Order of the Bath

There is a joke that says that Americans think that Scotland is part of England and is that anywhere near London? But it is true that most of the world doesn’t understand how the UK works—and come to think of it, many British don’t really understand it either.

Before I start, let’s be clear. I am talking about how things are for most administrative purposes, not how there were or how they should be. There are some anomalies and I will mention a few in passing.

• First there are countries: like England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. These are roughly what you would call States in the USA or Provinces in Canada but we call them Countries. They don’t really exist in the international arena except for a few sporting competitions like cricket and rugby.
• England includes the Isle of White and Lundy, a few other small islets but not the Isle of Man. It does not have its own parliament but hosts the seat of government for the whole union.
• (The principality of) Wales includes Ynys Môn (Anglesey). It has its own language and is known as Cymru in that tongue. There is a Welsh Assembly which adopts some aspects of a parliament.
• Scotland includes the Western Isles, the Shetlands and Orkney. Local banks issue their own banknotes but Sterling is also used (and to some extent vice-versa). There is a Gaelic language which is strong in some areas. There is a separate Scottish Parliament which makes local laws and the legal system is different to England and Wales.
• Northern Ireland separated from the whole of Ireland in the 1920’s and forms the north-eastern counties (9 of them?). The remainder is an independent country called Eire which is part of the European Union. There is a Northern Ireland Assembly but it is currently dissolved pending some political discussion. I certainly will not be debating its status or the status of Northern Ireland here.
• Cornwall (which includes the Isles of Scilly), for administrative purposes, is part of England. Whether it should be or not I won’t debate here. It has its own language which is growing but still not widely used.
• For some purposes, England and Wales are treated as one unit—in particular the legal system.
• Great Britain is the union of England, Wales and Scotland created in the C18th.
• The United Kingdom is Great Britain plus Northern Ireland.
• Then there are the satellites—I am not sure what the proper term is. These are separate countries for many purposes like economy but part of the UK for others like defence. These are the Isle of Man, the British Channel Islands which form two states—the States of Jersey (plural for some reason) and the Bailiwick of Guernsey which includes Alderney, Sark and Herm. They each have their own currency (but tied to Sterling), parliament and tax laws and are not part of the European Union. This creates no end of confusion with Customs and Excise when traveling. Their status is similar to the relationship between the Canary Islands and Spain. I have no idea what the status of Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands is, nor the few remaining colonies.

Some anomalies—the Pound Sterling (£) which is the currency for the whole of the UK has the designation GBP which is wrong. For some sporting purposes, Ireland competes as a whole, I think rugby is one.

I have always avoided using the word Xmas:

You are taking the Christ out of Christmas

people would say. Now I think, on the contrary,

• The X stands for Christ and can mean nothing else.
• It is a reminder of the sacrifice God made when he sent his Son.
• It is a reminder of the destiny of the child that was born so innocent.

So use the word well and remember what it stands for.

I can’t see myself ever using Crimble however. That is taking the “mass”, the celebration, out of Christmas—I wonder why there is only one “s” on the end?

This review is slightly early, but I have a free moment so what better time. Things have been very busy on the online front this year—these are just the ones I can remember:

• The site was getting too busy—800–1000 visits per day according to the (unreliable) stats. This was overloading the free hosting I was using even with a bandwidth enhancement so the step was taken to purchase real hosting from the same supplier, DotEasy.com. So far it has been good though sometimes you have to nudge/bully them into doing the right thing.
• 38 major new sections have been uploaded to West Penwith Resources thanks to the generous donation of material by others. This is compared to 20 in 2004. My own work has largely been reformatting but I have created some from scratch. There are now 821 solid pages of material.
• An RSS Feed has been introduced as an alternative to the old page watch service. It is manually generated with similar content to the “What’s New” page; I can’t easily see how it could be automated.
• The free search engine service provided by Atomz ran out of capacity and any externally hosted replacement was either too limited or too expensive. Now, having server side scripting available, I splashed out and bought a stand alone index generator and search script from Zoom. This has proved excellent, though a little slow to upload each time the site is re-indexed.
• A comprehensive link check was done (blogged earlier).
• This blog was added. I don’t think there are any readers, but that is not surprising as it is mainly a bunch of inarticulate rambling, but it gets it off my chest. Again, having server side capability, I used WordPress and customised a theme to my style, mostly by stripping out a lot of clutter. A few bits have made it back in as I discovered how useful they were but I am no fan of buttons and widgets distracting from the main goal.
• The spammers have discovered the domain name (not just my active addresses) so I get hundreds of rubbish mails, mostly failure bounces where it has been used as a from address. Popfile is doing a good job of filtering them out but I am concerned about missing mail, particularly failures to deliver.
• Losing mail is a continual worry. After a lot of effort I managed to resolve a blacklist dispute between DotEasy and Wanadoo but I still suspect that some stuff is not arriving when it should.
• David has started work on a new version of HTML-Writer. I am looking forward to that as my needs outstripped the current version a couple of years ago. Even so, not bad for a 6th form school project.

Things that need to be done (next year?):

• I am aware that WPR is rather drab looking. I have got used to it but it can’t be a good impression to new visitors—it needs brightening up but my graphic skills are lacking to do a good job of it. The requirements are a continuity with the past so as not to scare away existing users and to be mostly done in CSS so I don’t have to make huge changes to the 800+ old pages. Any takers?
• The biggest bandwidth consumers are the CSS file (so it needs thinning down) and the custom “Old English” font that is used to add a little antique style to many pages. I don’t really know how well this works, probably only in IE, but I can’t think of a better way to do the job.
• Finish the job of producing a dedicated print style sheet so that unnecessary navigation clutter is removed from printed reference copies of pages which many people like.
• Finish transcribing Matthew’s History (but there is a long way to go), Kelly’s Directory 1919 (ditto).
• Improve and complete the parish sketch maps. I have discovered some brilliant and free software to do the job, which will be the subject of another post; now I just need to get down to it.
• WordPress 2.0 comes out on Monday 26th—Is it worth the upgrade and when?
• Have another go at trying to spell check the site. Very hard as a) I can’t spell and b) neither could the writers of many of the documents transcribed. Finding a way to do it correcting my errors but not theirs is proving hard.

Offline things to do include investigating OpenOffice.org v2 and ThunderBird 1.5 (when it comes out) to try to detach myself from Office. I can then pass the 2000 licence on to others who need it. Will I ever detach from Windows—perhaps when Vista comes out?

That’s it for now—Happy Xmas everyone—deafening silence.

Once you become a manager, you’re always managing, whether you think so or not. Everything you say and do will be blown out of proportion and treated as the company’s official position rather than your own private opinion. Speaking of privacy, you won’t have any. Comments spoken in confidence will be in everybody’s e-mail by the end of the day. Sooner if they are negative. The price of power is giving up some of your personal identity. There is no point in feeling surprised or hurt by a phenomenon that is as predictable as gravity. Instead, since you will always be managing, learn to manage well. This means thinking before you speak, and considering the effects your words may have on other people. It also means living as if every one of your actions might be discussed at the next annual meeting.

That’s what they mean when they say it’s lonely at the top.

Albert Bernstein

Perhaps if all in management type positions, at all levels and in all situations, not just companies, realised this, then they would think more before opening their mouths.

Now that is ridiculous. Serving suggestion is one thing but when the largest ingredient on the list is not in the packet, that is something else.