If, like me, you sometimes find yourself transcribing interviews and switching between an audio player and your word-processing software, then a neat shareware program called Listen&Type may be just what you want. It ‘floats’ above your WP program, avoiding the need to switch. There’s a 20-day free trial, after which it’s $20. Get it from here.
Back to the drawing board
Well, well. After months of heated speculation, it turns out that Cambridgeshire County Council is shelving its plans for congestion charging in the city.
Cambridgeshire CC has shelved plans for congestion charging following a lack of local support
The council had said it wanted to cut traffic levels in the city by 10% and submitted a bid for £500m of the government’s Transport Innovation Fund (TIF). Its bid included proposals for peak period congestion charging in and around Cambridge, along with subsidising bus fares, a new railway station, park and ride facilities and an extensive network of cycle paths.
Cambridgeshire has now withdrawn its plans and gone “back to the drawing board”, despite a growing problem of congestion in and around the city of Cambridge.
Councillor Jill Tuck, the new Conservative leader of the council, said: “We have listened carefully over the last few months and it is clear that the Transport Innovation Fund scheme we put forward for consultation last autumn does not have sufficient support either from other key organisations or the public and needs, at the very least, refinement.”
A new transport commission, made up of key public and private sector organisations, will be created to come up with recommendations for a new transport strategy for the Cambridge area…
Customer service the PayPal way
Forgive me, but I thought this account in The INQUIRER from a frustrated PayPal user was worth quoting extensively.
1. Paypal account used happily for 3 years.
2. January: Sold a laptop computer on Ebay. Buyer paid with fraudulently accessed Paypal account. Paypal charges the cost of laptop back to my account, leaving it -£700 (and me out of pocket, despite being the victim of internet fraud enabled by Paypal).
3. Crime therefore reported to London Metropolitan Police. (Crime ref xxxxxx/2008). Officer investigating asks me to hold off paying account balance until crime investigation resolved or ended as account details may be needed as evidence.
4. Paypal requests balance of account payment for £700.
5. I contact Paypal, give crime reference number, mention advice of Met officer. Expect this to be the end of the matter until crime investigation resolved.
6. Receive frequent Paypal emails asking me to restore balance. Do not, as against advice of police investigating.
7. My parents (?) receive call from debt collector instructed by Paypal at their house asking for payment. Obviously distressing to them as elderly.
8. Call debt collector, give crime reference number and explain situation. They promise not to call again given police advice.
9. Call Paypal, where customer service rep explains that there is no way to prevent debt collection proceeding despite police advice. Despite advising that interfering with a police investigation is a criminal offence, simply restates that Paypal requires payment and will be proceeding with debt collection and regular calls to my mother’s house.
10. Receive call from debt collection agency regarding outstanding balance. Explain situation, restate crime reference number already on their file, they promise not to call again (again).
11. Receive call from debt collection agency two days later. Am unable to return call.
12. Finally cave and attempt to pay off account balance against advice of London Metropolitan Police in a bid to prevent further calls to the house of my elderly parents by debt collection agency acting on behalf of Paypal.
13. Paypal rejects payment attempt through website, stating that I am not allowed to add the requisite amount of funds in one go – and that this is a measure taken in order to prevent fraud.
14. Proceed to pay half the total in a bid to pay the second half when Paypal ‘allows’ me.
15. Paypal closes account, preventing me from paying off balance, and requests that I contact ‘appeals@paypal.com’. Presumably now sending hit men around to collect payment that system itself refuses to take.And so here I am, emailing the address requested. Unable to pay off a Paypal balance that the London Metropolitan Police advises me not to pay, yet receiving calls from my parents who are being harassed by debt collection agencies who are distressed by the situation.
At this stage I would simply like to be allowed to pay off the balance, close my Paypal account and be content never to use the service ever again. Would you be able to call me on 44 (0)xxx xxxxxx so that we can please arrange this?
Yours in hope,
W.H.
Beleagured Paypal customer.
What comes next? You guessed it:
We apologize but we are unable to respond to inquiries sent to this e-mail address. Your e-mail was routed to an unmonitored mailbox and as such will not be reviewed.
