~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~

Ahhh, my niece’s birthday went off without a hitch .. K-Boo was super cute too. She got a plush frog backpack, and when she opened it … she smushed her little face against the froggies face and said ‘fwoggy fwoggy fwoggy’ and then squealed. It was delightful to watch!!! Alas, she’ll also be the best dressed 2 year old girl in at least the five nearest counties to be sure!

I have to say … I’ve been working out … nearly daily. My back is aching in places it didn’t used to ache. This leads me to believe that either my core is getting stronger or that I may need to head into the chiropractor and see where my spine is twisted. If I hit the chiropractor I could possibly find out about, and concentrate on building, the muscles in my back that would help realign mah spine. (<— I’m a poet … didn’t know it!) I’ll make an appointment next week, after I get paid. I’m sure they’ll be expecting some type of monetary donation for their time and trouble. *sighs*

I’m getting behind on my blog reading, mainly because instead of paring down the number of blogs I read … I added to them … and it’s a bunch of photography blogs … so I’m all about getting the 411 on lighting and aperature settings and shutter speeds and film speed and whatnot. Good times … I’ll spend some time on them this weekend, on my pokey pokey pokey little laptop … that I can no longer use to trade up for a better one at the pawn shop because the mousepad is dead. *wipes lone tear away*

On TV last night was: The Deep End, Fringe, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Supernatural and Burn Notice. Off the bookshelf I’m still reading Wizard’s First Rule, it’s a long arse book, 836 pages!

So that’s today’s news … here’s a little chuckle for ya!

Women are Angels and when someone breaks our wings…. we simply continue to fly …

… on a broomstick! We are flexible!

On with the rest!

ஜ~§Quote Of The Day§~ஜ

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.

Charles Peters

(Oddly enough, this is exactly what I suspect our current legislators are doing, basically … nothing!)

ஜ~§The Question Of The Day§~ஜ

If you could give a secret gift of any value to one anonymous recipient, who would you choose and what would you give them?

I would love to be able to secretly pay off my parents’ house.  My reason for this is two-fold.  One, because they’re awesome and they deserve to have those funds to play with during their retirement.  Two, because that frees up some cash for me to borrow when I’m broke as a joke!

ஜ~§The Word Of The Day§~ஜ

Sanguine

PRONUNCIATION:

(SANG-gwin)

MEANING:

adjective:

1. Cheerfully optimistic or confident.
2. Having a healthy reddish color.
3. Blood-red.

ETYMOLOGY: From Old French sanguin, from Latin sanguineus (bloody), from sanguis (blood).

USAGE: “Still, let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober.”

ஜ~§Poem Of The Day§~ஜ

Q

I join the queue
We move up nicely.

I ask the lady in front
What are we queuing for.
‘To join another queue,’
She explains.

‘How pointless,’ I say,
‘I’m leaving.’ She points
To another long queue.
‘Then you must get in line.’

I join the queue.
We move up nicely.

Roger McGough

ஜ~§Recipe Of The Day§~ஜ

I’m adding some more Superbowl goodies … for the BACON lovers out there. I’ll add them up to the day of the SB.

Potato Cake with Cheese and Bacon

Ingredients:

5-ounce/140-grams piece lean bacon, cut into lardons*
2 tablespoons/30 grams lard or vegetable oil
2 pounds/900 grams baking potatoes, thinly sliced
Salt and pepper
8 ounces/100 grams Cantal or Gruyère cheese, diced or cut into thin, narrow strips
10-inch/25-cm nonstick frying pan

Preparation:

Heat the bacon lardons in a 10-inch/25-cm frying pan over medium heat until the fat runs, 2 to 3 minutes. Do not let them brown. Remove them with a draining spoon and set aside. Melt the lard in the pan, add the potatoes, and sprinkle them with pepper. The bacon may contribute enough salt. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and cook for 5 minutes. Stir in the lardons and continue to cook, uncovered, over low heat, tossing or stirring often, until the potatoes are tender and some are browned, 20 to 25 minutes. Don’t worry if some of them are crushed, as they will help hold the mixture in a cake.

Stir in the cheese, taste, and adjust the seasoning. Press down on the potatoes to level them in the pan. Turn the heat to high and let them cook without stirring until the bottom is browned, 3 to 5 minutes. Press on the cake occasionally to hold it together.

When done, it should be brown around the edges and starting to pull from the sides of the pan. Take the pan off the heat, run a knife around the edge to loosen the cake, and turn it out onto a warmed serving plate. 

*Lardons are fatty, thick bacon that has its rind cut off, and that is then chopped into small cubes. I suspect you could use 5 ounces of whatever your bacon preference is! 

Brightest Blessings!

Surry

What was sir expecting?

I was on my travels again last week. On Thursday I was speaking at the Chartered Management Institute annual conference in Leicester. As I was travelling on to London the next day, the CMI very kindly arranged for me to stay at the local Lenny Henry Inn (Names have been changed to protect the innocent, but UK television viewers will know the chain concerned).

The lovely Carla checked me in and this delightful woman couldn’t have been more helpful if she tried. First off we discovered that her system did not show me booked in for dinner as part of the deal. “No matter”, said Carla, “we deal with the CMI all the time, so I’ll give you a voucher and I’ll sort it out with them tomorrow. You just go and relax.”

“Wow, thanks,” said I. “Could I get and Iron and ironing board as well? I need to iron a shirt.”

“You can”, replied Carla, “but if it’s just a shirt, Ican do it for you.”

I declined, but what a service!

Unfortunately my experience when I booked into a hotel in London the next day couldn’t be more different.

Again I won’t name names but it rhymes the Pravel Hodge

Want to check in before 3pm? £10. Want to check out after 9am? £10. Want us to mind your luggage? £5. Want to come down six floors to borrow an iron? 30 minutes max, then a £5 penalty. What next? Want a bed……? I spent most of my stay holding my breath for fear I’d be charged for inhaling!

Now, I understand low-cost business models, but I object when people are just taking the Mickey. I was also intrigued to notice how much time reception staff spent explaining these ridiculous charges to disgruntled guests. Surely the cost of their time far exceeds any income generated by early check-in fees or left luggage charges.

From now on I shall vote with my wallet and would advise you to do the same!

This dream begins with me and my significant other. We are caught in a shop on a univesity campus, about to be certainly killed by a man with a chainsaw and mask, a copy of the man who committed the massacres in Texas. (Yes, that man. I did not recently see this movie, however. The usage of my head for it is purely my head’s choice.) With the man distracted by something or other, I seized my opportunity. I grabbed them and jumped up on a platform and out into another room. I darted behind the freezer and up onto a table and out of the window and ran mindlessly towards the campus mall, not looking back. I could hear him chainsawing people.

