The punter strikes back.

Working where I do at the moment - at the site of a major broadcaster - I occasionally have to visit offices occupied by some of the creative departments. One of them creates small props for TV shows.

Sometimes you really wish you were there when the person lit the first and only one of the stolen cigarettes!

Disable your Adblock!

Has anyone seen this page appear recently?
http://www.cpalead.com/adblock.php

Surely the idea of pop-up and adblockers is to stop all of this happening. 

CPA Lead is a web advertising agency and to be honest, I think they've missed the point - as have some of their customers. I suspect that this is going to make matters worse for those customers who have taken this script and it will actually decrease the amount of traffic through their sites, rather than boost their customer's - and therefore CPAlead's own income.

Just as an experiment I disabled adblock on a page that presented this message, just to check out  the  ads on the page. Practically every ad on the page was for a company or a product that I'd not use because I can't get them where I live on this side of the planet. The only ads I did find that were remotely relevant were from Google - those at least were from companies in my own country.


Not sure this is a good company either. Looking through their blogs and the comments that people have left I get the distinct impression that as far as they're concerned there isn't a world outside of  North America(possibly even outside the USA). They are also very good a dodging the question.

I wonder what the writer of Adblock/Adblock Plus has to say about this?

Oh, by the way, you can get around it with AdBlockPlus.

• As the page loads, go to the adblockPlus icon and select:"Disable on this page only".
• Wait for the page to finish loading
• de-select: "Disable on this page only".

You get to read the page AND not have to worry about pop-ups getting in the way or get that stupid message!

Health News?

Oh dear, Here we go again.

Fat Police
When does political correctness become political stupidity? I think a recent case in Barnsley (U.K) is a good indication of this. The parents of an eleven year old boy who is 3 lbs (count them) over the guide weight for children his age and height have been sent a letter from their local PCT (Primary Care Trust) saying that he is obese! The child is fitter and more active than most children his age since he swims, cycles, and even dances on a very regular basis.

And what do these brain doners say in their defence? "We are following national guidelines." Yes you are aren't you. Blindly and without the use of your God-given intelligence.

Via The BBC

Solve the problem, not the symptoms.
Why are modern management graduates so good at missing the point? Another story picked by several different news agencies was that figures released recently show that the A&E departments of a number of  hospitals are getting busier and busier. This is causing over-crowding because of the fact that the A&E staff are keeping people in for observation for between 12 and 24 hours - just in case.

What do we have? Some idiot saying that if these people are not being kept in hospital for less than a day they shouldn't be there at all.

How does that saying go again? Oh yes "Lies, damn lies and statistics."

Via The BBC

We don't care, we don't have to - we're the phone company!

Now I don't often slag off the bandwidth providers as I have to work with them so often, but this news story caught my eye this morning and I could only think of a hot, brown, semi-solid organic waste product. This was unfortunately also accompanied by a case of Deja Moo.

The village is rural, not remote. The nearest town is less than 7 miles away. There's no way you can make me believe that no-one in the town has broadband!!

£130,000 ($190,000) for a domestic broadband install? No, that's just a confidence trick.

Discredited systems causing discrimination.

I suspect that this is the beginning of a new topic series here, as this is not the first of these I've come across, and I doubt seriously whether it will be the last! Not only that, but this is not the first time rank stupidity from the county of Shropshire has made it to the national media.

A boy of five has been labelled ".....clinically obese as his body mass index put him in the 99th percentile [for his age group]." The child is 3'10" (1.17m) tall and weighs 4st 2lbs (26.3kg), and if you look at the picture of him from the Daily Telegraph, I find it hard to believe anyone with a gramme of common sense would call this boy obese.

Well, as usual it appears that "common sense" is a mis-noma these days as they have used the modern version of the height/weight chart: the BMI Index, which doesn't take account of the body's density in any way therefore even most super-fit athletes come out as clinically obese!

Even the NHS give the guidance to their own nursing staff that: ".............the [BMI] system is to be taken as a guide only and should not be used for children or the severely overwieght."

For those of you who are wondering how it's done, the formula is simple, take the person's weight in kilos and divide this by the person's height in metres squared. If you work in Imperial measures, then its pounds  x 703 divided by height in inches squared: height versus weight. quid pro quo!

Small minded people

Whilst waiting at the checkouts........
Woman: "How dare you go around drunk with your family!"
Me: "At least if I was drunk - which I'm not, I'd be sober tomorrow... you'd still be ignorant!"
Woman: ".............."
Me: "I have MS. Deal with it!"
Applause from those around me.

