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Nokia: The Turkey's Dilemma

2011-02-12T13:14:00.005Z

Much has been written in the past few days about Nokia's decision to team up with Microsoft. Some of it has been bordering on delusional, as fans of the firm lose their objectivity and close their eyes, hoping that the firm's troubles will vanish.

The reality is that Nokia is in serious trouble, something that CEO Stephen Elop seems to understand from the briefing he sent round his firm. It's not so much that Nokia don't sell phones anymore; over a quarter of all phones sold are still Nokia's. Nokia's trouble is that their brand has almost no cachet left. They make generally decent hardware, but their software is nothing short of awful. The N97 was to have been their flagship device in 2009, but it was another example of Nokia being left behind - not understanding the innovation of its competitors. The UI was frankly terrible, as this YouTube video shows. Some talk of Nokia's huge usage in developing markets. This is a dangerous game to play - you either assume that Nokia can churn out high-volume, low margin phones better than Chinese/Indian competitors (they can't), or that such markets will migrate to higher-end phones and then buy these from Nokia (they won't).

Nokia haven't really gone anywhere in developing their software, and worse they've showed signs of panic. They set up the Symbian foundation to develop the operating system used by their higher-end phones, declaring it a body of open source excitement in February 2010. They then brought it back in house nine months later. Nokia claimed the N8 (another attempt to get touchscreens right) would make it all right again. It didn't. The hardware was good, the software lousy as ever.

Oddly, the coverage of the decision on Friday to jump on board the Microsoft ship largely focused on whether this was the right idea, and on how bold Mr Elop had been. Often a few half-truths about Android, Google's open-source phone operating system were thrown in. The Economist duly obliges, writing an article that implies Windows Phone is the only option, and that Android would require Nokia to use 'Google’s mobile services and advertising'. This isn't true of course - Android is open source and Nokia can include, or not include, what they like with it (and Google Maps and Mail are already available for Symbian devices).

To lay this author's cards on the table: I used to love Nokia - they did once make great devices and it brings me no pleasure to see them flounder. However, Android is a very impressive phone operating system and Windows Phone 7 was the wrong way to go. There are two very quick reasons why Windows Phone is not the right choice for Nokia. Firstly, Windows is not a brand that consumers want to purchase. Windows is fine for home PCs - in fact Windows 7 is extremely good, but the very reason Microsoft picked the Windows brand for its mobile OS was to attract business users, who might mistakenly believe that having a Windows network at work and a Windows network on work phones would all work together beautifully. RIM (makers of the Blackberry) have shot right through that, and shown that what matters is good software, not a familiar brand. Consumers do not hanker for a Windows phone, or a Nokia phone. A Windows Nokia phone is no more appealing.

Secondly, there is little that Nokia can do to differentiate itself from other manufacturers of Windows Phone 7 devices. This has been said to be true of Android, but quite simply this isn't true. Good design has put some companies above others - HTC and Samsung make good Android devices, and Motorola's fortunes have rebounded because they have used Android well. Again, Android is open source. Nokia were free to add features as they saw fit to customise the OS and bring customers with them. Windows Phone 7 is a more closed system, and Nokia will most definitely play second fiddle to Microsoft in proposing changes. The attraction of Ovi Maps is not an attraction at all - most users have never heard of Ovi Maps and don't care to - how many people can you say this is true for with Google Maps?

Nonetheless, this decision is not the worst part of what was announced on Friday. The real problem was the indecisiveness. Nokia isn't having troubles with software - it's just plain bad at it. It does make sense to outsource development of the core operating system (if not all applications) to a more knowledgeable and proficient company. This is not what Nokia are doing. Here is their own graph:

This looks pretty simple: transition from the unsuccessful Symbian platform to Windows Phone. The graph, however, hides a multitude of sins. Nokia will be developing phones with four operating systems for the next few years: Symbian, Windows Phone, Series 40 and MeeGo. Series 40, although you may have never heard of it, is the world's most used mobile-phone software and powers low-end phones. It's not very pretty, it's not very functional, but it gets the job done usually with little fuss.

It is more troubling (for Nokia) that you've possibly never heard of MeeGo. Nokia have no idea what to do with MeeGo, but didn't make the right choice - stop doing anything with it at all. It is supposed to be an operating system for Mobile Devices - a catch all term to describe large smart phones and tablets. It's been in development for about a year now, and there's still nothing that runs it. Nokia's decision not to include sales of MeeGo devices in their graph above speaks volumes - they don't know what they're doing with it. They have implied it's being dropped, but still plan to ship devices with it. In short, this is a mess.

Nokia cannot effectively manage four operating systems. At best they can handle two - one for low end devices, one for high end. The lethargy in moving away from Symbian (note the lack of time axis on the graph above) only leaves Nokia exposed for longer. A bold Nokia would have moved to Android and focused on making the Linux kernel on which Android runs able to power more and more of its low-end devices. It would have clearly severed itself from the MeeGo experiment and halted Symbian development as quickly as possible. It would have developed excellent hardware and targeted improvements to the Android OS that would differentiate it.

This is not a bold Nokia. It's still the procrastinating indecisive beast it's been for some years. This turkey isn't flying anywhere soon.

Service Sector

2011-02-06T19:49:00.000Z

I was feeling pretty self-assured and prepared. I had the 3 website open in front of me as I dialed T-Mobile to ask for my PAC so that I could transfer to three.