However, everything was about to fall apart, no matter where I was. At the time of the dream, I was in the United States, which had entered an apocalyptic time in the magnitude of the horror in events. Things were about to collapse completely. I threw myself into a cellar full of what seemed like high school girls and attempted to rest my head on one in order to allow the roof of the cellar to come down completely. We spread out a bit and revealled that the cellar was a lid over a vehicle which I crawled into. We left the campus area and I looked behind the tiny bubble car at the black sky over campus where doom was raining upon those unfortunate enough to stay, and hopefully the chainsaw man. In front was an oversized, black weight on a crane. The intent seemed for the weight to drop so we drove as fast as we could.

It was as if we were in Phoenix, a place I had been recently. The street name signs had been tampered with on one side of the highway. There were signs such as “Road M.E.E. 1″ and “TALK TO ME”. We kept driving into a suburb. I noticed that there were some construction vehicles on the side of the road without construction to keep them busy. I wondered if they had been abandoned. We pulled into a lot and gathered people, and then headed outside of the city towards nothingness, as much as we could.

We discovered an abandoned apartment building that had two towers and eight floors. We had to secure the bottom floors first. We did not want unwelcome intruders. The pigs that had managed to make their way into the apartment were also unwelcome guests. They had to be dealt with, as did the excess motor oil drowning the walkways. My mind is not clear on how this was done. I pressed on accident the second tower to the top floor and we went up eight and then, as it seemed, up eight more. At the top was a man who was visibly frustrated at his video game skills. He seemed oblivious to his entire situation. Maybe it was willful. He asked me which games I was best at and I told him. He wanted things from the prize booth. I wondered why it mattered at all.

I looked out the window and saw that the sun was beginning to set, and turned around towards the people in the kitchen (belonging to some sort of cafe up top) to turn off the lights and close up the windows on their doors. The less light escaping and drawing people in, the better. I went back down to where my parents were and communicated with them and a little girl who had made it in with us in Spanish that we were going to do the dishes and wash clothes outside. We fashioned a cage for people to use the restroom and the first cage for people to sleep in. I proceeded to try and make a fire. However, my hand caught on a splinter so I peeled skin. Unfortunately, my skin wouldn’t perforate and I ended up with a very hollow hole in my hand. It was sizable and the skin I had pulled long and excessive.

A man pulled up in a very large truck in front of where we were with an incredibly angry dog. The dog began assaulting us so I attempted to push him over the fence and hurt him. The man told us and his dog to calm down and changed his tone of voice completely. He was a survivor and he wanted to lodge with us. He could make good, useful protection.

The sun was almost completely set. I looked out the front and saw cars continuously streaming. The apartment had been placed along a major road and it looked like people were still using it. People would park in front of our apartment and then leave.

I wanted to venture into the outside world, though. I brought along with me a very strong, armed woman. She was ex-military and fully trained. She stole a dead soldier’s army attire. (In the post-apocalyptic world, soldiers heads are covered in the back by something that resembles some sort of Saudi Arabean headdress.) We looked up when we spotted a friend from the top of a three-storey building call out at us. She asked us questions and then told us if we wanted to know how the world was at the moment in any location, we had but to punch in our personal data and coordinates. This was too easy – her cover was blown. The woman I was with unleashed fire onto this being and as it died it reverted to the dark grey alien it was.

My vision panned over to a frozen lake, on which the man with the chainsaw was looking around and walking. It looked like February in the day. The camera then turned it tonight with the man with the chainsaw completely gone. I was on the lake now. There were people beside me. I looked for the town centre and eventually found it. I discussed with people what they were doing for shelter. Some tried to make it to Alaska. Another travelled 50,000 km until they had found a lighthouse to take sanctuary in. Those lucky enough to have money still flew.

I walked out and found myself surrounded by aliens, slowly cornering me, desiring to rip off my head first and do god knows what next. Some people I knew and some I didn’t know came to my aid, but it seemed very futile. Then, I heard the chainsaws. We bolted and ran towards a group of people we saw, who all leaned down. The man with the chainsaw yelled “Don’t move” in a way which suggested he knew he’d target us if we moved and would rather concentrate on aliens today. He proceeded to decapitate them. I ran anyway, down towards the city centre, which required me to crawl down into a massive ditch where a subway once ran and into the station.

I had to be careful, very careful, because that’s almost certainly where he’d go next and he did. I made the observation that he’d attack people from the right as much as possible and tried to avoid leaving that side of me vulnerable. Meanwhile, a woman in a red dress had fallen and nobody was helping her. I grabbed her and I ran down the stairs, conquering my inability to use stairs without looking down to maintain my spatial integrity as well as my inability to lift such massive objects. I left her at the bottom of the staircase where a line was queueing to get onto what I learnt was a plane. I skipped the queue. The back doors were inoperable from inside. Someone had passed security. I jumped over the security gate and ran after the parallel door that had opened besides the guy’s door and ran out it. A security man confronted me and told me he wasn’t going to allow what I had just happened. I told him, “$2000 will take care of that, I hope”. It is at this point I awoke.

Despite its loud, yowling denial of this fact to any bouncer who glances in its direction, the bogan loves to queue. Nightclub operators have been aware of this for many years, and prime bogan clubbing localities are famous for creating 10 metre queues at the front door of a half empty bar. The queuing process creates anticipation in the bogan’s mind, like a particularly diligently wrapped gift.

Often though, a queue of bogans will become unruly. Forced to arrange themselves in a logical sequence, squabbles and yelling matches regularly erupt, creating a public nuisance and causing the venue operator to worry about being placed in a “high risk” liquor licence category. The solution for this problem is a velvet rope.

Put a velvet rope anywhere, and the bogan will line up behind it. It will queue for longer periods, and with less complaint, than it will behind a rope of any other fabric, alloy, or fibre. The presence of velvet is almost soothing to the bogan, and brings forth some of its best behaviour. But there are other motivators behind this improved etiquette, for the bogan is a complex beast.

Because the rope is velvet, the bogan will assume that whatever it is excluding people from is VIP, and likely to contain a DJ. OR CELEBRITIES. There could even be x-treme danger. Either way, a velvet rope makes the bogan strangely docile when it eventually gets to the front of the queue and is informed that it will cost $50 to proceed further. It will obediently hand a pineapple to the cosmetics-smeared door wench operating the till.

Once inside, the bogan will eagerly scan the room, searching for more velvet ropes. There is one by the cloak room, so the bogan joins this queue. 15 minutes later, jacket offloaded for $5, the bogan is ready to queue for a $9 bottle of locally produced foreign label beer, or a $10 Breezer. It will spend the remainder of the night switching between the bar queue and the velvet rope in front of the DJ booth, where it attempts to grind hips with inebriated bogans of the opposite sex each time the smoke machine creates enough haze to lend the air of initial mystique.

