Generational Housing Lockout

News reports today of housing ownership heading to a 30 year low. That is something that is really sad, it represents the affordability of housing together with the difficulty of obtaining loans.

So calls for taxing the "investment" of buy to let, that is many years too late but still an idea. Also increased home building and reduced planning restrictions - the equivalent of printing money in this currency.

Another report I read was that at least people who could secure the finance a few years ago are trying to keep up payments when in arrears - so there may be no mass repossessions that were seen in the early 1990s.

Man Utd 8 - Arsenal 2

This is not a results service, but this was a bit of history - Arsenal's worst defeat since 1896. In all honesty you could have dug up the side of 1896, they would have still lost but not by as much.

Despite the midweek Champions League qualifying against Udinesse, Arsenal just could not keep pace with Man U. Very sad for Wenger, calls for him to go are premature but he needs to get some new players in, even if they are still future prospects because Arsenal (quite rightly) will not pay over inflated prices of the other top sides.

UK Computing Education

I can remember taking what used to be called "Computer Studies" at school. That was in 1989, and it was the last year my school was going to offer that GCSE. I remember saying to the teacher why was this course being withdrawn, after all even then there was a skills shortage.

I imagine it was never re-instated, we teach how to use software packages but not so much how does software work and get constructed. Even the ex Google chairman has spotted it:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14683133

Spreadsheet as a database

I am by no means a Microsoft dev expert, I think the last time I used Dev studio every day was back in the 1990s. But it always amuses me that the casual programmer is quite inadvertently catered for by Microsoft without them really realising.

If you think of the Excel VBA macro language, there are some people whose IDE is Excel. VBA is the integrated language and the spreadsheet, well that is the database.

So tightly integrated ecosystem that was completely unintended. I was thinking of this recently as I was updating one of my simple spreadsheets on Google docs.

Of course there is nothing wrong with this, but in my mind this "casual" programmer has no other tools to use - and has not really looked at escaping from Microsoft's ecosystem. Actually in their case I think their learning curve elsewhere would just be too high to be worthwhile, unless they were really motivated by something like ethics or anti vendor lock in - such things rarely trouble these people.

I wonder if Google docs is targeting such casual programmers who just want to get something productive done with minimum fuss.

Bandwidth

I was walking through my local shopping centre today and something struck me that I had not considered before. People were buying and consuming even though they were not in shops but just walking along. It felt like every other person was on their phone, talking over some vital detail with someone or just looking at their handset.

So all consuming bandwidth, I thought of this as I walked past one of the many mobile phone shops which had a back to basics advert with a blackboard listing their bandwidth capacity deal.

A commodity that is cheap at the moment, but bound to get more expensive as we all demand more of it? It has to be as surely there is a finite capacity we are talking about here, and as we find more ways to consume it. Those are fast growing, films on demand, ever more capable mobile phones that are always connected to the internet.

Maybe the telcos/ISPs will get the last laugh here, an industry that singularly failed to make money off the services running over their wires - maybe as the commodity becomes scarce they will be able to charge more money. We'll all be addicted to it by then, too much to change our habits?

Film: Raging Bull directed by Martin Scorsese

A great performance by Robert De Niro, playing Jake LaMotta and portraying his life as a boxer inside and outside the ring.

It is a mix of humour, corruption, tough living and a rags to riches to rags tale. Clearly not the first boxer to have to deal with this.

Imaginatively shot with black and white sequences, some very good music - worth watching 8/10.

RBS Shares

I've had a SIPP for a few years, at first I mopped up all my under performing old pension pots and put them into this investment.

Not that I can think I can do better, but more that if I am going to lose the money then I am more than capable of doing it myself - and I can have some investing fun in the process.

That was about 2 years ago, I've bought some shares and some funds recently. But for the most part it has been difficult to invest - I just can't understand what is keeping the stock market so high. Companies are generally doing well, but more making money out of saving money and being more efficient - and there is only so much of that you can do.

But there has now been some market "turmoil", so there was a buying opportunity. While investing in some sensible prospects I decided to throw a small amount of money at the ailing RBS. So a bank going through a hard time - the government announced recently that it could see the break even point at selling off it's stake. That was around 65p not the rather sad 20p of today's prices. I'm hoping they can ride the storm and not go the way of HBOS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBOS

A forced takeover target in the last credit crunch.

First Person Not to go to University

A few years ago it was quite common for people to say "I was the first to go to University from my family". This was before the days of mass higher education expansion, and could have been considered an achievement.

But now university places are much more available, the cost of the education is now much more on the shoulders of the poor student. So I am wondering if we may now see a generation, some of whom will be proud to say "I was the first not to go to university" meaning that they had found some other direction and avoidance of a ridiculous amount of tuition debt.

Betting profit and loss

For a few years now I've done some low stakes betting, I term it micro-betting to keep my enthusiasm for sport - especially football going.

But I've never really tracked profit and loss, just bet within my initial budget. I do have memories of building up one account from around £10 to nearly £50 but that was eeking things out over a couple of years.

So this year, with the start of the new season upon us, I've decided to use a spreadsheet to track things. Hardly revolutionary, but I used Google Docs - very impressed with it for a basic spreadsheet like this, and I can access it from whereever I am.

Lets hope there is no cloud outage.

KVM Virtualisation

Like most people I've been using virtualisation for a few years, through VMWare and VirtualBox. VirtualBox was the simplest solution for quick VM setup.

I'd never looked at any of the options like Xen as it always looked too complex.

But now RedHat 6 seems to be shipping with KVM, and so far quite impressed with it. A kernel module option and some client tools to make VM machine creation easy.

Setting up bridged networking did need a little setup - the link below gives the details:

http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Networking#Bridged_networking_.28aka_.22shared_physical_device.22.29