Here’s an excellent example in today’s Independent newspaper lambasting DJ Chris Evans for blowing £12m on a car.

The Telegraph explains:

Three former Cabinet ministers, Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon, have been suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party over allegations they tried to sway policy decisions by lobbying the Government.

The allegations came after the three MPs were caught in an undercover sting by Channel Four’s Dispatches programme boasting that they had changed government policy and secured preferential access to ministers for private companies.

Recordings showing MPs in a series of meetings with bogus lobbyists were broadcast by the programme. The MPs offered their services for up to £5,000 a day.

Now and again I can’t help but comment on politics in the United Kingdom. Simply ridiculous. Absolutely 100% ridiculous.

What’s been fascinating is that, earlier today, when the news of the Channel 4 programme hit the airwaves, the Prime Minister dismissed calls for an investigation:

The Prime Minister said he did not believe it was necessary for a formal inquiry into whether ministers changed policy after being approached by Labour MPs acting on behalf of private firms

There’s been a swift u-turn now that video of Stephen Byers (above) is circulating around the planet. So now they’ve been suspended.

Has it come to this? By all means go and get a big job in the city ONCE you’ve finished your term. By all means get stuck in advising some of the big banks whilst you’re sat as a back bencher — but don’t offer to influence Government policy for 5 grand a day. Surely that must have felt a little bit inappropriate?

One of the best adverts I’ve ever seen — from the chaps at travel firm, Lastminute.com. I watch it now and gain to remind myself not to get too drawn into life’s mini challenges…

You can see Malcolm Tucker in the recent movie, In The Loop, or in the BBC TV Series, The Thick Of It.

If you liked Yes Prime Minister — and can handle thick-Scottish-accent cursing, take a look at the video…

And it can be a little bit annoying, having to download the zip file, unzip and then wait for hundreds of tiny files to upload.

Then I discovered EasyWP.

It’s a PHP script that does it all for you.

Just drag it over to your server, access it in your browser and you’ll be presented with the critical setup features (namely database name, username, password and so on).

Type them in and press ‘go’.

The script then downloads the latest version of WordPress in the background, decompresses the zip and populates the wp-config.php file for you.

Genius.

It means WordPress setup takes about 2 minutes now…

You can get the script here: http://www.funscripts.net/php-scripts/

And it’s freeware. Nice!

Woot!

My University, University College London, is now ranked number 4 on the planet. We’ve inched ahead of Oxford (number 5, joint with Imperial) and we’re just behind Yale (3) and Cambridge (2) with Harvard at the number 1 spot.

Go UCL! UCL!

US and UK institutions still dominate the top 10:

* Harvard retains top spot.
* Cambridge moves in to 2nd place, ahead of Yale.
* The rise of University College London to 4th place ahead of Oxford (5th equal with Imperial College) will be one of the major talking points this year. UCL outperformed its 800 year old peer, in terms of citations per faculty.
* Princeton returns to the top 10.

Ewan MacLeod was angry. He had been charged for sending an e-mail from a mobile phone via a package that claimed to offer free, unlimited data usage.

Months after he had written about the experience on his blog, Mr MacLeod was surprised to receive a call from the mobile phone company, 3, inviting him to meet chief finance officer Frank Sixt. Apparently, someone had posted his comments on the company’s blog, set up to promote the free service.

“Any big business is a faceless wonder, but a blog gives you the power to talk to someone in a company,” says Mr MacLeod, author of SMS Text News. “I had a call saying, ‘Frank would like to meet you.’ I was entirely delighted with the result.”

That feels like a very long time ago!

Read Dan’s full post in the FT archive here.

The online setup process was simply brilliant. Found the post-code, selected my services, chose my delivery date, typed in my bank details… everything was smooth and efficient.

THEN a day later, someone from Virgin tried phoning me to take 49 quid off me for the V+ box.

There was a specific reason I processed the transaction online. I thought you’d bill me there and then. The dog-and-pony arsing around trying to get the time to phone you guys back with a sodding reference number. Because some idiot business analyst didn’t factor this into your process.

I *TYPED* my card/bank details in. I authorised you to take money from my account. I agreed to the 49 quid up-front cost.

It was almost, almost a flipping amazingly good experience.

The net effect? My wife ended up having to phone up and complete the transaction — that I already thought I’d completed.

And it took a further two weeks for you to install; and for you to get my money.

Huge, huge friction for me. Massive friction — and wasted, wasted time for you. Do you think you could fix this for the new customers signing up? Do the transaction in *one*.

Other than this one point, it’s been brilliant.

I hope they fix that part of the system.