Conspiracy Theorists forward!

I wasn't sure - as this is diabetes related - as to whether to post it here or on Diabetes Daily. I decided to post it here and link from DD as being the easiest option.

Someone posted - in jest - that Diabetes was unheard of before 1947.  Actually there is documentary evidence that the early Egyptian civilisation had recognised the symptoms; they just didn't know what it was and what caused it.

That aside, the gist of the thread was whether members believed there was a conspiracy going on that was preventing a cure for the disease. The concensus was that there was no knowledgeable one, which goes to prove one thing that I maintain: there's no such thing as a conspiracy, just blatant stupidity. I'd like to invent a word here to sum it up:

Stupiracy: Stupidity that appears to be a conspiracy, but borne out of ignorance.

Yes, there is a blatant stupiracy going on here and it's all down to that wonderful ideal:- profit. Obviously a lot of this comes from pure greed, but some of it - as I've intimated - is just pure ignorance.

The nub of the matter is that the governments of the world have a serious healthcare problem building due to the increase in the incidence of diabetes, especially what they term "type 2". They are all seriously worried as to how they are going to pay for this. My simple suggestion is:

tax the convenience food manufacturer's additives, especially high fructose corn syrup

Now here's why I say this.

Let's start with the root of the problem. The actual incidence of what is erroneously called by a lot of clinicians "type 2" has escalated quite alarmingly since WWII, and it cannot be put down purely to the improvement in diagnosis of the disease: the statistics far out way this as being the only factor. So what has changed since the late 1940's?

DIET!

Now some of this rise can be blamed on the lifestyle changes that our modern world has given us: we are more sedentary, the degree of manual labour has decreased, cheap powered personal travel is extensively avbailable. But you cannot put it all down to this. The price of food has dropped overall, but not in terms of the healthier alternative, and don't get me wrong, I'm not going to go all the way out the other side and blame it all on what we call "fast food". What I'm blaming is the content of fast food / junk food / convenience food call it what you will, it comes preprepared and you just stick in the microwave for five minutes..

I cannot prove this personally: I'm not a research chemist, but it cannot be coincidental that instances of diabetes have increased with the increases of cheaper additives and ingredients being put into pre-prepared food. How do I come to this unscientific conclusion?   My wife has been allergic to apples since she was a child: they give her severe abdominal discomfort and at first it was thought that it was the high level of fructose within them that caused this. We could live with this, just buy pears and other hard fruit and we'll be OK. Then I did some more research. Pears and bananas actually have (weight for weight) more fructose in them so this obviously couldn't be the entire story.

Now comes the scary part. We started to notice that certain favourite "packet" and pre- prepared foods were starting to produce the same problem as apples and at first we couldn't work it out: we read the ingredients list looking for things like apples and cider and they just weren't there. Then we noticed that one particular item (a favourite biscuit) started to produce the problem that hadn't the week before and by chance we hadn't thrown away the old empty packaging. Comparing the ingredients list we instantly noticed the difference:

"high fructose-glucose syrup".

The older version of the product contained just "glucose syrup". We checked other products: they were the same.

More digging around the inter-web revealed what might be the problem: the ratio between fructose and glucose within the food! There are three main "versions" in common use within the food industry, all different "strengths" of the same thing: They are called HFCS42, HFCS55 and HFCS90. Now the name should give you a clue.

HFCS42 has actually got more glucose than fructose in it. a ration of about 1:1.1
HFCS55 is 55% fructose and 45% glucose: a ratio of about 1.2:1
Pears are about  66% fructose and 34% glucose: a ratio of about 1.5:1
Apples are about  70% fructose and about 30% glucose: a ratio of about 2:1
HFCS90 - the most common is 90% fructose to 10% glucose : an enormous ratio of 9:1!!!

Why do they use HFCS90? Well it's a simple calculation, the sweeter something is the less you have to put in, so the less you have to spend.

How this "ratio" causes the problem is someone else's research grant - I don't have the training. All I know is that as the number of products containing HFCS has increased so the number of these products in our shopping basket has decreased!

Deja Vu or Deja Moo?

In the news today, Toyota are having engine management problems: the car's brakes don't seem to want to work sometimes. It seems I've heard this all before somewhere... way back around 1998 with the Ford Explorer and Ranger models here in the UK having cruise controls that suddenly set themselves to some ridiculously high speed and wouldn't let go of the throttle.

