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It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Mainly because I wanted to try and get away from the usual whingeing, complaining, moaning tone that I seem to have adopted in my posts.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to write anything positive, so I’ll carry on whingeing.

Some time last year, I became aware that the performance-based compensation system the UK train network was changing from a system whereby all season ticket renewals were automatically applied a discount if the line fell below the target level of punctuality to a scheme known as ‘Delay Repay’.

Delay Repay works on the premise that you can only claim compensation against a rail company if your train is delayed by 30 minutes or more. This is proudly advertised as a fairer system, and on the surface, yes it is a fairer system. Whereas previously, I could get a discount on my ticket even if my trains ran on time and the mid-day trains were consistently late, now I am only entitled to compensation if I have been affected by the late running.

Late. What constitutes ‘Late’? In the rail performance figures, a train is considered ‘on time’ even if it is up to 10 minutes off the schedule. With Delay Repay, the train is only considered ‘Late’ if it is 30 minutes off schedule. Here we have the crux of the problem. Under the old scheme, if my train was 15 minutes late, I would get compensated for it. Now, if my train is 28 minutes late, I don’t.

I am pleased to note that Passenger Focus has highlighted this issue, but I’ve yet to see if this will do any good, as the train companies that have signed up to this scheme have no incentive to make the regular trains run to schedule.

On a related note, My usually reliable Chiltern Railways train was cancelled this morning, so as I sat enjoying a coffee while waiting for the next service, I visited their website to look at downloading their compensation claim form.

Nothing.

Searching for anything related to ‘compensation’, ‘delays’ or ‘delay repay’ simply returns no relevant results. I eventually had to visit the ticket office of a Chiltern-owned station to pick up a form titled ‘Passenger Comments’ which doubles as their compensation claim form. While Chiltern have obviously embraced an environmentally sound and cost-effective system, it is not obvious to the customer that a leaflet entitled  ‘Passenger Comments’ would be used to claim compensation.

Delay Repay is a fairer system, but if it is to be accepted by passengers, operators should be more accessible than before when helping passengers claim their compensation. It is too easy to simply forget that your train was delayed when you are sitting on the next service, and even easier to be too lazy to apply for compensation.

As the UK again grinds to a halt because of a relatively small amount of Crystallised water, online retailers reported a spike in sales.

It is easy to imagine many people sitting at home in front of a cosy fire because they cannot get to work, or because their children have been sent home from school, going online to shop because they have nothing better to do.

I was one of those who contributed to the spike, but not because I was bored, or couldn’t get in to work – I was able to get in to the office just fine. However, I was forced to purchase my new camera lens online, as the local specialist retailer was, to be frank, hopeless.

The local camera shop window looks like a treasure trove of photography. Second hand and new cameras, lenses and even some old ‘box brownie’ style cameras. Inside, it is one of those shops that you can hardly move because of the tripods, accessories and even more cameras and lenses.

The shopkeeper looked up from his computer and simply said: ‘Yes?’

To which I responded with a ‘Good afternoon’ and enquired whether he had the lens I was looking for in stock. His response was a flat ‘No’. Just ‘No’.

Disappointed as I was, I hopped back on the internet and was able to purchase the lens from an online retailer. Not only that, I experienced better customer service from a faceless website than I did from a specialist retailer who should be enthusiastic about his niche.

I actually visited two different websites, the first of which did not have the lens I was looking for in stock but offered me some alternatives – I could place an order and have it posted when they had some or I could see if a local branch of their retail arm had any in stock. Additionally, it offered what it thought were suitable alternatives to the product I had looked for.

The second website had the lens in stock, but also offered to show me some alternatives that I might want to consider.

Compare this to the shopkeeper’s ‘No’.

I was prepared to pay a slight premium for buying from the retailer, especially if I could have the lens today, but by being completely unhelpful he has missed out on a sale. Instead of offering to search for the lens and see if he can order it (He does sell brand-new Canon products) he chose to simply turn away my business.

