While hunting for a late Christmas present, I stumbled across the Tesco online store. One quick search for a Doctor Who boxset later, and that picture is the bizarre result I got back.

Given that Tesco is linking overtly to a legal store, can I assume that somewhere it has an illegal store, too? Can I have the link to that one, please?

The Tesco ‘legal’ Store

I haven’t done a security on a train piece for a moment, but I’m in the midst of a fascinating moment. Sat behind me is a Conservative MP – whose name is likely to be known to you – barking out all sorts of stuff into his mobile phone. He’s getting a bit stroppy with someone at the moment, so let me just take a minute to listen in…

…. ah, back now!

Given that this gentleman is happy to talk in a loud, snooty voice, it’s fair to say that, by my estimation, the entire carriage and a good deal of passengers in the next now knows his mobile number that he’s just given out, the name of the man at the Daily Express he’s trying to talk to, his movements for the next few days and what a rude sort of a man he is. He’s not so much talking down to people, as digging holes for them underground to sit in, so he can further establish his superiority. He seems to like scrawling on his piece of paper, though. A shrink would have a field day with it.

It’s a continual theme that the biggest compromise to any well thought-through security system is a human being rather than a machine. In this case, the only reason this particular Member of Parliament is likely to find at least two phone numbers compromised is because he’s made such a song and dance on the phone, and bleated them out at volume.

The moral of the story? Be careful what you talk about in public, and what you show people on a screen.

And don’t sit near me on a train.

Most weeks, I end up staying in a London hotel. And most weeks, given that this is a fairly new, if suitably economical, residence, I have a problem with the electronic door key system. There’s nothing more heartwarming after a long day working to crash back at a hotel, only to come back down eleven floors to tell someone on receptionist that the door card isn’t working. If I’m lucky, sometimes I can detect a roll of the eyes, but most weeks I get away scott free.

Then the usual always happens when you ask for help with a piece of technology: along comes someone and fixes it within a second without explaining what they did. When I ask, I get told that you “insert the card like this”, which matches the exact same method that I’d used 20 or 30 times before going and asking for help in the first place.

And so, week in week out, the majority of times I would be stumped by this problem, and around one in every three weeks everything would work okay. Yet the rest of the time it didn’t. And every time it broke, someone would come and get it working straight away with the exact same explanation.

Now I have many faults, but I don’t think being permanently dim week after week is one of them. I at least like to implement my many low intelligence moments in shifts. It did all get me thinking about a small business who I provided technical support to for a couple of years in my younger days, where the frequent criticism I received was that I’d go in, fix something and not tell anyone what I’d done, meaning the same call would inevitably come up the following week. Maybe this is some form of belated comeback for that?

But even in technical support, I worked out soon enough that arming the end user with the necessary information more often went right than it went wrong (although, naturally, sometimes if went very, very wrong). And so I did start taking time to explain what had had happened, and how to fix things. End result? The number of calls went down, the computers were working that bit longer, and everyone was (seemingly) happy.

I bring this up because last night, someone at the hotel bothered to explain what was, in the end, a stupidly logical answer to my weekly adventure. Simply: there’s quite a long time delay between the computer writing a door card and the door itself being able to accept it. The weeks when my key had worked perfectly were those when the room had been in a more remote part of the hotel, and had thus taken me longer to get to. In short: all I had to do was wait about another minute.

It’s taken the hotel a good few months to relate this to me (and, in truth, I feel stupid for not working it out myself – I blame fatigue), and now, as a result, the days of eyeball rolling may well be over.

Ironically, it was the new and enthusiastic member of staff who told me this. The old hands, the ones most fed up with taking the trip up and down the stairs to fix the ‘broken’ key cards, had never even hinted this was the cause, only once revealing that “lots of guests have the same problem”.

At the very least, it made me feel a little less stupid. Just for a minute.

I’ve just received a piece of market analysis that’s proclaiming that sales of digital photo frames are set to explode in the back end of 2007. How depressing is that?

Is it just me who finds these things a pitiful waste of technology? Or, more to the point, technology simply butting in where it isn’t welcome? For decade upon decade, to my knowledge, people seem to have had few problems with mounting a printed photo in a half decent frame and sticking it on their mantelpiece. It worked, it was simple, and everyone was happy.

Then technology stuck its oar in, and as a result, people the world over will be receiving these insipid gadgets as gifts this year. So we’re basically all expected to load our images onto a flash card, buy some good batteries (scrub that: lots of good batteries), and have a mini-Powerpoint presentation going on the fireplace now? Give me a break.

Apart from the environmental concerns here, of adding a power supply to something that ten years ago few would even considering needing one for, these things simply aren’t much cop are they? Once the novelty has gone and you deal with the reality of having a flashing screen on your fireplace, the temptation surely must be to relocate it a foot or two down.

But I’m curious. I appreciate lots of people have, and will receive, digital photo frames as gifts. Yet I’ve never been into the home of a single person who uses one day to day. Is it me, or is the digital photo frame the most unused, pointless gadget of the modern generation?

Hilariously, my train journey home last night, which was otherwise going perfectly to plan, was delayed one stop from home. It’s smashing when that happens, as there’s nothing like being a couple of steps from the end of the journey and having the rug ceremoniously pulled from underneath you.

The reason for the delay? Because some tit of a man, having not heeded the on-train announcement that we’d arrived at a station, took ages to get his stuff together and watched in horror as the automatic doors slung shut. You can imagine what went through his brain: what can I do? How can I get the doors back open? I can’t possibly do the logical thing and wait for the next station before battling a heavily computerised train with its automatic doors, can I?

Actually, I’m being kind. None of these thoughts seemingly flashed through his head. Instead, he pulled the emergency lever, which triggered the doors, and he was able to go and meet who he had to meet on time. Phew.