The bogan emerges from the club at 4am, $200 poorer, and visibly irritated due to the queue at the cab rank being framed only by a sticky steel rail.

I recently added both Inglourious Basterds and In The Loop to my queue and saw that they were both ‘Long Waits’  for me. However,  two friends who I’d just persuaded to try out Netflix both reported having been quickly shipped these exact two titles as their very first titles from Netflix! It was enough to make me wonder if I was being singled out for this treatment or if the demand just totally outstripped supply for these titles.

To help answer this question, we’ve added a new visualization to movie title pages on FeedFliks. You’ll now be able to see the statues for any title bucketed by these wait times. For example , the #1 most in-demand title today Inglourious Basterds and it is Available Now for some 60% of everyone who has queued this title: this graph is right below the DVD box art on the FeedFliks page. On the other hand, the #2 most queued title, The Hurt Locker is Available Now for almost no one and in Long/Very Long Waits for over 40% of everyone. So, if you’ve been ‘Very Long Waited’ for The Hurt Locker, you are not alone. (500) Days of Summer is also in the most queued list but is Available Now for  more than 90% of those who want it. If you’ve been long-waited for this title, by all means, reach for that tin foil hat. After all, it’s not paranoia when they really are out to get you!

I can’t praise this tool enough, I spent the day today picking a mass mailing out of and exchange 2003 outbound queue and if it wasnt for aqadmcli I would still be clicking delete.

This tool is more commonly used by people who can’t configure tarpitting and recipient filtering and want to clear down their SMTP queues which are full of NDR’s from where some bot-net is dictionary spamming their domain.

But there are often other reasons to clear down queues on your exchange SMTP queues.

In this case a client had sent out a newsletter which was temporarily deferred by the smarthost, I needed to clear out these emails so the other company emails could reach the world, however before I could do that the client wanted to know out of their 2000+ recipients who hadnt received the email.

Now if you enumerate the recipients in the queues with the ESM if found each email in the queue gave me all 2000+ recipients the newsletter was due to be delivered to.

However if you use aqadmcli you can at least get the domains of the stuck emails like so:

adaqmcli setserver= queueinfo >output.txt

This should produce a nice text file full of the all the domains still pending for delivery, now all you need to do is clear them out your queue to leave your other emails to flow freely.

aqadmcli
setserver [servername]
delmsg flags=MSGID,msgid=""
quit

You can get your message id from the ESM or by using the msginfo in aqadmcli.

Manners are not old-fashioned. Manners are not a waste of time. Manners are not pointless.

Manners just aren’t taught anymore. At least, that’s the conclusion I’m coming to lately. Oh, parents will insist on ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ – they’re the obvious indicators of an ‘I’m a good parent, don’t tell me I’m raising my kid wrong’ kind of parent. But what about the rest of it? And why isn’t it just the kids who fail so, so hard at manners now?

I travel to work on public transport – train and bus – and the bus journey is one of those sweet little ’same passengers, same seats, same time’ affairs. The same five people arrive in the same order and take the same place on the bus with the same driver every morning. Oh, and the same woman pushes to the front of the queue every morning too.

I know that, on a busy train platform, queueing is nigh on impossible – the shape of the platform and the unpredictability of where the train will stop means that there’s no way to queue properly. But the bus pulls up to the door in exactly the same spot every morning. There’s even a line of seats designed specifically to organise the queue! But this bloody woman ignores that completely, arriving last but hovering by the automatic door so that, as soon as the bus pulls in, she’s the first one on.

You might ask, ‘does it really matter?’ After all, everyone gets a seat, so what difference does it make?

The difference is that queueing shows respect for those people who were early. Whether you intend to be early, or it’s just a case of your connecting train getting in before anyone else arrives, you were there first, and you’ve waited the longest. Waiting takes some effort and patience, after all. So pushing to the front means you ignore the effort and patience of everyone else. It’s clearly that ‘me first’ mentality. It means that you simply don’t care about other people.

Now, given how uppity I can get about bad manners, you might wonder why I don’t take this woman to task over her ignorance. Well, there’s the rub. This woman is a colleague. Furthermore, she is permanent staff while I’m a temp. She has seniority. So for me to point out her mistake would be bad manners on my part. Which, in a way, is an even bigger fail in the grand scheme of things. I have manners, so I lose out. She doesn’t, and she wins  twice.

Perhaps, though, being a temp means that, when my last day of employment here arrives, I can let loose. Look out for it in the Metro: angry bus passenger beats colleague to death with stack of printed timetables.

It seems to me that it may be a little easier to explain why stacks and queues may not be used as much now as before.   One is simple technology and knowledge has changed since they were invented.  They seem awkward to work with and it also seems as if they would make the computer work harder in order to complete a task.  The fact that the program when it is searching for data would make several passes over a stack until it uncovered the data seems like a waste of time and energy.   Of course we won’t notice anything, but the program is working behind the scene. It appears that in Java programming and I would assume that any programming language would require that all syntax must be correct for the program to continue.  Stacks are being checked by the machine running them and then it is looking to make sure that all delimiters has its opposite closing delimiter to insure integrity before the program approves the machine to continue on to the next part of the program.

Stacks are mostly used when it is necessary to search for data in a reverse order. For example some warehouses have two systems, just like in accounting where they use LIFO last in first out or they use FIFO first in first out.  It would seem to me that a situation such as these that a stack or queue could be implemented.  A product would come in and it would be sent out in the fashion that the warehouse operation had decided to use either LIFO or FIFO.

The only computer situation that I have actually knowingly encountered what I think is a stack or queue is a peer to peer sharing program.  In the program when you may be downloading something from three or four people and there is actually more people willing to share the same program with you but they are already allowing someone else to download the program you would be set in a queue.  A peer to peer sight is programmed to allow a person to request to download a file in question until it has sent all of the packets in the section file. If someone else’s request gets in between yours and the server then you go back in the queue and your download will be slowed down for awhile.

me, back at the end of my first term

Recalling those heady days, back in August in Seattle, when I was so very sure I was going to blog about words post-Daily without prompting, and full of good intentions about doing so, I feel slightly silly now that it is January, and I am in England. Like the early 18th-century newspapers I have been studying, in which the editor would often begin by way of a long apologia, I figure I should start off with one of my own …

I got to Cambridge in early October and quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer Englishness of it all. It’s not like Canada, which is rather like England for beginners, or even America for beginners, for those come in from the other direction. There were a thousand subtle differences, from the way people drive to how they talk (of course) to what they eat (or don’t eat). In some ways, being in France or Germany or Spain would have been easier to handle, as they’re more blatantly different places, “foreign” countries. No, England tricks the American mind into thinking it’s someplace familiar, which is it is, but not really. Those “but-not-really’s” accumulated rapidly to the point of  disorientation. Other Americans expatriated here agree. England is a very different place, and one that takes a great deal of getting used to.

