I always thought I was fortunate to have started using Gmail in 2004. Back then, the service was still on trial, and accounts were only available if you were invited by someone who already had an account, with each user allowed to send just 10 invitations. As an early adopter, I was able to secure a short address, a form of my name, without the need to add a number or anything else to it.

Nearly 10 years later, it is virtually impossible to choose such a short address. However, a brief online moniker appears to be a double-edged sword. People with similar names to mine, who may live anywhere in the world, are forced to choose a longer address when they sign up for Gmail. Most probably they add a number to the end, or include a middle initial. Unfortunately, when they use the address to sign up for something online, it seems it is all too easy for them to forget that they couldn’t have the short address they wanted, and so they mistakenly use mine. I then receive information about their order or a new service they have signed up to, often including personal details such as a postal address. When this has happened, I have always attempted to contact the company concerned to let them know, but either it is not possible to find an e-mail address that is read by a human, or else they seemingly just ignore my messages.

Someone called Joan Rawle received an e-mail from the Utah First Credit Union wanting to speak to her urgently about her account. She also signed up with Weightwatchers at some point. The bank failed to respond when I contacted them, while Weightwatchers said they were sorry I no longer wanted to receive their newsletters (addressing me as Jonathan and apparently without reading my reason for cancelling). Then someone called Judy Rawle in Texas ordered a LifeStation Personal Emergency Response System using my address, and so I received a welcome message and also a UPS tracking number.

A slightly different misdirected e-mail was from a teacher called Carol Stumpf at the Sumner School District in Washington. She was writing to parents about her class’s activities, and the message said it was about a pupil called Jacob Hill. She did write and apologise, but said she’d have to speak to the student and his parents before removing my address. I later received an e-mail from another teacher, Mr Baker, about the same boy, but since then it has gone quiet.

More recently, I have received numerous messages from Bell Canada about a cable TV and internet package I have ordered, or at least someone called John Rawle in Etobicoke, Ontario has ordered. These included information about the date of the installation. If they rely on e-mail to let people know the details, John may not have been at home when the engineer called. I have tried to stop these messages, but I can’t find a way to contact them by e-mail as a non-customer. Last night I received a request for feedback about my recent telephone call to customer services, so I filled in the questionnaire with the worst scores possible, and a comment explaining why. Perhaps John phoned them to complain about missing the installation.

Then from the sublime to the ridiculous. Someone else called John Rawle, but this time living in Alicante, Spain, placed an order with the Danish Pipe Shop. This is not the sort of establishment with which I would wish to do business, and they have so far not responded to my requests to have my address removed.

These are only some recent examples of the communications I have incorrectly received. There have been others in the past, such as website subscriptions and even details of a summer camp.

It has to be said that using someone else’s e-mail address by mistake is quite dangerous. I have details of people’s names and home addresses, and in many cases a means of taking over online accounts for the services if they rely on e-mail for password resets. If I were dishonest, I could cancel their orders, or sign them up for expensive extras. However, I would settle simply for letting the people concerned know that they have got their e-mail address wrong, and asking them to be more careful in future. I have tried Googling all of these people, but in most cases without success, and in no instance have I found their correct e-mail addresses. However, I do have most of their home addresses. I think I may try sending postcards. If I ever receive any replies I’ll post details here. Perhaps receiving a postcard from a stranger out of the blue will make them realise the importance of checking their e-mail address when signing up for things to prevent personal details falling into the wrong hands. After all, had they used the address of someone less honest than me, they could be unexpectedly receiving far more than a postcard!

Aside from the lack of respect, the idea that there is anything to celebrate is quite ludicrous. It’s clear why people may celebrate the death in office of a dictator, or may celebrate the defeat in an election of a despised leader. However, Lady Thatcher hasn’t been in power for 23 years, and has rarely appeared in public for the last 10 years. So how have the lives of the unemployed or the economy improved this week? Lady Thatcher was an elderly lady and her death changes nothing.

