I travelled up to London on Sunday (yesterday), the engineering works at Wimbledon made the rail journey longer, but thankfully, the work at London Bridge doesn’t start until next weekend. I hope that since I am usually travelling to Waterloo against the SE London tide, the additional traffic on the Jubilee won’t distress me too much. In theory, the Jubilee can carry more than during 2012, but it could get messy and its planned for 18 months. …
Is I.T. a utility?
The power companies are starting to enable homes to act as power sources as well as consumers. People can sell back any surplus. In the UK, about ⅓ of the power generated is lost during the distribution. The UK consumed[1] 647 Terawatts (1012) in 2013. This implies that 219 Terawatts are generated and lost p.a. with a market value[2] of £20bn. The loss is dependent on the distance travelled and so one policy response would be to build community micro- or meso-generators. On the whole older power stations are …
Privacy
I published my notes on November’s BCS Privacy meeting about the coming EU Data Protection regulation. What it says, Chief DPOs, the SDLC & Risk Mitigation, with a bit on the right to be forgotten & the CJEU. …
Labour and the Greens
Last year, Luke Akehurst published a piece on Labour and the Green Party on Labour List, in which he argued that Labour needs to campaign strongly against the Greens to stop their momentum. Like all good strategists, he’s seeking to avoid a war on two fronts. I made a comment on the page, and considered writing a longer piece here but in the end failed to find the time. …
Insurance
Watching “Britain’s Wildest Weather 2014”; reminds me, need to check my insurance policies. …
Celery
Trip to Raymond Blanc in Pompey. They’d had a delivery problem and were only honouring bookings so that was OK. I should have had the pork, not the steak. The Mont Blanc was underwhelming but the celery soup was excellent as was the service. I was with Mrs. L’s family, not the easiest of customers. …
Too much power
The Dark Knight was released in 2008, five years before the Snowden leaks in 2013. It was on UK TV last night, and I have referred to the surveillance machine that Batman built to fight the Joker. There were stories at the time that the US Federal Government were tapping everyone’s cell phones, and my reasons for quoting this piece of fiction is the conversation had between Batman and Lucius Fox on the latter’s discovery of the machine built by Batman. Listen to the dialogue in this you tube short cut. …
Greek dreams
Playing Property Porn tonight, looking in Greece, Corinth, the Ionian islands & the Cyclades, with RightMove. One advantage of EU citizenship is that as a Brit, I have the right to buy property in Greece, maybe not near the borders, but they may be best avoided. One disadvantage is that the Health Service is not as good as in the UK, a second is that the language looks hard to learn because of the alphabet.
Mind you, money goes a long way in the Ionian islands. …
Rent or Buy
I think there’s some very heavy theory to be understood on the relationship between rental & primary markets; firstly there’s swap pricing, but it’s an acute issue in the housing markets, and also I think ‘creative content’. Although one market is very illiquid and the other is not. …
Sufficient
A good trip to PC World! The staff are as sullen and hard to find as ever, so we only left with what we went for although they’d run out of micro SD Disks! FFS! …