Recently in life Category

The people at uSwitch saw yesterday's blog post and were rather pleased that I was so happy with their service. To show their thanks, they've written to me with an offer for my readers.

If you use this link to visit their site and change energy supplier before the end of June 2009, they will send you an Amazon voucher for £10. You'll also (obviously) need to give them a valid email address so they have somewhere to send the voucher.

I don't yet have a policy for promoting products on this site. Perhaps I should think about that if offers like this become more common. I should, however, point out firstly that I have no connection to uSwitch (I'm just a satisified customer) and secondly that I'm getting no payment for mentioning them again - the offer is just for my readers.

So, once again, here's the link to use. The offer is valid until the end of this month. Which gives you about two weeks to make use of it.

How do you buy your power? Or, more specifically, how do you decide which company to buy your power from?

Here's how I do it. Ever six months or so I go to uSwitch and spend five minutes researching who does the cheapest gas and electricity for our usage. If I find something that is much cheaper than our existing supplier then I'll change. Most of the time I can make the change over the internet by simply following a link from the uSwitch site. Most of the time the differences are so small that it's not worth changing.

One thing that I will never do is to sign on for a new power supplier from people who knock on my door and try to tell me a new supplier without giving me time to investigate their offers. Firstly, I think it's incredibly rude to disturb people whilst they are at home, but mostly it's the hard-sell tactics that I object to.

We had one last week. He was from npower, but they are all as bad. I noticed him as I was walking home, but realised that he was walking away from my house. When I got in, my wife said that he had knocked at the door but she had ignored him. But an hour or so later he came back. I answered the door and he immediately launched into his nonsense. Apparently, most of my neighbours had realised that he could save them money so they had all signed up. He didn't have price data for my current supplier but he knew that he could save me money. I tried to explain to him how uSwitch works, but it seemed to just confuse him.

In the end I told him that I refused to do business with any company who called on me uninvited as I considered it rude. He started to argue that it wasn't rude, but realised that he was wasting his time and retreated.

Ususally I just let these things go, but on this occasion I decided to take it further. Firstly I checked with Uswitch and, as I suspected, my supplier (Scottish Power in case you're interested) we still the cheaper than npower by about a tenner a year. Then I emailed npower customer services to complain about them sending out uninformed and unethical sales people.

Today I got a reply from them. They were sorry to hear that I felt their sales representative was attempting to mislead me. They were also sure that normally "the standard of service offered by our Sales Team is professional and of the highest standard". They also pointed out that if I sent them my address they would pass my details to their "Marketing Supression Team" which would stop me getting further visits.

That last item got me thinking. Of course, it'll be an improvement if I get no more sales visits from npower. But there are many other power companies who delight in trying to mis-sell their services in this way. The absense of the npower team will scarely be noticed. Wouldn't it be good if there was a industry-wide "Marketing Supression" list that all of the power companies signed up to. I can't be the only person who gets annoyed by this.

I have no idea how effective these sales calls are. It must work to some extent as it's a relatively sales method. I know those people won't be paid much (and most of it will be commission), but there are a lot of them. I'm surprised that people listen to their nonsense, and I worry that they are preying on people who don't have the presence of mind to think about what they are being told and therefore take it at face value. I suppose that if you're told that "most of your neighbours are switching" and you're not given a chance to check that out before signing, then some people will just accept it.

Until we can get an industry-wide marketing suppression list (or, better, banning this kind of selling) can any one recommend any good tactics for annoying these people?

And please, make use of uSwitch.

I know I'm about five years later than everyone else in discovering the joys of a GPS receiver, but I'm really enjoying having one in my G1.

Here's our Boxing Day afternoon stroll around Tooting Common. More details on the InstaMapper web site.

We saw parakeets. I've known there are wild parakeets on the common for years, but this is the first time I've seen them for myself.

Update: PJ points out that  the maximum speed is quite possibly inaccurate.

It's been a bit quiet round here for the last week or so. Sorry about that. I was busy in other areas.

I spent the last week in Copenhagen, speaking at YAPC::Europe. Over four days I gave three short talks and a full day training session. It good to catch up with a number of old friends. I'd never been to Copenhagen before, so there will be some photos appearing on Flickr before too long.

As always at these conferences, I get fired up about interesting projects in the Perl world. I think there were three things I really want to get involved in this year. The first is my Proud To Use Perl blog which is already up and running. The other two I'll talk more about as they become more concrete.

Like a number of the conference attendees I was staying in a cheap hotel near the central railway station. There are a number of similar hotels in that area. But it turns out that it's also a slightly dodgy area to stay in. There were a few sex shops on the same street as my hotel and usually as I was returning to the hotel there was someone on the street who was happy to offer me either sex or drugs.

