I was much amused to hear that the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O'Donnell - or Sir Gusset as I’ve heard him referred to in a rather typical schoolboy(ish) fashion on more than one occasion - has been whinging to the Public Administration Select Committee that the Freedom of Information Act is interfering with his ability to give advice to ministers.
One particular complaint, which he made in his usual roundabout fashion, was that he could not guarantee that the information would remain private if ministers were to speak "without fear or favor" when they disagreed with something.
Which is complete and utter nonsense of course.
Sir Gusset’s own death might interfere with his ability to give us the 'benefit of his wisdom' but it’s not something I would care to bet on. One thing I am fairly certain of is that nothing as trivial as a mere Act of Parliament is likely to.
Monday, 28 November 2011
Friday, 25 November 2011
It's not dead. It's just resting.
There is an old saying about 'speaking too soon' or as I once heard an American put it, "You just had to open your mouth, didn't ya!"
Well, I lost my broadband connection a few days after making that last post.
Annoying but not earth shattering. Losing the connection is not a particularly rare event as it is a BT line and with no competing services at my local exchange I'm stuck with whatever they choose to provide.
To make matters worse, if their equipment can hold what they interpret as a 'stable' connection at any speed above 0.6mpbs they won't even look at it as this is what they call the "Minimum Fault Threshold".
However all this pales in comparison to the absolute disgrace which is BT Internet's customer/technical support who claimed he couldn't see anything wrong and suggested.
Even Eric Idle sounded more convincing than that in the now infamous Parrot Sketch.
In the end, it took nearly fifteen minutes for this idiot to satisfy himself that there was a fault and a further week for BT to 'fix' it.
Sort of...
The only real different is now they're claiming that because of something they had to do at the exchange - no explanation of what - they can't escalate the fault until fourteen days have passed.
It took them another three days on top to fix whatever they’d ‘fixed’ the first time round. So in total, I was without a usable internet connection for nearly a month.
And yes. I do have access to the internet at another location but I'd be a right bloody fool to post entries to this blog from there, wouldn't I?
Well, I lost my broadband connection a few days after making that last post.
Annoying but not earth shattering. Losing the connection is not a particularly rare event as it is a BT line and with no competing services at my local exchange I'm stuck with whatever they choose to provide.
To make matters worse, if their equipment can hold what they interpret as a 'stable' connection at any speed above 0.6mpbs they won't even look at it as this is what they call the "Minimum Fault Threshold".
However all this pales in comparison to the absolute disgrace which is BT Internet's customer/technical support who claimed he couldn't see anything wrong and suggested.
"It's probably just a bit slow due to network congestion."
Even Eric Idle sounded more convincing than that in the now infamous Parrot Sketch.
In the end, it took nearly fifteen minutes for this idiot to satisfy himself that there was a fault and a further week for BT to 'fix' it.
Sort of...
The only real different is now they're claiming that because of something they had to do at the exchange - no explanation of what - they can't escalate the fault until fourteen days have passed.
It took them another three days on top to fix whatever they’d ‘fixed’ the first time round. So in total, I was without a usable internet connection for nearly a month.
And yes. I do have access to the internet at another location but I'd be a right bloody fool to post entries to this blog from there, wouldn't I?
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