Between bouts of acute homesickness and slight starvation, the moments of lonely lucidity I could cobble together were mostly devoted to desperately beginning my “untaught” MPhil course. By “untaught,” as some of you know, and as I thought I knew going into it, I spent and now continue to spend most of my time reading. That’s not so bad, as you might imagine (reading really is rather nice), but also imagine reading by yourself. Everyday. By yourself. More on the slow madness of that process later. But the short version of it is is this: By the grace of God, and help from home, I made it through to Christmas break, which was mercifully long, having finished my intermediate paper, and now (in theory, anyway) working on the Big Paper, due in June.

All this is to say, I only just arrived back in Cambridge-town last week, and by way of addressing the many silly things I am encountering in this wacky place, I have made a sudden, spontaneous, and rather retro-active New Year’s resolution to finally blog more about what I am experiencing, the sillier the better. Many things strike me (as I suspect they would many of my country-men and women) as absurd, but in that gently English way that also makes you question your own sanity.

For those still inclined to read my etymologies, you will be pleased to note that my column has indeed continued from last term, which I write for one of the two student papers here, The Cambridge Student. As it might be a bit shorter this quarter, following an old habit I started at the UW Daily, I hope to blog about the extra bits and pieces that don’t quite make it into the print edition, as well as do some original “wording,” as it were, on here too. I promise to finally get around to “serendipity” while I’m at it. I may also post up my columns from last quarter, and will certainly put up the ones for this term, starting with tomorrow’s (“custom”).

an official taxi queue in the city centre

As of sort of introduction, however, I must say a little bit on the very British love of queues (yes, they really spell it that way). A queue is of course a line. Being someone raised in an Army family, I am familiar with lines and paperwork. But the British have raised line-making to a magnificent art, an admirably civilized, living, breathing statement of order and dignity, of politeness, of “muddling through,” or, more practically, of staying organized. They “queue it up” at all the usual places: grocery stores, banks, restaurants, cinemas, libraries, bookstores, etc.

But they also queue in places Americans normally don’t, such as the bus stop. Yes, we wait for the buses in America in lines, but we are put to shame by the self-discipline and tenacity of the English in their bus queues. In the driving rain, or when there is no bus at all (in fact, long before it arrives), they are lined up, in perfect order. It’s very impressive. Their buses are nice enough, but I would say that Seattle’s buses and its bus system are just as pleasant (and they really are, don’t get me wrong). And yet the way they wait in lines for them here would make you think they are waiting for a train, or an old-fashioned plane. And the disgust for those who dishonor the queue is apparent.

Just the other day at McDonalds (again, yes, they have them here too), a young lady was getting very flustered at the sloppy queues that had formed.

“There’s room for at least four queues!” she grumbled to no one in particular. Quickly four queues appeared, as the shame of not being rightfully queued affected all who happened to hear.

Queues are also a way of measuring frustration in general. The one grocery store in the city centre (if you asked where “downtown Cambridge” is located, you will get a funny look, believe me), a Sainsbury’s, is always seemingly swarming with people as they recreate the Battle of Britain (if it had led to a German invasion). On the weekends, and in the evenings, it is chock-full of hungry English people, and the poor staff members are hopelessly outnumbered as they dart in and out of the aisles, restocking an ever-dwindling supply of soda crackers and tinned meat (including canned hot dogs, more on that later).

Anyway, one day, during a particularly busy moment at “Insane-bury’s,” I overheard a friendly looking older English man (really a sort of postcard image of the sweet-’ol-English-grandpa) warn a fellow grandfather on the sidewalk to “not go in there … the queues are bloody bullocks.” This was actually one of the first times I had ventured into the store, and I quickly rued the moment I crossed the queue-crossed threshold. Since then, I have acquired a healthy respect for British queues, and those who queue in them.

Indeed, I could tell something was very wrong today at McDonalds (yes, I ate there again this week: I needed the calories!). A gaggle of kids was clogging the tills, were the annoyed workers were shouting, “can I help?!” to the next person in the milieu. It turns out, they weren’t English at all, but French teenagers here on a school trip.

“That explains it,” I thought. As soon as the French left, proper queues returned. It might be grey with a capital “E” outside, but by gosh, the queues were queued as they ought to have been, and all was right again in Cambridge.

But enough on queues.

Look for more, albeit probably shorter, thoughts on my brief time in England on a more regular basis. Thank you for reading, and as they tell Americans never to say, because we “just cannot say it right,” cheerio!

Those friendly little places, your local Post Office.

Seem harmless enough, don’t they…well, I like to think of them as prison cells, reassuring if you’re on the outside but the inside is somewhere you don’t really want to be. At all.

You see, Post Offices as a service provider are not the problem. Dear old Royal Mail does a fine job in my estimations, they’ve rarely let me down, it’s the experience of actually having to send your intended letter, parcel or package that gets my goat. Its the way things are done, the people that come in through those doors inflicting their own brand of strange on you in a confined space.

First off, I will talk about the people who go in there. I’m confident I can categorise the people who use Post Offices into a few easy to remember groupings.

1. “The Professional” – These guys, they go in, they know what service they want, when its got to be there, how much it weighs, the exact dimensions and the required amount of saliva to be used on the postage stamps. They get the thing done to perfection, then they’re outta there!

2. “The Clueless” – Now these guys can be irritating. They enter the Post Office with half a clue about what they’re doing there in the first place complete with “um, i need to be in this queue?” looks on their faces. They don’t know what they need when they get to the counter and they’re going to be as vague as they can asking about it. If you’re stuck behind a Clueless with only 1 counter open, you might want to reconsider your plans for the rest of the day. The Clueless will realise when he leaves the Post Office after several hours, that it would have been quicker to deliver the item by hand, even if it was going to Guernsey.

3. “The Average” – Now this is where most of us will hopefully slot into, Averages wait in line, get to the counter, maybe ask about a service, maybe they just know what needs to be done, but they do it with minimum fuss, and move on. Which is a blessing, considering the queue behind the Clueless had already reached Sainsbury’s.

4. “The Chatterbox” – My most hated of all Post Office users. The Chatterbox may also be an Average or a Professional, or even a Clueless, but the Chatterbox adds a new dimension to holding up a queue. When the Chatterbox gets to the counter, they prefer to engage in full-blown conversations with the clerk whether they know them or not. You’d just  better hope that the clerk isn’t their Aunty Mabel or there’ll be birthdays, tea parties, Uncle Keith’s divorce and that-girl-who-lives-in-number-43 mixed in with the Next Day Delivery of a knitted Angora sweater for the aforementioned Uncle Keith. You might also want to send up a prayer if they turn out to be a Clueless Chatterbox, they’re on par with an episode of Jeremy Kyle, he has no idea what the hell is going on but he wont shut up either.

