Longrider

Via Rachel, I came across the unfortunate story of Natalie who has been misrepresented by the Daily Mail. Natalie is, unsurprisingly, angry and upset by this. The journalist engaged in a ten minute phone interview and then went to press.

On April 30th just after 3.30pm, I snatched up my phone and bit the bullet. I called up the journalist that had ‘interviewed’ me (I say this loosely) and expressed my upset at her not actually stating that she was interviewing me and my concern that I would be included in a feature about revenge, which is not what I, or this blog are about. I told her quite shrilly (I was stressed for fecks sake) that I did NOT want to open the paper and see something like “Blogger gets revenge on ex with her blog!” or some other pathetic headline.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened. Why am I not surprised by this? Newspapers want to sell copy and, frankly, bad news or news about people behaving badly tends to sell rather better than “blogger writes about self help for women”. E-venge is sooo much more sexy. So, e-venge it was. Natalie also tells us that there were 26 inaccuracies in the article. Again, I am not surprised. If my railway career taught me anything it is that journalists are incapable of accurate, factual reporting. They either get it wrong through sheer ignorance or twist it to make the story appear more salacious than it really is. I lose count of the times following the Paddington crash when a journalist would spout utter bollocks about signal sighting like they knew anything about the subject.

I also recall a colleague who fell victim to having her words “twisted by knaves to make traps for fools”; in her case, it was the Sun. She was angry and devastated to find herself splashed across its wretched pages. It took a long time for her to get over the sense of anger and betrayal.

As a signalling manager, it was my responsibility to attend incidents. Journalists have a habit of turning up at incidents looking for a juicy story, and an unguarded comment could lead to a damaging headline. Therefore, we were under strict instructions not to talk to the press unless we were media trained. More recently, I was contacted by Channel 4 following one of my articles about the legality of dress codes in the workplace; in particular, about men with long hair. She wanted me to appear on a reality TV show; The Salon as they were planning a feature on men with long hair. She was disappointed and bemused when I flatly refused. I did so for exactly the same reason that my Railtrack employers insisted that I did not speak to the press when attending incidents; an unguarded comment can be taken out of context and twisted out of its original meaning and used against the utterer. I would have no editorial control, therefore, I would have no control over how I would appear on the finished piece. It would have been easy to make me look foolish with subtle editing. No, thankyou, very much.

For much of his life, Freddie Mercury refused to talk to newspapers. His line was simple enough; they are going to make it up anyway, so they don’t need help from me. It was a stance he maintained until a day or so before his death. It is a wise stance and one worth emulating.

It’s a bit late for Natalie, but for any other bloggers out there, I have one important piece of advice; take a deep breath and pause if you are asked for an interview. Ask yourself if you really want to do this. I know it is flattering and you are looking at your fifteen minutes of fame, but they are not thinking of you, they are thinking of their copy, of selling newspapers. You are just a means to that end; a pawn in their game. Is that fifteen minutes of fame worth a damaged reputation and the heartache that goes with it? If you take one piece of advice away from this site, then take this; never, ever, talk to the press. Oh, and don’t buy the Daily Mail, but that’s a given, isn’t it?

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Footnote: Natalie has complained to the Press Complaints Commission, but she is also trying to get this story on as many blogs as possible to set the story straight. This is my contribution.

On Monday, I turn fifty. The thought that goes through my mind is; where did all that time go? It seems barely a day or so ago that I was dreading turning forty. At the time, I wrote an introspective for Bikenet, musing on growing older. Now it’s the big five-o.

My life has been somewhat chequered. This is in part due to not really having any sense of direction. As a teenager, I had the vague idea that I wanted to be a veterinary surgeon. What kid doesn’t? A staggering lack of self-awareness meant that I missed the blindingly obvious lack of talent in the physics and chemistry department – both prerequisites for this career. By the time I reached the fifth form, I had, indeed, realised that this was a non-starter. I thought, perhaps, I could go to sea; following in my grandfather’s footsteps; and join the merchant marine as a radio officer. Ah, but, my lack of prowess with the old physics rather got in the way again. Two years at college taught me that while I could just about scrape through the exams, I was never going to cut it. Besides, the merchant navy was disappearing fast.

I tried half-heartedly to get a trainee post with the GPO telephones, but they saw through me and that died a death before it ever got going. So, I drifted aimlessly into credit control. I was a passable credit controller but tired of it fairly quickly. A falling out with my employer left me temping for the best part of three years before I took a job delivering parts to garages on behalf of a motor factor. I kidded myself that as I was riding a bike and getting paid for it, I was doing okay. But even I could see through the self deception. I was a lackey; a poorly paid lackey and my twenties were rapidly drawing to a close and I had achieved nothing useful with my life. I had done a fair job of screwing up my education and my career through a series of bad choices.