Equally disgraceful is the social media campaign to propel a certain song from The Wizard of Oz to the top of the music chart. The vast majority of people who will have downloaded the track will not be old enough to remember the period when Mrs Thatcher was in power. No doubt they will enjoy the trappings of 21st century Britain, probably growing up in a privately owned house, enjoying university education, and a far more prosperous lifestyle than if they had grown up in the ’70s. And of course, they will likely have downloaded the song over an internet connection provided by a private company making use of what was once the public telephone network, privatised under the Thatcher government. If these young people think Mrs Thatcher’s policies were so bad, perhaps they would like to trade in their current lives and be sent to work down the pit. Of course, the truth is that they mostly have no interest in politics, and will not have even given it much thought. Like sheep they follow a campaign on Facebook, making the protest about as real as the outpourings of grief that were displayed following the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

It is often said that Thatcherism lead to a whole generation growing up as being uncaring, selfish and lacking respect for others. It is therefore deeply ironic that the people who are celebrating the death of the lady who invented it are the ones exhibiting behaviour most symptomatic of the very ideology they claim to dislike.

The beauty of using RSS feeds to keep up-to-date with content is that it removes the need to visit dozens of websites each day to check for new postings. This isn’t limited to blogs: photo galleries and discussion forums often have feeds containing new content, and it’s even possible to follow people’s public Facebook walls via RSS (although finding the feed URL in the first place isn’t always straightforward). Until this month, it was also possible to follow a Twitter account through RSS, but that has sadly been switced off as part of Twitter’s new API policies. Twitter have disabled feeds becasue they want people to use their own site and mechanism for following someone instead. It forces people into the Twitter ecosystem. And if someone wants to follow a blog or photo gallery for updates, then unless the owner happens to tweet about it, you are out of luck.

Similarly, Google’s decision to scrap Reader is a result of their desire to force people to use their Google+ social network. Reader wasn’t helping Google to build their rival to Facebook, so they closed it. However, I do not believe Facebook or Google+ are a suitable alternative to Reader at all. The idea of social networking sites is that you follow people, and they can recommend articles that you might like to read. That isn’t the same as following a particular site that you are interested in. What if your Facebook “friend” never recommends another article from the same site? You may have enjoyed reading an article immensely, but becasue you can’t subscribe to it and have to rely on a friend recommending it, you may never catch any more articles from there. You could bookmark it, but then we are back to visiting dozens of websites manually each day. It is possible to follow a page for a website, service, person, etc. on Facebook or Google+, but that requires the author to produce content specifically tailored to those sites, whereas it would be much simpler to use an open standard such as RSS to allow people to follow you using whatever application or website they wished.

Some people are claiming Google Reader was all about sharing, and that this is still possible via Google+. That was the argument Google themselves used in 2011 when they scrapped most of the sharing tools built into Google Reader. However, what will be missing is part of the core functionality of Reader: the ability to follow any feed and be notified of updates. After all, if everyone just relies on recommendations of what to read from other users, and no users can receive feeds of new articles, how will anyone ever see any new content? If Google really want people to use Google+, why don’t they allow people to subscribe to RSS feeds and view them in their Google+ stream? Allowing people only to view posts shared by friends or content posted specifically to Google+ is such a poor substitute it’s practically useless, and I hope Google+ doesn’t gain any significant extra use as a result of this decision. A former Google employee has even written about how Google+ has killed Google Reader.

There are a number of alternatives to Google Reader, although they each have their own shortcomings, in particular their inability to handle the large influx of new users looking to migrate from Google Reader at the moment. At present my favourite solution is Blogtrottr. Rather than provide an interface of its own, it simply e-mails any new articles to you. That means I could soon be reading all my subscribed content from within none other than Google’s own Gmail service! As I don’t require any extra fancy features, this suits me quite well, and it’s a big advantage to have e-mails and articles all in one place. But I may yet find another, better, solution.

I’ll finish with a comment Google Reader creator Chris Wetherell made in 2011, on Google’s effort to make Google+ a clone of Facebook, using the analogy of Apple’s successful product line that many others have failed to copy:

But what if the thing you’re driving everyone toward isn’t the iPod but is instead the Zune?

