Monthly Archives: February 2006

Politics

More Money for Bank Profits?

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I came across an interesting article on the BBC News Website yesterday. It seems that after they have been heavily criticised over a number of practices, including late fees, usage fees, and an investigation of the whole industry by MP’s, they have a new way to try and make more money out of consumers.

This time they are targeting regular payers, the people who because they always pay off their bill in full, don’t make them much money. A Barclaycard customer contacted the BBC’s Moneybox programme after he received his bill at the normal time, but found that his payment date had moved from the 9th of the month to the 3rd. The fact that this occurred for his December bill also seems decidedly suspicious. Most peoples December bills would be bigger, plus with the Christmas holidays the cheque would have to be sent significantly earlier so as to get there on time. The consumer involved regards it entirely as a policy to maximise late payments by Barclaycard.

The response from Barclaycard is pretty honest. Ian Barber from the company said that Barclaycard was

“having to face up to the fact that clearly we are not making as much money out of customers that pay their bill in full as we are out of those that borrow�

and that they were

“quite open about it… if you pay your bill in full every month you may get a few days less to pay… That is the fact of it and we are not going to shy away from that.â€?

The suggestion from the article was that to avoid the problem you should set up a direct debit for the full bill, which is what we have set up on our cards already. However, it is worth noting that even with that, we have been hit by a similar problem ourselves. Since the direct debit payment is fixed, one of our card companies has moved our billing date, so rather than being billed early in the month, around the 3rd or 4th, it now bills almost two weeks later on the 15th. It is also worth pointing out that we have never actually been officially notified of the change, it just moved.

The golden rule seems to be that as the man from Barclaycard says credit card companies are primarily in it to make money, so it is always important to keep a close eye on what they are trying to charge you, whether it’s a £25 late charge for failing to pay £5, or moving the payment date to try and trip you up.

Pictures

Stunning Pictures from Flickr

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One of the great things about Flickr, is being able to browse through other peoples pictures and discover some really fantastic shots.

Whilst you can browse interesting shots on the Explore page, the site also allows you to set up customised RSS and Atom feeds of new pictures, which is where I spotted this one. The shot was posted by Andrew Denny who posted a number of shots of the Geek Dinner back in December, hence why he is on my contact list. However when he isn’t hanging out in restaurants in London with a bunch of geeks, he’s posting on his blog, GrannyButtons about life on the canals, and taking stunning pictures like this. You can take a browse through more of his pictures on Flickr.

Music

How Live is Live?

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We saw part of The Culture Show on BBC2 this week, which amongst other things included the launch of a campaign by the Musicians Union to provide an on-screen indication of whether a musical performance is mimed or live.

The campaign has been launched following an ICM poll that had found that 71% of the public would like some sort of indication. They then had different artists giving their opinion, Beverley Knight arguing for the indication, and Faye Tozer, former member of Steps arguing for the benefits of miming.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the item was the discussion with a Top of the Pops producer. Top of the Pops like other similar shows such as CD:UK have a mixture of people miming, people singing live to a backing track, and occasionally fully live performances. The item included some footage of live shows where the singer couldn’t hear the backing track, and some footage of Oasis who apparently have never sung live on Top of the Pops because it meant that they wouldn’t be able to drink before the performance! In the initial interview, the producer said that in a show with so many different acts in a short space of time, it was very complicated to have them all play live and be properly set up. He then justified it by saying that in his opinion people weren’t bothered too much by miming. What was interesting was his pretty surprised reaction when the interviewer quoted the results from the poll.

From a personal point of view, especially if I’m paying good money, I feel short changed if it isn’t live. To be frank if I wanted to hear a recording, I could go down to a record shop and get a CD! The same is true about TV shows. I haven’t watched Top of the Pops for years, however the one programme I do watch from time to time is Later with Jools Holland, which was noted on The Culture Show item as being about the only show on TV that is 100% live. What they do on Later is take advantage of the live medium to do special versions of songs, or to put interesting combinations of artists together. Indeed some of the older albums I listen to frequently are live recordings, CD’s such as “Way We Walk Vol.2â€? by Genesis which is a set of six live songs the majority of which run for between ten and twenty minutes. Another favourite is the live version of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band that Paul McCartney has on “Tripping the Live Fantasticâ€?. Here he combines the original song with the original reprise – which is in a different key – into one six minute performance by almost three minutes of guitar solo by both Paul and another guitarist, passing the solo back and forth across the stage, still one of my favourite performances of the song. So do I think that the liveness of a performance should be highlighted? Absolutely, whatever people may say about how miming gives bands the opportunity to put on more of a show, ultimately what I’m interested in is the music!

Computers/Technology

Swings and Roundabouts

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Quite often, thanks to the ranks of tweaks and hacks that many people on the Internet post, you can get a bit of software to work better, faster, or whatever. However from time to time, it just totally fails.

I’ve had the experience with the optimised Firefox builds that are regularly posted by Neil Lee. I’ve been using these for a while, as they are compiled for specific processors, and as such are generally faster than the regular Mac version of Firefox. As Neil says on his site all he’s doing is just recompiling the existing Firefox build, which made my odd problem with the new version all the more strange.

A look at the release notes for the latest version, 1.5.0.1 show that this is a pretty minor bug fix release, and the official release looks and runs exactly the same as before. However the same can’t be said for the optimised build, which has a fundamental problem with the Bloglines site – a bit of a problem as that is one of the major sites I use to track over 100 different blogs and feeds. The problem is that the new build doesn’t function correctly with the frame based feeds page – whereas the standard build quite happily allows you to click a feed in the left hand frame and shows you the latest updates on the right, the optimised build doesn’t do this – instead it generates a new, blank tab, and never shows you the feed.

Anyway, I’m sure if it’s a pretty common problem it will be sorted out quite quickly, but until then I’m back to the slow old standard release – not that it doesn’t work, it’s just a bit like the difference between the courtesy car you get when your car is in being repaired, and the car you’re used to!

General

Grey

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A friend of ours always used to say that one of the reasons she went skiing every year, apart from the fact that she liked skiing of course, was to escape the tedium of the weather that never did much at this time of year. I have to say that although one of my favourite weather anecdotes is the bit of research that compared the Met Office weather forecast with assuming that the weather tomorrow would be the same as today (called the persistence forecast) – and found that the assumption was often more accurate than the weather forecast – I’ve never noticed it that much. True the weather is fairly consistent, but there were always some differences from day to day.

However, this year is a bit different, for the past couple of weeks the weather has done absolutely nothing. There has been no wind, no rain (we are in the middle of one of the worst droughts for a century), and the temperature has been hovering at freezing or below for what seems like an age. Last week was not too bad as there was not much cloud, so at least it was sunny, but for the whole of this week, it has just been gloomy and grey, with full cloud cover the entire day. It is now at the point that it is so dry that even with the sub-zero overnight temperatures there has been no frost either. Roll on spring, then maybe we’ll get a bit of variety!