richardbrunton:BLOG

My MP defends car owners' tax

My MP was talking in the Commons yesterday about the Government's rise in the tax for owning a car and tries to explain it away by saying that this is to persuade the car manufacturers to make efficient cars.

That's despite the fact that it's penalising the individual and not for mileage or emissions, but for actually owning the car and never even starting the engine.

Here's what he said in the Commons yesterday according to TheyWorkForYou

"The crux of the issue is how we encourage people to use less energy and motor manufacturers to produce more efficient cars."

Wait a minute, what would they care? We're the ones being penalised and we're the ones who already have bought and own the cars that we're being penalised for owning - not for running - so why is that hurting manufacturers?

Oh yes, I know, the next time we go to buy a car we'll look to a cheaper and more efficient one and that forces manufacturers to make them. Great.

In the meantime the Government are forcing me to throw my old vehicle away or try and sell it to a marketplace that doesn't want it anymore because it has been devalued overnight.

Do they think that I can just throw away all the money that I saved up for so long to buy the car in the first place and just buy a brand new fuel efficient model rolling off the manufacturer's production line into the showroom? How much money does the Government think I can waste - obviously a lot with their latest taxes for car ownership, and their instant devaluing of my vehicle.

Doesn't matter about any of this, or the fact that I have driven 10,500 miles in four years as he goes on to repeat Gordon Brown's message, from TheyWorkForYou:

"...the majority of motorists benefit or pay no more in vehicle excise duty as a result..."

Dream on Darling.

Nuclear dump for Edinburgh? - Labour's green nuclear

My local MP Alistair Darling looks like he'll be lobbying for a Nuclear Waste Dump in or around Edinburgh, or at least supporting it if he follows all of the Government's current policies for nuclear power.

Here's what he's been saying about nuclear power, typically falling within the Labour policy.

He said in the Commons yesterday (through TheyWorkForYou):

"I also believe that it is essential to replace our fleet of nuclear power stations."

So if he's a firm believer no doubt he'll be signing up to the Labour Government's policy of persuading local councils to place nuclear waste dumps in their area, and so does that mean we're getting one in Edinburgh West?

It goes back to my previous article on Labour's two-faced view of environmental issues. On one side saying that they need environmentally friendly and renewable energy very quickly, and on the other not pushing forward with them and wanting nuclear power stations instead.

I love how the connection between nuclear power and environmental power in this following comment he made yesterday, again from TheyWorkForYou, and this isn't a "get at Alistair Darling" article, because these are the things I'm hearing from our Government time and time again:

"One of the biggest threats that our economy and, as I said earlier, just about every other economy in the world faces is the high price of oil. I believe that that should act as an encouragement, a spur, to us to do more to generate our own electricity and to get our energy from non-carbon sources. That is important in terms not only of the environment but of security of supply."

No, nuclear power is not environmentally friendly, no more than green taxes are for green issues.

Short term solutions and quick fixes without looking at the consequences.

Labour lies about Green Tax

While jets fly back and forth from the UK, US and China for the G8 summit for Gordon Brown and the Labour party, some even empty, motorists here are facing what Labour call a "Green Tax" for their cars.

This is about as much of a Green Tax as their policy of Nuclear power stations is green. Quite bluntly, Labour are lying and this is far removed from anything to do with a green issue.

I am probably a great example. I own a car but cycle to work, that means in the last four of ownership my car has travelled just over 10,500 miles. That's not even the average yearly mileage of a commuting car.

Except Labour are saying that I'm a polluter, and to raise money for green issues they are going to charge me almost £250 a year extra for owning that car.

Now that's not starting the engine, that's not putting a drop of petrol in the engine or emitting a single molecule of emissions, no, that's simply for having bought a car already.

That's also important. I bought it four years ago and their message through this so called Green Tax is that I am in the wrong for owning it and I'm being immediately penalised. Are they saying I should sell it and move straight to an biofuel car? Oh no, they've killed biofuel the other day. Electric perhaps, and put mammoth strains on coal and nuclear power stations?

What they are saying is that people shouldn't own cars, at least not ones with big petrol engines...or biofuel.

