Dom Davis (The Blog)

Last night at Norwich station was a farce. Arrive, discover there’s an intercity on platform 4, check the board, told it’s platform 6. Two trains on platform 6, so I get on the last one given it’s got the usual 2 carriages and the doors open. 5 minutes later we’re told over the intercom that this isn’t our train, so we all decamp and look at the boards. Platform 5. Great. 30 seconds later and a train arrives, at the same time we’re told over the tannoy that we want platform 6. Boards are still showing platform 5 and the guard that told us we weren’t going on the train on platform 6 was also waiting for this train. The guard on the arriving train, however, was adamant that we were supposed to be on the train on platform 6, although that’s only because that’s what he’d heard on the tannoy as they pulled in. So we head back to our original train to discover that, yes, this is the one we’re supposed to be on… we think. Cue many announcements to try and quell the confusion and many comments from annoyed passengers. It’s little wonder I get paranoid about if I’m on the right train these days.

So they’re improving Morrisons in Cromer. I have no idea what these improvements entail, but two bits of the car park have been closed off and works are going on, and the cigarette kiosk area is covered up and a temporary one set up. Since I don’t know what the changes are I’ve decided to make some up. Here is what I’d like to see:

Both car park works are close to the pedestrian crossings. It’s my hope that cameras are being installed that will sense when cars ignore the pedestrian crossings. This will then feed details of the car (size, location, velocity, direction of travel) to some form of high calibre weaponry or artillery piece. Hellfire anti-tank missiles would also work. Lastly an articulated arm would be used to push the smouldering wreck into a storage pit for later retrieval and recycling. Past experience would suggest the pits would need to be very large and the ammunition would need to be replenished regularly.

The works inside the store are by the entrance. Hopefully a new “express” entrance is being built. This would be for people who are going to walk into the shop instead of just fucking stopping dead once they’ve got inside, thus blocking it for the rest of us. This entry would again use cameras and under floor sensors to ensure people are maintaining a minimum speed through the entrance. Failure to achieve this speed, or stopping dead will result in a hail of 50 calibre heavy machine-gun fire aimed at the culprit.

These two, very simple alterations would vastly improve my shopping experience.

It was, apparently, the blogs birthday yesterday. I’ve no idea if that was for this or a previous incarnation of the blog (I just had a reminder pop up in iCal yesterday) but it seems I’ve been whittering on at the world for a number of years now (going on 6 if you include TMC. Anyway, belated happy birthday blog.

Anyway, that’s not what we want to talk about today. No, today we’d like to get up on our soapbox and bang on about spam. With the recent spate of high profile security breaches it would seem my details are now being traded to all and sundry and I’m getting inundated with spam, both email and SMS. Given most of it (70+%) comes from yahoo accounts I’m very tempted to just blacklist yahoo.com and yahoo.co.uk on my mail servers. Thankfully with SMS spam it costs money so there is less of it, but email is fundamentally broken and will forever be plagued with spam in its current form.

The solution is simple. We need to evolve. To become one with the Internet and gain the ability to traverse it ourselves, becoming corporeal and emerging at the other side, next to the person responsible for sending the spam so we can then punch them repeatedly in the face. Imagine it, millions of fucked off people, all queuing to punch the fuckers in the face. That would stop spam and reduce global stress in a single stroke.

Aero have introduced a new Aero Biscuit. It is, according to the advert, a combination of chocolate, bubbles and biscuit and, they go on to say, can be found in the biscuit aisle. The reality is that it’s a disappointingly small bar of cheap tasting chocolate and nondescript biscuit that left me wishing I’d just bought a normal Aero. I suspect part of the diminutive size is to allow each bar to be “only 99 calories” which makes it sound healthy but in reality means you have to eat at least 3 for them to touch the sides.

Whilst trying to locate the Aero Biscuits to give them a try (they’re not in the biscuit aisle of Morrisons by the way, they’re in with the rest of the chocolatey snacks) I was reminded of Fruit Clubs. Cheesy though it was the fact still holds that if you want a lot of chocolate on your biscuit then join their club. Whilst this suffices for a lunchtime chocolatey snack the reality is that we shouldn’t be pissing about with chocolate on our biscuits at all. No, you start from a chocolate base, add small pieces of biscuit, a few raisins and call it what it is: a chocolate bar. Thank you Yorkie. There are, of course, lard issues that need to be taken into account, expanding waistlines and the fact I look more pregnant than my wife, which is why I’m not partaking of a Raisin and Biscuit Yorkie on a daily basis but I still maintain that if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit stop fucking about and get a Yorkie