This is not the most worrying aspect of this "occurrence" as far as I'm concerned. What I find more worrying is the initial response from both manufacturers was exactly the same when the problems first became apparent:

"Problem? What problem? There's no problem!"

In the case of Ford, it had to take a couple of severe accidents that couldn't be attributed to either mechanical defect or "pilot error" for them to even begin to admit there was a problem, and to show how widespread that problem actually was, the recall is well over 4.5 million vehicles worldwide as of the end of 2009.

At least Toyota were willing to entertain the possibility of a problem existing or though why the customer facing parts of Toyota in both the US and UK say they knew nothing until very recently says a lot about the "never admit blame, even if it's true" culture in both countries. Come on guys, what's better; admit that you may have got it wrong or have the stigma of at least one very large lawsuit hanging over the company's profit forecast for a number of years.

As my wife often says to Customer Service departments: "Better safe than sued!"

Oh, the definition of Deja Moo: "having heard that bullshit somewhere before."

We don't care! We're Google! We're the Web!

Actually, no you're not.
What you are is a company that seem to want to emulate Microsoft's sales division.

To what am I referring?

iGoogle.

Someone somewhere within the corporate nightmare that the company has become has decided "Hey we can give everyone Google Chat - whether they want it or not!" And before anyone responds, "but you can disable it!" yes, you can... but you can't hide it!

I suppose what's worse than this is that person - in their infinite wisdom/stupidy (delete as appropriate) has decided to move the tabs from the top to the side of the page, thus making the layout awkward - to say the least.

A point here people! Not everyone out here in Webbyland has super splondicious 16 x 9 widescreen monitors yet and have to put up with old-fashioned fuddy-duddy 4 x 3 instead!

PLEASE! - give people a choice or you are going to find a lot of people no longer using iGoogle!

Your targeting is Off!

"The farce is strong in this one."

So Phorm could be getting the push - businesswise - with British Telecom's decision to ditch their part in Phorm's Webwise product. I would suggest that since they were the major partner in the entire project - if not holding Phorm's purse strings, at least holding their wrists - pulling out at this stage means it's unlikely that either Virgin or TalkTalk will take up the baton in the UK.

As being the type of person who considers web advertising as a necessary evil, actually having my browser awash with badly targeted ads as it is (Google ads anyone?) is enough already!

The "personal privacy" brigade have got it slightly wrong - these people are interested in your browsing habits, not you in particular. What they're really interested in is the big advertiser's budgets and how much they can screw out of these people.

Think on this, how can these companies prove that it's Phorm's software actually boosting their sales as against any other fluctuations in the market? They can't. All that can be proved is that a certain group of people visit these particular sites at anyone time. However, having something sitting in the back-office part of your ISP's system, trying to second-guess what you are looking for is not a good idea, for several good reasons.

One, if your are as mercenary a browser as I am, I'm not interested in the same old thing, day after day. I want my browsing experience to be fresh every time: all that Webwise will do is make my experience stale and uninteresting.

Two, how are the ISPs and Phorm going to ensure that the data they collect/intercept is secure? Let's be honest, there's a lot of hackers out there that would find it very easy to put hooks in this software to harvest the personal details of the ISP's customers, especially when these people are making on-line transactions of any sort, encrypted or otherwise. When you register with a site of anything, it's your browser that holds the passwords. Unless the site uses Secure Server authentication, that password is sent in plain text.

Phorm? No thank you. It'll just turn into a phisher's paradise.

I spoke too soon......

Actually it's not the boss this time... it's the trolls from the Finance Department. It seems that for the third year running someone has forgotten to budget for a set of software licences that the customer is paying us to renew...

Now I wonder whose office got re-decorated this year with that money!

Or is it a case of.... "Due to budgetary restraints, the light at the end of the tunnel has had to be turned off."
[deep sigh, wanders off to the coffee machine for a refill.]

Change for the better or just meaningless change?

As Ford Prefect noted, "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." I'm actually wondering when I can get to eat at the moment.... you can crunch only so many glucose tabs before your tongue revolts!

This morning we had one of those occasional tortures that they inflict on you: the "Management Meeting" This morning's effort was all about "Lean Management" and "eliminating waste in the procedures". This all stems from the experiment Toyota tried back in the 70's which they employed the principles that became "Kaizen". IT seems to work well in the manufacturing industry, but seems to fall short in most other sectors.

