Year: 2007

It’s rather remiss of me not to have mentioned it so far, but as well as surviving my 30th birthday last week, I also reached the end of my photo a day project. In case you were wondering, this is what the last year of my life looked like:

I may not have taken the most exciting photograph every day (you may be able to spot for yourself the occasions on which I clearly got to the end of the day not having bothered to take a picture of anything, and so ended up taking whatever we had for dinner that night…), but I definitely enjoyed doing it. And already I look back at this photographic record of the last year and think: did I really do all that stuff?

Hopefully it’s also made me a better photographer.

I’m not sure I want to stop now, especially as I have a lovely new toy to play with.

So I think I’m going to carry on, for now at least. You can follow my continuing progress here.

One of the reasons for continuing is that I really want to learn how to use my new camera. Right now, I’m mostly letting the camera do the hard work, but I’ll get there.

I had my first test last night when I joined Rob, Claire, and Laila at the Bloomsbury theatre to see another Lou Rhodes solo gig. Knowing that Rob had booked the tickets (and therefore figuring that we’d probably be sitting quite close to the front), I thought that this might be a good opportunity to try out some gig photography…

Unfortunately, my initial efforts were a horribly overexposed blurry mess, so I was forced to stray from the automatic comfort zone and try changing the only settings I knew how to change–increasing the ISO setting; decreasing the ISO setting; increasing something that I later worked out was the shutter speed; decreasing it again. I had no idea what I was doing, but I eventually settled on something that seemed to work, and proceeded to fill up my memory card…

The support unexpectedly turned out to be someone I had heard of–Mark Morriss, formerly of Hounslow’s finest britpop also-rans, The Bluetones. I actually used to be a bit of a fan (somewhere I have all their early singles, including the relatively rare first single, Are You Blue Or Are You Blind), so I recognised him straightaway. I could have sworn that The Bluetones had their initial success over 12 years ago, but Mark Morriss somehow doesn’t appear to have got any older over the last decade. Perhaps he was about 12 when the band started, or perhaps there’s a copy of Expecting To Fly in an attic somewhere on which his wizened face is slowly aging…

Lou Rhodes was excellent as ever. I’d only listened to the new album once before the gig, but I’d recognised most of the songs from the performance we’d seen her give at Glasto this year, which has to be a good sign I suppose.

And she did that thing where she follows Beloved One with her cracking solo version of Gabriel… Lovely.

I am so pleased that the Nationwide building society has decided to implement new internet banking security measures. Yesterday, on logging in, I was prompted to submit my answers to five questions from a choice of twenty, and I can now be asked to answer these questions at any time when using the online service. Fantastic: more stuff to remember. This is in addition to the 10 digit customer number, the memorable place, date and person, and PIN that I already needed to remember in order to use the service.

The more stuff they require me to remember, the more secure the system must be, right? Surely now I have five extra things to remember, it must be five times as secure…

They have massively missed the point. If they really cared about security, they’d implement proper two-factor authentication, which is about using at least two different methods of verifying that the user is who he says he is. Typically, that means verifying that the user knows something (like a password) and verifying that the user has something (like one of those security token/fob things that generates a really long number when you press the button). But clearly issuing every customer with a token would be far too expensive, so instead they’ve decided to implement a security system that verifies that the user knows something, and, er, verifies that the user knows some more stuff.

Fantastic.

This provides no additional security whatsoever over their existing authentication methods, and it’s actually worse, because the more stuff you ask people to remember, the more likely it is that they will start writing it down.

Of course, Nationwide claim:

These security questions offer additional peace of mind when you carry out transactions on our Internet Bank as only you will know the answers.

But this is nonsense. The questions are either going to have answers so obvious that anyone who knows me could work them out, or they are going to have answers I’ll need to think about, in which case I’ll either need to remember what I happened to think was the best answer to that question when I filled in the form in October 2007, or I’ll need to write down the answers somewhere.

