Dipsolect.com

Experian is kind of amazing.

For context; I recently received a very threatening letter over a council-tax bill from well over a year ago. It seems they’ve been trying to track me for ages to no avail (Hey, Islington council: The next time you try to contact someone, try googling their name. Mine is unique enough and easy to find, which means you would be able to find an e-mail address that I check semi-obsessively), and so passed it to a debt collection agency.

So, whilst I’m sorting that mess out, I figured I’d get a copy of my credit report, to see if it has gone far enough to send me into a spiralling mess of doom.

I Googled ‘Credit report’, found Experian, and decided to request my ‘statutory credit report’, which they (apparently, grudgingly) offer to anyone who requests one, at a relatively easy-to-swallow £2. (more…)

Reading this blog post on the Netflix technology blog made me come to a realisation: In many of my previous jobs, I’ve had to beg and bribe to make people blog about what they have been working on. I’ve just realise that means I’ve been working with the wrong people on the wrong projects.

Mark my words: if anyone ever works for me, and complains that blogging is a chore, and ‘not in their work description’, they’re getting fired. No ifs, no ands, no buts.

If you’re not excited about enough about what you’re doing to want to shout it from the rooftops and tell the world about it, you’re doing the wrong job for the wrong company.

“At some point, it became OK to laugh about rape”, I claim, and am met with looks of horror. “What”, people will say, “the ever-loving god are you talking about”, they will continue.

It is true: Most people would agree that sexual assault is not a laughing matter. We all know, or are aware of people who have been subjected rape. In the US, more than 25% of college age women report having experienced a rape or rape attempt since age 14.

Rape is the most denigrating and one of the most cowardly of crimes: Committing a crime hideous of nature, that often takes the victim longer to get over than that the suspect spends in a jail cell – if they are ever actually convicted of their crime, that is.

Repeat after me: Rapes ruin lives. Rape is not funny.

Why is Prison rape OK?

And yet, when it comes to prison rape, the tune is very different. It appears that people are more accepting of it. “Don’t bend over to pick up the soap”, they’ll say. “He’ll be bunking with Bubba at Broadmoor”, or “He’ll be someone’s bitch soon enough”.

What in the world is going through your mind, people? The criminal justice system has a whole array of penalties – Fines, community service, prison sentences, mental facilities and (in some cases) capital punishment. There’s no civilised society that has “rape” on the menu as punishment for a crime.

Rape is rape. It doesn’t matter if it is committed in an upstairs bedroom at a party, a park after dark, or in a prison cell. It’s revolting, wrong, and should be strictly punished.

I don’t care what a person has done to land themselves in prison – there is no crime that is punishable by rape, and as a society, we cannot be standing idly by and ignoring that this is being done. The fact that in some prisons, rape is the rule, rather than the exception, makes it only more disgusting.

Rape is rape. Rape is not funny. Enough with the jokes about prison rape, already.

If you’ve been a good boy or girl, the only time you would come across the Miranda warning (or, as it is more frequently known, the Miranda Rights) or the Police Caution on the dozens of cop shows on TV. Both of these warnings are given as soon as possible after someone has been arrested. On telly, the accused will often reply with a poignant “Sod off, wanker” or similar. Come to think of it, the same happens in real life.

Anyway, on TV, these warnings are often rattled off at incredibly high speed. If you take a closer look, however, you’ll see that the two apparently similar warnings are different. Very different. The Miranda rights in the US and the Police Caution in the UK are, in fact, the exact opposites of each other. (more…)

So, by now you probably can’t have failed to notice that I’m taking off on a grand tour of Europe – I’m expecting it’ll take about 3 weeks, and that by the end of it, I’ll have done about 3,500 miles.

Of course, being a complete and utter geek, I’ve been looking into how I can keep all my friends and family posted while I’m on the road – and I think I’ve found a solution. Brightkite is a brilliant website which does location-based blogging, but which is also deliciously Web 2.0 in that it spreads its love around. So, I think everything is set up correctly, which means that I can use the rather brilliant Brightkite for iPhone app – it uses the GPS unit built into my iPhone, allowing me to micro-blog (up to 140 characters) and post photos directly to the Brightkite site. From Brightkite, the feeds are picked up by other services, and depending on what you’re interested in, you can choose to see what I’m up to. (more…)

There, I said it. But I also mean it. I woke up this morning to about 3 – okay, perhaps 5 – centimetres of snow on the ground. Enough to persuade me that riding a motorcycle to the station might not be the
wisest option. So instead I take the bus, who – despite driving very carefully indeed – nearly spins out on the first sharp bend.

Anyway, so I made it to the station in about 45 minutes instead of 20 minutes (very careful bus driver), and I arrive to discover that all the trains are either 45 minutes delayed (!) or cancelled altogether. Now, I don’t want to appear cynical, but a train weighs… what… 200 tonnes? 300? I completely fail to understand how a loosely conglomerated alliance of snowflakes can stop a six thousand horsepower colossus of steel. (more…)

If you’re active in today’s society, you can’t have missed the word ‘gadget’. The word itself is confusing, and means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

How come an item can be a gadget one week, and not the next? What makes one mobile phone a gadget, while another isn’t? Does something have to be high-tech to be a gadget? What draws people to gadgets? (more…)

This morning, I stumbled across a news story about how:

1) Last year, the top 10 NHS litigation claims are responsible for £68m of its budget.
2) all 10 of these claims were related to problems with complications in birth or pregnancy.

This bothers me on a whole series of levels. The average annual brutto salary in the UK is just over £20K. This means that the top litigants, who were on average granted £6.8m of compensation, were given 323 annual wages as a lump sum.

Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that civil litigation suits can be a way to keep businesses in check, but the NHS is a government organisation which currently is running at a £512m overspend. The past year, the NHS spent £593m on litigation cases. For a government agency run on taxpayer’s money, this is completely ridiculous. The UK only has about 60 million inhabitants, which means that each and every individual pays £10 every year, just to cover the litigation suits. (more…)

So, the online bookmarking / social network site Reddit was down for a couple of days, and admits to having a lot of their data stolen. They further admit that the data will have included logins, passwords, and e-mail addresses.

The part that was stolen, according to the news story, was “media of ours that contained a backup of a portion of the reddit database was stolen recently”… Not being funny, but what the hell is a media company doing having unencrypted ‘backup media’ (CD or DVD, presumably) laying around? That’s hardly what’s known as being diligent in protecting your users. (more…)

Jesus, we’ve come a long way since the 1960s. Surely, they can make a taxi that doesn’t look completely ridiculous? With the launch of TX4, I guess the answer is ‘no’.

For some reason, we get tons of press releases about how great black cabs are, and how hard all other hackney carriages suck. Of course, it’s a bit tiresome, but we could live with that, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the LTI taxis themselves are complete dinousaurs, with ancient engines and ridiculous performance. (more…)