Had I at the age of thirteen chosen the arts – something my art teacher exhorted me to do – I might have made a career in graphic design, writing or photography. As it was, these things are all confined to my extra-curricular life.

Two severe winters interjected by a wet summer put an end to my desire to ride a bike and be paid for it. In the spring of 1986, I qualified as a driving instructor at the age of 28. For the first time in my career, I felt that I was achieving something positive, that I had a career. I was a pretty good driving instructor, though I say so myself. I tended to specialise in those pupils who had struggled with learning to drive and my unflappable patience seemed to work with them and I enjoyed the job. Well, most of the time.

Then came the poll tax and 15% interest rates. Overnight, my client base dried up. I could have returned to the likes of BSM, but had been badly burned by the franchise system. A system that disadvantages the driving instructor while guaranteeing income for the school – no matter how little work they provide. It’s a bad system and my recent experiences working with the AA merely confirmed my dislike for it. Nothing has changed and my brief desire to return to this career on a part time basis was, in part, killed off by that discovery.

So, after five years as a driving instructor, a new career beckoned. I was offered a post with British Rail as a signalman in Bristol panel signalbox. When it was privatised a few years later, I found myself on strike. Even now, I wonder what possessed us. We gained nothing and some of the working relationships were never repaired. A pointless exercise that became politicised by both sides in the dispute. My relatively short involvement with the unions left a bad taste in my mouth.

Shortly after the strike, I took the opportunity to become a signalling manager. Looking after Westbury panel signalbox, these were, perhaps, the happiest of my railway career. As I approached forty, finally, it seemed, I had a sense of direction.

By the time I had turned forty, I wanted something else, a change. In the spring of 1999, I took promotion and was once more back in the training and development field – something for which I have a natural empathy. My new role was looking after the training and assessment requirements for the whole of the Western zone of Railtrack. To say that it was challenging would be an understatement. I was faced with systemic failure left by my predecessor and had to close the whole thing down and start again from scratch. That was fun. I made a name for myself  and that name was bastard. Curiously, mostly from those folk who when asked would insist that “something be done” about the training department. So, I did that something. As it meant removing the trainer, it also made me a callous bastard. I couldn’t win.

I felt that I was settled. Ah, but, not me. Oh, no. I was asked to apply for a role at headquarters doing much as I had been doing, but nationally. This in part was a consequence of my being a bastard in my previous role. Although I liked my manager and the role, the conflict with the zones made life unbearable. Recommendations from Cullen were given to us to implement. Middle managers simply resisted. Network Rail as it had them become had a problem with serial disobedience and I was sick of trying to overcome it.

By this time, I was tired, disillusioned and ready to walk away. When Network Rail decided to shed a swathe of its middle managers in November 2003, I was one of those who went. The package was a decent one and I had a self-employed role all sorted out.

That self employed role should have enabled me to earn a decent living on part time hours. That it didn’t caused me several turbulent years. And it is only in this past year that I have found a client that offers me plenty of reliable work.

My mid forties saw a change in my attitude. Ambition evaporated. I realised that I don’t much like work. What I want; really, really want, is to bodge about, doing a bit of writing, mucking about on the computer, taking photographs of stunning landscapes, riding the bike and creating something with the garden. What matters to me is not my career – and, in all probability, never did. What is important to me is my home, my family, my leisure.

So, as fifty looms, I am working part time; sometimes as a trainer and assessor and sometimes as an auditor. I thoroughly enjoy it. For the first time in my career, I really do enjoy the job that I do – and, what is so important – is that I have more leisure time than I have ever had.

Ten years ago, I hankered for my lost youth. My lost youth was a somewhat directionless affair, riddled with bad decisions, insecurity and dead-end jobs. At fifty, I have a sense of direction, I am comfortable with who I am and that semi-retirement in France is going to happen within the next year or so. All we need is a buyer for the house and we are off.

Would I go back? If I could do so with the self-assuredness that only maturity can endow, sure, I’d like to make a few changes. But, overall, probably not. I’m not sure that I could cope with angst and insecurity.

It is usual at this point for people to say “and here’s to the next fifty”. I won’t. At fifty, I am still reasonably fit and healthy. I have all my hair and teeth. I am fortunate to look a good ten years younger than my actual years. But do I really want to be a centenarian? Do I want to be wheeled about, barely able to look after myself? No thanks. I want to go out while I’m still firing on all four. So, another thirty years or so will probably do me fine.