Whatever the message behind it, they are taxing me for having bought a car, not for the emissions I'm making on the environment, so where's the green part of that tax, and where's the money going once they received it? Surely not on public transport to help me give up my car or on researching wind, wave or biofueld options.

This tax does not penalise me for making emissions, in fact it doesn't matter if I'm doing 30,000 or 3,000 miles a year, the tax is the same.

Labour two-faced on environmental issues

I can't believe this Government and what they're doing right now with their policies, it seems as though one department doesn't know what the other one's doing, or saying, even up to the point of the defacto Prime Minister.

The most poignant moment for me came with Channel 4's cutting commentary of the G8 visit, and all the leaders two faced actions.

It began in earnest for me with the Government shouting about environmental policies and green energy. Fantastic I thought, rather than just saying "one day we out to think about it" or "it's not ready yet so we'll go off and ignore it and see if someone can make it better without any funding", they started actively looking into alternate sources of energy, and this was most prominent with the Biofuel investigation.

Then the report came out yesterday that Biofuel wasn't viable, and Channel 4 news summarised the failings under three main points:

Biofuels increase food prices
Biofuels increase greenhouse gases
Biofuels increase food shortages

What is going on? After all this time they've decided it's not good enough and are scrapping it, delaying the implementation by three years and hoping someone makes it better? It's like they want it to fail, as though all these people are trying to find ways to discredit green energy.

I've heard it before about wind and wave power - "it doesn't generate enough to power the country" - so? Surely that's not a reason not to start using it? I saw a windfarm on the way to Las Vegas that stretched from right to left along the hilly horizon, three to five windmills deep, and it looks spectacular.

Yes I'm sure that doesn't power the whole of America, but it's providing some, and that's removing some load from standard power generation.

So to stop the Biofuel program because of these reasons, saying that food shortages are being caused because farmers are growing crops for Biofuel instead of food is not a reason to stop a Biofuel program. The excuses seemed weak and half hearted.

That means we won't see Biofuel implemented in the UK for at least three years - leave it to the next Government.

At the same time as the report came out Gordon Brown exits the G8 conference to shout about the food shortages in the world and points out how much we waste at home, £8 on average per household.

So what happens if we don't waste that food? Does it stay on the supermarket shelves, get rounded up at it's best before date, and get shipped off to countries with food shortages? No it does not. I know people who work in supermarkets and I can tell you exactly what happens to it.

Reaching the date it will be offered on shelves at reduced prices, if that's not bought then it gets offered at very cheap prices to staff, and failing that it's marked and soiled and thrown in bins outside the shop. What tends to happen then are, and believe me this really is happening, people drive up at closing time and scour the bins for bags of perfectly good food which usually hasn't been spoiled at all.

Why is that helping the starving nations? How exactly is that helping the food shortage? It's the Government's laws that are stopping that food from being sent to deserving nations or given to charity, it's the Government laws that are saying the food should be thrown out for non-starving people to get for free.
In the end it's our money that's being wasted each week on food that we throw out, and that money has gone into the economy to keep it going. So where's the logic in ensuring we don't waste food at home, we don't put that money into the economy, and the supermarkets end up throwing that food out for non-starving people to steal? The starving nations are still starving.

Channel 4 news caught this perfectly, showing Gordon Brown talking about food shortages and food wastage at home, and then going back to the G8 summit where they had a six course lunch and an eight course dinner. Sure it was smaller portions, but none of those bloated politicians better have wasted a scrap of food, and if they did I want to see it being shipped off to a starving nation immediately.

Finally Gordon Brown is shouting out about the need for nuclear power plants and that we need at least ten in the country as soon as possible. The project begins without the thought of addressing the huge amount of nuclear waste that the plants will produce and be sitting around for hundreds of years, radioactive, deadly and needing somewhere to be hidden.

The plan is to offer incentives to local councils to house a nuclear dump in their area. Now I wonder how many of those Labour politicians, Brown included, who support the nuclear plan are lobbying their councils to house a dump in their area?

