I watched the first episode of the new series of Homeland some time last week and will probably continue, to see how much more unreliable Carrie can become. She's been started off in that great place for spies, Berlin.
Somehow she seems to be working for a dodgy corporate organisation on the wrong side of what America considers to be good.
Almost immediately we get a sleazy club's computer hackers electronically stumbling into a CIA outpost's website where, with almost no trickery, they download the crown jewels of the entire covert operations in Germany. Oops.
Carrie then co-incidentally runs into her old boss Saul (the one who who speaks in pompous meeting cliches). There's a hat tip to le Carre when Saul later deploys old-school tradecraft using a handkerchief in his top pocket as a signal. This is to Quinn, another of Carrie's ex buddies coincidentally in Berlin, who is sent to blow up a pipe bomber.
I gather that the next episode recreates a Syrian/Lebanese refugee camp, with arabic graffiti on the walls saying 'Al watan (Homeland) is a Watermelon' and similar phases. Clearly no-one on the set knew the arabic for Homeland (الوطن) so when it appears scrawled in half a dozen locations no-one was expecting it to say anything awkward.
There's a short scene in episode one where Quinn co-incidentally appears for a debrief and talks about the lack of empathy for middle east of the people he is briefing. Along the lines of 'none of you have seen active service in the middle east'. I can't tell yet with this series if it is really having a pop or just being cartoony.
I finally got around to looking at those Facebook annual accounts for the UK.
I say UK, although I notice from their Companies House Annual Return that they are set up with an Irish Director based in Dublin, which presumably helps give some taxation efficiencies.
The rest of the Directors are all based in California, so the 362 person UK business comprising 34 admin, 195 technical and 133 sales is directed remotely, at least according to the AR01.
Ernst and Young prepared the accounts in line with UK GAAP, and say that everything is tickety-boo. Facebook turned over about £105m in the UK in 2014, compared with £49m in the previous year.
With double the turnover of the prior year, they managed to make slightly more than double the loss of the previous year, 'worsening' the loss from £11m to last year's £28m. That also shows as a lower performance, making 126% loss this year vs 122% loss the prior year.
Of course, to the untrained eye, this could all look like some sort of fiddle of the books to dodge tax. But the big accountancy firms say not. This is all legitimate and above board. It's mainly the staff costs where the potential profit went. In addition to the £40.8m salaries, there's another share based payment charge of £35.4m. This apparent worsening of ultimate performance appears to be richly rewarded.
A few quick sums to get a sense of proportion. The average salary cost of one of the 362 UK Facebook employees works out at £112k, plus their payment of £24k National Insurance. That's £137k. Now add on the 2014 bonus averaged at £97.7k and the salary drifts towards £235k averaged across all employees.
I know, it's not that simple. Some people get paid less, and others get paid more. There is probably a distribution curve for performance too (XESIL), so that some people can get double bonuses and others get none. My quick bell-curve calculation shows a total reward range from £115k (mainly admin) to £336k for the bulk of the staff.
So do the staff actually get their hands on the bonus shares money? I can't be certain, but it looks as if they can't for four years.
What everyone appears to get are paper shares (RSUs) with a minimum 4 year vesting period.
So Facebook kind of wins twice, it has written its profits away, removed the Corporation Tax charge and only has to give the RSU certificates to its staff, until the end of another four years.
Oh well, I suppose it did have to pay £4,327 of Corporation Tax (usually rated at 20%-21% of profit) on its turnover of £104m. I wonder if it still has that Cayman Islands account where it was squirrelling advertising revenues?
My favourite pictogram from the new kitchen equipment is probably this one. As well as the wide range of instruction booklets in Arabic, Russian, French, German, Spanish and all points in between, many of the instructions were also available as little diagrams.
I'm not entirely sure what this one actually means though:
- Klaxon sound indicates bear in vicinity?
- If you hear a bear, hide in fridge?
- Don't leave fridge door open, because it may attract bears?
- Possible bear hazard in fridge?
- Do not pet the fridge bear?
- Bare right at fridge?
- If fridge door left open it will growl like a bear?
It's still a couple of weeks until the start of this years NaNoWriMo National Novel Writing Month although I think I'll be giving it a miss this time around.
I did idly consider some kind of Colder War theme, but I think I'd be better off fixing some of my previous writing attempts.
Strange to relate, I recently had another book published. This one wasn't under the name 'rashbre' but instead under my real name and was with a bunch of accomplices. It's been a longish project and finally made the light of day in time for a conference in Frankfurt.