Until fairly recently, the policy for many government buildings throughout the UK was for the flag to be flown only on these flag-flying days: dates such as the Queen’s birthday, or the anniversary of Her Majesty’s accession to the throne – hardly key dates in the Republican calendar, one would have thought; yet with their agreement it is on these days that the flag will now be flown in Belfast. A few years ago, the UK government did announce that government departments could fly the flag all year round if they so chose, but many still stick to the old schedule. Indeed, the government-owned site where I work flies the Union Flag on those selected days. Because it isn’t flown every day, people tend to notice it when it is flown, and comment on it. It can be fun to try and figure out what anniversary is being marked. I actually find the idea of flying a national flag continuously to be quite a foreign concept. If you visit cities on mainland Europe, they are often covered in flags. It’s all very pretty, but it just isn’t the British way of doing things. Only at British embassies in foreign cities can you be sure of seeing the Union Flag flown every day, and I doubt that’s the effect the protesters in Belfast are hoping to achieve.

One particularly sad aspect of the violence when it began in December was that the homes and offices of politicians belonging to the non-sectarian Alliance Party were targeted in particular. As they hold the balance of power between the Republicans/Nationalists and Loyalists/Unionists on Belfast City Council, some people saw the decision as their “fault”. Yet the original proposal tabled had been for the Union Flag not be to flown at all. The Alliance Party had suggested using the traditional UK flag flying days as a compromise, which was then approved in a vote.

It would be easy for people in Northern Ireland to say that those of us outside the Province should mind our own business, and that outsiders simply do not understand the issues that exist there. Yet the fact is the “Loyalists” claim to loyal to be British Crown, and are protesting over the right to fly the British flag. And as the violence has escalated, it is British police officers that have come under attack. That’s not a sort of Britishness many would recognise in any other part of the United Kingdom. Being British isn’t about flying flags every day or marching with banners and symbols. It’s about shared values including being tolerant of others, fair play, and showing respect for civic institutions such as the police or democratically elected councillors. If people in Northern Ireland wish to be British, then as someone who wholeheartedly supports the existence of the United Kingdom I am perfectly happy with that. But if they instead wish to pursue their own brand of Ulster Loyalism, most British people would prefer they found their own flag to march under.

The government’s new proposal is that all lorries will have to pay up to £1000 to use our roads, with VED cut by the same amount for British lorries. It is presumably being introduced in this way so as to avoid breaking European law, which could be the case if EU vehicles from outside the UK were treated differently.

I feel this is a welcome proposal that will make the situation much fairer. If foreign hauliers have to increase their prices, British companies may consider either giving their business to British hauliers or even transferring some freight to the railways. Either way it will be an improvement.

However, rather than welcoming the proposal, many people commenting on the BBC article have decided to turn the topic to fuel duty, repeating an often-heard claim that it unfairly disadvantages British lorry drivers. They claim that European drivers are better off because other countries impose less tax on diesel fuel. This is a completely flawed argument. If it is economical for a foreign lorry to cross the English Channel to carry out a job in Great Britain, then cross the Channel again to fill up with diesel, it would be just as economical for a British lorry to do the same. If the distance is too great and a fill-up is required in the UK, the foreign driver has to pay the UK rates of fuel duty. There are no circumstances where a driver from mainland Europe doing a job in the UK is at an advantage when it comes to the price of diesel. If they can return to the mainland to fill up, so can a British lorry. In fact, businesses tend to be quite smart when it comes to tax avoidance, so if this is really a way to save money, they will be doing it already. It’s true that a lorry driver carrying goods between Glasgow and Aberdeen each week would be better off if fuel duty was lower, but a Polish driver on the same route is not at an advantage when it comes to fuel as he would have to drive all the way back to the Continent to enjoy lower fuel prices, which would not be economical, and if it was, the Scottish driver could do the same.