About twenty minutes later I was signed up to another 24 months with T-Mobile. Hats off to the lady who served me: she impressed me, made me feel valued, offered me a much better deal that 3 had on their website and did so in an efficient manner. I was a satisfied customer. A few minutes later a text came through asking me to rate my satisfaction with the call; five out of five was duly dispatched.

I had a friend stay at my house the following few days while over from Shanghai. He'd picked up an Orange SIM card (£10) upon landing at Heathrow, and then phoned up to enable the card, activate the confusingly-named Dolphin package and add £10 of credit. His Dolphin package came with 100MB of internet and 300 texts. The next day there were only a few pennies left - it seems the Dolphin had not taken hold of his account.

He phoned up the customer service line, annoyed that having only been with Orange for 24 hours he already had a problem. To say they were unhelpful would be kind. No refund, no offer to help - only the offer that the 50p he was charged for the call would be refunded. Despite half an hour on the phone, being bounced from one member of staff to another, he got nowhere.

I contrasted his experience with mine, but of course I spoke to soon. On Monday my new handset had not arrived as promised, and when I got home I found a card from a delivery company, despite the customer service rep taking my work address and promising it would be sent there. I phoned T-Mobile on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday evening. Their call centre menu was hopeless with no option even vaguely fitting my problem, and their staff unhelpful. I still have do not have the promised handset, despite paying for 'next day' delivery. Oddly, not one of these three calls have resulted in me receiving a text asking me to rate them.

This is far from uncommon in my past experiences. What's odd is that, anecdotally, every mobile company seems to be as each other. Could the reason be a lack of competition in the sector? Despite the appearance of five mobile companies competing for market share, they are something of an oligopoly, with perhaps only 3 offering better packages or options. It's notable that T-Mobile's previously more generous fair-usage policy on data of 1GB has now been reduced to 500MB to bring it "in line with the rest of the industry".

The lack of competition is a bad thing for the mobile market, especially as mobile technology moves on so quickly so there should be an opportunity for innovation. Perhaps new wireless technologies will provide more competition, but for now each company seems to have little reason to offer the customer anything special.

Nexus S - Two weeks in

2011-02-02T21:10:00.004Z

I've seen a fair few user reviews of all sorts of products, from technology devices to bags of crisps. User reviews tend to suffer from one of two problems - that of rationalisation or using a review to take a few pops at the supplier because the user feels mightily aggrieved.

I'm going to try to take a middle road here. I'm presenting an honest look at the phone. It cost me £430, and I'm able to say it's not perfect. It is, so far, the best phone I've ever owned or used, but there are plenty of problems with it which I'll try to spend time explaining without concentrating on the bad at the expense of the good.

Before I start, a fair question is "Why review a phone"? In the days of my Nokia 3210 there was perhaps not much need. Today smartphones are finally befitting of their name. I use my phone as my music player, my web browser, my twitter client and my routefinder. I also send the occasional text and, just once in a while, I might make a call.

Hardware

The phone is certainly decent looking. It's all black and allows nothing to distract from the screen. Part of my reason for upgrading from the HTC Hero that I had previously was the smallish screen - 81mm feels even smaller now I'm used to the 100mm on the Nexus S. This isn't about boasting - browsing the web and reading from the screen are considerably more pleasant for those 19 extra mm.

Without the screen on the phone doesn't have that much definition, but the position of the volume rocker switch makes it relatively easy to orient the phone when you're hunting around in your pocket.

Display

While I'm talking about the screen, let me explain what it's like while it's on. The quality is phenomenal. There's no backlight here (this is an AMOLED screen), so blacks are Spinal Tap compatible and whites and colours shine. The image is exceptionally sharp and a joy to look at. Photos don't do it justice as they tend to attract moiré patterns, but I'll give it a go.

The soft-buttons below the screen (which only illuminate when the screen is on) have caused me no bother at all, and the detail of the screen itself is exceptional.

Performance

The other stand out feature of the Nexus S is that it's fast. I mean really fast. It leaves my HTC Hero standing. One can get technical and think that the 1GHz processor in the Nexus is what allows it's to supersede the Hero's 528MHz, but the more I use the phone the more I think the reason for the speed is the absence of manufacturer's bloat. The phone runs Android. There's no HTC Sense, no TouchWiz. I picked up a friend's Galaxy S a few weeks ago. This features the same processor as the Nexus S. It was fast, but not as fast as the Nexus. More gallingly, and more telling, was the inclusion of three separate app stores on the Galaxy S - one from Samsung (manufacturer), one from Orange (carrier) and the standard Android Market. This is the sort of shoddy interface design that astounds, and shows why the less involvement carriers and, to an extent, manufacturers have the better.

This lack of external interference was a big attraction of the Nexus S for me and encouraged me to buy the phone direct and not on a contract. The improvement in experience has been even better than I expected.

I wondered if I'd miss the built in features of HTC Sense. Short answer: not one bit. Little things like picking out contacts and navigating the calendar are so much quicker and more responsive on the Nexus S. In fact all the default apps are excellent, with the browser particularly speedy.

The very fast and easy to use update to Google Maps. The 3D building features is pretty, but currently pointless

While blogger defaults to a mobile view, this web page loads excellently when set to the full version and is very readable with easy zoom where needed.

