Lenovo and the reintroduction of switches and buttons

After my disastrous brushes with HP and Toshiba I finally bought a Lenovo laptop V330.  One problem … although the motherboard seems not to be totally messed up on this one and the component parts seem to have actually been assembled correctly … the camera appeared not to work.

After Ava Alexis had read the published manuals for several hours to very little avail as they appeared to be inaccurate or an information black hole we attempted to do a diagnostic on it and found that every time we switched the camera on through the software it switched its self off again.  So something else was conflicting and over-riding the software … after quite a bit of googleing eventually I read somewhere of a physical button on the exterior of the casing.  I couldn’t find it…

And then I looked at the camera its self … and … it is the physical switch – when you slide it left the camera’s off and when you slide it right the cameras on.  Such a shame no one thought to put this information in the manual… but then as we know computers these days are made by throwing all the items in a box as fast as possible and presumably the manuals are constructed in the same casual manner.

After this I ruminated on the mystery of buttons … and the days when it was all button and switches.  There should be more buttons.  Ideally that go click.  Our first colour television in the 1980s was the one of the first appliances to eschew buttons… having instead some kind of panel on the front that claimed to be powered by body heat but I suspected was actually activated by sweat.  Since then it’s all been downhill.  As though machines are designed to avoid even the idea that we should ever have to do as much work as pressing a button ever … when surely telling Alexa to switch your lights on and off is actually more work than pressing a switch ever could be.  And smartphone touchscreens encrusted with dead skin cells and smeared with sweat are actually pretty gross...

Of course switches wear out which is one reason manufacturers eschew them.  My dad had a music centre which after several years would crackle like the electric chair for 10 minutes after being switched on … but they were still fun.

Anyway if you too can’t cope with the fact no one bothered to put in the manual that the Lenovo V330 camera is also a button then hopefully this post will help you in keeping your hair in…

Aviva's Fraud Investigators - making policemen everywhere seem polite...

Last Friday afternoon at work I was rung by a gentleman who I never spoke to because I was working.  He then sent me an email informing me that he was a Fraud Investigator for Aviva and asking me to “give him a call” about my motor insurance.  I rang the number back only to be put on hold.  So I gave up and sent a grumpy email to which I received a perfunctory reply explaining that they wanted to check my claims history.  Later that afternoon I started to worry that I had not filled in my insurance application form correctly.  Had I missed an accident out?   

So when I got home from work I logged into Aviva’s website to check my policy documents and what I had told Aviva.  I was locked out with only a message on the site to contact Aviva… So I spent a huge amount of time trawling through my emails to try to prove to myself that my claims history was right.  It was.  But of course without access to my policy I couldn’t check what I’d told Aviva to reassure myself.  So I emailed the Fraud office again…

Unlike Barton Keyes – the fearsome fraud investigator in Double Indemnity - Aviva’s fraud investigators do not seem to burn the midnight oil or work through lunch hours or at weekends so it was only after a whole weekend of worry that my policy would be cancelled and I would be put on some kind of insurance blacklist that I received another perfunctory reply from Aviva thanking me for the information, saying that I was no longer under investigation and stating that my policy would continue as normal and that I could now download my documents.

It occurred to me later in the week that this is a funny way to conduct a business.  Why if you want to double check someone’s claim history would you loudly announce yourself to them in voicemails and emails as a “Fraud Investigator” or from the “Fraud Department” instead of just saying that you are some kind of underwriter and you are policy checking?  Adding the word “Fraud” into correspondence and conversations is quite accusatory – to the point of bullying.  Furthermore why not just tell me what it is I’ve told them and ask me to confirm it is correct?  The whole thing felt like a bit of a fishing expedition as if they were cross questioning me to see if they could get me to incriminate myself.  Had they simply sold the policy too cheaply?  One even wonders if this is a rouse to put the price up and start renegotiating the policy after sale.  Not that I’m saying that’s what happened by one has to wonder…

It seems someone does not like the photos of ladies with automatic weapons that greet one at Gatwick

The Cat, the Sword and the Bin Men ...

One of my hobbies is googling Danny John-Jules …for whenever the press find out something about him – such as that he had an argument with a co-star on Strictly Come Dancing – they take great glee in reminding us he was given 120 hours’ community service and ordered to pay £350 costs after attacking two men for not emptying his recycling bin. 

This is true … but it is not the whole truth ... for it is also true that this conviction was turned over at appeal at Harrow Crown Court on March 5^th 2009 for complicated reasons like the whole case was complete balderdash.  When Mr John-Jules said within earshot of the Daily Star that there might be some racist motivation to these events this was reported along the lines of “unlike his laidback character, John- Jules lost his cool and unleashed a bitter tirade about prejudice in the UK…”

Why would he think that the UK is a racist country …? perhaps because fast forwards 9 years to 2018 and the Sun publishes an article “Strictly star Danny John-Jules menaced two bin men with a samurai sword before punching and kicking them to the ground because they wouldn't empty his recycling”.  

