I couldn't possibly comment

Early railway humour - Charles Dickens on railway buffets

2011-11-23T14:24:00.001Z

I find myself on trains a fair bit, often travelling through Rugby. It never ceases to amaze me what a poor job the people who run stations do with franchising their refreshemnts. A captive audience, often plenty of space on the inter city platforms and cavernous Victorian buildings yet the ubqiuitous Pumpkin chain never fails to depress, the one at Stoke-on-Trent stands out as an especially sad welcome to that glorious city. It's not just Pumpkin though they are almost all bad. There are some lovely exceptions where independents get in (at Bath Spa for instance), but they are a vanishing minority.

Charles Dickens wrote some savage short stories about his experiences at Rugby Junction station, thinly disguised as 'Mugby'. Rugby in his day was a byword for chaos in changing trains. Dickens apparently had a bad experience in the refreshment room at the station 'it never yet refreshed a mortal being' and took pitiless revenge in the the razor sharp story 'The Boy At Mugby' an in character piece by the boy servant in the rooms.

This piece is as relevant today as it was over one hundred years ago. It seems to be the origin of all British railway sandwich humour. Next time you are stuck with the Pumpkin as your only source of sustenance on a cold night, read this, extracted from Project Gutenberg and weep at he state of progress:

CHAPTER III—THE BOY AT MUGBY

I am the boy at Mugby. That’s about what I am.

You don’t know what I mean? What a pity! But I think you do. I think you must. Look here. I am the boy at what is called The Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, and what’s proudest boast is, that it never yet refreshed a mortal being.

Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, in the height of twenty-seven cross draughts (I’ve often counted ’em while they brush the First-Class hair twenty-seven ways), behind the bottles, among the glasses, bounded on the nor’west by the beer, stood pretty far to the right of a metallic object that’s at times the tea-urn and at times the soup-tureen, according to the nature of the last twang imparted to its contents which are the same groundwork, fended off from the traveller by a barrier of stale sponge-cakes erected atop of the counter, and lastly exposed sideways to the glare of Our Missis’s eye—you ask a Boy so sitiwated, next time you stop in a hurry at Mugby, for anything to drink; you take particular notice that he’ll try to seem not to hear you, that he’ll appear in a absent manner to survey the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head and body, and that he won’t serve you as long as you can possibly bear it. That’s me.

What a lark it is! We are the Model Establishment, we are, at Mugby. Other Refreshment Rooms send their imperfect young ladies up to be finished off by our Missis. For some of the young ladies, when they’re new to the business, come into it mild! Ah! Our Missis, she soon takes that out of ’em. Why, I originally come into the business meek myself. But Our Missis, she soon took that out of me.

What a delightful lark it is! I look upon us Refreshmenters as ockipying the only proudly independent footing on the Line. There’s Papers, for instance,—my honourable friend, if he will allow me to call him so,—him as belongs to Smith’s bookstall. Why, he no more dares to be up to our Refreshmenting games than he dares to jump a top of a locomotive with her steam at full pressure, and cut away upon her alone, driving himself, at limited-mail speed. Papers, he’d get his head punched at every compartment, first, second, and third, the whole length of a train, if he was to ventur to imitate my demeanour. It’s the same with the porters, the same with the guards, the same with the ticket clerks, the same the whole way up to the secretary, traffic-manager, or very chairman. There ain’t a one among ’em on the nobly independent footing we are. Did you ever catch one of them, when you wanted anything of him, making a system of surveying the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head and body? I should hope not.

You should see our Bandolining Room at Mugby Junction. It’s led to by the door behind the counter, which you’ll notice usually stands ajar, and it’s the room where Our Missis and our young ladies Bandolines their hair. You should see ’em at it, betwixt trains, Bandolining away, as if they was anointing themselves for the combat. When you’re telegraphed, you should see their noses all a-going up with scorn, as if it was a part of the working of the same Cooke and Wheatstone electrical machinery. You should hear Our Missis give the word, “Here comes the Beast to be Fed!” and then you should see ’em indignantly skipping across the Line, from the Up to the Down, or Wicer Warsaw, and begin to pitch the stale pastry into the plates, and chuck the sawdust sangwiches under the glass covers, and get out the—ha, ha, ha!—the sherry,—O my eye, my eye!—for your Refreshment.

It’s only in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (by which, of course, I mean to say Britannia) that Refreshmenting is so effective, so ’olesome, so constitutional a check upon the public. There was a Foreigner, which having politely, with his hat off, beseeched our young ladies and Our Missis for “a leetel gloss host prarndee,” and having had the Line surveyed through him by all and no other acknowledgment, was a-proceeding at last to help himself, as seems to be the custom in his own country, when Our Missis, with her hair almost a-coming un-Bandolined with rage, and her eyes omitting sparks, flew at him, cotched the decanter out of his hand, and said, “Put it down! I won’t allow that!” The foreigner turned pale, stepped back with his arms stretched out in front of him, his hands clasped, and his shoulders riz, and exclaimed: “Ah! Is it possible, this! That these disdaineous females and this ferocious old woman are placed here by the administration, not only to empoison the voyagers, but to affront them! Great Heaven! How arrives it? The English people. Or is he then a slave? Or idiot?” Another time, a merry, wideawake American gent had tried the sawdust and spit it out, and had tried the Sherry and spit that out, and had tried in vain to sustain exhausted natur upon Butter-Scotch, and had been rather extra Bandolined and Line-surveyed through, when, as the bell was ringing and he paid Our Missis, he says, very loud and good-tempered: “I tell Yew what ’tis, ma’arm. I la’af. Theer! I la’af. I Dew. I oughter ha’ seen most things, for I hail from the Onlimited side of the Atlantic Ocean, and I haive travelled right slick over the Limited, head on through Jeerusalemm and the East, and likeways France and Italy, Europe Old World, and am now upon the track to the Chief Europian Village; but such an Institution as Yew, and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin’s solid and liquid, afore the glorious Tarnal I never did see yet! And if I hain’t found the eighth wonder of monarchical Creation, in finding Yew and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin’s solid and liquid, all as aforesaid, established in a country where the people air not absolute Loo-naticks, I am Extra Double Darned with a Nip and Frizzle to the innermostest grit! Wheerfur—Theer!—I la’af! I Dew, ma’arm. I la’af!” And so he went, stamping and shaking his sides, along the platform all the way to his own compartment.

