Amazon, and let you know how it works out.

Here's a hint.

Alaric

I should have guessed it was too easy!

2010-07-18T16:06:00.000+01:00

I'm currently battling with the Kindle file conversion facility on the Amazon web site. When converting from pdf files I seem to get unpredictable results. Most of the output looks good, but as you look more closely there are some bad formatting errors by the Amazon Kindle programs. We've temporarily pulled the Kindle version of our books while we sort this out. Making use of Calibre looks promising at present.
Alaric

Kindle - Teen Valour

2010-07-17T12:46:00.000+01:00

I was pleased to noted that within a couple of hours of Teen Valour being added to Amazon's Kindle books someone has made a purchase. It spurs me on to have Company Mole available through this route. There will be some cost to have the book reformatted, but it will be worth it in the long run. It will have the benefit of keeping the costs down to the followers of the Adam Cranford series. I'm delighted that we can save people around $9 or more by avoiding the printing costs and shipping costs.When Teen Valour goes high volume, I'll be able to justify high volume print runs; that will allow us to reduce the cost of the printed book to the public.

I was a bit concerned about making the book available only through Amazon, but they do provide free software for PC's and other readers such as the iPad that will allow Kindle books to be read in many places. Sure it means that Amazon will receive a commission, but they are after all providing the infrastructure.

Alaric

Kindle and proof prints.

2010-07-16T16:11:00.002+01:00

We just setup my first book Teen Valour on Amazon's Kindle website. I must say it was a very easy process, though we did get the InDesign CS4 whiz-kid to prepare a new layout for the e-book. We eliminated a lot of the format and the contents page as the viewers on the market don't always handle those consistently. Freed from the costs of producing printed books we have been able to reduce the price significantly. My publisher does not believe in charging the same price as the list price of the printed book.

I'm just inspecting the first proof print of Dangerous Donkey. It is looking good. I think the smaller format will be much more to the liking of the younger readers. Despite the book going through at least four edits I spotted a missing word - arrgh! Ah well, that is not too difficult or expensive to fix. We should still be able to release by the August publication date.

Alaric

Dangerous Donkey released into the public domain.

2010-07-13T11:24:00.000+01:00

After a slight delay I've released the first edition of the third book in the Adam Cranford series. It is called Dangerous Donkey. It can be purchased direct from www.lulu.com with an ISBN 978-1-907250-06-4

It is in the pocket book format and has 260 pages. This one is action packed and sees our teenage hero sky diving over the mountains of Afghanistan to rescue a friend. Lulu also provide an ebook version.

In a few weeks I'll be releasing the book in a different format and it will be available through major book sellers such as Amazon and B&N. The new format will be slightly cheaper, reflecting lower printing costs.

This book follows on from Teen Valour and Company Mole.

Alaric

UK NHS - Poor Management

2010-07-13T10:27:00.001+01:00

I've just hear from a friend of mine in London about a Primary Care Trust. The interim managers (external contractors) have suddenly discovered that the local PCT is exceeding its budget. So now they are in panic mode, rapidly trying to slash costs, which if they'd managed them properly in the first place would not be a problem. They are trying to cut costs by reducing the number of nurses and also recruiting lower grade nurses where an essential vacancy occurs. For this particular clinic the funding was supposed to have been ring fenced.

The result is that the senior experienced nurses are voting with their feet and leaving what was a highly skilled and stable team that has taken years to build up. The management response, stopping any temporary staff needed to cover sickness/maternity leave, bullying to get the senior nurses to agree to unrealistic rotas and expecting nurses to work unpaid overtime to fill the gaps. These senior "managers" are paid four times what the nurses are paid. The managers have no clinical skills or experience of nursing.

It is ironic that this particular service attracts payments from other PCT for treating "out of area" patients. The "income" is twice the running cost of the Department. The whole service is funded by external commissioners and there are agreed service levels. If there are not sufficient nurses on site, the public will be turned away and their ailments not treated.

I say - fire the managers and not the nurses! Just another demonstration of the difference between managers and administrators. These people are definitely not managers, but probably can craft excellent powerpoint slide shows.