Well, all I can say is that it’s good for them that the cat is too cool to sue.  Honestly why would anyone think England racist …?  Interesting that they use quotations from the court case – perhaps because they think that these quotes are protected under the defence of qualified privilege because they were made in court….  Then again perhaps I just over-estimate the intelligence of Sun hacks and the fact is that this is just lazy journalism at its finest and that they simply indulge in because they can get away with it…  

Jeremy Vine used to tell a story about a cat that was left a fortune and a house by its owner.  People from the press regularly visited the house to interview the neighbours and this continued for years and years and decades untill one day the neighbours wrote to him to ask how long it would take for the story to die.  He said never ... for the story had all the elements that touch people's imagination and as such it was a magnet to every lazy hack worldwide...  I guess it is the same with the story of the cat, the sword and the bin men... so I shall now return to my usual position of ignoring anything that might possibly require me to do something or be involved by saying...

That's all folks!

Jill Dando, Madeleine McCann and Jack the Ripper - my journey through cold case TV

This week I have mainly been watching TV shows about failed police investigations.  

First I watched a BBC documentary about Jill Dando.  Being the BBC it spent the first ten minutes telling us how lovely Jill was and how fondly people remembered her because a lot of the general public have forgotten.  Nick Ross told us she always took her high heels off when they were in the same frame so as not to look taller than him.  Eventually the policeman who put away Barry George stood amongst his decision logs trying to explain how they’d got Barry to trial on the basis of one tiny particle of gunshot residue.  The trial lasted 50 days largely due to the paucity of the evidence and the verdict was overturned on appeal.  Of course Barry George could have killed Jill Dando but it’s amazing the thing ever got to trial when they couldn’t do even basic things like place him at the scene.  While they had a photo of George with gun or a replica gun posing as an SAS man in the privacy of his own flat it frankly didn’t seem plausible that a man with Mr George’s limited intelligence should be able to customise the bullet that killed her in broad daylight to reduce the sound as it was ejected from the gun.  The bottom line is however much money was poured into the investigation no one saw the perpetrator, there was no concrete evidence and no one could be placed at the scene so there was never going to be a satisfactory outcome to the case ... but since money is allocated for political reasons a huge amount of money was spent to achieve little except an embarrassing miscarriage of justice…

Next I watched Netflix’s new documentary series on the Madeleine McCann case.  Oh dear… here we are again in the world of endless speculation, too little evidence and too much money.  You can't solve any case with a complete lack of evidence and lots of money but that didn't stop the McCanns having a good go....  aided and frustrated in equal terms by the press creating a circus that probably was more of a hindrance to the investigation than a help. 

The fact is no one saw who abducted Madeleine so no solid conclusions could be made.  With no forensic evidence left at the scene the Portuguese PoPo quickly fell back on the simplest conclusion that the McCanns had done it themselves – that they were trying to cover up an accident.  As with the case of Ms Dando the crime scene had also been contaminated soon after the discovery of the crime making it even harder.  Precious time was lost not doing house to house searches.  The McCanns hired their own PR person and soon the press turned against the Portuguese PoPo which made them ever more suspicious of the McCanns.  Psychological profiling was used to point the finger first at Robert Murat (who lived over the road and did some free translations for the McCanns) and then at a web developer who did some work for him who Murat called on the night (although he can’t remember why).  None of this amounts of a hill of beans but never-the-less both men had their properties raided and reputations trashed by the media to no avail as they were named "augidos". 

Eventually – suspicious of the discrepancies in the stories of the Tapas 7 - the PoPo pulled in the McCanns who did themselves no favours by refusing to answer their questions.  According to the Portuguese PoPo Mrs McCann called them a rude word but who knows?  The Portuguese PoPo were convinced the McCanns were guilty because of the evidence of two sniffer dogs from England – a cadaver dog and a blood dog – but as their handler pointed out … you can’t put a spaniel on the stand.  Scooby Doo Where Are You?  Unfortunately for the Portuguese PoPo they had jumped the gun by not waiting for the thing that every Jeremy Kyle viewer knows one must have - the All Important DNA results.  These showed only an 80 per cent match to Madeleine which meant that the DNA the dogs had found could have come from the parents themselves or Madeleine’s siblings.

Still lead investigator (much maligned by the British press as a lazy, fat bastard) Goncalo Amaral remained convinced it was the McCanns (much maligned by the Portuguese press as lazy Colonial child-neglecters-at-best-murderers-at-worst) wot done it and the whole thing reached the level of an international diplomatic incident when Gordon Brown started insisting Mr Amaral be sacked.  He was… but of course that problem didn’t go away because it created an intensely bitter angry ex-PoPo who decided he’d get his own back by writing a book about the McCanns’ “guilt”.  The McCanns sued and won and lost on appeal. 