I think it was her standing up agin the Foreigner as giv’ Our Missis the idea of going over to France, and droring a comparison betwixt Refreshmenting as followed among the frog-eaters, and Refreshmenting as triumphant in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (by which, of course, I mean to say agin, Britannia). Our young ladies, Miss Whiff, Miss Piff, and Mrs. Sniff, was unanimous opposed to her going; for, as they says to Our Missis one and all, it is well beknown to the hends of the herth as no other nation except Britain has a idea of anythink, but above all of business. Why then should you tire yourself to prove what is already proved? Our Missis, however (being a teazer at all pints) stood out grim obstinate, and got a return pass by Southeastern Tidal, to go right through, if such should be her dispositions, to Marseilles.

Sniff is husband to Mrs. Sniff, and is a regular insignificant cove. He looks arter the sawdust department in a back room, and is sometimes, when we are very hard put to it, let behind the counter with a corkscrew; but never when it can be helped, his demeanour towards the public being disgusting servile. How Mrs. Sniff ever come so far to lower herself as to marry him, I don’t know; but I suppose he does, and I should think he wished he didn’t, for he leads a awful life. Mrs. Sniff couldn’t be much harder with him if he was public. Similarly, Miss Whiff and Miss Piff, taking the tone of Mrs. Sniff, they shoulder Sniff about when he is let in with a corkscrew, and they whisk things out of his hands when in his servility he is a-going to let the public have ’em, and they snap him up when in the crawling baseness of his spirit he is a-going to answer a public question, and they drore more tears into his eyes than ever the mustard does which he all day long lays on to the sawdust. (But it ain’t strong.) Once, when Sniff had the repulsiveness to reach across to get the milk-pot to hand over for a baby, I see Our Missis in her rage catch him by both his shoulders, and spin him out into the Bandolining Room.

But Mrs. Sniff,—how different! She’s the one! She’s the one as you’ll notice to be always looking another way from you, when you look at her. She’s the one with the small waist buckled in tight in front, and with the lace cuffs at her wrists, which she puts on the edge of the counter before her, and stands a smoothing while the public foams. This smoothing the cuffs and looking another way while the public foams is the last accomplishment taught to the young ladies as come to Mugby to be finished by Our Missis; and it’s always taught by Mrs. Sniff.

When Our Missis went away upon her journey, Mrs. Sniff was left in charge. She did hold the public in check most beautiful! In all my time, I never see half so many cups of tea given without milk to people as wanted it with, nor half so many cups of tea with milk given to people as wanted it without. When foaming ensued, Mrs. Sniff would say: “Then you’d better settle it among yourselves, and change with one another.” It was a most highly delicious lark. I enjoyed the Refreshmenting business more than ever, and was so glad I had took to it when young.

Our Missis returned. It got circulated among the young ladies, and it as it might be penetrated to me through the crevices of the Bandolining Room, that she had Orrors to reveal, if revelations so contemptible could be dignified with the name. Agitation become awakened. Excitement was up in the stirrups. Expectation stood a-tiptoe. At length it was put forth that on our slacked evening in the week, and at our slackest time of that evening betwixt trains, Our Missis would give her views of foreign Refreshmenting, in the Bandolining Room.

It was arranged tasteful for the purpose. The Bandolining table and glass was hid in a corner, a arm-chair was elevated on a packing-case for Our Missis’s ockypation, a table and a tumbler of water (no sherry in it, thankee) was placed beside it. Two of the pupils, the season being autumn, and hollyhocks and dahlias being in, ornamented the wall with three devices in those flowers. On one might be read, “MAY ALBION NEVER LEARN;” on another “KEEP THE PUBLIC DOWN;” on another, “OUR REFRESHMENTING CHARTER.” The whole had a beautiful appearance, with which the beauty of the sentiments corresponded.

On Our Missis’s brow was wrote Severity, as she ascended the fatal platform. (Not that that was anythink new.) Miss Whiff and Miss Piff sat at her feet. Three chairs from the Waiting Room might have been perceived by a average eye, in front of her, on which the pupils was accommodated. Behind them a very close observer might have discerned a Boy. Myself.

“Where,” said Our Missis, glancing gloomily around, “is Sniff?”

“I thought it better,” answered Mrs. Sniff, “that he should not be let to come in. He is such an Ass.”

“No doubt,” assented Our Missis. “But for that reason is it not desirable to improve his mind?”

“Oh, nothing will ever improve him,” said Mrs. Sniff.

“However,” pursued Our Missis, “call him in, Ezekiel.”

I called him in. The appearance of the low-minded cove was hailed with disapprobation from all sides, on account of his having brought his corkscrew with him. He pleaded “the force of habit.”

“The force!” said Mrs. Sniff. “Don’t let us have you talking about force, for Gracious’ sake. There! Do stand still where you are, with your back against the wall.”

He is a smiling piece of vacancy, and he smiled in the mean way in which he will even smile at the public if he gets a chance (language can say no meaner of him), and he stood upright near the door with the back of his head agin the wall, as if he was a waiting for somebody to come and measure his heighth for the Army.

“I should not enter, ladies,” says Our Missis, “on the revolting disclosures I am about to make, if it was not in the hope that they will cause you to be yet more implacable in the exercise of the power you wield in a constitutional country, and yet more devoted to the constitutional motto which I see before me,”—it was behind her, but the words sounded better so,—“‘May Albion never learn!’”

Here the pupils as had made the motto admired it, and cried, “Hear! Hear! Hear!” Sniff, showing an inclination to join in chorus, got himself frowned down by every brow.

“The baseness of the French,” pursued Our Missis, “as displayed in the fawning nature of their Refreshmenting, equals, if not surpasses, anythink as was ever heard of the baseness of the celebrated Bonaparte.”

Miss Whiff, Miss Piff, and me, we drored a heavy breath, equal to saying, “We thought as much!” Miss Whiff and Miss Piff seeming to object to my droring mine along with theirs, I drored another to aggravate ’em.

“Shall I be believed,” says Our Missis, with flashing eyes, “when I tell you that no sooner had I set my foot upon that treacherous shore—”

Here Sniff, either bursting out mad, or thinking aloud, says, in a low voice: “Feet. Plural, you know.”

The cowering that come upon him when he was spurned by all eyes, added to his being beneath contempt, was sufficient punishment for a cove so grovelling. In the midst of a silence rendered more impressive by the turned-up female noses with which it was pervaded, Our Missis went on:

“Shall I be believed when I tell you, that no sooner had I landed,” this word with a killing look at Sniff, “on that treacherous shore, than I was ushered into a Refreshment Room where there were—I do not exaggerate—actually eatable things to eat?”

A groan burst from the ladies. I not only did myself the honour of jining, but also of lengthening it out.

“Where there were,” Our Missis added, “not only eatable things to eat, but also drinkable things to drink?”