Alaric

Hotmail shenanigans

2010-06-26T11:06:00.001+01:00

I'm part of the e-book drop scheme for Coalition Troops. It is organised by Ed Patterson. He collates the email addresses of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq who have requested to join the scheme. Participating authors then send invitations by email to the troops for a free download of e-books versions written by those authors. The troops normally visit www.smashwords.com to use a voucher code to download the books free of charge.

I've discovered recently that hotmail is rejecting a lot of emails either wholly or to the junk queue of individual email accounts. I've been wondering why the level of response to the programme has been quite low, but checking through the list of addresses it turns out a lot of them are using hotmail.com. The microsoft email system may be free but it's crude email filtering means that opportunities like the E-book drop scheme are being lost to the account holders. Sometimes free is not cheap!

Alaric

University Student Fees

2010-06-21T08:52:00.000+01:00

When I was of unviersity age life was a lot easier. If you obtained good GCE A-Level examination results you could obtain a place in University. There were no University fees and if your parent's income was low the student was given a grant to pay living costs.

The current tertiary education system is a massive con trick! Now students have to pay fees and do not get a grant. It is in effect taxation of students. Part of the con trick is to loan the students money to pay/living costs. That "loan book" is then sold to investment bankers who then recover the loan money from the students. In other words the tax money is spent now, but paid back later.

Universities are now pushing for annual fees of at least £7,000 per student. This is totally outrageous. Most students will only get a few hours lectures a week in what is effectively a 30 week year. Universities in the UK are very poor value for money.

I wonder if the need to have increased fees is not unconnected to the massive salaries now paid to the professors and senior management of the universities? Over recent years these payments (& pensions) have risen in an uncontrolled fashion. Rather that double the Student Fees we should see a halving of the salaries paid for the professorial sinecures.

Alaric

Shouldn't do that to a camel

2010-06-16T10:57:00.001+01:00

It's amazing how a slightly screwy headline can attract the attention. If I'd written Russians declare war on Apple it may have the same level of attraction. It does seem that the Russian antivirus software house Kaspersky is doing just that! Last night I tried to browse the www.apple.com website only to find that the site was "hanging". At first I suspected my own network, but there was no problem with other sites. Then I thought maybe apple.com was getting some form of DDOS, but when I used a Linux computer to browse the site there was an immediate display of the Apple home page.

Eventually my suspicions fell onto the recently installed business version of Kaspersky 2010 Internet Security. After some hunting around on google I eventually found the cure on Kaspersky's own technical forum. To access to the www.apple.com website you have make a specific entry in the depths of the configuration screens to tell Kaspersky that www,apple.com is a trusted site!! The are no problems with any other big name sites. I didn't have the problem with earlier versions of their product on the same PC.

I wonder if there is a software developer working in a dark room in the Moscow offices of Kaspersky who has a grudge against Apple? I have a great respect for Russian software, but this has put a serious dent in my confidence in the impartiality of developers of the Kaspersky software.

It may be useful as a sub plot in book number 4 of the Adam Cranford series though!

Alaric

Financial Services Authority

2010-06-15T08:51:00.000+01:00

I've just had one of those letters from the UK Financial Services Authority warning me that I may be targeted by Boiler Room Fraudsters. What a laugh! I've been having calls from Boiler Rooms once every couple of weeks for the past four years. They usually mention my shareholding in Pilkington Glass that I had briefly a few years ago. The calls are obvious and a source of entertainment for me. I love extending the fraudster's phone bills and where possible try to get them to post me big heavy glossy brochures, it must cost them a fortune.

Sadly though the Financial Services Authority failed to do their job in spotting the biggest fraudsters of all, namely the Bankers. I lost far more of my savings (and interest payments) as a direct consequence of the FSA being asleep at the helm when the bankers were driving their own ship onto the rocks. The boiler rooms are small fry compared to the bankers.

Alaric

Rolling back the repression

2010-06-15T08:20:00.001+01:00

It is excellent news that the new coalition government in the UK is rolling back the repressive government introduced the previous Nu-labour government. They are cancelling the child abuse vetting scheme. Don't get me wrong, we need to protect children from abuse, but the way the scheme was proposed was authoritarian and pretty ineffective in achieving the desired end result. The way it was proposed was to treat all people as guilty until proven innocent. Volunteers could have been banned on the basis of unproven gossip. What a waste of public money it would have been.