So far, so much praise. Well, as I say, the phone has generally been excellent, but here are a few of the most annoying issues:

The UK

It is almost as if Google are not aware of the existence of the UK. When you turn on the phone and sign in with your Google account (note that my account is a UK account) you get a nice e-mail from Google welcoming you to the Nexus S. It tells me I "can contact Samsung directly at +1 855-EZ2NEXUSS". Hmm - that's a fat lot of use. No problem, I'll head to the Samsung UK page if I need any support. Except their page doesn't even know about the phone they make. This isn't good. Don't worry - there's a full Nexus S support site - oh guess what, it's entirely geared for the US market. This is exceptionally poor. I'll leave it to the reader to guess whether Android Voice Actions work in English UK (I'll give you a clue - even though the verbs such as 'send' are clearly the same, the answer is not yes).

Update: A lady named Mary at the @GalaxySsupport account has been very helpful, but she has been the exception. E-mail support in the UK just hasn't responded, while US e-mail support told me they wouldn't support a UK device (the web form in the US was truly awful). Frankly Google are doing very poorly here.

Battery life

This is the most disappointing aspect of the phone to date. Many of the reviews said that the battery life was good. Tech Radar said 'Android 2.3 seems to be pretty darn good at holding up the power management.'

Oh that that were the case. Even with moderate use and a full night's charge the phone is almost dead by 18:00 if I unplug at 07:00. I have Twitter updating every 15mins and GMail syncing, but these are not uncommon uses of such a phone. I have WiFi on, but only connected while at home (there is no network at work). The battery plummets over the day. Because of the issue above it's not even obvious who to contact about this.

Notifications

As with all Android-based phones users can install their own MP3 files to be used to alert of incoming SMS messages, calls or alarms. There is quite an odd bug on the Nexus S which means these seem to sometimes randomly change to a different MP3 file - not even one stored within the notifications folder. I've engaged via Twitter with @GalaxySsupport who have made some suggestions, but none which has yet fixed the intermittent issue. This would be much less of an issue if the included alarms etc were anything other than bare-bones.

Update: This is a reported issue with Android 2.3. Regrettably there's no sign of this yet being fixed.

Other more minor issues

The new Android keyboard

The updated Android keyboard present on the Nexus S is, in my experience, very impressive to use. There are two minor issues. One is that entering a web address in, say, an e-mail is quite hard - the phone continually tries to 'suggest' what word you mean, resulting in something of a mess, and keeps adding spaces after the dots in a URL. This is, of course, no problem when typing a URL into the browser as suggestions are turned off.

More annoyingly the seemingly useful feature to switch between suggestion languages (I have French and English installed) is flawed in two regards. Firstly it's far too easy to switch between the two languages accidentally by lingering on the spacebar for too long. Cue annoying instances where the auto-suggest is working in a different language to your brain. Secondly the layout of the keyboard changes with the language. While ideal for some, for most people (who have one primary language and another, less-used, secondary) this is a feature that desperately needs a toggle to turn it off. Suddenly making the loaction of the Q on the keyboard home to the A is almost impossible to mentally adjust to.

Update: I was wrong in the above text - the change between languages is not caused by me lingering, but by a reproducible bug in the keyboard software that has been reported. Again, no sign of being fixed.

Wrap-up

Other than the battery life these issues are relatively minor (the support issue is poor customer service, but I hope doesn't inhibit my use of the phone). I'll continue to badger Samsung about the battery and see if anything is amiss.

As I said at the start, my overwhelming view of the phone is positive. If you want a versatile phone with a superb screen that performs fast, fast and fast again then this should be at the top of your list.

Simple backup software

2010-05-02T23:02:00.000+01:00

A while ago I lost too many pictures when my hard drive failed - since then I've been desperate to ensure that I don't have this happen again. A good principle with data is that if you don't have at least two copies of any given file, you don't really have it at all.

I have used online backup services - Mozy and Carbonite to be exact. I don't have much kind to say about either. Online backup is, in principle, a great idea. You don't need to remember to do anything, and your files are always up to date. In theory. In practice internet upload speeds are too slow to deal with a heavy workload of pictures - I shoot in RAW on my Canon 500D and so each image is around 20MB. I often end up placing 1GB on my hard drive after I've gone out to take pictures - this takes an age to back up.

Because such services give you the impression that they're constantly up to date, it's easy to live under false security, which may make things worse than if you didn't have the service installed in the first place. I'm not going to mention the performance impacts of either program, but suffice to say that my computer became unusable - crashing frequently - only a few weeks ago, and I am 70% sure this was Carbonite at work.

So I need to backup the old(ish) way - manually run backups from one disk to another. In this case I use an external hard drive (a Freecom 1TB affair). I initially used the backup included with Windows 7, but this has two major faults:

It backs up to ZIP files, each file no larger than 200MB
It is stupidly slow to copy - about three to four times slower than regular file copying

The second problem speaks for itself. The first might seem fine, but this means that if the backup doesn't complete, or if one of the files is damaged, the remainder of the backup can be useless, or at least needlessly hard to reassemble.

I've struggled to find something that does what I want - Microsoft's SyncToy is quite good, but again I've had problems with stability in the past. I think I've finally found what I'm looking for - SmartBackup from JAM Software. It isn't free, costing €20 for a license, but it does exactly what I want - incremental backups of a set of files/folders while maintaining directory structure and not forcing any propriety format on me (I shan't be forgiving TrueImage ever for this sin).