We were also very close to the Tivoli Gardens. So on Friday evening, after the conference was over, After a couple of hours I found myself in the middle of a free rock concert (Fredag Rocks! apparently). There was a huge crowd watching an incredibly dodgy Danish band. They sounded to me a bit like a Danish version of INXS - which is, in my opinion, a really terrible thing to sound like. I left after a few numbers. Later investigation revealed that they were called Gnags and that they are "frequently referred to as one of the best live band in Danish rock history". I couldn't see it myself.

p.s. Oh, and I've upgraded the software running this blog to the latest version of Movable Type. There seem to be a few glitches. Please bear with me as I try to sort them out.

It's been a week of anniversaries. Wednesday was the tenth anniversary of the first London.pm meeting. And last night we had our tenth anniversary meeting. But for me personally, today is an even bigger anniversary. It was twenty years ago today that I started my first "real" job. I hope you won't be too bored if I spend a few paragraphs reflecting on my career so far.

My degree from South Bank Poly (remember polys?) was in computer studies. This was very much aimed at people who were going to work in large data processing departments. We studied COBOL and CODASYL databases. SQL and C were seen as the cutting edge technologies. Interestingly I spent my sandwich year working on PC product releases for IBM. The documentation for these was in an obscure format called SGML - the weirdest things turn out to be useful in the future.

So I left South Bank with my degree in computer studies and got a job working for a company called Learmonth and Burcheet Management Systems (LBMS). LBMS were big on structured development methodologies. They apparently had a big hand in the design of SSADM. They did consultancy and training, but they also had a CASE tool. That was where I came in. I was part of a team who was reimplementing their CASE tool. It was to be a Windows application (which in 1988 was a rather brave step to take). Over the next four years I became pretty proficient at Windows programming in C (Visual C++ wasn't around in those days). I also, probably more usefully, learnt a lot about data modelling and databases as that was the part of the tool which I worked on. LBMS not longer exists. They went out of business soon after structure methodologies and CASE tools went out of fashion.

I left them before that though. In 1992 I decided to move to pastures new. I got a job working for a company called Comtext. They specialised in communications tools like telex. I was there to give their tools a nice Windows front-end. I was only there for six months. By then I had a CompuServe account and I could tell that email was going to kill off their business. I don't know what happened to them. There's no evidence of them on the internet now.

Early in 1993 I got a job working with Walt Disney. Actually it was with Buena Vista Home Video - their home video group. We were building a system to report on European video sales. I got the job on the basis of my Windows and SQL experience, but whilst I was there I moved to working exclusively on Unix. We implemented our system in a number of European offices and as part of the project I spent a few months working in Madrid.

Unfortunately for Disney, the technologies they were using (Sybase, C, Unix) were exactly the set of skills that were becoming popular in the City of London. And the City was crying out for contractors with that skillset. So in April 1995 I set up Magnum Solutions and went off to start contracting in the City.

For four years I worked for various banks in the City doing Bank-type stuff. I was during this time that I picked up my knowledge of Perl. In fact, by 1999 I was getting work purely on the basis of my Perl expertise. I was getting a little bored by banking though so I decided to try working for dotcoms for a while. Actually, it took a while for the change to take place and I spent eighteen months alternating companies like QXL and Sportal with financial work.

2002 started badly. I spent all of 2001 working for a single client but the contract finished at the start of 2002 and the jobs market had collapsed. I spent five months out of work before taking a permanent job with Bibliotech (now known as Spider Networks). That didn't last long though. In November they went through a bit of a cash crisis and made a lot of staff redundant. Including me. Luckily the market seemed to have picked up a bit and I found a new contract within a week or so.

Following that contract, at the end of 2003 I made one of best connections that I've ever made when I spend a few months working on the Guardian web site. I've been able to return there a couple of times since.

2004 was another bad year. I was unable to find a contract to follow the Guardian so I ended up designing and building a new web site for Karma Download - a site for musicians to sell MP3s of their music. They didn't make any money and closed down a couple of years later. In May of that year I took another permanent job, working for Outcome Technologies. I lasted until the end of the year before the call of freelancing became too strong and I left them.

Since then, things have been going pretty well. I've bounced between three different clients. Two of them are media organisations and the other is a bank. So I'm getting plenty of variety in my work.

It's been an interesting twenty years. It hasn't gone in the way I planned it at all. I was a Windows programmer. And now I'm a reasonably well-known expert in a language that I hadn't even heard of when I started out.

I wonder what the next twenty years will bring. Retirement, with any luck.

We were at our usual weekly pub quiz last night. One of the questions was this:

Who is the current captain of the Starship Enterprise?

I have to confess being rather confused by this question. Given that Star Trek is set two hundred (or so - I'm not a big fan, I don't know the details) years in the future, how can the word "current" possibly have any meaning?

The answer that the questionmaster accepted as correct was Jean-Luc Picard. Is there any way that answer makes sense?

As I understand it, he was last seen as captain in Star Trek Nemesis in 2002. But Jonathan Archer was seen as captain (of a far earlier Enterprise) until 2005.

