Review of the Cheap ZT1 ePad I Bought off eBay

Ecert omcre n a hile I bui a pircw of techjokogy...

Let's start that again. Reviewing this device with itself clearly won't work.

Every once in a while I buy a piece of technology which will, my friends warn me, be awful. Because I am an idiot I disregard this and base my decision solely upon the pretty eBay pictures and cheerful engrish item description. I wouldn't buy a car and a house like this but what the hey, it's £152 and I was drunk and curious.

I spend half my life reading other people's diligently composed reviews of random electronic tat and figured it was time to give something back to the world...

The ePad arrived this morning, about ten days after I ordered it. While good this was something of a surprise - when I checked the parcel tracking website ("International Mail Tracking System") linked from the supplier's email it claimed to still be in Shenzhen. Actually it still claims to be in Shenzhen! Maybe I am in Shenzhen too and never realised.




The tablet comes with:

1. Nice packaging. Very Apple-ish. Probably this is intentional.
2. No CD's or manuals, even though the auction promised one. Hm. Never mind, real men don't need instructions.
   
3. A dinky little telescopic stylus, possibly useful for selecting fine items on screen if you have fat fingers.
4. Cheap earphones which I immediately threw away.
5. (possibly) micro-usb - ethernet adapter. Given the device has wifi I don't know why. Perhaps I'll find a use for it someday.
6. A USB - MicroSD adapter. This is a bit weird since the device already has a MicroSD socket. Attempts to use it on the ePad (yes, with a MicroSD inside) result in a "Preparing Udisk" alert that never goes away and no apparent disk. Plugged into my Mac it works well enough.
7. Four square inches of cloth.
   

Physical Hardware

In the eBay auction it looks awesome. Shiny black fascia, metallic case, great screen full of icons. Friends have asked for pictures but there are plenty around already - check this article for a good idea.

In the flesh it is serviceable but less awesome. The fascia is made of thin, flexible plastic rather than glass and sits unevenly in the frame. You notice this most when it catches the light - reflections go wibbly-wobbly like a disturbed water surface. While the screen fits acceptably in the plastic body you can slip your nail between them. If you're like me you'll eventually ruin your tablet by levering off the screen off to investigate what's inside. But I won't, not yet. Not for at least another half hour.

What's inside is supposed to be a "ZT1" 1.2Ghz ARM chip, 256Mb of RAM and 2Gb of NAND flash storage. Very little of the NAND is taken up by Android but there doesn't seem any way to use it for your own stuff since all apps insist on loading their data from a "SD card". Really they mean MicroSD card. Maybe once I've rooted the device I'll fill it with a 1.7Gb file made up of the text "I am a fool who buys cheap plastic tat" repeated over and over again.

There's no 3G. You're on wifi or (wtf?) ethernet baby. Allegedly more modern firmwares may let you taste the 3G goodness if you plug an approved USB 3G dongle in but I haven't tested this.

And talking of that, whoever designed this thing really loves ports...

1. Power. That's right, it charges off a proprietary 9V adapter rather than USB like every other device in the galaxy. The adapter fits American two pin sockets and needs an adapter-adapter (supplied) for use in the UK.
2. Earphones. Probably this works but for reasons discussed later I haven't tried it.
   
3. USB. You can plug a whole bunch of things into this including a keyboard. In fact if you want to use the included development terminal application you'll need to since there's no way to coax the on-screen keyboard out of hiding.
4. Mini-USB (labeled "OTG"). Like the one which charges most phones. I'd like to say this is for charging or mounting the tablet as a drive on your computer but when connected up nothing happens. I don't know what it's for.
5. Micro-USB (I think; labeled with an ethernet icon). Presumably this is for the included ethernet adapter. I haven't tried this because the twentieth century ended some time ago.
6. MicroSD (labeled "TF"). Ought to take a MicroSD card. Recognizes mine but won't read it.
   

Also around the edge we have:

1. Nowhere for the stylus to go. You'll lose it in minutes.
   
2. A tiny hole labeled with a microphone icon. A microphone might live in there.
   
3. A hole labeled 'reset' which is too small for the stylus to fit. Unfortunate, since this hole's going to see more action than yo momma.
   
4. A rocker-button which looks like it ought to be a volume control. In most situations it isn't; instead "up" means menu and "down" brings up the standard Android task switcher.
5. A power button. We might hope this would put the device into some low-power standby mode like the power button on my HTC Hero but instead it raises a power off dialog that says in the finest engrish "Are you sure shut down?". And then it does. And takes about 15 seconds to start up again. Instant on this ain't.
   

On the front by the screen there is a single iPad-esque button which in most places seems to mean "back" and an LED (red for charging, blue for running). I don't know why we need a blue light to say it's turned on: the presence of icons, programs and well, y'know, stuff on the screen already tells the user this. In fact the constant bright LED is a bit distracting. I might stick some tape over it.

The whole device feels a bit cheaply made and it creaks when flexed.

Nerds! Here's the processor it admits to running:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 5 (v6l)
BogoMIPS : 1005.97
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture : 6TEJ
CPU variant : 0x1
CPU part : 0xb36
CPU revision : 5

Hardware : IMAPX200
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000

A quick peek at /proc/meminfo suggests only 192Mb of ram exists. I don't know where the other 64Mb went - perhaps it's used as screen buffer. Perhaps someone in China got hungry and ate it.

Perhaps the biggest weirdness about the device is that it's damn hard to figure out who made it. It might be made by a company called ZeniThink. "WE ARE MANUFACTORY DIRECT OF Tablet PC!!!" claims the eBay auction Apparently in China companies copy other companies copies of Apple products. Maybe this is a bonafide ePad, maybe it's an ePad rip-off. Hell, can the real ePad stand up? No?

Those kooky communists sure have a weird attitude to intellectual property.




OS and User Interface

The first thing you'll want to do with this baby is charge it. The eBay auction suggests a full 8 hours. It looks like you can still use the device while charging so here we go...

Switch it on for a warm-boot (power button on the side) and you're presented with an "ePad" logo. They've pinched the "e" straight out of the Internet Explorer icon. After a few seconds the home screen pops up - as promised in the description it really is running Android 2.1. It's standard Android fare: taskbar-type-thing at the top and a slider at the bottom to bring out the programs menu, the browser or a file manager.

The next thing that jumps out is how sparsely populated with icons the home screen is. There's a reason for this - even though it's a 1024x600 TFT and the icons are only about 50px tall everything is arranged on a 4x4 grid pattern. It looks downright weird - icons & widgets appear at their usual Android resolution but there's so much space left between you could drive an SUV between them. A 5x10 grid would suit it better.

Another oddity is the android top-bar (someone tell me the correct name for this?). It's grown to about 40px tall to suit the larger screen and has a collection of stuff: time, home button, back button, battery, wifi strength and the volume up/down looking confused after its surprise eviction from the rocker on the side. Icons added by the manufacturer are colourful and fit it well but the standard Android ones (wifi power and, bafflingly, phone signal strength) have been poorly enlarged - they look dithered and bitty.

I start by setting up access to my home wifi. It works well enough for the first half-hour (I browse a few websites) but after turning the device off and on again the tablet loses the ability to see any wireless networks - either my own or the my neighbours. It takes a hard-reset to clear this (hello mr paper clip). A booting screen pops up with a picture of an ashamed-looking Tux and in 30 seconds or so it's up and running again.

The screen is acceptable. It's a 10.2" 1024x600 TFT and the viewing angle's not great but is glossy, colourful & has no dead pixels. Contrast is acceptable but it's far from Apple's high standards. No multitouch (so no pinch-to-zoom) but you can live without it. Applications are fairly responsive - the tablet is packing a 1.2Ghz ARM and it makes all the difference.

Like most Android devices it contains a tilt sensor so the screen automatically rotates to show things the right way up. It's a smart idea; books are best read in portrait format but movies are landscape-shaped. Unfortunately the ePad's tilt sensor doesn't work very well. Sometimes it'll flip the screen around at the slightest provocation, at others it'll stubbornly refuse to and leave you to shake the living daylights out of your tablet until things until "up" becomes up again. I bet they get a lot of returns due to shaken tablet syndrome.