Give it a whirl (there's a 30-day trial), and if I have any problems I'll be sure to say here. Backing up is very boring, so the best possible form of backup is one that is simple enough to encourage you to actually bother. As my good friend Rick has found out after leaving his computer on a train, backing up is always something you wish you'd done.

Brand

2008-05-03T11:06:00.000+01:00

Yes, but it's the wrong one!

Swing

2008-05-02T13:22:00.000+01:00

The TV crews have packed up! There aren't many ways to spin this: Labour got one of their worst kickings in history and the Tories did very well.

Well enough, it seems, to make Mr Johnson the new Mayor of London, although it pains me to write that. The Assembly will presumably be chocked full of blue, so our new Mayor will have no need to moderate his plans for his budgets to be approved.

Waiting Game

2008-05-01T20:47:00.000+01:00

Now we just wait. The polls are still open for another hour, but after that there's nothing until 0900 tomorrow when the count starts.

I'm hoping there's been an exit poll that'll be announced at ten, but I've not heard anything yet.

Earlier on I helped by handing out leaflets at Wood Green station - I had been booked to go to Alexandra Palace, which I did, but no one from team Ken turned up, and nor did any significant number of commuters, so that was a (genuinely) damp squib.

Off message

2008-05-01T12:16:00.000+01:00

This is the first Standard placard I've seen today. Let's hope it's wrong. The Livingstone site have been preparing the ground for a new poll to be released by YouGov today showing a large lead by Mr Johnson.

The End Result

2008-05-01T12:02:00.000+01:00

I've just discovered that the London Mayoral results won't be announced until around 21:00 on Friday! I'm most disappointed!

Voted

2008-05-01T08:57:00.000+01:00

I'm navigated the poorly signed polling station and have cast my vote for Ken Livingstone. The ballot papers were simple and the process uncomplicated.
13 hours left and we'll start to know how the city voted.

Ubuntu

2008-04-27T18:17:00.003+01:00

As is my way when I have exams I needed to find something foolish to do to distract me from the horrors of revision. So a few days ago I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my machine.

Much is made of whether Linux is ready or not for the desktop, and has been for several years. The answer in my opinion is a not very emphatic 'not really'. I'm going to blog about the good and bad things I find with Ubuntu 8.04, partly for interest and partly to illustrate where the operating system is in terms of being ready for the mainstream.

Before I start any of this I think I should define what I mean by mainstream. I don't mean people like me who have been using computers for far too long. I mean the ordinary person who has a PC at home and wants to browse the internet, write a few documents, send a few e-mails, watch a few videos/DVDs, sync their camera/music player, maybe play the odd game and use instant messengering. If you work or live with real people what they want is for these things to work, and to be simple to set up - preferably requiring no set up at all.

Many moons ago I installed RedHat on my desktop, and more recently (perhaps about 2003/4) I installed SuSE on my laptop - the same laptop I have now. My machine is as follows:

Dell Inspiron 8200

2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor
1GB RAM
Primary Hard Drive: 160GB PATA
Secondary Hard Drive: 120GB PATA
nVidia GeForce Go 440 graphics card 64MB
Built in Wireless Networking (we'll come to this later) and wired networking
Permanently plugged-in Linksys WPC54G v1.2 wireless adapter
1600 by 1200 LCD display (we'll be coming to this later too)
Other typical bits and bobs (trackpad, keyboard, media buttons...)

So, in this post I'll explain about the install. This has been one of the best parts of the experience, so it's relatively short. I used a program called Wubi that's provided from Ubuntu (bottom of this page). It sets up your user account in Ubuntu, asks you where you want to install and then creates the installation as a file - no re-partitioning or any of that horribleness. This is very user friendly, and the install basically just gets on with itself.

Once I restarted the computer (as it advises at the end of install) Ubuntu booted for the first time and finished the installation - this takes a little time, and scared me a bit by talking about re-partitioning the drive and setting up a boot loader. This is in fact completely harmless, but this isn't entirely obvious at the time. What Wubi does is provide a space on one of your Windows drives that Ubuntu can then work with, so when the installer talks about partitioning it's only doing that on this piece of allocated space; a drive within a drive if you like. Nonetheless, the end user shouldn't have to care about this, and you don't - it just gets on with it.

One more restart and we have a jazzy sound and a login box. I enter the previously provided username and password and I'm in, complete with further jazzy sound, beautiful desktop and simple menu system. So far so good. Except the graphics do seem rather slow to do anything - dragging windows round is slow and full screen events (such as scrolling a maximised web page) are jolty. I'll talk more of this in a later post.

One other thing - no internet: in fact no wireless at all. So I need to plug a cable in to get anywhere.

I'll continue this soon!

T5 versus St Pancras

2008-03-28T21:29:00.003Z

To say that Terminal 5's opening has been poorly managed would be a generous appraisal. The media have certainly not been so kind. What was particularly striking to me was the contrast between this news story and the opening of St Pancras international.

I thought this evening that they generate two polar-opposite media responses. St Pancras was lauded as an amazing achievement, the return of the age of travel by rail and a truly wonderful piece of architecture that the country could be proud of. It seems I'm not the only one to notice the comparison. The Times have an article with the following quote:

The folk at BAA should take a short ride down to St Pancras International rail station to see how a 21st century terminal should be done. Tasteful, efficient, with only selected quality retail. Today's airport terminals are little more than downmarket shopping malls."

