Hooptedoodle #286 - A Brief Journey into the Unknown

Saturday was the day for my exciting trip to Perth & Kinross, which is unusually exotic for someone who doesn't get out much. Since I am not too confident about the last bit of the route, I transferred the satnav from my car into the van and loaded up the route. It is a very ancient Garmin Nuvi 250 - the only reason I persist with it is because I invested in a lifetime supply of map updates. Whether it is for my own lifetime or the device's is a matter of moot - I could never raise the courage to find out.

I was aware that there would be a strange bit in the middle of the run, since, though my maps were updated pretty recently, they predate the September opening of the new Forth road bridge, the Queensferry Crossing. I was interested to see what Martina (Ms Satnavrilova, the resident female voice in the device) would make of the lack of information.

Last time Martina had a nervous collapse was some years ago, on a very wet day in Inverness, when she got into an eternal loop in the one-way system, and the display briefly turned psychedelic before I switched her off, out of sympathy as much as irritation.

On Saturday, probably predictably, as I left the approach road for the old bridge, the display showed that I was travelling through a clear white space (previously farm fields), which became a clear blue space as I reached the water. There was the usual image of the rear of a car in the middle, but the rest of the display was blank. Martina said, "recalculating...  recalculating... recalculating..." over and over, for about 3 or 4 minutes, and then sort of trailed off. The display still showed me heading off into the unknown - although the view outside the windscreen was of traffic, and of the road over the new bridge on a nice sunny morning, the display made me feel rather lonely - almost homesick. I felt a bit like the Voyager spacecraft heading into the depths of space.

Voyager on its way to Kinross

As I approached the other side, Martina suddenly brightened up, though she didn't sound too confident.

"In one mile," she announced, "enter roundabout...", though there was nothing on the screen apart from the little car. Soon after, the road joined the Northern approach for the old bridge, and Martina was back to her businesslike self.

"Enter roundabout, and take first exit...", and normal service was restored. It was amusing to see what had happened, but I have to say it is not comfortable to behold that you are lost at sea. Today I am updating the maps again - that should sort it. Mind you, even the latest Garmin updates still give warning of a temporary 40mph speed limit on the A720, the Edinburgh By-pass, between Sheriffhall and Musselburgh, which was removed at the end of a spell of roadworks in about 2007. I keep a careful eye on Martina for signs of dementia. As it used to say in the audit manual, Trust but Verify.

Hooptedoodle #267 - Throw It Away

Must be about time for another whinge, I think. It is a constant source of sorrow to me that our lives seem to be dominated by the need to dump items - especially electronic items - since they are no longer supported, and/or cannot be repaired economically - and buy nice new ones. This process is enforced by the dictates of fashion; the message comes across when the young man on the other end of the support line actually snorts when he learns that my telephone (or camera, or sat-nav, or radio, or washing machine, or whatever) is almost six years old. The implication is that only a dreadful dinosaur would have a product of such age - how can such a person show his face in decent, tech-savvy consumer society? Sometimes the trained engineer [HA!] on the other end of the phone has never even heard of that model number - that's how old and uncool it is.

Well, I've thought some more about this - my thoughts are heavily influenced by two recent examples which I shall share with you in a moment, if you are not quick enough to spot what's coming and move off elsewhere. I have been doing some thinking, and my thoughts are summed up by one word.

Bollocks.

Recent Example 1: Tom-Tom. My wife has a new car - well, it was new some six months ago, and it has a built-in sat-nav system. Very nice. This renders her old Tom-Tom unit, which I bought for her about 6 years ago, redundant. I spotted an opportunity for shameless personal gain here, so I offered to take the old Tom-Tom off her hands - I could happily use it in my van, which would avoid my having to switch my own Garmin sat-nav between my car and my van (which may not seem like much of a hardship, but hey).

