Football (soccer to U.S.A. folk) and footballers.

It cannot have escaped your attention, here in the U.K. at least, that SportUK who do drug testing of sports people here in the U.K. has turned its attention to football players. Amid much hyperbole there are some issues in getting this turned from mere talk to reality. This blog post though has little to nothing to do with that. Instead I will recount what happened during my formative years.

When I was a football playing lad back in the late 60's and early 70's it wasn't unusual to find oneself playing alongside or against the Hull City players of that time in the local park (Princes Avenue for us). They almost always turned up unannounced with a Watneys 8 pint beer tin. One or two per player. Of course not all the Hull City players of that time turned up but of those that did they were the stars of the team. Also, we used to get Hull FC and Hull Kingston Rovers players from the world of Rugby League. At that age, we were aged between 9 years old and 13 back then, we where much in awe of our fellow players. Why they chose our park we had, nor have even now, any idea but for whatever reason they did.

Sunday afternoons at the local park where always an exciting place to be for us as we never knew who or how many of our sporting heroes would turn up. More often than not they never turned up at all. Sometimes it was just the Rugby League players who did. Other times in was just the Hull City players. Now and again they all turned up on the same day and at roughly the same time. Maybe they all preplanned this but we will never know. Certainly, at that time, we did not care. They always headed straight for our lot which could have been down to our playing skills but was more likely because, outwardly anyway, we were not in awe of them and treated them as just another bunch of grown men that wanted to play football with a bunch of kids on a Sunday afternoon. Can you imagine todays elite 'stars' doing something like this? Turning up with no security guards present at a local park to play a few hours of football with some kids? I can't. Those days are long gone.

What always stood out though was that they were always invariably drunk either before they turned up and always after a few hours of playing football.

None of this is related to the drug testing being touted of course but as beer, these days more so than 10 or 20 years ago, has chemicals added that could be classed as drugs. I am not one who would claim beer drinking leads to a lifetime addiction as some claim. In fact I refute such claims totally. Coming from a family background that had many heavy part-time drinkers within it and once being a part of that myself None of us where  addicted. My father and Grandfather were both seafarers and only drunk beer when on land which would mean 3 to 4 weeks  abstinence, for my Grandfather who was a  fisherman, and anything from 6 months to 18 months abstinence for my Father who was a long haul seaman. Once on land though they would both drink themselves silly. Myself never went to sea, much to both their disappointment, however, drink I did. A lot. Not now though as I rarely touch any alcohol due to the medication i am forced to take. I say rarely because i do, now and again, have a pint but that event is so rare as to be easily discounted and well within the intake limits recommended by Government. But, I digress...

Back to those Sunday afternoon football sessions. These are highly unlikely to happen these days as both football and Rugby League players are much removed from such things now as can possibly happen. Back then both Hull FC and Hull K.R. were, as they are now, high flying teams. Hull City where in the old (ancient?) third division North and during the 70's in the old second division and the players of all three were just as happy amongst a group of school children as they were on the pitch. It would never happen today. Maybe in the lower leagues but certainly never from players in the Premier League and extremely unlikely from any in the Championship nor the super fit athletes that make up the Super League (Rugby League).

It does, however, give me something to recount to any Grandkids my offspring may provide. My life has been full of such things happening and it does seem a different world to the one we are living through now. In all probability it is a different world. It certainly shows how some things have moved on. Not always for the better though.

Kcom and Karoo.

Kcom the incumbent telephone company here in Hull and its ISP spin off Karoo are technologically so far behind the other ISP's that proliferate around the U.K. they are fast becoming a bigger joke than they were last year.

They use relatively new DSLAMS but their back end servers often fail and twisted pair cable runs are mostly 20 or more years old. If you are stupid enough to use their proxy servers you are guaranteed to run into problems more times than not. Their back end servers that sift through what you do on-line so the data can be sold to third parties often fail. In the last year or so we have suffered outages of between 24 and 14 hours on 3 separate occasions. They have no backup servers. No redundancy whatsoever. They are a cost cutting operation. They have not invested much in new stuff for years. As for cable runs well, the best that can be said about them is they work. Slowly, but work. Just.

Look at the state of ADSL2+ in this city. Ignore what KCom and/or Karoo say about it as they often lie about statistics and it is a well known fact that those who say they are happy with the service are those who are technologically lacking in skills. There are thousands of people suffering from poor connection rates. Piss poor throughput rates and it can all be put down to 1 or 2 things. 1) Lack of exchanges. 2) Long, poorly routed, twisted pair cabling. Cable runs  that where laid early last century and new runs bolted on as the city grew in size. Back then of course there was no Internet so they laid cable willy nilly which results in this Internet age with piss poor sync rates and throughput speeds.