The on-screen keyboard - there's often between a half and one second delay between pressing a "key" and something happening. This might not sound too bad but believe me, if you're used to typing at anything more than five words per minute it's gonna hurt. If you're writing your opus on this you'll want to plug in a USB keyboard.

Next I try to install a MicroSD card (known-working, tested a moment earlier in my Mac). A notification pops up saying "preparing". Sadly it never goes away and the card never becomes usable.

There's no Android Market app - instead it comes with some weird third-party installer. Click on an application to install and nothing happens. Using the browser I visit the websites for a couple of Android app projects and try to download .apk files to install directly. A dialog helpfully tells me that since there's no SD card I can't download anything.

Now I come to test the music & library applications. It ought to make a good media player and ebook application, right?

Wrong. Both tell me "Cannot read SD card". Bummer. Shame, given the whole reason I bought the damn thing was to read documents on.

The browser (standard Android 2.1 fare) works pretty well. Despite this device having twice the CPU grunt of my HTC Hero and hanging off a 10Mbit broadband connection it's still very slow to load pages but once rendered they're pretty and very easy to read. Bookmarks & zooming work in the usual way.

Some of the built-in apps are so bad they're funny. There's a diagnostics app (left in by the developers to help you finish their OS?) which claims a temperature of five degrees celsius (wrong, even my flat is warmer than that) and a battery voltage of zero. Uh, no. There are settings options for "show compass in maps" (uh no, there's no compass built in) and "haptic feedback" - again no, there's no motor built in to make it buzz.

Here I'm starting to touch the root cause of why the ePad is not-great. Android may or may not be ready for use on tablets but the guys who adapted it for this device did a totally half-assed job. There are lots of places (showing more icons on home screen, removing menu options for missing hardware) this shows and the whole interface has an unfinished feel to it.




Conclusions

The ePad is cheap, shonky and plasticy but hey, it costs a third as much as an iPad so I'll forgive it that. The build quality was never going to be great and it has a generous number of ports. Hardware-wise it's good enough.

What really lets the device down is the build of Android. I won't whine about the engrish dialog boxes (they're cute!) but aligning apps & widgets in a 4x4 grid on the home screen is downright strange. Absent hardware is still listed in menu options and the absence of Android Market is absolutely painful. The whole power of IOS & Android is the ease with which you can customize your device with third party apps and without that power you might as well have bought a typewriter. One without any physical keys.

This could be a neat little device. It's light, thin and has a reasonably good screen. I won't be chucking out my Macbook anytime soon but for browsing websites, reading PDF's and watching the odd show on iPlayer it would be perfect. But right now the software totally lets it down.

Tomorrow I'm going to snag myself another MicroSD card then try installing an alternative firmware and try turning it into a useful reading device. But it feels like by the time I've turned an ePad into a useful tablet I might as well have given in and got an iPad.

Buy this if you are poor or a masochist.

Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition - Part 3. DAY 3

The final part of our mock challenge-documentary, where our eyeoreish self-absorbed hero finally makes it home. Or tries to. It's a bit like Ulysses 31 but with public transport instead of spaceships.

If you haven't already seen them read the rest of the series (one, two, three, four) first.


08:25: Awaken from a night of blissful sleep five minutes before the alarm goes off and launch straight into the shower. Launch straight back out of the shower five minutes later to switch it off. Today's improvised shaving substance is "Radox Shower Gel". It also helps remove yesterday's coal from my hair.

09:00: Arrive at station well in time for the 09:47 train to London my notes say I'll be taking home. It doesn't exist. A quick assessment of the timetables reveals the only East Coast train from Inverness to London left two hours ago. Why did the timetable I scribbled down a fortnight ago say otherwise? Damn my handwriting. Am reamed to the tune of £40 for a single ticket to Edinburgh and hop on a local train (full of bloody tourists, not local people) just before it leaves. From there my magic Willy Wonka ticket will start to work again.

09:18: Realise I've left a pair of miniature thumb-cuffs on the window sill at Mrs Thrills' boarding house. I wonder what she'll make of them.

10:59: At Perth I have an idea. When life gives you lemons you should make... a cocktail! I text an old friend in Edinburgh and we arrange to go for Mojitos at Harvey Nichols.

10:50: Hurrah, Forth Bridge after all. It's ancient and rust-coloured, built in a bygone era when everything was constructed for giants by giants. In the space of three days I've seen everything good in Scotland.

13:19: Edinburgh is sweet. So is the friend. Suddenly I'm pleased my notes were wrong.

17:00: After cocktails at Harvey Nicks I board a southbound train. It's packed with millions of uncontrolled kids. I find a seat but meh, no power and the free wifi's dropped from its usual, awful standard to just plain broken. I scrunch up into a very tiny ball and, 8 hours after leaving the Highlands, start to read my tattered copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps. No view but that's okay; after the last two days I'm all landscaped out.

19:47: Leave York late. It's still packed with rowdy children. On closer inspection there are only two children but they are rowdy enough to seem like thousands. Immerse self in Underworld and deliberately fixate upon a combine harvester at work in the evening sunlight. It couldn't symbolize the end of summer harder if it tried.

20:00: The horrid children persevere in their mission to drive everyone mad. Worse still there are two posh, loud, obviously spoiled and very annoying girls sat opposite and I can't decide whether to fancy or loathe them. I settle for both.

20:15: Depart Doncaster 15 minutes late due to "a rowdy passenger on the train which required attention from the police". By now the bog is starting to resemble something from a nightclub. The tannoy keeps going "bong! bong! bong! Attention train guard, please contact the driver". Maybe he can't get the wifi[1] to work either.

20:48: It's getting dark outside. And colder. No matter what direction I travel in it's always getting colder. Heat death of the universe taking effect? Whiny posh tarts are getting restless; without power for their laptops they're having to resort to the lost art of conversation. Despite working in media they aren't good at it.

21:40: Arrive London KX on time. Only kidding.

21:59: Arrive London KX for real.

22:43: HOME


---


Day 3 statistics: Mojitos: 1. Forth Bridges: 1. Apparent rowdy children: 2.96*10^15


So. Like a good arbitrary challenge documentary, what have we learned by the end?

• Complaining works. If they ignore you just complain harder. I've traveled about 1,400 miles this weekend and paid for hardly of them.
• Nothing will make you loathe humanity more than 22 hours spent on public transport.
• Neither of the East Coast trains I used this weekend ran to time. Maybe I'm due a refund on my magic Willy Wonka ticket - compensation on the compensatory offer so I can do the whole thing again? The Highlands must be gorgeous in winter.
• The Scottish Highlands are beautiful. Just don't stay at Mrs Thrills' boarding house.
• A friend says I'm an emotional masochist for doing this. She's probably right.
• Harvey Nicks do great cocktails.

THE END
?




[1] Truth in advertising: all over their literature and trains East Coast trumpet their free wifi. And indeed there is free wifi - you may associate a laptop with the "eastcoast-wifi" network to your heart's content. They do not, however, make any promises that eastcoast-wifi be connected to the Internet.


---


Edit: photos of the expedition here.

Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition - Part 3. DAY 2

It's day 2 of my expedition to the North. Yesterday - battling terrific odds - your hero made it as far north as Inverness. Will his luck hold out or will he suffer a fatal beating with Irn Bru bottles? Read on...


05:00: Can't sleep in this bunker anymore. I get up, shower and read a book.

06:30: After five hours sleep ever I limp out of Mrs Thrills' boarding house. My night has not been eased by the automatic "Freshmatic 3000" air freshener in the bathroom (it precisely simulates the experience of sharing a room with an influenza patient by going "a-shoo!" every five minutes) but at least I slept. I shave with squeezy soap and resign myself to a serrated face for the rest of the day.

07:00: Since breakfast at Mrs Thrills' [1] boarding house is served between 07:30 and 07:31 my bed and breakfast was just "bed". I'm starving. Limp around Inverness to find nothing but tramps and detritus from the night before. It's reassuring to find that even the most picturesque of towns look awful in the morning. A German on a bicycle directs me to the bus station; like bus stations the world over it's fucking grim. Even the obligatory bus-station-man-drinking-Diamond-White agrees.

