So my residents parking permit is up for renewal and the council send me a letter informing me of this along with a form to renew it and a summary of the various options for payment. I fill out the form, enclose a cheque and trudge out through the snow one evening to put it in the post.

Given the simplicity of the process and the fact I had followed the instructions enclosed with the renewal notice to the letter, I was surprised to get a phone call today citing a problem. I was even more surprised to discover what the problem was.

It would appear that the occupant of the basement flat below my house has also recently decided to avail of a parking permit, except instead of giving his address as the flat he gave it as the house. For reasons unknown to me they allowed him to do this even though I already had a permit.

The result of this confusion was that I was called to say that I couldn’t renew my permit because there was already one issued for the house; I would have to pay twice as much for a second permit as I was a second occupier requiring a second permit.

I replied that I’d love to know who else was secretly living in my house and buying parking permits for it as I certainly hadn’t seen anyone. I demanded that they process my renewal and do so promptly as they had only condescended to send me the renewal forms two weeks before the expiry of the old permit. They said they would “Look into it” and before I had a chance to say anything else they hung up. I would have phoned them back but they had withheld their number.

All I can say is that I shan’t be paying any more than what I already have and that if they screw this up and I end up getting parking fines because of their failure to renew promptly and correctly I shan’t even be writing them a letter, I will be passing the issue straight to the small claims court. What with the lack of rubbish collections and running out of grit for the roads, I’m pretty damn sick of Swindon Borough Council at the moment.

We’ve had a fair bit of snow in Swindon this week but I’ve been braving it all pretty well and have made it into work every day. One of the best days weather and traffic wise was Wednesday with most people making it into work.

How annoyed was I then to come home on Wednesday evening to find that neither my recycling nor my conventional waste had been collected and my street was filled with rubbish sacks on account of residents believing the better weather would result in a collection.

Combine this with the council running out of grit on Friday leaving roads slippery and just darn right dangerous, I think I have a fair claim to have a quarter of my months council tax refunded!

Seeing as we’re easing into a new year I’ve been taking a little time out to look at the 2008 statistics for my website. I’ve collated the most interesting of these and narrated them a little to put them in context.

• I’ve received more than 120 times as much spam in the comments boxes as I have legitimate discussion over the last year
• Twice as many comments have been made on the site as I have posted articles, making each post worth, on average, two comments from readers
• I’ve made slightly over 1 post every two days
• This site has consistently appeared first in Google when the search term “Kieran O’Shea” is used, second when “Kieran” is entered
• My blog received over 500,000 hits during the year and on average over 300 unique visitors per day
• More readers used RSS to consume my content rather than visiting the articles directly, with over 50% of traffic being comprised of requests for my feed links
• The most popular time of day to read newly posted articles in 2008 was between 7 and 8 pm
• In terms of refering sites, the most traffic was sent my way by Leeds RAG
• Apart from my name or variants thereof the search term “hubble” sent the most readers my way from search engines
• Despite my Linux leanings Windows and Internet Explorer remained the most popular operating system and browser amongst my readers

It’s the last day of 2008 and I’m heading up to Leeds to enjoy a New Years Eve party with all my friends from the School of Computing and I’m sure many others too. As the train hurtles through the foggy December countryside I can’t help but contemplate how little of our own country I’ve actually seen.

There are certain environments in which I find my mind wandering more than others and seeing the fog swirl amongst the distant trees and farm houses loom up out of the distance as the train passes really strikes a chord with me.

I knew I remembered someone else mentioning to me about the significance of watching scenery pass through a train window but couldn’t put my finger on who. Seeing as I had the rest of the journey to find out I delved into my e-mails and realised that it was Roger, who some way into my final year project, sent me a link to a wonderful website called Passing By.

The site shows a number of videos of scenes viewed though a train window and it allows you to change the direction in which you view it such that you can effectively change the side of the train you are sitting on. Its not quite as captivating as sitting on a train yourself and watching the world fly by, but it certainly is well worth a look.

At the end of my street there is a convenient snicket, just wide enough to allow a car to pass through, that affords me easy access to the main road and when I get there, an easier right or left turn than if I had used the proper route.

Sadly road works are currently taking place at the end of my street and have blocked access to the snicket. I realised this yesterday morning when I tried to use it to get to work. I was forced to go the long way round and wait 5 minutes for a gap in both sides of the traffic so I could turn right. I hope these works are soon finished as driving out of my street is so much more painful without this lifesaver of a cut through.

If you drive a large vehicle and come across a sign warning of a low bridge and displaying a maximum height less than that of your method of transportation, what do you do? Most would say they turn around and go an alternative route, but it appears that, in Swindon at least, the solution is just to carry on going and hope you will get though.