Whatever the rights and wrongs about high levels fuel duty, it is a fact that British drivers are not at a disadvantage compared to European drivers working in the UK when it comes to the price of diesel. The inequality is that British hauliers must pay to use our roads, and pay tolls on the Continent too, while Continental drivers use our roads for free. That inequality will be addressed by these proposals, so let’s leave the more general discussions about fuel duty for another day.

There is clearly a big problem in the UK with obesity and people lacking fitness, and this needs to be tackled, starting from an early age. However, forcing all children to do competitive teams sports is not the answer. It may be great for the ones who are good at sport, are always picked for the school team, score all the goals and are cheered by their classmates. But the ones who are not so capable at sport face misery and humiliation. The experience could well put them off physical activity for life, and yet they are the ones who need encouragement to take up exercise.

If the aim is to tackle obesity and declining fitness levels among the population, the answer should be to provide a wide range of physical activity in schools: both team and individual sports; both competitive activity and ones where people just try to reach personal goals to improve their fitness. Everyone should be allowed to keep fit in a way that suits them and perhaps that they even enjoy: after all, it’s important, as it’s their health at stake.

If the aim is to give children a taste of competition, then spare a thought for those who will either always be on the losing side, or who will be the last to be picked for a team and who will not contribute much to play, if only team sports are on offer. I don’t feel learning to be competitive is as important a goal as increasing fitness, but perhaps it could provide a useful lesson for later in life. If so, this can be achieved by other activities, not just team sports. If some children find they prefer to exercise on their own in the gym, why not allow them to learn to compete by playing chess, or in a quiz team, or through problem-solving exercises? If it’s only sport that is competitive in school, those who excel at academic subjects but struggle with physical coordination will be left feeling like losers, and no doubt will become social outcasts in their class. If classes or houses compete each year not only in sports but in a range of activities, it will teach pupils how everyone has different strengths, and they will come to value the classmate who is good at maths as much as the one who can run fast or kick a football.

And if the aim is to find more potential competitors for future Olympic Games, we need to be realistic. It’s true that there is an issue with such a high proportion of medallists having been privately-educated. Everyone should have a chance to discover they are good at a sport, not only the privileged few. However, I can’t see that making sport compulsory will enable this. If there is no money to improve facilities, it will still be those at expensive, fee-paying schools that have the most opportunities. I would also question how forcing children to play “sports such as football, hockey and netball” will help Great Britain to win medals in rowing or cycling. Perhaps the future Sir Chris Hoys will be put off physical activity after finding they couldn’t contribute much during a football match, and will abandon their bikes in their garden sheds and watch TV instead. It has to be said that while the media is full of praise for “Team GB”, very few Olympic medals are won for team sports. Most medallists compete primarily for their own glory – for their face on a stamp. Putting aside that I don’t think producing a nation of Olympians should be more of a priority than, say, producing scientists and engineers, I don’t think these proposals will do much to increase the medal haul at future games anyway.

Please let’s have a bit more common sense when developing a policy for increasing the amount of physical activity in schools. Let people have a choice when it comes to what form of exercise they take, and let competitions encompass a wider range of activities than just sports. There need be no expectation that everyone wins something, but it would be much better for the youngsters’ self esteem if there is at least the chance to try something they can be competitive at. Unfortunately I can foresee there being yet another generation of couch potatoes, people who when asked will say they hate participating in sport, ever since being made to pay football or netball at school in the freezing cold, where no-one even passed the ball to them. As that new generation of obese people sit at home and watch future Olympics on TV, it will be worth remembering that it’s not a legacy of the 2012 Games as such, but of David Cameron’s misguided policy.

On Wesnedsay morning, people in various parts of the world will have the chance to witness an astronomical event that won’t be seen again until 2117 (that’s the year, not a quarter past nine!)

The transit of Venus will be best seen from east Asia and Australia. In Europe and parts of Africa it will begin before sunrise, and people in America can see it start before sunset on Tuesday. Unfortunately, in the UK we would only be able to see the final hour of the transit in the early hours of the morning, but it looks like it will be cloudy anyway. It begins at 22:09 GMT on 5 June and ends at 4:49 GMT on 6 June. If those times occur during daytime in your time zone, you can see it!