07:40: Bus arrives. It smells just the way you'd expect the 7:45am Sunday bus in an overcast Scottish town to smell. The clock inside - as it is on all buses throughout the world - reads "22:35". Return ticket to the other side of Scotland costs a bargain £11. My fellow passengers clearly came to Inverness for a night out and haven't yet been to bed; they immediately take their seats, burp and fall asleep. But the driver is... Scottish! I have met my first Scotsman of the trip. Better still he appears to be some kind of bus racing driver.

08:25: The bus climbs out of Inverness. The scenery out here is wild: sheer precipices, mountains on all sides, waterfalls, you name it. The mountaintops are shrouded with mist and soon we are too. It's idyllic, just the way the Highlands are supposed to look.

08:30: St Columba's Well is a real place! Since the rocket-bus is running early I disembark to forage for supplies. St Columba sells me a snickers and a bottle of orange juice for breakfast but he has a suspiciously Midlands accent.

08:50: As we round Loch Ness the sun emerges. Plastic roadside Nessies give way to plastic roadside stags. A succession of even more weirdly named Lochs follow: "Oich", "Lochy", "Eil". No wonder the Romans were too freaked out to conquer Scotland.

09:40: (or "00:30" if you ask the bus) Arrive Fort William five minutes early. All my worrying about late buses was for naught. The Hogwarts Express waits in the station looking like a beautiful thing overrun with tourists. In Harry Potter nobody needed to spend a night in Mrs Thrills' basement or go on a bus smelling of stale highlanders to get to Hogwarts and I rather envy this.

09:55: Board the Hogwarts Express and have a fascinating chat with the driver. Sadly he says I can't have a go. Spoilsport. Get coal all over my jacket anyway.

10:18: Board the boring part of the Hogwarts Express and find my table occupied by a family of frogs with three hyperactive tadpoles. They elect to ruin the next two hours of my life. by squarking constantly (did you know tadpoles can do that?) and playing with bleepy electronic crap. The parental amphibians reinforce this behaviour by giving their little bastards affection whenever they get very rowdy out of the misplaced belief that it'll calm them down. If those kids were mine I'd sell them for glue.

10:31: As the brochures say, this is stunning. Great scenery, remarkable engineering (they literally hacked half the route out of solid granite) and lots of fresh mountain air. I lack the flowery vocabulary to describe how beautiful the journey is but trust me it's worth every penny. The only detraction from this is that many others think so too - the train is packed with noisy tourists. The Hogwarts Express people have a more relaxed attitude to those passengers who elect to ride outside the train, merely remarking "Please take care to avoid hitting trees as they may injure you". Sage advice indeed.

12:25: The steam train arrives at Mallaig perfectly on time. Are you spotting a pattern here? Modes of transport not operated by East Coast tend to be on time, even those run in some of the world's most difficult terrain using antique machinery maintained by hobbyists. I spend the next two hours exploring the harbour and eating lunch.

13:50: Before leaving Mallaig I have decided I must dip my toe in the water. The 20 feet of rocks to clamber down and a fractured ankle are no impediment; I dip the injured appendage into the healing waters of the North Atlantic and in my imagination it heals. [2]

16:30: I find a small park to laze in until the bus arrives. Since Fort William is at the foot of Ben Nevis I call a couple of friends who rented a log cabin here one Christmas and laugh at them for coming out of season. In summer it's great. If the bus wasn't due in 90 minutes I'd climb Ben Nevis, take a photo of myself at the top, name it "You_are_all_pussies.jpg" and mail it to them.

18:10: Bus appears. This one's clock shows no time but at least it smells of perfume instead of Sunday morning. Just as we depart the Caledonian Sleeper pulls into the station; I sigh at it with nerdy glee. The return journey is civilized and uneventful but even prettier than the way out - evening sunlight filters through the trees as it winds around mountain passes and I keep my eyes peeled for fairytale castles, of which there are many. The pubs are still open in Inverness and a pint of Belhaven Best is just what the doctor ordered.

21:30: Back at Mrs Thrills' boarding house. Tonight's room is above the ground, has a comfy double bed and comes with bourbon creams, curtains and a view of Poundland. Truth be told it's pretty habitable and not at all like last night's which was suitable only for masochistic vault-dwellers.


PROPER SLEEP NOW


---


Day 2 conclusions: AWESOME. The Highlands are stunningly beautiful. Steam trains plus Highlands = something even more than stunningly beautiful.



[1] This is a very obscure Spike Milligan reference

[2] I broke my toe a couple of weeks back after betting my father he couldn't cycle across a thousand year old causeway and needing to prove it possible myself. In reality it doesn't heal and Mallaig seawater is no substitute for a knowledgeable podiatrist.

Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition - Part 3. DAY 1

The fated day has arrived! It's time for my Bloody Minded Rush to the North. Armed with only a laptop, a change of clothes and a fractured ankle I'll head for "Mallaig" - a small fishing port on the northern coast of Scotland. An overnight stay in Inverness, 6am start the next day, a two hour coach ride then a further two hours on the Hogwarts Express to dip my toes in the freezing northern sea.

On the spur of the moment I opt to plagiarize the format of the Guardian's blow-by-blow cricket coverage. Ten hours later I will be glad of this.




11:30: Arrive at King's Cross after a sleepless night to discover serious delays; track pizza at Knebworth. Ask the East Coast desk "Can I upgrade to first with this ticket?" - they reply "Yes".

11:40: Train is announced. Platform six. I'd secretly hoped for the newly invented Platform Zero for its weirdness and sentimental value[1]. I find an unreserved seat in first class. It'll cost £25 but hey, given free tea & coffee for eight hours, tons of space and a big window it's worth the expense. A wee Scots girl who can only be described as a young Amy Pond is deposited in the seat opposite by her grandfather. I keep my eyes peeled for Daleks, cracks in time and dizzy Shoreditch timelords.

12:00: Screw the delays, we leave on time. I call the B&B to make sure everything's in order. The well-spoken Scottish gentleman tells me it is.

12:06: Diversion en-route to Peterborough announced due to Knebworthian under a train. They say it'll add a 15 minute delay. It sounds too good to be true. Fortunately the 12:00 to Inverness is too venerable a train to require electricity and so a 20mph trundle around Hertfordshire will circumnavigate the mess. I pity the poor souls who attempted to visit the Edinburgh Festival via more modern transport.

12:40: It's sunny outside and the train is still moving. That's the best I can say about it. Young Amy Pond seems engrossed with her walk-in laptop (it's bigger than she is) - I hope she's writing an East Coast travelogue all of her own.

12:50: We regain the main line. Full steam ahead! A pleasant guard finally appears and boots out all the freeloaders sitting in first class with standard class tickets. I pay my £25.

13:55: The wifi is, as usual, shit. It's been shit ever since East Coast's predecessor made it free - a limited amount of connectivity with several hundred twits all trying to watch iPlayer was never going to work. Scarce resources only work with a nominal free imposed - charging £1 for a password would instantly solve the problem. But I didn't come here to dick around with the Internet, did I. DID I.

14:00: Lincolnshire passes uneventfully, much as it did for the first 18 years of my life. The sun is out. Few things in life are better than racing across the English Landscape on a summer afternoon.

14:40: York. 40 minutes late. If we arrive at Inverness an hour late can I have a refund on my refund? No food remains in the buffet car and passengers are showing early signs of cannibalistic rage. I hide my emergency mars bar.

14:41: I Spy Tornado! [2] She's parked outside York railway station having a drink. Being similarly unencumbered by the requirement for electricity a steam engine is pretty much the only thing to arrive on time today.

15:09: We shudder to a halt somewhere south of Darlington. A shaky-sounding guard squarks "This is a safety announcement: please *do not* stick your heads out of the windows, especially on the right-hand side because this is where the signals are". Oops. Did somebody leave their head behind? Wasn't me.