A murmur, swelling almost into a scream, ariz. Miss Piff, trembling with indignation, called out, “Name?”

“I will name,” said Our Missis. “There was roast fowls, hot and cold; there was smoking roast veal surrounded with browned potatoes; there was hot soup with (again I ask shall I be credited?) nothing bitter in it, and no flour to choke off the consumer; there was a variety of cold dishes set off with jelly; there was salad; there was—mark me! fresh pastry, and that of a light construction; there was a luscious show of fruit; there was bottles and decanters of sound small wine, of every size, and adapted to every pocket; the same odious statement will apply to brandy; and these were set out upon the counter so that all could help themselves.”

Our Missis’s lips so quivered, that Mrs. Sniff, though scarcely less convulsed than she were, got up and held the tumbler to them.

“This,” proceeds Our Missis, “was my first unconstitutional experience. Well would it have been if it had been my last and worst. But no. As I proceeded farther into that enslaved and ignorant land, its aspect became more hideous. I need not explain to this assembly the ingredients and formation of the British Refreshment sangwich?”

Universal laughter,—except from Sniff, who, as sangwich-cutter, shook his head in a state of the utmost dejection as he stood with it agin the wall.

“Well!” said Our Missis, with dilated nostrils. “Take a fresh, crisp, long, crusty penny loaf made of the whitest and best flour. Cut it longwise through the middle. Insert a fair and nicely fitting slice of ham. Tie a smart piece of ribbon round the middle of the whole to bind it together. Add at one end a neat wrapper of clean white paper by which to hold it. And the universal French Refreshment sangwich busts on your disgusted vision.”

A cry of “Shame!” from all—except Sniff, which rubbed his stomach with a soothing hand.

“I need not,” said Our Missis, “explain to this assembly the usual formation and fitting of the British Refreshment Room?”

No, no, and laughter. Sniff agin shaking his head in low spirits agin the wall.

“Well,” said Our Missis, “what would you say to a general decoration of everythink, to hangings (sometimes elegant), to easy velvet furniture, to abundance of little tables, to abundance of little seats, to brisk bright waiters, to great convenience, to a pervading cleanliness and tastefulness positively addressing the public, and making the Beast thinking itself worth the pains?”

Contemptuous fury on the part of all the ladies. Mrs. Sniff looking as if she wanted somebody to hold her, and everbody else looking as if they’d rayther not.

“Three times,” said Our Missis, working herself into a truly terrimenjious state,—“three times did I see these shameful things, only between the coast and Paris, and not counting either: at Hazebroucke, at Arras, at Amiens. But worse remains. Tell me, what would you call a person who should propose in England that there should be kept, say at our own model Mugby Junction, pretty baskets, each holding an assorted cold lunch and dessert for one, each at a certain fixed price, and each within a passenger’s power to take away, to empty in the carriage at perfect leisure, and to return at another station fifty or a hundred miles farther on?”

There was disagreement what such a person should be called. Whether revolutionise, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: “A malignant maniac!”

“I adopt,” says Our Missis, “the brand set upon such a person by the righteous indignation of my friend Miss Piff. A malignant maniac. Know, then, that that malignant maniac has sprung from the congenial soil of France, and that his malignant madness was in unchecked action on this same part of my journey.”

I noticed that Sniff was a-rubbing his hands, and that Mrs. Sniff had got her eye upon him. But I did not take more particular notice, owing to the excited state in which the young ladies was, and to feeling myself called upon to keep it up with a howl.

“On my experience south of Paris,” said Our Missis, in a deep tone, “I will not expatiate. Too loathsome were the task! But fancy this. Fancy a guard coming round, with the train at full speed, to inquire how many for dinner. Fancy his telegraphing forward the number of dinners. Fancy every one expected, and the table elegantly laid for the complete party. Fancy a charming dinner, in a charming room, and the head-cook, concerned for the honour of every dish, superintending in his clean white jacket and cap. Fancy the Beast travelling six hundred miles on end, very fast, and with great punctuality, yet being taught to expect all this to be done for it!”

A spirited chorus of “The Beast!”

I noticed that Sniff was agin a-rubbing his stomach with a soothing hand, and that he had drored up one leg. But agin I didn’t take particular notice, looking on myself as called upon to stimulate public feeling. It being a lark besides.

“Putting everything together,” said Our Missis, “French Refreshmenting comes to this, and oh, it comes to a nice total! First: eatable things to eat, and drinkable things to drink.”

A groan from the young ladies, kep’ up by me.

“Second: convenience, and even elegance.”

Another groan from the young ladies, kep’ up by me.

“Third: moderate charges.”

This time a groan from me, kep’ up by the young ladies.

“Fourth:—and here,” says Our Missis, “I claim your angriest sympathy,—attention, common civility, nay, even politeness!”

Me and the young ladies regularly raging mad all together.

“And I cannot in conclusion,” says Our Missis, with her spitefullest sneer, “give you a completer pictur of that despicable nation (after what I have related), than assuring you that they wouldn’t bear our constitutional ways and noble independence at Mugby Junction, for a single month, and that they would turn us to the right-about and put another system in our places, as soon as look at us; perhaps sooner, for I do not believe they have the good taste to care to look at us twice.”

The swelling tumult was arrested in its rise. Sniff, bore away by his servile disposition, had drored up his leg with a higher and a higher relish, and was now discovered to be waving his corkscrew over his head. It was at this moment that Mrs. Sniff, who had kep’ her eye upon him like the fabled obelisk, descended on her victim. Our Missis followed them both out, and cries was heard in the sawdust department.

You come into the Down Refreshment Room, at the Junction, making believe you don’t know me, and I’ll pint you out with my right thumb over my shoulder which is Our Missis, and which is Miss Whiff, and which is Miss Piff, and which is Mrs. Sniff. But you won’t get a chance to see Sniff, because he disappeared that night. Whether he perished, tore to pieces, I cannot say; but his corkscrew alone remains, to bear witness to the servility of his disposition.

Life is a seesaw ride

2011-07-27T16:18:00.000+01:00

So I am 40 today. People have helpfully asked if that is my waist measurement or suggested that I have in fact been 40 since I was 19. I don't feel much different than I did ten years ago - albeit thicker round the middle and even thinner on top maybe.

The whole 'middle-age' thing can be very literal - I could well be half way through my life, this year could be the pivot around which things rotate. Certainly, this year so far has felt pivotal and seen the extreme ups and downs of life's seesaw ride.

Fran and I are overjoyed that her pregnancy is going well so far. This is a huge high after the low of miscarriage in the Spring. We hope to have our first child just before Xmas just after we move into a new house. We are delighted by the good wishes people send.

