This is not a "niche" blog. This is everything that makes me, me - or at least the bits I write down. There's no such thing as a "niche" person.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

6.53am

I don't like my job much, but I'm not the guy who was emptying the bins in Tesco car park in the dark and the rain at 6.53 this morning.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Laptop

Over a month ago I sent Daniel's laptop to Medion for repair or replacement, as it was less than a year old and had gone wrong (for the second time). I had phoned their customer service line several times - they never ever phoned me despite promising someone would call me back - and run up phone bills listening to their choice of queuing music, as well as repeatedly emailing them a scan of the receipt (which at first they denied receiving - they don't reply to emails either) to prove that the laptop was less than a year old. Eventually they conceded that the screen being completely white wasn't something they could sort out over the phone and Parcelforce took it away. I called again two weeks ago to find out what was happening and was told that they had replaced the keyboard (why?) but it had failed testing because the screen was white, so they'd ordered a new screen. I called again this morning and was told that two weeks ago they'd replaced the main board (aha - so not the keyboard then) but it had failed testing because the screen was white and so they'd ordered a new screen. I pointed out that this was two weeks ago, but the lady in their call centre explained there was nothing she could do except email someone to point out that the new screen hadn't arrived. Given Medion's record on emails, I wasn't hopeful, so asked who I called to complain. I was told that complaints have to be in writing - presumably nobody wants to talk to angry customers. She did give me an email address, to which I will send a copy of this blog post, in the hope that I can find out
  • why it has taken so long to diagnose the problem with this, given that I gave them a full description over the phone and simply trying to switch on the laptop on the day it was delivered would have given them a clue
  • whether in fact the delay is due to the incredibly high number of faulty machines sent back to Medion or to their underinvestment in tech staff
  • why it takes a company over two weeks to get a component for one of their own machines
  • whether they have any comment to make about never returning phone calls or replying to emails

If I get a reply I'll post it here, but I'm not indulging in any breathholding.

UPDATE: I've just realised that Medion's hotline web page is headed "I have a problem" and continues "is a phrase that we often hear when customers call our telephone hotline." Could it in fact be the phrase "I have a problem with your appalling level of service and apparent total disregard for your customers"?

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

If I had more money

cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Truth and information

I found this story via Cartoon Church. A site that is named after Martin Luther King is presenting a distorted and untrue picture of Martin Luther King. Given that Martin Luther King was in favour of direct action it doesn't seem unreasonable to use Google bombing to try and get more truthful information about Martin Luther King on to the Google results page for Martin Luther King. Truth is truth, however quietly it is spoken, but information is whatever is shouted out loud.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Young people happier in developing countries

Reuters carries a story about a survey conducted by MTVNI, which finds that overall young people in developing countries are happier and feel they have more to look forward to. There's a comment in the article that the happier young people tend to be more religious; I'd love to know if living in developing countries is enough of an indicator for likelihood of religious faith, or if religious faith by itself is a factor in young people's happiness. I thought this was worrying:

MTVNI said one of the trends they spotted was that young people with access to mass media tended to feel less safe as they did not have the cognitive skills to interpret real risk.

In the UK, more than 80 percent of 16- to 34-year-olds said they were as afraid of terrorism as they were of the getting cancer -- though the latter was far more likely to hurt them.


Not only worrying that young people may be as (un)likely to take positive steps to look after their health as they are to avoid the danger of terrorism, but that 16-34 year olds (34 year olds!) don't have the cognitive skills to spot the difference between scaremongering and actual danger.

Friday, November 17, 2006

472 peaches and 2 apples

The Australian reports on a survey carried out for findmypast.com on parents naming their children after celebrities. This is nothing new, of course; my friend Julie got her name because her parents liked The Sound Of Music. Girls seem to have come off best in the list: Kylie, Keira and Shakira are all OK, nothing to get beaten up for in the playground, which will probably be the fate of some of the Dres, Gazzas and Tupacs; I should advise all three Snoops to change their name to Michael or James as soon as possible.