They were proposing to register 9,000,000 people rather than the actual previous offenders. The Labour establishment were deaf to complaints about the proposed "service". Of course the other good piece of news was the scrapping of the National Identity register and also the national child register (Contactpoint).

Alaric

Massacre in Cumbria

2010-06-03T05:14:00.000+01:00

I feel great sadness at the deaths of 12 people in Cumbria UK at the hands of a deranged gunman. This will be a great tragedy for the families of the innocent victims involved in these shootings.

Alaric

Twitter Censorship

2010-05-31T10:12:00.005+01:00

An amazing consequence of the Israeli State killing 10 civilians on the Turkish relief flotilla to Gaza is that Twitter appears to be taking action to prevent the use of the keywords "Israel", "Flotilla", "Gaza". If you enter other keywords in Twitter you get a response fairly quickly. If you try to use "Israel", "Flotilla" or "Gaza" there is no response on the Twitter Search.

Coincidence? Other people are noticing this. Here and here, here, here

Alaric

The consequence of false fears

2010-05-30T18:30:00.002+01:00

The Chief Scout of the UK Scout Association, a TV adventure presenter, Bear Grylls is running a series of events to encourage adults to volunteer to take part in leading tween and teen children in adventurous scouting activities. It seems that the Scout Association is having problems recruiting enough adults interested in leading Scout Troops.

From my view point, one of the main contributory factors to this reluctance to take part in leading scouts is the attitude of of national and local government officials. Regulation after regulation has been introduced which treats any person showing an interest in leading children as likely criminals until proven innocent by a series of intrusive and ineffective official examination. Add to this this risk averse nature of officialdom where simple activity plans have to go through layer after layer of stifling and unnecessary evaluations. In essence, voluntary youth leaders are treated with a barrage of mistrust and a lack of respect.

I used to be involved in the Scout Association many years ago, but no way would I involve myself to the indignities of the present vetting procedures. This is not really the fault of the Scout Association. It is the poorly thought-out legislation introduced by the recent Labour government and also nameless jobsworth officials in the various unelected Quango's and local authorities. They love to exercise authority, but shirk the responsibility of causing this negative atmosphere in the youth leadership environment.

The insurance companies also bear some of the responsibility. Their risk averse approach leads them to placing unnecessarily high insurance premiums on any activity that is not padded in cotton wool.

I'm a responsible person, I've raised a family and guided my kids through University and they are on their way to raising their own families. It is ridiculous that people like me would be treated with suspicion if we offered to help out in the youth community. It is in essence disrespect of elders.

Alaric

Further drain on UK economy

2010-05-24T06:53:00.000+01:00

It is interesting to see the rumours that Infosys, the giant India based offshoring company is proposing to buy the UK IT Consultancy called Logica. Apparently the large government departments are now not keen to be seen to "Offshore" work to companies like Infosys.

It is sad really, I remember working for a Logica Consultant, who was embedded in the UK Civil Service, on a major government project over 40 years ago. This is more evidence that these India outsourcing companies are draining the UK economy of skilled job.

It is amazing that the previous Labour government used to promote offshoring as good for the UK economy.

Alaric

Low cost e-shop options.

2010-05-18T20:16:00.000+01:00

Most authors rely on their publisher to handle sales of their books, but circumstances may arise where the author wants to be able to offer their books for sale on the Internet. One method of achieving this is to rent a “Shopping Cart” service from an ISP. This is then tied into some form of Credit Card acceptance which is activated on the shopping cart. The process of initiating the on-line shop is not terribly complicated, but one can easily end up paying $30-$60 a month in service fees.

Nowadays there are some cheaper options:

If you open a business account with PayPal there is no regular fee for their basic service. It allows you to send payment requests/Invoices to anyone with an email address. The addressee can then settle the payment, either through their existing PayPal account or using a Credit/Debit card without having to register for a PayPal account. One benefit of PayPal is that they handle foreign currency conversions. Their fee is in the region of 3.5% per transaction.

A standard PayPal business account allows you to generate shopping cart “buttons” to embed in your website (or email). If you know some basic HTML coding, you can set up a shopping cart in less than 20 minutes. Finally add a “checkout button” using the code automatically generated by PayPal and you are in business.