Out of the full list of 20 questions I could not find a single one to which I could give an unambiguous answer that I wouldn’t need to remember. The questions included the likes of:

“Where did you first go on holiday?” (I was probably 1 at the time. I don’t know)
“What’s your father’s middle name?” (He’s got two: which one should I put?)
“What team do you support?” (Ok, so the answer’s “everton”, but should I write it as “everton”? “everton fc”? “the blues”? “the toffees”?)
“What was the name of your first employer?” (my first employer was the guy who ran the restaurant I washed dishes in when I was 16; I can’t remember his name, so should I put the name of the restaurant? Maybe I should put the name of my employer for my first proper job? How will I remember which one I chose?)
“What is your favourite colour?” (Seriously: is this a Smash Hits interview? Who has a favourite colour?)

They go on to say:

The questions were chosen to meet the needs of our diverse membership. We have listened to the views of people across a variety of age ranges and lifestyles. We have also taken into account industry standards.

You can type what ever answer you like, it’s not a test, as long as you give an answer that you will remember.

Yes, but that’s the whole point: how will I remember which song I picked at the time I answered your question? You’re not the only financial institution I have an account with, and it’s only a matter of time before they all start asking me to answer some silly questions of their own. I’m never going to remember all the answers I gave unless I start writing them down…

[The Nationwide cares so much about security that it was fined £980,000 by the FSA earlier this year when a laptop containing 11 million customer account details was stolen from an employee’s house.]

Oh, I almost forgot. Appropriately enough this was when we were in Kensington last week on the way to a real hospital…

In a car. Alive!
On Holby, that’s how she died.
Is it not real, then?

So we’ve been recruiting at work for the last couple of months in an attempt to double the size of my team. Well, perhaps I should clarify that I’m currently a team of one, so that’s just the one extra person we’re looking for, but still it’s proving tricky to find a decent technical author to take on the role.

It’s been a bit of an eye-opener, actually. You’d think, given that one of the key skills of a technical author is the ability to present information clearly, accurately, and concisely, that the candidates who have been thrown in our direction so far would be able to do that on the two pages of their CV, but apparently not… (it’s getting to the point where I’d be happy if some of them just used a spell checker).

Yesterday, though, came the most amusing development of the process so far. I’d just come back from doing an interview and was sitting back at my desk when my mobile rang. It was a withheld number…

Me: Hello?
Woman: Oh hello, is that Matthew? This is Woman from Recruitment Agency. Are you OK to talk?
[Aside: I get these calls from time to time, and still don’t know how these people get my details, given that I couldn’t have uploaded a CV to a job site in nearly 4 years…]
Me: Er, yes.
Woman: It’s just that I’ve got a role here and I was wondering if you’d be interested?
Me: Oh no, I’m quite happy where I am thanks. But just out of interest, what is this role that you’re trying to fill?

Woman: Er…
Me: It wouldn’t be at Software Company would it?
Woman: Yes
Me: It’s just that I work at Software Company, and that’s our vacancy that we’re trying to fill, so I probably won’t apply for that, if it’s ok with you…

Maybe I should have said I’d go for it. I’m pretty sure I would have known what I was looking for in the interview. Maybe I could even have referred myself and picked up the referral bonus. The second salary would definitely come in handy…

So what’s wrong with this timeline of events?

20 September 2007: Someone at the IP address 90.202.68.194 anonymously edits the Wikipedia page for TV theme composer Ronnie Hazlehurst to add the entirely untrue claim that he co-wrote Reach for S Club 7.

2 October 2007: Hazlehurst dies.

2 October 2007: Lazy journalists everywhere (including BBC News 24, the Times, the Guardian, the Indie…) use Wikipedia entry to write his obit.

3 October 2007: Other people repeatedly attempt to add the “fact” that he co-wrote Reach by S Club 7 back to his Wikipedia entry, citing the obituaries in “reputable” newspapers as the reference.

[Reach was written by Cathy Dennis and Andrew Todd.]

I’ve just noticed that my copy of today’s Independent has a banner across the top proclaiming:

FREE INSIDE 16 PAGE GLOSSY BOOKLET: HOW TO WRITE A BLOG

Sadly, this appears to be missing from my copy. So now I’ll never know. Sorry…

Elsewhere, the same paper’s “5 Minute Interview” asks some questions of two people I’ve never heard of (Basso & Brooke anyone?), one of whom answers “I wish people would take more notice of…” with this:

Punctuation. For example, when someone writes “their” instead of “they’re” and vice versa. It’s just one of those basics.