I have to give the usual warning. You must never look at the sun with the naked eye, or through a telescope, binoculars or camera. Doing so could cause sight loss. Either use special eclipse glasses, a camera or telescope with a proper solar filter, or project the image onto a screen. The TransitofVenus.org website has tips on viewing the transit safely, along with details of timings (it’s a bit US-biased; unfortunately the excellent transitofvenus.nl is down at the time of writing due to heavy traffic – they could have anticipated an increase in visitors for the next 24 hours!)

Transits of Venus always occur in pairs eight years apart, but those pairs are then separated by more than a century. In 2004, the transit occurred in the middle of the day in the UK, and it was a particularly hot, sunny day, unusually perfect for observing (the weather has a habit of spoiling any opportunities to see anything astronomical!) I was fortunate enough to be able to view this transit via the heliostat at the University of Leicester, from which these photos were taken. They still have a webpage about the 2004 transit with more images and animations.

If you are in a part of the world where the transit is visible, do take the opportunity to see a once-in-a-lifetime event if you can, although please remember the warnings about viewing it safely.

Soon to be the Elizabeth Tower?

It has been reported that most MPs are in favour of renaming the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster as the Elizabeth Tower in honour of Her Majesty the Queen, on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. The large square tower at the other end of the building was renamed the Victoria Tower to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. No other monarchs have reached 60 years on the throne.

I think that’s a fairly good idea, even if I doubt many people will use the new name. The tower is almost universally known as Big Ben, although strictly speaking that is the name of the largest bell it contains, which strikes the hour. Many people believe the official name of the tower is St Stephen’s Tower. I must admit that for much of my childhood and until fairly recently, I also believe this to be the case thanks to the film The Thirty Nine Steps, the ’70s version starring Robert Powell. The climax of the film takes place in the tower, and as they enter a door at the base, there is a sign saying “St Stephen’s Tower”. In fact, the official name of the tower is simply The Clock Tower. St Stephen’s Tower is the name given to the main entrance of the building, which is hardly a tower at all. Given the rather unimaginative name, it’s hardly surprising that most people prefer to call the tower Big Ben. While I doubt people will switch to calling it the Elizabeth Tower, at least this name may finally displace St Stephen’s Tower as what people think the “proper” name for it is.

Going platinum

After 50 years, different sources disagree on the correct names given to anniversaries. “Diamond” is sometimes taken to mean 75 years. It appears it only became popular for Diamond to refer to 60 years when Queen Victoria reached that milestone. At the time, no-one imagined another monarch would reign for that long, let alone exceed it significantly.

This time, it seems perfectly possible that the Queen could reach her 70th year on the throne in 2022. If that happens – and I certainly hope it will – the celebration could be designated the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. I think the books agree more closely on platinum being for 70 years, but that would not matter anyway. As far as Jubilees go, we are entering uncharted territory, so following the precedent of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, we can call them whatever we like!

One thing that’s for certain is that Martin Lewis is the one who is now laughing all the way to the bank. To his credit, he’s giving £10 million to charity, which of course he needn’t have done. But then that’s much the same as Bill Gates giving billions to charity. When you have such a large amount of money that most people could not even imagine, you can afford to be generous without having any impact on your own spending power or lifestyle.

I have thought for some time that MoneySavingExpert had lost its way. To me, money saving means finding the best deal, or looking for loopholes that allow the saving of a few pennies here or there. However, the site seemed to have shifted its emphasis towards claiming charges back from banks. First it was overdraft charges, and now it’s payment protection insurance premiums. That’s not money saving; that’s litigation. It’s nothing to do with saving money, but rather getting back money that you were stupid enough to lose in the first place. The advice to those who want to save money should be: make sure you don’t use an overdraft, particularly an unauthorised one; and don’t pay for useless insurance.

Take the analogy of a tradesman coming to do work to your home. The MoneySavingExpert approach would be to obtain several quotes, and find personal recommendations to make sure the one you choose will carry out good work. But the ReclaimChargesExpert approach would be to not bother with any of that, then when the work is complete, claim there is a minor problem with the work, withhold some of the money, and tell the tradesman to sue you. That may well save you money, but it’s not a good way to go about business.