It's more technical than my novel-writing attempts, and doesn't really belong in these pages, so I won't say more here. Instead, back to the Colder War.
My background thinking for a new story theme was to consider the effects of a Colder War in a socially connected world. The ways that webs work. However, with current global conditions, the real-life events are already operating faster than I can make anything up. I'd considered something about border incursions to stir unrest, and how long it could remain undetected in the era of Twitter.
The reality has already unfolded with the tragedy of the MH17 plane disaster. The Dutch investigation is reporting that the plane was shot down by a surface to air missile. That's where the social media kicks in, tracing what could have happened...or as some are saying, could have been faked.
Top of the post I've shown a representation of a BUK Surface to Air system. There's the command post, a snowdrift radar unit (the thing that looks like a solar panel), the rocket launcher (shown is the more modern M2 with its flatter radome) and a backup truck with more missiles. The missiles shown are the most recent type with short fins for extra manoeuvrability. Bottom line: It's not an easy convoy to hide.
So when social media started to lace the MH17 situation together, they assembled a set of photos and videos of a BUK convoy on flatbed trailers in Russia, heading towards the Ukrainian border just a couple of days before plane was shot down. These are supposedly from random dashcams and similar. Here's an example video:
There's another video of an assembly of BUK equipment near a filling station around Alexyevka. At least some of the convoy travels south following the Ukranian border towards Kamensk-Schactinsky, which is itself about 15 km inside the Russian side of the border.
Then there's another photo from Paris Match, around Snizhne, inside Ukraine, of what looks like a similar BUK missile launcher, this time on a civilian flatbed lorry.
Although it is under camouflage netting, the shape of it suggests it is one of the older launchers with the bulbous radome. They have the long finned missiles and a different type of equally lethal shrapnel in the warhead. The type that carves a T-shaped bow-tie pattern.
Above, it's the same flatbed and launcher captured in a video sequence also in Snizhne, about to head up a hill to forest, which on google also shows a couple of large clear areas.
Most of this data was available a day or two after the plane crash over a year ago. Even with video footage of the launcher moving through Snizhne, there's been challenges to the authenticity of every aspect.
It includes a counter suggestion about a Python missile fired from a Sukhoi Su-25 jet fighter which was then subsequently shot down by a Russian plane. There's even a fancy control room reconstruction of the airspace, from the Russians and showing the Sukhoi SU-25 alongside the three civilian planes in the 17:00-18:00 timeslot.
All of this has been playing out on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, with some incredibly polarised factions in the discussions. Further speculation includes that Putin was flying through the same airspace about 40 minutes before MH17. Presumably the Russian leader's plane would have IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) systems to identify it, like they now fit as standard to American and Canadian commercial planes?
What I'm coming around to, is that beyond the tragedy of the situation, there is also a complex web of jitterdata, which is now generated at spectacular velocity. Social media is fully in the mix and a few well-planted stories can quickly guarantee good coverage for just about anything. So if we are to get a Colder War, we'd better get used to looking for the webs and avoiding getting caught in them.
First was the appearance as a 'Free Gift' in a cycle magazine subscription of a pair of gloves.
They are actually quite snuggly, although it seems slightly early to be wearing them. I've another pair that I normally use for cycling which are thicker and waterproof, but these are very compact and could easily find a place in the pockets of a jacket.
The second item was the first proper sighting of mince pies, this time in Tescos. The example perched on one of the gloves includes a splash of brandy in it, so I guess that's another warming device. I noticed that their 'best before' date is sometime in November, so these are clearly pre-season examples.
No prizes for guessing what happened next to that particular pie.
I've mainly finished my transition to Windows 10 and Office 2016.
It has all worked well, with the only mishaps being computers that stayed 'hung' on the "updating and then we'll switch off and re-boot" screen. It's one of those screens that I'm inclined to leave a long time before eventually pressing reset.
The end result of the updates has been pretty good. Windows 10 is like a cleaned up version of Windows 7, with few of the tiling and other Windows 8/8.1 functions left available. On my ex-Windows 7 work machine it runs fast and on the iMac in a virtual machine it is extremely slick. There's still pieces of the old code lurking, such as the old 'run' dialogues, still available by pressing WINDOWS+R, from which it is possible to launch olde worlde Windows utilities like msconfig or regedit. Even the glitzy co tool panel will revert to old-style dialogues for mildly unusual requests.