Google and YouTube give U.S. courts your details

At the moment we're seeing a number of online privacy issues, and the biggest debate at the moment is undoubtedly around companies giving your details to third parties. One such issue has arisen with Google as the studio Viacom force them to had over the IP addresses of all of the people who have accessed YouTube.

Yes you read that right, they have been ordered by a U.S. court to hand over the details of anyone who has ever watched a video on YouTube, no matter what country they are from.

A story in the Telegraph reveals the extent of the issue:

“Viacom accuses Google of allowing millions of users to illegally post and watch clips of its TV shows and films, such as South Park, on the popular video-sharing site, and is trying to build evidence that suggests that the sharing of illegal material on YouTube is the cornerstone of its business.
Google must now hand over a "user log" to Viacom. The log will contain users' YouTube log-in details, the IP address of their computer - a unique code that identifies individual machines - plus details of all the video clips that users have viewed.

The judgment, which was made on Wednesday, could apply worldwide, and affect more than four million registered YouTube users, as well as potentially those who have simply watched clips.”

Thankfully Google has been trying to fight back:

“Google argues that it already far exceeds "its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works", and that Viacom's $1 billion (£500 million) lawsuit is a threat to internet freedom.
Google...said that it abided by the rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which states that as long as sites such as YouTube remove copyright content as soon as it is brought to their attention, they are protected by law from prosecution.”

However the U.S. judge ruled against them and said that the privacy concerns were speculative.

Now this raises a number of issues, not least that of U.S. courts ruling over the countries of the world. There's the question as to whether that U.S. judge can really make a ruling to gather the private details of people around the world or not.

Imagine if this was regarding the telephone system and not the Internet, and a phone service, who had been called by people from around the world, was being taken to court in America, could they demand the details of all those foreign callers? Could they get their telephone numbers and then trace who they made the call from and who they were?

I'm not a lawyer, but I very much doubt that would be the case, and the telephone model is very much like the internet.

The other issue is that there's probably a chance that you've watched a video on YouTubeand so you're going to be on that list of people that Google, a company you have entrusted to store your details and not pass onto anyone, is going to hand over to a third party company who will now know who you are, where you are, and what IP address you use to access the internet.

So now Viacom, a television and film studio in America, will know which videos you've been looking at, and will also know your IP address for the future when you go to their site, are listed on file sharing applications, or are found anywhere on any of their lists of internet users for their companies.

You should hope that you haven't been looking at anything questionable on YouTube. Imagine if something you did see is illegal in one country in the world, does this open up the law to allow your details to be passed onto that country, or a company in that country, to begin legal proceedings against you? Or at the very least to obtain your details and being storing them?

Pretty soon they'll start matching them up together and we'll have companies storing and sharing lists of every person around the world who has gone against their policies or illegally accessed or viewed content that they created.

Just after I wrote this offline I went to post it on the blog and saw a comment from Patrick under the Periodic Table Elements Song! story, and although the comment has a link to a different article it suddenly got me thinking, is that Periodic Table Element song copyrighted? Am I now going to be hunted down for displaying it and marketing it for them? Will I now be on the blacklists of Viacom and other companies?

It seems where the internet is concerned normal rules and laws do not apply, and your details are certainly not private, especially from U.S. courts.

In this case though, Viacom lay our fears to rest with the following comments to try and play down any fears YouTube users may have as their spokesperson said:

“Only our legal team will have access to this data...We will not be using to go after individuals.”

Wow. That puts me at ease. For a moment I thought they were handing the details over to their lawyers. Oh wait...

3G at the EIFF

It's been bad timing for me and this 3G Mobile Broadband review until this week. First the modem doesn't work in my works building and secondly I got married and headed off on honeymoon for almost three weeks. I did try and get 3G to let me blog my honeymoon but, rather tellingly, they said the cost was way too much.

So these next two weeks are a great trial as I cover as many films as possible during the Edinburgh International Film Festival. That means I'm on the go between cinemas almost constantly through the day and trying to keep the reviews coming out.

This first week has been interesting and shown two sides to the 3G Mobile Broadband.