I quite like the Tom-Tom - it's friendlier than my Garmin - only problem with it is that the maps have never been updated since the unit was bought. This is not entirely due to hopeless inertia on our part - until recently, our domestic broadband service was so poor that a download big enough to include a complete motoring map of Northern Europe would have taken days and days. In a state of some excitement, I now did some poking about online, and found that a map upgrade would cost me about £35 - fair enough - ordered it and paid by PayPal, but the download wouldn't work - nothing happened. A lot of further searching revealed an appropriate support number (Tom-Tom's website, by the way, is a nightmare - lots of closed loops where links point to the page you are already on, or the one you just came from etc). Nice young man (NYM) explained to my wife that the sat-nav unit in question is now so old that they have withdrawn support for it - in any case, the latest maps are too large to fit the on-board storage. He very kindly arranged a refund of the PayPal payment (which took a week to come through), and offered us a discount on one of their new models. Some thoughts at this point:

(1) Everything must come to an end - it is not unreasonable that Tom-Tom should withdraw support for an old model, though 6 years might be considered rather indecently quick - well, in my world anyway, but...

(2) At any point between 6 years ago (when it was bought) and some time later (when support was withdrawn) there must have been updated maps on sale which would fit the storage - it is quite likely that if I had attempted this transaction last year (say) then it would have worked nicely. This point extends into...

(3) Withdrawn or not, supported or not, there must be a number of past updates still on file which would be an improvement on the map which we have at present. Any one of these would have been useful - we could negotiate a fair price? Well - no....

(4) I realise it doesn't work like that. If they sold me a replacement map which was more modern than the one I have, but not fully up-to-date, then I might trustingly drive into a newly-constructed reservoir and be extinguished. The important point is that if this was simply a consequence of my being too mean or idle to buy an up-to-date map then that would be entirely my problem, but if they had sold me an outdated map which did not show the reservoir then things could get sticky. Hmmm.

(5) OK - accept that. What really pisses me off about this is that the decision to withdraw support for an old product is pretty much arbitrary - the owner has no reasonable idea when this might happen - and it is heavily weighted commercially in favour of forcing existing customers to buy a new replacement. All good economic sense, of course, but - even with a discount - this line of reasoning would discourage me from doing further business with such people.

(6) The way ahead - Ze Plan:  I shall happily continue to use my pre-owned Tom-Tom with its outdated maps, I shall keep my eyes peeled for unexpected reservoirs, and I shall chuckle to myself at the prospect of having diddled Tom-Tom out of - ooh - several pounds. One day you may read about the tragic accident which claimed my life.   

Recent Example 2: Pure. I am a big fan of DAB digital radio. Only concerns I have are that the hardware - certainly from the market-leading brands - is too expensive, and (I am learning) the sets are not wonderfully reliable. I had a small Pure unit which died miserably, about 2 months past the end of the guarantee period, and I rather disappointed myself by buying another Pure radio to replace it. Before she moved out of her own house into a care home, my mother had a surprising number of Pure radios - she liked to have one in each of several rooms (kitchen, sitting room, bedroom - in fact she had two in her bedroom - one on the bedside cabinet, one on the dressing table). This may seem excessive, but her sight is poor, and she cannot see to plug a radio into the mains, nor to retune it when it has moved. We bought 3 of the things for my mum as a batch after my sister died in 2013, so we have a pretty good fix on how old they are.

Mum now has just one of these radios in the care home with her, and she listens to it for many hours a day. Right - that's all very good.

I sort of acquired the rest of them, and they haven't been a huge success. One of them developed a fault with the display, so I gave it away to someone who needed an extra radio. One of the remaining two has also recently had a failure of the display - I checked the support pages on the Pure site, followed the instructions for a full power-down and reset, and the display still didn't work. I emailed them. Within a day, I got a reply from a NYM named Sam. Guess what? - the unit is so old that it is not worth getting it repaired, and they have no suitable spare parts - the best they can offer is a discount off a reconditioned product.

Does any of this sound familiar? Just a minute - they have reconditioned products? Does this mean somebody has fixed one? This seems unlikely - I doubt if they have any actual engineers - the philosophy seems to be one of unloading shiploads of new units from China - it is cheaper and easier to send out a new one than it is to attempt to test or repair an existing one - even assuming they have the skills in this country (which we may debate).

So, in addition to not buying a new Tom-Tom unit, I shall not be buying another Pure radio either - with or without discount. They can focus their marketing on customers who are more in tune [ho - see what I did there?] with their business model. I shall take my custom elsewhere.

Don't misunderstand this - young Sam is obviously a good chap - he sympathised with my situation, and said that if I change my mind (and somehow he seems to believe I will) he can supply a list of current reconditioned deals for out-of-warranty customers [dinosaurs] like me.

