Defecting from another blog...

I come here from Blog-City. For 3 years I had a great blog there. I loved it. I had also managed to build things up to a respectable 20,000 hits per months readership. And then they sort of sprung yet another 'upgrade' on me which rather than make life easier for long term maintenance, made it more difficult. The problem with their upgrades are two fold: (1) For the most part, they involve a lot of back editing of previous entries, which after 3 years, can add up to quite a few, or (2) seem to involve reformatting large chunks of the blog in a manner which is not user-friendly initially. This time, they wanted me to rebuild the entire custom theme to the blog, without even othering to migrate the previous theme's I had developed. I had the gaul to complain. They sent me a shirty reply saying they thought I should move on. Given I was a paying customer, I thought that response was unbelievable, so I am moving on... Hello Blogger!

And in case you were thinking of going to Blog-City, check out my complaint and their reply:
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My complaint to Blog-City:

Questions wil undoubtedly follow as it is not working for me but I have just spent the last 90 minutes TRYING to get this blog to resemble something similar to what it looked like before you FORCED us to go to widgets and do far, failing. Why do you persist in constantly 'upgrading' your system??? When I joined 3 years ago, you were VERY easy to use but now???? And in all honestly as someone who has had to suffer every single blasted change you have made so far, not one - I repeat, NOT ONE has made my life, my blog, my blogging any easier to maintain or improved it. None of them. And as far as I can tell, these widgets are not making it any easier yet. So in 3 years of ever increasingly complicated changes I completely fail to see the benefit of this and all it has done has made me madder and madder that you are making it more difficult and I have to build my blog up again every damn year. I am a WEB DESIGNER and I can't work out you've done this time. Even if I manage to resurrect my old theme, it will take me so long, I wont' have the energy to resurrect my other themese. And the fact I can't even migrate my saved skins, my saved theme's or my layouts or ANYTHING across and have to rebuild this blog from scratch SUCKS! Worse, who the hell can tell what your customised CSS scripts mean anymore??? How can I relate it to the blog body or the header panel??? I can't - I have to sit and play with 5 tabs under each heading,hoping one will eventually yield a style result similar to what I had before. I used to like you, but I tell you what, if you keep on 'upgrading' your system and making it harder and harder to retain the settings which made it so easy to maintain 3 years ago, I will NOT be renewing my blog subscription because I am getting very tired of battling for more and more hours every year to try and keep up with your changes. And this one is the most devsatating because if it is unworkoutable to a web desginer, how is someone who thinks blogging is just a matter of logging in and entering some thoughts going to work out your latest incarnation??? I am really going off Blog City and will no longer be recommending it to my friends as I can't even help them now.

And this is the reply from Blog-City - disgraceful!!!

I'm quite prepared to close you down today. This change to widgets has been available for 7+ months. And you email this on the 2nd last day? If you want a flat boring unchanging service there are millions of them out there. We change because we have users requesting changes, requesting features daily. We have the pressure of the blogging standard to conform to, and new sites coming up with different way for competition.

Version 6.0 is coming in the next few weeks - you can take a look now if you like just go to http://travelblips.blog-city.com/console/admin/v5/

If you don't like whats coming, you're not going to like the next 2 years at blog-city. I suggest if thats the case we can part waves now.

Best Wishes,

Mayoress, blog-City Team

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So give me time and I'll gradually get my other blog entries up and running in here - but it will take a while to migrate 3 years worth of entries across...

Under constant surveillance

Thank goodness I don't work in the UK nor aspire to spend any great duration of my life here in the future.... I think the endless plots to monitor every aspect of our lives is eroding my sense of privacy and well, making me feel disturbed - and angry more than anything. Its just so unnecessarily invasive!

Yesterday, I caught the bus back from London to my place of abode. I managed to grab the front seat on the upper deck of a double decker bus - something I like because you can't see the cars immediately in front of the bus so it always feels like you are lurching from one close shave to another (although for all I know, we actually are lurching from one close shave to another!). I must admit though, the only time I really though the upper deck of a double decker bus was brilliant when on a bus trip through the British countryside and I could see over the 6ft high hedges...

