Are you entitled to win ?

One of the best TED talks I have seen for a while. The idea that even though one player knew he had been given a better "hand" in a game of Monopoly, they still attribute the outcome to their skills and eat more Pretzels. Fascinating indeed and the sense of entitlement for the better off is, now it is pointed out to me, bloody obvious in just about all the spheres of life I move in.






Which lead to the thought that maybe tonight is a good night for a family game of Monopoly. I have an unfair advantage in having played before, but then Mum is a Scott, so acquiring money is a genetic trait.

Broadband in Ceredigion : are we in good hands ?

If the reporting is representative of the standard of debate and understanding of the underlying issues by our elected representatives at County level, then Ceredigion is stuffed.

Cllr Towyn Evans pointed out that service from BT left a lot to be desired in rural areas.
"I have a customer in my area who has been waiting three months for a telephone line," he said.
"You're told to phone BT and you end up in places like India. It's very unsatisfactory."

I don't know Cllr Evans, but he is clearly a man of the world !!!

B.T. will eat the council officers, that these elected representatives are meant to oversee, for lunch.

The Scottish and Urdd

Based on a sample size of 3, it appears to be biologically impossible for the Scotts to pronouce Urdd. It come out as "earth" or "the welsh club", no matter houw much coaching they get.

Broadband : what is the cause of the cause ?

Why does rural UK get such poor fixed Broadband service? The answers are may fold and I can't really speak for the rest of the UK and my picture is obviously incomplete, but here goes

1. We have a single incumbent supplier of last step infrastructure[the cable from exchange to your house]  who is in effectively unregulated by the regulator and in complete control of the market, this is OpenReach which is of course a subsidiary of B.T.
2. Councils and government don't understand the technology and business issues, so rely on information provided by the key players (B.T.) to set their direction. This results in a type of Stockholm syndrome where ministers and public servants become infatuated and absolutely trusting of their capture. Councilors for example don't understand the business or technology to be effective in providing oversight, so they don't. An other example of willful blindness by well intentioned people, but still not an excuse.
3. Because of 1 and 2, mobile operators have been ignored and left to their own devices. The fact that I now get 14MB over 3G is testment to the eficacy of competition and advancing technology.
4. Compared to countries like the US we pay too little for fixed line. 
5. The government subsidy (from Wales or Westimister) is going a fair way to making BT a Sky competitor and not actually providing decent coverage and speeds.

Much like the Railways or Water or Electricity, the last step is highly problematic to implement proper competition, so we have a veneer of competition. Companies like TalkTalk who compete on the bits that don't really matter like the contract and add on services.

So is a solution to phase out fixed line all together over the next 10 years? No public money be put into fixed line at all anywhere in the UK as there is no possible way that fair and effective competition which acts for the benefit of UK PLC can come into play. Let the mobile operators have a shot, they have a better change of providing a decent solution as it is clear BT won't be.

I have certainly come round to the way of thinking that the current alleged superfast roll out should be halted as it is 1) not superfast 2) it lacks coverage 3) we the tax payer are being overcharged 4) BT is able to veto other solutions/innovation and it is aggressively taking that option.

Like so many other sub-optimal (I am being kind) services, I can't see this situation changing while as a population continue to tolerate it.

Out of Broadband poverty : the importance of backhaul networks

Last week our Broadband on a pole solution gave us at best about 2Mb and usually about 1MB and sometimes less.

In the last few days 3 have upgraded their backhaul network (I assume since the signal strength on the router remains the same) and now we get

2 important lessons that I take away

1. The speed of the backhaul network needs government and regulator attention. I suspect the mobile companies want to do the right thing, i.e. give more bandwidth as that is how they make money, they just need freedom to do it.
2. Don't wait for B.T. and the Welsh Governent to maybe or maybe not improve your Broadband lot as it will be at least 2 years away and may not do anything at all for you in the next 10.

With some luck the next year should see a kick towards 30MB with 4G without having to make any changes to the solution.

If you read this, live in the south Aberystwyth area and think that is the solution for me, I suggest not using Three. Try EE or Vodafone instead. We don't want to contend, do we.

Belfast 28 years on

Just a northern post-industrial town

I last visited Belfast in 1985 for my grand fathers funeral which was probably the most bizzare funeral you can attend on account of packing 9 adult males plus coffin into the hurse for security reasons I still don't understand to this day. A lot has changed since then and it is all for the better.