"Oh dear, oh dear - another own goal for BA.....Or BAA? Or both?? Whatever, the CEOs should be forced to resign over this ridiculous affair. "

The reception for St Pancras couldn't have been better. Here's a quote from the International Herald Tribune's article:

But the mood among travelers Wednesday suggested that there was more to the new route than the speed of the journeys, and that St. Pancras has every prospect of fulfilling its ambition of becoming a "destination" in itself.

Forty years after the poet John Betjeman led a campaign to save St. Pancras from demolition, it has emerged from its years of restoration as one of the grandest public buildings in Britain. Architecture critics have been virtually unanimous in praising the result, and, judging by the reaction of travelers and others who crowded into the station for its commercial inauguration, the public loves it just as much.

So what happened? Why is one so praised and the other not. Many of the articles on the problems at T5 point to a lack of testing and training. I attended a breakfast talk on St Pancras in November 2006 and what was emphasised there was the meticulous planning and testing that went into every aspect of moving from Waterloo to St Pancras.

Interestingly there are many parallels between the two projects. Despite T5 being on a bigger scale, they are both the highest level of terminal in their respective fields. Both industries are maligned with strikes (although note how when St Pancras opened Eurostar luckily or skilfully avoided the French strike action). Both are in industries where people often complain about the regular level of service - here's what the Economist has to say about the opening of T5:

Heathrow airport's new Terminal Five made the news for all the usual reasons on its opening day: lengthy delays, appalling overcrowding and lost baggage. This time it was blamed on teething troubles rather than bad weather, terrorist threats or uppity unions that often turn the barely tolerable experience of flight into an ordeal.

However LCR (project owners of St Pancras) seemed to get it right. They took rail travel, which has a hint of romance, but is sullied by the general dislike of the morning commute and the poor reputation of many national franchise holders, and made it something attractive. St Pancras was branded as a destination station; a place one would visit in its own right. The opening was impeccable, the transfer from Waterloo seamless. The opening date for the station was published a year beforehand and was kept to. The project itself embraced the architecture of the original station, but built in new developments to provide a contemporary space. Something genuinely new was provided for the customer (high-speed rail end to end) and it was packaged in a masterful way. Most skilful of all, they named it High Speed One and gave the impression that LCR were the people to deliver further high-speed rail benefits to the UK.

Compare for T5. The architecture may or may not be impressive, but if it is it's been mentioned as an exception. Sentences such as The Independent's:

Eddie Loryman seemed oblivious to the grandeur of Heathrow's soaring new terminal 5 building with its cutting-edge architecture...he was more concerned with finding a lift that was actually working.

litter the press coverage. The Sun is less kind, criticising the architecture and facilities. There is not a feeling that T5 is a break from the norm - The Independent article (ibid) states "For [the terminal's] many critics it was merely a case of service as normal." There is a feeling in several articles that not only has BAA and BA's response been hopeless, it has also shown how they can not be trusted with such a project. They have been portrayed as complacent and uncaring. They have entrenched the perception that flying is a chore, and airports doubly so.

In a few months' time the airport will no doubt be operating fine. However, it will be very hard to shake the damage done here. LCR can still bask in the glory of St Pancras' opening four months after the event. BAA and BA have got no honeymoon from this story, in fact they are fighting fire even harder than usual. As opposition continues to grow to further expansion, and not just from the usual sources, there may not be much for BAA and BA to celebrate for quite some time.

Mobile Design

2008-03-09T10:42:00.003Z

Nokia have a certain kind of design wisdom with phones. The final release of their tool, Share Online, that allows one to send pictures directly to Flickr is on my phone.

The trouble is I want to get it off my phone. It's a cumbersome program that doesn't allow me to do anything that I can't do simply by e-mailing the photo to my Flickr account. It also, as you can see in the picture, puts more clutter on the phone's home screen.

I've tried removing it from within the phone's application menu, I've tried removing it from within the phone's Application Manager tool (bizarrely it did let me remove "Share Online 3 Upgrade", but this made no difference).

I've had a number of problems with my N95, and this is just another, albeit minor one. Anyone know how to fix this (without a complete reset)?

Hospital

2008-03-04T17:15:00.005Z

All finished at the hospital, but it's not much of a pleasant experience going. Here are a few samples of the trip.

1. From a sign in one of the rooms where blood is extracted for tests:

Please do not use needles and vacutainer tubes to ajar this windows

2. As a woman sobbed in the corridor a concerned member of the public came to ask what could be done to help her. This person speculated that:

She has a bit of the dementia

3. As a man in front of me in the queue for the tests seemed to be having problems he explained:

Last time they tried in my hand

Despite this, a phone ringing constantly, rooms that are tiny and poorly decorated and a constant stream of patients the phlebotomist who took my blood was friendly, smiling, caring and put up with my squeamishness and silly faces. Given she has to work there all the time I haven't got much to complain about, and I was as thankful as I could be to her.

Seeing red

2008-03-04T11:20:00.002Z

I'm not a fan of blood tests at the best of times. There's something very peculiar about the unpleasantly decorated waiting rooms, the tickets to enforce waiting in turn and the fact, as is always the case, there are far more people using the facility than it was designed for.

Someone just left the reception area because they couldn't speak English. Another patient offered to interpret, but the woman wasn't interested.