15:15: We're on the move again so the errant head must have been located. But "problems with the lineside signalling" mean the driver must stop at signals, get out and telephone control for permission to proceed. Somewhere back in York a steam engine is laughing at us.

15:38: The train roars over Durham. In a past life I dated a girl from here. She was horrible. Probably I was horrible too. I eat my Emergency Mars Bar and snarl at the one twunt in this carriage shameless enough to be using an iPad.

15:54: Newcastle. At this point I have to stop imagining I'm Michael Caine in the opening credits to "Get Carter". We're 55 minutes late. Our guard hazards a guess we'll arrive in Inverness at 21:10. Our "person under a train" at Knebworth is now officially a fatality. That's one less fish in the gene pool.

16:45: I can see the sea! The tide's in and Berwick upon Tweed is pretty as a postcard. I want to visit it someday. Judging by how transfixed she is with the view young Amy Pond seems to agree. A poster at the station proclaims "The best of colliery bands - out now!" and if the wifi wasn't so broken I'd buy it to listen to right now. From here the train skirts the clifftops for some miles and the views are stunning.

16:50: Scotland! I hide my Pret a Manger Pomegranate water for fear of a kicking. Everything here is gorgeous, even the nuclear power station. I always listen to All About Eve's "best of" album on this part of the journey; as a result I'll always connect the goth-hippy song "What kind of fool?" with the power of the mighty atom.

17:30: Edinburgh; 1 hour late. Amy Pond disembarks with her own bodyweight in luggage and an angry parent on the phone. Kids, don't carry mobiles - your parents will only use them to tell you off.

17:40: Still Edinburgh. "We are sorry for the further delay; this is due to a defective door on the driver's power car". I put on the Cocteau Twins' calming "Heaven or Las Vegas".

17:45: Depart Edinburgh 72 minutes late. Seriously, can I get a refund on a refund ticket? And hmph, I thought we were going to cross for Forth Bridge. It emerges that the "problem with the power car door" was that at a previous stop someone had put luggage in there, the staff locked it and then lost the key. They had to crowbar it open.

18:10: Pottering around Scotland at 20mph - apparently we are stuck behind a local train since nobody expected the express to turn up an hour and a quarter late. I'm strangely not furious - at least it's a sunny evening and everybody's being pleasant about it.

18:30: Stirling - 1h15 late. As we leave I notice something adorable: even in the year 2010 civilized people still teach their children to wave at trains. The landscape grows increasingly hilly; it's still sunny out there with the occasional low-lying cloud. What a beautiful evening. I hope I there's a pub near the B&B.

19:07: Perth. 1h09 late. At least the staff have found some more food and are keeping us well fed. Cannibalism outbreak aboard the 12:00 has been averted. At least one passenger is started massaging her legs for fear of deep-vein thrombosis. Staff are handing out refund forms, which is nice of them.

19:51: I finish catching up on a fortnight's worth of New Scientist. Glance out of the window and spy... geese! Weather is getting cold and ominous-looking. Perhaps I should have brought more than a thin jacket. Perhaps I'll die up here.

20:04: Mountains. Loads of the buggers. And dark, brooding clouds. Scotland is so dramatic.

20:19: The guard (did I mention he's lovely?) turns up, stamps my free compensatory return ticket and opines that I'm probably due a free compensatory compensatory return. I joke "see you again next month then". If it really happens I'll eat my hat.

20:36: The train continues to trundle around little Highland branch lines. Think single-track, clinging to mountainsides, that sort of thing. A team of mountain ponies would find this hard going. Why did we bring an Intercity 125? Only a handful of passengers remain, mostly looking scared and confused. It's getting cold and dark. I thought at these latitudes it was supposed to stay light all night?

21:11: Arrive at Inverness. Hobble to taxi rank. Cab to B&B.

21:30: ...who've never heard of me! In fact the well-spoken Scotsman who took my booking has been replaced by a brusque Eastern European lady with poor English. I press them and point out, repeatedly, that I've had the room booked for a month and even telephoned nine hours ago to check. The cross Eastern European is forced to sort it out. Emerges that the well-spoken Scotsman is Somewhere Else and merely handles the bookings, texting them (along with credit card details!?) to her to action. And the first day of my booking was lost. Nice. I make them give me the one remaining room for the price of a single and am tempted to report them to VISA.

21:45: Basement room is, uh... well it has a bed in it and cost £35. It'll have to do. It lacks phone coverage, daylight or a working TV and would suit even the most demanding of masochists. At least the place has wifi.

SLEEP NOW.



---


Day 1 conclusions: it is quicker to fly to New York from my house than it is to get the train to Inverness. East Coast trains seem very accident prone but at least the staff were nice. B&B's are atrocious. Always travel with an Emergency Mars Bar.

Day 1 statistics: Suicides: 1, Signal failures: 1, Keys to the engine lost: 1, Atrocious B&B's: 1.





[1] I once spent six months on a project to build a high-performance web architecture known as "Platform Zero". It was not a success.

[2] For the uninitiated: Tornado is a steam engine constructed by epic nerds in their shed. My dad built one of the lamp brackets. Having made their own locomotive from scratch they now drive it around Britain's railways for shits 'n giggles. No train journey is complete without a game of "I Spy Tornado" - it's a bit like "Where's Wally" only the protagonist eats coal and needs a 5,000 gallon drink from the Fire Brigade every couple of hours.

Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition - Part 2

Apropos of the original post...

Arrived home in London last week to discover... one free Anytime Return to Inverness valid from August 14th. They even booked me a seat.

Have arranged B&B and a copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps to read on the way.

Will I stay for one night or spend a few days exploring Scotland? Place bets now!

Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition

Let's start with the backstory.

Two months ago I had a crappy experience with East Coast. Terribly late, poor information about the problem, bad organization[*], rude staff, the works. Ticked every box on the "crap railway journey" checklist. Arrived back in London too late to get home and had to harangue the few remaining staff at King's Cross into paying for a cab (initially they insisted I take the night bus back to SE4 - two hours of pot smoke and ringtones with a high chance of stabbing. Thanks guys, that's real courtesy.). Others came off even worse - one poor girl needed a taxi all the way to Aldershot.

Never one to miss a bit of righteous indignation I wrote them a letter.

A bit self-important but hey, if you treat your customers like crap it shouldn't go unremarked. If the British weren't such masochists they'd get a lot more respect from business. I mailed it off with proof of purchase like their website asks and because I'm an untrusting sod took a copy of the tickets first.

Lucky I did. Six weeks later, nothing. Rather than letting it drop I get really mad. Phone calls never work - nothing said on the phone is provable (except if you're the one who recorded it for "fact verification purposes") so I write another letter. This time it's sent recorded delivery and by now I'm really, really pissed off.

Four days later, something. Three pages of it. "I have checked our records and your original letter never arrived" [paraphrased]... "we aim to answer all queries within 10 working days" ['aim', not guarantee - I might similarly express an aim to swim to the moon]... "I am concerned that you are unhappy"... "offer you a standard class complementary return journey for one person on any of our services...".

Probably the best I'm going to get. It's reasonable to protect their employees privacy by not cc'ing an irate passenger customer[*] into the disciplinary process but asserting that the complaint never arrived? Hm. My cynical side wonders if it's just an foolproof way to deter the laziest 80% of complainants.

Something in their response catches my eye.

You say any of your services...

Most people (well, the tiny subset of most people who care at all) think East Coast run their trains from London to Edinburgh. A handful continue to Aberdeen. Time for a chat with my train buff father...

It turns out they don't. Heaven knows why but East Coast run one train a day to Inverness. Departs London at midday and arrives on the icy northern tundra, 568 miles away, precisely eight hours and eight minutes later. About the same time it takes to fly to New York but with fewer skyscrapers. (I don't actually know what goes on in Inverness, I've never been there before). Do it at the weekend and for £25 each way you can upgrade to first. North of Newcastle it's one of the most picturesque rail journeys in the world and there's free wifi all the way. Two days programming time with excellent views, free at-seat refreshments and hell, I needn't even log off Facebook.

So I do what any footloose and fancy free IT consultant would. I'm off to the Scottish Highlands in a 125mph air-conditioned office powered entirely by righteous anger in...



"Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition"


Watch this space.





[1] When a train's already so late the passengers are due refunds why delay it even more to catch a fare dodger? What revenue have you lost? Muppets.
[2] At what point did passengers become customers? What's the difference? Semantic juggling at some mid-privatisation 90's head office for shits 'n giggles or do "customers" have fewer rights?

Privacy, you and the 2010 Election

I've been in two minds about posting this. It's preachy and inflammatory (woohoo, Internet!) and an illiterate squeal. Others discuss these issues more lucidly. Besides, there's nothing so unsexy as talking politics.

Really I feel like I have to. Sticking one's head in the sand and going "lalala" instead of criticising actions you think are really, genuinely bad would be the lamest thing of all.

Before starting let's make something clear: if at any point while reading this the phrase "but I have nothing to hide" crosses your mind, read this then drown yourself. You either don't have much imagination or go to bed every night cuddling a well-thumbed copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four.





If you support Labour in the coming election you're supporting:

• State powers to snoop on your email, facebook, location, web, SMS and call history and preserve them for months via the Intercept Modernisation Programme. Ask your Labour MP (I did) and they'll spin a yarn about only reading the headers / it being vital to stop evil in the world / we promise only to use it for serious crimes. Google some phrases from their response and you'll most likely find they parroted it from the officially supplied literature. Press them (again, I did) and they'll waffle tabloid-friendly claims about how much safer we'll all be when the police know our every movement. Get that? They want to record your email traffic, web usage and physical location at all times.
• HMRC powers to open your letters (!) - ostensibly "to combat tobacco smuggling" but really usable whenever a tax inspector deems it necessary.
• Policy-based evidence making. This isn't just a funny term - it describes how those in power choose a policy to follow then invent evidence to justify it, usually supported by a lazy media. Cf. war in Iraq, banning of ill-defined "violent porn".
• ID cards. They'll keep on trying.
• Mandatory CRB checks for anyone who works with children to combat the utterly overblown paedophile threat. This means you need, effectively, to seek the state's permission before going near anyone else's children. This is moronic; apart from the insult implied by deeming everyone a potential nonce the chilling effect it has on voluntary work with kids (Scouts? Football practice?) will be greatly to their detriment.
• Unmanned spy balloons operated 24x7 by police to watch people from many miles away to "greatly extend" the government's surveillance capacity and "revolutionise policing". Don't you love the phrase "revolutionize policing"? Just think of the possibilities...

Policymakers in the current government have a heartfelt belief in the ability of a controlling state to cure all ills and bring about their version of utopia. "We watch you", they think, "to save you from yourselves". The slew of laws they've introduced prescribing widespread state monitoring of the populace demonstrate an utter disregard for the privacy & liberty of individuals. Which means us. And if they win the next election it's going to get a whole lot worse.

Please, don't vote for these thugs.

The Erosion of Risk

Unless you've been under a rock for the last week you'll have heard the story. "Fundamentalist tries to blow up jet". As one journalist puts it the story practically writes itself: suicidal fundamentalist sneaks explosives aboard plane, attempts to collect his 72 virgins[1] as the plane lands in the US. The bomb fizzles, the nuttter's trousers catch fire and he's dealt with robustly by the other passengers. Authorities rush out a new, draconian set of rules making air travel more uncomfortable for everybody, even the silent majority who prefer travelling without explosives up their bums. Full body searches, stuck in your seat for the last hour of the flight, hands where attendants can see them, all electronics banned. Air travel goes from being merely unpleasant to actually excruciating.

Do the rules really enhance security? Much has been written about this; the general concensus is "no". Moreover the speed at which they were implemented is suspicious. Almost as if some agency had a new, guaranteeed-unpopular set of rules out back and was waiting for the latest atrocity to make their implementation seem more necessary.

I won't write about how easy to evade the new rules are, or how specific rules can never combat non-specific threats from a resourceful adversary. Poisonous ideologies must be stopped at the source, not at the airline gate. I'll resist the temptation to discuss how the biggest single factor defeating would-be-suicide-bombers isn't airline security but common sense (in this case bollards in front of the airport terminal) and their own incompetence. Credulous, suicidal, and usually disturbed muppets tend to be those least successful at blowing something up.

Ahem.



What's wrong with this picture?

It's reasonable to make an effort to prevent others from harming us. Clearly the authorities would be in remiss not to apply at least a little common sense. Locks on the cockpit doors, an obvious win. Taking luggage off a plane if its owner doesn't come on board - again, perfectly sensible. One wonders why this ever didn't happen.

But we get to a point where security goes from being a set of obvious, common sense measures to something more intrusive. And this isn't just about travel. I'll give a few examples of invasive & disproportionate security measures:

• The UK government's Interception Modernization Programme
  
• Full-body searches before boarding an aircraft
  
• Background checks for the nine million people going anywhere near someone else's child
  

These measures are indicative of a new kind of thinking about security. In the last few years those in power have come to believe it's their role not just to take reasonable steps to protect their charges but to prevent bad things happening at all, regardless of the cost to individual liberty.

The thinking goes something like "...but the right to not live in fear trumps all personal liberties". And well it might, if we didn't cumulatively inflict upon ourselves an order of magnitude more discomfort and worry than we ever endured to start with.



Security at Any Cost

Once upon a time (I like to believe) we lived in a world where people took a pragmatic approach to risk. "We should attempt to stop bad things" one imagines they reasoned, "but we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater". Being alive is inherently risky - at any moment something might happen (ill-placed bus, falling satellite, wild animals, house fire - you get the idea) to change one's status from "alive" to "not alive".

So what happened?

I think the erosion of risk has come from two sides. Firstly an increasingly prevalent blame-centric worldview - the "no such thing as an accident" culture. This is an narcissistic & very popular way to view the world - to say that everything that happens does so as a result of our choices, either individually or collectively. Good examples are:

• Child abuse - modern practice is to blame this on the local authority
  
• Inclement weather a result of man-made global warming
• Recent lame plane attack a failure of security

Like all popular beliefs this is reinforced by repetition. Every "X is responsible for Y" story, every advert for personal injury lawyers ("Plebs, have you had an accident in the last twelve months? You might be entitled to comp-en-sation")

Secondly, we have the eagerness of public bodies to accept this blame whenever tragedy rears its head. It is unfashionable to say "out of X million flights per year we should not be surprised to see one attacked" or "a large proportion of child abuse is prevented by the intervention of local authorities". Apologies, hand wringing and self-flagellation are de-rigeur. The BBC have apologized for so many things this year they may be forced to replace BBC News 24 with a rolling, constantly feed of live apologies for absolutely everything they do. In the case of governments this is closely related to the desire for power[2] - it's easier to say "we need these invasive new laws" if you can justify them with a commonly perceived threat.

What all this leads to is an total intolerance of risk. If someone hellbent upon bringing down a passenger jet succeeds it's not considered "just one of those things" - and the blame is not laid upon them or those wicked enough to encourage the act. Instead the state throws up its hands and exclaims "Oh no, something bad happened! We must work harder to ensure bad things don't happen (but at the same time foster a culture of fear and suspicion) or nobody will vote for us!". Almost always the solution presented is "more rules" with a side-helping of paranoia and often these rules are out of all proportion with the original threat. Not to mention surrounded by secrecy and paranoia.



Conclusion: Broken Perception of Risk

The net result of all this - a media eager to aportion blame and authorities eager to accept it so they can claim further power[3] - is a disproportionate and press-driven obsession with a very narrow collection of the dangers facing modern man. More people are killed by insects than by terrorists but since wasps are less dramatic (and no-one can be blamed) we do not dedicate immense resources to their eradication.

We are alive at one of the safest points in human history. Medicine, agriculture, relatively effective policing, education, social security and a low incidence of war result in the highest life expectancy ever seen. But pressure from two sides - from the state and from constant media reinforcement - force us to live in more fear than any time in recent memory. We're refuting the idea that risk and uncertainty is a part of being alive and coming to demand that any potential threat to our wellbeing - no matter how remote - be neutralized.

