Suppose the Act of Union had never happened, Scotland was still an independent country and the vote we were taking in two years' time was not on whether we should leave the Union but on whether we should join it.
"In that scenario, what would be the case for the Union? Your main Parliament will move hundreds of miles away and your MPs will be in a small minority. You will have a Government you didn't vote for.
"You will hand over all your oil and gas revenues to the London Treasury. The biggest nuclear arsenal in western Europe will be based on the River Clyde, 30 miles from your largest city.
"An austerity budget will be imposed from London, cutting jobs and threatening public services, instead of Scotland being responsible for raising and spending its own taxes. You will join a country whose health and education services are rapidly being privatised." -- Blair Jenkins OBE, CEO of Yes Scotland
Showing posts with label Viewpoint. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Viewpoint. Show all posts
20 August 2012
22 July 2012
Gaelic signs
A response to the narrow minded letter writers of The Herald and The Scotsman who protest against bilingual signs.
I was born in Scotland and grew up in Dunblane, Perthshire. Like many parts of Scotland outside the Highlands, there were native Gaelic speakers living in Dunblane. One of them, my teacher, was a crowned Mod Bard originally from Glencoe. Having been denied the opportunity to learn Gaelic in school because apparently there was "no demand" yet there was sufficient demand to run a class of 4 for Russian and a class of 4 for Latin, the same teacher ended up teaching me in Essex of all places.
Only then did I begin to pronounce properly and understand the nearest hill name to the house where I spent my childhood - uamh bheag. To those who say "there is no history of Gaelic here". Look around you at the personal names and place names right across Scotland including Balerno, Duns and Dalmeny in the Lothians. From a family that lived in Lothian and Berwickshire for 23 continuous generations before me I don't particularly care how many of them spoke Gaelic or didn't because I am forward looking, not back. However, there's a fair chance that when my ancestor was knighted by King Alexander III, the King was likely a Gaelic speaker. I don't confine Gaelic by a past where its decline has been largely confined by apathy, persecution and ethnic cleansing. We can't change, the past but we can shape the future. I look forward to a positive future when the Gaelic native speakers going through Gaelic medium education across Scotland become fluent adult speakers. I look forward to a time when Scots don't dismiss part of their heritage just because it hasn't been spoken widely on the street in living memory as such arguments can also be used to ban ethic minorities from moving in and of holding back a progressive and dynamic nation. "Not traditional here" is the view of right wing extremists, not of a forward thinking modern nation.
I find the English road signs in the Highlands a distraction because as a Gaelic speaker all I see is badly spelt corrupted Gaelic calling itself "English". I also don't understand why they are in a different colour, in Wales the bilingual signs have the town name in the same font and colour for both the native language and the one from England. Having learnt Gaelic to reasonable fluency, I look back on the time when I was just a monoglot speaker and realise now how much I missed. The placenames I couldn't understand, the songs I missed out on, the shocking embarrassment and ignorance of climbing a hill and not knowing how to pronounce the name of it, the perspective of the people who founded Scotland, the perspective of my country's history from a Scottish or Highland point of view rather than an English one. These things are taken as acceptable by so many Scots, simply because it has been that way by tradition. See Runrig's fichead bliadna (with translation below) for what Highland history looks like. Were you taught that in school?
It may be a language spoken by a few, but Gaelic language and culture are probably the biggest single thing which clearly differentiates Scotland from England. It is the cultural foundation stone on which our nation was founded and which resonates through our history to the present and beyond. Many Gaelic icons such as the kilt, bagpipes and whisky now are national icons representing all of Scotland. Gaelic may be few in number, mostly due to historical political persecution and forced clearances, but cultural icons are not defined by mere numbers alone - repeated surveys have shown that the majority of Scots as a whole, Gaelic speakers or otherwise, believe Gaelic is important for the nation as a whole and should be supported by the nation as a whole.
Gaelic needs two main pillars of support to survive. It needs political will to enact legislation that removes the barriers to Gaelic's growth and provide the legislative and financial support for Gaelic to not be held back. However, alongside this it needs the social will amongst Scots to want to support the language in the same way that the Welsh do in Wales, the French speakers do in Canada. Scottish Gaelic was the third most widely spoken mother tongue in British North America in the 1850's - spoken by 200,000 people but now even in formerly Gaelic speaking areas, the few Gaelic speakers left now are vastly outnumbered by French speakers. State support for a language combined with national will amongst the people will turn a language around, no matter how long it has been in decline.
If Gaelic dies out in Scotland it dies out everywhere. It is our responsibility to take the language forward for the next generation and not to let a minority of monoglot English speakers say "Gaelic has no place here", we embraced devolution yet that had no political precedent in Scotland. Multilingualism is to be welcomed and we in Scotland are lucky to have Gaelic, Scots as well as English to call our own. The bilingual street signs and road signs are just a small token, it is when we have a proper understanding of Gaelic and a population that can fully appreciate it, that we will really have moved forward.
I was born in Scotland and grew up in Dunblane, Perthshire. Like many parts of Scotland outside the Highlands, there were native Gaelic speakers living in Dunblane. One of them, my teacher, was a crowned Mod Bard originally from Glencoe. Having been denied the opportunity to learn Gaelic in school because apparently there was "no demand" yet there was sufficient demand to run a class of 4 for Russian and a class of 4 for Latin, the same teacher ended up teaching me in Essex of all places.
Only then did I begin to pronounce properly and understand the nearest hill name to the house where I spent my childhood - uamh bheag. To those who say "there is no history of Gaelic here". Look around you at the personal names and place names right across Scotland including Balerno, Duns and Dalmeny in the Lothians. From a family that lived in Lothian and Berwickshire for 23 continuous generations before me I don't particularly care how many of them spoke Gaelic or didn't because I am forward looking, not back. However, there's a fair chance that when my ancestor was knighted by King Alexander III, the King was likely a Gaelic speaker. I don't confine Gaelic by a past where its decline has been largely confined by apathy, persecution and ethnic cleansing. We can't change, the past but we can shape the future. I look forward to a positive future when the Gaelic native speakers going through Gaelic medium education across Scotland become fluent adult speakers. I look forward to a time when Scots don't dismiss part of their heritage just because it hasn't been spoken widely on the street in living memory as such arguments can also be used to ban ethic minorities from moving in and of holding back a progressive and dynamic nation. "Not traditional here" is the view of right wing extremists, not of a forward thinking modern nation.
I find the English road signs in the Highlands a distraction because as a Gaelic speaker all I see is badly spelt corrupted Gaelic calling itself "English". I also don't understand why they are in a different colour, in Wales the bilingual signs have the town name in the same font and colour for both the native language and the one from England. Having learnt Gaelic to reasonable fluency, I look back on the time when I was just a monoglot speaker and realise now how much I missed. The placenames I couldn't understand, the songs I missed out on, the shocking embarrassment and ignorance of climbing a hill and not knowing how to pronounce the name of it, the perspective of the people who founded Scotland, the perspective of my country's history from a Scottish or Highland point of view rather than an English one. These things are taken as acceptable by so many Scots, simply because it has been that way by tradition. See Runrig's fichead bliadna (with translation below) for what Highland history looks like. Were you taught that in school?
It may be a language spoken by a few, but Gaelic language and culture are probably the biggest single thing which clearly differentiates Scotland from England. It is the cultural foundation stone on which our nation was founded and which resonates through our history to the present and beyond. Many Gaelic icons such as the kilt, bagpipes and whisky now are national icons representing all of Scotland. Gaelic may be few in number, mostly due to historical political persecution and forced clearances, but cultural icons are not defined by mere numbers alone - repeated surveys have shown that the majority of Scots as a whole, Gaelic speakers or otherwise, believe Gaelic is important for the nation as a whole and should be supported by the nation as a whole.
Gaelic needs two main pillars of support to survive. It needs political will to enact legislation that removes the barriers to Gaelic's growth and provide the legislative and financial support for Gaelic to not be held back. However, alongside this it needs the social will amongst Scots to want to support the language in the same way that the Welsh do in Wales, the French speakers do in Canada. Scottish Gaelic was the third most widely spoken mother tongue in British North America in the 1850's - spoken by 200,000 people but now even in formerly Gaelic speaking areas, the few Gaelic speakers left now are vastly outnumbered by French speakers. State support for a language combined with national will amongst the people will turn a language around, no matter how long it has been in decline.
If Gaelic dies out in Scotland it dies out everywhere. It is our responsibility to take the language forward for the next generation and not to let a minority of monoglot English speakers say "Gaelic has no place here", we embraced devolution yet that had no political precedent in Scotland. Multilingualism is to be welcomed and we in Scotland are lucky to have Gaelic, Scots as well as English to call our own. The bilingual street signs and road signs are just a small token, it is when we have a proper understanding of Gaelic and a population that can fully appreciate it, that we will really have moved forward.
17 June 2012
BBC iPlayer and Gaelic. Must do better
Dear
BBC.
I am a licencepayer who lives in the UK. Your attempt at an
iPlayer service for Gaelic is a disgrace.
1. The iPlayer itself is only available in English, a Gaelic version would not
require much effort. Open source free software has already been
translated free of charge by volunteers. The same could apply to your software. Thanks for providing a Gaelic version of the iPlayer website but remembering my choice via a cookie would be helpful.
2. The iPlayer service needs to be better for the non
satellite/cable users who cannot get BBC Alba on Freeview. Anyone outside of
Scotland still can't get BBC Alba on Freeview.
3. When I looked just now pretty much the entire back catalog of Gaelic
programmes consisted of programmes for children, learners, gardening or sport.
Where are the music programmes ? Where are the news programmes? Where are the
factual programmes?
4. I might have been able to record "An La" but there
was no "future record" or "series record" facility. I can
do a "series record" for English programmes such as Trooping the colour which is on once a year,
but not for a daily news programme to catch up and watch in the evening? Why?
5. Watching anything on an android device with
flash installed? Site is hopeless! I have chrome, I have flash, your site says
I don't have flash. I request the desktop site and I get "your mobile
isn't supported". There's no "download and watch later option"
when you do get it to work. Did you test this? You don't even mention tablets
or phones on your supported
browser list. Shocking.
6. None of the Eorpa programmes can be watched.
Why? This is one of the best examples of Gaelic broadcasting.
Your standard "See our FAQ" doesn't actually explain the specific
reason why this internationally acclaimed programme isn't available to
download. It's as if you want the people who are able to get it to actually put it on youtube for the benefit of everyone else. Your policy is indirect
censorship
7. When I am on the BBC site I can filter for
"Scotland" but can't subfilter for Gaelic within this. Why is this? Do you think the Scots are one homogeneous audience?
8. You're probably not obliged to provide input
into the national plan for Gaelic, broadcasting not being a devolved subject,
but it would be helpful if you detailed what your strategy was in relation to
Gaelic as the media (particularly the excellent Radio nan Gaidheal and BBC Alba
if you are lucky enough to receive them) are one of the key parts of the Gaelic
revival.
9. The Piping
Live programme, which I eventually found, has an English title and
English description. Sorry, this made me think it was actually in English.
Would it be possible to actually have Gaelic names for Gaelic programmes? Only
when you click on more information do you get a hint it might be in Gaelic.
10. Since Gaelic is a language
of Scotland, how about using the colour of the Saltire to represent the channel
rather than a rather dull grey? This is what tourist attractions which have Gaelic audio guides such as the Clan Donald centre on Skye do. When was dull grey the national colour?
11. I click on a Gaelic news
programme and your recommendation engine then thinks I should watch Top Gear in
English. Some work required? How about a "top watched" on the Gaelic channel - this should be easy to implement, like so many things on your English medium news site there is a "most read/shared" facility. Missing from the Gaelic equivalent. This should be a simple plug in, can't you reuse on the Gaelic news site and for Gaelic iPlayer content?
12. The excellent Litir
do Luchd-ionnsachaidh (all 674 weekly episodes) is available here on
your podcast site but not on
your iplayer site. Please make the iPlayer site consistent. Even a link to
the podcast site would help.
I still believe that Gaelic should be
promoted (not "Gaelic roots should be unearthed", that
sounds like pulling a plant up and killing it). This includes you doing your
bit too.
many thanks
Craig Cockburn
25 August 2011
Contact from Recruitment Agencies
I typically get a lot of calls from Recruitment Agencies. Usually it's about 20-25 a week. At 5-10 mins a call plus the inevitable telephone tag that goes on when I phone back and they are busy, this could take up 3-4 hours of my week. This is a necessary use of my time when I am job hunting, but I don't have spare time during the day for that at all when I am working and neither do many other candidates that are in demand. It's also rather obviously a sign of leaving when someone gets calls in the office several times a day and very quickly has to leave the room to speak somewhere private, not a good signal to send your employer or other employees. When I'm not working the default use of the phone is a fairly inefficient waste of time, please see the tips below on how we can use this time more efficiently.
I do think speaking to someone is important when the call is relevant and specific and to get to know the candidate. I'm not against phone calls at all, but with the volume of them, the length of them and the random calling at random times of day it's a bad way to manage time. If agencies want to talk for more than 5 mins and email simply won't do, like many popular candidates I'm either working, busy or can't talk - if you schedule some time to speak and we both have the time set aside we will both be a lot better prepared.
Some further tips:
1. My initial preferred form of contact is email. I can read email in busy places such as on the bus or train where it's too noisy to speak. I can also read email in patchy communication areas (also the train) where a phone conversation isn't practical or the quiet coach when it isn't permitted. I'm also on Skype: Craig.Cockburn for online chat - please send me a message which I will pick up and reply to the next time I log in.
2. Please don't call for a general chat about my job seeking status and recent career when this information is freely available online. This is available on LinkedIn, please look there first. If LinkedIn says I am currently in a job, then I'm currently in a job. If LinkedIn says I have finished my contract then I have finished my contract. If you have a template list of questions, please send me the template list of questions and I can fill it in quickly and you'll probably get an email reply giving you the information you need a lot quicker than if you leave a voicemail. You know, the stuff about salary/rate, location, contract/perm, career aspirations, etc. It's all fairly standard stuff. Once we get that out the way then we can schedule a proper talk for the relevant opportunities. Neither of us likes playing telephone tag and an introductory email is a much better use of my time, and yours, than random calls about permanent jobs in the wrong location or contract jobs at half my acceptable rate. Generally I only look for work within 90 mins of Central London, however I make exceptions for outstanding opportunities.
3. I am always happy for agencies to have my current CV (Resume) so we can stay in touch and you can follow my career and goals. Please send me an email at craig@siliconglen.com
4. I have two phones, one for incoming and one for outgoing. This allows me to browse the web, read relevant emails, etc whilst talking. The incoming one is usually on silent unless I am expecting a call as I don't want the phone ringing at work 20 times a week. It usually goes to voicemail. If it does go to voicemail, you are nearly always guaranteed a quicker response if you use the email address above. This is because I won't have to pick up the voicemail, write down the phone number and find a time to call back and hope you are there. Instead, I can just click reply and not worry if I've misheard the message, got a digit wrong or need to find somewhere quiet. I've had several calls from agents calling from bad reception areas and it took several attempts to get the phone number from the message, this is a waste of time. At least twice I have worked in a bad reception area. It is incredibly frustrating trying to deal with agencies who insist on using the phone in these circumstances and it is ultimately their loss if they can't put forward the best candidates because they insist on being able to talk to them to confirm basic details even when this isn't possible.