In the last few weeks though we have been coming to terms with my Mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer. My beloved Mother is the very embodiment of vitality, determination, love and kindness. She is a fizzing bundle of energy who lightens every room she enters. My father's tragic, sudden early death means I literally owe her everything. Outwardly she still appears remarkably well. She has fought off cancer six times in the last 20 years. I am enormously grateful to family, friends, colleagues even clients who have been so supportive over the turbulent last few weeks as we have ploughed through the awful diagnosis period.

We now know what confronts us and are resolute on the course we have set. Mother starts palliative chemotherapy in a couple of days. It's a terrible shock but our small family beset by so many untimely deaths over the years is rallying together. The tragedies we have confronted together have made us strong.

Sadly of course these things don't balance each other out, but mean much up and down, like a seesaw on its pivot. But with the support of some wonderful people, life goes on.

Calm Club - self organised, accessible mindfulness meditation groups at work

2011-04-21T08:57:00.003+01:00

A colleague, noticing a line of people outside an office recently told me 'it [was] great that smokers got to stand outside and stare into the distance for a while'. This brought home to me that almost the only way you can get some calm time in the office is to take up a habit likely to kill you. For a while I've been toying with the idea of a self organised 'Calm Club' that anyone could run in their workplace, supported by a central website with basic materials.

Calm Club is simply a way of getting people together to take a short focused break in the middle of the day in their place of work or study. It is a self organised guided meditation/mindfulness session. A Calm Club website would provide basic branded materials to help people organise a short group meditation in a meeting room at work. The online resources would explain the concept simply, provides some customisable pdf flyers, an eventbrite style meeting organiser, basic tips and simple script for organising a group session and some short guiding podcasts to download and play to the group. The podcasts would be tailored versions of mindfulness guided meditation CDs such these by Reinhard Kowalski a consultant clinical psychologist in the NHS.

So if you want to organise a Calm Club at your workplace, you would:

Book a quiet meeting room and use either the calm club website or your office meeting system to invite people. Maybe stick some Calm Club flyers from the website on the notice board in the coffee area. Send text from the website to interested people.
Download the podcast to your player, print off the one-sider script and a Calm Club Do Not Disturb sign from the website. Find some speakers for your ipod/mp3player.
Set up the room by partially drawing any blinds or turning down the lights
Invite people to sit comfortably
Stick the sign on the door
Ask for silence for 30 seconds. Run through the script. Play the podcast for say 15 minutes
Go back to your desk refreshed.

In the tradition of the yoga movement Calm Club would be run on a not for profit basis with a strong self organised bottom up ethos. Calm Club should be free of religious, mystic or commercial influences in and around the Calm Club session. There are quite a few people out there offering workplace meditations but, the language around them can often be off putting to people who aren't familiar with meditation or eastern traditions. Calm Club or a similar brand could be more attractive to a sceptical Anglo Saxon office worker in the spirit of 'Keep Calm and Carry On'.

I came up with the idea of a Calm Club during a course with Reinhard Kowalski in 2009 and have been kicking it around in a sporadic email exchange with Reinhard and Andy Gibson for ages. But we’ve all been too busy to get Calm Club off the ground. I've finally got around to writing about it, prompted in part by the happiness agenda in the UK. But also aware that several things come together to make this happen.

Employers are starting to understand that they may be liable for long term mental health issues if they don’t help their staff manage stress - eg law firms, management consultancies, call centres
The understanding that stress can be or managed tackled through non pharmceutical interventions
Mindfulness is accepted in the NHS on the last course of Reinhards I attended only two of us were non-NHS professionals
The web is good now at organising meetings and spreading the word
Work-based groups such as book groups are increasingly popular
It’s easy now to download a podcast and play it
Meditation is considered slightly less weird than it was
There’s a lot of interest in happiness now which embraces mindfulness
Some sporting role models such as Ryan Giggs and Jonny Wilkinson and sports coaches are open about the benefits of meditation, yoga and a mindful approach
The whole thing could be done very cheaply if people give materials to a movement.

So all this is a bit rough - it may be that someone has already come up with this (i usually find that Geoff Mulgan has) or that there is a similar movement in California or that I am missing some huge things here or that I am just a stupid hippy. Can you help me make this idea better and bring Calm Club into existence?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Talking about our miscarriage

2011-02-23T10:04:00.000Z

Recently Fran’s pregnancy miscarried. We were both stunned, shocked, upset. We found it hard to talk about at first. Especially, as we’d been looking forward to telling all our friends the good news about the pregnancy in a few weeks. As we tentatively spoke to friends and colleagues we were struck by how many had suffered and the raw numbers that about 25% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. But that they hadn’t talked about it. Google took us to the Miscarriage Association website and their video and guides for mothers and fathers. We are concerned that people aren't supported to talk about miscarriage.

So we thought that we would break our normal silence online about our private life together with this blog post. We have also made a substantial donation to the Miscarriage Association, a small charity that does important work helping people with the awful experience. We would like to encourage others to do the same – to feel able to talk about their experience and to help support this important charity.

Fran and William Perrin

The Indigo Trust - trustee

2010-12-12T21:42:00.000Z

I was delighted recently to join my wife Fran as a trustee of The Indigo Trust. Indigo is a grant making charitable trust established around ten years ago.
The trustees are refocusing Indigo on issues of information inequality and literacy in the developing world, particularly Africa. Fran and I are motivated by our work on transparency in the UK, which began with the Power of Information report in 2007. Several good things came out of this report, not least of which was our marriage.
An early priority will be on the use of information technology to improve political and donor transparency in Africa and to help people communicate. We believe that transparency leads to better government and that modern, simple information tools can play a powerful role in that. We want to support people in Africa who share this belief.
The rapid increase in bandwidth available in many African countries as new transoceanic fibres go live enables access to previously unavailable web services, albeit to a small proportion of the population.
Dr Loren Treisman joined Indigo as a executive a few months ago and we have recently made our first grants.

Westminster commercial noise map - experiment with Google Fusion Tables

2010-08-29T18:45:00.008+01:00

I want to produce maps from a set of government data for my local website. But I don't write code and don't think I should have to. So I am experimenting with simple ways of producing a map from a real data set. First off Google Fusion Tables.

Noise is a big problem in an urban area and Westminster City Council has published via FOI a list of commercial noise complaints with approximate locations (they take the street numbers off for some reason). It's at Whatdotheyknow.com I downloaded the spreadsheet of data and tidied it up a tiny bit, putting the word 'London' where it was missing from each address field.