All a bit depressing - I'll see you down at the landfill.

I'll finish with my most treasured tale of techno-waste. Some years ago I had a friend who had retired in ill-health from his job, and had set himself up as a self-employed photographer. In his new role he did a vast amount of printing of digital photos - he had a trade card which allowed him to purchase new Canon printers so cheaply that he could now buy a brand new printer (with cartridges) for far less than the cost of a set of replacement cartridges, so it made obviously good sense for him to simply throw away his printer when the ink ran out, and buy a new one. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture?

To cheer me up, here's a smashing song, written and sung by Abbey Lincoln - Abbey is dead now - she recorded this when she was in her late 70s - her voice had gone to hell, as you will hear, but this is a piece of magic. See if it cheers you up too.

Hooptedoodle #263 - The Airline and the Krell

I was not personally impacted by the dreadful systems failure which hit British Airways and their customers a few days ago - my heartfelt sympathy is extended to anyone whose holiday was destroyed, or who suffered personal discomfort or inconvenience - all of that goes without saying. I am interested to see that there will be an independent enquiry into what went wrong - I fear that there might just be a whitewash job, or that some poor department head somewhere will be the subject of a token beheading, but in principle I look forward to seeing what they come up with. This is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. Certainly the current official explanation that it was all due to a power surge of some sort seems so laughable that it is equivalent to the old catch-all, "the dog ate my homework", though, naturally, it would be unwise to pre-judge. Already, there is sinister mention of software support having been outsourced to India - erm - right...

There was a professor from Glasgow University on BBC Radio 4 this morning, talking about the boring but rather essential matter of system resilience. He talked a lot of sense - there is not much sense around on the radio at the moment (don't get me started on the Election).

If you will forgive me, I'll plead for two quick timeouts at this point; the first is a link to a post I wrote here almost 5 years ago - The Banks and the Krell - about the increasing scope for catastrophic system failures in business, and the implications for society in general. If you care to check that out, it will save me saying a lot of the same things again. If you do not care to, that's fine too.

The Krell's computer installation in The Forbidden Planet

The second is a short story about a car I used to own. It was a 1995 Mercedes - only Mercedes I ever owned, and it was a great car - not very exciting, but dependable, and built to last. The date is significant, because it was a period when cars were starting to be equipped with automatic sensors and systems which were intended to make life simpler for the motorist, but also meant that the family car was becoming more and more of a mystery to both the owner and the supposed mechanics at his local dealership.

After a while, my Mercedes suddenly started suffering frequently from a flat battery - eventually it was every morning. The dealer replaced the battery (at Mercedes prices, of course), and checked the car over - no problems. Well - not so fast. The battery was flat again the following morning - that's the new battery with the clean new labels on it. The car went back to the dealer, who kept it for two days and returned it with a clean bill of health. Battery was flat again the next day. A terse phone call prompted the offer of another replacement battery under the terms of the warranty.

In desperation I took the car to a proper automotive electrical engineer somewhere near Prestonpans, and within an hour he had identified the problem. The car was fitted with a special sensor, the entire purpose of which was to detect if the electric windows had been left open when the vehicle was locked with the remote key. If it found that any one was open, it automatically switched in the motors which closed the windows. Great idea, eh? Unfortunately, the sensor had become faulty, so that when the car was locked the system incorrectly detected an open window, and attempted to shut it. Since the sensor was faulty, of course, the car was never satisfied that the windows were now closed, and it continued to try to close them continuously until next time it was unlocked. This doesn't mean that the motors were grinding away - the motor would not actually run if there was any resistance (another safety feature), but it would keep checking and trying - silently - and by the next morning this would have consumed enough power to flatten the battery.

The engineer rang the workshop at the Mercedes dealer and discussed the options with them; I could pay £370 + VAT for a replacement system - no other possibilities. In fact there was one other possibility, but I'll get to that.

I talked it through with the engineer. I was probably going to sell the car within a year anyway, and I had never left - nor was I likely to leave - the windows open when I locked the car. If I did, the worst result would be an open window - without the keys, the immobiliser system (Ha!) would prevent anyone pinching the vehicle.