So, here’s to what’s left

The BBC site draws our attention to yet another attempt to put people on a database that will be abused, that will lead to people suffering gross injustice and that appears on the face of it, to have little in the way of safeguards:

Workers accused of theft or damage could soon find themselves blacklisted on a register to be shared among employers. It will be good for profits but campaigners say innocent people could find it impossible to get another job

This is not people who have been convicted of a crime, who have been demonstrably proved to have been guilty – this is simply a blacklist of grievances, of allegations, of subjective opinion, tittle tattle and unsubstantiated gossip. No “innocent until proven guilty” here. There is the useless and toothless data protection act that an aggrieved employee can call upon in the event of being wrongfully included on the database, of course. That is, if they are aware that they are on the blacklist in the first instance. At least with the criminal records fiasco, people get to see what is held on them.

I don’t have a problem with employers using references to check up on potential employees – that’s prefecrtly acceptable. And, in the event of a falling out between employer and employee, the employee may choose not to use that employer as a referee; it’s what I have done in the past. That this database is a terrible idea and is little more than a blacklist with no proper safeguards, and, indeed, is wide open to abuse by employers with a grievance and has the potential to wreck an innocent person’s life, is pretty obvious to a reasonable observer. However, to realise that not everyone is a reasonable person, indeed, that some are terminally and dangerously stupid, one only has to look at the comment from Les in Elgin. This moronic fuckwit has this to offer the discussion:

Big brother state? I’m all for that as at the end of the day, it makes society safer and fairer and gives criminals a harder time; if you have nothing to hide then why should you be worried?

To think that my grandfather ruined his health on the convoys, and died young as a consequence, to make this country a safer place for ignorant totalitarian shitheads like this.

I love the facile fashion advice dished out by… well… facile fashion journos. Today, it’s advice on sunglasses.

Do I look cool in these? Or do I look a dork?” Every man has to ask this question about his sunglasses. If he has any sense, he’ll make sure that he does it in the shop - with a ruthlessly objective wife, girlfriend, or mate - rather than a week later when the lenses are scratched and he’s blown £150 on eyewear he belatedly realises makes him resemble a low-grade Albanian pimp.

I never realised that there was so much in it. Ever since the eighties, I’ve settled on the classic Ray Ban Aviator. I like the shape, they suit may face and they work. End of. At least, that’s what I thought.

It sounds easy but there’s a major catch: the gap between Steve McQueen embodying cool in his Persols and Alan Partridge embodying a prat in his mirrored shades is an extremely slim one. Which way you end up depends on three key things: your degree of self-confidence, your general dress style and your face shape.

Oh, right. I don’t have a chiselled face. Mine’s sort of heart shaped. I’ll still wear the aviators, though, because I like them. Now…

The self-confidence bit is the most important because it trumps everything. We all have friends who can put on any item of clothing, no matter how ludicrous or outré, and look brilliant. This is because, having no embarrassment or self-doubt, they are able to dress with such infectious conviction that everyone assumes they must know what they’re doing.

Oh, dear… I’ve always had my own dress sense and the willingness to wear whatever I want whenever I want and to hell with what others think. I have never worried about self-confidence and people just accept that my quirky dress sense is, well, just me. And, yes, I do know what I’m doing when I wear a regency style shirt and waistcoat with Levi jeans and western boots. This quality is not valued, though, it seems:

People who do are mostly shallow and worthless and will surely be punished by God in the afterlife, even if in this earthly one they’re destined to have far more sex and fun than we do. So it’s important to choose sunglasses compatible with your general dress style.

That puts me in my place, then. Dunno about the more sex thing – I must have missed that bit… Did I say that the aviator style works well with the regency/western look?

As for trends, Jabolin says that Aviators remain an excellent bet, but that where sunglasses are going is smaller, more intellectual and a bit geeky. “Sunglasses fashions follow clothes fashions, so you need something to go with that high-tailored, slightly gentrified look.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah… I’ll be sticking with the Ray Ban Aviators and slip a leather jacket over the loose shirt and waistcoat. I might just dig out those knee-length boots…

Thus goes the headline in today’s Groan.

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.

Am I surprised by this revelation? Am I buggery. CCTV was always going to be a placebo, a comfort blanket for the hard of thinking and terminally gullible. It makes a certain portion of the population feel safe; it doesn’t actually make them safe, though.