5. I've read James Caan's book on how he started in recruitment and made millions. In the beginning it was partly due to having a prestigious address in Pall Mall. I know that the address means a lot to many agencies for image purposes and so many agencies rent serviced offices. For this reason, and others, they often call from withheld or shared phone numbers. Please do not do this, it is exceptionally unprofessional. I have no idea when the call rings from a withheld number if it's a reputable agency I really want to talk to, a cold call agency I can put off, or a dodgy scammer. If you don't want to get mixed up with the dodgy scammer, don't call from a withheld number. It should be a simple switch on the office exchange, it isn't a big deal to change it and if it is then why not use Skype out instead? Not only does revealing your number let me know who is calling it means it's much much easier for me to call you back. Surely you want this? Please also call from a normal geographic landline rather than a non geographic number.
6. When you send me an email, please include a link to your LinkedIn profile so we can connect there and preferably also your mobile phone number. I classify all my contacts and email the recruitment related ones when my contract is coming to an end. I am able to do this effectively, despite LinkedIn's best attempts at making this selective mailing impossible. If we are connected on LinkedIn, you will know immediately when I am looking for work. Please forward your LinkedIn email account mail to your work address if you use a personal email address for this.
7. Don't ever send me a text from a number I can't reply to. This is exceptionally irritating and also quite rude. The equivalent of requiring someone to write a letter to stop anonymous sales phone calls. If you communicate with my by text, it is only courtesy to allow me to reply the same way.
8. If I call you from a different number, don't store it in your database. The number I put on my CV is the number you should use. If I wanted you to use a different number, I would put it on my CV.
9. Despite the insistence of many agencies in using the phone, none appear to use Skype. This strikes me as odd as we have both the benefit of talking by phone as well as the benefits of video calling.
10. I get a ton of mail about completely irrelevant vacancies that have no relevance whatsoever to my skills, largely because some agencies don't have very effective email campaign software and instead prefer the blanket email approach as it's cheaper than advertising. Please send these to a startup I have an interest in at MoveJobs.com . If you email them to movejobs@yahoogroups.com they will go to a pre-moderated list that goes onto the web at the Move Jobs Board and auto tweets the updates to the associated http://twitter.com/move_jobs twitter account at peak times of day when people are most likely to be looking for work. If your standard signature says the email is confidential and can't be redistributed then this will be ignored; you are sending it to a group for publication, that's what it's for. There are a lot of innovative ideas coming with movejobs.com, based largely on my 20 years of jobseeking and having thought up probably the world's first on-line recruitment agency in 1989 and winning an award for it through Shell Livewire and appearing in the local paper at the time.
Thanks for your time, if any candidates or agencies have any further thoughts, please add them in the comments.
I do think speaking to someone is important when the call is relevant and specific and to get to know the candidate. I'm not against phone calls at all, but with the volume of them, the length of them and the random calling at random times of day it's a bad way to manage time. If agencies want to talk for more than 5 mins and email simply won't do, like many popular candidates I'm either working, busy or can't talk - if you schedule some time to speak and we both have the time set aside we will both be a lot better prepared.
Some further tips:
1. My initial preferred form of contact is email. I can read email in busy places such as on the bus or train where it's too noisy to speak. I can also read email in patchy communication areas (also the train) where a phone conversation isn't practical or the quiet coach when it isn't permitted. I'm also on Skype: Craig.Cockburn for online chat - please send me a message which I will pick up and reply to the next time I log in.
2. Please don't call for a general chat about my job seeking status and recent career when this information is freely available online. This is available on LinkedIn, please look there first. If LinkedIn says I am currently in a job, then I'm currently in a job. If LinkedIn says I have finished my contract then I have finished my contract. If you have a template list of questions, please send me the template list of questions and I can fill it in quickly and you'll probably get an email reply giving you the information you need a lot quicker than if you leave a voicemail. You know, the stuff about salary/rate, location, contract/perm, career aspirations, etc. It's all fairly standard stuff. Once we get that out the way then we can schedule a proper talk for the relevant opportunities. Neither of us likes playing telephone tag and an introductory email is a much better use of my time, and yours, than random calls about permanent jobs in the wrong location or contract jobs at half my acceptable rate. Generally I only look for work within 90 mins of Central London, however I make exceptions for outstanding opportunities.
3. I am always happy for agencies to have my current CV (Resume) so we can stay in touch and you can follow my career and goals. Please send me an email at craig@siliconglen.com
4. I have two phones, one for incoming and one for outgoing. This allows me to browse the web, read relevant emails, etc whilst talking. The incoming one is usually on silent unless I am expecting a call as I don't want the phone ringing at work 20 times a week. It usually goes to voicemail. If it does go to voicemail, you are nearly always guaranteed a quicker response if you use the email address above. This is because I won't have to pick up the voicemail, write down the phone number and find a time to call back and hope you are there. Instead, I can just click reply and not worry if I've misheard the message, got a digit wrong or need to find somewhere quiet. I've had several calls from agents calling from bad reception areas and it took several attempts to get the phone number from the message, this is a waste of time. At least twice I have worked in a bad reception area. It is incredibly frustrating trying to deal with agencies who insist on using the phone in these circumstances and it is ultimately their loss if they can't put forward the best candidates because they insist on being able to talk to them to confirm basic details even when this isn't possible.
5. I've read James Caan's book on how he started in recruitment and made millions. In the beginning it was partly due to having a prestigious address in Pall Mall. I know that the address means a lot to many agencies for image purposes and so many agencies rent serviced offices. For this reason, and others, they often call from withheld or shared phone numbers. Please do not do this, it is exceptionally unprofessional. I have no idea when the call rings from a withheld number if it's a reputable agency I really want to talk to, a cold call agency I can put off, or a dodgy scammer. If you don't want to get mixed up with the dodgy scammer, don't call from a withheld number. It should be a simple switch on the office exchange, it isn't a big deal to change it and if it is then why not use Skype out instead? Not only does revealing your number let me know who is calling it means it's much much easier for me to call you back. Surely you want this? Please also call from a normal geographic landline rather than a non geographic number.
6. When you send me an email, please include a link to your LinkedIn profile so we can connect there and preferably also your mobile phone number. I classify all my contacts and email the recruitment related ones when my contract is coming to an end. I am able to do this effectively, despite LinkedIn's best attempts at making this selective mailing impossible. If we are connected on LinkedIn, you will know immediately when I am looking for work. Please forward your LinkedIn email account mail to your work address if you use a personal email address for this.
7. Don't ever send me a text from a number I can't reply to. This is exceptionally irritating and also quite rude. The equivalent of requiring someone to write a letter to stop anonymous sales phone calls. If you communicate with my by text, it is only courtesy to allow me to reply the same way.
8. If I call you from a different number, don't store it in your database. The number I put on my CV is the number you should use. If I wanted you to use a different number, I would put it on my CV.
9. Despite the insistence of many agencies in using the phone, none appear to use Skype. This strikes me as odd as we have both the benefit of talking by phone as well as the benefits of video calling.
10. I get a ton of mail about completely irrelevant vacancies that have no relevance whatsoever to my skills, largely because some agencies don't have very effective email campaign software and instead prefer the blanket email approach as it's cheaper than advertising. Please send these to a startup I have an interest in at MoveJobs.com . If you email them to movejobs@yahoogroups.com they will go to a pre-moderated list that goes onto the web at the Move Jobs Board and auto tweets the updates to the associated http://twitter.com/move_jobs twitter account at peak times of day when people are most likely to be looking for work. If your standard signature says the email is confidential and can't be redistributed then this will be ignored; you are sending it to a group for publication, that's what it's for. There are a lot of innovative ideas coming with movejobs.com, based largely on my 20 years of jobseeking and having thought up probably the world's first on-line recruitment agency in 1989 and winning an award for it through Shell Livewire and appearing in the local paper at the time.
Thanks for your time, if any candidates or agencies have any further thoughts, please add them in the comments.
07 August 2011
Gaelic in Scotland, renewal and growth
Having recently returned from a holiday in Oban, I thought it would be appropriate to comment on the state of Gaelic having been involved in promoting the language for over 10 years while I lived in Scotland - a fuller biography is at the end of the article.
To be honest, I'm worried about the state of Gaelic today. Very worried. I see Gaelic disappearing from use in Scotland largely due to apathy and to some extent misguided opposition and prejudice from a small vocal minority. You only have to view the comments here to see the prejudice that Gaelic has to put up with, the sort of comments that would be banned if we were talking about Blacks, Muslims or other ethnic groups.
I don't want Gaelic to disappear from Scotland the same way it died out in the Carolinas (early 20th century), Isle of Man (1974) and is on the precipice in Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia has less than 1,000 speakers left despite it being the most common mother tongue amongst the fathers of the Canadian federation and once spoken by 200,000 in Canada in the 1850s. Gaelic culture generates $23.5m annually for the Canadian economy. The comparable figure for Scotland is £41m (Scottish Parliament figures). Besides the economic loss, the cultural loss would be immense.
From my own point of view growing up in Dunblane, Perthshire, I had to contend with Gaelic apathy as recently as the 1980's. The nearest hill to my house was "uamh bheag". Incomprehensible and even unpronounceable without Gaelic. We had the Mod Bardic crown winner as a teacher in our school; Alasdair MacInnes of Glencoe (sadly passed away in 2009) yet despite his requests to teach Gaelic so that we could understand and even pronounce local placenames, the local education authority kept blocking him saying there was "no demand". Yet, we were never actually asked as pupils if we wanted to learn Gaelic. Instead the schools ran classes in Russian and Latin, both of which had 4 pupils. Apparently there was enough demand in a school of over 700 pupils to run those classes, so why not Gaelic?
Legislation is necessary, but is not enough. What is necessary for Gaelic to be revived is to counter not only the blocks such as the ones above, but also the wider lack of confidence, enthusiasm and patriotism in Gaelic amongst both Gaelic speakers and non-Gaelic speakers in Scotland. We need to encourage Gaelic speakers to use the language more readily and confidently rather than defaulting to English and so that non-Gaelic speakers don't put up narrow minded blocks towards the revival of Gaelic. Gaelic speakers no matter their quantity should be as confident and willing to use Gaelic as the Welsh are with theirs.
All too often we see the letters columns of papers that should know better filled with the type of hostile remarks about the amount of money spent on Gaelic and Gaelic being spent on signs "where no one has spoken Gaelic for centuries" and similar arguments as referred to here. These are of course the same vacuous arguments put forward by the English Defence League and the National Front - people afraid of change. Devolution had never been a part of Scottish history. We embraced it in 1999. Voting for independence minded politicians had never been a part of Scottish history. We did so to elect an independence minded government in 2007 and by a landslide in 2011. Internet culture didn't exist at all less than a generation ago and now it is part of the everyday life of a majority. The argument of whether something has been the historic part of a community or not is the cowardly argument of those resistant to change and has too many echoes of the English Defence League and the British National Party for my liking. In the broader context, when I travel around London, I see advertisements in Polish only, signs in Chinese only, no hesitation or problem with people from all over the world using their languages without question and none of the "that language hasn't been spoken here traditionally" that Scots use as an excuse for putting down Gaelic. Supporting Gaelic in Scotland should not be a problem, compare that to Southwark in London - when I managed the website redesign for that London borough I learned that there were 170 languages spoken in the borough including an Irish population almost the size of Oban. Multilingualism is much more an everyday way of life in London than it is in the Highlands.
I find it frustrating that many Bed and Breakfasts are keen to embrace Gaelic placenames to attract tourists, "Ceol na mara" "Ben More" etc, many Scots keen to embrace Gaelic (Highland) dress, Gaelic (Highland) bagpipes, yet are ambivalent or even hostile to the language itself. This vocal minority needs to be put in context with repeated surveys showing that the majority of Scots throughout Scotland are supportive of Gaelic as a national language and not just one for the Highlands and Islands. We need to build wider enthusiasm and support for Gaelic so that it can enjoy the same growth that Welsh is enjoying (over 20% of the Welsh population) and Modern Hebrew enjoyed when it went from almost nothing to 7 million speakers in a century. A language needs to be supported by legislation, but more than that there needs to be a positive attitude amongst both speakers of the language and non-speakers who share the same country. People should be asking questions like "why is it easier for me to pick up Radio1 and Radio2 in the Highlands rather than Radio nan GÃ idheal?", "Why does Radio nan GÃ idheal change to broadcasting on Radio Scotland English for much of the time?" "Why is the link to BBC Alba hard to find on the BBC Scotland news page and when I do find it, Google Chrome offers to translate it from Irish?!"
I fought for the ban on smoking in public places. We now have legislation to enforce the ban. However, even before the ban we had places voluntarily banning smoking. It was commonplace to ban it on airlines, cinemas, many restaurants and even some pub chains had non smoking areas in all their pubs in the pre-ban days. The same is true of supporting Gaelic. Legal support for Gaelic is necessary, at least comparable to that in Wales, but prior to that we need people to take the initiative without legislation to support the language, legal support or otherwise in much the same way that we did with "smoke free". This support needs to extend beyond the 3Cs of core support - the local Coisir, An Comunn and Croileagan to the wider community, Gaelic speakers or otherwise. 7% of people in Argyll and Bute speak Gaelic according to the Scotland 2001 Census Report. But less than 7% of The Oban Times is in Gaelic - Why? Why are the signs informing me of the smoking ban in English only? A Gaelic translation would not be illegal so why not make one? Where you see English only, ask "why is there no Gaelic translation for this - you wouldn't break any laws and you would support the local culture". A simple "Just Translate It" attitude should apply. Behave as if a law has been passed and put Gaelic up alongside official notices. A few token street signs and bank names is not enough. There are plenty other things that could be translated at little or no cost and would significantly add to the presence of Gaelic so that Gaelic leaps off the street sign and onto the street, How about Gaelic translations of menus? Some communities have their own local currency to promote their community, perhaps a Gaelic currency with "Tha GÃ idhlig agam" on it would work (with appropriate discounts for using it). There are lots of initiatives that don't require legislation to get people to get behind Gaelic, speakers or otherwise.
Google+ has gone from nothing to over 25 million users in a month. If Gaelic added 25,000 "users" in 10 years it would be a major leap forward. People started using G+ because it was interesting, they could talk to their friends and it was cool. It is uncool for young people not to be on social media. If only Gaelic had the same coolness factor as social media! If being against Gaelic or not using Gaelic had an "uncool" factor then Gaelic would be in an entirely different place. Runrig and Capercaillie led the way, but where is the Gaelic Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga or Susan Boyle for Gaelic to not only be cool but to take it to the masses in wide numbers as Clannad did when they got to #1 in 1982 singing in Irish? Who is joining Manran in making Gaelic attractive for youth culture?
Nova Scotia was once Gaelic speaking. Now for every Gaelic speaker there are 90 French speakers. The French put down the foot and said "non" to English. Will the world of Gaelic be saying "Chan eil" as we move forward?
The Gaelic national plan 2012-2017 is being compiled, your comments are welcome.
