The prattlings of Steve Crook

Time for a rant on a subject I know nothing about.

I’m sure I’m not the only person in the UK this week who feels quite strongly about the Sir Fred Goodwin issue. To the layman it seems as though Sir Fred, the chairman of The Royal Bank of Scotland steered his great company into the largest UK corporate disaster ever and is now being rewarded for his fine efforts with a £16m pension pot. Owing to the magnitude of Sir Fred’s cock up, the poor chap has been forced to retire early and will subsequently be drawing his £650k annual pension from the ripe old age of 50!

Did I let a hint of sarcasm creep in there? It’s hard not to. Sir Fred will continue to lead a life of the utmost luxury. His earnings from RBS in 2007 alone amounted to £4.2m, a sum that most hard working, honest people can only dream of earning in a lifetime. Others are not so lucky: The poor employees of RBS are facing up to the realities of their bosses mismanagement. Many of them are soon to be unemployed; like wartime cannon-fodder, they are simply a statistic that Sir Fred can read about from the comfort of his ivory tower.

At the moment the Government is making lots of noise about Sir Fred but I can’t help feeling that the root of the problem is the Western “fat-cat” philosophy where company directors seem to decide their own value to the business and reward themselves accordingly. I don’t care how clever Sir Fred was, he broke his bank, left the taxpayer with an eye-watering bill and his employees to pay with their jobs. With great responsibility should come accountability and if that were the case, Sir Fred would be going to prison and his personal wealth to help those whose lives he’s irrevocably damaged.

Last year I treated myself to a Garmin GPS. Being someone who is often trying to find a city-centre hotel in the dark, in the rain, during rush-hour, this device quickly proved to be heaven sent. Being a bit of a geek for gadgets, I installed all the associated Garmin software on my PC and frequently checked for available updates to my Nuvi250W. To date the only updates I’ve found have been to textual English language files.

At the beginning of 2009, I switched on the GPS and it warned me that my maps were now over a year old and that I should update them. Obviously something wasn’t working to plan as I’d frequently been told by Garmin’s software that there were no updates for my unit. As I live in Cornwall it was obvious that updates were required as the A30 bypass of Indian Queens near Newquay had caused me considerable grief. My GPS thought I was driving cross-country and subsequently lost the plot, (quite literally) and subsequently deposited me in a maze of twisty little roads, all alike.

Finally today I found the cause of the problem; I needed to subscribe to map updates before the Garmin software would even advise me that they were available. In other words, there were no updates available for my Nuvi250W GPS as I hadn’t paid for them. Further clicking around Garmin’s website led me to the required item, Lifetime Europe Map Updates priced at £99.99. Wow, that’s a lot of money for updates to a device that only cost £150 in the first place! The other point to note is that “Lifetime updates” doesn’t mean my lifetime, it means the product lifetime. The updates are tied to the serial number of the device so in a few years time, should I want a newer GPS, I would need to buy another Lifetime Europe Map update.

This all strikes me a dreadful profiteering on the part of Garmin. A quick visit to Google Shopping reveals that I can buy a brand new Nuvi250W from Tesco for less than the map update. In this day and age when we’re all supposed to do our bit for the environment, having a high-quality product like this turned into a annually disposable item by the price of software updates is ridiculous.

I must be a spammer because SORBS say I am. I didn’t realise it until today when I tried to email the administrators of a Usenet Peer and the message bounced because their Mail Server uses SORBS (Spam and Open Relay Blocking Service).

SORBS have a good website so it didn’t take long to find out that my host had been listed because it relayed an email to a SpamTrap. I had to ponder this for a minute before it occurred to me that the server in question runs a Nymserver. This means that any user of that service could have maliciously or accidentally emailed one of these SpamTrap addresses.

Okay so it’s a mistake on the part of SORBS, I’m not really a spammer and one email sent to an address certainly doesn’t qualify me as one. Unfortunately that’s not how SORBS see it; it’s my fault I got on their list and it’ll cost me $50 to get de-listed. That’s funny! They want me to pay to get off their spam list. What a lucrative little venture, no wonder they make it so easy to get on their list in the first place.

So to sum up:

• I’m listed on SORBS and I’m not going to pay to get off it. Internet blackmail is distasteful.
• People who rely on nothing but SORBS to vet their email will be dropping legitimate email, mine. Serves them right for letting a third-part like SORBS control their services.
• It seems that Spam, (like Viruses) is now a lucrative business, not just for the perpetrators but also for those who claim to cure it.

Update 25th Dec 2008
This morning I got a email reply from SORBS, I’ve been de-listed! The single email to the Spamtrap that caused the listing has expired and subsequently my enquiry was enough to warrant a de-listing. Very kind of SORBS but it doesn’t really make their practises any more palatable to me.

A few incidents yesterday got me thinking about the law and farming. Somehow the farming community seems to be a law completely unto itself, exempt from the rules that apply to other folk.

Sunday was the annual sponsored walk supporting Teenage Cancer Trust. It was a lovely day on Dartmoor but for me was slightly tainted by being forced to keep my dog on a lead for 10 miles because of grazing sheep. Why are farmers allowed to keep sheep in our National Parks whilst being paid to keep their own fields dormant? It’s mad!

On the same day, whilst walking up the old Princetown railway line, a young child on a Quad-bike passed us at a ridiculous speed. How on Earth is a quad-bike allowed on a cycle trial? Because the law exempts farming vehicles and their users from restrictions that apply to other drivers.

Lastly, on the same day newspapers report this article of a dog being shot. Not for worrying sheep, but cows. This was a boxer dog not a man eating tiger, geez! The police response to this, “A police spokesman said there were no independent witnesses and, as it was deemed a civil matter rather than a criminal offence, there would be no further police action.”. What a load of bollocks. Seems that like the ban on hunting with hounds, the police put cases like this in the “too difficult” tray.