The rest of us in said train, of course, were then delayed fifteen minutes, entertained  by a carnival of alarms going on, beeps from the internal phone system, a raging train manager and a couple of announcements over the PA that effectively told us off for what the guy before had done.

All because, effectively, someone was given the opportunity to push a button. That, for me, is the biggest problem with the modern day technological world. Whether it’s your other half with the remote control or the emergency controls of a train, the problem with buttons is people are oh-so-tempted to press them. There seems to be a mindset in some people that it’s their eternal right to press them, whereas the more logical and kind thing to do would be to cut their fingers off and flush them down the toilet.

The train, naturally, then got caught up in extra traffic that added a further five or ten minutes to the journey. And the after-effects in this case of one person activating controls they shouldn’t was a grumbling train manager, and a whole lot of people who had to wait, because one person couldn’t.

Not that I’m angry about it, of course. It’s just a good job I don’t watch Corrie…

Taken from the BBC Online shop on 19th June 2007, the day I received an e-mail about their new legal download offerings…

Sigh.

The deli counter at my local supermarket has long been using a computerised queuing system, where you take your number and wait for the obnoxiously large display screen to call yours out. It’s a simple system, but by jove it gets you to the Scotch eggs that bit quicker.

Over the past few months, I’ve had cause to visit a couple of hospitals in Birmingham that have recently introduced such systems to their reception areas. Yet the result’s been absolute chaos. You walk through the doors to be greeted by dozens of people clutching their tickets as if their numbers came up the night before, all feverishly waiting for the screen to move on to their number.

Here’s the thing, though. In said hospital reception areas, before the computer system moved in, there was something simple to a queue of people. You knew where you stood, and that receptionist facing a line of people was less likely to nip off and shuffle some papers, or take that call, or chat with their colleague. There simply wasn’t time, as there were people to see, and they were immediately in front of the desk.

What the computer has done is to remove the sense of urgency, which must be great for the reception staff, but it’s chaos for the visitors. Now, any interruption can be entertained, it seems, to the point where three weeks ago, it took 20 minutes to get through a queue with six people in it.

In a supermarket, it all works well: after all, there’s generally a lot you need to get in one shop, lots of room to mill around and not one solitary reason that you’ve been drawn to the ticketing system for. Plus, the staff service the queue at the same speed as there’s no phone/stack of papers/other such interruptions.

Sometimes then, in my view, good old fashioned human conventions, such as a physical queue, are actually better than any technological alternative. Because here’s the sum effect solely of the new queuing system: visiting the two hospitals in question now requires you arrive at least 20-30 minutes ahead of your appointment, simply to be able to be seen by the receptionist in time, never mind a doctor.

Surely that’s not right?

As damning an indictment that your format is in the gutter as you could hope to find. I wondered into Game over the weekend, and after cursing that the gamepad I bought last week was now eight quid cheaper, I headed off for the bargain shelves.

And there they were. Movie UMDs for the PSP. 98p each. Everything must go.

This one brave new format - remember those early 100,000 unit sales boasts - has been crippled by its horrible pricing structure and the fact that you get much more content on a DVD. And the corpses were on the shelves for all to see: Reservoir Dogs, Ghost In The Shell, Resident Evil 2 and more, at under a quid.

The most damning thing of all? I didn’t buy one of them. Eyestrain just isn’t worth the bother…

Sitting patiently on the Sharp customer support line yesterday, in kicked the latest jolly tune no doubt designed to keep my calm in preparation for the moment when I’d get to speak to a real person.

The tune in question? That classic Disney number, The Ugly Bug Ball.

An oil painting I ain’t, but it beats the ongoing Cliff Richard ditties that one firm thrust at me a few years’ ago. Actually, that tactic worked that time - I hung up long before I suspect the phone was ever going to be answered…

Can anyone top those?

The worse thing about anniversaries of the debut of home computers is they make you feel so old. Granted, my first Spectrum was rubberless – I got the 48k+, where the keys fell off if you took it out the box the wrong way – but I was still there or there abouts, taking early tentative steps in computing that would lead to me posting this, and you reading it.

Clive’s no doubt beaming at the mere thought of it.

There’s always, of course, the temptation to go misty-eyed when recalling the so-called ‘good old days’. But much though I admire and owe a lot to the Spectrum, here are some of the memories that never seem to make those grinning retrospectives:

* Spending several hours programming the damn thing, only for a) the power pack to come suddenly loose, or b) the notoriously wobbly tape save to go wrong. There’s a c), too. I remember when Star Wars was first broadcast on ITV, and there was a big power surge in our area that led to a power cut. Just as I was finishing off the game that would make me my fortune. That’s bloody George Lucas’ fault, I reckon.

* Listings in computer magazines. Rarely accurate, and it took me three months to work out that those REM statements weren’t compulsory. I was, in my defence, only ten at the time.

* Football Manager: the most hideously overrated game of the era. It was awful then, and it’s awful now.

* Games with little playtesting. A bit like receiving a Christmas present off the market, after it’s failed every EU safety standard going, Jet Set Willy continues to be revered, despite the fact that it was impossible to finish it.

* That printer. What. A. Waste. Of. Time.

* The endless hours lost with the BEEP command. A relation of mine once, and this is true, got out of the doghouse for forgetting his wife’s birthday one year by programming his Spectrum to sing Happy Birthday to her. And, get this, she was impressed. Impressed by that! It must be like being serenaded a late 90s mobile phone ringtone.

I could go on, but my point is this. The Spectrum was a machine with umpteen problems, lots of flaws and the catalyst for rants that these days the blue screen gets instead.

But it’s still great, warts and all. Let’s, though, not pretend it was all plain sailing, but I’ll be more than happy to raise a glass to the machine that mattered more to the UK home computing scene than any machine before or after it