I have long thought that campaigns to abolish overdraft charges are misguided as they could mean an increase in the cost of banking for the very sort of people MoneySavingExpert is supposed to be for, and could even mean the poorest in society would be unable to afford to use a bank account. And indeed, the banking industry is still trying to chip away at the free banking we enjoy in this country, under the guise of increasing competition.

Whatever other changes there are to MoneySavingExpert.com, perhaps one good thing will come out of the takeover. Hopefully they will remove Martin Lewis’s name and picture from the masthead of the site, and that will mean we no longer need to endure the incorrect apostrophe that features there. Just as every transaction has pennies to save, every cloud does have a silver lining.

The chart has always contained a fair amount of contemporary music, including film music, with examples of the latter being real movie classics by John Williams such as Star Wars and Schindler’s List. I do think film music has a place in a classical poll, as the film music of today may be tomorrow’s classical music. When defining contemporary classical music, I feel we have to ask whether the music is likely to still be played in 50 or 100 years’ time. Some of the contemporary music in the Hall of Fame – whether film music or not – may well fall into that category. Much of it is likely not to.

The first sign of something being wrong with this year’s chart what when they played a piano piece by Helen Jane Long. Who, you may ask? Good question. There are actually three pieces by Long in this year’s chart. It turns out that she is a pianist who performs her own compositions, and who has done quite well in the classical album chart this year. Unfortunately it seems listeners who are not immune from the short-term celebrity culture that engulfs most other media these days have voted for music that even they are likely to have forgotten in a few years’ time.

However, at least those people voting for Helen Jane Long may well have heard her on Classic FM and are genuine listeners to the station. One could argue that it is their democratic right to vote in that way. Worse was to come. There had apparently been a campaign amongst members of the video game community to try and get the soundtracks from some of their games into the chart. Their campaign has proved a success, with two such pieces making it into the chart: Jeremy Soule’s Skyrim and Nobuo Uematsu’s Aerith’s Theme, which was right up at number 16. Now, these are decent pieces of orchestral music that are in my opinion just as worthy of being included in a classical chart as film music. What I find wrong is that many of the people voting for them have probably never heard of the Hall of Fame before, and may never have even listened to Classic FM. So their votes meant the chart no longer reflects the tastes of Classic FM listeners, but instead has been distorted by outsiders who ordinarily have no interest in the radio station. In political terms, it is not the equivalent of an election campaign, but rather of bussing in extra voters from a neighbouring constituency who shouldn’t be entitled to vote.

The final insult this year was that the chart was said to contain the highest ever new entry in the history of the Hall of Fame. Indeed, the new entry would be in the top five. Speculation turned out to be correct, and the piece in question was Paul Mealor’s Wherever You Are. This work is clearly only at such a high position in the Hall of Fame because it has been popularised by the “Military Wives”, a choir that initially featured in a BBC television series, and became the Christmas number one in the UK singles chart (that is, the pop chart). I find it hard to believe many people would vote for Wherever You Are because they consider it one of the best pieces of music ever written. Rather, they have voted for it because they saw the TV series, or because they like it at the moment in the way that people buy the Christmas no. 1 single. It isn’t actually that good a piece of music from a purely musical point of view, and it isn’t really classical music. It’s a song. I don’t mean any disrespect to Professor Mealor. In fact, I’m sure he’s a much better composer than this. After all, he was commissioned to write music for the royal wedding last year and has several pieces in the Hall of Fame. This simply isn’t his best work.

The Hall of Fame has always been a rare refuge from the pervasive celebrity and personality culture that is far too common in every other aspect of life. Perhaps they need to subtly tweak the eligibility criteria to ensure it remains true to its origins, although admittedly I can’t see an easy way of doing that. If the Hall of Fame just becomes a clone of the weekly classical chart, or even the pop chart, I see little point in it continuing in its present form.