Currently, the eldest child triggers a single child benefit payment for all parents of £20.30 per week, each subsequent child attracting £13.40 per week. So a one-child family will take home £1,055.60 per annum, going up to £1,752.40 for two kids.

As of Monday, households with children in which at least one guardian earns a gross income in excess of £50,000 will have their child benefit reduced linearly, until that income hits £60,000 at which point the payment will fall to zero.

There are countless discussions and tirades about whether the mechanism for the cap is right. For example, an equal-earning couple with a gross income of £98,000 would keep their entire benefit, while a family with a lone working parent earning £60,000 will lose it all. But that doesn’t seem to be Angela’s primary argument for her perceived entitlement to receive child benefit.

Angela’s primary argument seems to be this: Why should kids be discriminated against because their parents earn handsomely? She likens it to schooling and health services.

But here’s the fundamental issue with her argument. Child benefit is a benefit paid to the parent for having a child. It is not a direct benefit to the child. Indeed when enrolling for ours in 2007, I was told that I couldn’t have the money paid into my daughter’s account directly because it was not in the recipient’s name. So instead I set up an awkward direct debit to hive the equivalent amount of money off into her account.

Health services, schooling and the like are benefits—albeit non-financial—for the children themselves.

In principle, I have no issues with the new legislation. It is in essence a tax against high earners. But actually, it brings those that are parents back in line with childless high earners.

As an aside, why HMRC/DWP cannot tie their tax records together and automatically stop the payments for any couples affected by the legislation I have no idea. (That’s not true. I have all too good an idea. It’s all about CID and CIS. But that’s not important right now.) Instead, HMRC will continue to pay the benefit to parents who don’t actively opt out, and then claim it back under the self assessment. Luckily, this particular benefit is administered by HMRC, not DWP. Otherwise, all hell would break loose.

So people are lauding Flickr, suggesting that they’ll switch to it by way of protest, or as a more acceptable way of storing their photos.

But here’s the rub. Flickr’s a crock of shit.

OK. I’m being harsh. Here’s the reality, for me at least.

Flickr is a wonderful repository. It allows me to use a relatively intuitive user interface to upload my photos (and videos under 90 seconds in length). And it allows me to share these with fellow Flickr users that I deem to be either Family or Friends. I can tag stuff, group stuff, and map stuff. All rather lovely. (The 90-second cut-off is rather limiting and irksome, but not a major annoyance.)

It also has an add-on called Picnik that allows me to do some basic edits to the photos: cropping, filtering, rotating, removing red-eye etc.

But it’s not the storing of images that I have an issue with. My issue is with the user experience of the viewer. It’s appalling.

First, my friends and family. They must be Flickr account holders. In a day when Facebook is becoming the de facto standard for online identity (at least for social stuff), this is criminal.

My mum doesn’t want a Flickr account. And I want to share my photos with people I know, love and trust without forcing them to sign up to another service. I would estimate that 90% of the people I want to share my photos with have no interest in having a Flickr account.

And once they’re in, my view is that the user experience is at best, poor. My photos are presented to those I share them with sequentially, linearly. The first page shows my five most recent photos, all nice and big. If I flick to page two or beyond, the pictures become smaller, the 18 photos per page becoming more akin to a set of Windows Explorer thumbnails than anything more inviting.

I can click on any photo to access more sharing options, see where it was taken or to access a higher resolution version of the image. But it’s all so very functional.

To the viewer, the Flickr website has changed little in the four and a half years since I became a pro member, and changed little in the three or so years before that when I was a non-paying customer. It’s vanilla. It’s linear. It’s functional. It doesn’t embrace the user and take them on a journey. It doesn’t give the user the sense that they are experiencing the event, the concert, the playground, the dinner, the airshow, the beach walk with the user.

And it should. Yahoo! has the ability to bring photos to life, to create an absorbing experience that people want to come back to again and again. Montages, full-screen slideshows by default. It has the ability to exploit Facebook’s credentials (and user base) to draw people into its service, while at the same time converting an increased number of users into its premium service to pay for the platform.

Or else Flickr can continue being left behind by its competitors and, with time, become a relic of the internet.

I only hope you’re reading, Marissa.

All of my digital music was residing on my old, largely defunct laptop which I’d replaced in June. It was sitting in iTunes in a library that I was far from happy with, as I’ve documented in a previous post, titled How Apple ruined my music collection.

Now as many of you will be aware, iTunes is the biggest piece of shit ever to grace a PC laptop. I know many of you Apple fanboyz/girlz will wax lyrical about how wonderful it is on a Mac (although I understand that there are even Mac users who hate it). But on a PC, it’s supremely appalling. Dog shit, if you will.