40

So now I'm counting the days I have left: 20 days (including today) of being thirtysomething. This is the first birthday I've ever had that I've not wanted to celebrate. I wasn't looking forward much to 30, but I had a party (probably the first successful party I ever organised) and in the end it was OK. But now it feels as though my life is ending. I know that this is partly because I'm feeling a bit miserable, and I know that plenty of people have achieved things when they're older than 40 - I am, by the way, finding it increasingly hard not to slap people who say "Life begins at 40" - and I'm sure that the day after my birthday I'll wake up and do exactly the same things as I did the day before my birthday, but nonetheless I can't help feeling that that's it: life is over, from now on it's simply existing. I'm not likely to start a new career, despite the fact that I have longer to work before 65 than I have worked since I was 18; I'll continue to be adequate at some things, but I'm unlikely now to ever excel in anything; all the aches and pains I have now will most likely either continue or get worse, rather than improve or disappear; my thoughts about God's plan for my life are complex but usually come down to an assumption that he wants me to just do the best I can, where I am, with what I've got and I'm not doing very well so far.

People who complain better than I do

This made me smile: The Helsinki Complaints Choir

Monday, November 13, 2006

The enemies of blogging

The enemies of blogging are busyness, tiredness and depression. Busyness, by itself, is not necessarily an obstacle to blogging. After all, a short post only takes a few minutes, and being busy means that there's plenty to blog about. Tiredness, equally, will not in itself stop any blog owner from writing that he is tired, or that she has done many things, and now she is worn out. If I still eat and drink and walk around the house when tired, then surely I can manage a little light keyboard tapping. Tiredness and busyness, alas, come together; not an insurmountable obstacle, but when blogging is last on a very long list of things to do, chances are it may fall off the list altogether. All it takes is to add the last ingredient to this poisonous cocktail, and the blog takes to bed, surrounded by grieving relatives. The most insidious aspect, I know from experience, of being mildly but chronically depressed, is the feeling that manifests itself in the phrase "I just can't be bothered". It's late, I'm tired, I still have things to do, and I'd really like to blog. I enjoy blogging. Blogging makes me feel good, gives me a sense of achievement and a connection to the outside world. But I look at the time, I look at the stack of ironing, and I look at the computer and I think "I just can't be bothered".

P.S. Sorry about the prose style of this post; I've been looking at Norman Rockwell pictures.

Monday, November 06, 2006

Strange pronouncements on Scottish smoking

BBC news carries a story that Scotland's Chief Medical Officer has said the country's smoking ban will reduce the number suffering from lung cancer. I'm not sure whether a ban on smoking in public places is any more effective than other measures in stopping people from smoking, but I was slightly taken aback by the comments by Neil Rafferty, from the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (FOREST - a desperate attempt to get a good acronym if ever I heard one), who said that there is no conclusive evidence that lung cancer is caused by second hand smoke. Just out of curiosity, I put the phrase "conclusive evidence that lung cancer is caused by second hand smoke" into Google - perhaps Mr Rafferty should try the same. The winning bizarreness, however, has to be this: "Mr Rafferty said that by claiming such good results from the policy, the public could be misled into entrusting politicians with more power over people's lives". I'm sorry? Are we to assume that the Government should only deliver inaccurate and negative public health messages, in case the populace foolishly decide that they will hand over all responsibility and control to elected officials? "This Government has done something helpful: I must give them complete power over my life." Any evidence that smoking causes brain damage?

Friday, November 03, 2006

Friday tired

4.30 on Friday - time to go home, put feet up and relax for the weekend. Or not, as the case may be. Bursledon Players have their next production coming up (directed yet again by me) - tickets available here - so tomorrow is set building all day, then technical rehearsal all Sunday afternoon. Yet again I've had to ask the ever-helpful Mike Andrews at Lite Relief if we can have lights etc at short notice - to his credit, when I asked him on a Friday evening as he was driving back from a job in Oxford, he promised to see me at the warehouse at 9.30 on Saturday morning. I'm out praying with John tonight, it's Cathy's birthday party tomorrow evening (a masked ball for which I don't yet have a mask), and what with church Sunday morning (plus Celebration in the evening) and going to the Fox and Hounds quiz, I'm wondering when on earth I'm going to get the usual 5+ loads of washing done so that children have clean school uniforms etc. I'll be shattered by Monday.