Then i uploaded it to Google Docs and imported it into Google Fusion Tables a Google Labs product that has been around for a year. I hit Edit, Modify Columns to tell the sheet what was in each column and then I hit the Visualize menu and selected - Map. The following emerged, just like that:

There's a small snag for me - I couldn't figure out how to configure the simple weblink to show a particular level of zoom in a map. If you get an embeddable link then this will give you zoom control - but you can't use iframes in wordpress.com the popular publishing platform. There is a KML option but practically no corporate desktops nor government departments run google earth - this diminishes the use of the data to achive social impact.

Pretty good all in all - quick and simple with no techno stuff, the help page was useful. It isn't perfect, but it's easy. If you can use a spreadsheet you can take some real public data and make a map to make a point. Any suggestions for other visualisation services i could try with no coding required are welcome.

UPDATE
This small post was just done for my own benefit and i wasn't expecting it to get the traffic it has. If you have suddenly landed here from the Guardian or elsewhere then you should know that I run a small business, talk about local with 4IP and Screen West Midlands funding to help people get a voice online. I am also on the Local Public Data panel for CLG to advise them on freeing up data from local government. If you are reading this from Google and also hadn't heard of Fusion Tables then feel free to send me some corporate bumf for the free publicity - some cupcakes maybe or a fetching jacket (XL).

Towards an open, transparent BBC - publishing in detail its mainstream expenditure #opendata

2010-07-01T06:39:00.006+01:00

Today the BBC Trust announced that it wants the coporation to publish the pay of its top stars. This follows on from publication of the pay and expenses of senior executives. Publishing executive pay does not seem to have damaged the BBC's ability to function as a business. Publishing stars' pay is also unlikely to damage the BBC. I wonder if it is time to go further and make the BBC much more open - apply some of the open data work being done in central and local government to this £3billion per annum, tax payer funded organisation while protecting its journalistic independence.

The BBC is a fabulous national institution. It is funded by what is known as a regressive tax - a fixed charge on every person or business that owns a television set. For ante diluvian reasons the tax is a called a 'licence fee'. The poorer you are the greater the proportion of your income goes on the tax. To my mind, this places a strong moral obligation on the BBC to be prudent and transparent in expenditure, especially in such tough economic times.

Michael Lyons the Chair of the BBC Trust tackles this in his speech:

"there are distinct areas where further change – and acceleration of change - is needed. First: to demonstrate that every pound the BBC takes from licence fee payers is used well....To the public the BBC can appear spendthrift when it is unclear how the BBC is using the money the public gives it. This underlines the need for much greater financial control and transparency by the BBC.

...The answer lies in much more openness by the BBC. Openness about how it's spending the public's money

Due to the way it is funded the BBC has a direct responsibility to licence fee payers who are effectively its shareholders. This goes beyond the obligations that commercial companies have towards investors and is different from the relationship that other parts of the public sector have with tax payers.

The third area where we are asking the BBC to go the extra mile is in increased transparency over how the BBC spends the public's money."

Michael Lyons says that the BBC can appear spendthrift when it is unclear how it spends its money. The answer for Michael Lyons is to follow the open data movement that is starting to bring transparency to government. This would involve systematic publishing of detailed items of expenditure on the internet for others to analyse. We would then know precisely how our money is being spent. And it might even help the market for goods and services in TV to work better and drive out further value. It also gives a voice to the listener and viewer - if I want the BBC to spend more on local radio in my area it is very hard to campaign for that if i don't know what it actually spends.

Publishing data can be done safely and responsibly. As a member of the Local Public Data Panel I helped draft guidance for Local Government on how they could publish detailed expenditure on goods and services over £500. These offer a handy, adaptable framework. The BBC I suspect is not short of accountants, expenditure managment systems and technologists who can help prepare and publish the data.

To safeguard genuine journalistic independence, simple circles could be drawn around the new, current affairs etc, bring out into the open all expenditure on goods and services. There would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth about where the boundaries lie between news/current affairs and the rest. But that doesn't stop anyone publishing the budget and expenditure of Bargain Hunt, Dog Borstal or Doctor Who or the accounts department next week.

There will be confidentiality clauses in contracts - lawyers love those even when you are only contracting for a whelk stall. But, as the Chairman set out, there is a strong public interest case. Indeed elsewhere in the publicly funded sector, the Information Commissioner has been quite clear about the relative importance of the public interest viz a viz commerical confidentiality.

The new government has said that it would bring the National Audit Office in to audit the BBC and Michael Lyons tackles this in his speech. The NAO faces a huge task - publishing detailed expenditure data and bringing many eyes to bear on the problem might help that.

Declaration: I speak occasionally on media issues and was on the panel appointed by the last government to advise on the Independently Financed News Consortia. When in the civil service, in the diatant past I used to work on media regulation. I now run a company called talk about local that helps people in deprived communities find a voice online. This article is my own personal view and does not represent the views of employers or clients past or present.

Preserving our computer game history

2010-02-19T18:49:00.005Z

I recently stumbled across the national videogame archive at Nottingham Trent (when i was researching a post on why we shoudl have one....). In the 1980s for many young men like me Elite, Zalaga, Frak, Uridium, Head Over Heels and Zynaps were more important than music. They consumed hundreds, possibly thousands of hours of my leisure time. For today’s young gamers immersive console based games and online MMORPG environments are even more significant. In the 1980s the UK had a glorious indigenous computer games industry. Tiny businesses produced wonderful games that were a joy to play and remain a remarkable display of craft on low power eight bit platforms. Today, the British games industry is different but going from strength to strength.

Computer gaming only entered popular culture in the 1980s and yet within a generation the UK was spending more on games than on going to the cinema. This is a cultural impact as profound as rock and roll. Substantial resources are devoted to film preservation at academic and cultural institutions. The British Library, in its wonderful but little known Ritblat Gallery has an exhibit of the original hand written lyrics for great Beatles songs on menus and in school exercise books. Such ephemera could easily have been lost and we would have been poorer for that.For me at least the early history of the games movement is as important as popular music history.

As a society we should seek to preserve early British game artefacts now, before they are lost – and in some cases while you can still buy them at car boot sales. Yes i can play spectrum games on an emulator but that doesn’t preserve the intriguing part of the cultural context – the delivery media and the media used in production.

I was delighted to find that Nottingham Trent has in the last year or so started up a collection with the National Media Museum to gather artefacts. Sadly there isn't a permanent exhibition yet - it's the kind of thing that would go really well at the Science Museum. Am keeping an eye out for their next travelling show. Although i find that almost no one has ever heard of it. Am gutted to have missed their 25 years of Elite celebration i can still remember unboxing my copy for the Electron. Let's hope this doesn't get caught up in any future cuts.

