Mobile Data Use

It being a month (give or take) since I got the new phone and unlimited mobile data, I got the bill today from O2.

Just in that first month, I’ve used something like 8Mb of online data all told, which would’ve cost me some £3 per Mb or so. (It’s hard to tell for sure, as they’ve changed the tariff to be ‘Up to £1 per day’ instead of ‘£x per Mb’, but I remember it being about £3 per Mb last time I looked)

Either way though, the ‘unlimited’ browsing bolt-on looks like it will be a good plan all round.


The film wishlist

Currently, 2009 is looking like it’ll have a fair number of films that I want to see. At the moment, the list looks like this (in no particular order, except how I remember them) with links to the trailer sites:

Yes, there’s some right rubbish in there (Transformers 2 and Wolverine, as examples) but well, I’m not proud, I know I’ve got ropy taste in films sometimes. Sometimes though I just want brainless entertainment rather than high-brow intellectual matter.

There are countless numbers I don’t want to see as well (Angels and Demons, I’m looking at you here), but I can’t be arsed to list those.

Mind you, it’s also interesting to compare it with the list of the films Hollywood hope you’ll be watching to make them a profit


Badly Written

I guess someone at the BBC is trying to see what they can get past people on a slow week.

In this story about new British stamps for 2009, there’s the following paragraph…

Later sets will feature mythical creatures such as mermaids, post boxes, eminent Britons, Royal Naval uniforms and the fire service.

Hmmm, eminent Britons are mythical creatures?


Social-Engineering Spam

Bah, HumbugOver the last few days, I’ve noticed a resurgence of spam email – but this time the email subjects are quite clever.

Bearing in mind the closeness of the Festering Season, it strikes me as an intelligent move to have email subjects such as “Order details” (and various mis-spellings thereof) and “Your account was blocked!”. At this time of year, it’s subject lines like this that will make people click on the emails, and then (possibly) on the links in those emails.

Of course, it’s still dead easy to spot spam mails – not least because they come from sites you’ve never ever visited – and even easier to type the address yourself into the web browser, rather than following any link from an email, but that’s something that requires awareness. (And as we all know, that lack of awareness is exactly why some people do fall victim to these emails, spams, and scams)

But all the same, I can be slightly more understanding if someone were to click on an email saying “Order details” and then click through links than if the email subject were, for example, something like “Its workss!” (another one I’ve had a lot of recently)


Locked Down

One of the things I’m kind of fascist about in the workplace is locking down workstations when people are away from them. In a big environment, it’s all too easy for someone else to use your computer to do something that they don’t want attributed to them (Such as sending a rude email to the CEO, for example) and if the workstation’s left unlocked then it’s even easier.

In the new place, people just don’t have the mindset to lock down their computers when they leave them. It’s something they should be doing, and it’s part of the IT policy, but they just don’t.

So since I started, I’ve been instigating a guerilla campaign to start making my colleagues lock their workstations down when they leave them. In short, if they don’t lock them down, I play…
(Note : I should point out, if I were to leave my workstation unlocked, I’d fully expect them to do the same to me in return.)

  • Stage One : I created emails to CEOs, colleagues etc., but didn’t send them, and just left them on the desktop.
  • Stage Two : Close down open applications
  • Stage Three : Change the Desktop images
  • Stage Four : Change the colour schemes
  • Stage Five : Change the password…

So far, we’re just on Stage Three. People are learning slowly but surely, but as they learn, the penalties for mistakes become far steeper…


In The Cloud(s)

Is it just me, or does all the guff about “Cloud Computing” just sound like all the old thin-client and server stuff, updated for t’internet?

Maybe I’m a Luddite of sorts, but I have to say, I prefer my data to be somewhere I can control – not in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Amazon et al. If I want my data available “whenever, wherever”, I’ll put it on a USB stick/drive, and use it that way, thanks.

That’s all.


Guesstimation

One of my biggest bug-bears in development is having to come up with arbitrary methods of scoring.

For instance, I’ve got to work on an assessment system where there are three levels of skills based on roles, and three skill levels for the relevant tasks. For example, a question such as “I can touch-type” would have three levels, such as “Can’t at all”, “can but not properly” and “Fully qualified touch-typist”, but touch-typing itself would be a skill level of 2 (don’t ask me, I don’t know where the levels came from). Once the tests have been done, I’ve got to come up with some completely arbitrary method of taking the scores from those role-based skill levels, and from the skill level in each role of the user, and saying “User [x] is at skill level [y] and thus needs/doesn’t need extra training”.

But the actual formula for working out the points is being left to me – no-one else can get their head round it, so it’s been left to the techie. And I think I’ve got something that works, and weights things properly in favour of the higher skills, but I don’t really know. Even worse, I suspect we won’t really know whether I’ve got it right until the entire system has been fully tested and used – by which time it will (in theory at least) be far too late to do anything about it.

It’s enough to drive me crackers.