Now I know that this is all voluntary and mostly pleasurable, and that there are a lot of people who don't have leisure time to anywhere near the extent that I do, but nonetheless it's not a great feeling to be finishing work for the week, feeling tired, and knowing that it's going to be non-stop until Monday when I'm back at work again (and giving a presentation on the Local Government White Paper that I haven't even thought about yet).

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Bizarre signs


Dave's recent post reminded me of probably the most surreal sign I've ever seen - picture taken in Southampton General Hospital a few months ago.

Swedish furniture (but definitely not IKEA)

I found this via Boing Boing - FRONT use 3D mapping techniques and instant prototyping to turn their designers doodles into plastic furniture. It looks horrible, but I'd love to play with the hardware. Instant 3D graffiti... or how about drawing round a model, à la Anthony Gormley. Performance sculpture!

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Choice, identity, Kingdom

Some quick and not necessarily coherent thoughts. C.S. Lewis, in The Problem Of Pain, says “There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a ‘self’, can exist except in contrast with an ‘other’”, which is a much better way of putting some of the ideas in my previous post. Combined with the idea that a choice-driven society, by reducing frustration of desires, reduces our ability to relate to or even conceive of the ‘other’, it’s not an enormous step to suppose that living in a consumer society leads to the erosion of the self, and that such erosion is shown through features of contemporary culture such as identification with celebrities in an increasingly cultic fashion, a makeover culture that focuses on constant renewal and reinvention of the self through possessions and environment, and a paradoxical presentation of violent and erotic objectification as both abhorrent and universally pervasive.

The other idea that I’ve been thinking about, motivated partly by discussions on Luke in our small group, is the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven. What does this mean? How does it differ from ideas about heaven as a place we go when we die? Well, the Kingdom of Heaven is a phenomenon that produces both an affective and a behavioural response – like someone finding treasure in a field: they change what they are doing with their life (they go and sell everything they have to buy the field), but they do this related to an emotional response. This isn’t a business decision, made with an eye to the balance sheet. This is a sequel to an emotional response, to a feeling that is literally life-changing. Lots of parables talk about rejoicing and throwing a party as the normal response to the Kingdom of Heaven impacting on your life. And just as an aside, how often does evangelism try to reason people into Christianity, as if the response to finding a lost possession was to sit down and think “Hmmm… I reckon that this is worth throwing a small-to-medium sized party”? And how often is joy the defining characteristic of Christians?

Crucially, it seems that the Kingdom of Heaven is something that changes us profoundly, at an identity level, yet also remains separate from us. It is a “present-but-not-fulfilled” entity, an essentially ungraspable fact. Living in the Kingdom requires that we be perfect, as God is perfect – that we strive for the unattainable. Living in the Kingdom means that I am made in the image of the Other; that my identity is derived from that which is ultimately unknowable, that I find myself as I grow closer to the Other, rather than finding the Other as I look more closely at myself. Living in the Kingdom requires that we love our enemies, pray for our persecutors, forgive those who hurt us; not because these are sensible things to do, but because they are precisely the things that are most likely to produce a response of “It’s not really me”. It means that the more intimately I become involved with and connected to that which is not-me, the more I discover myself, until one day I become one with all that is not me, and I become truly who I am.

Civil liberties in an information society

E-Health Insider have picked up on articles in today's Guardian, emphasising the concerns over confidentiality and security of the national patient database. The Guardian is also providing a template so that people can opt out of the system - with a comment that if enough people refuse to have their details on the Spine, then the system will be unworkable and will be abandoned. Normally I'm on the side of the Civil Liberties lobby, but in this instance it seems crazy to try and wreck the whole system. Patient records will be held electronically; my records at my local GP haven't been on paper for several years. If I'm admitted to hospital, I want my notes to be available to hospital staff - particularly if there is some urgency, or if I can't provide relevant information. Surely it makes more sense to campaign for increased safeguards and stricter penalties for those who attempt to misuse data, rather than trying to delay or disrupt a useful and necessary but imperfect system?