The biggest has been the benefit over the free WiFi provided as part of the EIFF Delegate Centre. You see everyone with a pass can sit in this area, enjoy an overpriced coffee and cake, and utilise the free WiFi provided.

Well I was in for the first time yesterday and it took an age to connect for the first time. When it did it was fast, but suddenly during my session the connection died and I couldn't get back on.

Slapped in the 3G USB Broadband Modem, launched the app, and connected no problem. Well that's not entirely true, I did get disconnected at one point and had to wait a while for the signal to reacquire.

What struck me as odd though is that both at my work, at the EIFF centre and at a few other locations where I've had no 3G signal, I've had GPRS on the phone. Now I thought that the 3G Modem had a GPRS connection too and that if there was no 3G it would drop down, apparently not.

There's something else that the 3G Modem offers over WiFi. You see during the EIFF there are three cinemas you really go back and forth from, and two of those have free WiFi. Free, open, all access WiFi.

Now I'm not saying anything against these cinemas and their WiFi offerings, I actually use them a lot and I love their coffee shop areas where I can do this. However sometimes you want piece of mind and security.

There are applications out there that can snoop in on the traffic on WiFi hotspots and with a bit of work, dig out personal and sensitive data.

Although I'm quite confident about secure HTTP connections through WiFi, and I never try to do anything overly sensitive and personal on open connections, there is that little bit of concern, fuelled by sensationalised media.

So the 3G offers the next best thing. Your data is not heading out on an open cloud before reaching a privately hired broadband service, one which is out with your control and signed with a private contract between two third parties. There's no personal control there for you, no liability and protection should something go wrong.

With 3G I'm sending my data directly to the company that I have a signed contract with, a company that has signed an agreement with me to keep my data safe and secure, and a company that has the scale, funds, and resources to do that.

Now that makes me feel much more secure. So, as I had to do yesterday, I had no qualms when I remembered I had an urgent bill to pay and just leapt on the 3G Broadband Modem to pay it through my online banking service - something I might have been a little unsure of doing with an open WiFi connection.

So the 3G Broadband Modem is doing well so far, and although it's not as mobile as I had hoped, it is giving me access right outside screenings to get my reviews written and posted.

Irn Bru "If..." Scottish advert

Irn Bru have done it again with another absolutely cracking television advert here in Scotland - possibly in the UK as well, I don't know where it's playing.

Anyway the advert does an amazing job of explaining what makes being a Scot as well as capturing the pride you feel to be called Scottish.

Well, it does until it says Irn Bru at the end. The first time I heard it I thought that it was going to be an advert about Scotland and being Scottish, the Irn Bru announcement was a bit of a low down.

That said, the advert is superb and there's a couple of bits in there that I smile and feel a warmth inside and think, that's me, that's what I do.

MP David Davis' impressive speech

I've just heard the news that the Shadow Home Secretary David Davis has resigned his position in UK Parliment, and while that doesn't interest me that much because UK politics and politicians are like petulant teenagers and deserve little respect, Davis has just broadsided me.

His speech struck a chord and his actions are nothing short of selfless, or so it would seem. It seems that a politician has finally done something for the right reasons rather than bickering like children.

David Davis decided to resign, and give this speech, after Parliment voted through the extension of the so called Terror Detention Limit, a law which allows anyone suspected of a terror related crime to be held in prison without charge for forty-two days, a figure that doesn't sound much until you say forty-two days is in fact six weeks.

However it's not just that, it's the growing erosion of our civil liberties that has been bothering him, something that should be bothering us all, and his resignation speech was a corker. Here it is from The Times Online:

"The name of my constituency is Haltemprice and Howden - Haltemprice is derived from a medieval proverb meaning noble endeavour.

Up until yesterday I took a view that what we did in the House of Commons representing our constituents was a noble endeavour because for centuries of forebears we defended the freedom of people. Well, we did, up until yesterday.

This Sunday is the anniversary of Magna Carta, a document that guarantees the fundamental element of British freedom, habeas corpus. The right not to be imprisoned by the state without charge or reason.

But yesterday this house allowed the state to lock up potentially innocent citizens for up to six weeks without charge.