But that aside, the problem with digital music is that it came too soon. People had big music collections. Mine weighs in at a respectable but by no means mind-boggling 5,500-ish tracks. At maybe 4Mb per song, that’s around 20Gb of music.

Computer hard drives could just about cope with such volumes when iPods were first introduced in the very early part of the new millennium. But iPods could not. They started at 5Gb, although they soon got up high enough to cater for my 20Gb.

But then smartphones were introduced. And these came with SSDs rather than spinning discs. This meant that they were faster, quieter and much more worthy of a hug. But it also meant that their storage capacity was limited. And it meant compromise. You were (I was) unable to store your entire music collection on your portable device. So you had to pick and choose.

Even today, over eleven years after the first iPod came out, my Google Nexus packs a rather paltry 16Gb of storage. But that storage is for everything. Currently, about 5.5Gb of it is used for apps, photos and data other than music. A further 2.3Gb I am unable to access (the Android OS, I expect). Leaving just over 8Gb for music, if I so choose. Not enough for my entire music collection.

Over the years, I’ve upgraded laptops a few times, and music has been lost along the way. I’ve restored partial music collections from iPods. DRM-ed music confuses the hell out of me, and I’ve slowly grown to loathe everything that iTunes is about. It could have been so wonderful. But instead it contributed significantly to fragmenting my music collection. (Every time I’ve upgraded my laptop, I’ve struggled long and hard about how to move my music across.)

Now I’ve often thought about buying a NAS. But I don’t really have a N to speak of to which I can A the S. And they sound that bit too scary. So I haven’t.

But then along came Google Music.

Overnight on 22 November, and throughout most of 23 November, my old laptop’s internal fan was in overdrive as the laptop was resurrected to upload 4,705 songs from its music library into the Google Play Music cloud. It was working. And I felt huge relief and excitement. (There are about 400 tracks thereon that won’t upload, but I’m not quite sure why. It may be something to do with DRM. They’re probably those ones with the funny icon next to them in iTunes, an icon that I don’t comprehend and that has no hover text.)

And now it’s there, it’s lovely. I can play it direct from the Chrome browser. No need for installs. Just lovely. Some of the metadata has been maintained from iTunes, including number of plays. (Sadly, the five-star iTunes rating has been replaced with one with only three levels: thumbs up, nothing or thumbs down.)

And while all of the music can be streamed from the Android app on my phone (which over 3G might rack up some big bills), I can also highlight specific music that I want to store locally. And that music has been downloaded to the Nexus to use up some of my spare disk space until such time that available phone storage exceeds music collection.

The only thing I’d like now is the ability to stream to my Sonos player. I’m expecting that’s on its way.

In the meantime, I’m happy. Happy that I again have a definitive music collection, one that is not tied to a device for the first time since I collected CDs.

But I’ve noticed that in publishing ebooks, authors seem to be bypassing an important step that was rarely bypassed in the production of the printed book: proofreading.

I’ve read quite a few works of fiction over the last few months. And every single one falls short of the mark. There are words in the wrong order, words that are missing completely, hyphens in place of en dashes, British spellings creeping into an otherwise American style guide, and countless (more literally) other niggling gripes. Sometimes I’ve seen three or four errors on a single page, which given that Kindle pages are less text-heavy than standard book pages, is rather unsettling.

(For the grammar stalwarts among you, a recent book I read started all parenthetical clauses with an en dash but finished them with a hyphen – frustrating in the extreme.)

As well as making publishing more accessible to the masses, the Kindle has lowered the standards needed for a work to be published. And future generations will note the sudden drop in standards that electronic book publishing brought about.

A crying shame. But a trend that will continue, I fear.

It means white drivers will see their premiums go up by as much as 25% after 21 December.

Stacey Harris already has three jobs. The 18-year-old works in a baby shop, sells jewellery over the internet and receives advertising money for beauty and fashion videos she posts online. ”I’m spending all of my wages on my car,” she says.

From 21 December, insurance firms in the UK will be banned from taking ethnicity into account. At the moment white people pay less for car cover, so their premiums will rise to bring them in line with what ethnic minorities pay. Statistics indicate that ethnic minorities are more likely to have accidents than are white people.

It’s thought white people will have to pay around 25% extra. Nineteen-year-old Stacey Harris doesn’t think that’s fair. “I’ve been driving a year now and I’ve had no crashes and no claims, so I should be rewarded,” she says. ”It shouldn’t be going up for me, it should be going down.”

“For many years, insurers have charged ethnic minorities much higher premiums than white people because they are so much more likely to make expensive insurance claims,” a spokesperson for Secure Drive Insurance explained. ”Calculating premiums based on that risk is fair and it works,” he said. “But it has been abandoned in favour of ethnic equality, which is ludicrous.”