I'm pathetically squeamish. I loathe the thought of my own blood, but they presumably they won't take much today. I'm on number 92 at the moment - only 47 left.

Wrong route

2008-03-03T19:55:00.006Z

Bendy, taken from my Flickr stream.

Boris Johnson, candidate for the Conservative Party in the London Mayoral elections, made clear today his plans to scrap the bendy bus. He also declares that he wants to bring back conductors and the Routemasters.

I should say, first of all, that all of the points I make on this blog are entirely my own and don't seek to represent anyone else. Mr Johnson is wrong on this one - these policies are often 'popular', but they fall apart when examined.

Let's start with conductors. Conductors are a member of staff, and having two members of staff (a driver and conductor) on every bus nearly doubles the staffing costs. Of course, there could be some reduction in ticket inspectors, but there are much, much less ticket inspectors than there are buses, so the potential for cost savings is small. Conductors are not a solution to the problems Mr Johnson claims he is seeking to solve. He claims that bendy-buses have become free, but conductors provide a bizarre forced fare-evasion. On so many occasions when riding on buses with conductors, especially when I've been riding on the top desk, the conductor has not even ventured upstairs, meaning that my Oyster card was never checked. This is inevitable if the conductor is busy downstairs with lots of passengers getting on and off.

Conductors don't make journeys usefully quicker either - a trial on the 55 a few years back showed that as so few London Bus users buy tickets on the bus there is little time to be saved by allowing them to walk straight passed the driver. Oyster is generally very quick, so touching in with the card is only ever so slightly slower than doing nothing while walking past. The time saved on the 55 was so small it didn't allow any reduction in the number of buses to run the route - not much help there then.

But Routemasters are wonderful aren't they? No - they're not. They are, rightfully, acknowledged as being iconic, but this does not make them a good form of public transport. They are small, cramped (I'm 189cm (6ft 2 inches) and they really don't have the leg room) and, let's not forget, much less safe. People often scoff at this, blaming an H&S culture (a fact well addressed in this article), but as someone who's broken my wrist jumping off a Routemaster when I thought it was safe to do so I can say that one might realise that an open back on a moving vehicle is not terribly safe.

Of course, the stats bear this out - this pro-Routemaster booklet (page 47) accepts that the accident rate for a Routemaster was double that of a regular bus. One of my lecturers suggests it's worse than that (2.6 times worse than a regular bus).

Finally, of course, everyone agrees the articulated buses, or "bendy buses" are awful. Except they don't. TfL did lots of customer research with simple, unambiguous questions when the bendy buses were brought in. They asked people on routes that had been converted from Routemasters (like the 36) what they thought of their replacement (in this case the 436). You know what - regardless of whether the bus being replaced was a Routemaster or a standard double-decker people preferred the bendy buses. This effect, although diminished, was still present when they revisited these users after 18 months (to try and eliminate the effect of bendy buses simply being new and thus worthy of praise).

These were real users saying they liked the buses. It's amazing how many of the people complaining about them don't use them - Mr Johnson included. I use them pretty regularly - I live on the N29 route, I take the 507 quite often (hence the picture) and the 73 and 38 provide useful routes from Victoria (where I work). I like them - I like the fact I can get on them, even though they're busy. Busy buses are always tough to board, but at least on bendy buses you have three doors to try, and no need to push people to try and get upstairs only to find it's full. They also do board quicker when there are a lot of people - it's the doors that help with this. I invite anyone who doubts this to come and watch them alight/board at Victoria bus station in the morning.

Of course other road users must be taken into consideration, but the stats showing that bendy buses have a higher injury rate than other buses (for other road users) seem to be explained by the fact that these buses, by design, are used on the very busiest routes which encounter the most traffic. This isn't to diminish the importance of reducing accidents, but to say that we do have to be sure of a common base of comparison.

With money likely to be tight (Crossrail, Thameslink, PPP Upgrades and much more) it's vital that buses can spend money on useful things (more buses for routes, new routes, police on buses), not on conductors. Finally, when someone tells you that conductors make buses safer, I would always rather have a trained police officer (someone whose job it is to deal with crime) than a conductor, who understandably is trained not to put themselves in danger's way. So why doesn't the Mayor fund police officers for buses? Oh, he does.

Move to blogger

2008-03-03T17:09:00.002Z

I got fed up with WordPress. So, from now onwards, the blog is here. At some point I'll redirect the old site. I had some trouble getting a template that was wide enough for large images, but didn't stretch across the whole screen - I've manually edited one - if anyone has any suggestions for anything more elegant then do say.

Tom

Taking note

2008-03-03T13:44:00.003Z

Having recently finished the last lecture of my masters course I wanted to make some notes on how things seemed to have changed since my undergraduate course. My undergraduate course was four years of full-time study, living with friends or in college. My masters has been two years of part-time course while working at TfL. Clearly there are a lot of differences, but I don't want to write about these. What really struck me was how different the actual lecture and study process was.

The most obvious change is in the way people behave. It's difficult to write this without looking like a stuck-up malcontent, but the behaviour was much worse than while I was at Durham. I can't say if this is because of my particular class, the subject, the passage of time or the different university. People would routinely talk, quite audibly, in lectures. There were regulars who would turn up to every lecture and just talk to each other the whole way through. They not quiet about it, they're not subtle about it (as we used to try and be in Durham). I've seen people on the phone during lectures (seldom trying to hide the fact), and it is very common to see laptops open across the lecture theatre, not one of which being used for anything related to the lecture (facebook, youtube and Windows Live Messenger seem to be the distractions of choice). I find this all somewhat bizarre - no one is keeping these people at the lecture, so if they truly have no interest why not go elsewhere?