The Counter-terrorism Bill will, in all probability, be rejected by the House of Lords very firmly. After all, what should they be there for, if not to protect Magna Carta?

But because this is defined as political, not security, the Government will be tempted to use the Parliament Act to overrule the Lords.

It has no democratic mandate to do this since 42 days was not in its manifesto. Its legal basis is uncertain to say the least but, purely for political reasons, this Government is going to do that.

Because the generic security argument relied on will never go away - technology, development complexity, and so on - we’ll next see 56 days, 70 days, then 90 days.

But in truth perhaps 42 days is the one most salient example of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedom.

And we will have shortly the most intrusive identity card system in the world. A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with thousands of innocent children and millions of innocent citizens on it.

We have witnessed an assault on jury trials, a bolt against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state. And shortcuts with our justice system, which will make our system neither firmer nor fairer and a creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.

The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws to stifle legitimate debate, whilst those who incite violence get off scot-free.

This cannot go on, it must be stopped, and for that reason today I feel it is incumbent on me to take a stand. I will be resigning my membership of this House and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden.

Now I will not fight it on the Government’s general record. There’s no point repeating Crewe and Nantwich. I won’t fight it on my personal record - I am just a piece in this great chess game.

I will fight it, I will argue this by-election against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this Government.

Now, that may mean I have made my last speech to the House. It’s possible. And of course that would be a cause of deep regret to me. But at least my electorate and the nation, as a whole, would have had the opportunity to debate and consider one of the most fundamental issues of our day.

The ever-intrusive power of the state on our lives, the loss of privacy, the loss of freedom and a steady attrition undermining the rule of law. And if they do send me back here, it will be with a single, simple message - that the monstrosity of a law that we passed yesterday will not stand."

This was almost stirring in it's nature and certainly shows a great deal of passion and conviction as well as sheer determination. Now why can't our politicians be more like this and less childish, non-sensical, unethical, and unwilling to stand up for anything other than the opposite of what the other party are?

Let's just hope that whatever happens with Davis that the House of Lords throw out this dangerous law change and that the insanity and paranoid Labour government out aside their plans to put the change into law regardless.

Could Twitter replace business IM?

I've written before about utilising tools that are used daily on the Internet to create a new and knowledge focused Intranet with little cost to the business (have a look through the Knowledge Management category), and in that I've talked about the use of Instant Messaging. This has been something that has come up against resistance whenever it's mentioned in a business context, so when I started using Twitter I saw answers to so many of the issues and negatives raised against IM in the workplace.

The Twitter model of messaging is one which would work superbly well in a business that is both scared of employees chatting the day away, and also of employees concerned about the instant intrusion of IM.

Previously I wrote about how Instant Messaging could be restricted by setting ensuring that employees could only contact those people who are members of teams to which they have been assigned - the team they work in, the project teams they are assigned to, and so on.

However this still leaves open the opportunity to sit and chat online, something which traditional business leaders are still very concerned about. It also scares network people with the idea of constant flowing network traffic, and to a degree it concerns some employees who are very concerned about the instantaneous demand of IM - after all sitting at your desk an IM pops up right in the center of your work and above everything you're doing, it demands attention even more than the telephone.

Twitter is an IM with a difference though. It's not so much about direct, instant communication, it's more about sending status updates to different channels, where a channel might be a person, a team, or a project.

Twitter messages allow for the originating person to send a status update to a channel, usually their own, and whoever is subscribed to that channel can view the update. They can also send to another channel publicly or privately, publicly meaning that it is seen by all those reading both the sender and receivers channels and privately meaning that only the sender and receiver can read it.

Two of the strongest appeals of this system, and of clients that connect to it - e.g. Digsby, are that it does not demand your instant attention and interrupt your current work, and it restricts message to within channels that the user is engaged with - it's not just a random chat system.

So imagine this in a little bit of a business context. Employees would have their own channel where they update their own working status, this would be referring to projects they are working on, etc. This could let others know where they are and what they're currently engaged in, as well as giving updates on what they've just completed.

You can already see this replacing team meetings as the team leader, and other members of the team, could subscribe to the other team members channels and have instant updates of work in progress.