Virtualisation and wattage
From The INQUIRER…
AMD ONCE HAD 135 servers crunching data for its Austin Texas HQ. Now, having virtualised the lot using VMware’s virtualisation software it has cut that number to just seven. The move resulted in 79 per cent power savings, Margaret Lewis, AMD director of commercial solutions* and software strategy told the INQ this week.
What Google does right — and wrong
Here’s an interesting phenomenon — a guy who has left Google to work for Microsoft. In his blog he explains why. First the good news:
There are many things that Google does really well, and I plan to advocate that some of these things be adopted at Microsoft.
Among them is the peer-based review model where one’s performance is determined largely based on peer comments, and much less so based on the observations of the manager. The idea that a manager is far easier to fool than the co-workers are is sound and largely works. A very important side-effect that this model produces is an increased amount of cooperation between the people, and generally better relationships within the team.
The wide employee participation in corporate governance through a concept called “Intergrouplets” is a good one and merits emulation. Unlike most other companies where internal life is regulated largely by management, a lot of aspects of Google are ruled by committees of employees who are passionate about an issue, and are willing to allocate some of their time to have this issue resolved. Many things, such as quality of code base, testing practices, internal engineering documentation, and even food service are decided by intergrouplets. Of course, this is where 20% time (a practice where any Googler can spend one day a week working on whatever he or she wants) plugs in well, for without available time there would have been nothing to allocate.
Doing many things by committee. Hiring, resource allocations at Google are done by consensus of many players. If you are to achieve anything at Google, you must learn how to build this consensus, or at least how to not obstruct it. This skill comes in very handy for every other aspect of work.
Free food. More than just a benefit, it is a tool for increasing communications within the team, because it’s so much easier to have team lunches. I don’t think making Redmond cafeterias suddenly free would work (maybe I am wrong), but giving out free lunch coupons for teams of more than 3 people from more than one discipline to have lunch together – and at the same time have an opportunity to communicate – I think, has a fair chance of success.
There are other things that I would want at Microsoft, but which will probably not happen simply because there is far too much legacy. I will miss the things like one code base with uniform style guides and coding standards – there’s too much existing code at Microsoft to try and turn this ship around.
So why did he leave?
Several reasons. Firstly it seems that he prefers writing software for users who are willing to pay real money for it.
Secondly, he doesn’t like the way Google approaches software engineering. Its orientation towards cool, but not necessarily useful or essential software, he writes,
really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering – PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter.
[…]
On the other hand, I was using Google software – a lot of it – in the last year, and slick as it is, there’s just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it’s a different 10% every week – the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.
This is probably fine for free software, but I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared – culturally – to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.
As I say, it’s an interesting perspective. And he’s probably done himself no harm with his new bosses at Redmond by writing about it. Or is that too cynical a view?
Fame at last!
Oooh… what a nice surprise. The wonderful Arts & Letters Daily picked up one of my columns in their weekend edition.
At last — a useful role for bankers
According to Miriam Lord, Parliamentary sketch-writer for the Irish Times, the Irish Labour Party has a policy on big bankers. It is, she writes that “They should be recycled and made into pork pies for the working man”.
Now there’s an interesting idea. Personally I think that, if boiled with pepper, a few carrots and a clove or two of garlic, many of them would also make a nourishing soup.
Fact: I don’t much care for pork pies. But then I don’t care much for bankers either.
Microsoft’s other problem
Google is Problem #1, obviously. But the other one is the baroque — and unsustainable — architectural complexity of Windows 12 (which is what Vista really is). Randall Stross has an interesting piece about this in the NYT. The next version of Windows is — bizarrely — called Windows 7 by the Microsoft High Command.
Will it be a top-to-bottom rewrite? Last week, Bill Veghte, a Microsoft senior vice president, sent a letter to customers reassuring them there would be minimal changes to Windows’ essential code. “Our approach with Windows 7,” he wrote, “is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7.”