Thus my £370 + VAT would provide a complete solution to a problem which I was unlikely to have. The alternative was simply to remove the fuse from the bit of the system wiring which supplied power to the Windows-Open-When-Locked sensor - the cost of this would be zero, of course, though I might be at risk, however unlikely, of leaving the windows open by mistake. No brainer - I went for the cheaper solution.

There are many lessons like this, but that one stuck in my mind - someone had provided a costly, over-the-top, luxurious solution to a problem which did not seem terribly serious, and - after it became defective - had thereby generated a much more significant operational problem in my use of the car. Something wrong there?

This whole industry expanded at a crazy rate - huge cleverness being applied to provide solutions to problems which might or might not exist, in the holy names of convenience and (the ultimate trump card) safety. My wife's current car knows when it's raining, knows when you need to change gear, knows when it needs to switch on the lights, knows the numbers in the phonebook on her mobile, will give you running statistics on things you never even thought of, has a built-in satellite navigation system, has an intelligent cruise control system which can be set to maintain a minimum distance to the car in front and - of course - can park itself without your assistance. It's wonderful that a piece of everyday technology can do all these things, and some of them are definitely useful, but what's going on here? If my wife's car suddenly stops running, or if the doors decide they are not going to let her get in, she is well and truly stuck. There is no question of opening the bonnet and spraying WD40 on the plug leads, or improvising a temporary fanbelt replacement. She is stuck. All she can do is phone up on her mobile, and get a mechanic with a laptop to come when he can, and diagnose what the problem is.

Righto - our cars are very unlikely to conk out, compared with cars we've had in the past - this is the power of technological progress - but if they do then the degree of well-and-truly-stuckness may be of a different order from what we have seen in the past. Not only has our vehicle let us down, an event which we will not have expected and for which we will not have a back-up plan, but our greatly diminished residual experience of coping with emergencies, of applying flexibility and adaptability, of having contingency margins built into our Plan for Today, the unfamiliarity of having to switch on our own lights and wipers, of getting to Lancaster without having a robot tell us what to do - none of these things is going to be a big help.

To sum up - the technology looks after us wonderfully well, but if anything fails we can be more desperately exposed than we used to be.

Consider the mobile phone networks. Presumably your local (or national) service could be impacted by a power surge (surely not?), or a malware attack - it is even possible for natural events like unaccustomed levels of sunspot activity to cause technology headaches. It could happen. If it does, how many kids will be out of touch - lost somewhere on the way home from school? - how many mothers are going to be running around screaming OMG? - how many calls will not be made to rescue sevices in response to genuine emergencies? - how many online banking transactions will fail because the text message to the mobile with the passcode will not work? - how clever is your Apple Pay app going to be in the supermarket? Does any of us have any idea what we could do, in the event of what might be a fairly routine and low-level failure?

Well - you might, quite possibly - but I know that I don't, and I've thought about it - I used to have to think about things like this in my old job. My 2012 post about the Krell was mostly about the fact that we take these advances for granted, and we very quickly forget what it is they are  doing for us, and what it was that we used to do for ourselves before they arrived. We do not understand how the business which employs us works, because normally we do not need to; we do not know how to spell "laughs out loud" in full, nor how to read a map, because we no longer do things like that - there's no demand for that sort of knowledge.

If your airline of choice has a major systems collapse, and they do not seem even to know what it is, or what caused it, you may not find this reassuring. One day, aircraft may be so complex that only the onboard flight systems know how to fly them - with who knows what level of outside communication with global systems. In a world where, to save money, we are trying to achieve UK passenger trains manned by a single individual, how long will it be before the flight crew on a plane are just there to serve the coffee and make sure the computer is happy? At what stage will progress mean that they are no longer able to land the stupid thing without the technology?

Do you feel lucky, punk?

Hooptedoodle #250 - Steve Jobs Says No

This is eventually going to develop into a gentle whinge, so whingeophobes should leave smartly. As a background project - more of a private ambition, really, I intend to improve my knowledge of the Thirty Years War sometime soon. I know some bits of the history and some of the names, but my line of thinking is thus:

This was an important period of European history, I don't know very much about it, and I think I probably should know a bit more. It might make me a better, more rounded person (unlikely) and I might find it interesting (less unlikely).