Imagine then that there are channels set up for projects, and the latest project I'm working on includes a few people from overseas in different timezones, and a few in the UK, perhaps on compressed hours or part time, or even just working on the project at different points in their working day.

How easy would it now be to keep up to date on a project if you subscribed to the project channel that all the other project team members were updating to and could read the updates as they happened but at your own pace?

A simple "@Application Upgrade 4" message would send my latest update through to the project channel where everyone could read it, messages such as "Testing complete and issue 5 is resolved", "Latest use case documentation updated - replace old version" or "I'm available at 3pm for an hour of testing". This could really start to eat away at the requirement for continual project update meetings, email chains, miscommunication and deliver some timely action.

Timelines are a useful feature which aren't altogether properly implemented in Twitter as yet but could be hugely useful in a business environment for knowledge retention. Displaying the timeline for a project should list all the messages sent to the channel in ascending order of time, showing public and private messages and giving an instant history of the entire project. A user could simply select a person or channel and see a history of all the message interactions between them and the other person or channel including all the public messages.

This would be a much better tool to be used in businesses than a straight IM. From the employees perspective it's quick, easy and device independant to send a message to another channel, be it project or person, and it also doesn't instantly demand your attention above everything else you're working on.

From a business perspective the tool doesn't have the potential to waste so much employee time as a traditional IM system because the updates are being placed in channels for others to find and subscribe too, and when the choice is with the employee, they are more likely to subscribe only to relevant information.

It's a slightly different view than just pushing out IM messages to anyone and the extra effort required for someone to find and subscribe to relevant sources of information would mean that this would be less likely to happen.

I could see a business type version of Twitter working well, however it would need to be a bit like a Google server and allow a business to purchase a full system which would just drop into their network and integrate with employee directories that they already have. It would also have to provide an administrative and reporting back end in order for technology teams to effectively manage and monitor it, and above all it would have to be secure.

Periodic Table Elements Song!

I can't remember why this popped into my head, but I was sitting with my wife and it just did, so I searched it out and memories of school came flooding back.

The Elements by Tom Lehrer is a song that sings the periodic table of elements, well as many as had been discovered back then in 1959 when the song was written.

So a quick search online and I was rewarded with the song itself. Okay it's not a perfect graphical representation, but it does show you the table itself. I'd have loved to have seen the complete table with element names being covered as the song went.

Here's the song with the table being checked off as they are sung:

That's the Major General's Song from The Pirates of Penzance by the way. Now Wikipedia also has some information on the song and links to another graphical representation of the song, which is almost as good as it does make some graphical representations of the elements as it goes along, but mostly it just shows the names.

If you know of a better version online with either the whole table represented properly and crossed off or graphical representation of each element as it flies by, then point me in that direction.

In the meantime I'm off to look at the chords and give it a bash!

American toilets

I have to say I love American toilets. You know the actual toilet itself.

It's the design, environmental friendliness, ease of cleaning and the quietness of them that I like. Why can't we have them in the UK?

Now I had perhaps better warn you that this is going to go into a little detail that some might find a little offensive, and for that, I do not apologise.

First of all the bowl area is shallower but wider than the UK counterpart and the water level sits much closer to the top. What you find is that men can't stand and urinate but have to sit down, and this causes less mess immediately.

However because more water is stored in the upper visible part of the toilet, if the bowl does need cleaning then the flush swirls all that water into a vortex and that seems to self clean.

In the UK toilet there's much more toilet brush action and it's much easier to stand and urinate rather than sitting down, i.e. more mess.

So there you go, that's why I like American toilets, oh and in the public ones you get ready made toilet paper seat cut outs to cover the seat before you sit down.

Why can't UK toilets be like that?

British Airways and Terminal 5

We were concerned before we flew off on our honeymoon that we would be flying out of the new Terminal 5 in London's Heathrow airport - you know the one with the huge complaints of delays and lost/delayed luggage that had once again shown just how poorly we British can build and implement things.

However the reality was far from our expectations built from the media coverage, and in fact I wondered if we were indeed in Terminal 5 at all.