But I digress. I was quite contendly looking ahead at all the dingy buildings of inner London when I glanced at a grey pole and discovered I was eye-level with a camera. I looked around. I guessed it was to monitor for all those people who drive in bus lanes when they aren't supposed to (and at great cost as I discovered last month). If I had been at ground level, I would have thought this was just another street light - it was painted up and and everything to look like the surrounding street light posts. I glanced across the road and saw a corresponding grey box perched at street light height facing my way. I then counted about another 10 camera's in a 4 block radius, surveying for bus-lane offenders, traffic light runners and just pedestrian activity on the street below.

As we crawled forward in lunchtime traffic, we came across another double barrel camera near some traffic lights - more distinguished as it was on a white pole not the grey pole of street lights. I looked at the intersections where side streets joined the main road - two little white boxes were usually placed at the entrance of every street, one facing down the street, one facing the main road.

AAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!! Is it only me or is this really necessary??? Now my every movement into any side street is being recorded?????? To me this is unnecessary and invasive monitoring!

I am only slightly mollified - yet horrified - to learn this week that London has the highest crime rate in Europe, despite the highest number of CCTV's in the world (I mean, the density must be in the order of 1 every 50m...) AND the death toll from car accidents caused by speeding has risen not fallen in the last 2 years as camera's have replaced police on the street and sulking behind trees with radar guns. What does this tell you???? To me, it rather suggests that all this CCTV is doing nothing to deter crime and the excess of camera's on the road mean people have become so complacent about them, that they just go about their lives as if they don't exist - which is no doubt what we are supposed to do. Thus if a fine appears anomalously 2 weeks later in the post, they either pay it or contest it. But you have to face it - for crime and road death tolls to be rising - camera's are clearly just not as effective has having a siren wail into existance behind you, lights flashing and a dark-suit clad police officer knocking on your window and asking for a drivers licence and some paperwork or being pursued down a street by a squadron of fully armed police.

But it doesn't stop there. The police want to install camera's in buses and private company vehichles (eg couriers, post office vehicles) to record traffic violaters as the bus/courier/business people go about driving. This has set up a cry from the overworked automobile organisations, vexed that this is just a money making gambit from the police...

...the papers are also buzzing with the fact over 1 million people have signed a petition to try and stop the government from launching a new program to monitor EVERY car in the UK by satellite and hit them with congestion charges when they enter congestion zones around cities. Apparently it is pretty unprecedented in the UK for so many people to protest such action, but the government is pushing ahead, claiming it is 'good for the environment' and the campaign which showed how people could protest was 'flawed' and if people realised that this wasn't "Big Brother" at all but good for the environment, then everyone would withdraw their protest. Rubbish, I say (and I suspect the over 1 million people who signed the petition)! This is about protesting yet another invasive form of monitoring our every activity AND (probably more importantly) leveraging yet another fee for transporting ourselves from A to B in a country which already has the highest fuel tax in Europe and the highest train prices in the world! But when does the monitoring stop? I feel like a criminal whose allowed out on bail as long as I wear a monitoring device around my ankle. Yes, I am crime free, but I am very aggrevated about my privacy being monitored so publically!

But I can't rest yet - the council's now want to install microchips in household bins to weigh the rubbish as the rubbish collectors pick it up so they can charge us more for not recycling - and this with barely adequate recylcing provisions in place. Since everyone is already paying the council tax to pick up their rubbish, why do they now have to be charged more to pick up stuff which wasn't recycled?

And my final bit of angst was reading how German and English companies are trying to develop a finger-nail sized camera which can be embedded in every seat on an aeroplane to monitor our every tick, blink and whisper to try and detect if a terrorist is going to suddenly spring into action and do something destructive. This isn't just about safety anymore, this is getting damn invasive and personal! Using fear, to try and get us to submit to an omnipotent body of government officials watching over our every move and trying to second guess us.