The problem with this attitude is that they haven’t yet invented a lorry that can defy the laws of physics and this morning, on my way down the hill from Old Town as I journeyed to work, one truck driver found this out to his, and every other motorist’s cost.

As I approached the railway bridge I noticed the queue for the lights was a long one, even for the morning rush hour. After sitting stationary for over 5 minutes and realising that I might very well be late for work, I nudged out slightly into the middle of the road in the hope I might get a look at what the problem was. I saw to my horror that a lorry was stuck fast underneath the bridge and that while the odd car was getting past every time there was a break in the traffic flow on the other side of the road, I had very little chance of getting through before 10 O’Clock.

As luck would have it I had with me my trusty map of Swindon and using this and a neat bit of u-turning I went the long way round and came out not too far from the bridge but on the other side. Needless to say the truck was still stuck and the queue of traffic was now tailing back probably as far as the centre of Old Town.

I arrived into work a little after 9:15am. I guess there is a lot more to be said for leaving some contingency time than I thought, even if I do only have a 5 minute long journey to work.

Well, in Swindon at least. Listening to BBC Radio Swindon as I awoke this morning I was informed that last night the council had voted to remove all the speed cameras in Swindon such that the budget currently used in maintaining them could be better deployed elsewhere on Swindon roads. To me this seems to be a most excellent decision. Nothing is more likely to cause an accident these days than worn out sections of road and deep potholes that lurk on our street corners. This is of course not to mention the improperly fenced gasworks close to my street that attempts to lure any unsuspecting driver down a 6 foot hole. Its high time the real causes of road accidents are properly addressed with a funding injection. Bravo I say. Bravo.

Just got myself broadband for my new house and wanted to make a few of my techie friends envious by quoting some specifications.

24Mbit download, 2.5Mbit upload and a block of 8 IPv4 addresses. Finally a connection and home setup to be proud of. Even my laptop can have a dedicated IP address with that many to my name

Due to the fact that I rented my house as unfurnished I didn’t have any curtains when I moved in so rather than add rails and hang material I thought blinds would look contemporary and be functional too. I used an online store to obtain made to measure venetian blinds and was very pleased when they arrived and found they fitted the window frames near enough perfectly.

The only issue it would seem was putting them up. The brackets needed to be fitted inside the frames which meant screwing into the wood very close into a corner. Anyone who has done this before will now how difficult it can be, especially when you add into the mix brackets that don’t allow screw drivers anything approaching easy access and screws which burr more easily than butter.

Looking at the number of screws and brackets you could be forgiven for believing that each blind was a 5 minute job. I’m not kidding when I say each one took close to an hour. I burred, bent and snapped a ridiculous number of screws and when I finally got a blind up I found myself in need of a cup of tea and a lie down due to exhaustion from the process.

I guess the lesson here is never underestimate a DIY job otherwise it’s bound to go wrong or at the very least take up valuable drinking time.

You’ve all heard of working days but the big question is, who has heard of data days? I hadn’t and I work in IT. The individual who first mentioned to me about data days was a business banking customer services employee.

It seems that, despite updating millions of financial records every second, any change of customer details is only committed to the central database once a day. This means that if you provided data to a customer services employee at your bank and they add it to their machine, it will not go live until up to a day later. I guess you could argue that this makes sense because expensive (both financially and computationally) integrity checks don’t have to be carried out that often but in the grand scheme of things, I don’t agree.

The first issue is quite obvious and that is the potential for data loss. Luckily I’m a business customer so I can get through on the phones quickly and get something sorted. If they lost data I’d given them before the central databases were updated then its no biggie, but for those who had waited 30 minutes to speak to someone it would be a right pain. I’m not saying they lose any data, but it *could*, theoretically at least, happen.

The second and more subtle issue is that these updates happen at 5pm. This means that despite the phones being open till 8pm on some nights, any updates that occur as a result of phone conversations after 5pm will not be seen to be updated until after 5pm the following day. Even if this data day practice has to happen, can’t it happen at 3am so that at least that days updates will be live the day after?

I just find this shocking. The technology exists to do things in real time. We use it everyday. What would happen to the popularity of facebook if it took someone 24 hours before they could read a post on your wall? We don’t put up with it there so why should we put up with it from our banks? Annoyingly the banks are willing to invest in the technology to fix the issue where it involves money (try taking money from a cash machine and then checking your balance on another - you can be sure you don’t have to wait 24 hours to see the change).

IT these days is very powerful but when used poorly like this it gets a bad name. I’m proud to work in IT but when I see IT being used as an excuse for this kind of poor practice I’m simply ashamed.