12.25.08
Carl Sagan’s apple pie recipe
I can see why his Cookery books never took off.
(Gag stolen from Robin Ince’s performance at the “Nine lessons and Carols for godless people”)
12.17.08
In praise of the FSCS
Yes, I was a rate tart who had stashed a bit of money in Icesave. After the Nationalisation of Northern Rock, it seemed prudent to remove the eggs from ones basket. Unfortunately, even though the FSCS guaranteed some of the Icesave money, it was up to the Icelandic compensation scheme to fork out the first £16K. Now the Icelandic scheme was backed by government and as a last resort any shortfall should have been supplied (via a gentlemen’s agreement) by Iceland’s Scandinavian and Nordic friends.
Unfortunately, most bank compensation schemes are just thought experiments, none of the thoughts include total financial meltdown of the banking system as well as the near bankruptcy of an entire country. As a result, those with a modest sum (<16K) faced getting squat.
Given that the FSCS has probably never had to deal with anything like a hundred of thousand saver’s cash, totalling several billion : we were mostly expecting a long drawn out bureaucratic process.
After the promise from Darling’s treasury backed guarantee that no saver would loose his cash – the FSCS sprang into action and were able to repay savers in just over a month.
In a surprising feat of IT literacy – the FSCS took over the icesave.co.uk domain, and made a couple of modifications to the site to only allow users to remove their cash.
This worked very well since, as Icesave is an internet only account, all savers had to link to another account in their regular bank in order to transfer money in and out. That meant that savers could withdraw their money to their linked account, and that account only (which at least in part avoids the obvious Phishing scams which pray on desperate savers trying to get their money back).
By waiting, and not hassling the FSCS, after they contacted me via email I spent about 5 mins on the website and within two days the money was back in my current account without the need to cut down any trees. Fantastic.
Some savers complained that the FSCS was slow to get in contact, but they should bear in mind that the FSCS doesn’t have a list of customers at the immediate point that the bank collapses.
I’m sure there were corner cases, but overall the handling of the situation was efficient and sensible.
Distractions
Survived my five hour DIY session with the orthopaedic surgeons. I’m not sure why they are still called orthopaedics (lit. child straightening), but it really is spanners, chisels, hammers, sterilised black and decker drills.
Luckily the Virus that had hit the hospital trust that week, did not affect my operation. It’s pretty harsh for a hospital having to deal with infections by Russian hackers along with MRSA, C.Difficile outbreaks – but highlights the security problems of re-using off the shelf ‘civilian’ technology.
Unfortunately, during the first part of the procedure to remove the metal rod, a screw broke off and they had to ‘bang it through to the other side of the leg’. Perhaps to make up for this bashing, they used a cool £1000 per gram bioactive cement to revise the non union of the femur – a sort of paste mixed with bone cells harvested from my pelvis (the iliac crest to be precise).
I’m on crutches till January and then, hopefully, I will be able to walk less like Quasimodo (though my girlfriend said that my limp was cute and I didn’t need an op).
A post op analgesic such as morphine make it almost impossible to read, and for me made it difficult to watch fast moving films or banging music. But, I found the perfect opiate companion to wail away the winter evenings : Audio books.
After scouring the interweb for some books I always thought I should read, but never could be arsed – I tried out a few public domain audio books where I found renditions of Oscar Wilde, Conrad and Dostoyevsky mostly read by nasal, winy Californian hippies. I gave up after a few chapters, preferring the sound of the my neighbour vomiting his breakfast into his lap.
I did however find that audio books narrated by the authors themselves are often very good:
- The God Delusion – Narrated by Dawkiepoos and his wife, this was lovely to listen to. The alternating of the Professor Yaffle-esque sound of Dawkins and the maternal voice of Lalla Ward helps to keep your attention, and helps to keep you attention, minimising the incessant loss of attention and rewind common to audio books and so helps to keep your attention.
- His Dark Materials:
– Philip Pullman (with a whiff of Tom Baker in his voice) provides a cracking unabridged reading of this popular rehashing of Milton’s paradise lost, complete with armoured bears. The three volumes will keep you occupied for a while. Also it’s good because you don’t have to pronounce the difficult Norse inspired character names.
I’ve been told that Steve Martin’s biography Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life
There is a rumour that the 27hour long Ulysses audio book (on 22 CDs)
Youtube as ever is the ultimate distraction and I found some classic Armando Iannucci sketches:
I also searched for “explosion idiot” and came up with this gem:
I suppose I’m going to have to do some real work now…