The only shining light this week was first the company(s) developing the security chip for the passports politely informing the government the chip was onl covered under warranty for 2 years - not the 10 years of a passport (and how inconvenient would it be if the chip failed while you were traveling???). This caused a lot of blustering from the government about that being unacceptable. "Bite it," replied the I.T. companies. And it was nice of the political oppostion to remind computer companies supposedly in charge of developing the idenity card that the current government wants (but can't justify) that should they come into power, since they are firmly opposed to the identity card, and they will end contracts to develop said identity card... When the I.T. companies "on a platform of impartiality" protested and said the government simply didn't understand contracts with private companies, the oppositions responded that they were all to aware of the problems of contracts with private companies (see example at start of paragraph) I can but hope the opposition, if they come to power, do something more than protesting the identity card to giving back people a society where they aren't constantly being monitored.

No wonder movies like V, Equilibrium and Children of Men are all based in the UK - I have not been anywhere else on the planet where our rights are so constantly being violated - and taxed - in the name of fear (be it fear of the climate catastrophically changing in the next 50 years or terrorist). And I am glad to see newspapers, organisations and indiviuals alike all rising to tell the government to stop taxing and monitoring their lives!

PS: In case you don't check the comments below this post, here is an interesting link posted by one reader worth checking out - thank you!

Don't rush to Windows Vista - lots of unfriendly glitches!

OK, I know this has NOTHING (or very little) to do with travel, but in a way it does - but I have to WARN people of the perils of Windows Vista if thinking of upgrading - WAIT! I don't doubt in the end, it will be good, but by golly, I'm fast finding out why I usually wait a bit (although I wsa quite content to wait this time as well, but circumstances overtook me...)

• Firstly - do you have a diploma in network security? If not, you are going to be paralysed within a week of using Vista...
• Secondly, if you don't have a broadband connection, don't even bother - there are so many (large) patches and updates to download...
• At this point, its so damn new, no useful books are out (and any you'd want be how to disable all the security features and regain control of your computer - so Microsoft probably didn't endorse them for people writing in trial phases..) - and people are stil tripping over the problems so there are hardly any useful tips on the web.

Just before Xmas, my HP computer gave up the ghost - 3 months into warranty. 7 weeks later, HP Customer Service offered to refund me the money for my computer as their Technical Services department apparently reports to no one, least of all Customer Services and the Customer. This heartache is a whole tale I am not going to go into here.

So I had to go out and purchase a new laptop as hey, I travel and need my computer for a variety of things when on the road. Utterly coincidently, I bought the new laptop the day Windows Vista came out. So coincidently, I wasn't even aware it was the day it was released. So I bought my new laptop, vaguely concerned it had Windows Vista on it (had no option to get Windows XP), but hoped (very naively) that Microsoft had ironed out many bugs. Yeah, right!

At first, its a real snazzy system - the Windows Aero is pretty neat, although I like it more for the ghost windows showing the items on the task bar than the tab through the angled windows on the desktop thing. All my major programs installed fine, even quicker. There was a noticeable difference in speeds - generally biased towards the faster side. So far so good. Mind you - its not like Microsoft thought to actually give you instructions on how to use the Aero interface in their tour of the Windows environment or help centre... No, I had to go on the web to find out how to get the best out of Aero!!!!

Copying from one folder to another was not to bad either - now you are given the optoion to copy and replace, copy conflicting files across and have the second one renamed (great if copying photographs with same file given by camera...), not copy... Restore etc is also improved and if willing to go beyond the Home versions, I hear the Shadow copies are good... But. I don't like the partitioned hard drive (especially as everything goes on 1 hard drive and the 'backup' is supposed to go on the other partition). Every time I have 'lost' data its usually been accompanied by a lost computer and lost hard drive as well. I would say that for most people, when they loose their computer, they loose their hard drive - so its all rather stupid to back up to a partition on the same hard drive. And even though you can adjust the space on the SECOND partition, you can't merge the two and you can't transfer space from the 2nd partition to the 1st. I want my full 160Gb on one hard drive!