Almost every area of this city suffers from old copper cabling. Almost every area of this city suffers from long lines (from house to exchange). Some areas suffer what they call 'dead' exchanges which are then routed out to real exchange which can be several miles away from the 'dead' exchange. It is a mess. Worse still is the fact they are doing nothing whatsoever about it.

It is quite simply take it or leave it. As there are no other ISP's in this city it is impossibly difficult to go eslewhere.  Those who do not understand the telephony situation in this city often say "Go to another ISP"  which is impossible to do here.

If another ISP came here and did not use the Kcom network of piss poor cabling nor use their exchanges but did in fact set up their own autonamous network then people and businesses would jump ship in a heartbeat. But they will not come here and neither will they invest in a new network simply because of some believed loyalty to Kcom and Karoo which frankly does not exist amogst the rank and file of this city.

The people and businesses of this city are crying out for a real high speed connection. If there is someone out there with money to burn and they set up a high speed fibre network and charged reasonable rates for the connection they are guaranteed to succeed in taking  thousands, 10's of thousands, 100's of thousands of customers.

Kcom and Karoo can't see this simple fact. If they can see it they are doing nothing whatsover about it. Last I heard they where  doing a feasibility study  about fibre but the fact of the matter is if it will cost then money they  will not do it. They are a shadow of the company that once served Hull only. In those long since gone days they where a company to proud of. Since they expanded into a, don't laugh, world wide company they have forgotten about their long suffering roots. Telephony in this city is so poor now they are the biggest joke this city can offer.

Someone, any one, set up a fibre network. Use the cities extensive sewer system to route the fibre to homes and businesses. Use a route out to the wider Internet somewhere outside the city. No need at all to touch anything belonging to Kcom. Provide  real high speed services which the current piss poor ADSL2+ cannot provide, Offer Internet, telephone and TV via cable and the people would jump. It it so easy to envisage but finding someone to do it is the hard part. Which is a shame because I guarantee the people of this once magnificent city would jump ship tomorrow if the fibre network suddenly appeared.

The fact is that the long suffering people and businesses of this city are ready and primed to move elsewhere.

Really?

According to this BBC article Jacqui Smith who has never ever been in sync with what the English rank and file people want has declared that the  people  "can't wait for ID cards". While her comment is not the first bullshit to come via government sources at any level it sure ranks right up there as the biggest lie to be uttered.

I don't know every member of the English population obviously but of those I do know and/or have contact with there is not one amongst them that want an ID card. These people come from every walk of life. From the lowest to the highest and yet here we have the home secretary telling the masses that people "can't wait  for ID cards" like she  even knows what the public wants. She is, and always has been, so out of touch with the general feeling amongst the general public is it unreal.

From her lofty promiment position of home secretary you would think she actually knew what the public wanted but no. Not ever has she shown that to be true. This latest lie, in a long line of lies, comes across as if she knows. She is undoubtably the most unpopular home secretary this country has ever known and comments like this will only serve to reenforce that unpopularity.

Say no to ID cards but remember the governemt, especially the current one, knows more about what you want than you do as is seen by the home secretarys comments.

This current government, more than any other previous government, has dome more to remove your control over your own life. That comment only serves to re-enforce that. There is not one iota of evidence to back up her claim and yet she will force it on to a public that simply does not want it. This government has done that at every level so it should not be a surprise to anyone.

Karoo customer services.

Our incumbent ISP, Karoo, have what is possibly the worst customer services of any similar, and none similar, industry.

They often proffer an email address to which one should sent customer related enquiries. That email address is in addition to their regular one. More often than not any email sent to either addresses is routinely ignored.

As a test to make sure it was not just me that they ignore (I have been on their internal blacklist many times over they years) I arranged with some of the people on my list to send  an  email from their own computer using their own email address. Around 2000 agreed to allow me to conduct this test. I then sent such an email from the  around 2000 different customer computers and of those more than 2000 around 82% were ignored. Not exactly conclusive proof but is a clear indication of how they hold their customers in utter contempt.

Why do they ignore the emails? That can only be answered by them. However, it is well known here in Hull that the Karoo customer services team follow very closely a sheet from which they read. That is how many other companies do things as well except that in Karoo's case they  rarely, if ever, deviate from it. This sends customers tempers flaring as more often than not this tends not to solve whatever is/was the problem that prompted the question in the first place.

Ringing them up is no better either as it is essentially they same team so inherits all the same bad traits as emailing them does.

In conclusion it can be said, within the limited scope of the test mentioned above that Karoo Customer Services quite simply is diabolically bad.

Folly pure folly.

As Man grapples with Natures natural climatic changes in an effort to slow down the obvious impact on Man itself one has to wonder what nature herself makes of it all.