I’ve added some examples in the previous blog entry. In the next blog post I'll demonstrate how to use Google Forms to capture Sales orders. If you want a preview have a look at my site.

Alaric

PayPal coding examples

2010-05-18T20:05:00.004+01:00

Here's a cart button:
Here's a checkout button:

The theme for Book 4 of the Adam Cranford Series?

2010-05-16T11:26:00.003+01:00

I think I've found the theme for Book 4 of the Adam Cranford series. Whilst each of the books has action adventure there is an underlying plot for teenagers (and adults) to consider.. In Teen Valour I touched on population control. In Company Mole it was illegal drugs. The recently written Dangerous Donkey mentions the issue of green fuels.

For the fourth book I'm thinking about looking at the issue of global water shortages and what mankind can do to recover water in the planet. As part of my initial research I came across a video on Re-greening the desert. It is fascinating stuff. It shows with a little knowledge and some physical effort it is possible to fight back against desertification. Here's another link from the same source. My wife would kill to own this garden,

Alaric

Technology Clash

2010-05-12T10:31:00.000+01:00

We use Adobe's InDesign CS4 to prepare the books I write for publishing. The process is a bit counterintuitive, but produces good results. Imagine my feelings when I discover that having used InDesign on my PC yesterday that the prouct no longer works on the same PC. It would not load. After much experimentation I uninstalled and reloaded the software. The joys of finding the original DVD's last used a couple of years ago. Then finding the earlier software for the serial number because CS4 was an upgrade.

I rebooted the PC - InDesign would not restart! To cut a long story (5 hours) I tracked down an obscure reference on the Internet. My PC also has Rapport software provided by my bank to protect my web browser connection when using on-line banking.

Removing Rapport cured the problem.

Alaric

Dangerous Donkey is at the Editors

2010-05-10T18:10:00.001+01:00

I've just released the manuscript to my editor Autumn Conley. She's a treasure! Here's an extract from the start of the book.

Dangerous Donkey Technology

2010-05-10T11:08:00.000+01:00

In writing the Adam Cranford books I always try to research a lot of modern and exotic technology and incorporate it within the story. I try not to put too much detail and thus bore people, but I provide enough hints to encourage people to do some research on the internet. Many of the technologies mentioned are likely to have a significant effect on people's future lives. I well remember watching a (now dead) presenter called Raymond Baxter on a BBC television programme called Tomorrow's World. He was demonstrating a technology where he had two small sheets of glass about 15 cms square, the glass sealed at the edges contain a liquid. He was demonstrating that it was possible to change the light transmission ability of the fluid by applying an electric current to wires attached to the glass. He told us the technology was called Liquid Crystal. My reaction as a young boy was "huh, so what?" If only I'd known then that the technology would be developed to have a major impact on our lives, such as the LCD screen I'm using to display the text I'm typing now!

There is a lot of fascinating technology research happening right now. It will have a similar impact on our future lives. I just hope that somewhere there will be a boy or girl who reads my books and as a result gains interest in this new research. Maybe they will go on and develop great uses for the technology.

Alaric

Finished at last

2010-05-08T15:06:00.000+01:00

I've just finished the first draft of the third Adam Cranford book. The provisional title is Dangerous Donkey. I'll have to go through all the editing of course, but I'm quite pleased with the ending of the book.

Alaric

Book 3 Adam Cranford series

2010-05-05T08:26:00.001+01:00

Today I shall sit down and sort out the title for the third book. I'm writing the penultimate chapter so soon I'll have to track down my hard working editor Autumn Conley to knock the narrative into shape.

If anyone wants to have a peek at the new book, please get in contact.

Alaric

Published Author Network

2010-05-05T08:21:00.000+01:00

I've just transferred over from ning.com to the Publisher Authors' Network. It is set up by Shelagh Watkin's who is an author and editor based in the UK.

It seems reasonably active so let's hope it goes well.

Alaric

Westminster Equities

2010-05-04T12:25:00.001+01:00

I just had another unsolicited phone call from Westminster Equities. Their caller Id was withheld and the person on the other end of the line had a mid-atlantic accent. The usual noise of a call centre in the background. These people always claim to have a previous association with me and then go on to try and push some kind of "Research Report" on equities in my direction. I always tell them never to call again, but they come back with monotonous regularity. I wonder if these are the same people who are listed by the FSA as a boiler house operation.