Now, you’re thinking, thats not so bad is it? We’ll get served in time with all of those serving windows ope…ahhh.

Yes. It would appear that the infinite wisdom’s that be decided that lunch hours between the hours of 12 and 2pm are more important that delivering a nationwide postal service. Dont get me wrong, I take my lunchtime seriously and think they are a god given right, but there must be flexibility when the hordes of workers leave their warm offices to post something of importance only to find there are 2 windows open. 2 windows and what would appear to be the forces of the Persian army forming an orderly queue. With, um, letters and bubble wrap. Anyway, my point is, during lunch times, when they know it becomes busy, why, oh why, are there only 2 windows and the rest of the post office workers on their lunch…

As an aside, I salute those window clerks, those brave souls who take on that 12-2pm horde and survive. If it wasnt for you, I wouldn’t have got my novelty egg cup to Frinton-on-Sea by Wednesday.

I’m tempted to blame the guy from the Post Office adverts but it’s really not his fault and he’s too jolly to be awful about.

Finally, I notice they have installed some kind of computerised machines, presumably in order to cut down on peoples questions about what exactly is a large letter, why the hell didn’t you just keep it how it was and where’s the exit but I really don’t know. I was too scared to move from the queue in case I lost my place, I’m fairly sure there was a Chatterbox behind me…

One of things I like about operations is that it shows up in interesting ways in places that you would expect.  Take, for example, elevators.  One could think of this as a queuing system.  Even if we just focus on morning at an office tower when all the action is getting from the ground floor to their offices, it is a nontrivial problem.  At a glance, it seems like a pretty simple queuing system in which a person has to wait for a server (i.e., an elevator car) to be free to take him or her to the right floor.  But there are some complications.  First, this ain’t Bruce Wayne zipping to the Bat Cave.  There is room for several people in an elevator car and it would seem efficient to take more than one at a time.  Second, there are externalities.  If you stop at a floor before mine, you slow me down.

Inspired by the recent opening of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, NPR had a story about modern elevator management (Inside The Genius, But Asocial Elevator’s Brain, Jan 11).  One point made in the article is that there has been relatively modest changes in the hardware of elevators over the last several decades.  Instead, the action has been in optimizing the logic that runs elevator systems.  The current state of the art is something called Destination Dispatch:

The new Baltimore headquarters of the asset management firm Legg Mason has a similar elevator system. In the lobby, employees scan in their employee ID cards at a turnstile, and an LCD screen flashes which elevator to take. The system already knows where people are going based on their ID cards and generally by the time employees arrive at the elevators, one is waiting.The elevator stops at only one floor.

In many Destination Dispatch elevators, there are no buttons inside. If you accidentally get into another person’s elevator or input the wrong floor, you must wait to exit the elevator to choose another floor.

Supposedly, this is the most energy-efficient way to operate an elevator system.  I wonder where the gains come from.  The article suggests that under destination dispatch people end up with lonely asocial elevator rides.  That cannot be completely true.  There are economies of scale in batching customers together.  Giving those up has got to be costly.  My intuition is that the gains from smart batching, grouping customers to minimize stops on the way to the top.

#2Here’s today’s schedule. You walk, wait, and ride. Over and over again. And the excessive crowds squishing and trampling you aren’t helping. After an intense day at the parks, a little breathing room is needed!

But don’t worry, all that hard work will be rewarded because many late nights – even some stretching into the next morning – will be packed with pure crowdless fun.

That’s right, it’s time to skip happily through the empty streets and queues because you’re the only one here. While most other sane people are in beds sleeping, you can ride your favorite attraction ten times in a row, only getting weird looks from the cast members.

Relax and take it all in as you slowly walk listening to the louder-than-normal themed background music echo through the empty pathways.

You’re free to dance, skip, jump, and stretch to your heart’s content because it’s simply awesome to stroll through the park’s empty streets and areas without worrying about other people. Congratulations, you now own the place.

Photo by Communicore82

Despite working in an on-line media environment, I’ve never really trusted the Internet when it comes to shopping. As the mother and stepmother of four teenagers and two tweenies, I recognise this is a failing on my part and definitely not a cool attitude to buying. Why go out in the cold and wet, pay exorbitant parking fees, and stand toe-to-toe and elbow-to-elbow with crowds only to end up foot-sore and grumpy?

You might well ask, especially if you’re under 30. The answer is, once you’ve put something in your basket, stood in a queue and paid for it, you know it’s bought. You can tick it off your to-do list, your gift list or your shopping list, delete it from your Blackberry or your mental checklist. If the purchase is for you, perhaps a little black dress for all those pre-Christmas, pre-New Year parties, it’s sorted. You know it fits, you know what it will go with, you can buy matching shoes, boots, hair clips, stockings or whatever takes your fancy to make it an outfit rather than just a pipe-dream. Dammit, you can even leave the shop wearing it if you like it that much. Barring a mugging on your way back to the car park, it’s yours to put in your wardrobe or to give to your lucky friend or relative if it’s a present.

Contrast this with the on-line shopping experience. If all goes well, you surf suppliers on the net, find your chosen item, bundle it up with other purchases so that you only pay one lot of P&P, then make a coffee, sit back and relax while other people run around a warehouse, get in their vans and bring your gifts and purchases to your house. That, of course, is only the theory. The reality goes something like this in my experience.

• You surf the net, find what you want, order it, pay the P&P charge, sit at your desk hoping the item is in stock and awaiting a confirmation e-mail.
• You receive the confirmation e-mail and start tracking your parcel, wondering if it’s safe to go out for a walk with the dog. You ensure one person in the household is on door duty, just in case.
• Your parcel doesn’t arrive on the appointed date.
• You start to wonder where it can be, you ask your friendly postal worker (they’re still friendly around here) – he or she hasn’t seen hide nor hair of it.
• You send an e-mail to customer service.
• They send a standard e-mail back confirming they’ve despatched your goods and telling you to check with your postal worker.
• You start wondering if you’ve been out when a delivery was due and make a mental check-back to establish no, you haven’t been, and though you may have visited the loo at an inopportune moment, you know the dog would have thrown herself against the door the moment the post was delivered or the bell was rung.
• You search outbuildings, speak to neighbours (if you have any, we don’t), and tape a message to your gate with very clear instructions about what you’re waiting for.
• You send another e-mail to customer services to ask when can you expect your parcel. They tell you to check your garage, check with your neighbours and ask if you’re sure you’ve been in 24/7.
• They tell you they can’t find your house. You tell them to put your postcode into Google maps.
• This e-mail table-tennis continues for several days…

Add a few inches of snow into the equation and you have the perfect excuse for customer care not to take your enquiries seriously.