Species come and species go. That, by definition, is what Nature is all about. Nature can be brutal at times, mostly gentle at others but over the course of the last couple of years and no doubt in the future we are seeing her flex her muscles. Man can fight her all he likes but Nature will win. She always does.

Trillions of monies have been spent on fighting this most natural of sequences of events. Money wasted. But onwards the worlds great thinkers (tinkerers) go trying to work one over on Nature. It is all doomed to abject failure but that will not stop them wasting evermore money in their quest for absolute Human power over Nature.

Mirrors in space, iron filings dropped into the worlds oceans are two such of their ideas. As the Earth slowly, wearily, cycles through its seasons in times long since past cataclysmic events have befallen not only Man but other predominant species of those ancient times curtailing their existence to the annals of history. In more recent times (10 of thousands of years)  temperatures have risen and temperatures have fallen but Man has always survived. Perhaps what is due to come will be the end of Man as the   dominant species. Is that something to be so scared of that we enable these tinkerers to do yet more damage to our fragile planet in their efforts to keep Man on top of the food chain?

To my mind no. They are simply stalling the obvious. The Earth moves in cycles and the time is coming when Man's very survival depends not on his will to survive but by Natures say so. Some would claim that by trying to stall the inevitable  we are showing a will to survive Natures onslaught. To that I say no, that is not correct. What Man is doing will simply drive Natures desire to rid herself of Man's interference on  every known species, and natural resources we have plundered, on this Earth.

Man has slowly all but destroyed this planet with its insatiable desire to be top dog and with Man's tinkering to stave off the inevitable Nature will ensure, no matter what Man tries to do about it that we die off. If not completely then with severely limited numbers left. So few that Man will struggle.

"The weak shall inherit the Earth". And we all know that "only the strong survive".

Is it just me or?

Is it just me or is the whole Web experience slowing down? Not by ISP's slowly but surely making connection speeds fall lower and lower through lack of anything approaching decent networks but by more and more usage of PHP and SQL?

Have you noticed how several of the so called main stream web sites hit URL after URL in your browsers taskbar? This transversal of URL and after URL usually includes several hits to various advertisements which plague the Internet web experience these days which all goes towards slowing down what eventually fils your browser window.

It is bad enough when a web site uses flash to display some minor image. None are more guilty of that particular practise than news services where when going to any single one of the so called main stream news web sites it can take from a minute to several minutes even on a 18Mbit plus  ADSL2 connection for the web site to fully load into the browser.

The whole web experience today is bad to piss poor but as the web sites themselves deliberately slow down the end result (what you see in your browser window) it is only going to succeed in people looking elsewhere as they struggle to find something that displays faster.

It does not matter if one is using Internet Explorer (though one must ask you why you are using that insecure monstrosity) or Safari or Firefox or any one of the many others that are available this slowdown thing affects everyone irregardless of browser in use. It is only going to get worse.

Google's front page shows what can be done but even that is slowly caving in to the ever more loaded pages.

Government Databases.

I surely am not alone in being scared of our government, be they Labour, Conservative or any other political party, being ever more willing and in some cases already doing, huge one point databases am I?

They either plan or have implemented all encompassing databases which will include every man, woman and child resident in this country, whether they be nationals (defined as born here irregardless of creed, race or faith) or tourists (business or otherwise). Another database will contain every child and so on.

The number of 'lost' names in recent times is scary enough but a single point database (which means only one entry for access to) containing who knows what of every individual just fills me with dread. I don't know how hackers (defined as those who break into such databases).

We already have the police database, the passport database, the drivers database (think DVLA), a doctor's database and hospital databases, registered with banks and so on. We are first on the goverment radar after being registered at birth and from that time to death, which is also registered) we voluntarily sign up for most, if not all of the services mentioned above. We leave information at various shops where we purchased something. That signals to the bank that at that moment in time where we were, what we  bought and what we spent. All that sort of thing while not voluntary is just part and parcel of everyday life. Having all that information stored in one place and accessed  via one single means is just plain scary. It is bad enough that the number of databases holding all manner of information on individuals exist and some link up so verifications can be made. The fact that this huge database is government run (for now until they decide to sell the information as will surely happen within 25 years of it starting) and owned make it all the more scary.

Our government, or put another way our elected officials, has an appalling track record regarding such things and it is widely and well known that the government, at any level from Westminster to local councils, are useless at governing  any IT project be it small or large. This huge database comes under the banner of the latter.

During the last year various government departments 'lost' private and confidential information. They 'lost' laptops and notebooks with monotonousness regularity usually containing unencrypted data. Their track record is appalling.

I,  for one, find these huge government mandated databases scary.