The other new thing with Windows 10 has been Microsoft Edge, the replacement browser. It is generally pretty good, although it currently lacks extensions, so to use the password security feature currently requires some deftness. 1Password also highlighted Microsoft's Wifi Sense addition for Windows 10, which is the thing that defaults to let all of the contacts in the contacts list have access to my private wifi network. I need to read the small print book of FAQs on this, which I've currently disabled.
The other big part of the jigsaw has been the updates to Microsoft Office, which are now part of Office 365 or Office 2016. Those have been straightforward updates on both the Windows and the Mac platform and the resultant software runs smoothly and error free (touch wood) in both environments. Some of the oddities of the previous Windows 8-ish versions have been removed. The shouty ALL CAPITALS menus have been changed back to mixed case and there's a modicum of customisation of the appearance of the product which can suit both the Windows and the Mac world.
What I particularly like is the way that the functionality has converged across Mac and PC in these new versions. I usually work with Excel on a PC and every so often if I try to do something on a Mac its just different enough to make my head hurt. All the way from simple things like formatting that were different, through to pivot tables and beyond.
The latest version seem to have rationalised those things, which were enough to make me actually swap back from a Mac to a PC if I had some serious spreadsheeting to do.
Word had some quirks too, particularly some types of fiddly editing which would fail on a Mac, as would some kinds of simple copying like embedding an Excel spreadsheet as a picture into a Word document.
I haven't tried all the combinations yet, but it looks as if it has got a whole lot better - particularly when working across mixed platforms.
I'll still be using the PC for what I call 'Work work', where Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook are usually the corporate weapons of choice, and where I know I need to be able to swap documents reliably with other people.
Add for the occasional Project plan or Visio diagram, the extended Microsoft office suite becomes essential.
So it is pleasing that they seem to be getting the latest versions right, after a few aberrations in the last series.
Keeping something of a road theme, we've been visited by all manner of trades' vehicles over the last few weeks, courtesy of the kitchen re-fit. One thing I've noticed is the increasing range of van colours in use. The old speculation about vans being white doesn't seem to apply around here.
I'd almost go so far as to say blue has taken over, except that one of the guys told me with only half a smile that it's plumbers who choose blue. The fella with the steel girder had a silver pick-up truck. The electricians came along in two blue vans. We had a guest appearance of a red van. So I'm not buying it that there's specific colours by trade.
It also got me thinking of the London services which have raised white van person to a gentlemen/lady thing. The most frequent I see are White Van Gentlemen, who also do occasional leaflet drops around the low SWs.
Next is the slightly less cleverly named Gentleman and a Van, which is usually in a royal blue livery, complete with a top-hat toting parcel carrier logo on the outside.
And the more recent Ladies and a Van, which is a sort of -er- magenta colour.
Although I think the Aussie Man and Van was probably the original of this type.
Nowadays the Aussie company seem to have huge articulated lorries as well as Ford Transits. Fair dinkum.
One of my regular travel routes includes lengthy roadworks where a stretch of motorway is being converted into 'Smart Motorway'. It's one of those phrases that I've always guessed I understood, but finally googled it to be sure. Like I expected, it's all about active traffic management with overhead gantries and automatic speed limits based upon time of day.
Ahah, you think - surely that's a 'controlled motorway', like large pieces of the M25?
Well, the difference appears to be that a smart motorway doesn't have a hard shoulder. Like those bits of motorway around Birmingham, the hard shoulder is converted into a live lane.
It is supposed to be a way of widening a road for less money. I gather the widening cost for changing from hard shoulder into a lane is between £5-15m per mile. That compares with a mile of new three lane motorway costing about £25m per mile. It is all so expensive that that the latest figures are starting to quote the costs in £ per kilometre, which I suppose is designed to make it all sound less.
The curious thing is, the new extra lane is the repurposing of an existing lane, so I'm not quite sure how the figures really stack up? Let's take a figure somewhere in the middle of the £5m-15m quotation for the repurposed lane. £10m for change of purpose from hard shoulder to fourth lane.
Now lets take a mile of typical motorway. Three lanes and a hard shoulder.
Quick sums. One re-purposed lane = £10m. Three lanes = £25m. So one lane = £8.5m (approx) or £6.5m if we take the hard shoulder into account. There's something that doesn't quite add up properly about these numbers (I know I've rounded the figures). Why would the Smart Motorway mile cost be higher than laying a brand new stretch?
Then we get the safety question. No hard shoulder, so cars that conk out have to stop in lane one (if they can make it across).
I already regularly see people going through the red crossed lanes on motorways or down the hard shoulder in traffic jams, so there's going to be some challenges if they move to no shoulder and refuges at presumably one kilometre intervals.