“It’s the weather,” they cry, fobbing off your disappointed teenagers. “Give it another 24/36/48/60 hours.” The teenagers’ faces drop a hundred miles, yet trusting beings that they are, they resolve to go out to a party in a borrowed dress/tell their friends that their present has been delayed/ make the best of their disappointment and believe the line that is being spun, so build their hopes up again for the next party/occasion/purchase.

By contrast, we 40-somethings start hopping up and down when something doesn’t arrive and we’ve exhausted our reserves of politeness. We start looking on-line for a telephone number to talk to a real person. None of this “standard reply” nonsense for us. Except that’s the trouble. There is no telephone number. Only an e-mail address – this is modern technology in action. Why say in one minute what will take three text messages/e-mails to establish? IE “My parcel isn’t here” and “We’re too busy to care.”

Top of the delivery pops? The good old Royal Mail, whose postal workers trudged through snow and searched their vans to placate a near-weeping teenage girl the day of a VIP (Very Important Party); and to the CityLink Amazon delivery driver who arrived on the doorstep wet, cold and snowed on, but was still cheery enough to wish us a Happy Christmas as he dropped off the last of the on-line purchases.

Chief culprits for giving negative experiences this year are Next and Asos. Though Next’s final apology was accompanied by a £20 gift voucher – the shoes, dress and waistcoat ordered for the tweenies for our wedding simply failed to turn up – they couldn’t even deliver the right order to their own shop a few days later adding exasperation to pre-wedding nerves and the need for yet another shopping trip. Even last week, two months after the order was placed, I was still having to insist I didn’t owe them any money for goods undelivered.

As for Asos, my 17-year-old daughter’s experiences with them would have driven another teenager to tantrums. Let’s just say, it’s now 13 days and counting since she ordered that special dress and it’s just appeared in their post-Christmas sale, £10 cheaper than the price she paid. It’s in the post, they’ve just told me. I’ll keep you posted on its progress, which is more than you’ll get from Asos.

*Update December 30th – With the power of Twitter and the help of Red mag editor Sam, and blogger LibertyLndnGirl, the dress arrived at lunchtime today, 15 days after the order was placed. My daughter looks fab in it and seems unfazed by her experience. Good job as her grandmother had bought her an Asos gift voucher for Christmas.

**Update December 31st – The same dress has been delivered again today – You have to see the funny side!

WARNING: This is an anger venting post and goes on a bit.

Of all the airports I have ever been through around the world, the London ones are all at the top of the worst list.  I don’t particularly care which one we’re talking about – Heathrow, Stansted, Gatwick, Luton – take your pick, they all suck.  GRRRRrrrrr…. is the most articulate way of expressing how I feel about London airports.

My most recent experience occurred last Thursday when my boyfriend and I were leaving for Christmas with his family skiing in the Swiss Alps; noice.  We had a 7am departure so we skipped the hassle and booked a car to drive us out – this was the first and last thing to go well.

We queued for half an hour in the car just to get into the airport.  On arrival, we queued for nearly an hour just to drop off our bags (we checked in online).  We queued for 20 minutes to get through security.  We thought we were home free and on time when we discovered the snow in London had immobilised the mini-train to take us to our gate.  So we queued, no joke, for half an hour in each of 4 different spots as thousands of people were ferried to their planes on a tiny number of buses.  Half an hour outside the broken train.  Half an hour at the top of the escalator down to the buses.  Half an hour at the start of the hallway before going out to the buses.  Half an hour to get onto the plane after the bus.

And the worst bit?  NO ONE EXPLAINED ANYTHING.  We were all missing our flights because we were just standing there and no employee could say a word.  Worst customer service ever (except maybe BT).  Then of course we waited hours on the plane waiting to take off.  So, so so tense.

It’s always something at these airports, huh?  As if UK budget airlines haven’t made flying such a horrible experience anyway, the pollution is now contaminating the base camp – a positive London airport experience is now the exception.  To make matters worse, everyone who goes through a London airport presumably gets off at some other airport which, without a doubt, is going to be a better experience.  Just to emphasize the point.

But I have to admit, I have actually had a positive experience.  That one time.  And it may come to no surprise to those in the know, that it was at London City Airport; my diamond in the rough.  Located in Zone 3 with direct tube access, no queues, no red tape – but still all the proper precautions I am now contemplating just going to places I can get to from this airport.  Brussels and Amsterdam here I come… over and over and over again.

PS Priority Pass conducts one of the biggest polls of the World’s Best & Worst Airports and Heathrow was in fact crowned #1 WORST, but the others were not listed… I hazard a guess that this is because they are not the big internationals the poll focussed on.

wunderbar, wunder year, wunder all you want

many moons, single moon, time will always pass

stride along, walk along, head held high

what does it matter, why stand in line

when the queue is all in your mind

stand in line, pass the time, dont ever rush the fullest of time

stand up to the weight of the glorious gate, that befalls us like a ticking hand

pressure beseech us, time never preach us – why would one

looking back fills us with pride, watching all those standing miles behind

looking ahead fills us with wanton longevity

impatience flying,swarming, shine

ever calculating, ever reaching

why are there so many ahead

makes you question the head, the way, the form and the form

pity the before, lust the after – i am the lightening

no one will before or after will ever feel the surge

i will drop and crash

then, then, then,

then

what then

Thousands queue outside Birmingham’s Bullring from the early hours before shopping during Boxing Day sales…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: smart shopping. The blog is also related to: shopping center directory.

….today. It´s a long enough journey from Mexico City to Merida, without any delays. Just under 20 hours. But because a super obese blind woman selling CDs on the metro decided to stop right in front of my seat as we came into the metro station I needed to get off at and refuse to move an inch despite my vigourous pushing, making me miss my stop; because hundreds of Mexicans behave like animals the moment you show them a queue on a form of public transport, preventing me and my rucksack to get on the next train; because taxi drivers think all gringos with a rucksack are prime targets for ripping off – I did not accept the ride from the driver who wanted to charge me 200 pesos for a 3 minute journey to a metro station just two stops away; and because Mexican families in general think that the best way to way through tunnels to the bus station is in a sideways line, and to walk very, very slowly – because of all that and more I missed my bus. And now I have a six hour wait for the next one.

For anyone who feels my analysis is harsh….it´s just as well I had to queue for a half hour to get at this internet cafe terminal, during which time I have calmed down a little, or this post would have been full of fairly extreme profanity, and suggestions of potential solutions to this problem in future. Solutions involving machine guns and dynamite. Pendejos.