Craig Cockburn, August 2011. Written on a Sunday - I don't believe in being constrained by past attitudes.
The author is writing in a personal capacity, and was a director of the Gaelic learners' association 1992-1998, a moderator of the Gaelic discussion list Gaelic-L in the 1990s, sang in national and local mods with choirs and as a soloist in the fluent category and has written about Gaelic song. He wrote the first online guide to Scotland, a guide to Gaelic events in London, worked for many years for the Scottish Tourist Board, was editor of the Gaelic community group newsletter and helped to relaunch the Edinburgh Mod.
To be honest, I'm worried about the state of Gaelic today. Very worried. I see Gaelic disappearing from use in Scotland largely due to apathy and to some extent misguided opposition and prejudice from a small vocal minority. You only have to view the comments here to see the prejudice that Gaelic has to put up with, the sort of comments that would be banned if we were talking about Blacks, Muslims or other ethnic groups.
I don't want Gaelic to disappear from Scotland the same way it died out in the Carolinas (early 20th century), Isle of Man (1974) and is on the precipice in Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia has less than 1,000 speakers left despite it being the most common mother tongue amongst the fathers of the Canadian federation and once spoken by 200,000 in Canada in the 1850s. Gaelic culture generates $23.5m annually for the Canadian economy. The comparable figure for Scotland is £41m (Scottish Parliament figures). Besides the economic loss, the cultural loss would be immense.
From my own point of view growing up in Dunblane, Perthshire, I had to contend with Gaelic apathy as recently as the 1980's. The nearest hill to my house was "uamh bheag". Incomprehensible and even unpronounceable without Gaelic. We had the Mod Bardic crown winner as a teacher in our school; Alasdair MacInnes of Glencoe (sadly passed away in 2009) yet despite his requests to teach Gaelic so that we could understand and even pronounce local placenames, the local education authority kept blocking him saying there was "no demand". Yet, we were never actually asked as pupils if we wanted to learn Gaelic. Instead the schools ran classes in Russian and Latin, both of which had 4 pupils. Apparently there was enough demand in a school of over 700 pupils to run those classes, so why not Gaelic?
Legislation is necessary, but is not enough. What is necessary for Gaelic to be revived is to counter not only the blocks such as the ones above, but also the wider lack of confidence, enthusiasm and patriotism in Gaelic amongst both Gaelic speakers and non-Gaelic speakers in Scotland. We need to encourage Gaelic speakers to use the language more readily and confidently rather than defaulting to English and so that non-Gaelic speakers don't put up narrow minded blocks towards the revival of Gaelic. Gaelic speakers no matter their quantity should be as confident and willing to use Gaelic as the Welsh are with theirs.
All too often we see the letters columns of papers that should know better filled with the type of hostile remarks about the amount of money spent on Gaelic and Gaelic being spent on signs "where no one has spoken Gaelic for centuries" and similar arguments as referred to here. These are of course the same vacuous arguments put forward by the English Defence League and the National Front - people afraid of change. Devolution had never been a part of Scottish history. We embraced it in 1999. Voting for independence minded politicians had never been a part of Scottish history. We did so to elect an independence minded government in 2007 and by a landslide in 2011. Internet culture didn't exist at all less than a generation ago and now it is part of the everyday life of a majority. The argument of whether something has been the historic part of a community or not is the cowardly argument of those resistant to change and has too many echoes of the English Defence League and the British National Party for my liking. In the broader context, when I travel around London, I see advertisements in Polish only, signs in Chinese only, no hesitation or problem with people from all over the world using their languages without question and none of the "that language hasn't been spoken here traditionally" that Scots use as an excuse for putting down Gaelic. Supporting Gaelic in Scotland should not be a problem, compare that to Southwark in London - when I managed the website redesign for that London borough I learned that there were 170 languages spoken in the borough including an Irish population almost the size of Oban. Multilingualism is much more an everyday way of life in London than it is in the Highlands.
I find it frustrating that many Bed and Breakfasts are keen to embrace Gaelic placenames to attract tourists, "Ceol na mara" "Ben More" etc, many Scots keen to embrace Gaelic (Highland) dress, Gaelic (Highland) bagpipes, yet are ambivalent or even hostile to the language itself. This vocal minority needs to be put in context with repeated surveys showing that the majority of Scots throughout Scotland are supportive of Gaelic as a national language and not just one for the Highlands and Islands. We need to build wider enthusiasm and support for Gaelic so that it can enjoy the same growth that Welsh is enjoying (over 20% of the Welsh population) and Modern Hebrew enjoyed when it went from almost nothing to 7 million speakers in a century. A language needs to be supported by legislation, but more than that there needs to be a positive attitude amongst both speakers of the language and non-speakers who share the same country. People should be asking questions like "why is it easier for me to pick up Radio1 and Radio2 in the Highlands rather than Radio nan GÃ idheal?", "Why does Radio nan GÃ idheal change to broadcasting on Radio Scotland English for much of the time?" "Why is the link to BBC Alba hard to find on the BBC Scotland news page and when I do find it, Google Chrome offers to translate it from Irish?!"
I fought for the ban on smoking in public places. We now have legislation to enforce the ban. However, even before the ban we had places voluntarily banning smoking. It was commonplace to ban it on airlines, cinemas, many restaurants and even some pub chains had non smoking areas in all their pubs in the pre-ban days. The same is true of supporting Gaelic. Legal support for Gaelic is necessary, at least comparable to that in Wales, but prior to that we need people to take the initiative without legislation to support the language, legal support or otherwise in much the same way that we did with "smoke free". This support needs to extend beyond the 3Cs of core support - the local Coisir, An Comunn and Croileagan to the wider community, Gaelic speakers or otherwise. 7% of people in Argyll and Bute speak Gaelic according to the Scotland 2001 Census Report. But less than 7% of The Oban Times is in Gaelic - Why? Why are the signs informing me of the smoking ban in English only? A Gaelic translation would not be illegal so why not make one? Where you see English only, ask "why is there no Gaelic translation for this - you wouldn't break any laws and you would support the local culture". A simple "Just Translate It" attitude should apply. Behave as if a law has been passed and put Gaelic up alongside official notices. A few token street signs and bank names is not enough. There are plenty other things that could be translated at little or no cost and would significantly add to the presence of Gaelic so that Gaelic leaps off the street sign and onto the street, How about Gaelic translations of menus? Some communities have their own local currency to promote their community, perhaps a Gaelic currency with "Tha GÃ idhlig agam" on it would work (with appropriate discounts for using it). There are lots of initiatives that don't require legislation to get people to get behind Gaelic, speakers or otherwise.
Google+ has gone from nothing to over 25 million users in a month. If Gaelic added 25,000 "users" in 10 years it would be a major leap forward. People started using G+ because it was interesting, they could talk to their friends and it was cool. It is uncool for young people not to be on social media. If only Gaelic had the same coolness factor as social media! If being against Gaelic or not using Gaelic had an "uncool" factor then Gaelic would be in an entirely different place. Runrig and Capercaillie led the way, but where is the Gaelic Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga or Susan Boyle for Gaelic to not only be cool but to take it to the masses in wide numbers as Clannad did when they got to #1 in 1982 singing in Irish? Who is joining Manran in making Gaelic attractive for youth culture?
Nova Scotia was once Gaelic speaking. Now for every Gaelic speaker there are 90 French speakers. The French put down the foot and said "non" to English. Will the world of Gaelic be saying "Chan eil" as we move forward?
The Gaelic national plan 2012-2017 is being compiled, your comments are welcome.
Craig Cockburn, August 2011. Written on a Sunday - I don't believe in being constrained by past attitudes.
The author is writing in a personal capacity, and was a director of the Gaelic learners' association 1992-1998, a moderator of the Gaelic discussion list Gaelic-L in the 1990s, sang in national and local mods with choirs and as a soloist in the fluent category and has written about Gaelic song. He wrote the first online guide to Scotland, a guide to Gaelic events in London, worked for many years for the Scottish Tourist Board, was editor of the Gaelic community group newsletter and helped to relaunch the Edinburgh Mod.
19 July 2011
A note to Larry Page of Google
Hey Larry. In your recent earnings call you commented on Facebook and its lack of data portability. However, in the Google camp we have the disappointing Google data portability standpoint which states "In most cases, it's not possible to move products from one Google Account to another".
It is a constant source of annoyance that I have to log into one account to use most of my Google services and another one to use the Gmail I have had for ages because you can't port Gmail (and a lot of other things) onto my primary login which uses the domain I own. This is rather a fail. How about putting your own house in order first? Come on, this is just a foreign index in a table, how hard is that?
I'm not that impressed with Google search most of the time either. Try searching for a car service centre open on a Sunday in London within 15 mins walk of a tube station in zones 1 and 2 or 30 mins travelling time of a given postcode. I mean really, this is the sort of useful data driven search that people really need - it connects me with relevant services. Why is no-one apparently looking into this? Is anything happening with semantic search?
Can we also have links to individual comments in Google Plus (as I understand Sir Tim Berners-Lee called for on Facebook)
Why also can't we find things en-route? Like I'm going from A to B, show me the nearest service stations or restaurants etc
Can you also stop Google Chrome thinking that articles in Scots Gaelic (language code gd) are written in Irish (language code ga). Please fix the bug I logged. This is about as bad as thinking articles in Spanish are written in Italian. Gaelic and Irish are two related but different languages and offering to translate from Irish rather than Gaelic means the translations are hopeless!
Just a few ideas, many more to come.
Craig
It is a constant source of annoyance that I have to log into one account to use most of my Google services and another one to use the Gmail I have had for ages because you can't port Gmail (and a lot of other things) onto my primary login which uses the domain I own. This is rather a fail. How about putting your own house in order first? Come on, this is just a foreign index in a table, how hard is that?
I'm not that impressed with Google search most of the time either. Try searching for a car service centre open on a Sunday in London within 15 mins walk of a tube station in zones 1 and 2 or 30 mins travelling time of a given postcode. I mean really, this is the sort of useful data driven search that people really need - it connects me with relevant services. Why is no-one apparently looking into this? Is anything happening with semantic search?
Can we also have links to individual comments in Google Plus (as I understand Sir Tim Berners-Lee called for on Facebook)
Why also can't we find things en-route? Like I'm going from A to B, show me the nearest service stations or restaurants etc
Can you also stop Google Chrome thinking that articles in Scots Gaelic (language code gd) are written in Irish (language code ga). Please fix the bug I logged. This is about as bad as thinking articles in Spanish are written in Italian. Gaelic and Irish are two related but different languages and offering to translate from Irish rather than Gaelic means the translations are hopeless!
Just a few ideas, many more to come.
Craig
22 June 2011
Agile and PRINCE2
In January 2008, I posted an article on PRINCE2 and Agile which it seems has been #1 in Google for those search terms ever since and consequently has received a great deal of attention, comments and traffic.
More than 3 years later I have worked on 4 agile projects, become a PRINCE2 and MSP practitioner and qualified in DSDM (the Agile project management method mentioned in my earlier blog). I've also got a lot more experience - see my LinkedIn profile at http://www.CraigCockburn.com for further details - including 3 projects for Central Government (BERR, CIO Council and DirectGov).
Given the recent push to have Agile more accepted in government circles I thought it was time to update the blog.
A few things have been happening recently
More than 3 years later I have worked on 4 agile projects, become a PRINCE2 and MSP practitioner and qualified in DSDM (the Agile project management method mentioned in my earlier blog). I've also got a lot more experience - see my LinkedIn profile at http://www.CraigCockburn.com for further details - including 3 projects for Central Government (BERR, CIO Council and DirectGov).
Given the recent push to have Agile more accepted in government circles I thought it was time to update the blog.
A few things have been happening recently
- The Agile Delivery Network are hosting a meeting later today. I am attending - the ADN appears to be a small developer led community promoting the use of Agile in government, especially from the software development perspective and working with the Institute for Government
- This week we have seen reports in the IT media about the Government turning to small companies for help in introducing Agile and a number of important blogs such as Agile can fix government IT calling for agile to be taken seriously as a delivery method.
- There has been a fair amount of debate about Agile in Government on the DSDM Group on LinkedIn and the DSDM group itself is also responding to the System Error report
- The government ICT strategy (March 2011) also states "Additionally, the application of agile ICT delivery methods, combined with the newly established Major Projects Authority, will improve government’s capability to deliver projects successfully and realise benefits faster. "
- Increasingly organisations outside of government are deploying DSDM as a project management method rather than PRINCE2 as DSDM not only incorporates the benefits of Agile, but is also suitable for an environment that is regulated, compliance driven and is interested in meeting CMMI standards. Swiftcover (part of the AXA Group) won the award for "Most Agile aware organisation" at the inaugural UK agile awards in 2010.
I am project management method neutral. I am not pro or against PRINCE2. What I am against is using PRINCE2 when it is either unsuitable for the project in question or that it is suitable, but there are more suitable methods. There is nothing in the PRINCE2 manual about producing reams of documentation although to be fair DSDM as an Agile project management method does go further and state that documentation should only be produced where it adds value. Neither am I going to recommend Agile when there are certain projects (especially those with risk to life) where you cannot adequately timebox testing and for which a pure Agile approach would be less than ideal.
PRINCE2 by itself assumes a waterfall like approach where the requirements are signed off at some level and then handed to development. There's no principle in the usual PID of fixing the time, cost and quality and flexing the scope. However, PRINCE2 does afford the project manager quite a lot of freedom and flexibility. The project manager works within the tolerances of time, cost, budget (and possibly scope) that are set by the project board and these can be as wide or as narrow as is appropriate for the project. In that regard, PRINCE2 gives the project manager the flexibility to get on with the job as best they see fit within those parameters. I was programme manager on the BCS "IT Project Team of the Year 2010" award winning programme. This was run along these lines of light touch management and working within agreed parameters - something common to both Agile and also a sensibly run PRINCE2 project. PRINCE2 really can have as much or as little ceremony as you like, it doesn't have to be a bureaucratic monster that some make it out to be, but in differentiating it from Agile, PRINCE2 does assume you know a lot more up front and are prepared to spend longer in analysis having detailed requirements to "sign off".
DSDM, like PRINCE2, had its origins as an IT Project management method but has now become a generic project management method capable for delivering both IT and non-IT projects. DSDM does have a lot more to say about day to day activities at the delivery team level (e.g. daily standups) and as such is more of a how-to manual rather than PRINCE2 which is more of a process guide for managers.
There are therefore a few potential options in choosing the appropriate method:
DSDM, like PRINCE2, had its origins as an IT Project management method but has now become a generic project management method capable for delivering both IT and non-IT projects. DSDM does have a lot more to say about day to day activities at the delivery team level (e.g. daily standups) and as such is more of a how-to manual rather than PRINCE2 which is more of a process guide for managers.
There are therefore a few potential options in choosing the appropriate method:
Choice of Development methods:
- PRINCE2 with a waterfall development method (the traditional way)
- PRINCE2 with an Agile development method (quick win for the PRINCE2 advocates)
- An Agile Project Management method with PRINCE2 and one of the development methods above - -- Hybrid as put forward by Keith Richards - author of Agile project management: running PRINCE2 projects with DSDM Atern published by The Office of Government Commerce and Agile Project and Service Management: delivering IT services using ITIL, PRINCE2 and DSDM Atern (by Dot Tudor and also published by the Office of Government Commerce.