Eventually the Portuguese PoPo archived the case and everybody stopped being an “aguido” and many libel damages were awarded...  Still, the McCanns through their fundraising now had huge sums of money to perpetually re-investigate the case.  Much of this money came from Everest Windows entrepreneur Brian Kennedy who dispensed his wisdom from within a giant red sofa to underline his conspicuous consumption and I was reminded of a salesman of Everest Windows who once told me replacing my windows would cost £20,000 but “he could give me a discount” … how I resented staying in to talk to that idiot.  Anyway, soon a private investigation firm was hired who scoured the deep web for peados and found many but not a trace of Madeleine … so the McCann trust sacked them only to replace them with a professional con-man.  At one point a police artist was interviewed who said that there should be more to a drawn photofit than the physical geometry of the person in question and that the portrait should reveal something about the person … but unfortunately the person who saw a man carrying a girl (who turned out to be someone else) couldn’t remember what his face had been like anyway… so the police artist lady had a pretty hard time exercising her artistic licence on nothing.  And people wonder why it's so hard for the PoPo to catch anybody with scientific methods like these...

And on and on went on the farce of trying to solve a case without any evidence. If only all this time and money had been spent on some slightly less hopeless cases…

And finally I watched a BBC documentary where a lady in black attempted to identify Jack the Ripper with the help of HOLMES … a much vaunted Home Office computer product which seemed little more than a relational database.  The program ended by telling us who the Ripper was a mere 131 years too late with the certainty that can only come from all the protagonists being long gone.

What all these cases have in common is a large amount of money being spent in the teeth of there not being enough evidence to build a case as if one will ever make up for the other… there’s a moral there but I don’t know what it can be…

The questions Mrs McCann reportedly refused to answer are:

1. On May 3, 2007, around 22:00, when you entered the apartment, what did you see? What did you do? Where did you look? What did you touch?

2. Did you search inside the master bedroom wardrobe?

3. (Shown two photographs of her bedroom wardrobe) Can you describe its contents?

4. Why was the curtain by the sofa near the side window tampered with? Did someone go behind the sofa?

5. How long did your search of the apartment take after you detected Madeleine’s disappearance?

6. Why did you say Madeleine had been abducted?

7. Assuming Madeleine was abducted, why did you leave the twins to go to the ‘Tapas’ and raise the alarm? The supposed abductor could still be in the apartment.

8. Why didn’t you ask the twins then what happened to their sister or why didn’t you ask them later on?

9. When you raised the alarm at the ‘Tapas’ what exactly did you say – what were your exact words?

10. What happened after you raised the alarm there?

11. Why did you go and warn your friends instead of shouting from the verandah?

12. Who contacted the authorities?

13. Who took place in the searches?

14. Did anyone outside the group learn of her disappearance in those following minutes?

15. Did any neighbour offer you help?

16. What does “we let her down” mean?

17. Did Jane Tanner tell you that night she’d seen a man with a child?

18. How were the authorities contacted and which police force was alerted?

19. During the searches, with the police there, where did you search for Maddie, how and in what way?

20. Why did the twins not wake up during that search or when they were taken upstairs?

21. Who did you phone after the occurrence?

22. Did you call Sky News?

23. Did you know the danger of calling the media, because it could influence the abductor?

24. Did you ask for a priest?

25. By what means did you divulge Madeleine’s features, by photographs or by any other means?

26. Is it true that during the searches you remained seated on Maddie’s bed without moving?

27. What was your behaviour that night?

28. Did you manage to sleep?

29. Before travelling to Portugal, did you make any comment about a foreboding or a bad feeling?

30. What was Madeleine’s behaviour like?

31. Did Maddie suffer from any illness or take any medication?

32. What was Madeleine’s relationship like with her brother and sister?

33. What was Madeleine’s relationship like with her brother and sister, friends and school mates?

34. As for your professional life, in how many and which hospitals have you worked?

35. What is your medical speciality?

36. Have you ever done shift work in any emergency services or other services?

37. Did you work every day?

38. At a certain point you stopped working. Why?

39. Are the twins difficult to get to sleep? Are they restless and does that cause you uneasiness?

40. Is it true sometimes you despaired at your children’s behaviour and it left you feeling very uneasy?

41. Is it true that in England you even considered handing over Madeleine’s custody to a relative?

42. In England, did you medicate your children? What type of medication?

43. In the case files, you were shown canine forensic testing films. After watching them, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

44. When the sniffer dog also marked human blood behind the sofa, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

45. When the sniffer dog marked the scent of corpse coming from the vehicle you hired a month after the disappearance, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

46. When human blood was marked in the boot of the vehicle, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

47. When confronted with the results of Maddie’s DNA, carried out in a British lab, collected from behind the sofa and the boot of the vehicle, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

48. Did you have any responsibility or intervention in your daughter’s disappearance?