I regard Boiler Houses as being the financial equivalent of Pubic Lice (Crabs). A blood sucking irritation that can be difficult to remove.
I suppose that they must be legit (ROFL) because they list as clients: Rolls Royce, BP, Carphone Warehouse, Cairn, Sibir, Vodafone, Volkswagen, Nokia. I wonder how those robust organisations would react to that news.

Alaric

Research - it takes time

2010-04-30T09:36:00.000+01:00

Writing books often takes an enormous amount of research by the author. I’m no exception. I spent all of yesterday researching the details of poison darts and also mobile phone (cell) encryption. Eventually I’ve decided on a combination of two poisons on the darts used by the Guild of Sisters. One of those poisons (Batrachotoxin) is so toxic that 0.1 of a milligram is lethal to a grown man. The other (PhTx3) has some nasty side effects affecting men only. Let’s hope that the Sisters are merciful in Book 3.

The other item of research is independent encryption of mobile phone calls. The mobile phone (cell) GSM calls are already encrypted during transmission from the cell phone to the telephone company mast, but bright people are beginning to publicise ways in which those calls can be decrypted by third parties. I was shown a micro-SD card, about the size of my little finger nail, that plugs into Nokia phones to allow end to end (peer to peer) encryption of calls. The card does the processing of the encryption and helps to keep the whole thing secure. It is called SecuVoice. It costs north of £700 to equip your handset, but it does mean that it will give a hard time to anyone who might want to listen in on your call. That includes authorities who might have the ability to connect direct to the Telecom provider's systems.

Alaric

Secure USB Dongle

2010-04-29T08:11:00.004+01:00

I was at an IT Security exhibition in London yesterday. I saw an interesting device which I'm considering buying to protect my manuscripts and business documents when I'm on the move. It is a USB memory "stick" called the Security Guardian. It incorporates embedded AES-256 encryption which is pretty much standard on these devices, but it also has built in GPS and GSM so you can track the location then it is in operation. You can lock down the data on a geographic basis and also remotely delete the protected data.

You can also pair the device with a specified Laptop computer so that the laptop will not operate if the dongle is not present and is in the "approved" location. One version of the device has a built in battery that will allow three days tracking even after the laptop is switched off.

Alaric

Basis for revolution?

2010-04-21T08:34:00.000+01:00

My friend down in London was shocked to find that his neighbour's four bedroom house recently sold for nearly £600,000. He'd bought his place about 25 years ago as a home for about £33,000. That means while the value of the building as a home is unchanged the price has changed on average 12% every year during that period. It is crazy money way above the rate of inflation during that period.

What it means is that young people wanting to buy the place would have to raise a deposit of £120,000 before they could get a mortgage. The deposit alone is about four times what a young graduate would be earning in his/her mid-20's. When my friend bought his house he tells me that the total price was about three times his annual salary as a computer analyst. How on earth are young people going to be able to afford a home for their families?

The stealth tax called Student Loans makes matters worse. Young people are now expected to get themselves into debt at the start of their careers to pay the stealth taxes called University fees and accommodation costs. If they already have the burden of the Student Loan how on earth are these young people expected to raise the money for a deposit? In my early days, if you worked hard and passed your exams you could go to university and get a government grant to pay for your living expenses. There were no university fees. In effect the country invested in its graduates. Now, in effect, students have to pay tax to go to university. It is a deferred tax called a loan but it is still a tax. This is the result of continued dishonesty by successive governments who have shifted the support away from students.

The whole problem is not helped by the inefficiencies and greed of the Universities who expect an ever increasing cash supply to feed their bloated salaries for very short working hours.

Alaric

A different life

2010-04-19T10:57:00.001+01:00

I continue the process of writing the three volume of the Adam Cranford Series of books. As part of that process I've been doing a lot of research into the Pitcairn Islands. This is a remote place. The nearest International Airport is is over a thousand miles away. They rely on a regular boat service that arrives four times a year, and some occasional visiting yacht's, tourist boats and passing commercial vessels. Yet I discover that every house on the main island has a broadband internet link. I'll be setting part of the action on the largest island which is called Henderson Island. This island is 170 km's from Adamstown which is the populated island. Henderson is surrounded by limestone cliffs and coral. There are only a couple of passageways through the Coral. The island is now a nature reserve and is recognised by UNESCO.

