More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • Snow In The UK

    Hardly very topical, but it is about time I talked about snow in the UK. We do not get much snow in the UK … at least not in the highly populated areas, and when it does arrive we end up in a situation which could be described as chaos. And every time we get snow, there is an incredible amount of fuss about all the chaos that results. Why?

    Ok. So there are plenty of countries that cope better with snow than we do, but we always forget the why … they get more of it. If you have practise, you get used to it. And we don’t get used to it, so what is all the fuss about ? So we have travel chaos for a day or two. It is not the end of the world after all.

    Admittedly being stuck in travel chaos is hardly what you could call fun, but what is the travelling for ? On almost every occasion in recent times, snow has been forecast in advance and we’ve been given the advice of not travelling unless it is absolutely necessary. Of course nobody explains what this means.

    Let’s have a law that gives everyone who wants it a day off if it snows. Instantly we stop all the complaints about schools being shut whilst parents have to work, and it would keep many people off the roads making it easier and safer for those who really have to be on the roads.

    Employers who really needed employees to come in could provide employees who volunteer for it a snow kit and training … snow chains, shovel, and basic survival gear for the snow. Employees who came in despite the snow should be able to ‘bank’ half a day on top of their ordinary leave entitlement.

    I can imagine that any employer reading this would scream at the thought of giving people an extra day off and the cost to business of doing so. Sure it would cost some money but there are things more important than money. For instance it is easily possible to imagine people being killed in traffic accidents caused by snow, which is far more important to stop than saving a few pounds. Maybe a few businesses would go to the wall if we had such a law, but surely any business that is that close to the edge would fail anyway.

    One other thing that has only just occurred to me (as I’m not a parent); kids greet snow with joy. At the same time, we are always being castigated for not spending enough time with our children. What better time for a bit of parent-child bonding ?

    It is time to stop treating snow as a disaster and start treating it as a minor inconvenience that can be a bit of fun too.

  • IT: Released A Shell Script To Keep A Rockbox Device In Sync

    I have “released” my simple shell script to keep a Rockboxed device in sync with a local filesystem copy. There are plenty of better ways to manage your media player, but this is mine. It :-

    1. Tries to upload a scrobbler.log to your last.fm account using someone else’s script.
    2. Copies several files from the mounted device to the filesystem copy (various settings files)
    3. Uses Rsync to update the copy on the mounted device.

    No deep magic here, but it may be useful as a starting point for others.

  • Equal Pay For Equal Work In Tennis

    Wimbledon has just announced that they are giving women in their tennis matches the same prize money as the men, bringing them into line with many other tennis competitions. Sounds good doesn’t it ? Well maybe, but give this a try … this means that the women are actually paid more for each ball they serve than the men!

    Why? Well, tennis matches between women are shorter than the ones between men being the best of three sets rather than the best of five sets. So when the prize money is the same, women get a higher rate of pay than the men. Why should women be paid more than men for the same work any more than men be paid more than women for the same work ?

    Easy enough to fix. Change the game so that women play the same rules as the men … the shorter game for women was laid down at a time where there were quaint notions of women being too feeble and weak to play the full-length game. There is no excuse for this sort of thinking now, so remove the stupid differences between men’s tennis and women’s tennis to restore some proper equality.

    Let’s have equal pay for equal work in tennis.

  • The Vista Ripoff

    So I was reading a review of Vista on The Register and was hardly surprised to see that the consumers are being ripped off again. It seems that they think that Microsoft can’t do currency conversions without making mistakes … I guess this is not too surprising given this is the company that gave us a calculator that made basic arithmetic mistakes.

    However I decided to do a little checking myself and decided to use Amazon as the benchmark on differing costs on “Vista Ultimate Full” :-

    Amazon.co.uk

    £327
    Amazon.com

    $379

    Next I converted the Amazon.com cost into pounds using £1 = $1.95 which is close enough for the purposes of this little rant :-

    Amazon.com in pounds

    £194

    But wait! I forgot to add UK’s VAT rate of 17.5% :-

    Amazon.com in pounds + VAT

    £228

    Now it is pretty obvious to me that £228 is considerably less than £327. Enough that I should do the calculation the other way around :-

    Amazon.co.uk – VAT

    £278

    And to convert it into dollars :-

    Amazon.co.uk – VAT in dollars

    $543

    So instead of $379, we in the UK pay $542 for our copies of Vista. That’s an increase of 43%! Now I could forgive a little bit of flab in the cost, but 43% is a little much to swallow. Apparently when The Register contacted Microsoft about this puzzling price discrepancy, Microsoft claimed they adjusted their prices to suit the market … or to put it another way, they gouge as much out of the consumer as they think they can get away with. Obviously they think that the average UK consumer is a bit of a numbskull.

    It would be nice to prove them wrong. And ask the EU to take a little look into this matter.

    Of course Microsoft is not the only company that tries to rip us off with the excuse of ‘tax variations’ and other bullshit reasons. Apple sells the Mac OSX operating system at widely varying prices :-

    Apple.com US Price for OSX

    $129
    Apple.com UK price for OSX

    £89

    Hmm. Doesn’t seem like a ripoff compared with Vista does it ? Take a closer look :-

    Apple.com UK price without VAT

    £76
    Apple.com UK price without VAT in dollars

    $147

    Hey that’s only 14% more expensive in the UK than the US. All worship Apple! No wait … that’s still a huge ripoff, but just not quite as excessive as Microsoft.

    Of course this gives the Linux, Solairs and *BSD marketing types a good slogan :-

    £0 or $0 – No ripoff there!

    It is interesting to see that Microsoft could not give The Register reviewer a free review copy … you might understand it if it were a small company with a valuable product, but Microsoft and Vista hardly fit in there. Microsoft are probably wondering why they didn’t get a positive review 🙂

  • Idiotic Packaging

    I had reason to buy a couple of USB leads the other day, but this entry has not got anything to do with the leads themselves, but with the packaging which can be found keeping people away from many other goods. It is that clear heat-sealed hard plastic which makes things like leads, and other small items so easy to hang up on a rack in a shop. They’re not exactly easy to get into are they ?

    In fact they are probably the worst kind of packaging out there … a waste of oil, and very difficult to get into. There are probably quite a few packages waiting unopened around the country when you consider that not everybody has a great deal of strength in their hands. I spent a lot of time using my fingers (hitting the keyboard), but I certainly don’t find it easy.

    I guess this kind of packaging does have one advantage … it is easier for the items to be displayed in a shop as they hang very conveniently on those hooks shops use. This gives the lie to the idea that manufacturers only care about the consumer. They obviously care more about the convenience of the shop keeper.

    Well, it is time to get the message across. Every time you (and I) buy something contained inside inconvenient packaging, ask for the package to be opened as you buy it … make it clear that you find such packaging very difficult to get into, and that you won’t buy the product if it isn’t opened for you.