- An Agile Project Management method without PRINCE2 and one of the development methods above. Agile project management with a waterfall development method makes no sense, so the alternative here is a full top to bottom Agile Project management and development method such as DSDM Atern. (published by the DSDM consortium, not the Office of Government commerce!)
I am dismissing 3 as not very useful. I've read the first book. It flips between one method and another not particularly blending them in any coherent way and comes up with a management structure that has BOTH the PRINCE2 board and the Agile project management team - 5 managers. This seems like a double headed monster. Besides not combining the "Senior User" and "Business Visionary" and also the "Senior Supplier" and "Technical Co-ordinator" there is still the conflicting philosophy of Waterfall and Agile to deal with. The only merit I can see in this split personality approach is for people interested in Agile management but who can't or won't take the leap and abandon PRINCE2 completely. DSDM by itself is enough. It doesn't need to be helped or hindered by PRINCE2 to be a success. The DSDM manual states although the method can be combined with the likes of PRINCE2, "For most organisations, Atern is all that is needed" (P29).
So the front runners for project management techniques emerge as :
So the front runners for project management techniques emerge as :
- The existing practices of PRINCE2 and a waterfall development method
- PRINCE2 incorporating Agile techniques
- DSDM Atern (or equivalent) Agile project management with Agile development techniques
There is no particular good or bad here; the skill is in choosing the technique most suitable for the project, people, skills, organisational culture, involvement of 3rd parties and so on. In the main however, I think in the new world of government project management we should be starting with 3 as the default position and then move to 2 if there are good reasons not to use Agile project management and to 1 if there are good reasons not to do Agile development. I really think there are few projects which are genuinely in the last category of requiring exclusively waterfall developmentl however. For further information, please see the Agile suitability filter paper [PDF] or the Project suitability filter. Note that both DSDM Atern and PRINCE2 can work alongside methods such as CMMI, see this paper on CMMI and Atern.
Once we have got a culture that is comfortable choosing the most appropriate techniques for a project, we should revisit the procurement process. This still seems to favour a waterfall like approach of fixed scope rather than an agile like approach of fixed time, cost and quality and having scope as the variable. Once that is sorted I think public sector project management will be in a much better place.
Comments welcome. See also the follow up article.
Craig
21 June 2011
The future of social media
Recently, French media banned the words "twitter" and "facebook" on TV. Well, that's what the press would have you believe. Here is the original decision in French. The real (not hyped up) story is that TV networks are now only allowed to mention Twitter or Facebook if the story is about Twitter or Facebook. Anything else, such as "follow TV station XYZ news on twitter" was deemed to be advertising on a public network and broke the rules. Fair enough I thought, seems to make sense to me. Why should a social network get free advertising if it isn't the subject of the news story. Pete Cashmore of Mashable thought this ban was "Ridiculous". I disagreed and posted my thoughts supporting the ban on Mashable, and the next web and on Hermione Way's wall (5th June). One response on The Next Web wrote "For a "noob" you certainly put forward a good point. I think what you proposed would be a great idea". Facebook and The Next Web, please note though - individual comments should have their own URL so that people can link to them and so says Tim Berners-Lee.
So that's the background to this post.
As Tim says, Facebook is becoming a closed silo of content. It wants things that way so you have to go to facebook. Advocates of an open web want the content fully opened out so that you can link to individual comments and work with all the data. Facebook doesn't want to go down the way of Myspace as little more than a hosting platform.
However, my point in relation to the French story is that the news networks and indeed anyone else shouldn't be asking anyone to follow them on twitter or facebook or any third party site. You don't need to go to twitter to see my tweets, you can see them here courtesy of a widget. You don't need to visit my blog with a web browser, you can subscribe to the RSS feed and read it in an RSS reader. When I tried to define Web2.0 in 2009, I wrote that a large part of it was the sharing of data between different sites and applications. The same should be true of social media.
When I go to Facebook, I get the Facebook branding and advertising. When I go to Twitter I get the Twitter branding and advertising. Do respectable major brands really want or need this? Sure they need to engage with their prospective audiences but on a 3rd party URL with 3rd party branding and advertising (possibly from competitors) isn't really the ideal platform. Does anyone remember Geocities, Netscape, Digital or CompuServe? None of those links work anymore. 3rd party sites that have been wound up or bought over. Only today Club Penguin, value $700m, has gone offline because Disney forgot to renew the domain in time. that wouldn't be so great if it was your twitter or facebook campaign in dust would it? Where's your service level agreement with facebook or twitter? You don't have one? What happens if like Google you suddenly lose access to all your data or your flickr account gets deleted? Oops. Not such a good social strategy anymore was it giving out all those 3rd party URLs you had no control over, no backup strategy and no compensation if they are down. The ideal approach would be to edit and store all my brand's social media content locally on-site and push it to relevant social networks as needed, thus giving me some fall-back should they foul up. A site central social media dashboard, shouldn’t be too hard to put together – think of it as a super TweetDeck - sold for £25m and it was mostly Twitter oriented rather than a general platform.
Big brands should be looking to protect and consolidate their identity rather than dilute it across the web. If I want to engage with a trusted brand, I should be able to do it on their site. Their social media landing page should show me what's going on in the world of social media for the brand in as much one place as possible. It should blend discussions, videos, updates, "likes" and conversations in a view that has the brands look and feel but also their advertising rather than their competitors. Social media platforms are just that - platforms. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and the likes we have great platforms that reach millions of users. Just however as you can "like" my page at siliconglen.com without actually going to the Facebook site, a brand should be able to embed their Facebook fan page within the brand's page. They should be able to embed their twitter feed within the brand's page too. Some sites already do this, see my profile on mywebcareer. It shouldn't be difficult for a brand, on its own domain, with its own branding and its own control to behind the scenes connect up with its different online presences in social media to present one consistent view in one place. I used to have a LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com/in/siliconglen , for a while LinkedIn changed it to http and then all the links broke. I think it is easier now for me to just maintain the brand at CraigCockburn.com so I am in control if LinkedIn change their policy again. Big brands should take note, if they manage to control their social media presence through URLs they own rather than a 3rd party and branding they own rather than a third party then of course the French will have shown us the way and no-one will need to advertise Twitter or Facebook anymore. Just say "non" to 3rd party branding, URLs and loss of data!
Is this the future of social media we really want? Feel free to share!
Craig
So that's the background to this post.
As Tim says, Facebook is becoming a closed silo of content. It wants things that way so you have to go to facebook. Advocates of an open web want the content fully opened out so that you can link to individual comments and work with all the data. Facebook doesn't want to go down the way of Myspace as little more than a hosting platform.
However, my point in relation to the French story is that the news networks and indeed anyone else shouldn't be asking anyone to follow them on twitter or facebook or any third party site. You don't need to go to twitter to see my tweets, you can see them here courtesy of a widget. You don't need to visit my blog with a web browser, you can subscribe to the RSS feed and read it in an RSS reader. When I tried to define Web2.0 in 2009, I wrote that a large part of it was the sharing of data between different sites and applications. The same should be true of social media.
When I go to Facebook, I get the Facebook branding and advertising. When I go to Twitter I get the Twitter branding and advertising. Do respectable major brands really want or need this? Sure they need to engage with their prospective audiences but on a 3rd party URL with 3rd party branding and advertising (possibly from competitors) isn't really the ideal platform. Does anyone remember Geocities, Netscape, Digital or CompuServe? None of those links work anymore. 3rd party sites that have been wound up or bought over. Only today Club Penguin, value $700m, has gone offline because Disney forgot to renew the domain in time. that wouldn't be so great if it was your twitter or facebook campaign in dust would it? Where's your service level agreement with facebook or twitter? You don't have one? What happens if like Google you suddenly lose access to all your data or your flickr account gets deleted? Oops. Not such a good social strategy anymore was it giving out all those 3rd party URLs you had no control over, no backup strategy and no compensation if they are down. The ideal approach would be to edit and store all my brand's social media content locally on-site and push it to relevant social networks as needed, thus giving me some fall-back should they foul up. A site central social media dashboard, shouldn’t be too hard to put together – think of it as a super TweetDeck - sold for £25m and it was mostly Twitter oriented rather than a general platform.
Big brands should be looking to protect and consolidate their identity rather than dilute it across the web. If I want to engage with a trusted brand, I should be able to do it on their site. Their social media landing page should show me what's going on in the world of social media for the brand in as much one place as possible. It should blend discussions, videos, updates, "likes" and conversations in a view that has the brands look and feel but also their advertising rather than their competitors. Social media platforms are just that - platforms. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and the likes we have great platforms that reach millions of users. Just however as you can "like" my page at siliconglen.com without actually going to the Facebook site, a brand should be able to embed their Facebook fan page within the brand's page. They should be able to embed their twitter feed within the brand's page too. Some sites already do this, see my profile on mywebcareer. It shouldn't be difficult for a brand, on its own domain, with its own branding and its own control to behind the scenes connect up with its different online presences in social media to present one consistent view in one place. I used to have a LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com/in/siliconglen , for a while LinkedIn changed it to http and then all the links broke. I think it is easier now for me to just maintain the brand at CraigCockburn.com so I am in control if LinkedIn change their policy again. Big brands should take note, if they manage to control their social media presence through URLs they own rather than a 3rd party and branding they own rather than a third party then of course the French will have shown us the way and no-one will need to advertise Twitter or Facebook anymore. Just say "non" to 3rd party branding, URLs and loss of data!
Is this the future of social media we really want? Feel free to share!
Craig
18 December 2010
Albannach, Whisky and Restaurant, London
Tonight I ate at Albannach (Scots Gaelic for 'Scottish') at Trafalgar Square, London. I used to do restaurant and pub reviews when I travelled a lot (you can read some of the previous reviews here) but haven't done one in a while. Tonight's visit has prompted me to get back into Gordon Ramsay mode.
First of all, I'd like to steer clear of the Scottish stereotypes. A place doesn't have to be dripping with tartan, heather and playing Kenneth McKellar for me to say it's authentic - we've all had enough of Scottish kitsch, but there are a few basics to get right. Albannach is in the Scottish heart of London - a stone's throw from The Scottich office, The Crown Court Church of Scotland, the world's oldest Scots Gaelic choir at Covent Garden and the meeting venue of the Gaelic society of London (founded 1777). No shortage of local experts then.
It's perfectly possible to be modern and relevant and still be Scottish. The revival in Gaelic, the growth of modern Scottish folk music with new interpretations on old songs, the kilt being cool to wear amongst young people at ceilidhs all goes to show you can be trendy and contemporary yet still be Scottish. Rstaurants such as Ghillie Dhu in Edinburgh are using Gaelic now - after all it's always cool to demonstrate knowledge of your own country, rather than ignorance.
The Albannach has trendy white antlers for decoration, but that's about as far as it goes. The music was I think American swing, the staff from somewhere in Europe. They didn't really understand Scottish cuisine and I had to explain it to them. There's some basics you really need to get right. I usually get served by Indian people in an Indian restaurant and get Indian music. I would feel a bit surprised being served by Chinese people in an Indian restaurant whilst African music was playing in the background, yet this cultural mix up seems completely OK when you're a Scottish restaurant in London. I'm not going to dwell on this too much since doing so might seem too stereotypical, the point is that when I go out in Scotland there's often non-Scots serving me and this is perfectly OK but the difference is that there they know the menu and can explain it.
For a restaurant trying to be up-market, there is a pretty dire selection for vegetarians, none of the vegetarian options being very Scottish. Best go elsewhere. I was a bit surprised too that for a restaurant priding itself on its whiskies and being a "restaurant and whisky" venue, that I was presented with the wine menu on seating, no whisky menu in sight. Perhaps a wine and whisky menu would be more relevant in the circumstances?
Having been a fan of McSween's haggis for about 20 years (and mentioning it in the Scottish FAQ, the first online guide to Scotland, since 1994) I went for the haggis main course. What a disappointment. It was a haggis tower, trying to be trendy but like a Bay City Roller in platform shoes 30 years too late, failing miserably. It resembled a haggis hamburger atop a potato slab. I looked for several minutes for the neeps (turnip) that was supposed to accompany it but eventually gave up and called the waiter. He explained the white stuff tasting like potatoes was turnip, and then went to get some more "neeps", which also turned out to be potatoes. After some more digging around in the potato slab I eventually found about a square inch of actual turnip, buried deep within the tatties (potato). There it was, small yet not perfectly formed, as it was undercooked and not mashed or even cooked properly. This was a potato slab with a hint of turnip buried deep within, rather than the traditional tatties, neeps and haggis in roughly equal proportions side by side on the plate. Accompanying this was an anonymous whisky, no mention of which one it was. For a place priding itself in its whisky knowledge, I would have though asking me which one I wanted or at least saying which one it was might have been a basic.
When the second helping of "neeps" arrived I had actually finished the main course at this point so had a helping of potatoes as an intermediate course. Nice. Not. Again, there were a few small pieces of actual neeps buried deep within, like finding the proverbial sixpence within Granny's Christmas pudding. However, I thought I would illuminate the staff with a few pictures from Wikipedia illustrating what neeps looked like as it seems they had never tasted it personally and mistakenly believed that mashed potatoes were in fact turnips. Huh? Shurely shome mishtake?
I ordered coffee and dessert. Normally in a basic restaurant, never mind one trying to think about being upmarket you get the dessert first then the coffee. Not so at the Albannach, when you get the coffee first then the dessert 10 minutes later.
It is difficult to see how this place has one the awards that it has, it would be interesting to see when the awards were actually given and if the current staff were involved in any way.
Surprisingly for a restaurant that couldn't be booked online and gave the impression of being full for weeks, the place was deserted. There were about 3 tables in use, 9 staff or so busying themselves doing apparently nothing in as many creative ways as possible. It might have been better on a coldish night if we hadn't been sat next to the draughty window with our coats on and tables near the bar were going empty, another mistake. Maybe it was the cold keeping people away, or maybe tonight's diners had found somewhere more attractive to eat.
I don't subscribe to the 12.5% service charge philosophy. If I want to leave a tip I will and if I don't like the service I like the option of not paying it. Should a restaurant find it's not making enough money, it should increase the food prices and not rely on a 12.5% service charge to make up the shortfall. I also don't subscribe to the philosophy of just because it's central London it's got to be expensive either.
Wetherspoons in Whitehall is but a 5 minute walk away from Albannach. When Wetherspoons serve haggis, it is also from MacSween's. They do neeps you can see and which are separate. They do mashed potato (tatties) too. They charge about 1/4 the price of Albannach, have a warm room and the portions are bigger too. So there's no justification in being ripped off just to look at white antlers.
Perhaps you could be a bit more Scottish and cool by playing Clarsach music, something by Capercaillie or the Red Hot Chilli Pipers? A menu in Scots or Gaelic would be helpful or at least to say they are available on request, it shows you might have been to Scotland recently where bilingual signs are becoming increasingly commonplace. You might even pick up some good Scottish words such as "Hogmanay" rather than the "New Year's Eve" menu advertised on the site. If you put Cranachan on a menu, surely using the Scottish word for turn of the year isn't too much to ask?