On Thursday I was part of the British Computer Society Acreditation Panel for Queens University Computer Science. For obvious reasons I can't talk about the visit as the outcome needs to be ratified, but I was very impressed by the overall student experience and in particular by the library complex which is the best student working environment I have seen. If you are visiting Queens, it is well worth a visit.

There is clearly a lot Wales could learn about how to develop a computing sector, but the Welsh Government is unlikely to embrase any of the lessons and to be fair the situation is different.

I was chatting with the taxi driver on the way back to the airport about how different it was since my last visit and he mentioned that people from the north of Ireland, especially youngsters, work harder than their counter parts across the water. I suspect he is spot on.

The only landmark I remember of my previous visit is the Black Mountain and wish I had time for a run up there this week. I shall be taking any opportunity I get to visit again.

Post Office privatisation : should we care ?

The post from counciler Williams here and Alex running a seamless PR machine (again) makes me wonder should we care about the future of the Post Office ?

We are very fortunate our posties (Seems to be a scottish term) are the other end of the spectrum from Postman Plod in quality of Service, though Benny did leave the job to become an undertaker.

I don't hold a view either way as I have no grasp as to the shape of the future ecosystem in which the Post Office (private or otherwise) will operate in when the Universal Service Obligation expires in 2019.

• To what extent will letters become irrelvant and replaced by email ?
• What proportion of the bussiness will be parcel delivery?
• Will there be universal lookup for email addresses for individuals or addresses
• How far will decent reliable broadband roll out get in rural areas to allow reliable email access

The one thing we can be probably be reasonably confident of  is that any adverse consequences will have a disprporionate adverse effect  on rural areas.

How many peoiple are going to send me a xmas card if it costs double what it costs me to send them one?

Will bills still be sent out by post if I only get delivery once a week? Will pay within 7 days or face a fine still be legally enforcable?

I don't have a good picture of the world of communications in 2019, but I know it will be very different from today. Articulating a view of the shape of communications in 7 years time should be
central to any campaign..... this is why the Post Office is important today and what it will be important in the future. As an investor I would struggle to articulate a business case for the Post Office going forward, but that is the whole point of state ownership to make sure those services which have economic and social benefit, but can't be run for a profit, are provided.

The one principle that propably will hold is that the changes will only improve the lot of those who embrace them and this who don't (or can't) will be adversly effected.

One the plus side it may reduce the amount of junk mail those of us in rural areas get sent.

My name is Clive and I am not a Map Addict

I meet Mike Parker a few months ago, the book seemed interesting, so it join the "to read" shelf.

As a fell runner, rock climber and long time mountain wanderer, maps are an essential  tool of the trade. There, see, I used the word "tool", so I  can't be  a map addict. I may have various other compulsive behaviors, but none of them involve maps in any capacity other than working out where to go.

My 1st post university job was at the Ordnance Survey in Southamptom. I was not cut out to be a civil servant and I woke up one morning 6 months into my life long tenure in a cold sweat having had a nightmare that I went into work thinking I was still 23, was shocked I had missed the majority of my life and was now being presented with a clock for my retirement at 65 and told to take the rest of the day off. I resigned that morning (I never tried to explain why, don't think they would have understood) and went to work on a farm back home in Wales before getting a most wonderful job in the computer science department at Aberystwyth 3 month later. 22 years on I don't regret in any way taking the dream seriously as an indicator of what my unconscious mind was worried about.

I read this book over about 2 months which is quite quick for me. Mostly a page or 3 at  bed time, some on a train from Boston to NYC and some on a canal boat in north wales.

 What made this book very worthwhile for me was the random, general knowledge that Mike come out with. not about maps, but places maps took him. I don't share his hatred of GPS/satnav, though I don't often use one for driving in the UK. I do use them as a last resort on the hills and on roads in the U.S, but I love both my android phone and Dakota 20.

 Towards the end of the book, it gets more philosophical. I need to get from North to South train stations in Boston, it did  prompt me to  undertake the mile walk Google maps directed, rather than use the metro. I encountered the Freedom Trail and in particular the New England Holocaust Monument, which at the time had profound effect on me at the time, one of those rich, random experiences which an unplanned walks across a city brings.

I am quite sure we see Cader Idris in quite the same way here, or here, though I know what he means about the sense of calm being on the top at night brings. During my Bob Graham addiction, Cader was one of my primary training grounds. Dog and I did 4 reps one day of the route described in the book and it was a different experience , almost felt like a different mountain, on each rep over 8 hours. I certainly have not become a poet as the myth cited in the book suggests and enjoyed just about every moment on Cader.

