The Co-operative Bank online banking… again (!)

The uselessness of Co-op Bank’s online business banking is a long running saga on my blog.

The latest twist, which I noticed some weeks ago, is as follows. Previously lots of problems with CORBA_NO_RESOURCES errors coming back to you when you try to do stuff.

It doesn’t take an IT consultant to guess this means their servers are overloaded.

Which is why I am a little cynical when I see that they have changed all the payment reporting screens to default to show only payments from TODAY by default. Where you used to see a history of recent payments immediately, you always have to select a date range and do a report now.

Why cynical? Well you could argue that this was a cheap way to further inconvenience customers reduce load on the database systems.

Dear Co-op bank. I’m getting more and more people contacting me via blog comments saying how fed up they are. You are going to lose a lot of business if you don’t sort this out.

So wrong its not even funny

I just read this at Wired, about US Military desire for a robot that children of servicemen and women can “talk” to, to reduce the anxiety of their loved one being away killing or being killed in some conflict.

They obviously envisage some delivery problems with fighting robots for the battlefield, so this smaller more attainable robot project is going to tide over loved ones until such a point robots fight the wars for us.

Oh, but do you get to keep the little robot once your loved one returns home, or worse dies in the field? Does it become some kind of sick stand-in for them?

These people are nuts. If you have to go out of your way to try to make things OK, you have to think about what was wrong in the first place.

Non-programming books for Christmas?

Maybe you’re stuck for ideas for christmas gifts… well I thought I’d throw up links to the best books I’ve read recently (caveat: still making my way through Tribes and Market Schmarket).

These are nothing to do with programming, but everything to do with modern business and the world.

Presentation Zen – on a mission to end the bullet lists of doom we are all subjected to. A must read.

Under Cover Economist – a very accessible quick introduction to the way economists think, and why that Starbucks coffee comes in so many configurations!

Tribes – an excellent work discussing peoples’ need to belong, and how new businesses that really want to make change have to lead such tribes. The days of big advertising budgets yielding good returns are pretty much gone…

Understanding Comics – a seminal work that is not just for those into comics (I’m not). Its about how comics excel at getting across information with minimal detail. How they take a reader on a journey. How the simplest images are often the most iconic and the best way to convey a message.

Market Schmarket – a look at how the global markets work (or rather don’t) for us.

The Green New Deal

The Green New Deal is about putting a lot of money – although relatively small in comparison to the huge corporate bail outs going on – into training and tooling up a large workforce to improve the energy efficiency of EVERY house in the UK. This is a win-win-win-win situation.

It stimulates the economy nationally and locally (one would hope a condition would be to use UK-sourced materials), creates jobs, gives training, and massively reduces our country’s dependency on foreign energy sources. Oh AND it means lower fuel bills for everybody in the country, forever (relative to those bills without the efficiency improvements of course).

What a vote winner that would be. It is probably only a matter of time before this kind of policy is adopted by the mainstream parties – after all it is a rare prospect that of a truly tangible benefit to everybody in the country in hard times. There’s large scale unemployment around the corner, and manufacturing needs a boost. Obviously there will have to be a plan to transition these skills and services into new lines of business as the process unfolds – but its going to take a fair few years to cover every one of the 26 million or so households in the UK. Of course the skills will transfer in some ways to the commercial sector too.

It makes perfect sense to stimulate a war-time style effort to create solar heating panels, small scale wind generators (hmm not on houses…) and locally-produced insulation solutions. Can Warmcel style insulation be made locally from waste paper, can we make thermafleece locally? Can we grow enough hemp for hemp insulation?

You can download the full Green New Deal proposal PDF. Why not mail the link to everyone you know who is fed up with the increasing per-capita national debt as a result of failing economic systems? Oh sorry, that’s pretty much everyone. Give it a go eh? It’s not about voting green (although I’ve now decided that I will – every little does help) its about getting behind the concept.

Whichever party does it, we will all be thankful.