Much is written about the inappropriateness of intrusive, threat-specific security in modern life but little thought has so far been given to the root cause. It isn't the TSA, it isn't New Labour and it isn't the Health and Safety Executive. It's a whole western society grown terrified of its own shadow and a system full of incentives for any organization that propagates fear.

Next time you get patted down at an airport or get ISA checked because you can't be trusted not to explode or molest children, see it for what it is. You're living in a milieu that demands constant fear.

It's sicker than anything your local fundamentalist could ever dream of.






[1] The origin of the "72 houris" concept is discussed in Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" - online copy here - but there is modern debate around the translation. Gibbon suggests it was introduced as a highly effective way to aid military recruitment. Everyone ought to read Decline and Fall; it gives a fascinating perspective on the development of globalized civilization (not a new idea!) and how little humans have changed in two millennia.

[2] In general it is the nature of government to gain power, not to rescind it.

[3] ...normally used in a cackhanded manner and much more broadly than originally envisaged.

Royal Fail II - even my bank agrees

Following on from the original Royal Fail post...

I made it home this evening to find a rather nondescript letter. Looked like your average junk mail addressed in a faux-handwriting font - the sort they use so you'll glance at it and think "oh, a letter from my mum" then open it to find dozens of unbeatable offers from your local estate agent.

Out of curiosity I opened it. Inside was another, unstamped envelope - this time with my address in a more conventional typeface - along with this...






That's right. Even HSBC don't trust the Royal Mail.

The Alex World Factbook: "Oh Canada"

Imagine 33 million people all decided to behave like adults and start a country together. That's pretty much a description of Canada - all warm clothes, sensible shoes, common courtesy and strong coffee. And the moose.

I present to you, dear reader, the latest hurriedly-researched instalment of the Alex World Factbook. Toronto.



Architecture & Engineering

To celebrate how practical they are the Canadians built the world's tallest tower*. Using an entirely sane methodology (pour some concrete, wait for it to dry, check it's straight with a plumbline, pour more concrete) it reached a height of 555 meters - and provides radio pressure for miles around. Construction only took two years and it has yet to catch fire, fall down or do anything else embarrassing.

The CN Tower oscillates between red and yellow until 2am and costs $20 for a ride to the observation deck, which has a glass floor and a cheerful lady to tell you about it. To demonstrate that common sense and practicality aren't a recent innovation they exhibit a large steam engine at the base of the tower.

Downtown Toronto has many tall buildings, most of them banks*. Compared with other cities however it has a curious lack of people - possibly because there aren't very many Canadians to start with. Traffic drives on the right except for my limo driver who drove wherever the fuck he wanted.


[1] Mad people in Dubai built a larger one
[2] Which are doing just fine because, y'know, they're Canadian and don't do dumb shit like inventing batshit packaged-debt resale vehicles with which to evaporate their economy. I haven't seen any public information signs reading "don't screw the economy" but there must be some.



Nightlife & Culture

Alcohol is available, widely advertised but used responsibly. Y'know the way in London every other shop is obliged to sell beer? Here they have special beer-ariums ("Off Licenses") and the other shops concentrate on selling non-alcoholic products such as moose-shaped cushions, pictures of moose and moose beermats.

There are literally four bars and a pub in the whole of Toronto. Public drunkenness is rare and even on a Monday morning you won't see any sick. Compared to your usual British six-for-a-fiver corner shop a can of Grolsch costs $2.50 - so get blind drunk if you wish but it'll cost a lot more than £10. For reasons your author cannot fathom all drinking establishments have a rack of ladies undergarments hanging above the bar.

They have nightclubs but aren't into drugs.

Most non-moose-related culture is imported from America or Britain. The TV is slightly americanized but less sensational.



Ambience

An unfortunate side effect of all this calm good-nature is that nothing happens here. Given the absence of serious crime, scandal, witchhunts and Jade Goody the main forms of entertainment are socker and talking about snow. Due to its relative proximity to NYC Toronto is subject to the Tunbridge Wells Effect.

Canada looks and feels like a more subdued, less insane version of America. Advertising does not cover every surace and while looking a lot like NYC's the subway only has two lines Cute.



Government

Not mad. Does not expense duck houses or invade things. Puts up well-meaning posters saying "don't get run over" and "sneeze on your sleeve if you don't have tissues" which everyone observes since they're manifestly right.



Transport, Weather, Clothing

...are all related subjects here. Airport has only road connections (!?) which doesn't really matter since their road system works. Everyone drives a truck held together with gaffer tape (sensible given the snow, the ravenous bears and the vast scale of the place) except for one guy with a BMW Z3. The other 32,999,999 Canadians are too polite to point out he's bought a hairdresser car.

You will spend more time getting through security at Pearson airport than you did getting there from the centre of town.

Why? why a limo? I never asked for a limo, especially not a rocket-propelled one. I distinctly do not remember saying to the hotel "please book the fastest, most mental vehicle you can to hurtle down highway 401 at a million miles an hour drinking Jack Daniels so I arrive FOUR HOURS EARLY for my flight".

Ahem.




Wildlife

To make their wildlife sound more interesting Canadians have invented a mythical beast, "the moose". None visit downtown Toronto but one often sees fibre-glass representations of how a moose might look if it came here. Going by these the moose is a ponderous, majestic beast which sports a traffic cone and women's undergarments*.

[1] not to be confused with the British Moose, a ponderous beast often sporting a traffic cone and women's undergarments but more commonly found in urban areas.




People

The best thing about Canada is Canadians. They're well-educated, humorous and courteous. If you took the English, Americans and Dutch but removed tulips, binge-drinking and warmongering you'd get something similar. I'm told this is more or less what happened. They hold doors for each other, say "please" and "thankyou", are patient with idiotic cold-addled zombie foreigners and absolutely never get cross. Somehow they manage all this without over-egging it like yanks do.

For a Londoner it seems odd to see a city peopled with reasonable, cheerful folks. You will not feel threatened by anything (except bears) and there appears to be just about zero crime. Because there's so little crime the police mostly just hang out and act friendly.

Canadians have plenty of guns but are too polite to shoot one another.



Ratings

Burgers: 8/10, excellent value
Nightlife: ask me when I come back without a streaming cold
Moose: n/a
Weather: currently indistinguishable from London
Inhabitants: 11/10
Anthem: yes, rarely used
Currency has queen on: yes
Hotels: compared to my flat about 20/10. They have hot water and windows that shut.




fin

Royal Fail

Britain's postal service is in a mess. Sporadically the staff have been on strike for months - letters take weeks to travel a couple of miles. Last week's notice from my nearby dentist took ten days to arrive. 0.0025 miles per hour. Much post disappears for good; tonnes of mail languish in out-of-town silos because no-one can be found to deliver it. Theft is rife. Of the mail workers who do turn up to work one suspects a lot are only going there to pinch it.

And they don't deliver when you're at home. Once upon a time mail came in the morning - 7, maybe 8am just before father went to work. Now letters (ones they didn't lose, burn or steal) fit through the door just fine but parcels? No-one to sign for them. Now it's anytime between 10am and 6pm and everybody who can afford a parcel is out at work. Useless. Parcels go back to the depot. Often they never left in the first place - in many areas the postman will sneak a "we called but you were out..." card through the door and shamble off without even bothering to bring the parcel with him. Try lying in wait for one and you'll see what I mean. Instead you collect it from the sorting office the next morning and cart the damn thing around work all day.

I'm sure some postmen are very good, consciencious people. But if you're a state-owned utility with crap pay, bad conditions, hostile labour relations and decades of underinvestment... well, then you just ain't gonna attract the cream of the crop. And just like any bad environment the best ones quit first.





The General Post Office was a remarkable innovation. The Victorians weren't the first generation to write letters (writing appeared, ooh, several thousand years before) but they were they were the first to conceive a network of dirt-cheap, universal communication. In 1840 it cost a few pennies to communicate with anyone else in the country, a few more and you could get all the way around the empire.

The General Post Office was quick, too. Thanks to a burgeoning railway network the penny letter you posted one evening would be at the other end of the country by dawn. Very Thirty-Nine Steps.