Although the wait did mean I had to watch four people typing crap into the computers in full caps. Why do all Mexicans have to write in full caps? Don´t they know that´s rude?? It just winds me up, it does…

If your neighbor mentions that they had to make a trip to the emergency room, your second question after “what happened?” is likely “how long did you have to wait?”  The ER generally ranks right up there with the local Department of Motor Vehicle office as a place that imposes miserably long waits on users.  There also seem no easy solutions to reducing those waits.  The whole point of an emergency room is that literally anyone can walk in at any time.  Putting would-be patients on an appointment schedule just is not feasible. Adding more resources is also likely difficult.  An emergency room is unlikely to be a big money maker.  In an emergency, there is an obligation to treat first and ask for insurance cards later so many of those coming through may be uninsured making collecting the full cost of the services provided difficult.

So why not provide information? Many of those coming into an ER have some discretion in where to seek service.  A broken wrist is an appropriate reason to go to an emergency room but does not necessarily demand going immediately to the nearest facility.  A network of hospitals in Scottsdale, Arizona, is now exploiting this flexibility (Advertising emergency room wait times gains popularity, Dec 21, LA Times).  Scottsdale Healthcare has three hospitals and when you walk into any of them you are greeted by a TV screen with the current wait time at the hospital you are at plus the times at the other two.  The differences in waits can be dramatic.  The example given in the article is 2 hours and 55 minutes at one but only 4 minutes at another.  Needless to say, many people with less pressing concerns are willing to spend an added 15 minutes in the car to shave nearly three hours off their wait. Other hospitals are trying different schemes to provide patients with wait information.  Methodist Stone Oak Hospital in San Antonio tweets about waiting time (see here).

While one cannot directly attribute decreased waiting times to publicizing waiting times, both Scottsdale Healthcare and Stone Oak have seen improvement:

At Scottsdale Healthcare’s hospitals, the overall length of stay for patients — from walking in the door to discharge — is less than three hours, a one-hour decrease from that of the previous year, said Nancy Hicks-Arsenault, emergency services systems director. Administrators there are aided by the proximity of their facilities, two of which are located 16.5 miles apart, with the third splitting the distance. Prospective patients whose emergencies aren’t life-threatening can log on to the Internet from home and choose which emergency room to visit based on the wait time. Or, like [patient Len] Balon, they can arrive at one facility, check out the monitor and then head to another hospital. If they have registered and decide to move, all their intake information is transferred for them. …

At Stone Oak in San Antonio, [chief operations officer Jeannette] Skinner,  said the staff so closely monitors wait times that personnel try hard to resolve delays when the number ticks up. “It bugs them,” she said. “They don’t like seeing that number get higher and higher . . . so they start to self-assess very quickly.”

It is not surprising that providing a little information can go a long way here.  When the wait time differential between nearby hospitals is north of two hours, clearly telling people that can shift a lot of patients to where more resources are available.  It helps that the three Scottsdale hospitals are under one corporate umbrella but this seems like something that should work even among hospitals that are ostensibly in competition.  No one wins when an ER is backed up.  It is obviously bad for patients but it has got to add to the stress on staff who are already in a stressful job.  At some level, Stone Oak is already forcing hospitals in San Antonio to play this game.  Presumably when they post that the current wait is high, those in the know try a different area hospital instead.  The two difficulties here would seem to be to get people to check their Twitter page and to keep the information up to date.  Glancing at the Stone Oak’s Twitter feed, they are not exactly providing real-time information.  There is also a question of context.  If I am fortunate enough that I don’t go to the emergency room often, how do I know what is a bad wait? I understand that 5 minutes is short but is 90 minutes high for local ERs?  The Scottsdale approach may therefore be better; people are certain to see it when they are in a position to make a decision (although one suspects that more than one patient has left the ER wishing that he could have been told where the short wait was before driving to the wrong hospital) and getting multiple wait times presides a relevant yard stick.

Two points to note before leaving this topic.  First, not everyone thinks that advertising ER waiting times is a great idea (although their complaints seem a little paternalistic):

Dr. David C. Seaberg, an American College of Emergency Physicians board member and dean of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Chattanooga, said he worries that it may be sending the wrong message to patients. “Frankly, my opinion is that it’s a very bad idea to put waiting times up on a billboard,” Seaberg said. “When you get seen is a very complex process. . . . To put out a number can be misleading.” Any hospital’s emergency room can change at a moment’s notice if there’s a serious crash or other multiple-injury event. … Some conditions should move people to the front of the line, no matter what, Seaberg said, but posting wait times might cause people with chest pains, for example, to drive farther when any emergency room would make them a priority. “That’s a real problem,” Seaberg said. “If you’re really acutely ill, we’ll see you right away. It doesn’t matter how busy we are.”

Second, someone is already trying to make a dime on this issue:

Some hospitals are going a step further and contracting with an outside company to help ease the flow of patients. InQuickEr allows people to register at a hospital emergency room on the Internet and hold their place in line. It projects the time that the patient should arrive at the hospital and guarantees that the person will see a doctor within 15 minutes of that time or the visit is free. The service, which costs $2.99 to $24.99, depending on the market, is currently available only at three hospitals in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. But founder Tyler Kiley said that by next year, the goal is to be in 30 emergency departments. “At this point, I think it’s all about efficiency,” Kiley said. “There are so many ways that technology — even relatively simple technology — can be applied to basic customer service issues in healthcare.”

I have to admit that I am a little dubious of this.  Running an emergency is a little more complicated than, say, running a Sizzler.  A casual restaurant can give out spots on its wait list and provide a fairly accurate wait time.  An ER is just much more susceptible to disruption. They may be giving away a lot of free visits.

I apparently am different from many Britons.  I totally love self-service checkout systems, particularly at grocery stores.  Many Brits apparently have a different take — at least according to the BBC (The problem with self-service checkouts, Dec 9):

New research suggests 48% of Britons think self-service checkouts are a nightmare, neither quick nor convenient. Quite the opposite in fact, and their complaints are all too familiar.

Now the article is unclear about the other 52%. Are they indifferent or in love?  Do they dislike the machines to an extent less than totally loathing?  What is clear is that the author of the piece has an ax to grind and would like to sink that ax into the speaker squawking “unexpected item in the bagging area.”

Despite her flights of hyperbole, the author has a point.  These machines are not perfect and take some learning to use well.  She points to specific issues like not being able to use your own bag or that mysterious warning when the recently bagged item does not match what the machine was expecting.  Apparently, Brits also have paranoid thoughts that have never crossed my mind:

Finally, after the palaver of paying, there’s the nervousness about leaving the shop. Did I scan it all correctly? Did I select the right type of bread roll from the menu? Will I feel the long arm of the store (manager) on my shoulder as I walk out the shop?