I had cranachan for dessert. Again, this was made by someone who didn't seem to have a clue. The dry oats sandwiched between the cream and fruit were difficult to blend together with the soup spoon. Try picking up some tips from a proper Scottish award winning restaurant such as the three chimneys or on the cover of the Scots cooking bible if you want to know how to make this. Come to think of it just about anywhere in the excellent taste of Scotland would be able to give this place the proverbial boot in the goolies. Perhaps Taste of Scotland should come down and give them some advice. The chef at Albannach is Jason Wilson. I couldn't find any info about him other than he had previously worked at an Argentinian restaurant (Gaucho Grill) but did note that along the way that Albannach were advertising on Gumtree for staff, a rather surprising location to be looking for upmarket staff.
Bio: The author is a Gaelic speaking Scotsman, used to work for the Scottish Tourist Board, who work closely with Taste of Scotland (although the opinions here are entirely my own) and wrote the first online guide to Scotland and which even has a food and drink section. The restaurant mentioned above in London has thankfully absolutely no connection with the excellent Albannach Hotel which has a highly coveted Michelin star.
First of all, I'd like to steer clear of the Scottish stereotypes. A place doesn't have to be dripping with tartan, heather and playing Kenneth McKellar for me to say it's authentic - we've all had enough of Scottish kitsch, but there are a few basics to get right. Albannach is in the Scottish heart of London - a stone's throw from The Scottich office, The Crown Court Church of Scotland, the world's oldest Scots Gaelic choir at Covent Garden and the meeting venue of the Gaelic society of London (founded 1777). No shortage of local experts then.
It's perfectly possible to be modern and relevant and still be Scottish. The revival in Gaelic, the growth of modern Scottish folk music with new interpretations on old songs, the kilt being cool to wear amongst young people at ceilidhs all goes to show you can be trendy and contemporary yet still be Scottish. Rstaurants such as Ghillie Dhu in Edinburgh are using Gaelic now - after all it's always cool to demonstrate knowledge of your own country, rather than ignorance.
The Albannach has trendy white antlers for decoration, but that's about as far as it goes. The music was I think American swing, the staff from somewhere in Europe. They didn't really understand Scottish cuisine and I had to explain it to them. There's some basics you really need to get right. I usually get served by Indian people in an Indian restaurant and get Indian music. I would feel a bit surprised being served by Chinese people in an Indian restaurant whilst African music was playing in the background, yet this cultural mix up seems completely OK when you're a Scottish restaurant in London. I'm not going to dwell on this too much since doing so might seem too stereotypical, the point is that when I go out in Scotland there's often non-Scots serving me and this is perfectly OK but the difference is that there they know the menu and can explain it.
For a restaurant trying to be up-market, there is a pretty dire selection for vegetarians, none of the vegetarian options being very Scottish. Best go elsewhere. I was a bit surprised too that for a restaurant priding itself on its whiskies and being a "restaurant and whisky" venue, that I was presented with the wine menu on seating, no whisky menu in sight. Perhaps a wine and whisky menu would be more relevant in the circumstances?
Having been a fan of McSween's haggis for about 20 years (and mentioning it in the Scottish FAQ, the first online guide to Scotland, since 1994) I went for the haggis main course. What a disappointment. It was a haggis tower, trying to be trendy but like a Bay City Roller in platform shoes 30 years too late, failing miserably. It resembled a haggis hamburger atop a potato slab. I looked for several minutes for the neeps (turnip) that was supposed to accompany it but eventually gave up and called the waiter. He explained the white stuff tasting like potatoes was turnip, and then went to get some more "neeps", which also turned out to be potatoes. After some more digging around in the potato slab I eventually found about a square inch of actual turnip, buried deep within the tatties (potato). There it was, small yet not perfectly formed, as it was undercooked and not mashed or even cooked properly. This was a potato slab with a hint of turnip buried deep within, rather than the traditional tatties, neeps and haggis in roughly equal proportions side by side on the plate. Accompanying this was an anonymous whisky, no mention of which one it was. For a place priding itself in its whisky knowledge, I would have though asking me which one I wanted or at least saying which one it was might have been a basic.
When the second helping of "neeps" arrived I had actually finished the main course at this point so had a helping of potatoes as an intermediate course. Nice. Not. Again, there were a few small pieces of actual neeps buried deep within, like finding the proverbial sixpence within Granny's Christmas pudding. However, I thought I would illuminate the staff with a few pictures from Wikipedia illustrating what neeps looked like as it seems they had never tasted it personally and mistakenly believed that mashed potatoes were in fact turnips. Huh? Shurely shome mishtake?
I ordered coffee and dessert. Normally in a basic restaurant, never mind one trying to think about being upmarket you get the dessert first then the coffee. Not so at the Albannach, when you get the coffee first then the dessert 10 minutes later.
It is difficult to see how this place has one the awards that it has, it would be interesting to see when the awards were actually given and if the current staff were involved in any way.
Surprisingly for a restaurant that couldn't be booked online and gave the impression of being full for weeks, the place was deserted. There were about 3 tables in use, 9 staff or so busying themselves doing apparently nothing in as many creative ways as possible. It might have been better on a coldish night if we hadn't been sat next to the draughty window with our coats on and tables near the bar were going empty, another mistake. Maybe it was the cold keeping people away, or maybe tonight's diners had found somewhere more attractive to eat.
I don't subscribe to the 12.5% service charge philosophy. If I want to leave a tip I will and if I don't like the service I like the option of not paying it. Should a restaurant find it's not making enough money, it should increase the food prices and not rely on a 12.5% service charge to make up the shortfall. I also don't subscribe to the philosophy of just because it's central London it's got to be expensive either.
Wetherspoons in Whitehall is but a 5 minute walk away from Albannach. When Wetherspoons serve haggis, it is also from MacSween's. They do neeps you can see and which are separate. They do mashed potato (tatties) too. They charge about 1/4 the price of Albannach, have a warm room and the portions are bigger too. So there's no justification in being ripped off just to look at white antlers.
Perhaps you could be a bit more Scottish and cool by playing Clarsach music, something by Capercaillie or the Red Hot Chilli Pipers? A menu in Scots or Gaelic would be helpful or at least to say they are available on request, it shows you might have been to Scotland recently where bilingual signs are becoming increasingly commonplace. You might even pick up some good Scottish words such as "Hogmanay" rather than the "New Year's Eve" menu advertised on the site. If you put Cranachan on a menu, surely using the Scottish word for turn of the year isn't too much to ask?
I had cranachan for dessert. Again, this was made by someone who didn't seem to have a clue. The dry oats sandwiched between the cream and fruit were difficult to blend together with the soup spoon. Try picking up some tips from a proper Scottish award winning restaurant such as the three chimneys or on the cover of the Scots cooking bible if you want to know how to make this. Come to think of it just about anywhere in the excellent taste of Scotland would be able to give this place the proverbial boot in the goolies. Perhaps Taste of Scotland should come down and give them some advice. The chef at Albannach is Jason Wilson. I couldn't find any info about him other than he had previously worked at an Argentinian restaurant (Gaucho Grill) but did note that along the way that Albannach were advertising on Gumtree for staff, a rather surprising location to be looking for upmarket staff.
Bio: The author is a Gaelic speaking Scotsman, used to work for the Scottish Tourist Board, who work closely with Taste of Scotland (although the opinions here are entirely my own) and wrote the first online guide to Scotland and which even has a food and drink section. The restaurant mentioned above in London has thankfully absolutely no connection with the excellent Albannach Hotel which has a highly coveted Michelin star.
24 November 2010
Manifesto for a modern society
It's been a while since I posted to this blog. Have moved to London, worked for Directgov, moved the blog to a new plaform, changed my main site hosting provider, changed the hosting provider for a site for No10, worked for News International. Well there's been a lot going on. In the meantime I've just found some notes I made a while back at the time of the Labour Leadership contest. Hope you enjoy them.
Manifesto for a modern nation
1. Withdraw over time the state funding of religious schools. The state should support religious buildings but not the religious education of children. The state’s inspectors should be able to inspect all aspects of religious teaching. The study of religion in historical context and understanding of the world is important, but religious studies should be optional
2. The health service should be free. This means eye tests, prescriptions for all and essential dentistry including check ups. Why make the middle classes pay for prescriptions yet rich people get heart operations for free. This inconsistency dates from how well dentists and opticians lobbied in the days the NHS was set up and really has no place in the 21st century.
3. Abolish ‘Sunday’ laws. We live in a country where some people are non-religious and others observe days other than a Sunday. There is no logical reason why shops and the sale of alcohol should vary on a Sunday just because it is a Sunday; we want a modern nation where one religion should not dictate terms to all irrespective of their religious background. Personally I also find it annoying in England that I can't go out for the day and enjoy myself in the countryside then do the shopping when I come home. The big shops shut at 5pm.
4. Abolish discrimination of all kinds. As an employer, I cannot hire on the basis of age. That is illegal and justly so, yet if I wish to go into self-employment , there are grants available for young people. This simply disadvantages older people with commitments and makes it harder for experienced people to set up in business. This inconsistency and others like it must end if we want to live in a fair society. Why have one rule for employers but another for government grants?
5. Encourage a culture where going to the pub is seen as a social family occasion, including children. This culture works well on the continent. By all means ban drinking to those under age, but children should be able to see adults drinking responsibly and growing up with that good example.
6. Ban the inclusion of service charges in restaurant bills. If I want to leave a tip it should be optional, not mandatory. This will allow fair and transparent pricing.
7. Require all call centres to have a maximum queue time of 1 minute and allow the person to request a call back after this time. Too much time in this nation is being wasted hanging on hold listening to hold music rather than being productive. The contact centre industry has deemed it acceptable that people can be waiting for 20+ minutes plus to get a call answered. This is a totally inefficient use of everyone’s time. How are we supposed to get anything done if we're stuck on hold listening to "your call is important to us". Well if it was, you wouldn't need the message because you would have already picked up the phone.
8. In a modern digital society where paying electronically is increasingly the norm, all prices regardless of the means of payment must be the same and there will be no minimum charge or extra fees for using electronic payment methods. The banks to get their acts together to reduce the charges passed onto merchants accordingly. If I can do micropayments or buy a song on itunes for less than a pound, there is no possible justification whatsoever for a £5 charge to buy an airline flight other than “everyone else is doing it”.
9. The study of British customs and traditions to be encouraged to give people a sense of identity. Welsh to be available in all Welsh schools, Irish in all Northern Irish schools and Scots Gaelic or Scots in all Scottish schools, local culture and history in English schools. This isn't a political statement, Northern Ireland needs to look to the rest of the UK to see it's not a political statement in Scotland or Wales. Having children grow up not knowing about their own local placenames and history is totally inexcusable for a modern educational system (my local school banned Gaelic for instance and my children’s school taught about the Chinese new year but couldn’t teach about pagan Hallowe’en). What sort of education is this?
10. Repeal the act of settlement. The monarch should be free to marry a person of any faith or none. In the event that the monarch themselves is non Anglican, the head of the Anglican church to pass temporarily to the next in line to the throne or someone who works in the church full time (e.g. Archbishop of Canterbury or similar). Scotland manages on the basis of having an annually elected head, perhaps a lesson here for England?
11. Create a democracy act that allows the views of the people to overcome political self-interests. Should it be clear that 30% of the electorate wish to express their views on a subject in a formal referendum, then that referendum shall be held and political parties free to campaign for whatever position they prefer. Not holding the referendum is an insult to democracy (e.g. the lack of a referendum on a Scottish parliament whilst the Conservatives were in power 1992-1997).
12. The Royal Family should be taxed the same as everyone else but considered as a company. The company income includes income from crown lands, and tourism effect of the royal family. Add this up, take off corporation tax and the rest is theirs to live off. I think they would in fact be better off under this arrangement, which seems fair enough. This isn’t a pro or anti royalist move, merely that I think the present system of funding is unfair and doesn't reflect their true value.
13. Recognise that England and Wales together do not in any sense form a nation. Thus “The national curriculum” “the national trust” being only entities that refer to England and Wales should be properly renamed to reflect a correct sense of identity.
14. Upon leaving public service, the prime minister to pay for any security arrangements required as a result of their activities from their own funds. There is no reason why current tax payers should foot the bill for famous former public servants to become even richer via signings, etc.
15. Where the government undertakes the random examination of tax affairs or the random selection of businesses to complete forms for the government’s benefit, the government to reimburse accordingly. Same applies for jury service. Noone should be out of pocket for fulfilling a mandatory public duty by random selection, this is an “unlottery”.
16. Following a general election, the party which has won the most seats is given the first opportunity to form a government, as in Scotland.
17. Members of the House of Commons to refer to each other by their common name and not their job title. It is the House of Commons after all, not the house of jobtitles
18. There should be some leeway for young children to be able to cycle on the pavement. Seems like common sense. Equally cycles in London to be fitted with number plates. I see almost total disregard for traffic lights in London from cyclists. Time they followed the rules of the road, as a pedestrian I'm fed up having to avoid cyclists that ignore red lights.
19. Give notice that all leaseholds on properties to be abolished following a suitably long timescale. The idea of buying a property only for it to revert back to someone else’s ownership eventually is little better than feudalism, leaseholds are comparatively rare in Scotland compared to England, time for England to reform and keep up.
20. Allow parents to make the choice between themselves who takes time off work to care for a child. It should be the parent’s choice, not the state expressing an assumption the mother might take up to a year but the father has to return after 2 weeks.
21. Require all organisations to take due care with personal data. This includes but is not necessarily limited to the fact that companies house publishes directors names and dates of birth online at minimal charge and freely available to anyone. Completely unacceptable
22. Make opting out of junk mail the default on the electoral register
23. The government to invest in startups so that is sees a return on its money. It works for universities.
24. Prostitution to be taxed and legalised so that it can be controlled and policed more effectively. The revenue to be used to protect those forced into it against their will. I don't like it, I don't want it happening, but accepting the reality that it happens allows both people to be protected and taxes to be raised.
25. Marrying your cousin to be made illegal
26. People to be allowed to register at a GP of their own convenience (ie near their work) if their own local GP does not offer evening or weekend appointments.
27. The BBC licence fee to be abolished and raised from income tax. Far too much time and money is wasted on collection and non payers.
28. Vehicle licence duty to be abolished and a visible MOT disc/ insurance disc to be shown instead to visibly show if the vehicle is safe and legal. The lost revenue to be transferred to the cost of having the MOT done. This works in Ireland.
29. Hereditary and religious peers to be abolished. Religion and accident of birth should have no place in objective lawmaking.
30. If 16 is legal to marry and have children, then it should also be old enough to vote.
31. If having a ranked voting system is good enough for selecting the Labour Leader, it is good enough to also vote MPs into office.
32. Laws on musical performance are inconsistent and badly implemented. If a football crowd in pub sings “You’ll never walk alone” (a copyrighted song) no one seems to care. Yet if a guy in the corner with a guitar sings his own material, the venue needs a performance licence. Surely we can legislate better than this?
33. Airline security to be consistent. If we are trying to defeat terrorists then being able to walk onto a BA flight without photo ID yet requiring a passport to do the same flight on Ryanair is wholly inconsistent
34. If a person goes bankrupt in their private life, this should not affect them being a company director provided that the said company has no debt facilities. After all, being a company director might be the person’s quickest route to paying off their debt. Forcing them to work for someone else could well lower their ability to earn and pay their debts back.