There were no delays, no more than usual airport security, and perhaps even then I have to say it was less than we experienced leaving Edinburgh Airport.

It seemed as though there was staff galore, a lot of floor walkers at some key points and staff to cover the various helpdesks. Indeed when we went up to three different helpdesks we were seen immediately and didn't have to wait behind anyone.

Okay, so we were flying about lunchtime on a Monday, but with the media presentation I still expected to see delays. Not so.

There's a huge array of shops to chose from, and some we did. Yet I was surprised that we had to travel from the main building to get to the satellite area where our San Francisco flight was departing from. It was smaller, but still had good amenities and shops.

All in all it was a great experience, and I'm happy to report we didn't lose out luggage at all. A great experience...now let's see what it's like on the way back as I'm not sure when all the international flights will have moved to the new Terminal.

In Flight films - London to San Francisco

I was surprised that even in the cheap economy class, called World Traveller by British Airways, that we received their new video on demand during our trip to San Francisco. Well we did and there was a good, not great, selection of films to choose from.

So I picked three titles that I hadn't seen as yet. However, I didn't feel it was worth reviewing them over at Filmstalker or on their own as the screen is something like seven inches and the audio wasn't that great so it really is unfair to do so.

Instead, here's a quick round up of what I saw.

We Own the Night
I really enjoyed this story, there were great performances from Joaquin Pheonix and Mark Wahlberg, the latter being a real surprise as I often think he over acts or just plays himself. Here though he was strong and managed to belt out a good performance. Robert Duvall and Eva Mendes also starred, and Duvall was excellent as always with Mendes looking incredibly sexy but having to deliver little more than a damsel in distress role.

The story is strong and it really does play out well. I think, going back to that screen size and quality again, that the car chase scene looked really well handled and filmed - I'm dying to see that on a better screen, it looked like a really good film.

American Gangster
I expected a lot from this film, and I have to put down a lot of the negativity of it to the poor sound from the small system I was watching it on because some of the dialogue was a little difficult to catch as it had quite a different range in volume throughout and was often mixed with some authentic city street sounds.

Denzel Washington is, as always, superb and he does bring something a little different to this role. Russell Crowe gives a powerful performance, and one of his best to date, allowing a few little flaws into his character but still coming out similar to his L.A. Confidential role.

The story is interesting, particularly as it's based on a true one - I'm not sure if this has been edited yet based on the law suit from some of the policemen involved. It played out well, except the running time seemed a little too long and I did feel bored and wanted the story to progress at times. Again, this could have been down to the viewing situation.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Marissa Tomei naked was not the reason I wanted to watch this, but a great bonus for she is utterly gorgeous and an incredibly natural actress. No it was Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke coupled with the excellent Albert Finney.

Again this is another great story that is a small and personal drama that plays out with some excellent twists and turns that seem very natural and not forced into the plot.

I really enjoyed this film and it was by far the best of the three. Superb performances by all concerned, and a great conclusion that showed just what a great actor Finney is. Powerful, engaging and compelling, even on that small screen.

First experiences with 3G Mobile Broadband

After setting the Mobile Broadband Modem up, which was perhaps one of the easiest installations of hardware I've ever accomplished, I was ready to start using it. However the real problem was I wasn't actually going anywhere.

However that's been sorted since with a few trips that have been made much easier with the 3G Mobile Broadband access.

I did log on from home before heading anywhere with it, and this was really to prove it would work, and it did, very easily.

I've found the best thing to do with a Vista system, and perhaps this is true of other operating systems too, is to plug the USB Mobile Broadband Modem in before powering on the laptop, otherwise it often tries to install the software again or doesn't recognise the modem.

Now I have to say that I think this might well be my setup as plugging the Broadband Modem into the back of the laptop always causes a reinstall attempt, whereas having it plugged in the side USB ports means it never is - strange indeed.

However none of this is a major killer. Plug it in, power up, and if the software isn't in your startup folder to automatically start, run the 3G Mobile Broadband software and watch the messages verify that the modem is connected and that it is valid.