Interestingly people seem to turn up late. At Durham it was typical for a few people to drip in at five or ten minutes past the lecture start, and there would be the occasional twenty-ish minutes late arrival which usually got a chuckle from the class. This is nothing for people who attend these lectures. It was typical for people to come in half an hour late, and almost every week there were several people arriving over an hour late. Given the lectures started at the same time every week I don't understand this - the class size was fifty (smaller than in Durham), and only about 30 would turn up at all each week.

The library was also interesting - Imperial's library has two types of area - one that are "quiet study areas" and others that are for group work. Quiet doesn't seem to be a word well understood - conversations are routinely held without any effort to whisper. There is, generally, the concession made that phone calls should take place in the stairwell, but this is not always followed. The group work areas are intended to be noisier, but in reality they're just people sitting round a computer laughing at a youtube clip. In Durham we had separate computer rooms in the library - even in these people were normally very quiet.

So why the change? I have a few theories. One is that the totally ubiquitous nature of the mobile phone, along with much more common use of laptops, make people much less aware that there is a distinction between talking to someone (on the phone) and any other activity - the two blend together. In lectures it also is overwhelmingly international students who make the most noise - I don't know why this is - one guess is that if the lecture is not interesting then it may be even less interesting if it's not in your native language (and thus even harder to follow), so it's easier to lapse into talking to a friend.

It's far from all doom and gloom though. I'm amazed how far technology has come along. It's common for lecturers to e-mail out slides or further reading to the class. Laptops are so much more common, the entire site has WiFi, collaborative work is so much easier with Google Docs. The number of journals that are accessible online is vastly improved, and the creaky authentication via ATHENS is all done invisibly now. The ability to VPN into Imperial's network from home is a far cry from the glacially slow dial-up service that Durham had. A few years of technology's development have made a big difference.

I would be intrigued if other people have comments about how lectures have changed.

Tuned Out

2007-01-28T19:12:00.002Z

An extensive library

Newsworthy

2007-01-22T21:02:00.002Z

Comic, as in the noun rather than the adjective.

The Crail

2007-01-16T18:23:00.001Z

One of the troubles with contemplating public expenditure is the vast sums of money involved. One can easily understand what a few hundred pounds equates to - perhaps a new piece of furniture. This can be extended to the thousands for extensions to a house or yearly salaries.

Already, by the time we have got to the hundreds of thousands level we have little comprehension of the magnitude involved. We mostly will need to take mortgages for house purchases, and thus such grand payments are broken down into small chunks; converted to a language we understand.

Yet in the public sector we are asked to consider spending millions or billions. The NHS annual budget is 96 billion pounds. This is £1600 for every one of the 60 million UK residents. How can we consider such gargantuan values?

Enter the Crail - the soon to be de facto unit of public investment measurement. One crail is the cost of Crossrail. The cost of the scheme is £15 billion. So one Crail currently is equal to £15 billion.

"Currently?" you might say! Yes, the Crail varies with time as the cost of Crossrail varies, but this is no less or greater a problem than the changing value of money, causing us to continually write "at 2003 prices" or similar after quotes. The Crail is always measured at the current cost of Crossrail.

The symbol for the Crail is Cr, and one can use all the usual SI prefixes. I thus expect conversations such as the following to occur:

[Someone who isn't me]: Can you believe that Beckham's going to LA Galaxy?
[me]: I can believe it and yet still be indifferent to it.
[person 1]: But it's for 8.5 minicrails!
[me]: Yet my indifference remains.

Just for reference, the US National Debt is about 290kCr, the cost of upgrading Trident is about 1.3Cr, Tesco sells 10 mCr of sales through its internet site, the average UK salary is just over 1.54µCr and lunch last week at the noodle bar cost me 1.07nCr. Start using it.

A walk in July

2006-07-07T09:33:00.000+01:00

I went for a walk this morning.

I got off at Russell Square station at twenty past eight. The station has been reconfigured so one exits the lift straight onto the street. Immediately the yellow high-visibility jackets are visible everywhere, and the press were already present - penned in by metal railings to keep them a certain distance from the station, although as usual they lack much subtlety.

I walked up Marchmont Street then onto Tavistock Place. Tavistock Square was closed to vehicles, but pedestrians walked around pretty much as usual. Signs on the street gave information about the park in the centre of the square being closed to provide some privacy to those directly involved in the events of last year, and the bus stops being closed, but otherwise the people seemed much the same as always - hurrying to work.

The news crews have gathered (or been told to congregate as such) around Upper Woburn Place and the south end of Endsleigh Street. They were frantically laying cables, testing equipment and getting just the right angle for their shot of the location the number 30 exploded. On seeing the media vans some passers by seemed more aware of the date, although this form of resonance is probably more media generated than personal.

I walked to Euston Road and then toward King’s Cross. A helicopter chopped above us and the sound reflected off the buildings, and other than the road closures previously mentioned it was in almost all ways a quotidian experience.