35. The creation of a universal contactless payment method for businesses and a tie up with major payment providers. Millions of hours are wasted maintaining manual accounts each year, mistakes are made in accounts and in tax calculations. It should be possible to tie up a payment method directly with a business’ accounts such that the transaction in the high street is filed correctly automatically (including VAT), reducing the capacity for fraud and error
36. Smoking in cars to be made illegal. First off it is at least as distracting as using a phone, secondly the smoke film builds up inside the car increasing glare at dusk and reducing visibility and thirdly stats have shown that smokers as a group are more comfortable with higher levels of risk. Car insurance companies to ask people if they are smokers and then premiums adjusted accordingly.
37. Smoking in a car with children in the car to be made illegal, smoking within a home where there are children to be illegal, fines to be increased for dropping fag ends on the pavement. It causes cancer. If you inflicted cancer on your children via other means you'd be locked up. Why should smoking be any different?
38. National Insurance. Why? Get rid of it and roll it into income tax. Tax system in this country is far too complicated.
Manifesto for a modern nation
1. Withdraw over time the state funding of religious schools. The state should support religious buildings but not the religious education of children. The state’s inspectors should be able to inspect all aspects of religious teaching. The study of religion in historical context and understanding of the world is important, but religious studies should be optional
2. The health service should be free. This means eye tests, prescriptions for all and essential dentistry including check ups. Why make the middle classes pay for prescriptions yet rich people get heart operations for free. This inconsistency dates from how well dentists and opticians lobbied in the days the NHS was set up and really has no place in the 21st century.
3. Abolish ‘Sunday’ laws. We live in a country where some people are non-religious and others observe days other than a Sunday. There is no logical reason why shops and the sale of alcohol should vary on a Sunday just because it is a Sunday; we want a modern nation where one religion should not dictate terms to all irrespective of their religious background. Personally I also find it annoying in England that I can't go out for the day and enjoy myself in the countryside then do the shopping when I come home. The big shops shut at 5pm.
4. Abolish discrimination of all kinds. As an employer, I cannot hire on the basis of age. That is illegal and justly so, yet if I wish to go into self-employment , there are grants available for young people. This simply disadvantages older people with commitments and makes it harder for experienced people to set up in business. This inconsistency and others like it must end if we want to live in a fair society. Why have one rule for employers but another for government grants?
5. Encourage a culture where going to the pub is seen as a social family occasion, including children. This culture works well on the continent. By all means ban drinking to those under age, but children should be able to see adults drinking responsibly and growing up with that good example.
6. Ban the inclusion of service charges in restaurant bills. If I want to leave a tip it should be optional, not mandatory. This will allow fair and transparent pricing.
7. Require all call centres to have a maximum queue time of 1 minute and allow the person to request a call back after this time. Too much time in this nation is being wasted hanging on hold listening to hold music rather than being productive. The contact centre industry has deemed it acceptable that people can be waiting for 20+ minutes plus to get a call answered. This is a totally inefficient use of everyone’s time. How are we supposed to get anything done if we're stuck on hold listening to "your call is important to us". Well if it was, you wouldn't need the message because you would have already picked up the phone.
8. In a modern digital society where paying electronically is increasingly the norm, all prices regardless of the means of payment must be the same and there will be no minimum charge or extra fees for using electronic payment methods. The banks to get their acts together to reduce the charges passed onto merchants accordingly. If I can do micropayments or buy a song on itunes for less than a pound, there is no possible justification whatsoever for a £5 charge to buy an airline flight other than “everyone else is doing it”.
9. The study of British customs and traditions to be encouraged to give people a sense of identity. Welsh to be available in all Welsh schools, Irish in all Northern Irish schools and Scots Gaelic or Scots in all Scottish schools, local culture and history in English schools. This isn't a political statement, Northern Ireland needs to look to the rest of the UK to see it's not a political statement in Scotland or Wales. Having children grow up not knowing about their own local placenames and history is totally inexcusable for a modern educational system (my local school banned Gaelic for instance and my children’s school taught about the Chinese new year but couldn’t teach about pagan Hallowe’en). What sort of education is this?
10. Repeal the act of settlement. The monarch should be free to marry a person of any faith or none. In the event that the monarch themselves is non Anglican, the head of the Anglican church to pass temporarily to the next in line to the throne or someone who works in the church full time (e.g. Archbishop of Canterbury or similar). Scotland manages on the basis of having an annually elected head, perhaps a lesson here for England?
11. Create a democracy act that allows the views of the people to overcome political self-interests. Should it be clear that 30% of the electorate wish to express their views on a subject in a formal referendum, then that referendum shall be held and political parties free to campaign for whatever position they prefer. Not holding the referendum is an insult to democracy (e.g. the lack of a referendum on a Scottish parliament whilst the Conservatives were in power 1992-1997).
12. The Royal Family should be taxed the same as everyone else but considered as a company. The company income includes income from crown lands, and tourism effect of the royal family. Add this up, take off corporation tax and the rest is theirs to live off. I think they would in fact be better off under this arrangement, which seems fair enough. This isn’t a pro or anti royalist move, merely that I think the present system of funding is unfair and doesn't reflect their true value.
13. Recognise that England and Wales together do not in any sense form a nation. Thus “The national curriculum” “the national trust” being only entities that refer to England and Wales should be properly renamed to reflect a correct sense of identity.
14. Upon leaving public service, the prime minister to pay for any security arrangements required as a result of their activities from their own funds. There is no reason why current tax payers should foot the bill for famous former public servants to become even richer via signings, etc.
15. Where the government undertakes the random examination of tax affairs or the random selection of businesses to complete forms for the government’s benefit, the government to reimburse accordingly. Same applies for jury service. Noone should be out of pocket for fulfilling a mandatory public duty by random selection, this is an “unlottery”.
16. Following a general election, the party which has won the most seats is given the first opportunity to form a government, as in Scotland.
17. Members of the House of Commons to refer to each other by their common name and not their job title. It is the House of Commons after all, not the house of jobtitles
18. There should be some leeway for young children to be able to cycle on the pavement. Seems like common sense. Equally cycles in London to be fitted with number plates. I see almost total disregard for traffic lights in London from cyclists. Time they followed the rules of the road, as a pedestrian I'm fed up having to avoid cyclists that ignore red lights.
19. Give notice that all leaseholds on properties to be abolished following a suitably long timescale. The idea of buying a property only for it to revert back to someone else’s ownership eventually is little better than feudalism, leaseholds are comparatively rare in Scotland compared to England, time for England to reform and keep up.
20. Allow parents to make the choice between themselves who takes time off work to care for a child. It should be the parent’s choice, not the state expressing an assumption the mother might take up to a year but the father has to return after 2 weeks.
21. Require all organisations to take due care with personal data. This includes but is not necessarily limited to the fact that companies house publishes directors names and dates of birth online at minimal charge and freely available to anyone. Completely unacceptable
22. Make opting out of junk mail the default on the electoral register
23. The government to invest in startups so that is sees a return on its money. It works for universities.
24. Prostitution to be taxed and legalised so that it can be controlled and policed more effectively. The revenue to be used to protect those forced into it against their will. I don't like it, I don't want it happening, but accepting the reality that it happens allows both people to be protected and taxes to be raised.
25. Marrying your cousin to be made illegal
26. People to be allowed to register at a GP of their own convenience (ie near their work) if their own local GP does not offer evening or weekend appointments.
27. The BBC licence fee to be abolished and raised from income tax. Far too much time and money is wasted on collection and non payers.
28. Vehicle licence duty to be abolished and a visible MOT disc/ insurance disc to be shown instead to visibly show if the vehicle is safe and legal. The lost revenue to be transferred to the cost of having the MOT done. This works in Ireland.
29. Hereditary and religious peers to be abolished. Religion and accident of birth should have no place in objective lawmaking.
30. If 16 is legal to marry and have children, then it should also be old enough to vote.
31. If having a ranked voting system is good enough for selecting the Labour Leader, it is good enough to also vote MPs into office.
32. Laws on musical performance are inconsistent and badly implemented. If a football crowd in pub sings “You’ll never walk alone” (a copyrighted song) no one seems to care. Yet if a guy in the corner with a guitar sings his own material, the venue needs a performance licence. Surely we can legislate better than this?
33. Airline security to be consistent. If we are trying to defeat terrorists then being able to walk onto a BA flight without photo ID yet requiring a passport to do the same flight on Ryanair is wholly inconsistent
34. If a person goes bankrupt in their private life, this should not affect them being a company director provided that the said company has no debt facilities. After all, being a company director might be the person’s quickest route to paying off their debt. Forcing them to work for someone else could well lower their ability to earn and pay their debts back.
35. The creation of a universal contactless payment method for businesses and a tie up with major payment providers. Millions of hours are wasted maintaining manual accounts each year, mistakes are made in accounts and in tax calculations. It should be possible to tie up a payment method directly with a business’ accounts such that the transaction in the high street is filed correctly automatically (including VAT), reducing the capacity for fraud and error
36. Smoking in cars to be made illegal. First off it is at least as distracting as using a phone, secondly the smoke film builds up inside the car increasing glare at dusk and reducing visibility and thirdly stats have shown that smokers as a group are more comfortable with higher levels of risk. Car insurance companies to ask people if they are smokers and then premiums adjusted accordingly.
37. Smoking in a car with children in the car to be made illegal, smoking within a home where there are children to be illegal, fines to be increased for dropping fag ends on the pavement. It causes cancer. If you inflicted cancer on your children via other means you'd be locked up. Why should smoking be any different?
38. National Insurance. Why? Get rid of it and roll it into income tax. Tax system in this country is far too complicated.
24 April 2010
Fed up with rip off hotels
A rant at the hotel industry and their standards.
I am fed up being ripped off with crap food, especially crap food that is overpriced and you take all evening to serve me.
Where do I start? Cereal loaded with sugar. Muesli is supposed to be healthy. So why only serve varieties with sugar in? This makes as much sense as automatically putting sugar in everyone's tea or coffee and makes no sense for anyone trying to eat healthily or on a low sugar diet. In 1997 I suggested this to Benedict's of Belfast and they got in muesli with no sugar. I stayed in that hotel in a contract for 7 months and when I returned for a random visit last year they were still serving it. Must have made sense I guess and maybe more people than me liked the sugar free muesli, you can even leave a bowl of sugar beside it for the sugarholics (add to taste).
Bacon. It's supposed to be reasonably crispy. A pile of bacon drowning in its own fat that looks like it has been steamed and has more fat on it than bacon just doesn't do it for me. This isn't just me, the other guests were complaining about it too. Why do you think it's acceptable to put out such inedible crap? Shall I call Gordon Ramsey up to tell it to you straight?
Coffee. It's supposed to be fresh and tasty to wake up guests in the morning. Usually however you have instant chemical coffeesoup in your room with a barely adequate amount of milk unless you are sad enough to be staying by yourself. Alternatively you could venture to the breakfast area where I'm sure it's been stewing since 6am. Why don't you do a deal with one of the semi-reasonable high street coffee chains who I am sure would welcome the expansion opportunity or at least have a cafetière available in the room so I can make it myself.
I also know that £5 bowl of soup probably cost you less than £1 for ingredients and 2 mins to heat up so unless your waiter earns £4 for 2 mins work (£120 an hour) I don't buy the rip off. I also don't get the £10 min for a main course either, nor the £3 for a pint, all of which I frequently decline in preference to an entire meal with food and drink, no hidden service charges AND a proper VAT receipt correctly itemised from a Wetherspoons pub with change from £8 (usually less). They can deliver decent food on a budget, why can't you? They also take 10 mins to serve me usually rather than the best part of an hour unlike hotel restaurants while I get bored waiting and wondering how much the hotel will charge me for the 'service'.
I had completely had it tonight when I thought I would try the restaurant. I had to ask especially for the menu. Clearly a tactic that you use so that when people sit down and ask for a menu, you've already 'got them'. Most normal (not hotel) restaurants have the decency to put a menu on public display so you can make your mind up first. Having thought it overpriced, I was just going to have a starter (the famous £5 soup) but then ventured to the bar to see what they had there only to be told they didn't serve food. Except the nuts I spotted and then had to ask if there were any other edible items they sold also not classified as food, such as crisps etc. I then popped out to the car for 5 mins then returned to the restaurant only to find it closed. No warning when I was there 5 mins earlier, no clearly indicated signs indicating their hours, nothing. However, I could get exactly the same food on the menu delivered as room service to my room. I was going to ask if having then had it delivered to my room I could bring it back to the bar, be sociable and annoy all the other hungry guests being told by barstaff that they didn't serve food.
So tonight as I was hungry and actually needed more to eat than nuts (even if the bar didn't classify them as food) I went to Tesco, bought long life milk, sugar free cereal, plates, cutlery, juice, bread, fresh fruit (not available in your restaurant, why?), coffee, cafetière (so I don't need to drink instant chemical soup) and a bottle opener for less than the price of two meals in your restaurant, thus saving me eating breakfast with you indefinitely and at least the next two evening meals. Saved a fortune and of course I can also eat whenever I like. Result. Healthy eating for a 1/3 the price of overpriced unhealthy food. I have also considered buying a microwave for £30 and putting it in my room so that I can enjoy a Tesco curry and rice for an amazing £1.50 rather than the £15 and long delay with it would take you to serve up pretty much the same thing. After 3 days, I'm already in profit (and I can eat my food in less than 10 minutes).
Look this isn't just a stereotypical stingy Scotsman story. There's a number of points here - one is that when I'm in a hotel I actually want to eat healthily and 'normal' food, not joints covered in unpronouncable incomprehensible French names trying to be pretentious. Nor do I need huge portions, starch, carbohydrates and overcooked vegetables. I actually want food that's reasonably close to what I would eat at home, portion size and with tasty fruit and vegetables. I also don't want to wonder why you charge 3x the price of Wetherspoons, your food is nothing special and by the way your beer is probably crap too. Serving 6 types of lager and no ale isn't much of a choice really. As someone in a hotel on business I also resent my week being whittled away waiting for a table, waiting for my order to be taken and waiting for my food to arrive. Once in a while is OK for a special occasion, but when it becomes a regular nightly event because I travel a lot, it eats in not only my time when I could be catching up on work or getting an early night but also when I might like to go for a walk and enjoy the local sights. Wetherspoons can take my order and serve me in 10 mins, why does a restaurant like to block a table out for over an hour with slow service the main cause?
Anyone else think the hotel industry needs a good kicking? As a starting point, if you want the lowest prices for a bed, try this remarkable Hotel search engine which I use very regularly and which makes finding hotels a lot easier.
I am fed up being ripped off with crap food, especially crap food that is overpriced and you take all evening to serve me.
Where do I start? Cereal loaded with sugar. Muesli is supposed to be healthy. So why only serve varieties with sugar in? This makes as much sense as automatically putting sugar in everyone's tea or coffee and makes no sense for anyone trying to eat healthily or on a low sugar diet. In 1997 I suggested this to Benedict's of Belfast and they got in muesli with no sugar. I stayed in that hotel in a contract for 7 months and when I returned for a random visit last year they were still serving it. Must have made sense I guess and maybe more people than me liked the sugar free muesli, you can even leave a bowl of sugar beside it for the sugarholics (add to taste).