“I spend half my time worrying that security will arrest me for selecting the wrong price Blueberry muffin,” said shopper Sharon Adams when consulted in a survey on self-service tills conducted by Fatcheese.

So if so many customers hate them, it must be that the companies are saving a ton of money by using them, right?  The firms claim there is more to the story:

Supermarkets say the move towards self-service checkouts is not all about cutting costs. They argue the tills can speed up your shopping trip, says Ahmed Zaman, from shopping website Fatcheese, which conducted the research. “But many shoppers have yet to be convinced that they really save time,” he says.

Not everyone agrees with this analysis, claiming that assertions of time savings are misleading because they are based on being able to walk right into service without waiting.  Further some assert that consumers are fooling themselves:

“People perceive self-service checkouts to be quicker but that’s because they are actually doing the work,” says [Bjorn] Weber[, of retail analysts Planet Retail]. “In reality they take longer than someone serving you, but it’s annoying for the shopper to stand around waiting.”

This suggests that Mr.  Weber is a fan of David Maister.  Back in 1985, Masiter published The Psychology of Waiting Lines, which laid out some principles for managing waits in service settings.  One of his main points is that “Occupied Time Feels Shorter Than Unoccupied Time.” So it is not clear that trading a wait for traditional service for a more engaging process of checking out is per se bad.  Also, I am not sure that it is wrong to focus on settings in which customers can just walk into service.  In the very first post of this blog, I argued that an advantage of self-service systems is that they can provide extra capacity at off-peak times when traditional staffing cannot be justified.  To put this another way, when my local Jewel is totally packed on Saturday afternoon, they would be better off with two conventional checkout lanes in place of the four self-service lanes they have.  However, late in the evening or early on Sunday morning.  They can provide more capacity and a better chance of walking right into service than the Dominick’s two blocks away that does not have self-service checkout. I once overheard a manager at Jewel comment to another worker that he had not had to man a cash register since the self-service lanes had been added.

Let me add that the supermarkets in Chicago (OK in greater Evanston) don’t use self-service lanes correctly.  Most stores don’t regulate who utilizes the self-service options.  I can check myself out even if I have 100 items in my cart.  Here’s a phrase I rarely use: They did this better in North Carolina.  I usually save that phrase for pork barbecue but it applies here.  My first experience with self-service checkout was at Harris Teeter stores in North Carolina.  They reserved the self-service lanes for those with a small number of items.  One can break down the checkout process into two steps, a fixed time to process payments etc and a per item scanning time.  (We’ve done this.  See this post.)  The fixed part is going to be largely the same between standard and self-service checkout — particularly when it comes to credit card payments.  Customers, however, are slower than pros at scanning cereal boxes and identifying Fuji apples.  Hence, the store loses capacity when it moves customers to a self-service lane (assuming that a full-service lane would have been staffed).  How big a hit they take is driven by the number of items in the basket.  My local Jewel has four self-service checkout stations AND at least one if not two express lanes for those with small baskets open.  That’s boneheaded.  Those who are the best fit for self-service are being served by an expensive resource that is more efficient with larger baskets.  As I said, they did this better in North Carolina.

We have written in the past about AT&T’s travails with bandwith hogging iPhone users.  Now it appears that they may be serious about reigning in those heavy users (AT&T moves closer to usage-based fees for data, Computerworld,Dec 9):

Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, today came the closest he has so far in warning about some kind of use-based pricing. He spoke to attendees at a UBS conference in New York. “The first thing we need to do is educate customers about what represents a megabyte of data and…we’re improving systems to give them real-time information about their data usage,” he said. “Longer term, there’s got to be some sort of pricing scheme that addresses the [heavy] users.” AT&T has found that only 3% of its smartphone users — primarily iPhone owners — are responsible for 40% of total data usage, largely for video and audio, de la Vega said. Educating that group about how much they are using could change that, as AT&T has found by informing wired Internet customers of such patterns.

That is, much like Ryanair, they are hoping to alter consumer behavior that is costly to the firm.  Instead of charging fees (at least initially) they are hoping that providing information alone is enough to alter behavior.  I remain dubious.

As Mr. de la Vega notes, their heavy users are the ones listening to Pandora and watching YouTube all the time.  Given how everyone complains about AT&T’s network performance they can only be running up these data amounts at off hours.  Stated another way, it is unclear to me that browbeating college students listening to online music at midnight is going to make the network better when grown ups are trying to use it in the morning.

I am not the only one unconvinced by this proposal (from AT&T to iPhone users: Cut back on data!, Marketplace, Dec 10):

Broadband consultant Scott Cleland says carriers are going to have to start charging because the problem is only going to get bigger.

SCOTT CLELAND: This is going to be a constant dilemma. The more customers you have, the more usage they want to use, puts more stress on a network.

But iPhone blog’s Rene Ritchie says even that probably won’t solve AT&T’s problem. iPhones make up about a third of the smartphones market and even if customers cut back, it won’t be enough. AT&T will probably have to give up its exclusive hold on the iPhone.

RITCHIE: To have that many phones on one network, unless that network spends billion and billions of dollars, it’s going to be problem.

You could already sort your Instant Queue on http://feedfliks.com. Now, you can sort your DVD Queue as well. We’ve also added two handy links – the ability to sort by Predicted Rating and the ability to see if any titles that were already in your Queue but not yet available on DVD have become available recently.

It’s been said a million times over but I have to say it one more time because it just doesn’t make any damn sense to me nor to any human with a functioning brain.

December 1st 2009 and I’ve spent the better part of the morning sitting in my car waiting to buy gas for my car and I’m thinking, Nigeria is a bloody joke.

I think of the Niger-Delta people and the way they’ve been raped, brutalized and general ripped of for decades and we still can’t refine and distribute petrol within our borders and I say, Nigeria is a bloody joke.

I don’t even want to know what is causing the queues this time, I’m just pissed and tired. This is the end of 2009, how far have we progressed since 1999?

On my last visit to London,  I was waiting in the line for the Border Control in Heathrow, when the digital board said that due to stricter checks they need to spend more time with each person, and thus the lines are longer than usual. That may sound like a very good reason for the excessive waiting time. However, it was very easy to notice that among the 13 stations allocated to non UK/EU citizens, only four were staffed. If the British government (and their UK Border Agency) is really concerned with the quality of the inspection (and it should be), but would like to reduce the waiting time, the solution is very simple – have more border officers on board. This is doubly infuriating since the British believe they invented the queue (“Britons will still be first in the queue, and second, and third”, Times, 2003), and thus should assume more responsibility in educating those coming to the Kingdom.