It doesn't work that way anymore. Telecommunications (in Britain mostly part of the GPO but spun out by an asset-stripping government in the 80's) have made letters irrelevant. Your packet of information can travel from Land's End to John o' Groats in a millisecond and you don't even need to stick the queen's head on it. Money goes down the wires too. And even NetGear's naffest router won't cash the cheques and chuck your bills in the canal.

So what are the Royal Mail for?





Three things. Letters, parcels and as a general repository of government-things-that-didn't-fit-elsewhere[*]. Passport applications, driving licenses, that kind of thing. But we've seen competition in the parcels market for ages (UPS, DHL, CityLink off the top of my head), license applications are all just forms (html, <form/> geddit?) and the letters... well, just why?


Today I got an email from my lawyer. A contract, all signed and approved and scanned and pdf-ed. Another from my accountant. Later my gas bill (negative, evidently my flat produces gas). If even accountants and lawyers and the gas company are electronic - the most conservative, luddite professions in existence - what are letters for?

The only people still sending letters are junk advertisers and the state. The former have no choice to reach high-value demographics (we all have good spam filters, right?) and the other... well, it's just big too old and slow to change. And even supertankers like Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs will turn around if you push them hard enough.

We don't need letters anymore and the private sector can compete for the parcels. Sooner or later some bright spark will even realise they can charge an extra tenner to deliver the parcels when we're actually at home.

Anachronistic, pointless and getting in the way. It's time we scrapped the Royal Fail.

[*] For the sake of correctness - your local Post Office is no longer operated by the Royal Mail. This also was spun out into a separate business a few years back; the Post Office is essentially now a chain of concession stands and very tatty corner shops.

TechCrunch 2008-12-16: Germans, flash laptops and Britney Spears

Came, saw, was bored. Broken wifi. Dear Internet, have my gonzo notes as a xmas present.

Presentations in the back room of an underground twit-bar are never a good idea. I'm blogging this from the back row of a room full of people dressed in suits and Gap's "preppy" range and I can't hear a word of the presentation. Britney's latest hit is belting out of bar and no amount of pulling the curtains shut will muffle her. The demographic is in itself curious, we're talking 30+ and I'm probably the youngest person here. I think there's a reason for this - if you're under 30 you know about the Internet already and you're out there doing Internet instead of in here talking about it.

"Free Public Wireless" doesn't work. Not enough seats. For £25 a ticket my ass wants a parking space.

Content . Community. Organic growth. Scalable revenue streams. Social Media. CPM. I have a cold and a headache and am losing interest fast. I shouldn't (big boy now, the sticker on my jacket says "founder" and everything) but really, come on. They're all so bloody effusive - mildly techy but fresh from some web2.0 garden of eden full of fairies and angels and VC growing on trees. Until about four months ago that's perhaps how it was: since then they've had a rude awakening and most are still figuring out what these gosh-darn business things are supposed to do.

It's dead simple. Make some money. Make it from customers and not investors because the investors all went away. Think of something people will pay money for, build it and pray to god they will. Don't spend too much to find out if your idea's a good one and drop it as soon as you work out it isn't. Like, y'know, a business. Many of the acts bang on about this new law of nature like they only discovered it yesterday.

One silver lining flagged: office space is getting cheap. Landlords will practically give it away, better than getting your office block squatted. But the world's changed a bit since the last boom; now we have 3G and coffee-shops on every corner and until the headcount gets to ten you don't even need an office anymore. Floorspace is cute but a luxury - rent a basement from your mates in Brighton for one day a week and code from the pub the rest. Some people report this works well.

Next up: a parade of daft startup ideas described in excruciating detail by their proud parents. Social media for pets and how to monetize it. One gets the feeling that in the biz2.0 echo chamber no-one dares criticise their ideas - once they've squeezed one out it's all systems go without a moment to ask "hey, will anyone buy this?"

"Hands up who has a DVR? Hands up who skips the ads?" --> there are ads? I have a computer. It's connected to the Internet. Telly now comes through the Internet, through Iplayer if Auntie's generous through BitTorrent if not. If you knew about computers you'd probably do that too.

60 minutes in the blonde 2 rows in front remembers to take off her coat. She doesn't look like a perl hacker.

Oh, there's a talk still going on. I catch a few words - "Qype, best local review site in europe". Jolly good and I wish them luck, it's not an unreasonable business model.

Crikey, they've found an investor. Look, they still exist! We caught one!" - yeah but she's from the music business, a sector with an already-successful product that just needs the distribution fixing. People want music. People don't want social media for pets.

"Optimize the deal flow". "Value exchange".

Would somebody like to talk about something that's not social media or selling music?

To my mind there's a problem here. This room is full of self-declared entrepreneurs in good suits with American accents and good teeth. This is because if you can't code and want a Startup (rhymes with "monorail!") you need to be here - you can't build that idea alone and you're gonna want someone else's money to pay for a Clerkenwell office full of geeks. And this is why you're in a world of business plans and chatting up investors [who all just died anyway - how do you flatter a corpse?] instead of opening up your battered old laptop and, y'know, bashing out a few thousand lines of ruby.

My friend (name omitted to protect the innocent) punted a great idea this afternoon. "I know, let's start selling Fail 2.0" t-shirts. So I have. You know you want one.


 

The Alex World Factbook, 2008 Edition. “Mauritius”

I’d planned on making some giant turgid rambling post out of these notes. It would have been titled “what I did on my holidays” or “postcard from a tropical island”. Even peppered with comically inappropriate photos it would have been utterly forgettable – I’m no Spike Milligan.

Nobody will read things like this. None of you are going to wade through page upon page of self-indulgent bollocks which basically says “ha ha, I didn’t go do work this week like you proles”. Not unless you publish it in a glossy wipe-clean book with the letters “BBC” on a corner of the cover. So instead you get this monstrosity, this steaming dormant volcano of half-truths bashed together from the back of an Airbus 340-300 while a French drunkard falls asleep on my lap.










The Alex World Factbook, 2008 Edition. “Mauritius”



Geography

The island was formed by volcanoes which have repackaged themselves in the more user-friendly “mountain” format. The jury’s still out on one mountain which might still explode and kill everyone. Less horizontal geography is also available but it’s covered in sugar cane and hence boring.

Since Mauritius is in the tropics the sun rises all year at 6am and sets at 6pm. Sunsets are pretty but if you didn’t already know that you’re a dolt. Much of the day happens at night. Workers currently rise early and come home in the dark but there’s talk of cooking the clocks so they can all spend less money on lightbulbs.

The former volcanoes looked like fun. I tried to climb one but it wasn’t a success – large pieces of geology can often trick you by seeming close when they’re actually being very big but far away.

Fail.



Religion

...is popular. Roadside shrines are common to the point where you’ll experience shrine congestion on the larger thoroughfares. Leading brands are Hinduism (68%), Islam (15%) and Catholicism (15%). They take it seriously - many buildings are decorated with pictures of a favourite god or saint. They’d paint Ganesha or the Virgin Mary on anything if it stood still long enough.



Transport

The airport is on the northern coast and you’ll get a beautiful view of the island as your plane dodges volcanoes on the way in. On Friday I met some gents who run an aeroplane company - they own several jets and rent them out to other companies to fly. The lifespan of a 747 is 20 years for passenger flights and a further ten on cargo flights - cargo isn’t fussed about safety.

Turn up at the airport sporting facial piercings and a Will Self novel and you’ll get stared at by security then searched. The HSBC machine outside the airport will eat your card as you try to withdraw rupees (I can imagine the heuristics in their security system – “abroad == CRIMINAL”) so you’ll be glad to have friends living there who can lend you some money to live with. “World’s Local Bank” my arse.

If you don't want to rent a car (you don't) buses will force themselves upon you like a talkative old tramp. “Buses” here means a fleet of endearing little museum-dodgers with religious icons pasted to the windscreen. Sometimes they don't even bother with a destination board - it's a small country, get on a bus and the Virgin Mary will get you where you wanted.

Mauritius had a railway system but mislaid it in 1965. They stick to minicabs and the wheezing old buses now.