The first and most obvious reason being that the clued up criminals will simply move their base of operations to an area devoid of CCTV. This leaves the more empty headed variety to carry out their nefarious activities under the watchful eye of the CCTV operators. But, even then, it still isn’t working… Why might that be, then? What about all this fantastic face recognition technology? And what about all those cop shows where someone says “enhance that, please” and a pin-sharp image of the suspect is displayed neatly on-screen?

Ah, ain’t fiction wonderful. They can do all sorts of things in fictional TV land – travel through time and space, speak English to aliens and be immediately understood, solve crimes with DNA alone and, importantly, enhance an image that is so dreadfully low resolution that all you should get is a few unrecognisable pixels – but, hey presto! we get a razor sharp picture of the perp with not a pixel out of place. The reality is somewhat more mundane. The reality is that a low resolution image cannot be enhanced because it doesn’t have enough information in the image to enhance. And, frankly, facial recognition is a pile of poo.

So, there you have it, the entirely predictable being announced. The surveillance state has wasted millions on piss-poor technology that achieves bugger all. The low tech solution would be to spend that money on police officers patrolling the streets, but that, presumably, isn’t sexy enough.

Reading on through the article, though, they want to utilise the technology anyway – quelle surprise.

The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include:

· A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.

· Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.

· Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

They also complain that the use of images in court cases has a poor record. Well, given the poor quality of the images, I suspect that a decent defence counsel would drive the proverbial coach and four though it. And, what is it with these people who think that national databases are going to do what good old fashioned policing won’t? Sure, if you have a decent image of your suspect, it will help – but go back to the original point; they are not decent images. They are, frankly, barely recognisable. You have only to see what they put out on news items and Crime Stoppers to get a feel for the poor quality of the pictures CCTV produces. They are little better than photofits.

Why do I get the feeling that the police are looking to make their lives easier rather than making a proper effort to secure safe convictions?

It seems that Google has decided that Longrider and Felix Domesticus are both distributing badware. If you search on Google, this is what you see. These sites are not distributing badware. Felix Domesticus suffered a corrupted database following a failed upgrade of Wordpress. Otherwise, nothing has changed with the sites.

According to stop badware.org, the reasons for this warning are:

1. Badware available for download on your site

2. Badware available on sites that you link to

3. Badware distributed through ads running on your site

4. Badware links posted in user-generated areas of your site

5. Hacking attacks to your site

I don’t offer any downloads. I link to other blogs and news sites and I don’t have ads. I always checkout links posted by people who comment, so can confirm that they do not lead to badware sites. That last one sent a chill down my spine but a check reveals no evidence of hacking. Indeed, the only recent change in circumstances was the failed Wordpress upgrade. Generally when looking for a fault, the last thing that went wrong is where it is to be found. A check with AVG confirms what I already established – there are no threats on my sites. Google is wrong. Not only is it wrong, it is verging on the paranoid.

Seriously, I’m pissed off with Google – if their bots can’t tell the difference between a corrupted database and malware, and consequently tarnish the whole site, then I am not impressed. I’ve requested a review, so we will see what happens. Interestingly other search engines are fine. It’s Google that sees badware where none exists and blackens my name with no good reason. If they don’t fix this quickly, I’ll simply block their bot from the sites completely. I’ll be losing nothing by doing so.

Bastards!

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Update: Google have done the decent thing and removed the warning. Thanks chaps. I withdraw the bastards comment. However, there is a caveat; you still got it wrong, there was never any risk to peoples’ PCs from my sites.

Seumas Milne in comment is free:

But it’s also clear that the kind of progressive coalition and policies that Livingstone favoured - on transport, housing, privatisation and redistribution - are a good deal more popular with voters than the rudderless triangulation currently on offer from Gordon Brown.

Having been trounced because they steal from those who earn and give it to those who don’t, or piss it up the wall on special interest minorities and quangos, because they snoop and pry into our private lives, bully and fine us for petty misdemeanours – because, frankly, they are poisonous bastards, the way back is…

…more of the fucking same?!?

Fuck me, but they are thick.

I notice, too, that Milne is trying the same misanthropic and patronising tack displayed so admirably by Neil Harding and blaming the press. No, you thick fuck, people are not so stupid as to vote on the basis of a headline – they voted the way they did because the Labour party has treated them like shit.

Jesus, but the so called progressive left in this country is a monster to behold. They didn’t get it wrong – the voters, blinded by the evil press barons got it wrong. Listen, chaps; you got it wrong. The voters rejected your candidates. Some genuine introspection – should you be sufficiently intellectually honest  – will provide you with an answer. Don’t blame the press, don’t blame the electorate, don’t blame “posh” people. Blame yourselves, for there is no one else.