the corner office

Hrmph. UNISA rolled out a new service called 'MyLife' which is advertised as a student email address for life, but is in effect just a front-end for Microsoft Live. Adding insult to injury, UNISA no longer allows you to use any other email address for correspondence.

If it were voluntary then I'd understand that MS are providing a service that UNISA needs, no doubt with all sorts of cushy terms and incentives, but hey, that's the way things go and good luck to those who want to use it. But forcing students to use this address is a different story. I can't think of any way in which this is in students' best interests. I can jump through hoops to redirect or forward the email, but I shouldn't have to. I should be able to have my UNISA correspondence mailed to me at an address of my choosing.

Shame on you, UNISA.

BBC: Schools switching to clip-on ties

The emergence of clip-on ties is part of a growing sensitivity towards health and safety, says the association, along with modifications such as high-visibility trimming on scarves.

Clip-on ties take away the risk of pupils having accidents with their knotted ties.

Schools have raised concerns about ties catching fire in science lessons, getting trapped in technology equipment or ties getting caught when pupils were running.

Generations of school boys have been imperilled. It's about time they did something about it.

My domain registrar had the wrong card details on file so the thecorneroffice.org domain quasi-expired and showed a Go Daddy splash site for a day.

I don't like domain registrars much. That is all I have to say on the matter, really.

I'm wary of writing about economics and stuff, because Ronwen says she doesn't read these posts. That's half my audience gone. But I'll keep doing it because it interests me and because I think it'll be interesting to come back to some of these posts and articles in future, when this is all over, and the world has (possibly) ended up a really different place.

I've noted before that boring old not-free-market Canada has emerged from the crisis, relatively unscathed. One Canadian economist's opinion of why Canada hasn't been as affected:

1. We never had restrictions on interstate banking, so Canadian banks spread their assets and liabilities across Canada. (So it doesn’t matter if a local housing market goes bust).

2. We don’t have Glass-Steagal. The investment banks joined the retail banks some years ago.

3. We don’t have mortgage interest deductibility from taxes. So paying down your mortgage is a tax-free investment. So most people want to pay down their mortgages.

4. (Except in Alberta), mortgages are fully recourse. You can’t just walk away from a negative equity home and hand the keys to the bank; the bank will come after you for the difference.

My (admittedly uninformed) interpretation: Point 1: the Canadian government doesn't impose artificial constraints on where banks can do business. Point 2: the Canadian government doesn't impose artificial constraints on what a 'bank' can and can't do. Point 3: the Canadian government doesn't tailor its tax regime to make it easier for people to stay in debt. Point 4: the Canadian government doesn't have laws that make it easier for you to be irresponsible with your debts.

It is true that Canadian banks are regulated in other ways, but you have to ask exactly why 'free markets' and 'deregulation' are to blame for the credit crisis, when more freedom and less intervention are the reason Canada's not in so much trouble?

This has generated some discussion on the economics blogs I follow, and led to this comment on how respective governments approach bank regulation, by economist Arnold Kling:

In any case, back to the original quote, it gets to the distinction that I make between "letter of law" regulation and "spirit of law" regulation. I keep insisting that letter-of-the law regulation is bound to fail, because the natural impetus toward profit maximization will lead the banks to innovate in ways that are consistent with the letter of the law but violate its spirit.

Anyone who's had the displeasure of dealing with UK banks (or most UK corporates, for that matter), know exactly what that is all about.

A byline from an article in the Times about Severn Trent's plans to put sewage to good use:

In-house scheme is the first step in a programme to develop raw sewage sludge into pellet fuel to burn in power plants

'Pellet fuel'. Hehehehe. I know it's juvenile, but still. 'Pellet fuel'. Hehehehehe.

More seriously, I strongly believe that technology will help us to achieve the sorts of energy efficiency and sustainability we need. And let's be honest, you don't get more 'sustainable' than the inputs for 'pellet fuel'. Hehehehehe.

The article is clearly a journalist's dream. The title is "Flushed with enthusiasm, Severn Trent sees light at the end of the tunnel for its new revenue plan".

Hehehehehe.

I will end with one more quote:

"Sludge has half the calorific content of brown coal, so this is a very viable fuel," Mr Wray said. "The trick is to find new ways to dry it. Wet sludge is not very economical to use."

That's a mental image you won't be able to shake for a while!

I edited last night's post. I decided a bit of subtlety actually conveyed more.

I like a good rumble, it's very cathartic, but sometimes, as I said to a friend recently, I sound too much like a Daily Mail columnist. Being grumpy, that's OK, but sour and miserable, not. There is a difference.

That of course raises an interesting point. I've noticed this amongst male friends and family of a similar age. Wives all complain that we've become grumps. They've been saying it for years, admittedly, but they're not wrong. It's a badge of honour, sort of. We're all proud members of the Meldrew club.

I think, for some reason, that the more women complain about men being grumpy, the happier men are about being grumpy.

Whenever I see an advert or billboard and a sentence ending with an asterisk, what I'm really reading is*

(* blah blah blah not really).

I don't mean to make light of something serious, which has already taken many lives and will probably take more. Given that I commute through the centre of London most weekdays, I'm as skittish about the coming weeks as anyone else.

But I have to ask: why don't they just call it pig flu?

GeoCities is being shut down (because Yahoo! is! circling! the! drain!), but some people are trying to archive it (via):

Already, little gems have shown up in the roughly 8000+ sites I've archived. Guitar tab archives. MP3s that surely took the owners hours to rip and generate. GIF files, untouched for 13 years. Fan fiction. Photographs and websites of people long dead. All stuff that, I think, down the line, will have meaning. It's not for me to judge. It's for me to collect

This resonates with me, which is I have so many boxes of crap. Recently I was digging through some old files, and came across some old Telkom phone bills.

'I have a lot of old phone bills,' I said to Ronwen, 'It's silly but I can't quite bring myself to throw them away, what do you think I should do with them?'. 'Why don't you hang on to them for a little longer,' she replied. 'I have all my phone bills going back to the mid-90s,' I said. 'OK,' she said, 'then maybe only keep some of them.'

Which is not so easy for me, because if there's one thing that compels me more than the urge to hang on to old things, it's the urge to preserve collections.

Bea Arthur has passed away. I remember All In The Family (albeit vaguely), I remember Maude (slightly less vaguely), and of course the Golden Girls, when I was in high school. Bea Arthur's characters became entrenched in our culture; what a memorable lady. RIP.