NHS World Service

2009-11-18T08:00:00.004Z

Making the UK government's ambitions for free data real requires simple demonstrations of what can be done to help citizens. Attending the launch event yesterday at Downing Street I was reminded of a proof of concept I did a year or so ago to free up the government's excellent, unbiased health advice online.

The web is awash with health care information but it can be hard to work out what to trust - did this piece of advice come from a drug company, was it influenced by a crazy politician or by an insurance company or religious group? The UK is very lucky to have the huge and expensive resource of NHS Direct online that does a good job of providing unbiased free health advice to all comers on the internet. But if you aren't from the UK you won't have heard of it. Even though there is a fair bit of non-English language content.

I mashed NHS Direct up with elements of the BBC World Service model to ask if developing countries would find the NHS Direct data set useful to repurpose in their own cultural context, rather then write their own, or worse still buy it from a big consultancy or drugs company with a world Bank grant. The idea got a good wind inside Whitehall but couldn't find a neat home to implement.

Gary Ashby of NHS Choices was at the Downing Street event too - he tells me that they are already working with Kenya to do something like this - so with his permission and to get a debate going, I publish the internal slides here. The slides are not a statement of policy, they are/were a discussion paper and are Crown Copyright, allowing you to reuse them freely.

NHS World Service

View more presentations from william perrin.

Citizens empowered by information

2009-07-16T11:44:00.005+01:00

The new Cabinet Office survey of public service best practice has a strong power of information theme.

In late 2006 I was in the Cabinet Office trying to work out how the new wave of web2.0 activity applied to government. Since 2004 I had been working with what became the mysociety collective. Although never a paid up member of mysociety, I would often find myself as the link between external disruptive innovation and internal discomfort as i reassured civil servants who were suddenly victim of unplanned innovation. I followed closely all the other stuff mysociety got up to.

By 2006 it was clear that the new web technologies were becoming pervasive - not just a spot effect, but a more profound wave of change. Opportunities lay not only in reusing public information, but also in working with information people themselves were creating. We could see very large groups emerging online debating public policy issues such as childcare for instance. Hilary Armstrong MP the then Cabinet Office Minister and a former social worker could see how groups like netmums were enormously helpful to parents and rightsnet to social workers and benefits advisors.

So with David Halpern in the Strategy Unit, backed by Andrew Stott now Director Digtial Engagement and John Suffolk the UK Government CIO we commissioned the Power of Information Review for Hilary Armstrong to work out what this was about. Lots of work has flowed from Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo's original report.

Cabinet Office Strategy Unit have today published a global survey of best practice in using information along the POI lines. The chapter on empowering citizens in the information age is an interesting round up of what is going on. The conclusion is good:

New technologies are providing opportunities to open up information as never before. Governments around the world are responding to this technological revolution by re-evaluating the approach they take to information transparency. The shift required, however, is more than just a technical one. The starting point for government in countries such as the USA, which are at the leading edge of information transparency, is that government information should be in the public domain and easily available for use and re-use by citizens. This approach is underpinned by freedom of information legislation and practices which actively promote openness in government. Across other countries, government cultures will similarly need to change, possibly prompted by changes in legislation.

The final sentence is the important thing- the real benefits of the power of information require culture change, not actually legislation, nor even much money. To get this culture change political leadership is vital, but so is administrative leadership by the civil service cadres. Financial incentives always help of course. The technology community can support this if they keep showing directly what the potential is with clear vivid examples that relate to public service goals.

An open, digital Iraq inquiry

2009-07-09T23:23:00.007+01:00

Lord Hutton's 2003/4 inquiry in the death of David Kelly was a model of open-ness and transparency, unusual in Britain at that time. Freedom of Information is still in its early days in Britain and daily transcripts live video, documents made avialble online were a novelty in 2003. The 2004 Butler Review into the intelligence failures around Iraqi WMD was a secretive affair, in part because it dealt with intelligence. Sir John Chilcot, head of the new Iraq inquiry served on the Butler review.

The Iraq inquiry has already got into a dispute over secrecy and open-ness. It seems to his credit that Sir John is pro-openness where possible. How could his new Iraq inquiry use modern online methods to better Lord Hutton and become a model for digital transparency?

COI and the Government's Director of Digital Engagement are already no doubt advising the new Inquiry Secretary, Margaret Aldred on an approach. HMSO who handled the MPs expenses publication and redaction will also be in the loop I guess. But I thought it would be interesting to try a Blackhall approach and bring many external minds to bear. Blackhall is a metonym for a Whitehall that embraces modern collaborative working tools and greater transparency see this post, slides and a paper on Blackhall.

This post is inspired by Sir Tim Berners Lee's recent note on publishing government data and my late night experience of marking up my MPs expenses on the Guardian's superb crowdsourced expenses website.

Some of the following might sound a bit 'techy' or complicated to the uninitiated. It is just good practice and low cost to implement. In many cases small up front investments bring large downstream benefits and cost savings.

Documents

The Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office are good at paper trails in making decisions. There will no doubt be very large quantities of documents for the inquiry. The Scott inquiry into arms to Iraq received 130,000 documents. There will, quite rightly, be some redaction of names and posts to protect people. Redaction is usually done manually with a marker pen and the document rescanned and pdf'd or in som cases TIFFed. So you can't tell by looking at the electronic file what is in it without reading it. A search engine can't penetrate the innards of the scanned pdf. The same applies to any document that has been scanned to a pdf. For people going through huge numbers of pdfs this electronic opacity slows things down enormously and adds to expense, cost and frustration for all concerned.

A tiny investment as the documents are sent by departments to the inquiry would work wonders. It is possible to put electronic labels or 'tags' on the documents so that computers and search engines can tell what is in them without having a human to read. This information about what is in a document is known as 'metadata'. Books have metadata - the index, ISBN number, title etc that make them easier to use - electronic documents have something similar that you can't see but the computer can when say you are searching for it.

Metadata, like making dictionaries is dull work. But the inquiry can insist on the format of information sent to it electronically. If it were to ask for basic metadata in each document it would greatly speed their prioritisation and later re examination. What metadata should be in each file?

Date of origination
for a communication, name from
name to
title of document as written
place of origination
keywords that describe content, including names of units, people mentioned etc
if map or image description of what it is representation of
any unique reference number in the original document
reference number for department sending to inquiry
inquiry reference number

In the Hutton inquiry the secretariat used the time honoured civil service technique of giving each pdf document a file name composed of the inquiry's reference number. This method is primitve and only helps the inquiry, not others.

