Idiotic Packaging

 General  No Responses »
Feb 032007
 

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.

Car Alarms

 General  No Responses »
Feb 032007
 

I find car alarms really irritating, at least the ones that make loud noises to alert everyone that someone wandered by the car a little too closely. Mind you I can live with those, but the ones that really get my goat are those that are so sensitive that they go off almost continuously.

There is one car with a particularly sensitive alarm near my flat that is always going off. One night it was going off every 10 minutes, all night!. The owner obviously needs a lesson in social responsibility.

Photography: Sensor Cleaning & Wandering Around Old Portsmouth

 Photography  1 Response »
Jan 272007
 

I hate cleaning the sensor on a DSLR … there you are doing the equivalent of scraping a spatula across the surface of something tiny yet sufficiently expensive that it would cause me a heart seizure if I were to scratch it. Not uncommonly I clean my sensor only to find out that the dust spots found in the raw images are still there! However this time I seem to have removed a good amount of grime.

Took the newly cleaned camera out with my fisheye lens around Old Portsmouth to make some images. Not a bad little stroll :-

Elderly

Educating People About Taxes

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 182007
 

Everyone hates paying taxes. To be honest nothing is going to change that at all, but there are a few things that could be done to improve the situation. At present people want to pay as little tax as possible, whilst having well funded public services. Which is kind of foolish and impossible to achieve; of course there are ways in which to make public services more efficient but that is a whole other rant.

I should point out at this point, that I’m somewhat partial here as my own salary comes indirectly from taxation (and pretty stingy the tax-payers are too), but that is also a whole other rant.

The funny thing is that when you start working, you get a nasty shock when you get your first payslip about how much disappears in the direction of the government and nobody is there to explain what you get for your money. Why not include classes in school about what taxation gets us ?

All that taxation does provide us with useful services which include :-

  • A public health service that anyone can use at no cost or vastly reduced cost.
  • A police service intended to protect us from criminals.
  • Armed forced to defend us from external threats.
  • A social security system to provide us with a safety net in case we cannot earn an income.
  • An education system that educates everyone.

And I dare say I’ve left loads out … I nearly forgot education where I work! But we don’t get told about what we get for our money, we are expected to “just know”. Of course it some ways it is obvious, but why not make it clearer ?

In fact why not make the yearly pay slip (the P60) larger and include rough figures for how much we paid for each service ? If you get something that says you paid £10,000 in tax, of which £1,500 went to pay for Health, etc., we are more likely to be less critical of taxation.

Special Needs Children (in Education)

 General, Media  No Responses »
Jan 092007
 

Recently a government minister caused a fuss in the press (they’re very excitable) by taking her child out of a state school and putting the child into a public school (a fee paying school for any US readers) because the child was dyslexic. The fuss of course is all about whether the needs of dyslexic children are adequately met in the state sector.

This is not about that at all.

Of course we should try to meet the needs of “special needs children” in state schools, but don’t all children have ‘special needs’ ? I don’t know how things are today, but when I was at school teachers would often concentrate on the poorest students and ignore the brightest students. Probably the thinking was that the brightest students could pick up the education they needed on their own, which is true to an extent. However I know a number of bright children (myself included) who were not pushed to study as hard as they should have been.

What often happened is that bright children found some or many lessons boring when they were stuck in a lesson proceeding at the speed of the slowest child in the lesson. Boredom as is well known is the enemy of learning. You could frequently find bright children obtaining poorer results at exams than they should be capable of doing well at.

Obviously I’m prejudiced towards brighter children, but the same applies to all children … all children are ‘special needs children’ in that they all should have individual attention in their education.

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