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.

I cooked some ceps, blewits, wood mushroom and the horse mushroom with some spaghetti, garlic and thyme for me, my wife and kids. It was well received by all.

After the meal I started to wonder. My wife’s questioning made me suddenly anxious as to whether my Horse Mushroom identification was correct. I thought: they were a bit small actually for horse mushroom, and the “cog” pattern on the ring wasn’t so well defined. They didn’t stain brightly yellow, I double checked.

I was feeling a bit tense, wondering if I felt truly sick. The abject fear that perhaps I had fed Death Caps or Destroying Angel to my entire family alone started making me feel ill. You simply cannot *feed* your children a mushroom that you cannot identify – this is a potentially lethal mistake. I went over the id of all the really poisonous white/yellow mushrooms again and my memory of how they looked (another foolish mistake – not keeping one back from cooking).

I ended up the evening pretty certain that what we had was indeed an Agaricus, the Wood mushroom Agaricus Silvicola – a fine eating mushroom at that. Not – thankfully due to my in-built “Agaricus identification skills” but sadly not through real conscious identification – a Destroying Angel.

I can only say how genuinely mortifying it is to be in this kind of situation – even if just through a bought of self-doubt – wondering if in 8-12 hours your entire family will start suffering the dreadful symptoms of often fatal Amanita poisoning that begins with diarrhoea and ends with kidney failure.

Moral of the story: even if you’re experienced at picking mushrooms don’t let excitement get the better of you – remember the perils of identifying the “small white mushroom”. In future I’ll be steering clear of them. I never want to feel that fear again.

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.

I digress.

Yesterday I worked out a change to my routine, a life hack if you will. Every other Tuesday afternoon I get to emerge from the grails shack early to charge up my rock batteries at a drum lesson. I the past this has meant I lose 3 hours of work time due to driving to and from the lesson and lesson time.

I decided to change this by cycling to the train station in future, about 15 min each way, get the train to drum lesson (station is opposite) and work on the train and in any waiting time. Exercise + outdoors + more work done = win. I tried it out yesterday minus the cycling part (bike needs fixing) and it worked great.

Sort of. I got another 2 hours work in, but not connected work.

Opposite the station is a café and a large pub. Neither have wifi free or paid. In a city opposite the major rail station. In 2011. Commercially this is madness for those businesses. Want to be full of commuters buying stuff? GET FREE WIFI. It is like water in a desert.

Today I have to return to another part of the same city to have my car serviced at the official dealer. I don’t have a fancy car (Toyota) but since they paired up with Lexus is means we get a swanky dealership, free coffee brought to you etc. I my shorts and t-shirt I feel like a kid in a grown-up’s world.

So I have to work here for a few hours. You guessed it, no wifi. Plenty of chairs, comfort, free drinks but no wifi. Wtf. There’s nowhere nearby with wifi either… Ok there’s McDonalds and KFC and I will have no choice but to go there shortly. It should come as no surprise that these efficient businesses have grasped what smaller businesses appear to have missed. (notable exception Star Anise café in home town of Stroud has free wifi for patrons yay!).

There is however good 3G and yesterday morning I paid O2 for tethering on my iPhone to remedy this in future, but 24hr later it’s still not up and running, despite “within 24hr” commitment. Here’s another real world fail – telcos like o2 send you automated text messages, but they have no way for you to reply and interact with someone. This is a one way customer mis-service:

The fact you even have to “order” tethering and it can’t be enabled immediately is pretty bizarre in this connected world.

But going back to the wifi… basically I’m complaining about the ineptness of UK businesses to adopt what is actually nearly 10 year old technology now, for their own benefit. This is basic stuff. Make money by going the extra mile.

UPDATE: McDonalds stank, had The Cloud wifi but neither iPhone nor MBP nor MBP with Skype Access could connect. KFC had nothing. Found Starbucks in a Sainsburys supermarket. No wifi at all. And they wonder why the UK is not very competitive or innovative any more.

And while I’m here, I happened to notice something really depressing about our society, probably a global phenomenon. Driving here I passed a junction where, on the corner, sat a beautiful and ornate remnant of our society’s past.

On this corner sits the base of what must have been a cast iron lamp-post. It is ornate like you wouldn’t believe, with swirls and botanical motifs over it.

Next to it, like some kind of poor excuse for a replacement, is a long grey pipe with a traffic light strapped to it.

Where did it all go wrong? Where did pride in our streets and urban environment go? Was it the war and the make-do era? Why has this not returned now that it can be argued there is a biggest passion for design than ever before? It does not have to cost, the material is not as important as the aesthetic detail.