From time to time, Sal has been known to do the occasional bit of market research. This, you understand, is entirely to do with her desire to help the UK’s corporations to better target their consumer offerings, and nothing at all to do with the brown envelope stuffed with used fivers that they offer as an “incentive” for attending one of the sessions.

So she’s signed up to a couple of companies who send out emails from time to time whenever they’re looking for candidates to fill up a focus group, and as she doesn’t sit in front of a computer all day long, she has these emails forwarded to me.

One of them arrived this morning, in which said market research people were looking for candidates to join a group on hair products. At the bottom, though, was this sentence:

“We also have to have a range of types of hair covered for the research – so please advise if your hair is European, Latin/American, Asian, or African”.

What an odd thing to say. All this time I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that hair can be divided into the categories of “light”, “dark”, “short” and “long”, but apparently hair has a nationality of its own. Who knew? I considered emailing back to ask them how I can find out what nationality my hair is, but I worried that they might think I have illegal immigrant hair and report it to the home office. Perhaps I should arrange for my hair to have a passport of its own.

Sadly, as you may already have spotted, Sal doesn’t fit the criteria for this particular session, as they apparently aren’t interested in marketing their products to those with Australian hair (as I’ll have to assume hers is, until I’m informed otherwise).

I’m confused by some of the other categories, though: I can’t imagine that many of the respondents will have Roman hair. I suppose that explains why they’ve chosen to lump that into an either/or category with American hair. Not sure I can see the connection myself, but what do I know…

Well, it’s over: some of us thought it would never happen, but finally the great Coldplay “silence” of 2007 has been broken. The NME has the exclusive:

I don’t know what you have been doing during this long, difficult period of silence, but I’ve spent most of the year so far just hoping and praying that Chris and those other blokes (whatever they’re called) would speak to us. Christopher. Why did you neglect us for so long?

And now they have spoken. We now know that their new album will contain “nine tracks”. Wow. So many of us would have expected eleven. I predicted twelve, but it was not to be. Nine is truly a radical departure.

Not “At Home” Today,
Book signing down the market:
Jamie Oliver

UPDATE: Photographic evidence. I don’t just make these things up, you know…

So last week we went to see the adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement on another one of our free film previews. Of course, you should never see a film adapted from a book you’ve read and enjoyed, and so, inevitably, I was hugely disappointed.

The first hour of the film–the part set at the Tallis house in 1935–is really effective, but once the action skips forward to the war scenes for the second half, the film loses its way completely. My watch told me that the second half of the film only lasted an hour, but with the direction suddenly so plodding and pedestrian, it could easily have been two… [At one point, Joe Wright devotes about 10 minutes of screen time to an impressive-looking but ultimately pointless sweeping, tracking shot showing the carnage on the beach at Dunkirk. Quite what this has to do with the story, I couldn’t tell–I couldn’t help wondering whether they’d just spent so much money making this that they couldn’t bring themselves to leave any of it on the cutting room floor, even though it doesn’t add anything to the film.]

But apparently we can’t escape this film, because this evening on our way across Leicester Square to get to another free film screening (the Russell Crowe/Christian Bale remake of 3:10 To Yuma, which unexpectedly turned out to be rather good fun), we stumbled across the première of Atonement on the other side of the square, so we stopped to have a look. Clearly a lot of people had come to Leicester Square specifically to see some famous people going to the cinema, and as we peered over the crowds to see what was going on, we could hear occasional squeals of delight from the crowd. You could almost tell how famous the person who’d just got out of the car was by the volume of the squeal. We did get to see James McAvoy and Benedict Cumberbatch standing around while people took their photographs, but missed Keira (although I’m pretty sure we heard the crowd appreciatively whooping at her ability to get out of a car and walk towards a cinema).

Not all the cast arrived by car, though. I almost felt a bit sorry for actor Daniel Mays, who wasn’t apparently important enough for the film company to drive him there. After we’d got bored of trying to spot celebrities, we’d left to get to the Panton Street Odeon where our screening was, and almost bumped into him as he walked past in the other direction, all DJ-ed up.

“He’s famous”, whispered Sal to me, as he passed us.

I knew she was right, but for a second I couldn’t quite place him. And then I realised that he’s actually in the film.

As there’s a tube strike on at the moment, I wonder if he had to get there on the bus? Perhaps that’s why he was late…