Month: October 2007

It’s rather remiss of me not to have mentioned it so far, but as well as surviving my 30th birthday last week, I also reached the end of my photo a day project. In case you were wondering, this is what the last year of my life looked like:

I may not have taken the most exciting photograph every day (you may be able to spot for yourself the occasions on which I clearly got to the end of the day not having bothered to take a picture of anything, and so ended up taking whatever we had for dinner that night…), but I definitely enjoyed doing it. And already I look back at this photographic record of the last year and think: did I really do all that stuff?

Hopefully it’s also made me a better photographer.

I’m not sure I want to stop now, especially as I have a lovely new toy to play with.

So I think I’m going to carry on, for now at least. You can follow my continuing progress here.

One of the reasons for continuing is that I really want to learn how to use my new camera. Right now, I’m mostly letting the camera do the hard work, but I’ll get there.

I had my first test last night when I joined Rob, Claire, and Laila at the Bloomsbury theatre to see another Lou Rhodes solo gig. Knowing that Rob had booked the tickets (and therefore figuring that we’d probably be sitting quite close to the front), I thought that this might be a good opportunity to try out some gig photography…

Unfortunately, my initial efforts were a horribly overexposed blurry mess, so I was forced to stray from the automatic comfort zone and try changing the only settings I knew how to change–increasing the ISO setting; decreasing the ISO setting; increasing something that I later worked out was the shutter speed; decreasing it again. I had no idea what I was doing, but I eventually settled on something that seemed to work, and proceeded to fill up my memory card…

The support unexpectedly turned out to be someone I had heard of–Mark Morriss, formerly of Hounslow’s finest britpop also-rans, The Bluetones. I actually used to be a bit of a fan (somewhere I have all their early singles, including the relatively rare first single, Are You Blue Or Are You Blind), so I recognised him straightaway. I could have sworn that The Bluetones had their initial success over 12 years ago, but Mark Morriss somehow doesn’t appear to have got any older over the last decade. Perhaps he was about 12 when the band started, or perhaps there’s a copy of Expecting To Fly in an attic somewhere on which his wizened face is slowly aging…

Lou Rhodes was excellent as ever. I’d only listened to the new album once before the gig, but I’d recognised most of the songs from the performance we’d seen her give at Glasto this year, which has to be a good sign I suppose.

And she did that thing where she follows Beloved One with her cracking solo version of Gabriel… Lovely.

I am so pleased that the Nationwide building society has decided to implement new internet banking security measures. Yesterday, on logging in, I was prompted to submit my answers to five questions from a choice of twenty, and I can now be asked to answer these questions at any time when using the online service. Fantastic: more stuff to remember. This is in addition to the 10 digit customer number, the memorable place, date and person, and PIN that I already needed to remember in order to use the service.

The more stuff they require me to remember, the more secure the system must be, right? Surely now I have five extra things to remember, it must be five times as secure…

They have massively missed the point. If they really cared about security, they’d implement proper two-factor authentication, which is about using at least two different methods of verifying that the user is who he says he is. Typically, that means verifying that the user knows something (like a password) and verifying that the user has something (like one of those security token/fob things that generates a really long number when you press the button). But clearly issuing every customer with a token would be far too expensive, so instead they’ve decided to implement a security system that verifies that the user knows something, and, er, verifies that the user knows some more stuff.

Fantastic.

This provides no additional security whatsoever over their existing authentication methods, and it’s actually worse, because the more stuff you ask people to remember, the more likely it is that they will start writing it down.

Of course, Nationwide claim:

These security questions offer additional peace of mind when you carry out transactions on our Internet Bank as only you will know the answers.

But this is nonsense. The questions are either going to have answers so obvious that anyone who knows me could work them out, or they are going to have answers I’ll need to think about, in which case I’ll either need to remember what I happened to think was the best answer to that question when I filled in the form in October 2007, or I’ll need to write down the answers somewhere.