Then I activated the Norton Internet Security that came with a free 3 month trial on the computer - I had paid for a subscription that was going idle on my previous computer so just reactivated that. The first time I rebooted, I was deluged by a number of windows from Vista start up informing me that it had "blocked programs - click here to see programs." Well, to click on the bubble doesn't reveal the blocked programs at all - it starts off a cascading avalanche of bubbles with Windows asking to stop opening one program and open another. After a few reboots, I worked out that Windows Firewall wanted to block Norton's firewall, but despite going into the Windows Security centre, I was damned if could work out how to turn off Windows Firewall - and keep it off during any reboots as every reboot resulted in Windows wanting to insist it was the default firewall.

Peeved, I emailed Microsoft - and got no response, and Norton - and got a response to download their latest version (40+Mb) - depressing given the computer at this stage as only 3 days old and Vista brand new... That seems to have fixed the problem for half the reboots.

Data migration produced some problems - it seemed some of my folders had security limits on them that I knew nothing about from my previous computer. So there was some more, er, sounds of exasperation, as I bumbled and stumbled around in Windows Security trying to remove all security restrictions on my data. Honestly - people are going to have SERIOUS issues with this sudden explosion of security on their computer where it didn't exist before. Especially when we are talking things like Word documents you had harmlessly saved into a folder on your previous computer, and now suddenly you no longer have permission??? Hence my recommendation for a Network Security diploma...

(For the record, since you are set up as the main user, you do have admin rights - but you have to reassert them by right clicking on the top level folder that is giving you problems, selecting Properties > Security tab > And then clicking on the 3 users there and making sure they all have "Full Control." Frequently the 3rd user - "Me"in the below example, does not have full control.) Addendum (3 days later)- Seriously - turn Security off first thing as per instructions! My stress levels have plummeted since I stopped being harassed by Vista for permission to do the most minor of tasks!

Then there was some mild headaches when I migrated all my data across - to find out that fonts... where do fonts go?? Before they were under Windows > Fonts. Easy! A search for ttf files produced results only for the 6 new fonts that come with Vista. Whoopty doo. I knew the rest were there somewhere - I was still formatting my documents using Times New Roman. A quick surf on the web turned up nothing - I guess no one else had had to migrate their fonts across from one computer to another. In the end, I stumbled across opening up the Control Panel, typing fonts into the Search area, and voila! A window appeared which allowed me to view installed fonts. I copied and pasted my fonts to that window - and to this day, I have no idea where they are on my computer, but they are there in Word and Photoshop...

But the real problems began when this road warrior decided to install a new batch of language programs on the old Pocket PC. Turns out just about, no, lets make that, every single program I have bought for the Pocket PC synchronises with the Pocket PC via Microsoft ActiveSync. Guess what? Microsoft has discontinued that with the advent of Vista. Now we have to use Microsoft Mobile Device Manager (yet another download (10Mb) - heaven help you if you don't have a broadband connection!). Well, it took about 3 attempts just to get that to synchronise with my contacts, but I have yet to get any 3rd part software to recognise I am hooked up to my pocket pc, so I guess I will be travelling without my usual spoken language dictionary to my next destination.

And the GPS? Again, installed the Waypoint Manager and it opened - once. Then I was driving nearly to throwing the computer at the wall with a circular message from Vista assuring me I - the only user on this computer - did not have access to this program and I should contact my administrator to get the rights! I nearly went beserk trying to apply full rights to myself in the security tab over the Garmin folder. As far as I could make out, there wasn't one administrator (as there was on Windows XP) but 3 right now - a "System" a "My-PC" and "Me" (made up names). "System" and "My-PC" seemed to have full control, but "Me" despite being the only User on the computer was still restricted.

