jonathan.rawle.org

What do the Utah First Credit Union, US Weightwatchers, a school in Washington State, an alarm system for elderly people, Bell Canada Telecom, and the Danish Pipe Shop all have in common? They have all sent e-mails to me, believing them to be addressed to one of their customers.

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!

Margaret Thatcher, her policies and legacy, are highly divisive. Let me be clear: I believe people absolutely have the right to criticise her, to point out where she went wrong, to discuss and debate the way she changed the country for better or for worse. As she was such a major public figure, I do not even think the normal rule of not speaking ill of the recently deceased need apply. However, the idea of celebrating or holding parties following the announcement of someone’s death is nothing short of disgusting, and completely childish and immature. I am glad to see politicians as diverse as Tony Blair, Alex Salmond and Martin McGuiness telling people it is not a time for celebration. Those involved should be truly ashamed of themselves, and should think how they would feel if others were to celebrate the death of one of their relatives.

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.

Google announced recently that they plan to close Google Reader on 1 July. Google Reader is a service that allows users to subscribe to feeds published by websites, blogs, news sites, etc. so as to read articles and be notified of updates from those sites all in one place. RSS feeds had been around for some time, and there were plenty of desktop applications that allowed people to subscribe to them, but the beauty of Google Reader was that it was web-based, so not only accessible from anywhere but always up-to-date irrespective of which browser or even mobile device it was accessed from. The advantages of Reader over a stand-alone feed reader are the same as the advantages of, say, Gmail over a traditional desktop e-mail client.

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?

Since early December there have been violent protests and criminal acts taking place in Northern Ireland as a result of Belfast City Council’s decision to change their policy on the flying of the Union Flag over Belfast City Hall. Previously, the flag was flown every day, but the new policy is for it to be flown only on a number of designated days a year.

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.

Finally, some common sense when it comes to taxing foreign lorries. They are a common sight on British roads, yet do not have to pay UK Vehicle Excise Duty (VED). British-registered trucks have to pay up to or over £1000 per year, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage, leading to claims that foreign drivers are taking their business. Yet when British lorries work in other European countries, they are hit by road tolls, which many countries use in place of a VED system, and which everyone must pay regardless of nationality.

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.