Out of the full list of 20 questions I could not find a single one to which I could give an unambiguous answer that I wouldn’t need to remember. The questions included the likes of:

“Where did you first go on holiday?” (I was probably 1 at the time. I don’t know)
“What’s your father’s middle name?” (He’s got two: which one should I put?)
“What team do you support?” (Ok, so the answer’s “everton”, but should I write it as “everton”? “everton fc”? “the blues”? “the toffees”?)
“What was the name of your first employer?” (my first employer was the guy who ran the restaurant I washed dishes in when I was 16; I can’t remember his name, so should I put the name of the restaurant? Maybe I should put the name of my employer for my first proper job? How will I remember which one I chose?)
“What is your favourite colour?” (Seriously: is this a Smash Hits interview? Who has a favourite colour?)

They go on to say:

The questions were chosen to meet the needs of our diverse membership. We have listened to the views of people across a variety of age ranges and lifestyles. We have also taken into account industry standards.

You can type what ever answer you like, it’s not a test, as long as you give an answer that you will remember.

Yes, but that’s the whole point: how will I remember which song I picked at the time I answered your question? You’re not the only financial institution I have an account with, and it’s only a matter of time before they all start asking me to answer some silly questions of their own. I’m never going to remember all the answers I gave unless I start writing them down…

[The Nationwide cares so much about security that it was fined £980,000 by the FSA earlier this year when a laptop containing 11 million customer account details was stolen from an employee’s house.]

Oh, I almost forgot. Appropriately enough this was when we were in Kensington last week on the way to a real hospital…

In a car. Alive!
On Holby, that’s how she died.
Is it not real, then?

So we’ve been recruiting at work for the last couple of months in an attempt to double the size of my team. Well, perhaps I should clarify that I’m currently a team of one, so that’s just the one extra person we’re looking for, but still it’s proving tricky to find a decent technical author to take on the role.

It’s been a bit of an eye-opener, actually. You’d think, given that one of the key skills of a technical author is the ability to present information clearly, accurately, and concisely, that the candidates who have been thrown in our direction so far would be able to do that on the two pages of their CV, but apparently not… (it’s getting to the point where I’d be happy if some of them just used a spell checker).

Yesterday, though, came the most amusing development of the process so far. I’d just come back from doing an interview and was sitting back at my desk when my mobile rang. It was a withheld number…

Me: Hello?
Woman: Oh hello, is that Matthew? This is Woman from Recruitment Agency. Are you OK to talk?
[Aside: I get these calls from time to time, and still don’t know how these people get my details, given that I couldn’t have uploaded a CV to a job site in nearly 4 years…]
Me: Er, yes.
Woman: It’s just that I’ve got a role here and I was wondering if you’d be interested?
Me: Oh no, I’m quite happy where I am thanks. But just out of interest, what is this role that you’re trying to fill?

Woman: Er…
Me: It wouldn’t be at Software Company would it?
Woman: Yes
Me: It’s just that I work at Software Company, and that’s our vacancy that we’re trying to fill, so I probably won’t apply for that, if it’s ok with you…

Maybe I should have said I’d go for it. I’m pretty sure I would have known what I was looking for in the interview. Maybe I could even have referred myself and picked up the referral bonus. The second salary would definitely come in handy…

So what’s wrong with this timeline of events?

20 September 2007: Someone at the IP address 90.202.68.194 anonymously edits the Wikipedia page for TV theme composer Ronnie Hazlehurst to add the entirely untrue claim that he co-wrote Reach for S Club 7.

2 October 2007: Hazlehurst dies.

2 October 2007: Lazy journalists everywhere (including BBC News 24, the Times, the Guardian, the Indie…) use Wikipedia entry to write his obit.

3 October 2007: Other people repeatedly attempt to add the “fact” that he co-wrote Reach by S Club 7 back to his Wikipedia entry, citing the obituaries in “reputable” newspapers as the reference.

[Reach was written by Cathy Dennis and Andrew Todd.]