So last night I dreamt I was wondering around my old office at 100 Liverpool Street. This is the main office of a major investment bank so security is tight. No problems, I just took the stairs, went up two levels, through an office with lots of suits looking at my bright yellow trousers and light blue top, up some more steps, then down another set into the server room. Getting into one of the server cages was done by simply hopping over the bit of the fence that was a bed, then I had to be careful with the bouncy floor that I didn’t disturb the carefully stacked DVDs…

At no point did my subconscious brain go WTF? it was quite happy to accept all of this (plus more) as utterly normal. My conscious brain, distressingly awoken by the alarm, took hold of the fading fragments of the dream and simply went “er… riiiiight…”

Yesterday was a very exciting day for me at work in so far as the IT team closeted themselves in a meeting room and we officially launched what had been a black project as the underpinnings of a Two Year Plan. Now, I’ve been in IT for a long time and I know a project is nothing without a name and this one has many. Overall it’s project onyx which is a nod to it’s skunkworks roots. Internally phase one is nucleus. We’re off to a cracking start if you ask me. The names are cool and they’re lower case. Unlike previous projects I’ve spearheaded though this one involves designers. Oh yes, I have logos. We cannot fail

So with the profusion of .me domain names I hatched upon an idea for a service that would allow you to create throw away email addresses which would forward to your normal email address a configurable amount of times before just trashing any further emails. This would allow people to sign up for services without having to worry about spam in the future. I would call this service: fuckoffandstopbothering.me – now how do I monetize this?

Programming is not brain surgery¹. There’s a complete lack of blood, gore and drilling into peoples skulls for starters, but if we stick with the analogy we shall see for why.

My current task is, in brain surgery terms, the equivalent of rewiring someones brain while they’re awake and talking to their relatives. One wrong move and we’re in trouble; tricky. I do have an advantage though. I can make copies of my patient (we’ll call him Bob) and test the procedure over and over again without the relatives until I get it right. Still tricky, but not as hard as having to go in, all guns blazing on attempt one (good thing really, we’d have a dead patient otherwise).

To make life more complicated I’m trying to do this while being interrupted to perform splenectomies, tonsillectomies and other spurious tasks at the same time. Damn near, if not very actually, impossible. The past week has seen the metaphorical hospital littered with dead copies of Bob.

Unlike a brain surgeon, however, I have an alternative. You see I don’t really care about Bob, I just know he needs brain surgery. What I can do is have the relatives say goodbye to him, have them leave the room for a bit, shoot Bob, replace him with someone that doesn’t need brain surgery and, when the relatives come back, tell them it’s Bob.

While we’re on the subject I wouldn’t get too attached to Sally either. She’s scheduled for her op next week.

¹ It’s not like rocket science either, but then again few things are. It’s one of the few professions where you can put some very expensive equipment (and possibly a handful of highly trained people) on top of, or strapped to one or more tubes of highly explosive material, set fire to the end and call it a good idea. We do have people do the equivalent in programming but we shun them because it’s rarely a good idea.

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It’s less than a week before Christmas. The Christmas Spirit is in full swing and yet there is a dark underbelly that I think everyone has overlooked. Yes, I’m talking about Santa. On the surface a jolly old fat man who flies about in a sleigh on Christmas Eve distributing gifts for everyone, but scratch the surface and look at little deeper and there are some big question marks.

Lets pick on the obvious first. We actively teach our kids never to accept gifts from strangers and yet here is a person that your children don’t actually know save through reputation and stories offering gifts if the child sits on his lap. Do we raise an eyebrow? No, we take photos. In most cases we even pay for the privilege. Now, I don’t want to case aspersions here, but if a random old bloke told your son or daughter that he’d give them a gift if they sat on their lap would you let them? Didn’t think so.

More sinister, however, is hinted at in songs about Santa. Apparently he has a list, one that he checks twice when ascertaining if you’ve been naughty or nice.

Now lets just assume that someone has found a laptop on a bus. On the hard drive of this laptop are the movements of… oh, I don’t know, everyone from a local primary school. A document contains a long list of names, activities, times and dates. There would be uproar. News outlets would be banging on about the paedophile stalker and the police would not stop until they’d found the culprit citing grave danger for the children at the school.

With Santa we’re talking about an old bloke with the very same list covering every child in the country. Should we be worried?

Finally, that list also, one assumes, covers the adults in the country too. Now I’m not an expert on UK and EU law but doesn’t this fall foul of the Data Protection Act? I don’t know, perhaps being a foreign establishment Santa doesn’t have to conform to the act, but if he does who do I write to in order to find out what information he has on me?

So Santa, all round good guy who gives people gifts on Christmas… or dirty old man who bribes you to turn a blind eye?