I have Peter H Wilson's highly praised The Thirty Years War - Europe's Tragedy, which I've skimmed and which looks very good. I bought it about 2 years ago. The main problems have been:

(1) The last two years have been a bit hectic for me - very little free time or peace of mind to settle to it, because - with the best will in the world...

(2) ...it is a big book. Substantial. It is a serious piece of work, to be approached with appropriately monastic dedication. Anything less would be selling both me and Dr Wilson short.

So I decided that I might be better to start with something shorter and higher level, so I can find some kind of timeline or skeleton on which I can hang a more detailed study. This is the Foy Approach to problem solving - start with some one-liners and a nice map or two, and then find where are the hooks and trapdoors to get closer to the details.

So I purchased CV Wedgwood's volume on the subject - a bit long in the tooth now, maybe, since it dates from 1938, and our collective view of Germany has evolved a little since then, but Dame Veronica is always a comfortable read, I find, if somewhat over-partial at times. I bought a paperback, American edition which set me back some £12 or so. It is smaller than Wilson's book, and I have actually started reading it. Good so far. The plan is, once I've finished it, to return to the worthy Europe's Tragedy with a few more lights on and greater enthusiasm.

One (debatable) brainwave was the idea that I might augment my efforts with an audiobook - I listen to audiobooks a lot when I'm out in my van, so I thought that might be useful. We might discuss how an audiobook would work without any maps to hand, but you can see what I was thinking. So I went to the excellent website of Librivox, and downloaded a suitably hefty, three-part freebie, which is an unabridged reading of a translation of Schiller's great standard history.

Now that is a very fair pedigree, you have to admit. I could feel the scholarship gland swelling just at the idea - sadly, the reality was less happy. The product is free, so it almost seems above criticism, but I could not warm to the narrator, the language (translated, at that) is ponderous in the extreme. Indigestible. I found I could drive along quite happily, thinking about something else, while the pearls of Schiller droned on in the background. So I'd run it back a bit, and try to locate the point at which I had lost the plot (so to speak), and the same thing would happen. I also had a faint worry that I might become a danger on the roads if I paid more attention to the goings-on in Germany.

In truth, the main problem is the text - in whatever tongue, Schiller's work comes from a period when it was necessary for historians - nay, scholars of all types - to write in a lofty and long-winded manner which demonstrated their stature and their great wisdom. The actual transmission of knowledge seems so much a lesser objective that at times I wonder whether they even thought it was necessary.

Schiller/Librivox - strike. Not for me.

Being a stubborn sort of fellow, or a slow learner, if you prefer, I located an unabridged audiobook version of CV Wedgwood's history, narrated by one Charlton Griffin. I listened to an extract, and it really sounded very promising, though the issue about the maps remains, of course. Good-oh - so how do I get one?

Well, my friends at Amazon offered me a free download copy, no less, but I would have to subscribe to Audible, which is Amazon's audio-book version of the age-old book-of-the-month-club racket, and would cost me £7.99 a month indefinitely thereafter. No, thanks - I do not care if I then have access to 200,000 audiobooks - I do not wish to even think about 200,000 audiobooks. I swerved that solution.

Next up, I found that I could download the same book for about £8 from iTunes. OK - after some thought, I did this. It comes down as M4P files, which will only play on an Apple device and which cannot legally be converted to more mainstream MP3. In fact I had a pretty good idea this is what would happen, and I do have an iPhone and an iMac, and we have the iTunes player app installed on various other devices, but not, alas, on my van. I could, of course, hook up my iPhone to the van's BlueTooth, or even just plug the beggar in, but it is more hassle than I would choose.

Now we get to sanctimony, so I tread warily here. I can understand that audio and music files should be protected in some way, not just to boost Apple's profits, but to maintain any chance of the recorded music industry surviving. It is customary at this point to bleat on about how I have purchased these files, and thus am the owner, and should be able to play them on anything I want - I would quite like it if this argument carried some weight, but the reality is that I have paid £8 for a set of files which are intended only to play on Apple kit or via Apple's licensed software. I knew this before I bought them, and that is what I have bought - I have no further rights.

On the other hand...

