The joy and singular terror of mushrooms
For the first time in years my family and I had a wonderfully successful fungus foray in The Forest of Dean. The kids are just now old enough to tolerate a couple of hours of walking and searching in the woods.
I’ve been picking mushrooms for about 15 years now, though not that regularly. We were blessed with finding a good amount of Ceps and a lot of Wood Blewit this time, along with some Blushing Wood Mushroom and some small Horse Mushroom. Just before cooking my wife asked me to confirm the young white Horse mushrooms were what I thought and I said yes of course. I’m experienced after all. I know how to identify Agaricus species.
Why leaving the house sucks
This is a perhaps atypical post for me… Long ish but hopefully interesting.
I often feel like I’m in the wrong job. I love the real world, being outside, being with my family. Staying indoors all the time in front of a computer is a bind, thought it obviously conveys benefits to my family so one can’t complain. I am also incredibly privileged to spend most of my time applying my sometimes hard to constrain creative urges, rather than plodding along doing dull grey work.
Working outside of the corporate office is something that all companies should strive to support. It is challenging, buy we should be driving forward developments to make it less so for more people. There was a recent article about this and increased productivity I read, and it holds true.
Co-op Business Banking – new system looks bad already
I hope to be proven wrong, but I fear that the ongoing Co-operative Bank Business Online Banking fiasco is going to degenerate even further.
The co-op bank have published a short video screencast demoing their new system, presumably to make us believe they might actually come up with something usable any time soon. The new system is already overdue, pushed back to Q2 2010 which we are already into.
Why am I whining again about this? Well if you watch the video pay attention to some of the details.
First – you need a code generator device just to LOG IN. Yes that’s right. You need a CUSTOMER ID, and a USER ID (hey I’m a small business, there’s only me!), and a generated passcode from those crappy machines that need your card and PIN entry. This mechanisms is supposed to make you more secure – but the way Co-op use it on their personal banking is a complete nightmare. You can’t even transfer a few quid to one of your own accounts, pay a bill (already set up) or amend an existing standing order without having to grab a registered debit card AND the code generator device. It makes the entire process extremely slow and awkward. What about people who work on the move? This is not user friendly at all. Using it to log in is a nightmare.
Second – notice how the transaction display in the video is a complete usability cock up. It shows 3-4 lines of balances without scrolling, despite there being much more screen space. It has a horizontal scroll bar all the time, because there are too many columns shown. Even with this, there’s not enough space given to the name of the account and it wraps after only a few characters. All this can be fixed quite easily but the point is it betrays a complete lack of understanding of usability.
On the plus side, I do notice from the navigation menus shown that there appears to be an ability to search for transactions, although you’ll forgive me if I don’t hold out much hope for the actual implementation of this being any good.
There’s however no mention of an international payments option, which presumably – and rather insanely in 2010 – still requires a FAX sent to their offices, on “headed notepaper” to be acceptable. I know, I had to do this last week. It is so antiquated and so foolish. FAX is inherently insecure, and you could easily fax all your bank details to the wrong person if you get the number wrong. Add to that the hilarious false assumption that “headed notepaper” is of any valid use in judging authenticity at all. They don’t know what my headed notepaper looks like. In fact I don’t have any. I sent it with a default template from iWork. And yet if it doesn’t look like “headed notepaper” they won’t accept it.
Laughable. Wake up banks! We don’t user typewriters, telex or fax any more, even if you do in your antiquated businesses.
Nuclear power – in your neighbourhood?
I was thinking about nuclear generation and it occurred to me that the NIMBYism of people towards wind farms is nothing to that of the NIMBYism that would occur if there were plans for nuclear power stations on the same site
I appreciate the reasons for people like George Monbiot (for whom I have huge respect) and other prominent greens declaring that nuclear may be our only realistic option (or part) at the moment to make massive CO2 cuts.
On a pragmatic level I agree, but emotionally I cannot, like many others I am sure. Nuclear power stations obviously will not be located so near to people, but my point is that actually even those in favour of nuclear power wouldn’t want to be living near to one – no matter what the safety record is relative to other power industries.
Would you really be happy for one to be placed near to your family’s house? For the benefit of the world?
I have to say, that I would answer “no” to this – and I think the vast majority of people will.
So is the only reason nuclear might be acceptable to the masses, the fact that it will be located far away from them? That would be a realisation of deep-seated (and I would say natural) distrust of a technology that can (if rarely) have such dire consequences.
So to accept siting of these power stations “over there somewhere”, is to say “I think its risky but as long as it might be a problem elsewhere I don’t mind”.
