Grrr! Murphy is taking the piss....

I posted elseweb about the problems with BT's "Digital Voice" project and no-longer being able to make landline emergency calls in powercuts, so of course we promptly had our longest powercut in ages, Only 90 minutes, but it was pitch black outside and of course it took the heating out with it - gas boiler, but electric pumps. I'm pretty much convinced it was the sub-station on the main road opposite my house as I noticed there was someone working in there just moments before the power came back on. Ironically my next door neighbour has just gone to work for the power network, yet his van was sat on his drive throughout,

On top of which I've spent the day sneezing, though at least the Covid test says "Not one of ours, guv".

The oven is on and I'm planning on warming myself with chicken and chips.

I may as well add the Digital Voice post while I'm on as the publicity about it from BT and OFCOM has been near non-existent:

https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/19823730.county-durham-residents-arent-happy-bt-axing-landlines/

I made a note to look the background to this story up when I got back from the land-of-no-internet (aka my mother's). The TLDR version is that under a programme called 'Digital Voice' BT are axing the old PSTN landline network come 2025, which means everyone's (new) landline phone will operate via the net, and stop working in the event of a powercut, which will make calling 999 a bit of a bugger.

Apparently OFCOM are allowing them to do this because everyone can now call 999 on their mobiles, except those who don't have one, or who live somewhere with no signal, or whose mobile simply has a flat battery.. The problem for this argument being that the recent Storm Arwen didn't just knock out the power for major areas of the North East, it took out their cellphone coverage as well, leaving some people with no way to call 999 for a fortnight.

It's also going to be a problem for elderly or disabled people who have an emergency care set-up via the phone-line. My mother has one to the local county run system and the only thing I'd seen about Digital Voice prior to the Storm Arwen stuff was a letter from them, which completely failed to explain what was going on.

I'm speechless that this wasn't stopped on general emergency planning grounds, never mind putting vulnerable people at risk.

But Tories.....

 

Recent Reading - Jan 2022

A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine

The sequel to A Memory Called Empire. Having achieved her mission of setting the all-engulfing Empire of Teixcalaan at war with the unknown power nibbling on her space station home's borders, Mahit Dzamare has fled home before she's herself engulfed, but finds all of Lsel Station's leadership want to know what's going on inside her head, and if that means brain surgery, then so be it. Meanwhile, back on Teixcalaan's capital planet, Three Seagrass (aka Reed), Mahit's former liaison and now an undersecretary in the Information Ministry (aka a senior spy) takes receipt of a plea for an expert on talking to aliens from the Teixcalaani fleet, and decides she and Mahit are the best candidates for the job. Being Reed with an idea, this means her talking very fast at everyone she encounters, and leaving them steamrollered in her wake.

I didn't like this quite as much as A Memory Called Empire, but that doesn't mean that I didn't like it a lot. Not only are Mahit and Reed back, but there are a couple of new and interesting characters with the Tleixcalaani fleet, and we also get a substantial chunk of Teixcalaani politics via Eight Antidote, the 11yo clone of the former Emperor and likely future Emperor. The problem for me was structural, in that the resolution bypasses Reed and Mahit.

OTOH we're pretty much promised a third book from something Mahit says to Reed, and I'll be queuing up for that.

To End in Fire - David Weber and Eric Flint

I thought Weber was done with Honor Harrington, but I'd forgotten the spin-off series with Eric Flint. The Grand Alliance may have hammered the Solarian League in record time, but the Mesan Alignment, the slave-trading eugenicist bad-guys responsible for the last 20 (30?) years of war are still out there, and all the intelligence types are still looking for them, And their hidden base. Utterly bizzarely the story has a single major new character, the Solarian Leaugue's new spy-chief, who is basically a Marty Stu (he's repeatedly called a genius) of Flint's frequent collaborator Charles E Gannon. He's even called Charles E Gannon?!?

The plot is completely predictable, the spies and analysts narrow down the physical  patch of space where the bad guys can be and then hand the problem over to Honor to blow up their not so little evil base, But there's something off for me, the whole thing feels rushed, even to the point of having Honor go into premature labour to get her back in the saddle a couple of months earlier, which pretty much times the whole plot to that point at under seven months, even though it can take months to get from place to place. One character even completely regrows a leg they lose in the course of the plot within those seven months, including post-regrowth physio. Yet there's absolutely no reason that I can see for the compressed timetable.

And there's at least one more book to come, because that was only the bad-guy's secret base, the good-guys don't know about the secret secret base yet.

Fighting the Great War At Sea - Norman Friedman

Wow, this one was heavy going, I think it took me a full month to get through, reading most days. The length isn't excessive, either 320 or 416 pages in the print edition depending on whose website you believe (though that's A4 pages), but it's a very dense book. As is normal for Friedman, about a third of the length is footnotes, often just a citation, but just as frequently 3 and occasionally 4 kindle pages of text. But it was heavy going because of its depth and I've come out of it finally understanding what was going on with Fisher's Baltic Project and the truth about Winston's competing desire to invade Gallipoli - yes, Winston was all for the Gallipoli landings, but so was the entire War Cabinet and Winston took the historical fall for all of them as the junior member.

And oh, dear God, Asquith*. I was vaguely aware he was discussing Cabinet affairs with his lover Venetia Stanley, I wasn't aware it went to the level of "We've been seriously discussing the invasion of Borkum, we've agreed always to refer to it as Sylt, but we really mean Borkum"

* aka the Prime Minister,

Definitely only one for the serious naval history fan, and it might more accurately be titled Fighting the Great War in the North Sea as coverage of the other theatres is minimal.