nonsense
piled on nonsense"

Pinched from Overlawyered: Thanks for the haiku

Methinks that our friends in the Guardian may have gone and confused individual post codes with postal sectors, which are a much more useful thing to work with - both because there are far fewer of them, 9,900 vs 1.7 million, and because there's enough information aggregated at this geographic level them to make them analytically robust. For more information on UK postal geographies see the relevant National Statistics pages.

The interesting thing about Mosaic's classifications are the way they try and subdivide areas based on income, home-ownership, number of children, occupations and so on. Not sure which [if any] of the Mosaic groups the parties are allegedly targeting [Cultural leadership, Symbols of success, Fledgling nurseries, Upscaling new owners, Affluent blue collar, Coronation St, Rustbelt resilience, Corporate chieftains, Burdened optimists, High technologists, Semi-rural seclusion, Golden empty nesters, Provincial privilege, University challengers] I fit into, but then living in a Labour safe seat I doubt if any of the parties care much about my vote.

Oh, cool...! Shame it's impossible to get to all the new developments without a car, but hey, first things first...

While this [C&P] does have disaster written all over it, I am rather more confident about it than I was two weeks ago, having seen just how badly implemented the US version of C&P is. The logic of C&P is that retail staff don't provide an adequate check of the card's signature [true, particularly in the US where clerks often never look at same] with the signature on the receipt, and so an alternative has to be found which forces the consumer to more accurately identify themselves - hence the need to enter a PIN number.

Now half of this problem could have been solved if more card issuers had just put people's pictures on the cards, but that was too simple. So now we will have to constantly use our PIN numbers if we want to buy anything in the UK, which is almost guaranteed to make it easier for other people to steal same, and since it will be much more difficult to prove this has happened, fraud costs which were previously passed on to the retailer will now be passed onto the poor consumer. Result, if you're a bank that is.

The worst implementation of C&P [or equivalent] that I've seen so far [and it was so bad it was absolutely breathtaking] was in a Duane Reade drug store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. A woman in line in front of me paid for her purchases with a card, and was instructed to enter her PIN number on an 8" x 12" LCD touch-screen, mounted at head height in front of the cash register so that everyone standing behind her [and there were probably twenty or thirty of us] could see her tap in each number.

Now that's something that would be pretty obvious to anyone in the City Centre in the evening... it's full of lamb dressed as mutton, as the saying goes.

There is also a curious belief that black mini-skirts should be paired ONLY with nude-coloured tights, just to make sure that your legs look as chunky as possible.

But hey, you didn't expect anyone who bought their best party gear in Sainsbury's to be much of a fashion icon, did you??

1. When you are in New York [actually, place is irrelevant in this case, but I digress...], and it is -15 Celsius [or 0 Fahrenheit for the luddites] and you are wearing two items of clothing that zip up, zip them both up you damn fool.
2. And yes, you brought a hat and scarf for a reason, so use them you silly muppet.

Yes, it was bloody cold in Manhattan on Monday, although it was also very clear and sunny and quite beautiful in that super-cold winter way. Monday night was absolutely Arctic, however.

As a result of #1 and #2, I do now feel rather rubbish. Not sure being on 5 flights in four days helps either.

Sunday I went to explore the recently re-opened MoMA.*

The building itself is remarkable, and has been rightly hailed as it is massive yet simultaneously minimalist, completely lacking in ornamentation [well, in garish ornamentation, if you want to argue that the design details are minimalist ornamentation, which I wouldn't disagree with]. While hailed as an example of Japanese minimalism, I thought it was more of a combination of Bauhaus and Walter Judd, particularly the latter writ large. Now while I am at times not the biggest fan of Judd, his influence is palpable, and the few of his sculptures that were on display were perfectly integrated into the larger whole. Large portions of the building are tremendous, with views across the galleries and across streets cleverly fitting the building into its wider context.

The galleries are huge, both horizontally and vertically, and I can see how it will be a tremendously flexible space. Bits of the galleries however are very dark [particularly around the banks of escalators] and the fourth and fifth floors are impossibly fragmented, with the effort to open the spaces up [allegedly as it was too 'constraining' for visitors trying to flow through spaces] resulting in a seemingly random set of curtain walls that allow you to move wherever you want and ensuring that you've got no idea if you've actually seen everything, which to me does rather make the change rather pointless. The fifth floor walkway provides a stunning view down and across the central galleries, though it did vibrate alarmingly under the weight of the traffic crossing it to the restaurant. I do wonder how long it will be before someone jumps off of it though.

While I loved the building, I was rather less impressed by its contents.

As you may know, the US has changed quite a bit since 9-11, and one of the things they've done to make themselves all safe and secure is to implement the US-Visit program, which photos and fingerprints foreigners flying to the US. Great boon to Samsung, who've sold US Customs and Immigration thousands of flat screens and Logitec who've sold them web cams [which is what they're using for cameras]. So we go through this at Shannon, which is fine, but we don't clear US customs, which I thought was a bit strange.