When you look around, our streets (certainly in the UK) are full of ugly “street furniture”. This stuff is the difference between walking through your shitty, dirty, soulless urban environment and a classic European city’s old quarter back streets full of charm and attention to detail. Architecture is part of this (but who said cheap architecture has to be free of beauty?), but the “street furniture” of railings, lamp posts, traffic lights, litter bins, pavements, telco wiring boxes etc are everywhere and detract from our environment in such a pernicious way we cannot have pride in these places.

And that affects how people feel, and how their lives turn out.

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.

From http://www.mcclatchydc.com/cartoons/gallery/80178-a80399-t3.html

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”.

For example, I think all cars should be forced to:

• Show the user current MPG at ALL times, something that cannot be hidden or deactivated. It must also cope with more than 99.99 MPG – an extremely irritating limitation of both the Toyotas I have owned.
• Show the user current average MPG at ALL times.
• Add a red/yellow/green indicator lamp next to the current MPG and average MPG, so the driver is constantly aware of how they are driving. People who don’t study their MPG are often unaware of what is a good or bad figure for their particular vehicle.
• For manual transmissions, add a simple indicator suggesting a more appropriate gear if the efficiency is currently poor – eg “Try changing down to 4th”.

It can be very hard to drive economically even if you watch a standard MPG counter as so much depends on the temperature of the engine and incline of the road. Some reasonably simple logic and sensors could make the car educate people.

Something like this could easily become as ubiquitous as peoples’ reliance on navigation tools like Tom-Tom systems. A retro-fit kit would probably pay for itself within a year in fuel savings alone – so making them mandatory could be a real boon. Of course whether a retrofit is possible on older cars is another matter.

I find I can get very passionate about creating a woodland garden. I love woodlands and trying to plant the correct plants to thrive in the deep and partial shade whilst also producing some form of crop or wildlife benefit is really important to me. The book Plants for A Future is invaluable for this – as soon as you start thinking that every space can be filled with a productive plant, you have a completely different view.

I’ve been programming commercially for about 16 years now, and I have to say that if I could make a living being outside and working with nature and plants I’d happily drop it all tomorrow. There are parts of programming/consulting I absolutely love – creating new architectures, UI analysis and design, solving real business problems for clients.

However there is the insidious addictive quality of computers that has kept me in front of a screen for what is probably 5 or so years of that last 16 years since I’ve been programming. That much of my time sitting down typing. Its really ridiculous when you think about it. Think of the self-sufficient permaculture woodland I could have created in that time.

That is surely awful, and I think if I could engage myself in other constructive co-operative activities outside and the mental challenges those can produce, I would not look back to computers for occupation!

I do find it easier and easier to unplug these days, and my happiness has increased tremendously. At weekends I rarely touch my iPhone or laptop any more, and I barely use email now.

We all need to reconnect with the people and land around us.

Now this is particularly interesting to me as I have a fairly well developed idea for such a service, and had begun implementing this using the iPhone with a custom iPhone application (and of course a Grails application for the back end).

My immediate thought was “phew! Glad I didn’t spend any more time on that. Note to self: check own ideas for ‘behemoth trouncing risk’ in future”. Not to mention some relief that I wouldn’t have to implement the service myself now Google has “done it”.

However, then I started to think a little more and looked at their offering a bit closer – as much as I can with nobody using it and no iPhone support yet.

This made me realise a few things:

1. The behemoth does not always get it right, or rather tends to cater for the very high volume use-case which is not necessarily where the financial gain is to be mad
2. I have not seen their phone app yet, but I am wondering if it will have the right “drop dead simple” UI it requires
3. The behemoth when trying to handle the generic mass-market use cases, can not always create the seamless and simple UI required for users to love (and continue to use) a service
4. Most importantly – this kind of usage is not, in my view, what this technology is best for. I think the money to be made here is on smaller groups of users, and users in specific organisations.

Sure Google will have some plans further down the pipe – I’m sure an API will come (“Show where you are on your blog”, “Get location of friend X” etc). Its also surprising they don’t have an iPhone app (rather than an iphone customized web site) for this already.

However I think there’s a fair bit of money to be made with such a service that focusses on making sure parents know where their kids were when they said they’d check in, and for small-scale logistics for companies. The application UI -has- to be top-notch, and the functions it provides have to relate to the market place. There’s possibly a couple of different client apps that could be made to front the same back end.

So if you’ve got a some spare cash and want to fill what I believe remains a gap in the market, drop me a line and I can flesh out the ideas for you

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Again. At best Co-op business banking is painfully slow. Very often it just doesn’t work at all.

Today, I am finally going to see if I can talk to a manager on their internet team and see what plans they have to remedy this.

Thanks to all the Co-op customers who have commented on my various posts about them. Keep the comments coming.

Anyway followbot spam is boring and will just get worse and worse.

So why not require email confirmation with captcha entry for the first follow request, and then random
Spot confirmations on future follows on accounts with a high follow to followed ratio?

Problem solved.