From here it's a case of double clicking the icon in the system tray and selecting connect, once a signal has been picked up of course, something that just takes a few extra seconds.

Establishing the connection is also very easy and quick, hit the huge button marked Connect and you can watch the status as it does just that. I've never yet had a situation where it fails to connect as if you see a signal at the top if the window, displayed just as a normal mobile phone signal strength with the name of the service you're connected to, then you'll connect.

Once connected you can minimise that window and head to the browser or email, neither of which needed any configuration changes and work perfectly well with WiFi or 3G connections.

So far I've managed a few connections from different places, although my workplace is notoriously bad for receiving mobile signals as only two mobile operators work there and both have corporate deals with the company, so there's no surprise there.

I was at a wedding in Paisley and managed perfect connections from the hotel room just before we headed off for the ceremony, and a few times I've been sitting in city centre cinemas and typing up a few stories, reviewing all the articles from my almost two hundred strong feed filled Bloglines, or tapping away answering emails with my Digsby chat client running in the background with MSN, Yahoo, GMail, Facebook and Twitter sitting there quite happily.

Interestingly the connection is more reliable than my home based O2 Broadband which disconnects and reconnects a few times per hour! With the 3G Mobile Broadband connection there's no such problem and the chat clients sit there quite happily.

Recently I was at Dead by Dawn and was arranging to meet someone there, that involved a few texts back and forth synchronising schedules and such like. How much easier that was with the laptop and the messaging application for the Broadband modem.

I just tapped in the number and typed away the message on a full size keyboard, it made text messaging so much easier and quicker, and although the size of the mobile is often more convenient, when you're tapping away on the computer anyway it was a breeze not to have to change devices.

Another thing I would like to see is a way to tie in the local messaging functions of the 3G Mobile Broadband modem with a chat client such as Digsby or Trillian. Offering an API for programmers to latch onto their clients, or even offering a plugin for the popular chat clients, would be superb.

Finally I was flying out to Dublin for a long meeting the other day, and I sat quite comfortably at the gate, awaiting the boarding, and reading my Bloglines, answering a few emails, and more importantly getting my Twitter updated. Easy as pie.

Installing the 3G Broadband modem

I received my 3G Broadband Modem a few days after getting the instructions, a DVD type box contained a few pieces of paper with simple instructions on how to install, too simple I thought, this can't be right. There are always problems with installing hardware like this, especially portable hardware, so when I realised the box contained no software and the instructions stated that I should simply plug it in and it would automatically install, I was very sceptical.

I couldn't believe when I simply slid the SIM card into place, plugged in the USB dongle, just slightly larger than an average sized USB stick as you can see below, the software began installing, and installing right first time.

It's very handy and nicely rounded at the edges, and with an unobtrusive logo and an embedded light that gives an aesthetically pleasing glow when connected. I only wish that when the designers had thought of something to do with the USB cover when the modem is plugged in, if it could have been designed to clip over the other end rather than just sitting around it might have negated the chances of losing it.

The software autoruns direct from the USB modem, now while that's great to begin with, it does become a little bit of a pain when my Vista laptop keeps asking me if I want to if I want to autorun the software every time I plug it in. The simple solution is to plug the modem in before the laptop starts up, or to stop autorun on Vista, which is a little more severe.

Using the software is pretty simple. You can see from the screenshot that it tells you the service and signal at the top with stats galore through the middle. At the bottom there's a huge button that flips between a connect/disconnect button and that's pretty much it.

The statistics are pretty variable and don't really give you too much information unless you want to see what transfer rate you're getting right now, so far I've found this pretty variable on the statistics screen, but feeling constant and surprisingly fast during usage, more on that in later posts.

You can mess around with the settings if you want, but there's no real point. For me there were only two settings I really thought that I might want to play with, that's the service selector and the startup minimised option.

Startup minimised is pretty self explanatory, but the service selector tells the modem to always select 3G networks, or simply 3G preferred. This means that if you can't get a 3G signal then it'll drop to the next available data signal, maintaining access.

Really it's just a case of connecting and going for it, and that I did.

I have to say that the install was damned easy. Now onto the actual usage.