The lens I have bought has quite a specific use: it specialises in producing a very shallow depth of field, and is particularly suited to portrait and still-life photography. Instead of recognising that requirement and offering alternative lenses that he did have in stock, and potentially sharing some of his experience and knowledge he simply decided to push me away, as if a customer was inconveniencing his web surfing.

The High-street appears to have already given up the battle with online, and eventually all that will remain are these specialist retailers. The reason why you would visit a specialist, particularly one involved in leisure or hobby items is to talk to an expert and share information. High street retailers have never been under more pressure to deliver a level of customer service that is simply not possible on the web, but they need to go that extra mile.

I’m not a political blogger, I don’t even pretend to have the slightest interest in british politics unless they have any direct impact on me, or more usually, if they are going to cost me more money.

The 2.5% cut in UK Sales Tax (Value Added Tax) is one such example.

In a desperate attempt to revitalise the UK economy, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has decided that people will start spending money again when they hear that they will pay less tax on them.

UK consumers are usually unaware of the fact that the price they pay in the shops for the majority of goods in includes a 17.5% tax, so if you’re paying 50p for a Mars bar, just under 9p of that is tax, so you’re really paying 41p to the shop for the Mars bar, and the shop is collecting 9p that it pays to the Government.

In addition, certain goods carry a duty tax, including cigarettes, alcohol and petrol.

By announcing that the VAT rate will be cut to 15%, Alistair Darling has effectively brought attention to the fact that we pay VAT on goods.

What is not so widely reported (yet) is the fact that duty on goods is being increased to offset the effects of the VAT rise.

So, the price we pay at the petrol pump should remain the same.

However, there are other, deeper implications to this.

Businesses can claim the VAT they pay on fuel back from the government. By effectively moving the 2.5% from VAT to duty, that increases the costs of transport. The cost of putting £100 of fuel in a lorry changes from £82.50 to £85. While £2.50 is not a significant amount, consider the fact that most haulage companies will be spending thousands of pounds on fuel per week. When you consider £4000 worth of fuel, the difference becomes £100 – this cost adds up. Coupled with the fact that this reduction is only temporary for 13 months, whereas the rise in duty is permanent, the VAT cuts are nothing but a con.

And what does this mean to the humble Mars Bar? well, it comes down to 47p, but will the 3p extra in your pocket be worth it, and will the shop actually pass the cut on in the long term, as the cost of transporting the Mars Bar, and therefore the cost to the shop of stocking the snack that helps you Work, Rest and Play also goes up.

One of the other side effects that has probably not been considered by Mr. Darling is the fact that a lot of pricing and invoicing systems are computerised. I know from my own experience that the VAT rate has been hard-coded into many systems. Thankfully, I’ve not written a system that does VAT calculations but I wonder how many systems will be requiring a rapid re-write?

The added problem is that invoices produced prior to December 1st, will still be applicable for 17.5% VAT, so if the system calculates the VAT ‘on the fly’ from the NET value, the system is in trouble, as it could end up displaying legacy invoices with the wrong rate of VAT applied.

This is the first change in VAT since the big computer boom, how many systems are really ready?

***Update***

Before Christmas, I noticed that NEXT had placed notices all around the till area stating that they were passing the cut on to their customers and that the discount would be deducted at the till.

After Christmas, the same retailer had new notices saying that they had corrected all their prices so that the price on the ticket was correct. I purchased a coat before Christmas, but had to return it. When it was scanned in again, it still came up at the pre-VAT cut price (i.e. with a VAT rate of 17.5%). When I found the same coat on the rails (it was not in the sale stock) the ticket was still the 17.5% VAT rate price.

NEXT have only really provided the UK consumer with a small pre-christmas cut, and they are now pocketing the difference in VAT, as many smaller retailers were accused of doing. I am certain they are not alone.

This VAT Cut is nothing but smoke and mirrors tactics from a chancellor who is panicing.