But sticking with that same core architecture is the problem, not the solution. In April, Michael A. Silver and Neil MacDonald, analysts at Gartner, the research firm, presented a talk titled “Windows Is Collapsing.” Their argument isn’t that Windows will cease to function but that the accumulated complexity, as Microsoft tries to support 20 years of legacies, prevents timely delivery of advances. “The situation is untenable,” their joint presentation says. “Windows must change radically.”
Randall points out that the problem facing Microsoft now is analogous to that which faced Apple with its ageing OS9 system in the late 1990s. The solution was a radical break and the adoption of a completely different OS architecture — OS X. This meant a lot of pain for some die-hard Apple users, though it was partially eased by providing an OS9 emulator.
The complexity of Vista is largely a consequence of having to ensure backwards compatibility with earlier versions — which is why Bill Veghte wrote as he did. But with the power of modern Intel processors, where’s absolutely nothing to prevent Microsoft harnessing virtualisation technology to enable users to run earlier versions of Windows in virtual machines, leaving Redmond’s software designers free to design a completely new OS.
Controlling the email monster
Intriguing account by Luis Suarez of IBM…
EARLIER this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity.
I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.
It’s not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction…
This strikes a chord. I’ve found that the email system at my day job has become positively dysfunctional (I’m cc’d on everything, it seems), so I’ve had to resort to giving selected colleagues a different address, which ensures that anything from them comes straight through to my phone. But of course this has the disadvantage that I may miss ‘important’ messages from other people in the organisation — who then get shirty because I don’t appear to be paying due attention to them!
I’ve taken to using Skype a lot — mainly for IM and occasional phone conferencing. I’ve also found Twitter useful — and its unreliability correspondingly infuriating. So I often fall back on SMS. My experience with wikis has been mixed — most of my colleagues seem reluctant to use them.
The bottom line, though, is that organisational email has to be brought back under control. Someone once told me that one of the big supermarket chains — it may be ASDA — has a policy in its open-plan HQ that when anyone’s on email they have to wear a red baseball cap. It’s wacky, but might just work.
The mess that is organisational email is actually a symptom of the failure of ICT systems to provide software services that workers really need. Why, for example, do you find that office workers have email inboxes with thousands of messages in them? Answer: because it gives them an electronic filing system that they can use. So instead of being an indicator of how hopeless people are at managing ICT, overflowing inboxes are actually a measure of how ingenious humans are when faced with useless technology.
Measuring compassion
Simon Caulkin is the most perceptive writer on management in the UK. He’s also been a relentless critic of the Labour government’s obsession with ‘targets’ in the public services. This morning he excoriates the latest absurdity, namely
Alan Johnson’s inexpressibly depressing announcement the week before last of a ‘compassion index’, the results to be published on an official website, to show how kind hospitals are to their patients. This is so tragic that it’s hard to know where to begin (although I already have an idea of the ending). But let’s try.
The question is not whether compassion is desirable. It should go without saying that it is vital. For at least 50 years, it has been known that recovery from injury or illness is a delicate joint venture in which dedicated medical care and will and optimism on the part of the patient feed off and reinforce each other. A health service without compassion is therefore a contradiction in terms – compassion indeed figured among the important reasons the NHS was set up in the first place. In such a context, the question that needs answering is: how and why did compassion get lost that it now has to be inspected and audited in again?
The culprit is the dehumanising, Soviet-style regime of league tables, inspection and audit by which the UK public sector is now run…
The effect of targets is to create professions that are increasingly administrative rather than vocational.
First, simplistic targets (waiting times, exam results, detection rates) take away from professionals the duty to use independent judgment and make them accountable to inspectors, auditors and ministers rather than the citizens they are serving. Then, to deal with the mountainous bureaucracy that targets generate, the next step is to break the professions in two. As a Guardian blogger noted, over the last decade nursing has been turned into an academic and ‘managerial’ discipline, with wards turned over to managers and the basic caring component (bathing, feeding and comfort) hived off to less trained, lower-status heath care support workers. Exactly the same process of separating out the menial, ‘volume’ tasks from the rest can be seen at work in schools (classroom assistants) and the police (community police support officers), all in the vain quest for economies of scale.