“Yes, there was once railway. But they pull it up and sell the iron for scrap… in 1970 I think. The iron, it was worth very much back then”

Pictures of the engines are online if that’s what floats your anorak. The engines are straight out of Noddy and impossible to take seriously. Maybe the passengers were laughing so hard that the Mauritian Fat Controller gave up.

Mauritians who can afford it prefer to drive. Those who can’t don't let it stop them; the roads are full of decrepit pickups and rusty old mopeds. Allegedly they have MOT’s and driving tests. Roads are British in appearance - despite being on a volcanic island 6,000 miles from Lewisham you’ll still find speed bumps and fried chicken every ten yards. Motorists often follow convention by driving on the left but like to shake it up a bit on blind bends. In all disputes over right-of-way the stray dog takes precedence followed by the goat. All roads have a ditch foot-deep concrete man-trap at the side which doubles as an excellent pied-a-terre for the mosquito population. Supposedly it's there to channel away floods in the monsoon season but I've a suspicion it's really because watching foreigners fall in ditches is funny.

An integral component of important road junctions is the police – without a rozzer or two many junctions suffer from servere invisibility. Accidents are common - I've already seen one [motorbikes will not seat three no matter how drunk you are!] and it was ugly. There's no public transport at night so the only way you’re getting home after six pints of Phoenix is in your own personal booze-copter, via several ditches.



Internot

Skip this section if you aren't a nerd.

Mauritian telcos are pushing the internet but outside businesses it isn't catching on. This is for two reasons: firstly a million Mauritians share one piece of damp string that links their island to the outside world. Secondly on a tropical island there are better ways to slay your evening than holing up on the sofa in front of a laptop.

“Are you helping Toby with dinner from the sofa?”

“Yes, I’m downloading the meat. It takes a long time here.”

3G is affordable and ubiquitous but until residential users get sub-second ping times to the rest of the planet it ain't gonna fly. You wouldn't play Counterstrike from here and in the early evening it takes longer to check your email than to make dinner.

“60% wireless broadband coverage” – unless you want to visit a website off the island in which case your screwed; packets are corked inside bottles and chucked into the water off the coast of South Africa. Pingtimes range from seconds to months.



Nightlife

All interesting drugs in Mauritius have fun-classification “A” and therefore banned by the government. They aren’t fooling around and you will get searched on the way in. Instead the inhabitants mash their brains with locally brewed "Phoenix" beer. At 5% it's stronger than a Chinese weightlifter and the state of my head on Sunday proves it’ll do you quite a damage. Ow. It’s a good beer, just don’t drink five of them after a bottle of Moet.

For those dabbling in the psychonautic arts there’s a fashionable local pastime called “scoring gear”. It’s like fishing: takes up all of Saturday and they still come home with bugger all. The difference is you'll never catch Cap’n Bird’s Eye docking a trawler full of fake plastic jellyfish and sheepishly justifying it with “s’okay, I met this dolphin down the pub who says the legal shit’s well good”.

Ask anyone who’s snorted raw caffeine - unless you’re Dutch the Good Shit ain’t legal. Even in Camden.

Clubs are widespread. Thanks to the climate usually an outdoor affair. On Saturday we attended a Mauritian copy of Vibe Bar in the preposterously named town “Flic-en-Flac” - all canopies, progressive house, plasmas and a scrum at the bar. It’s a passable affair – hardly fabric but the beer’s cheap, you can jump the queue if you’re white and at least it isn’t another stinking old London warehouse. Go see for yourself.



Industry

The main industries here are minicab driving, the police force, agriculture and textiles. I've witnessed little of the usual tourist bullshit and long may this continue. A friend of a friend is trying to market a glossy magazine to the ex-pats but they don't look like the magazine type.

For complicated reasons I’m writing this section from the manager’s office of an upmarket lingerie factory in St Pierre. Getting there was an accident – el Tobe had work to do for a client so I tagged along to try out IT consulting, tropical style. It's a good factory and certainly no sweatshop. They have health & safety rules pinned to the wall and everybody gets healthcare and plenty of fresh air. These be free-range knickers.

There’s a tragic downside to all this. Seeing where fancy women’s smalls come from ruins the illusion. Some of the light just drained from my world. Never again can I goggle at fetching lasses in their pants without visualizing a room full of 40something Indo-Mauritians at their sewing machines.

I keep capitalizing “lingerie” but Word corrects it. I think Afraz has installed a copy of the Office 1856 Sexual Repression Pack on here. He’s so in trouble.

I asked about the promotional shots all over the walls. Curvy, well-groomed European girls modelling bits of lace and string calculated to turn men’s minds to slush. But all of them European – Mauritian girls won't model underwear. It's a prudish society, porn is unwelcome and on a small island the girls care too much about their reputation. Those they’ve tried wear swimwear underneath and it looks awful. Instead each year they shoot the collection in London.

“All these models… they’re very beautiful but so different to the women here. Why do you use them?”

“Mauritian girls don’t want a reputation. Instead we shoot the collections in London. We use strippers – they aren’t shy”

Atmosphere

In a word, chilled. Few things run on time to but it's sunny so no-one minds. Think faded ex-colonial vibe and you’re getting close. Outside Port Louis or the upmarket residential areas buildings aren’t well-maintained and many parts have a distinctly half-built feel. Everywhere you’ll see logos for local brands and for Pepsi, who aren’t local but still think they own the place.

Bricks are expensive on Mauritius because there isn’t anything to make them with. This adds to this half-built atmosphere; many who set out to build a house run out after the first storey and have a decade-long tea break before finishing the job. I know how they feel. I’m told unfinished houses aren’t taxable and people exploit this loophole to the max. Others sidestep the issue by making their house out of rusty metal.

Dogs roam the streets and in the evening misterlizzards skitter around your ceiling chomping mosquitoes. A palatial villa outside Tamarin with four bedrooms, aircon, pool, mountain and a view of the sea costs less than my flat in London. The water heating's just as bad though .

The inhabitants are pleasant, cheerful and have a great sense of humour. Even the most grizzled of cynics will be warmed by their company. Meet as many as you can – they make the place.

English is the official language but some eschew it in favour of the local Creole. Signage is in English, advertising in French. Crime is low - possibly because most men under 40 are stuck in police uniforms and employed as road junctions.



Restaurants

Outstanding. If you come here eat out as often as possible. The good ones are close to London prices - a lot of the food has to be imported – but it’s well-executed, the service friendly and if they can’t find you a minicab the owner gives you a lift home in his truck.

“Aha, you are from London? My name is Bob, I live there ten years ago in Portland Square. Have you still the red phone boxes with the pictures of the girls? I like them. After work I drink four, five pints of English beer then I go see the lady. Very good. Only fifty pound.”

Share a table with the retired French drug dealer if you can. He’ll be excellent company and a sound philosopher. He'll moodily sip his water while regaling you with stories of past girlfriends and Harley Davidsons.



Flora & Fauna

All sorts. Misterlizzards scuttle everywhere (can you tell I like them?) and allegedly there are monkeys up in the mountains. It’s bat country. There's a monkey in a cage; as a baby some locals caught it eating meat and decided it was evil. It's been in the cage for ten years and has gone a bit strange.

“Wow, I didn’t know Mauritius had real lions”

“Yes, they live in the nature park up on the mountain. You should go and see them – they’re so cute and fluffy and really friendly. But we had to leave early, one wanted to eat my son”

Other wildlife includes the Cunting Mosquitoes who want to devour you piece by swearing piece. Since they spread Mauritian Flu and not Malaria nobody’s interested in wiping them out. I had a go but if you flap around like a trapped bird screeching “Fuckers! Headcrabs! Get them off!” people will look at you strangely.

Much variation is to be witnessed in Mauritian trees. Some of them have bananas, some have coconuts. The tall straight ones are badly-disguised mobile phone masts.

The only Dodo I saw was a forlorn wooden one in a shop. Bye bye Mr Dodo.




Fin




Postscript

Thanks are due my hosts. Your hospitality – particularly in the form of booze, fags, excellent cooking and a pool are very much appreciated. Whenever I open the fridge I’ll think of you.