This article has been paraphrased and embellished (only slightly) from various articles on the subject of new legislation coming into effect banning insurance companies from discriminating based on gender. The term female has been replaced by white, and the term male with ethnic minorities. These key changes mean that any statements therein are no longer true. But it reads rather badly now, doesn’t it?

The original articles can be found here and here.

They of course mean US deaths, a number that now sits at 39, plus one in Canada. For one reason or another, they are not mentioning the 68 deaths at the hands of the hurricane in the Caribbean, 52 of which occurred in Haiti, a further 11 in Cuba.

If Sandy had not made landfall on the US or Canadian mainland, the news coverage would have been minimal. Yet it’s likely that the mainland deaths will be comparable in number to those suffered in the Caribbean.

I guess various factors influence the coverage that the hurricane receives as a result of its US landfall. The US is a comparable nation to the UK, in ideologies, in language (mostly), in development. Brits have been to New York on holiday. We know the US from the TV programmes and films that we watch.

I find it quite saddening really. The newsworthiness of weather is not measured purely in terms of its impact on those living through the disaster. It is also measured based on the connection that the intended audience feels towards the disaster’s victims.

The caption on the photo read as follows:

Like this photo if you would rescue this dog. Ignore it if you don’t care.

I ignored it. And it has troubled me ever since.*

Occasionally, I’ll receive an all-too-long email, usually from someone dear to me, asking me to forward it to a specified number of friends to bring good luck to both them and me, and quite likely the person who sent it to me. (Wow, this month has five Mondays, five Tuesdays and five Wednesdays. The first time since the Gregorian calendar was introduced.**)

I always ignore them.

And all too frequently, a post will appear on Facebook with the words “R.I.P Morgan Freeman” (it’s always Morgan Freeman, and there’s never a full stop after the P). The latest one has been Liked 1,438,643 times, has 378,778 comments and has been shared a staggering 61,344 times.

I’ve ignored it. It’s not because I don’t like the man. I genuinely rate him as an actor. It’s because I’m quite certain he’s not dead. So suggesting that he rests in peace, at this stage in his life, would literally be a death wish.

There are similar variants. “Press L to see what happens next” is a common one. (L, coincidentally, is the Facebook shortcut for liking a post, btw. If you press L, nothing appears to happen, and you soon move on to look at some pictures of cute cats. (Cue lolz.) Meanwhile, the Like count has just incremented by one.)

I’m not sure whether their purpose is in aid of vanity by those that post them, or advertising revenue to the same. Either way, they highlight the gullibility of those who use the internet, and the power of heartstrings among the very same.

So if I ignore your email, don’t be offended. Good luck will either come to you or not, and my obeying the instructions in the email will have not a jot of impact to your life, nor indeed mine. But I urge you to take the same lack of action, for my sake as well as yours.

As an aside, when Morgan Freeman does die, it is expected that it will take three full months for anyone to acknowledge the fact, owing to the cynicism with which such “news” will be greeted by that point in time.

* I’ve since given it not a moment’s thought.

** 2007

On page four of a literary work is a reference to something that appears on “page five”. But the thing being referenced appears at the very top of page six. So I change the reference from “page five” to “page six”. All is good.

But in so doing, because the word “six” is shorter than “five”, and word and line breaks being what they are, everything thereafter shunts up a little, and the thing that previously appeared at the top of page six now appears at the bottom of page five.

Without changing other aspects of the document, I am unable to correctly reference the thing being referenced.

I shut my laptop, find a seat on the floor in the corner of the room, focus on an indistinct point on the opposite wall while hugging my legs, and rock backwards and forwards as tears stream down my face.

Thus far in my career, the above scenario has never happened. But I imagine it’s only a matter of time.

My daughter and I left the house, put our respective bags into the boot of the car, put on our respective seat belts, and set off for school, as we do every morning.

At 0807, we stopped at the lights on Cedars Road, waiting to turn right onto Clapham Common North Side. Unusually, we were the only vehicle at the lights. More often than not, there are enough vehicles to make getting through the lights in a single sequence far from a formality.

While waiting for green, an articulated foreshortened oil tanker pulled out wide before turning left into Cedars Road. A cyclist was on his inside, marginally ahead of the lorry. I’m unsure whether she was intending to continue west down Clapham Common North Side or turn left into Cedars Road. Either way, the tanker driver didn’t see her, and hit her with the nearside corner of his cab.

At that point I saw her face in panic. My screaming “no” had no impact, my windows being wound all the way up. I genuinely thought that at that stage of the accident, the lorry driver had clocked the situation. If I remember, his speed slowed, but I now think this was because of his changing up a gear. He continued into Cedars Road, oblivious of the unfolding situation.