I'm receiving great support from the Island Office.

Gauleiters in Nottinghamshire

2010-04-13T08:57:00.003+01:00

It seems that the officials in Newark and Sherwood District Council have suddenly become outraged that some dog owners are not clearing up dog mess in the public parks. The reaction of the Councillors is typical officialdom - they have banned all dogs from the public parks. Typical punishment of the innocent majority in a vain attempt to deal with a few offenders. If I was a dog owner in that district I'd sue the councillors for Malfeasance.

Dogs have been defecating in parks for over 100 years. Now it suddenly seems to be a problem. Laws exist to deal with people who do not clean up. Banning all dogs + owners is Collective Punishment. In one of the parks where I take my dogs (yes I do clean up) the local officialdom threatened the same in their usual anonymous way. When their next public meeting was flooded with angry dog owners there was a rapid U-Turn by the Gauleiters.

Alaric

Not invented here

2010-03-19T07:25:00.000Z

It is not often something on the web makes me laugh out loud (LOL) but just one word of a posting caught my attention. It deserves to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

"govmuppets" - describes a Government Minister blindly trying to peddle a long dead project.

Alaric

Gold and Tungsten

2010-03-08T07:55:00.003Z

Unlike the gold bar in my publisher's competition there may be be a big problem with the gold stored in places such as Fort Knox and the Bank of England. Whilst researching for the third book I came across the fact that tungsten metal has almost exactly the same density as metallic gold. Couple this with gold being currently about 800 times the price of tungsten, it offers the ideal opportunity for fraud by embedding tungsten within gold bars.

A little bit further investigation on Google there are plenty of recent stories on this subject, here's one such recent story and another. Of course you should be cautious about believing all that you see on the internet, but the precursor conditions are there and there seems to be a lot of speculation.

Couple this with the fact that a lot of people have put their money into gold following the recent sub-prime mortgage scandal. For convenience most of these people either bought a share of a gold bar stored somewhere in a gold vault or they purchased shares in the companies holding gold bars. Some of these securities are called ETFs. (Exchange Traded Funds?). The rumour is that in some cases the underlying physical gold bar security may have been re-leased several times for different securities, i.e. the total risk greatly exceed the value of the underlying asset.

Now the Perfect Storm conditions arise when people realise that the same gold bar is in fact gold plated tungsten. The fake bar weighs almost exactly the same as real gold. suddenly a whole bunch of paper securities are totally valueless.

The rumour further extends in that the governments of India, Russia, China have been buying gold bars to soak up all of the excess dollars that they've accumulated, but you've guessed it .... So now they are carefully testing every bar and refusing any that is not as it should be. So if a western bank wants to sell gold to the expanding economy countries it will not be possible to pass the fake gold, thus the ratio of fake gold/real gold in their vaults will increase.

A relatively simple electronic test can spot the fake gold. Of course the UK & USA Governments could easily quash this story as a rumour if they employed an independent team to check each gold bar in the reserves and other major Banks. Sadly though, who would believe Gordon Brown if he stood hand on heart and said our gold is ok?

Alaric

Adam's in Afghanistan

2010-03-02T08:41:00.000Z

I've just landed Adam Cranford in Afghanistan to rescue some one important. Let's hope the Coalition Troops don't send any friendly fire in his direction.

Alaric

New edition of Company Mole

2010-03-01T07:45:00.002Z

There's going to be a revised edition of Company Mole. We've just got the re-edited version back from our new copy editor Autumn Conley and she has picked up loads of errors. The new edition goes to press in the next ten days or so. Curses on Thomas the original editor.

I've been running a competition to win a solid gold bar for the Adam Cranford marketing. It was surprising how poor the response was to an advert in the regional press. We are monitoring the initial response website, so have pretty clear figures. Still it makes a change from the London Evening Standard who actually banned one of my early adverts because it contained the word "Teen". Political correctness gone mad. I did have a great laugh when the Evening Standard was sold for 50 pence to a Russian Business Man. It is maybe a sign that regional newspapers are effectively dead.

Alaric