It never ceases to amaze me that in these ‘Hard’ times of ‘Credit Crunch’ that the rich find ever more ludicrous ways to squander their money, and other people get richer.

The very fact that con artist Damien Hirst has made over £110,000,000 from the sale of pickled sharks is mindboggling.

Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate art – even some of the more obscure pieces, but do people not have better or more worthy things to spend money on than buying overhyped tat?

My wife would go mad if I came home having spent £150 on a Nintendo Wii, What would the wife of the person who bought the pickled shark say? At least with the Wii you can wave your remote control around like a lightsaber.

The only saving grace to this story is the disappointment felt that the zebra in formaldehyde above only sold for half it’s expected price, but at over £1M, that wasn’t exactly a snip.

I think this line from Del Amitri’s ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ sums up the hypocrisy of the situation:

While American businessmen snap up Van Goghs
For the price of a hospital wing

So, it’s been a long time since I updated – a cardinal sin in the blogosphere – is it still called that? the term seems dated these days.

I was going to post last week, about the farce that is Formula One, but after re-reading my bile-filled rant, I thought it was best to put that aside and let the rest of the world say it. I really have little more to add on the subject.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have joined Flickr since having my new camera and I am having a lot of fun with it, much to the exasperation of my wife. However, looking at my statistics page, only one of the photos taken with my new camera make it into my top 10 views of all time.

The most popular image is this:

taken at Goodwood in 2005, it shows Damon Hill driving one of the cars his father’s team built before his tragic death in 1975 in the air crash that not only killed him, but the man who was to drive this car in the 1976 Formula One World Championship.

In many ways, the photo is very poignant, which is possibly why it has so many hits. It is also a rare picture, as to my knowledge Damon Hill has never driven the car before, or since.

The second most popular photo is this:

Personally, I find this to be a more intriguing shot – ephasising the poverty in which this community live. But what is slightly concerning is the search term that was entered into Google Images that led someone to this image: ‘Latino Prostitutes’. I know we live in a sick world, and there are some very sick people out there, but nowhere in my image, description or tags have I mentioned those two search terms.

I’ll grant that Google has been ‘intelligent’ to work out that the Dominican Republic could be classed as Latin America (although I would class it as Carribean), however – where did ‘prostitute’ come from?

Perhaps I should consider changing the title of the image, but again ‘Little Girl’ does not evoke anything sexual to me – am I a little naiive?

Of course, given the fact that I have now mentioned this in a blog post, it is now going to be indexed by Google and the chances are that the image will be even more associated with the search terms.

Can we trust machines to truly understand the subtle semantics of text? I wouldn’t expect them to understand sarcasm or irony, but could Google one day ‘understand’ the semantics of this post and reduce the association of the image with the search terms if a blog post or article is describing what an image is not?

Then there is the added complications of a post like this, where I am reinforcing the association of one image – Damon Hill, Graham Hill, the GH2 and to a lesser extent Tony Brise, but I am also reducing the association between the ‘world’s oldest profession’ and the image of the girl.

Flickr and other such sites allow you to ‘tag’ your images to reinforce themes, but as far as I am aware, they do not yet provide this facility.

Flickr does provide the following advice if you are concerned about the sites/search terms that you see in your stats:

Search engines
If your photos turn up in a search for terms you’d rather not be associated with, you need to remove those terms from the content in your account, like photo titles and descriptions, tags, your screen name, or your Flickr profile page. If you decide that you’d prefer not to be part of search results on other services, you can set a preference on Flickr to prevent external searches from adding your Flickr account to their index. Search engines do not update their (huge) indexes in real-time, so if you decide to change that setting on your Flickr account, search engine indexes can take a few weeks (or sometimes more) to reflect your preference. 

This is all well and good – but the title is ‘Little Girl’, the description is ‘Dominican girl outside of school’ and the tags are ‘Dominican’ and ‘Republic’.

I do not wish to remove my images from the search engines, but should we really have to simply accept that occasionally our content might tagged inappropriately by a machine simply because it has made assumptions about other words?