Now, when you do this elsewhere, like in Bermuda or in Toronto, when you've cleared Customs you're effectively on a US internal flight, and you just get your bags and wander out of the terminal and go off on your merry way once your plane has landed. But we didn't do that, no.

On arrival in JFK, we entered the immigration hall where all Aer Lingus passengers were told to just walk around the Immigration stands and straight to the baggage carousels. Thing is, we weren't the only flight whose passengers were entering the hall [including one from Kuwait...] but passengers were allowed to just walk past immigration [and the fingerprint machines and the finger scanners] if they felt like it. Nobody checked if we were actually on the Aer Lingus flight...

So all you have to do to bypass the whole US-Visit system is to make sure you fly from somewhere where you won't be pre-cleared by immigration, be on an airplane that's arriving at the same time [and in the same terminal] as a pre-screened plane, follow these passengers and bypass immigration completely, get a stamped customs form from somewhere and away you go. No fingerprints, no pictures, just someone on the airplane manifest they've got no picture of [excluding surveillance cameras of course...] who didn't go through immigration.

Whoops.

So, flew to New York on Saturday via Manchester, Dublin and Shannon on Aer Lingus. I will agree with everyone else that Manchester has to have one of the world's most incomprehensible airports. From the elevator that had buttons for three floors, but which only stopped at two, to the complete lack of sign-age to the helpful computer system that took 10 minutes to figure out where I was trying to go... but top marks to the check-in staff, who took one look at my tickets on the computer and said "did you have any trouble booking this?" which led to the tale of the Aussie named Bruce [no, you couldn't make it up...] who worked in the Aer Lingus call centre and who couldn't figure which way was up...

But I digress. On the flight to Dublin nothing interesting happened.

On the flight to Shannon I was sitting in the window seat when a woman came down the aisle dressed in all black and with a general demeanour that shouted NUN [and bloody unhappy nun at that...], and when she saw me, sitting in the seat next to her... well, let's just say that she did not look best pleased at having to sit next to the spawn of Satan for the next 45 minutes. So she sat down and we spent the next five minutes fighting over the arm-rest and my rather petty belief that she should at least keep her elbows over the arm rest and not lodged firmly in my ribs.

After which she pulls out her book and spends the entire flight reading why it is IMMORAL to KISS BEFORE MARRIAGE.

Now I will be honest and admit that the thought of spending another 7 1/2 hours like this was not pleasant and I was dreading it, to put it mildly. So we all got off at Shannon, and went through the completely stupid US-VISIT immigration system [of which more in a subsequent post...] and I went in a fruitless search for munchies as I'd neglected to stock up in Edinburgh or Manchester or Dublin. Whoops.

So I get back on board and see someone different sitting next to my seat... which was a relief, to put it mildly. She was also Irish, and was, well... drunk. As a skunk, having had six whiskies at the bar in the airport and lord only knows how much before that. She thought my nun story was funny, but when the airplane's engines were started she whipped out a bottle of Holy Water and sprinkled her surroundings before crossing herself...

WRONG.

We know, as there is plenty of empirical evidence to back it up, that

1. the longer you have been on-line, the more likely you are to be comfortable with the net and therefore shop online


2. that the longer you have been online the more probable it is that you have broadband

We also knew that #1 was true several years before we knew that #2 was true, and that there is no evidence that #2 invalidates #1.

But we also know that the BBC tends to re-write press releases as news stories, rather than thinking about them in any great depth, so we can surmise that, as usual, they have got it utterly wrong once again.

Oooh boy. No contractors selected, project starting within a month, 60 roads closed... finished by the festival?? No chance.

What the contractors have built is a large white dome that stretches all the way across the Royal Mile and halfway across the junction... and since you can't see over/around it, if you didn't know any better and were walking up the street you might think it marked the end of the Royal Mile and miss the Lawnmarket behind it.

And the Council/contractors haven't closed the surrounding roads either, so cars drive up to the dome before having to do a three point turn and go back the way they came.

Brilliant planning.

Those of us who have lived in Edinburgh for a while will remember that the council also had to rebuild the intersection of the Royal Mile and the Bridges, where the pretty cobblestones were laid on a bed of dirt, which promptly washed away under the weight of traffic and which had to be replaced by a concrete foundation. Whoops.

Just when you thought that Edinburgh Council's plans to run a referendum on congestion charging couldn't get any more farcical, it emerges that 57,000 of us won't get a ballot because we asked for our details [i.e. name and address] not to be sold by the Electoral Register.

This cuts down on junk mail, but apparently the council's ballot is classed as junk mail, so we won't be getting ballots unless we happen to either notice the council's advertising campaign on the subject, get flyers in the mail, or notice the relevant ad in the Council's free newsletter [which has yet to be delivered].

If you want to get a ballot you have to phone the Council's hotline - telephone number not printed by the Scotsman [thank you yer much...] but it's 0131 529 4877. According to them, half the flats in my building aren't on their mailing list.