Metadata tagging by the originator transfers cost and man hours from the inquiry team and the general public back onto the Departmental originators. Which is only right. It is an investment in transparency, democracy and openness.

The inquiry's log of documents and reference numbers should be live online

Website principles

The inquiry will have a website. What are some basic tenets it could follow to be fully open and electronically transparent?

The inquiry should procure the servcies of a competent technical advisor with proven track record in reusing information online or publishing it for reuse (not me - i am not technical enough). And perhaps assemble an informal bunch of online publishing advisors.

The inquiry should assume that interesting things will be done with the information they publish off their website by independents. And design the site accordingly following the principles of the Power of Information Taskforce report. See for instance They Work for You or the Guardian crowd sourcing of MPs expenses.

All documents, maps, images, transcripts, audio and video should be on the inquiry website as soon as they are received or created. This would be different from the Hutton inquiry where only documents used by Counsel were published. There would be some exemptions for legal correspondence.

Documents should be put online with a unique static URI/URL (or the site should in general follow RESTful principles). This means people can easily link to and reuse information.

Documents should record how many times that have been viewed and in particular be marked as not viewed if no one has looked at them.

The site should be archived to the highest standards by National Archives so that it does not disappear and its collection is held together in perpetuity. The Hutton inquiry site is archived in full.

It should not be acceptable for departments to publish evidence documents on their websites alone where there is a greater risk of links disappearing, especially with an election due in the near future which always causes disruption to departmental sites.

Google site search should run on the site (pay Google $2000 to remove adverts) not a bespoke search engine nor google enterprise box.

Documents being discussed by the inquiry on a particular day in open session should be brought to the front of the website and associated with the witnesses that day.

The site should either be designed for low bandwidth connections or have a 'low graphics' option so that it can easily be seen by people in Iraq who may have slow internet connections or older computers and browsers.

The inquiry should consider funding an Iraqi internet service provider to cache or mirror all its material locally in Iraq.

Some sort of simple API should be provided to let third parties reuse the information on the site

All material published should be free of copyright or under a permissive creative commons licence.

Video/Audio

The video stream from the inquiry should be declared to be free of copyright and for anyone to reuse. The video stream should be stored online for people to search through. Each change of speaker should be tagged in the video stream.

The time clock on the video stream should be synchronised carefully with the time stamp in the written record so the two can be matched up. (Hansard time stamps for instance are out of synch with the parliamentary video causing problems for reusers).

Audio should be treated in the same way as video. This is especially for countries such as Iraq where the bandwidth may not be available to view video easily.

Conclusion

This post has probably only scratched the surface and i may well have got some things wrong. Let me know in the comments how you could improve this.

Comments are moderated to be on topic, polite, free of conspiracy theories, sane, in english and playing the ball, not the man etc.

Declaration - I used to work for the UK government, but not on Iraq issues. This post is in an entirely personal capacity and does not represent the view of my former employers. My career details can be found on Linked In. I am currently on sabbatical running a hyperlocal startup Talk About Local.

'Blackhall' - collaborative working in Whitehall

2009-07-02T20:24:00.012+01:00

At last year’s Civil Service Live I gave talks to about 150 people on modern ways of working in the civil service. Alex Allan, a long term champion of modernisation sponsored and chaired the sessions. It was great fun to do some free thinking on how we could work differently in what is arguably Britain’s biggest knowledge factory. In the spirit of the event I published the slides which have been viewed nearly 1,000 times. There was a strongly positive reaction from our audience, mostly front line workers who complained of ‘death by email’ and were passionate that ‘there must be a better way’.

The feedback from Civil Service Live, inspired me to set out a knowledge working vision for Whitehall – ‘Blackhall’ a ‘universe like ours but different in many ways’. With Alex's explicit permission I am publishing the Blackhall internal paper here in advance of Civil Service Live 2009 where we are taking part in a session on 'Digital Engagement' at 1115 on Wednesday 8 July at Olympia. (The paper has typos etc in it - please let me know of errors or omissions i will republish a commentable version when I have time.)

The Blackhall paper asks whether there is a cheaper, quicker, greener, better version of policy making and administration if modern ways of working are adopted in the civil service. Things like the ability to 'Google' filesystems across Departmental boundaries, fully flexible place independent working, transparent online diaries, the ability to find people with the right experience using internal directories similar to Facebook etc etc.

The Blackhall I describe is powered by a pervasive electronic working environment of the sort that you can create yourself in a low security way using free web tools. Or that is found, more securely and expensively in some knowledge businesses. It is common to see people arriving from say a management consultancy in the civil service who are baffled as to why they can't work as flexibly as they are used to. The day one experience of the Obama's Whitehouse team was instructive- 'It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari'. Whitehall though is better than the Bush Whitehouse.

Since I wrote the paper, some excellent work has been done to create a secure internal civil service wiki 'Civilwiki' - 'Blackhall' was the first substantive article and is in the top ten. And the philosophy behind the Public Sector Flex desktop is the right direction of travel.

A big obstacle to pervasive knowledge environments in Whitehall has been, historically security. Central government faces some eye watering IT and other security challenges that the private sector does not. But for the security community to manage these risks, which with great skill they often can do, a coherent vision is needed. Given Alex Allan's role in the security apparatus I am always heartened that he backs this vision. To get Blackhall across I have been asked to speak at IA09 the big government security conference.

Political leaders seem to be heading in this direction.

Tom Watson MP, when cabinet office minister said in a speech at IPPR that:

‘the policy process is a bit like building a Morgan in Malvern: a handful of people taking years to create a beautiful, hand-crafted model…but surely the future is to be more like a Toyota made in Derby, modern tools, modern processes, high-speed development and delivery.'

Adam Afriyie MP who speak for the Conservatives on new technologies said recently that new technologies:

"will make the man in Whitehall redundant". He said a Conservative government was committed to using technology to give people more power over their lives and to scrutinise and choose public services.....Do we embrace the new culture of openness, transparency and interactivity? Do we respond as if we, too, were 'born digital'? Or do we stick with the same clumsy, controlling tactics of a tired political system?"

George Osborne MP said in a newspaper diary that:
‘David Cameron and I meet…..the founders of Google and two of the most creative people I've come across. We talk about the contrast between their world and the world of government, stuck as too much of it is in a bygone bureaucratic age’. Observer 25th May 2008

I'd be interested to know what people think of 'Blackhall' - is it something worth pursuing, or are the old ways best? Can the security risks be managed? What are the obstacles? Who should lead this change? Is it something the Institute for Government should look at in their work on transition or the National School of Government? Are your knowledge tools better at work or at home? Have you got some great examples of modern knowledge working or some bygone practices you could change?