Bacon. It's supposed to be reasonably crispy. A pile of bacon drowning in its own fat that looks like it has been steamed and has more fat on it than bacon just doesn't do it for me. This isn't just me, the other guests were complaining about it too. Why do you think it's acceptable to put out such inedible crap? Shall I call Gordon Ramsey up to tell it to you straight?
Coffee. It's supposed to be fresh and tasty to wake up guests in the morning. Usually however you have instant chemical coffeesoup in your room with a barely adequate amount of milk unless you are sad enough to be staying by yourself. Alternatively you could venture to the breakfast area where I'm sure it's been stewing since 6am. Why don't you do a deal with one of the semi-reasonable high street coffee chains who I am sure would welcome the expansion opportunity or at least have a cafetière available in the room so I can make it myself.
I also know that £5 bowl of soup probably cost you less than £1 for ingredients and 2 mins to heat up so unless your waiter earns £4 for 2 mins work (£120 an hour) I don't buy the rip off. I also don't get the £10 min for a main course either, nor the £3 for a pint, all of which I frequently decline in preference to an entire meal with food and drink, no hidden service charges AND a proper VAT receipt correctly itemised from a Wetherspoons pub with change from £8 (usually less). They can deliver decent food on a budget, why can't you? They also take 10 mins to serve me usually rather than the best part of an hour unlike hotel restaurants while I get bored waiting and wondering how much the hotel will charge me for the 'service'.
I had completely had it tonight when I thought I would try the restaurant. I had to ask especially for the menu. Clearly a tactic that you use so that when people sit down and ask for a menu, you've already 'got them'. Most normal (not hotel) restaurants have the decency to put a menu on public display so you can make your mind up first. Having thought it overpriced, I was just going to have a starter (the famous £5 soup) but then ventured to the bar to see what they had there only to be told they didn't serve food. Except the nuts I spotted and then had to ask if there were any other edible items they sold also not classified as food, such as crisps etc. I then popped out to the car for 5 mins then returned to the restaurant only to find it closed. No warning when I was there 5 mins earlier, no clearly indicated signs indicating their hours, nothing. However, I could get exactly the same food on the menu delivered as room service to my room. I was going to ask if having then had it delivered to my room I could bring it back to the bar, be sociable and annoy all the other hungry guests being told by barstaff that they didn't serve food.
So tonight as I was hungry and actually needed more to eat than nuts (even if the bar didn't classify them as food) I went to Tesco, bought long life milk, sugar free cereal, plates, cutlery, juice, bread, fresh fruit (not available in your restaurant, why?), coffee, cafetière (so I don't need to drink instant chemical soup) and a bottle opener for less than the price of two meals in your restaurant, thus saving me eating breakfast with you indefinitely and at least the next two evening meals. Saved a fortune and of course I can also eat whenever I like. Result. Healthy eating for a 1/3 the price of overpriced unhealthy food. I have also considered buying a microwave for £30 and putting it in my room so that I can enjoy a Tesco curry and rice for an amazing £1.50 rather than the £15 and long delay with it would take you to serve up pretty much the same thing. After 3 days, I'm already in profit (and I can eat my food in less than 10 minutes).
Look this isn't just a stereotypical stingy Scotsman story. There's a number of points here - one is that when I'm in a hotel I actually want to eat healthily and 'normal' food, not joints covered in unpronouncable incomprehensible French names trying to be pretentious. Nor do I need huge portions, starch, carbohydrates and overcooked vegetables. I actually want food that's reasonably close to what I would eat at home, portion size and with tasty fruit and vegetables. I also don't want to wonder why you charge 3x the price of Wetherspoons, your food is nothing special and by the way your beer is probably crap too. Serving 6 types of lager and no ale isn't much of a choice really. As someone in a hotel on business I also resent my week being whittled away waiting for a table, waiting for my order to be taken and waiting for my food to arrive. Once in a while is OK for a special occasion, but when it becomes a regular nightly event because I travel a lot, it eats in not only my time when I could be catching up on work or getting an early night but also when I might like to go for a walk and enjoy the local sights. Wetherspoons can take my order and serve me in 10 mins, why does a restaurant like to block a table out for over an hour with slow service the main cause?
Anyone else think the hotel industry needs a good kicking? As a starting point, if you want the lowest prices for a bed, try this remarkable Hotel search engine which I use very regularly and which makes finding hotels a lot easier.
06 April 2010
UK General Election
Today Gordon Brown is predicted to call the general election.
Here's a few more predictions
In 2006 I said an uninspired Labour would feed into the hands of the SNP in Scotland and the Tories in England. Within a year, the SNP was in government in Scotland and in 2010 the Tories are leading in the polls UK wide.
In 2007 I predicted the resignation of Tony Blair, the SNP winning the Scottish elections and the Tories winning the UK elections in 2010.
In 2008, I predicted on the BBC website that 2010 would see Labour lose and Gordon Brown off to a well paid job in the City and the SNP a good 10 points in front.
In 2010, we see the SNP a good 10 points in front, and of course the Tories in the lead UK wide.
The polls have been wrong before - hopefully the number crunchers will have taken 1992 into account - but the predictions are looking good so far. I'm not much of a fan of the Tories, including the lack of help in sorting out the red tape I got from my then MP Alistair Darling, but anything has to be better than another 5 years of Labour.
Craig
Here's a few more predictions
In 2006 I said an uninspired Labour would feed into the hands of the SNP in Scotland and the Tories in England. Within a year, the SNP was in government in Scotland and in 2010 the Tories are leading in the polls UK wide.
In 2007 I predicted the resignation of Tony Blair, the SNP winning the Scottish elections and the Tories winning the UK elections in 2010.
In 2008, I predicted on the BBC website that 2010 would see Labour lose and Gordon Brown off to a well paid job in the City and the SNP a good 10 points in front.
In 2010, we see the SNP a good 10 points in front, and of course the Tories in the lead UK wide.
The polls have been wrong before - hopefully the number crunchers will have taken 1992 into account - but the predictions are looking good so far. I'm not much of a fan of the Tories, including the lack of help in sorting out the red tape I got from my then MP Alistair Darling, but anything has to be better than another 5 years of Labour.
Craig
09 March 2010
BBC fail - my correct name is not permitted
BBC displays another example of the Scunthorpe problem. I am no longer allowed to use my name on the BBC site. See the screendump (click to enlarge) and also my previous experience with Microsoft on this issue in 2004.
02 November 2009
Password and PIN problems
An article on the relative security and insecurity of websites and banks
Why is it that websites deem a 6 character all lower case password to be "very weak" when there's 306million+ possibilities. Yet a 4 digit PIN (9999 possibilities) is secure enough for banks?
The website one is almost 31,000 times more secure yet is deemed "weak". Surely a rule for websites that if the incorrect password is used a certain number of times the account is locked would be sufficient to make the weak password 31,000 times stronger than the bank's security.
We have to be practical about this. In reality, any rules around requiring a password to have upper and lower case letter and special characters such as $,% etc simply make it much more likely people will write the passwords down. Just because this makes it the person's problem rather than the website's is no excuse - the overall security of the account is the issue, including the likelyhood that the account will be broken into because the password was so complicated it, together with the dozons of other passwords from other sites, all had to be written down somewhere because it was too much to remember.
Can we please have simpler password rules for websites and some way of having one strong security mechanism which ties them all together?
Craig
Why is it that websites deem a 6 character all lower case password to be "very weak" when there's 306million+ possibilities. Yet a 4 digit PIN (9999 possibilities) is secure enough for banks?
The website one is almost 31,000 times more secure yet is deemed "weak". Surely a rule for websites that if the incorrect password is used a certain number of times the account is locked would be sufficient to make the weak password 31,000 times stronger than the bank's security.
We have to be practical about this. In reality, any rules around requiring a password to have upper and lower case letter and special characters such as $,% etc simply make it much more likely people will write the passwords down. Just because this makes it the person's problem rather than the website's is no excuse - the overall security of the account is the issue, including the likelyhood that the account will be broken into because the password was so complicated it, together with the dozons of other passwords from other sites, all had to be written down somewhere because it was too much to remember.
Can we please have simpler password rules for websites and some way of having one strong security mechanism which ties them all together?
Craig
22 October 2009
Nokia N97 problems
I thought I would write this to document the ongoing problems I have with my Nokia N97. It seems from the conversation in the phone shop today that my problems are far from unique. Hopefully you can add your problems into the comments field of this blog and if enough people link to the article, tweet it etc it will feature as prominently in Google as some of the other pages on this blog and it might inspire Nokia to respond in some way, perhaps by way of a few overdue bugfixes for their so called flagship product. Anyway, here goes:
1. I have an old Nokia E61 and last year got a N95 on contract. The two worked flawlessly together for 18 months, I could synchronise calendar entries, notes, contacts flawlessly. With the N95 and the N97, despite them both being on the same timezone, I get random calendar entries moving forward by an hour on synchronisation, meaning that I have to go in and manually check them all. This is a totally unacceptable bug, fix it. I also notice that if I have a contact entry with no phone number (e.g. its just a name and address) then this entry gets randomly duplicated as well. Another bug that needs to be fixed.
2. There is no facility in the browser to sort bookmarks alphabetically. This is again basic functionality you would expect in a flagship product especially if you have a lot of bookmarks to manage
3. The sound on the N95 was great for a mobile phone. The sound on the N97 is pants by comparison. This is a retrograde step, not something you would expect for a flagship product.
4. The N95 was responsive and fast. The N97 is not. Particularly after it crashes and you have to pull out the battery to restart it because it won't power up. Then the phone decides to do something in the background (I think it is rebuilding the music database) and this takes about 10 minutes, during which time the phone is unusable. I demonstrated this without difficulty in the shop today.
5. When I flip open the screen I expect a hardware switch to be able to tell the software the screen is open without any issues, not have to wait 20 seconds for the software to switch the screen to horizontal mode.
6. Having Adobe reader installed as a trial version that expires sucks especially if you get a PDF you need to read. If you do want to waste the time and money paying to get a full version of this product (the same product that was completely free on the N95) then don't bother unless you have a free evening to waste as you are directed to the quickoffice.com site to make the purchase. This is about the suckiest site I have ever used in terms of usability. Every payment method failed with either a timeout or an incomplete screen when attempting to purchase using IE on a broadband connection with a laptop. They have no help email address or phone number, instead you have to register for a support account, wait for the account to be validated, then log your request via a long form that asks all sorts of irrelevant and pointless questions about your phone even though its the website that is at fault.
7. The N95 allowed you to browse home media via Wi-Fi and to download media across Wi-Fi easily, the flagship N97 removed this extremely good functionality and replaced it with nothing. Well maybe Ovi store, but the least said about that the better. Gone are the days when I could download a whole album to my phone from another room, now I have to find the connection wire and sit next to my PC to do it.
8. After connecting my phone to my PC to download music, I then disconnect the data connection cable. Since the same connection is used to charge the phone from the mains, the phone gives me the stupid message "unplug charger from power supply to save energy". Except I wasn't bothered about charging the phone, I was transferring music, and the "charger" is my PC which I am still using. Stupid message.
9. Rather unhelpfully the useful facility to search email messages on the N95 is no longer present on the N97. The search messages function only searches text messages, not email messages. Fail.
10. I am using 40% of the 32Gb internal memory to store MP3s. Since I went from using 1% the phone goes slow, especially after a crash. If you give people 32Gb of memory, expect them to use it and write apps that can handle this rather than apps that run at a snails pace.
11. The compass sucks. Waving my phone around in the air for 10 minutes to get a pseudo lock for the compass makes me look stupid and should not be necessary.
12. The maps suck as well. The location finder is nothing like as fast and as accurate as it was on the N95 and on several occasions has been a few hundred metres out. Combined with the sucky compass, this wastes my time - I emerge from a London underground station and want to know which street I am on and which way I am facing not 10 minutes later after waving the phone around like a magic wand only to get an approximate position. When I'm using the phone for GPS I don't want it automatically turning off when the maps are updating thanks, I might be using it to navigate with and shouldn't need to keep waking the phone up.
13. Under "My Videos" there is a video clip promoting the E90. I don't care about the E90, I want to delete the video clip. There is no obvious delete in an obvious place.
14. The captured image count only seems to update after the phone is powered off. It doesn't update in real time. This is laughable.
15. My downloads area says it has 21 items but when I open it, I get 21 randomly twinkling broken image icons. There's no way to delete these. You get a general system error if your try. Here's a tip for your programming team:
if have_just_shown_randomly_twinkling_broken_image_icon then
note_image_isnt_there_and_patch_database()
remove icon()
How hard was that? You spent how many millions on R&D for this device?
16. Since the collective brains of the universe still haven't figured out how to link music files (ie you get the same piece of music as part of a greatest hits but also as part of the original album and it is on your phone twice rather than as one linked item) we have the problem of duplicate tracks. To conserve memory and also as part of a general tidy up and inconsistent naming I moved the tracks into consistently named folders. However, on doing this the "All" bookmark to the previous track still hangs around, so you if you rename "Beatles" to "The Beatles", there is still an artist reference to "Beatles" and it it there is still a reference to "All" which now points to nothing. You can't delete the empty references, if you do there is an error "File is corrupted: Operation cancelled". Here's some more code for your programmers.
if artist->all.bookmark()==null then delete(artist->all.bookmark)
how many millions did you spend developing this product?
17. You still haven't fixed the stupid email bug.
18. The usability of the email client is pants. Here is an example. I have my email open in list mode and I want to read a message, so I double click on it.
1. Double click on message, expecting message to be shown (one action). What actually happens is:
Phone wonders why I might have pressed double click. Who knows maybe I just wanted to wake the phone up. Maybe I pressed double click for some other reason than opening the mail. So it asks me "E-mail not retrieved yet. Retrieve now?" There is no retrieve later option. Of course I want it retrieved now, I'm trying to read the message you stupid phone. So you click yes, then it connects to your mailbox. Then it considers that the most important thing on connection is to refresh your mailbox which may take a while. Perhaps in a future release the refresh might take place as a background task? Then note that message is empty, due to bug noted in point 17. So you have to delicately click on the HTML attachment icon, not easy on a moving train. Then rather than getting the attachment you get another screen saying "Attachment.HTML" which you then have to click on to open it. If this is an HTML mail with images, it prompts you if you want to connect to the server even though you are already online. You get this request multiple times, even if you say no. However sometimes saying no closes the message down so you see nothing, not even the text content the phone has already downloaded. All in all a usability fail. Do you think Apple would design it this way? Do you even have to think about the answer?
19. Application on the homepage which require a connection, e.g. the weather, randomly don't work. Even if you go to the application itself and download the content, the homepage view just sits there saying "content loading" indefinitely.
20. I would like to delete all the delivery reports for messages that have been delivered. No such option exists, it's an all or nothing affair. If you can individually delete a text message, you should be able to individually delete its delivery report. Seems like basic usability to me?
