Brown "unfit" for office

Alistair Darling has written his memoir of his time as chancellor, and it does not apparently paint a good picture of Brown. As one journalist put it today, he was unfit for office if you piece together all the evidence and accounts of his behaviour.

So why was someone not braver in the Labour party in ousting him while he was in government? There were just a couple of attempts and no heavyweights broke ranks to help see it through.

The memoir is probably also quite damaging for current Labour shadow ministers, some of whom were around and closely associated with the flawed and out of depth Brown.

ITV

I watched ITV yesterday for the first time in a long time. The channel proudly presents itself as "Terrestrial channel of the year", which is slightly strange proud claim. I was also exposed to TV advertising, Jenson Button trying to sell me head and shoulders.

So not a bad experience but not one I will repeat for a while, they just do not have enough content worth watching. A possible concern for them is that TV manufacturers realising the world is changing are trying to muscle in on advertising revenue by providing their own advertising spots on over the top content (after all why should the broadcast stream be the only insertion point of adverts).

Raspberry Pi

This is a very interesting project to provide a basic computer at a target price to encourage people to hack with technology and become interested in what's behind the everyday gadgets they use.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/
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Driven by the assertion that modern PCs are just too difficult to play around with or generate the fascination to insprire people to do things (especially people just starting out).

The price point is very interesting $25-$35 dollars seems incredible. If you think that nettop/books cost around $200.

Tax refund

In a rather futile move the Tax Office wrote to me (twice), to provide me a refund for over paid tax.

The amount?

£12.43! The bureaucracy involved in getting it to me must have cost at least that. I would have been prepared to say "tell you what, use it to pay off the national debt that nanosecond more quickly".

Still the fact they know so accurately is impressive, maybe that computer system is working in the worlds most complex tax system.

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