It'll be soon enough that we get to find out. The current roadworks and narrow lanes have been in place for over a year now. Just over one more year of cones to go and then we'll be back to normal, albeit with the smart motorway running.
Today was one of those asteroid near miss days. We had 1.5 mile wide asteroid 86666 (2000 FL 10) pass by earth. When I originally looked at some of the artist pictures, I thought it was surprisingly close to not be mentioned more prominently.
Then I noticed the distance. 15m miles. Yes 15 million miles. The moon is about 230,000 miles away, so that asteroid is more than 60 times further away.
How about Mars distance? Mars ellipses around the sun at between 141m and 228m miles. We're around 94m miles from the sun, so the closest gap between us is somewhere around 40m miles. That would make the asteroid's passing gap something like between a third and a half the distance to Mars at its closest point to earth.
They set up a global Asteroid Day this year, for the first time ever, to spend the looking for potential asteroids on track for earth. I don't think they have found any yet needing Bruce Willis (or substitute) to be called out. The Americans are building a so called space fence which goes live in 2018, but seems to be more about clearing paths for warplanes through low-earth orbit space.
The next identifies biggie asteroid moment isn;t until 2029. It's an intriguing one called Apophis, which has already passed us once recently and is coming back for a second close look.
Apophis is predicted to whizz past earth at around 24,000 miles distance, which is actually slightly closer than geostationary satellites. Given the 2,271 satellites in current orbit plus 200 defunct satellites and space debris, I guess there's a real chance that something might get pranged by that asteroid?
Those night owl logos are starting to appear on parts of the Tube, ahead of the opening of the all-night service.
The design is quite clever, modernising the old night bus owl logo and even working in the dot from the lower case "i" from TfL's preferred typeface.
There's a great TfL style guide which describes their entire signage design in around 200 pages, for anyone THAT keen.
I can't help also noticing the Seoul night bus symbol, which somehow seems to be a step on the route.
And now I'm wondering whether they will put one on platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross? *Albus Dumbledore
I've had plenty of office moves over the years including every form of floor repacking, and experienced many of the ergonomic trends to get more people into the available space.
Yes, I've had those boinging seats, the relaxation swing area, the beach scene, the special hoteling pedestals and even the electric height-adjustable desking favoured by certain Scandinavian countries.
I've also probably been in more temporary offices than proper permanent ones, as a by-product of corporate lifestyle where whatever office space is found isn't quite enough and then another building nearby has to be leased for the over-spill.
I'm finding a current situation slightly amusing, where the building I was in yesterday was built as overspill for another building nearby. In order to do it, the previous building on the space had to be demolished. The construction crews brought in every form of Tonka Toy imaginable and that included a Rock Monster building eater.
Simply put, you could point the big yellow machine at a building and it would somehow ingest it whole and spit out rock pebbles at the back. Before the current building was constructed, we'd look out of the windows of the one nearby and watch the Rock Monster at work. It's not every day you see a whole headquarters building gobbled to dust.
Or is it?
I was in the shiny-shiny replacement building this week and when I looked out of the window I could see the old building. When I say old, it was late 20th Century.
Guess what?
The bright yellow Extec C12+ was at work crunching its way through that very building. I could marvel at the 350-hp Caterpillar C-9 industrial diesel engine and the large vibrating feeder with grizzly and separate discharge conveyor for fine rock. Now I was in the new building watching my old vantage point destroyed before a new even shinier building would take form.
And the overspill of people from the current building? They are over the road in yet another temporary building.
Time for that Queen song maybe?
"And another one, and another one, and another one bites the dust."
One of the side-effects of the kitchen replacement is the shock testing we've given to the various electrical circuits in the house.
The electricians had to test the 30 amp and earth leakage trips (sounds like a space movie?) in order to issue a new certificate. It meant having the power turned on and off about 10 times, sometimes in quick succession.
We've an ever-increasing number of connected devices here - along the lines of the internet of things/thingyverse - so it was a good test of general robustness.
I'd already switched off the servers, but realised the house nowadays has myriad home automation devices. I wondered if they would all survive and restart or whether it would be like the olden days with VHS recorders, where everyone eventually had them with the flashing clock because it was too much trouble to re-programme.
In practice everything seems to work.
The wifi, the BT broadband router, and the various computers all regained their links to the internet.
The home automation hubs for the hue lights, harmony media control, nest heating and smoke detectors also seem to have resynchronised. I'd previously mused about whether a 'home reset' would be troublesome, but so far everything seems to have figured out how to restart gracefully.
As Richard Brautigan said: I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