21. Remember how search messages only searched text messages? Well the emails are in fact stored in an area called messaging, just so that when you fire up the search messages thing you think it might search the emails because they are in the messaging area. Anyway, I digress. I set up my "messaging" area to be on the internal memory, there's more room there. Randomly however it resets to the phone memory meaning that I lose all sight of my email and text messages. Once when I set it back again to the internal memory, I found they had all been wiped. Whilst the emails were just a copy of what was on the Internet, there was no copy of all the text messages. I'm not backing up the phone twice a day and I don't expect this to happen. Stop it.
22. I'd like to turn off the stupid nanny messages such as "Exiting will disconnect the active mailbox connection. Exit anyway?" Yes, you fool, that's why I just pressed the exit button.
23. When I press the off button, I expect the phone to turn off. If an application has hung then too bad. Off means off. Consider the functionality for a second of the off button, it means the user is wanting to turn off the phone. It doesn't mean that they want the phone to remain on because an application has hung. This basic introduction to the functionality of the off button should be enough for a company of Nokia's size to code it up properly that the off button does in fact turn off the phone when the off button is pressed. Otherwise I will resort to removing the battery, that powers off the phone at the same speed the off button on the phone should work at and does in fact work even if an application has hung (unlike the off button). Take a tip from the old "reset" button on an Apple II. It reset the computer no matter what state it was in. That's what I want in an off button.
24. You can't independently put the browser in silent mode to stop those incredibly annoying websites that auto-play music when you land on them, yet still have the audio on so you can hear calls and text messages arriving. There is no audio control for the browser. A mute function would be expected in a flagship product. Try reusing the code from the media player.
25. When you open the contacts address book it's called "contacts" but when you go to search it, it's now called "people" rather than "contacts".
26. There is a grid view and list view for most things, but only a list view for settings. Why?
27. The delay on the camera is completely unacceptable. See earlier points about the phone being slow. There is a couple of seconds delay between pressing the button and the picture being taken which makes action shots almost impossible. Are the electrons for operating on the camera going on a detour via the moon when this happens? Seemingly a light beam could bounce off the moon quicker than it takes the message to travel the 6cm or so from the shutter button to the camera. Totally unacceptable. If you can get the phone to respond instantly there's an incoming call, you can make the other applications work the same way. Deal with it.
28. If you are going to write a phone with such sluggish performance try giving better feedback to the user, such as greying off a button they have pressed to give some feedback rather than just vibrating the phone and making it look like its hung.
29. You can configure your alarm on a N97 to go off on days you specify. I have mine on a Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri as I get up at 4am on a Monday but not on the other days. However, the same flexibility is not available to calendar reminders. So I can have an alarm for 6:30 on a Tuesday, but I can't have a calendar entry for a Tue-Fri that says "leave to get train". I can't even have it on workdays only. This is pants. Yet another example of useful functionality in one part of the phone that isn't reused everywhere it could be useful.
30. The previous and next buttons on the calendar and emails are pretty useless and work randomly. The sensitive area for these isn't under the icons as you might expect but somewhat near them.
31. When I open up the music player and select "All songs" in music library it says "7 days 11 hours" of music. When I go into playlists and select All songs it says there's only 1 day. Even if I open up the bookmark and add "all songs" to it, it still says 1 day. Huh?
32. In the music player, the term "song" and "music" is used randomly interchangeably. Guys, just call it music will ya? you don't know if it's a song or not because you have no idea how many tracks are instrumentals.
33. I would like the facility to show my contacts in order of most recently used, rather than having to favourite and unfavourite them. Besides the favouriting function is also buggy as they favourites get randomly lost when synchronising with another phone.
34. I still can't understand why there is such a conceptual difficulty between text messaging and emails and translating between the two. If I get an email I might like to forward it by text. If I get a text, I might like to forward it as an email. Why is this apparently impossible? How about a useful "select all text" option on the options menu rather than the hopelessly erratic slide and copy and context sensitive copy function that appears of its own free will?
36. The space bar belongs in the MIDDLE of the keyboard. See your PC/Laptop for a clue.
37. Why does the help for the calendar describe a function to view lunar data, but this function does not exist?
38. Why is there no facility to colour code entries in the calendar? How about a facility to have daily reminders auto delete themselves once the day has passed (user configurable)
39. Why does my phone light go out after 10 seconds when the display light out feature is set to a minute? I'd like a setting for the display to be permanently on, where is it?
40. Why is it that when I open the clock application it has nice rounded figures, but when the same digital clock appears on the homepage it looks like a bad digital LED display from the 1970's?
Any others anyone?
1. I have an old Nokia E61 and last year got a N95 on contract. The two worked flawlessly together for 18 months, I could synchronise calendar entries, notes, contacts flawlessly. With the N95 and the N97, despite them both being on the same timezone, I get random calendar entries moving forward by an hour on synchronisation, meaning that I have to go in and manually check them all. This is a totally unacceptable bug, fix it. I also notice that if I have a contact entry with no phone number (e.g. its just a name and address) then this entry gets randomly duplicated as well. Another bug that needs to be fixed.
2. There is no facility in the browser to sort bookmarks alphabetically. This is again basic functionality you would expect in a flagship product especially if you have a lot of bookmarks to manage
3. The sound on the N95 was great for a mobile phone. The sound on the N97 is pants by comparison. This is a retrograde step, not something you would expect for a flagship product.
4. The N95 was responsive and fast. The N97 is not. Particularly after it crashes and you have to pull out the battery to restart it because it won't power up. Then the phone decides to do something in the background (I think it is rebuilding the music database) and this takes about 10 minutes, during which time the phone is unusable. I demonstrated this without difficulty in the shop today.
5. When I flip open the screen I expect a hardware switch to be able to tell the software the screen is open without any issues, not have to wait 20 seconds for the software to switch the screen to horizontal mode.
6. Having Adobe reader installed as a trial version that expires sucks especially if you get a PDF you need to read. If you do want to waste the time and money paying to get a full version of this product (the same product that was completely free on the N95) then don't bother unless you have a free evening to waste as you are directed to the quickoffice.com site to make the purchase. This is about the suckiest site I have ever used in terms of usability. Every payment method failed with either a timeout or an incomplete screen when attempting to purchase using IE on a broadband connection with a laptop. They have no help email address or phone number, instead you have to register for a support account, wait for the account to be validated, then log your request via a long form that asks all sorts of irrelevant and pointless questions about your phone even though its the website that is at fault.
7. The N95 allowed you to browse home media via Wi-Fi and to download media across Wi-Fi easily, the flagship N97 removed this extremely good functionality and replaced it with nothing. Well maybe Ovi store, but the least said about that the better. Gone are the days when I could download a whole album to my phone from another room, now I have to find the connection wire and sit next to my PC to do it.
8. After connecting my phone to my PC to download music, I then disconnect the data connection cable. Since the same connection is used to charge the phone from the mains, the phone gives me the stupid message "unplug charger from power supply to save energy". Except I wasn't bothered about charging the phone, I was transferring music, and the "charger" is my PC which I am still using. Stupid message.
9. Rather unhelpfully the useful facility to search email messages on the N95 is no longer present on the N97. The search messages function only searches text messages, not email messages. Fail.
10. I am using 40% of the 32Gb internal memory to store MP3s. Since I went from using 1% the phone goes slow, especially after a crash. If you give people 32Gb of memory, expect them to use it and write apps that can handle this rather than apps that run at a snails pace.
11. The compass sucks. Waving my phone around in the air for 10 minutes to get a pseudo lock for the compass makes me look stupid and should not be necessary.
12. The maps suck as well. The location finder is nothing like as fast and as accurate as it was on the N95 and on several occasions has been a few hundred metres out. Combined with the sucky compass, this wastes my time - I emerge from a London underground station and want to know which street I am on and which way I am facing not 10 minutes later after waving the phone around like a magic wand only to get an approximate position. When I'm using the phone for GPS I don't want it automatically turning off when the maps are updating thanks, I might be using it to navigate with and shouldn't need to keep waking the phone up.
13. Under "My Videos" there is a video clip promoting the E90. I don't care about the E90, I want to delete the video clip. There is no obvious delete in an obvious place.
14. The captured image count only seems to update after the phone is powered off. It doesn't update in real time. This is laughable.
15. My downloads area says it has 21 items but when I open it, I get 21 randomly twinkling broken image icons. There's no way to delete these. You get a general system error if your try. Here's a tip for your programming team:
if have_just_shown_randomly_twinkling_broken_image_icon then
note_image_isnt_there_and_patch_database()
remove icon()
How hard was that? You spent how many millions on R&D for this device?
16. Since the collective brains of the universe still haven't figured out how to link music files (ie you get the same piece of music as part of a greatest hits but also as part of the original album and it is on your phone twice rather than as one linked item) we have the problem of duplicate tracks. To conserve memory and also as part of a general tidy up and inconsistent naming I moved the tracks into consistently named folders. However, on doing this the "All" bookmark to the previous track still hangs around, so you if you rename "Beatles" to "The Beatles", there is still an artist reference to "Beatles" and it it there is still a reference to "All" which now points to nothing. You can't delete the empty references, if you do there is an error "File is corrupted: Operation cancelled". Here's some more code for your programmers.
if artist->all.bookmark()==null then delete(artist->all.bookmark)
how many millions did you spend developing this product?
17. You still haven't fixed the stupid email bug.
18. The usability of the email client is pants. Here is an example. I have my email open in list mode and I want to read a message, so I double click on it.
1. Double click on message, expecting message to be shown (one action). What actually happens is:
Phone wonders why I might have pressed double click. Who knows maybe I just wanted to wake the phone up. Maybe I pressed double click for some other reason than opening the mail. So it asks me "E-mail not retrieved yet. Retrieve now?" There is no retrieve later option. Of course I want it retrieved now, I'm trying to read the message you stupid phone. So you click yes, then it connects to your mailbox. Then it considers that the most important thing on connection is to refresh your mailbox which may take a while. Perhaps in a future release the refresh might take place as a background task? Then note that message is empty, due to bug noted in point 17. So you have to delicately click on the HTML attachment icon, not easy on a moving train. Then rather than getting the attachment you get another screen saying "Attachment.HTML" which you then have to click on to open it. If this is an HTML mail with images, it prompts you if you want to connect to the server even though you are already online. You get this request multiple times, even if you say no. However sometimes saying no closes the message down so you see nothing, not even the text content the phone has already downloaded. All in all a usability fail. Do you think Apple would design it this way? Do you even have to think about the answer?
19. Application on the homepage which require a connection, e.g. the weather, randomly don't work. Even if you go to the application itself and download the content, the homepage view just sits there saying "content loading" indefinitely.
20. I would like to delete all the delivery reports for messages that have been delivered. No such option exists, it's an all or nothing affair. If you can individually delete a text message, you should be able to individually delete its delivery report. Seems like basic usability to me?
21. Remember how search messages only searched text messages? Well the emails are in fact stored in an area called messaging, just so that when you fire up the search messages thing you think it might search the emails because they are in the messaging area. Anyway, I digress. I set up my "messaging" area to be on the internal memory, there's more room there. Randomly however it resets to the phone memory meaning that I lose all sight of my email and text messages. Once when I set it back again to the internal memory, I found they had all been wiped. Whilst the emails were just a copy of what was on the Internet, there was no copy of all the text messages. I'm not backing up the phone twice a day and I don't expect this to happen. Stop it.
22. I'd like to turn off the stupid nanny messages such as "Exiting will disconnect the active mailbox connection. Exit anyway?" Yes, you fool, that's why I just pressed the exit button.
23. When I press the off button, I expect the phone to turn off. If an application has hung then too bad. Off means off. Consider the functionality for a second of the off button, it means the user is wanting to turn off the phone. It doesn't mean that they want the phone to remain on because an application has hung. This basic introduction to the functionality of the off button should be enough for a company of Nokia's size to code it up properly that the off button does in fact turn off the phone when the off button is pressed. Otherwise I will resort to removing the battery, that powers off the phone at the same speed the off button on the phone should work at and does in fact work even if an application has hung (unlike the off button). Take a tip from the old "reset" button on an Apple II. It reset the computer no matter what state it was in. That's what I want in an off button.
24. You can't independently put the browser in silent mode to stop those incredibly annoying websites that auto-play music when you land on them, yet still have the audio on so you can hear calls and text messages arriving. There is no audio control for the browser. A mute function would be expected in a flagship product. Try reusing the code from the media player.
25. When you open the contacts address book it's called "contacts" but when you go to search it, it's now called "people" rather than "contacts".
26. There is a grid view and list view for most things, but only a list view for settings. Why?
27. The delay on the camera is completely unacceptable. See earlier points about the phone being slow. There is a couple of seconds delay between pressing the button and the picture being taken which makes action shots almost impossible. Are the electrons for operating on the camera going on a detour via the moon when this happens? Seemingly a light beam could bounce off the moon quicker than it takes the message to travel the 6cm or so from the shutter button to the camera. Totally unacceptable. If you can get the phone to respond instantly there's an incoming call, you can make the other applications work the same way. Deal with it.
28. If you are going to write a phone with such sluggish performance try giving better feedback to the user, such as greying off a button they have pressed to give some feedback rather than just vibrating the phone and making it look like its hung.
29. You can configure your alarm on a N97 to go off on days you specify. I have mine on a Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri as I get up at 4am on a Monday but not on the other days. However, the same flexibility is not available to calendar reminders. So I can have an alarm for 6:30 on a Tuesday, but I can't have a calendar entry for a Tue-Fri that says "leave to get train". I can't even have it on workdays only. This is pants. Yet another example of useful functionality in one part of the phone that isn't reused everywhere it could be useful.
30. The previous and next buttons on the calendar and emails are pretty useless and work randomly. The sensitive area for these isn't under the icons as you might expect but somewhat near them.
31. When I open up the music player and select "All songs" in music library it says "7 days 11 hours" of music. When I go into playlists and select All songs it says there's only 1 day. Even if I open up the bookmark and add "all songs" to it, it still says 1 day. Huh?
32. In the music player, the term "song" and "music" is used randomly interchangeably. Guys, just call it music will ya? you don't know if it's a song or not because you have no idea how many tracks are instrumentals.
33. I would like the facility to show my contacts in order of most recently used, rather than having to favourite and unfavourite them. Besides the favouriting function is also buggy as they favourites get randomly lost when synchronising with another phone.
34. I still can't understand why there is such a conceptual difficulty between text messaging and emails and translating between the two. If I get an email I might like to forward it by text. If I get a text, I might like to forward it as an email. Why is this apparently impossible? How about a useful "select all text" option on the options menu rather than the hopelessly erratic slide and copy and context sensitive copy function that appears of its own free will?
36. The space bar belongs in the MIDDLE of the keyboard. See your PC/Laptop for a clue.
37. Why does the help for the calendar describe a function to view lunar data, but this function does not exist?
38. Why is there no facility to colour code entries in the calendar? How about a facility to have daily reminders auto delete themselves once the day has passed (user configurable)
39. Why does my phone light go out after 10 seconds when the display light out feature is set to a minute? I'd like a setting for the display to be permanently on, where is it?
40. Why is it that when I open the clock application it has nice rounded figures, but when the same digital clock appears on the homepage it looks like a bad digital LED display from the 1970's?
Any others anyone?
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