Kaizen is a Japanese term formed from the words Kai meaning change and zen which means good. In Korea, this translates as ge sun and in Chinese gai shan both meaning improvement change for the better. However, modern management has perverted it to stand for one of it's supposed foundations: continual inmprovement. From what I can see this is just another case of "smoke and mirrors"

While I agree waste, in terms of time and effort should be got rid of with all possible speed, I'm not sure how we in particular can do this as most of the waste is generated by the procedures thrust upon us by the management itself.

As a team, once our own pointy-haired boss had left (20 minutes into a scheduled 90!) we sat down and worked out some ways we could use to measure how much time we are actually spending on fulfilling the reporting tasks he demands from us as against how much time we are spending actually servicing our customers; we intrinsically know we are spending less on the latter, we just can't prove it yet.

This afternoon I'm going over to see the union rep. with one of the team (I'm acting supervisor as he's resigned!) as the guy has issues with the pointy-haired one

Big is not beautiful.

Michael Douglas' character Gordon Gekko, in the movie "Wall Street" famously said to his audience of stakeholders: "Greed is - for lack of a better word - good". I've never agreed with that philosophy as most, if not all the people who subscribe to it, end up in a worse state than when they bought into it. Unfortunately, there's a lot of innocents that unwittingly subscribe to it as well and get burned even worse. The movie reflected the time at which it was made, where banking and stock markets were the place to be. and the premise that "big is beautiful" seems to have persisted to a large degree even through the current economic crisis: some may even say that it in fact started it, but this is not my point here.

My point is that sadly one area of industry where this philosophy does still persist is IT. This is understandable considering that the financial world was one of it's biggest founders, and even after 20+ years of non-financial use some companies IT is still run by the Finance Department.

So, what's the problem? In a word, inertia.

Talk to any physicist or engineer with any mechanical background and they will tell you that the larger an object is, the more force you need to get it to start. However, once it is moving it will keep moving without much force at all - that roughly is inertia.

You can apply this analogy very well to corporate bodies - you can say they're like a super tanker: once they're moving it's easy to keep them moving, but they take a long time to do anything once they are unless you use a lot of energy.

What's worse is if it loses all power, no matter what the command crew does, it will just keep going on the same course until it hits something hard, and the results will not be pretty - as the real Wall St. found out with Lehmann Bros.

In the IT world the alarm bells should start ringing sooner but, as above, it's a case of whether the right people hear them. I've now heard two with my current employer: a global IT support company. The first was when we started to have to jump through hoops to get even the smallest travel claims approved, the second made me and others where I'm based do an enormous mental double-take. It is that the upper management are considering the option of off-shoring our own IT.

Scott Addams once drew a Dilbert cartoon about this - I thought he was joking!

UK ID card scheme.

The pig-headedness of politicians never ceases to amaze me.

10 Downing St. and the Home Office are still pushing to get this running even after having all the problems the chosen implementation will suffer from made pellucidly clear.

I personally have no objection to a national ID card system that would make my daily life easier - I'd welcome it in a minute if it would combine all the goverment/tax/health/social services data that currently exists about yours truly.

BUT.........................

Unfortunately these are still science fiction due to the stupidity inherent in the human race.

So what are my objections to the current scheme? Well, it has nothing to do with human rights or anything to do with the so-called "surveillance society". They can be summed up simply as:

• Fraud: No matter what the underlying card system is, Chip'n'Pin or contact-less, it is still open to abuse. Note how quickly the criminal fraternity caught up with the technology after it was introduced.
• Physical reliability: The physical environment and cleanliness of the card can and does cause significant problems. With Chip'n'Pin it's the build up of crud on the contacts that causes the problem. It then builds up in the reader and it's not going to be long before
  the reader needs servicing, if not disinfecting!
• Cost: the current government estimate is about £5bn ($7.4bn). In the past, an overspend of not less than 50% of the original estimate is a good bet for HM Gov. projects, so the independent experts saying £10bn to £20bn is quite feasible.
  Oh, and you the holder of the card are going to have to pay £50 just for the privilege of having the card produced.
• Logistics: yes.... well the way the UK's vehicle licensing system works seems to be OK, but it's only dealing with one un-related item of data at a time, this system is eventually going to have so many hooks and tie-ins it's bound to collapse eventually.

Give it up for now Jacqui, wait until the technology is a little more reliable and can cope with these problems.