What’s it like be have the consciousness of a baby?
It’s like being in love, I’m Paris, for the first time, after you’ve had three doubles espressos.
Which is a fantastic way to be, but it does tend to leave you crying at three o’clock in the morning.

Research shows that natural light increases productivity by 16%.

If Parans type of technology replaced 10% of electric lights in every building in Europe, US and China, we could reduce CO2 emissions by up to 220 millions tonnes every year.

Currently, I have ticket open that they wont close, or more accurately, don’t realise it is still open.    Every once in a while I will add another comment to the ticket, to see if that will jiggle something loose.  so far it hasn’t and it is six months and counting.

The profess to teach everyone about the dangers of Smart Meters.

Here is some choice excertps:

“The meters are watching you.”

No, they are only monitoring the electricity consumption.

“They see how many watts your electric toothbrush uses”

No, they have no way of knowing what is consuming the power.

“They send information about [when you use your toothbrush] over wireless networks”

No, they send a continuous feed of the current amount of electricity consumed. They do not record when appliances are turned on or off.

“They send the information to the power company, where they keep record of all your power consumption, volumes and patterns, and store it forever on computers that you have no access to”

Utility companies already store this information, and have done for many years. It is how they bill you. Data cannot be stored forever, it will be archived, just like your credit card information and your driving record.

“The data shows when you were at home, when you were sleeping, when you’re on vacation, when you have visitors, when you turned on a lamp, a power tool, some extra computers, and if you look like you are running a business out of your home.”

Usage patterns can be used to infer alot of things. The meters will not record exactly when you go to bed or turn on a lamp, but the usage over time creates a pattern that can be recognised. Power companies already have illegal usage detection to prevent grow ops in your neighborhood.

“It even senses when you ‘bootleg’ energy off the grid”.

For shame! They should turn a blind eye to that!

“This is not electrical metering. This is personal surveillence. It is a search without a warrent every day.”

“The smart meters are radio transmitters which can easily be intercepted by a hacker to gain intimate personal knowledge of your life”.

No. The information is encrypted. Just like every time you use your debit card at the store, your banking information “shoots through the air to some institution somewhere.”

“Your power company can give or sell your personal information to whoever it wants.”

Then pick a better power company with a privacy policy you agree to.

“Any abnormal use is considered just cause … for a raid … to bust you for illegal activities in the privacy of your own home that they otherwise wouldn’t have known about.”

Getting away with a crime does not make it legal. It makes it hidden. If the power company used meter data to bust a grow-op in my neighbourhood that attracted dangerous criminals, I’m ok with that.

“Smart meters are no different than wire tapping devices.”

They are very different. Wire tapping devices intercept your communications and allow the attacker to know exactly what was said. Smart meters only watch electricity consumption.

First thing I battled with was a corrupted PST file.  scanpst.exe is a little hidden gem that helped with that.

Then, after someone “helped” ¹, and messed up the mail delivery, I had to fix his outlook profile. Trouble was, I could not find the “show profiles” tab in the mail control applet. This was maddening, because it was turning up nothing in my Googling.

Turns out that somehow, outlook had been switched into “Internet Mail Only” mode, and I suppose this somehow removes the profile editing stuff. However, the profile that was left was so broken that it had to be fixed. 10 GOTO 10.

Lukily, I found this link which informed me about IMO mode, and how to switch it back.  So a lesson for everyone is that in order to use profiles in Outlook, which you need in order to have multiple PST datafiles, and to control how and where mail is delivered, your Outlook must be in Corporate Workgroup mode.

May I also add that TeamViewer is a very good remote control solution, which I used to great effect today for about 3 hours, including 2 reboots.

[1] By “helped” I mean completely screw everything up.

Excel Multiplication Weirdness

Um, what?

Update: Turns out that the cell with the value “0″ was a text string, and apparently, a text string is equivalent to 1.

Accommodation makes sense only if the economy is reaching a steady state. But the clearer the vision becomes, the further away it seems. A steady state economy will be politically possible only if we can be persuaded to stop grabbing. This in turn will be feasible only if we feel more secure. But the global race to the bottom and its destruction of pensions, welfare, public services and stable employment make people less secure, encouraging us to grasp as much for ourselves as we can.

Your place of encounter

My place of encounter? Great! Do I need my boots of escaping?

It wishes to send a modification?

It must specify return date!

And when it’s done, it rubs the lotion on it’s skin.

[1] I have high respect for anyone who can speak multiple languages. Having lived in multiple places where English was a second language, that respect only grows. But c’mon, we can still have a giggle at the funny things we see, right?

