London Rants

I love the BBC, it offers a great service with reporters distributed all over the world and some of their research units are developing leading edge technologies to do with video technologies, music and all sorts of things to do with broadcast, HD TV, DVB as well as IPTV (such as BBC iPlayer and the list goes on. The TV License is one of the few taxes that I don’t actually mind paying. For those that are interested in the new technologies that the BBC is playing with I recommend reading the BBC Internet Blog.

One of the cool new features they are developing a new beta product called Sound Index. Details about exactly what it does can be found on the site here. In very basic terms it takes information from various music sites around the net such as iTunes, Amazon, MySpace, YouTube, Bebo, lastFM, and more, they then apply an algorithm which creates a ranking of the top 1000 songs and artists online. Very cool and very interesting!

Most Londoners have a love hate relationship with the Tube. I love it most of the time except when I have to travel during peak hour and when its horribly hot in the midst of summer. One of the things that I enjoy is the amusment that some of the TFL employees come out with to make your daily commute that little bit more amusing. Whether it be a funny annoucment on a train or platform or the occasional poem. This is what I saw today at Kings Cross - St Pancras underground.

Welcome to the inaugural London Rant.

BAA amuses me with their increases to taxes that they’ve just been granted. I have no idea why the government has granted them an allowance to do this. From their website they report an operating profile of £577 million yet they still manage to completely fuck up the operations and security of the likes of hugely important airports like Heathrow. There have been two major security incidents in the last couple of weeks, the last one occuring as I write this. They also manage to loose more baggage than Imelda Marcos has shoes as well as not even managing to maintain things like baggage handling facilities!

How does the government allow this to continue happening? I would guess that they get a large percentage of the taxes that BAA collects so allowing them to increase the taxes allows them to collect more from the general consumer who is already paying. I recently went to New York for a holiday. The cost of the return ticket from Heathrow was £285.30 but I was interested to note at the bottom of the confirmation email was a breakdown of the cost, the flight was £102 but the the Tax/Fee/Charges was £183.30! Nearly twice that of the actual fare!

Surely their ability to increase taxes and hence their revenue should be tied to their performance, especially that of security and the basics like their ability to be able to load/unload planes with luggage. They strike me to be alot like most of the formerly publicly owned companies completely incompetent due to being filled with ex public servants but profit driven due to their private ownership.