So it was back to the web to find out if anyone else was having problems synchronising their GPS system with Vista. Ya see, being one of the first to use Vista, everyone else is only just beginning to stumble across the perils of Vista as well so there is very little help out there. Fortunately it turned out that Mapsource does not work with Vista, so they issued an update to fix some bugs with North American topo maps (irrelevant to me) but also mentioned in passing it worked on Windows Vista. So I downloaded that (44Mb patch) and now I can use Mapsource again...

By now the pop up windows constantly asking me for permission to do things was driving me nuts. See here for how to turn that annoying feature off - if I have clicked to intall a program then of COURSE I want the damn thing installed AND I want it to have access to my computer!

But in the good old days, I'd download all these patches, trial software etc to a specially created download folder in C:\\My Programs\Downloads - and now I, the administrator (!!!) apparently don't have the right to do that! And there was NOTHING I could do about that - I could only download programs to "Me>Download" which peeved me because on MY computer I want to put things where I want to put them! I am sure that all this forced emplacement of data also will make it easier for virus makers down the road to target parts of someone's computer....

I am sure there will be more headaches. But for now, I can't wait for other people to find themselves wishing to throw their computer at the wall and the the low-level mumbling to rise to a furious roar as people demand their computer back - and start posting tips on the web on how they managed to fix these problems. Because if nothing else, I want to be able to update my pocket PC with langauges and other handy travel programs!

PS: (3 hours later). Getting there... Turning off the Security barrage REALLY helps and I've started to resolve more of the issues. But seriously - does anyone want to go through this much trouble to simply reinstall programs and data on their computer???? There HAS to be an easier way (I think Windows 95 was pleasantly easy or... the Apple?!)

To date it has cost me 100Mb in downloaded patches and upgrades to software $120 in purchasing new versions of software which simply isn't supported on Vista in its old style, about 1.5 hours just to set up Vista, 10 hours to install programs (including downloading and installing patches etc), 3 hours to transfer data (because I had to scrape around on the web for tips on disabling all the security features that had miraculously locked me out of my previously unsecured data), about 2 hissy fits over the security features, and an additional 3 hours surfing on the web for answers just on how to use Windows Vista because nothing is listed in the Windows help system or welcome modules.... I don't recall it being this hard to go from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to Windows 98 to Windows XP!!!!
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PPS: OK, 3 days after setting it up and 3 day after turning off the annoying security permission request bubbles (the turning point in my relationship with Vista...), I have settled down with Vista. It's nice enough to say it will be hard to go back to Windows XP (which I have to do at work...). Is it worth upgrading? No. Is it nice enough to get eventually? Yes. Will Microsoft make it easier for those who barely know how to turn on their computer let alone deal with a bubble telling them to contact their administrator on their home computer when installing a program? Time will tell...

Racoons downtown

I am currently in central Vancouver, at the Syliva Hotel, a nice boutique hotel which I have frequented for well over a decade when visiting the city. It is quaint and (the bit I like most) allows dogs. But despite the abundance of some sort of ivy on the outside walls and dogs in the foyer (Ok, for dog-phobic people, the dogs aren't really in a big abundance there), I did not expect the guest I had last night!

I entered my room well after the sun had set and turned the lights on. Being an historical hotel, there is a broad ledge outside - and pacing restlessly on it was a racoon! I am 3 stories up so don't even know how a racoon got there - where did it come from (the nearby Stanley Park?) Talk about a refugee from some time when there were less skyscrapers and more tall Douglas Pine trees!

Anyway, as I walked towards the window to look at my guest a little closer, it scurried along the ledge, peered at me through the other window before going to the corner of the building and sitting in the shadow for a few seconds, staring cautiously at me. Then with the freedom such critters have, it scurried around the corner and out of sight.

I am sure many in Canada would probably just about have flung themselves out of the window to kill the racoon as they can be a real pest, but you got to give it some credit for living right in central downtown Vancouver and surviving (it certainly didn't look unhealthy) in an area which is more concrete jungle and fast-driven cars then natural forest and only the odd hungry carnivore (or angry trapper) around... But I am a tourist here and I was very bemused by my brief and unexpected encounter with Canadian wildlife in the heart of the city.