The cavernous new western ticket hall at King’s Cross was largely closed off - only a small staircase took you down to the lower level, with blue full-height barriers blocking off the station in a way rather discordant with the normally expansive layout. I walked up to the remembrance garden at the base of York Way and saw a sizeable crowd. The media were again out, this time in greater numbers. They were in front of a metal barrier, we were behind. There was a stark contrast between the media and the public: the media were laughing and chatting with each other and rushing about. The public were most urbane, simply waiting.

As 08:50 came Ken Livingstone, Tessa Jowell, Tim O’Toole and Peter Hendy walked in to the garden, accompanied by a member of the church. They lay flowers and stood in a silence shared with the public for about five minutes. During this time the press received calls on their phones, fidgeted for better composition of their piece and a late coming cameraman pushed the public aside attempting to get as close to the front as possible. Despite these intrusions the event was powerful - a somber, simple and unsentimental occasion.

After a time the group left the garden and walked, under police escort, towards the entrance to King’s Cross mainline station. A woman broke down in tears in front of them - they stopped, stood and listened to her. All of them looked earnest and sincere, particularly Tim, Ken and Peter, of whom it was clear that this event held genuine significance. As the lady was calmed they walked into the station, tears in Ken’s eyes while Peter and Tim looked shaken, but proud to be present.

I walked down to the underground station and took the Piccadilly line south to continue my journey to Victoria, making a trip that one year ago was impossible.

I’m glad I decided to take this diversion on the way to work this morning. I don’t believe that such anniversaries require mass hysteria, but quiet reflection of what has happened in the past year. I spoke to Johnny Bucknell, a former councillor in Camden two weeks ago - I’m sure he won’t mind me quoting him here. We didn’t agree on very much, but on one thing we were in total concordance. The best way of making defeating terrorism is to get on the train the next morning and come to work.

I think the rational reflection I observed, with the otherwise bustling tubes today showed that this statement is not only right, but what London did.

A fatal error

2005-12-09T20:29:00.000Z

As America 'celebrates' the state-sanctioned murder of a round number of its citizens the issues of the death penalty has again been brought into the limelight. I'm always interested in these arguments. I think many people know that, deep down, the death penalty is fundamentally wrong and an anachronism. However, it's incredibly easy to become irrational and emotional about cases that have led to the death penalty being issued (they usually are murders) and this tends to lead to a "they deserve it" mentality.

It's particularly interesting to see how those who are against the punishment argue their case. The arguments for the action are generally pretty easy - the criminal has forfeited their right to life and it will bring closure to the family of the victim. The arguments against take various forms. When trying to convince the population at large often the arguments are made of a very detached nature. Typically the two points are that the death penalty doesn't work and that innocent people get convicted and then killed.

These are, to some extent, good points - it is obviously important that a justice system convicts the right person, and any punishment should look at whether it effectively reduces the chance of a person committing the crime (whilst also protecting society from the most dangerous). Equally obvious is that once you've killed someone it doesn't matter how innocent you later find them, it's too late - something that generally isn't true of prison sentences.

The trouble with these arguments is that they are too utilitarian - they imply that if a perfect system could be devised (where no one was wrongly convicted) and if it could be proved that the death penalty did deter potential criminals then it would be perfectly acceptable to inject people with potassium chloride.

It's not. Just because something might be useful to the state doesn't mean we should do it - it might be 'useful' to kill off a the severely mentally disabled, but thankfully we're enlightened enough to realise we have a moral responsibility to care for them. It might be 'useful' to cut off the genitalia of paedophiles, but again we realise that this crosses a barbaric line. The death penalty is wrong - simply for one reason - it's fundamentally wrong to kill someone in cold blood. Humans have an inalienable right to life. There will be rare moments when this right needs to be placed below someone else's right to life - in the case of a self-defence killing, for example. However state-sanctioned murder is not self-defence - it's just murder.

This is the argument we have to keep at - because it's the only one that there's no comeback to. We have to recognise that as humanity and societies have evolved we've built up a set of rights and moral standards that can't be broken. We all think of hangings, stonings and beheadings as ghastly historical events, when people were less well educated and there were considerably weaker democracies. Yet capital punishment by electric shock or a three-way cocktail of drugs is no better - it simply makes the death more palatable to those doing the killing. Equally, we must not forget those countries (China and Saudia Arabia spring to mind) who are considerably more gung-ho with the death penalty. Both suffer from oppressive regimes, both must be changed through international pressure if their own citizens are not allowed to influence their states' actions.

Finally, it is worth returning to the argument cited above - that such events bring comfort to victims' families. This may or may not be true, but it is a terrible argument. When we or our loved ones are the victims of crime we quickly revert to our baser instincts. As civilised people we know that we mustn't always respond to our heated emotions - when someone pushes me out the way in the street it is rash and unwise of me to stamp on their face, however initially tempting this may be. However, if your child has just been murdered your ability to think rationally is, unsurprisingly, highly compromised. Rather than giving people whose lives have been shattered the support and assistance they need, we instead parade them in front of the media with headlines like "bring hanging back", "hanging's too good for 'em" and so on. This is playing on people's emotions in their darkest hours, and we really should know better. Opinion polls often show a bump in the public's support for the death penalty after a high-profile case, and stupid politicians often seize the day - this is no surprise as we collectively try to put ourselves in the minds of someone who's family member has just been killed. Sensible decisions are not made during periods of immense emotion - they're made rationally. We must make the rational argument that the right to life cannot be taken away out of convenience.

Tags: death penalty, justice