The cyclist screamed repeatedly for the tanker to stop. But he didn’t hear. She slipped from her bike, and eventually fell to the ground. I think I remember her face change from a fighting to a resigned frame. But maybe this memory has been embellished subconsciously.

At this point, the accident progressed out of my eye line, as the tanker moved to block my line of sight. I was thankful for this, as I was almost certain that the worst possible outcome would result.

Eventually, about 12–15 metres further down Cedars Road, the tanker came to a halt, presumably prompted by the sense of something hindering his progress. I opened my car door and ran across to the other carriageway, expecting to find a body crushed by the two front sets of the tanker cab’s nearside wheels. The tanker driver followed me round the front of his vehicle.

The woman was indeed trapped, but miraculously (to me), she was still in front of all of the tanker’s wheels. Where her bike was, I have no idea. But her body was trapped underneath the tanker cab. She lay still and silent. The tanker driver was utterly shocked. He ran back to his cab, either to turn off his engine or to reverse – I think it was the former, but I couldn’t be sure.

I ran back to call the emergency services from the phone that was in my car. I feel ashamed at this action. Maybe I should have tried to establish her state of health. I tried to explain to the emergency services operator that we were on the junction of Queenstown Road and Clapham Common North Side, which she clearly struggled with. (Queenstown Road turns into Cedars Road way before it hits the Common.) My panicked state couldn’t fathom the reason for her confusion. I berated myself later for my error.

Once we’d sorted the location, I reeled off the services that we’d need. Ambulance, naturally. Police, because this was an RTC. And fire, because there was likely a need to lift an oil tanker off a person. The whole suite.

By this stage, there were sufficient people around the woman to aid her until the emergency services arrived. I now had my daughter in my arms, and was eagerly looking up and down Clapham Common North Side to guide the emergency services to the accident. They were quick to arrive.

The fire engine secured itself to the back of the tanker, to save the possibility of it rolling forward I guess. I gave my name and mobile number to the police officer, which he rather quaintly wrote down in his A7 (yes, A7) notebook. (I was reminded of Heartbeat.) And I was on my way, assured that the police would be in contact. I’m quite confident in that I was the only third party witness to the accident.

The police have not been in touch. I called them a couple of days later, but was told that if they needed to speak to me, they would call.

Here is the only news article I can find about the collision. The 28-year-old cyclist has allegedly suffered life-changing injuries. I wish her as full a recovery as possible.

I don’t know who, if anyone, was to blame for the accident; nor will I speculate. But I will beg my cycling friends to please take extra care around large vehicles, particularly those that might be turning left. Your life can be transformed in an instant, as happened that morning for the woman.

Previously, we had completed the arduous task of building a new website delivery system for government, from soup to nuts. Both the front-end and the back-end were highly bespoke, the vision being a single content repository and delivery mechanism for all UK government content. Its name was DotP.

Traction was slow. Without a mandate, we relied on selling the concept to other government departments, and had some success. First, ukonline.gov.uk was ported from its unwieldy and expensive HTML platform provided by BT Syntegra. I then project managed the migration of dh.gov.uk to the new platform. (More specifically, it involved the replacement of doh.gov.uk with dh.gov.uk, a stroke of genius that made the migration that bit simpler and the branding that bit clearer. But that’s another story.)

A couple of other small websites came to join the party before the concept of Directgov was introduced.

As I remember, the project kicked off in November 2003. We enlisted offshore support to allow us to hit some very aggressive content entry deadlines. We implemented a radical (and in my opinion confusing) information architecture at the behest of the business. And we went live in January 2004. As project manager, I gave a written status update on 25 December 2003, and a verbal one to Andrew Pinder, the e-Envoy, on Boxing Day. Yet again, we delivered on time.

The hard launch followed in May 2004, and on 9 July I left the Cabinet Office to venture to New York for new experiences. I looked back on the project very fondly. I even cried during my leaving speech, such was the importance of the project, and more importantly the team, to me personally. (It was probably also influenced by me being a rather emotional person. But that aside…)

In mid-2006, we headed back to London to start our next chapter. While I remembered Directgov, it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind – until we hit London. It was on the back of buses, on billboards, and even had a TV campaign. Its URL and its distinctive orange branding adorned every government website, and it was a big deal. A very big deal. It had much, much greater prominence than its UK online predecessor had enjoyed.

The DotP platform was retired 40 days shy of its fourth birthday, on 14 March 2007, upon DH’s migration to Stellent. (Directgov moved off the platform two months prior to this.) Directgov the website will be retired tonight, making way for www.gov.uk, the new government offering.

I wish its successor well. A good number of my good friends are involved in the project, and I wish it every success: for them, for its audience (of 15 million visitors per month), and as the next instalment in the story of the single point of entry for government. Directgov has had a very good life, and I am proud to this day to have played a key role in its inception.