Why do they bother putting a search button in the Recent Contacts view? Have you ever tried it? It never finds anything. Like, never.  In the normal Contacts view, it finds stuff according to some weird quantum mechanics algorithm.  In other words, it returns a random selection of contacts that have no relationship to the search term.

And then, to cap it off, Notes went completely unresponsive for 10 minutes, and pegged the disk at 100%.

On the bright side, it gave me the opportunity to complain about it here.

Except the ellipses.

On the US keyboard, the left and right ellipse is above the 9 and 0 key, respectively.

On the European keyboard, they are above the 8 and 9 key, respectively.

This causes me pauses everytime I go to use them, and eventually, I have become so confused, that I get it wrong.  Every.  Time.

It’s actually kinda funny how my brain works though, because it has started to slowly get used to the idea that for a left elipse I need to press the key marked with the right ellipse, and for a right ellipse I need to press the key marked with an equals sign (as far as the superscript marking on the key that is.)

This is where it gets interesting though, is when I go to use the blackberry.  That one-key-to-the-right bias carries over, and when I try to type a left and right ellipse on the BB I get a right ellipse and a dash.

Stupid brain =)

• Atomised: The Fukushima crisis should not spell the end of nuclear power.
• Going Critical: How the Fukushima disaster taught me to stop worrying and embrace nuclear power.

I’m deeply worried about the the apparant lack of consensus on the subject of sustainable energy production.

I would love to know what he thinks about a recent interview with Dr. Helen Caldicott after the Fukushima Japan nuclear accident.

Apart from the curious relationship she draws between nuclear power and men’s testicles, she does seem to have some alarming scientific facts about the dangers of nuclear power, and how, in her opinion, there is no such thing as a safe nuclear reactor.

How can we make the right choices, and put the correct pressure on our elected politicians, if we can never be sure we are getting the right information?

Who do you trust?

Google Accounts: I’m getting a message that says ‘Sorry, your account has been disabled.’
If you’ve been redirected to this page from the sign in page, it means that access to your Google Account has been disabled.
In most cases, accounts are disabled because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service.

Google reserves the right to:

• Suspend a Google Account from using a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated.
• Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.

Well that’s just wonderful. This all started when they thought they detected weird logins from multiple countries, and their SMS secret code method completely failed for my Spanish mobile.

And what’s up with that last clause? For any reason without notice? How do they expect to win business customers with that? I am now completely unable to use any google service, and all my data is locked away. Including YouTube, google docs, gmail, rss reader and chrome bookmarks.

Update: Got the account back, and it was pretty straight forward.  But four days is too long without your main email repository.  Luckily, I was able to redirect my main accounts to another service.

• 97.3% of respondents feel like they receive a large amount of work-related emails
• 55.8% use a BlackBerry while 34.8% use an iPhone
• 90.4% said eProductivity saves them time, and 72.1% of those people said eProductivity saves them 30 minutes or more every day.
• 87.1% said eProductivity makes it easy to get an empty email inbox
• 91.2% can access LinkedIn at work, but only 73.5% can access Twitter
• 90.5% reported being satisfied with Lotus Notes when using eProductivity, but only 31.1% reported being satisfied with Lotus Notes when eProductivity was taken out of the mix

The last fact sums it up: If you must use Notes, you must you eProductivity. It is that simple.

Trying out smugmug, and lightroom.

Full gallery here.

Really? Remove the battery? Twice?
And what happened to apps which gracefully replace themselves with the latest version?
Every time a remove the battery, my Curve takes 10 minutes to be useable.

Battery out reset didn’t help.

The secret address book rebuild code on this site did the trick.

I am so three one three three seven.

Well, no-one uses it, and its really bad.

Yeah, no shit Sherlock.

So I kindly informed him that I had previously reported that the SAP web application had stopped working, and had turned into a paint program.  He said, “By any chance do you have the zoom set to anything other than 100%?”

Stunned silence.

As my brain slowly started processing the idea that a client-side zoom setting had caused the ENTIRE application to hang, I realised that I was trying to apply Reason in the first place.  So I simply did what the IT guy said, and checked.

Oh. My. Fracking. God.

Behold – the IE zoom level of death:

IE zoom of death

I set this back to 100%, and wouldn’t you know it, it started working….

….until… <click>

<click>….wait….<click><click>

…. ah yes – we all knew this wasn’t actually going to solve all the problems.  In fact, it has joyfully created another problem.

The report which I had wasted my ENTIRE DAY on is inaccesable from the web client.  The IT guy on the phone said those dreaded words:

“Huh.  Never seen it do that before.”

I said that if I  have to delete my report, and start ALL OVER AGAIN, I would come through the phone and strangle him.  He laughed, but with that tinge of fear caused by the realisation that I might actually manage it, somehow.