On the other hand, it is worth bearing in mind that Steve Jobs, before he became a lay saint, was not the least sanctimonious person in history. It should also be remembered that an operating system upgrade for one of the early iPhones (or it might have been an iPod - I don't actually care which) deliberately deleted any non-iTunes musical files from the customer's device, even if he had purchased the tracks legally from some other source. I believe Apple did get into hot water over this, and rightly so, but the logic was originally that Mr Jobs felt he should protect Apple's financial position by making it impracticable for i-device owners to buy their music elsewhere (though there was no such Term or Condition of use accompanying the sale of the device), and - primarily - because Apple thought they could get away with it. Given the background, I do not find the idea of someone ripping them off so terrible.

If anyone has any idea how to convert M4P files into MP3, so I can listen while I'm driving, then - entirely out of academic, theoretical interest, of course, I would be happy to learn. Not that I would ever do such a thing, you understand.

Hooptedoodle #242 – They Say the Neon Lights are Bright on Broadband

In which a new gizmo arrives, and British Telecom make one last, bravura attempt to be a pain in the backside.

As I mention fairly regularly, I live in a rural area, and one of the consequences of this is that we have had very poor broadband since forever. This in itself is just a fact of life if you choose to live in the middle of nowhere, but things have actually got steadily worse over recent years – for a start, there are more people online out here, so traffic levels are getting further and further beyond the capacity of the available service, and, for another thing, the global assumption that everyone now has fibre-optic connections which blow your hat off has meant that all the resulting add-on claptrap noise of advertising screws up what bandwidth is left by sending you gratuitous video clips of things you didn’t want to see in the first place. In the last couple of years, it has been a feature of my email that I cannot read it until I have seen some advert of the day – frequently this is a completely irrelevant American advert (this because our ISP, BT, provide an email service which is really just a very poor relation of Yahoo’s), and often it could take up to a minute to reach me from a server in Ohio or similar. Your blood pressure can do some surprising things in a minute.

The fundamental problem has been the distance between here and our nearest telephone exchange. We pay BT for a service which is officially 1 Mb/sec, but it is normally about one fifth of that. Not fast. We were, of course, promised by that nice Mr Cameron that everyone in Britain would soon have superfast broadband, and BT have even published some grandiose plans for implementing this, but no-one was holding their breath around here. BT have finally admitted that there will be 5% of the UK population for whom fast broadband is just not going to be available – we are in the 5%. You may imagine us, sitting around a campfire in our animal skins, playing with bones and baying at the moon.

Well, there is a new game in town. As a result of a local government initiative, a private company, Lothian Broadband, has created a new infrastructure which provides broadband by wireless connection. Our hamlet is now connected. Our broadband is transmitted from the hill of Traprain Law, some 10 miles away, a shared receiver/relayer then sends signals to the individual households, via little aerials – ours is shown in the photo. As broadband goes, it is not especially cheap, but for a total outlay similar to what I was paying BT we now get an effortless 12Mb/sec. This may not seem impressive to you, but for us this is a whole new world.

Good.

Very pleased.

I have, of course, taken the opportunity to remove broadband from the services I receive from BT. It was harder to get it sorted out than I expected. As of last month, I was paying BT some £69 per month in total, including a charge for this lamentable broadband service, and – as it happens – my account was some £83 in credit. I spent a fair amount of time on the phone to BT on Thursday, explaining that I wished to keep my telephone services exactly as they were, but to drop the broadband. OK. It was explained to me that my new monthly bill (ignoring any extra call charges that arise) will be £28.74 per month. That seems reasonable – that’s about £40 down on what it was, which compares favourably with the £35 I shall be paying to the new broadband provider.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I received a confirmatory email stating that my new monthly payment to BT from December would be £72. That’s right – though my account is in credit at the moment, and though the broadband will be removed from the service I receive, my monthly payment was to increase by £3. The email stated that if I did not agree with this, or if there was something incorrect about the proposed changes to the service, I should phone 0800 800 150. So I did.

This number puts you in touch with a technical support team (in New Delhi), who do not know anything about the product ranges or the pricing. All they could do was arrange for the Sales people (in Leeds, I think) to phone me back. This was done, and eventually I got confirmation that the revised service will be what I actually asked for, and that the monthly payment will, in fact, be about £30. That’s more like it.

There was a time when I would have been interested to know just why they had been prepared to charge me a completely fraudulent amount, but I no longer care. I don’t get my broadband from them any more. They can, in fact, go to Hell.