If you are a civil servant and want guidance on commenting in public then there is simple guidance here.

Disclaimer: the above is expressed in a personal capacity and does not reflect the view of the government nor the cabinet office. William Perrin is on sabbatical/special leave from the Cabinet Office running a community empowerment project Talk About Local.

Audience and cost curves - some dull micro economics

2009-06-10T13:15:00.005+01:00

Pete Ashton has an interesting post about the changes in the distribution of media audiences. He essentially presents a flattened power curve for the relationship between audience reach and size of media outlet. The curve shape he says has changed from a teepee to a yurt. This can be expressed another way as above - illustrating that, as well as Pete's point, for the first time high reach options are available at low to zero cash cost. Old media retains the very high fixed costs (print, distribution, broadcast, transmission, legacy penions etc) making them vulnerable to market entrants with low to nil fixed costs and thus more flexibility.

I shall write more on this and the implications for the changing costs of engagement in due course.

Tom Watson MP - making leviathan twitter

2009-06-03T15:32:00.006+01:00

In the UK, the dialogue between a government minister and their civil servants takes place behind a screen, like any good professional relationship. Exchanges are relatively stylised and formal as one might expect and some might hope. Social media in government makes that dialogue occasionally break out into public when you are least expecting it.

The recent coverage of Tom Watson reminded me of this unexpected public exchange when I was working on the Power Of Information work in the Cabinet Office. It is hard to explain to those outside the system how odd it is to see 'your Minister' suddenly popping up replying to your tweet about the work you are doing for him.

As one of the people behind the power of information work I am all for this sort of thing, but it isn't everyone's cup of tea.

Goat Carter - can Lord Carter bring free, simple wifi to the great British greasy spoon?

2009-04-03T19:40:00.011+01:00

These happy goats in Argentina are on an isolated farm about 50 miles from Salta. The Santa Anita goat farm has a little cafe and is in the middle of nowhere on the route to the fabulous Calchaqui Valleys. The goats look happy in part because they have free wifi, so does anyone who stops off there for a cup of tea or some cheese. Like dozens of simple cafes and restaurants I visted in Argentina the cafe probably plugged in a simple wirelss router to its Telfonica Argentina broadband and provides the wifi key to his visitors.

In Britain it is a rarity for an independent cafe to do this. If you want casual, simple access to wifi to check an email, using your bargain netbook or phone then the outlook in Britain's cities is poor. Even London's West End is a free broadband desert. To my mind in a successful knowledge society, bandwidth should be plentiful enough to give some away around the edges. When you speak to foreign visitors or travel a lot outside Europe it is clear that Britain has an uncompetitive position in casual, easy, free broadband access in cafes, hotels or popular public spaces. The contrast with the USA is stark, but also with far less devleoped nations like Argentina. This seems bad for a knowledge society.

But why do so few independent cafes and hardly any of the the great British greasy spoons have free wifi for their customers? It should be there like salt, sugar, ketchup and brown sauce on the table.

The economics should be straightforward - the greasy spoon's bandwidth isn't constantly being used, the cafe owner will often pay a flat tariff so why shouldn't s/he give away bandwidth at marginal cost (ie zero) to his customers? If you want quick and simple access over a coffee or in a public space it should be free. But if you want to start filesharing video say, then you should pay for it. And public authorities should not be leading in this provision - the private service sector should be there providing this trivial service to its customers on the premesis.

In major cities there are paid for wifi services provided by say The Cloud and or BT Openzone. But they are expensive and erratic in coverage, despite their PR. This reflects a simple cost equation - it is expensive to roll a city wide network and not many people use it, compared to say a mobile phone network. Pret and Mcdonalds are belatedly starting to roll free wifi for customers but they are big corporates and indeed you have to ask why they didn't do this years ago. You can get a 3G dongle, but again it isn't cheap and requires some forethought.

The roots of this must go back to the bad old days of broadband in the UK. When broadband was in short supply in 2001ish, a rather paranoid BT was worried it would lose customers to folk sharing their broadband connection with neighbouring homes and businesses. The small print in the standard BT broadband contracts (that were resold by third parties like Tiscali etc) prohibited you from reselling or sharing your connection. A lot of campaigners were unhappy about this, but the contracts persisted for years. From a regulatory perspective, the micro economics of this seem suspect to me given what was then BT wholesale's position in the market. Only in the last few weeks has BT come out with an notionally free hotspot product for businesses to provide to their customers although still attached to the Openzone kit.

Now that almost every business that wants it can have broadband why can't the big telcos let go a little around the edges and create permissive sharing standard terms for SME and domestic broadband contracts? Indeed 'share it' is the best answer to the puzzling question of what to do with your very own 50MB connection.

So for Lord Carter is there an opportunity to bring broadband to the greasy spoon? Can the Carter work bring about a culture change amongst the telcos to encourage free wifi in cafes? If goats in Argentina have free cafe wifi, in a developing country with a rolling economic crisis, then why doesn't my greasy spoon? There must be over 100,000 small cafes in Britain - imagine bringing simple free wifi to that many high street outlets - it would palpably change the feel of our knowledge society.

I'd love to know the real answer to all this. Is this something OFCOM has looked at? Is Carter working on it ? Let me know in the comments (moderated - no abuse, rudeness, swearing pls).

Disclaimer - this piece is written in a purely personal capacity (after the theft of my 3G mobile force me to explore the high street wifi scene) and does not reflect the views of any organsiation I may have worked for.

Rootkit destroyed my evening

2009-03-31T22:08:00.002+01:00

So i spent this evening extracting a rootkit from my samsung nc10 - first i knew about it was when clicking on google search results, weird ad pages sprang up. Installed AVG wouldn't touch it. So i tried to install superantispyware, but it wouldn't install. then malwarebytes, which also wouldn't install. Both were blocked by the malware. AVG was also behaving strangely.

It was only RootRepeal that saved me, finding the hidden rootkit

>>Name: UACyxxtjwqc.sys
Image Path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\UACyxxtjwqc.sys
Address: 0xF70D3000 Size: 77824 File Visible: -
Status: Hidden from Windows API!

Wiping this then allowed malwarebytes to tackle the other 15 problems and get the machine back under control.

About three hours on this on top of an hour on the phone with Vodafone customer service as they managed to get my address wrong and i bounced around between various hapless contact centre people trying to claim for my phone lost in Brazil......

Why this blog

2009-03-21T14:45:00.001Z

There are some things I want to publish for discussion that don't fit into my other websites – the Kings Cross family and Talk About Local.

I also want to check out the Blogger service and to understand why so many web peoepl i know mutter darkly about it - can't be that bad?