One of the things that I have struggled to understand about Facebook and Twitter is the lack of permanence. These are fuzzy spaces where people can play and redefine themselves and make tangential jokes about the current context that don’t make sense years, months or maybe even days later. And yet, they are also spaces that define an online personality, affect job prospects and even get you in trouble with the law. They are like postcards, indexed and made available to the world.

(Interesting postcard link via Russell Davies.)

I avoid lots of tv because of the sexism, but now I begin to see why so many films don’t speak to me. It can’t turn me against Back to the Future, though.

(via Bechdel herself, who credits a friend of hers with the idea.)

via The Chief Happiness Officer.

Happy Christmas!

This is the Christmas card I drew and sent this year, but which also threw me into a frenzy of confusion about Christmas card etiquette.

When I was growing up there were two sorts of Christmas card givers and you had to pick a side. One set of people gave a card to everyone they knew, including everyone in their class at school and as they grew up all their work colleagues. The second set, to which I attached myself, sent cards to people they’d not seen in a while as a way to keep in touch (and, ocassionally in my case, totally failed to send cards altogether).

Then there’s the cards. Some people use cards as a way to demonstrate their charitable affiliations, some send tasteful, some send funny, some send religious and so on. I decided to send handmade cards wherever possible, and recently handmade cards that make me laugh, and saw this as one of the benefits of my small distribution group. The downside, of course, was that the people I saw a lot in my close circle of friends wouldn’t get the amazing works of genius I created.

One year I experimented with Christmas e-cards and in some ways that was the most successful (although I still fear some of my friends didn’t realise I knew the pictures were rubbish) because I could distribute the cards so widely and relatively unobtrusively. Sure, it broke my distribution rule, but the cards made be laugh so it was OK.

All this has changed with the rise of Facebook. Now, many of the people on my traditional Christmas card list are friends on Facebook and I increasingly feel I am in touch with them without the need for a card once a year. Why a card for the friend I chat to on Facebook but not the friend I chat to in the pub? It is of course great that I am now so much more in touch with these friends, but, as a result, this year’s card giving has been totally lacking in logic or thought. It has also been fraught with the potential to offend and confuse the people who’ve received or not received.

It’s clear I need a new policy. I’ve eleven months to think of one.

I have just visited your Islington branch and have a few questions.

1. Why are you playing music in this branch? Are you under the impression this bank is an optional shopping experience, which you seek to enhance, or somewhere that people might visit for leisure? Do you believe that all your customers are under 25, with the attention spans of hamsters and need constant entertainment while they carry out their banking? In my experience, the music and advertising is distracting and annoying and makes it hard to concentrate on the multitude of options that your machines present me with. Speaking of which…
2. Why are you signs so confusing? (see above)
3. Why do you have one tiny table for writing at? Would it not be reasonable to assume that by forcing your customers to fill in forms to do anything, they need the space to fill in the forms?
4. Why does your cheque paying in machine not work properly and, on failure, not give any useful feedback about why it’s rejected my 6 cheques?
5. Why do you have only two staff at the tills at lunchtime? When do you expect your customers are most likely to want to use the bank?
6. Why are your staff wearing casual t-shirts? This is my bank. This is where all my money is. Why do you think I should entrust it to someone who looks like he is on work experience?

I’ve banked with HSBC since I was a kid, and regret it every time I do anything other than internet banking or taking out cash.

Regards, etc.

NSID Afpak meeting,
originally uploaded by Downing Street.

Check out this photo on Flickr. It’s in the Downing Street Flickr stream and I found myself intrigued by the table furniture. Empty candlesticks and nice water glasses. I would expect nothing less, really, and I wonder how that environment helps to remind the attendees of the importance of their roles. I suspect and hope they don’t need it, but still. Gordon Brown looks to be drinking a smoothie :-)

I like the way they’ve made the resolution of the photo such that it’s not possible to read anything on the papers.

I’ve been wondering about the VAT changes that are coming in on Monday. If VAT and the savings of 2.5% really will make a difference to what people buy, which is surely the whole point, is it reasonable to expect that customers will wait until Monday to make any purchases that they may have planned for the rest of this week and this weekend?

If so, let’s think about the fact that this coming weekend is the fourth before Christmas and also the end of November. I guess that quite a few businesses use month end as a cut off point for income from third parties and perhaps also for their terms to pay bills. So, potentially, a drop in earnings for this weekend (which could have been expected to be high given the Christmas factor) could have quite an impact on cashflow, even if that cash does eventually come into the business at the start of December.

Just a thought.

(normal lack of programming will now resume…)

me: excuse me, are you stealing that bike?
- he looks at me blankly
me: hey, are you stealing that bike?
him: what are you saying?
me: show my your key then.
- he starts to pull away on the bike. I follow him.
me: what are you doing? You’re stealing that bike. Give it back. Get off.
- he keeps moving.
me: hey! that’s someone’s bike. You’re fucking stealing it. Get off it.
- he keeps moving and I follow him into the road. I push him and he doesn’t fall but he gets sort of trapped, on the bike, against a bollard on the side of the road. He hits me, on the arm, I think.
me: give it back! You’re stealing that.
His friend, shouting from up the road, on another bike: hit her in the face.
- He looks at me like he’s considering it, but won’t do it.
- I realise I’m carrying my lock.
Me: Give it back.
- I hit him on the arm with my lock. He grabs my lock, but doesn’t take it off me.
His friend: hit her!
- I realise there are a group of friends and they are cycling towards me.
One of them says: get her bike!
- Another one kicks me as they cycle past. I get distracted and head for my bike. They escape.

I get back to my bike and a guy comes up and says he just told Waitrose security about the kids and they said the bike racks weren’t their responsibility.

A woman with a bike says I shouldn’t have confronted the kids. What if they’d had a knife?

I swear about Waitrose security. I swear about the kids and the pure front of stealing a bike in front of everyone.

A woman in a car says she saw the clippers the kid used.

The woman in the car drives off. The man who spoke to security goes back in the shop. The woman who told me not to act locks up her bike and goes into the shop.

I get a bit shaky and scared and want to cry. Adrenaline. I decide to not hang about, as those kids know exactly what I look like and exactly where I am. I head off and a couple of minutes later I pause for a moment to cry as the adrenaline rushes through my body, before cycling home and emailing Waitrose about their security policy.

So.

Was I right to confront potentially dangerous kids (a group of about 5, probably about 16-years-old, I would guess) when they were obviously breaking the law?

Or, from the other perspective, why didn’t any of the other people intervene to help?

I am fairly certain that about a year ago I would not have acted with such confidence and aggression, although I think I would have said something. It was obviously not what the guy was expecting at all. I attribute this change to my taekwondo classes. I was not phased by being hit or kicked at all – far worse happens in class – and the way I moved towards him, shouting and assertive, was, in retrospect, very similar to how we are taught to attack when we do sparring training.

And do I think I did the right thing? Yes, I do. But I worry what would have happened if one of those kids had actually gone for me seriously. I had wrongly assumed that all the other people there would help, or in some way protect me from serious harm. I’m now not so sure that would have been the case and that depresses me perhaps more than anything. Those kids thought no one would do anything, and I think they would have been right if I hadn’t acted. They don’t need to carry knives. They just have to have everyone else think they are and they can do whatever they want.

“So will biometrics prevent ID theft? Well, it might make it more difficult for you to prove your innocence. And once your fingerprints are stolen, they are harder to replace than your pin number.”