UK map are the best in the world, but my favorite map is not from my past employer which I say with some regret. Instead it is the Harvey's Bob Graham Round map.

Go do it yourself : 3G Broadband solution

Attempting to make a living from doing this computer stuff in rural Ceredigion is only made harder by decisions of previous governments on the way they structured B.T. and of the current governments in both Westminster and Cardiff on their decisions to subidise B.T. to become a Sky Competitor at the expense of business and those who live in rural areas, or just those who B.T. can't make a profit from.
As a family we can't wait until the end of 2015 for a faster service that may not even arrive, no matter how nice the sunset (and you can go for a swim if you think it is OK to suffer bad/no broadband coverage in rural areas. Dont' read on, I forbit it in the same way Johnny Marr forbid David Cameron to like the Smiths).

So, as a backup to our rather slow and increasingly unreliable B.T. line (as the exchange gets busier, service further from the exchange gets worse), we now have a 3G service. It is not super fast for reasons I will explain later, but it is good enough to work on, download low-res video and play ClubPenguin. Biggest performance limiation is the backhaul network.

Under the track

Cable tie quality is important

If it is waterproof here, it is waterproof anywhere!

Getting a 3G service where we live is not has simple as going into a Three shop and buying a MyFi device. We don't have line of sight to the mast, so only get 2G reception (sometimes it is even Vodafone I.E., I joke not), we need to be a bit more creative.  The components of the solution are

• 83 meter of Armoured Cable
• 2 x 83 Meters of external Cat-5 cable
• Adaptable Box
• Proroute H820 Commercial Grade Router
• 10DB high gain attenna
• 3G SIM card 
• Lots and lots of cable ties 
• 20m of plastic water pipe (duct for going under track)
• A pole
• Odds and ends like Armoured glands, 2 gang socket, cables glands
• A most excellent farmer as a neighbour who is happy for me to run a set of cables under the road and up his fence

Inside the box

Cheap? No, not really in capital terms, but cheaper than finding an other house with the same qualities and it is cheaper that Sat. without the 1 second latency. It is also in one of the most exposed places in Wales, so the mast does need some more work in terms of strengthening over the next few weeks before the October storms appear.

At the top

We are using Three as a 3G provider on the basis that their transmitter is the highest up the Blanplwyf mast (Where my late Dad worked from 1960 something till about 1985).

Target

We have got 4MB at best, but more usually it is 2Mb or a bit less and we do suffer from a busy backhaul network. The router will cope with 4G if it ever comes this way. Router was easy to set up, has the  largest range of temperates it will work in and gives much better performance than a Telonika 500 I tried. Latency is between 70ms and 100ms, so runs a SunRay fine.

One quite minor issue with the Proroute H820 router is that it gets itself in a twist and needs to be rebooted maybe every 2 weeks. Probably be addressed in a future firmware update at some point.

If we could get the attenna 1m higher, there should be a improvement (we gained 1 bar of reception by going from 2.5m off the ground to 4m  off the ground), but wondering round the fields with a laptop and a dongle suggests there is only about a 25% opportunity for improvement to getting better line of sight.

I also want to try a SIM for different providers as I am not convinced that the Three transmitter is pointing in our direction.

Still better than B.T. and it is here today, required no major technology on our part and I expect 3G speeds to improve over the next year in this area.

Serious error of judgement Mr Rees-Mogg ?

Other than a quiet poor appearance on "Have I Got New For You",  the little I know about him suggests we have little in common. This BBC article I found interesting, but not for the central line of the article.

Towards the bottom of the article we find

But Labour MP Sheila Gilmore said it was a "serious error of judgement" by Mr Rees-Mogg and said he should make it clear that he did not support the views expressed on the group's Facebook page.

The use of the term "serious error of judgement" has permiated our culture having the effect of scaring us off from having a go incase we make a mistake and are accused of a  "serious error of judgement". A rather more serious chap than either of this pair of clown's^D^D^D^D^D M.P's. would be appauled and its part of why we are in the economic state we are in.

Better Mr Rees-Mogg has at least brought this particular bunch of right of centre clowns into the light.

Given her background I would have expected better from Sheila Gilmore. Jacob Ress Mogg on the other hand it baffles me how someone like this gets elected.

Anyway, watch Sir Ken's TED talk and can you see the link ?