I hate it when quiz questions are illogical.

We've acquired a cat. My step-daughter has come back from university bringing a cat with with her. And we get to look after it while she goes off on a two-month world tour with her boyfriend. I have no objections to this at all. I like having a cat in the house. What has been particularly interesting is watching him trying to establish his place in the food chain. We have plenty of local wildlife.

On the first day that he started exploring beyond the back garden he met one of the local urban foxes. I'm not sure what the circumstances of the their meeting were. The first we knew of it, the cat was dashing into our garden with the fox in hot pursuit. The cat ran up a tree and the fox couldn't follow. I went out into the garden and the fox ran away. It took ten minutes to persuade the cat down out of the tree though.

A couple of hours later the cat managed to re-establish some kind of superiority. He brought in a mouse. Fortunately (for us, I mean, not the mouse) it was dead. I disposed of it.

So we've established that cats trump mice but foxes trump cats. This morning there was an altogether more interesting contest. I was still in bed when I heard the cat flap open. Shortly afterwards there was an unearthly screaming from the kitchen. I was dispatched to investigate.

There was a cat vs squirrel fight going on under the kitchen table. And it was really hard to see who was winning. The cat obviously had the weight advantage, but the squirrel had the speed and agility. And the aforementioned screaming which seemed to be putting the cat off a bit.

I closed the kitchen door and opened the back door to ensure that if the fight moved elsewhere, it would be in the right direction. But neither of them showed any inclination to go back into the garden. Until suddenly the squirrel decided to make a break for it through the (closed) window. He sat on the radiator beneath the window scratching frantically at the glass. The cat sat on the floor watching. I grabbed a tea towel, wrapped the squirrel in it and threw it out the back door, where it picked itself up and made a sharp exit up a tree.

I went back to survey the damage. I was dreading finding the floor covered in squirrel poo or something like that. But I was spared that. I did, however, have to wipe rather a lot of squirrel blood off of the radiator. It seems the cat did more damage that I had first assumed.

Squirrels are just rats with good PR. They deserve anything the cat can give them. I just wish he didn't bring the fights indoors.

I spent a lot of the weekend clearing piles of old crap out of my study. I can't remember the last time I gave it a good clean, but it was nice to be reminded of the colour of the carpet and to be reassured that there is still a wooden desk underneath the layers of paperwork.

One decision that I took was that I was going to throw away all of the old 3.5" disks that I found. It's been years since I used a floppy disk and I can't see me needing them in the foreseeable future. The last time I bought a desktop computer it didn't even come with a floppy disk drive as standard. That was an added extra. I gave it one last workout on Saturday though as I checked about fifty disks to see if they contained anything that I wanted to keep. The only useful thing I found (I say "useful", but that's probably an exaggeration) was a set of eight disks that contained a set of Disney graphics that I must have acquired somehow when I worked for their home video group.

I also found a number of disks that were labelled with various DOS version numbers and a complete set of Visual Basic Professional 4.0 which came on about ten disks. It gave me great pleasure to dispose of those. The only disks that I didn't throw out were a copy of the original version of Doom (I remember three of us at Disney clubbing together to buy that) and the boxed set of The Lost Treasures of Infocom. This was partly just because of nostalgia, but also because in both cases the most important part of the game is a data file and there are interpreters for reading those data files available for many computing platforms. It appeals to me that I just need to hunt down a Z-Machine implementation and I'll be able to play The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy on my Linux system.

I found one other set of software that I haven't yet thrown away. I had largely forgotten about it, but in the second half of the 90s I wasn't as committed to open source software as I now am and I spent quite a lot of money on Microsoft software. I found a big stack of installation CDs for things like Encarta, Cinemania and Money. I remember being very impressed by Encarta and Cinemania when they were released - I spent hours watching tiny jumpy clips from films when I first got hold of Cinemania. Of course the presence of things like Wikipedia and IMDB makes them a bit pointless these days. I have no idea if these 1990s products even run on modern versions of Windows, but I can't help wondering if there's a market in secondhand versions of this software. Let me know if you're interested in hearing more about exactly which products I've got.

It's Talk Like a Pirate Day. So...

I'd never heard of "tombstoning" until yesterday. Apparently it's an "extreme sport" and involves diving off rocks and cliffs into the sea. Sounds bloody stupid to me.

It seems that it's also something of a craze in the town where I grew up.

A middle-aged man drowned and another was seriously injured when they jumped into the sea off a pier in Essex, in a stunt known as "tombstoning".

The two men - both believed to be in their 40s - were found face-down in the sea by lifeboat crews after jumping off a pier at Clacton, Essex, on Saturday.

Man dies after 'tombstoning' jump

Natural selection in action.

Update: More details on the story. It seems that the man who died was a former soldier who had moved to Clacton to escape his drink problem. Not sure that was the brightest of moves. As long as I can remember, there's always been a big drinking culture in Clacton.