It’s that time of year again: time for some life-admin in the form of renewing the car insurance. It’s the most fun I’ve had since Christmas! Even though I’m now over 25 and have managed to build up two years’ no claims discount, apparently I still need all the help I can get when it comes beating down the price of my car insurance. (Maybe it’s something to do with this incident; though it wasn’t my fault!)

I ended up renewing my policy with Admiral, after discovering that their customer service is absolutely awesome, their renewal quote was reasonable, and they gave me a discount just for asking!

Admiral: Their website is a bit clunky, but the customer service is awesome. These are definitely the people I’d want to be dealing with if I ever need to make a claim. (Now, if only every call centre could be this good.)

The Process

To save dealing directly with insurers one-by-one you can go to comparison sites that gather quotes from dozens of insurers at once; and to save having to choose which of the comparison sites to use, you go to Martin Lewis’ Car Insurance Guide. There he will tell you not only which comparison sites to use, but the most efficient order to use them in! (Updated every quarter based on a full survey!) He’ll even optimise your job role: if you’re a software consultant you can save ~5% on your premium just by calling yourself a computer engineer instead.

After some eye-watering “best” quotes from the comparison sites, the renewal quote from Admiral wasn’t looking so bad. To take it down further I took my wife off the policy — she has decided not to go through with getting a full UK license for now, so taking her off the policy as a provisional driver was bound to help.

I also checked in with my friends at A-Plan insurance brokers to see if they could work some magic (don’t bother filling out the form on the website — call them on the phone and you’ll get a ballpark figure in 5 minutes. Ask for Jason Jarratt; tell him I sent you :-) Unfortunately Jason’s quick search yielded similarly eye-watering quotes to what I’d seen before,  so much so that he didn’t think there was much hope of finessing down the price with some direct negotiations. He advised me to stick with my current insurer.

The Findings

In the end, after about half a day of research I was barely able to beat my renewal quote. This came as quite a surprise; I thought insurers were meant to screw you on the renewals to exploit the inattentive and lazy? Maybe they only do that after the first couple of renewals, once they know you’re not paying attention and don’t have enough spare time to shop around...

I had already called Admiral to see about taking my wife off the policy and Tiffany was very friendly and helpful, so I figured there was nothing to lose in calling them again. Much to my surprise they were accepting calls at 8:30pm, how nice! I think their call centre is in the USA since both times I called the person I spoke to had an accent; I guess it makes it easier for them to be so friendly if it’s only 3:30pm where they are (rather than 2am for a call centre in India).

The Clincher

So I called Admiral and said I’d found a slightly cheaper quote; could they match it? After confirming the details of the policy to check everything was up to date (it was), the also-super-friendly Bethann put me on hold and went to speak to her manager. A minute later she was back with the offer of a discount that was almost 10% off the premium! My premium is pretty hefty, so that discount is nothing to scoff at. That’s quite a result for just asking!

It’s a good thing I got that discount too, because before she let me go the super-friendly-Bethann also managed to charm me in to an optional courtesy car upgrade. I got a bit of a spiel from Tiffany as well, before she’d let me go, so I assume it’s their ploy to win you over with awesome customer service then try for the up-sell. It’s okay; she earned it.

Meet Clive Wearing; a man with the worst case of amnesia ever known. Twenty-five years ago he lost his memory and now his wife, Deborah, is the only person he recognises. He is constantly under the impression that he has just come out of a lengthy period of unconsciousness, so every time he sees her he greets her with the enthusiasm of being reunited after years apart.

Clive Wearing has a neurological disorder called anterograde amnesia which is a condition that doesn't allow new memories to transfer into long-term memory. This means that he will never remember anything since his incident, similar to Leonard in the movie Memento.

On March 29, 1985 Clive came home with a very bad headache which wouldn’t go away for days, and wouldn’t respond to any medication. By the fourth day he had a high fever, and forgot his daughter’s name; by the fifth day he was very delirious.

Clive had contracted the Herpes simplex virus which attacked his brain and caused damage to the left and right temporal lobes as well as the frontal lobe. The temporal lobes contain a structure called the hippocampus which is involved in memory function, and in Clive’s case the hippocampus has almost certainly been destroyed in both sides of the brain.

Before his illness, Clive was a successful musicologist and conductor. One of the few things that have survived intact is his ability to read music and play the piano.

Now his memory-span is so short that he will often forget the beginning of a sentence before you have completed it. Or he may begin answering a question but forget the question before he’s finished with his answer. It’s not uncommon to forget what you ordered for lunch by the time the food is served; but Clive additionally doesn’t remember which flavours belong to which foods.

Happy Holidays from the Straight No Chaser men’s a capella, Indiana University.

Flatterland (2001), by Ian Stewart, is the long-awaited sequel to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (written in 1884!) — an imaginary story about two-dimensional beings living in a two-dimensional world. I’ve not read the original Flatland, but I have it on good authority that Flatterland is much better.

This book is essentially a mash-up of an easy-going children’s story with hard-core mathematical concepts that will stretch your mind. Flatland is a 2-dimensional world where females are lines with razor-sharp end-points; males are two-dimensional shapes; browsing the interline is always wireless because otherwise you’d be trapped inside a network of cables with no way to get out; meat comes mainly from oxagons – hexagons crossed with octagons; and books come as long lines rolled up into a spiral.

Vikki, a line from Flatland, is taken on a tour of different worlds by her guide, a space-hopper. On the way, they explore 3-dimensional space, 4-dimensional space, higher-dimensions, fractional dimensions, and more.

Although the story is fictional, the facts and concepts are most certainly not fictional. They explain the concepts of Hamming distance and error-detecting/error-correcting encodings in a way that is remarkably clearer than my university lectures on information theory! They visit topological worlds where doughnuts and two-holed doughnuts turn into teacups and teapots respectively. The milk comes from a one-sided cow named moobius, whose tail is joined to its nose with a twist; oh, and the milk is served in Klein bottles.

The book is full of incredibly witty puns, which are highly amusing for the scientifically-minded reader who has come across some of these mathematical concepts, and enjoys geeky jokes. One example: Moobius, the one-sided cow, has a loud marching band playing from within – this music cannot be stopped because that would be incredibly “orienting”, and besides, he is nothing without his “band”. (Geeky-pun explanation: A Möbius strip is a single-sided non-orientable two-dimensional surface embedded in three dimensions, and can be constructed by taking a band of paper and gluing its ends together with a twist.)

A non-technical reader can just ignore all the incredible puns and still enjoy the book, with all its challenging thought experiments and odd situations, written in an easy-to-read style.

It’s been exactly a year since we got the broadband connected here. I ran a speed test at the time and was much impressed with the results:

2008 Speed Test Results

We’re on the O2 Standard Home package, which is rated at "Up to 8 meg" downstream and "Up to 1.3 meg" upstream, so I was quite impressed to be getting rather close to these ideals.

Let’s see how things are a year on:

2009 Speed Test Results

• The SpeedTest.net test server is allegedly 300 miles closer than it was last year.
• Which might be why the ping is marginally down, from 39ms to 32ms.
• Upload speed has decreased by 8% since last year’s value (from 1.11Mb/s to 1.02Mb/s).
• Download speed has decreased by 12% since last year’s value (from 8.05Mb/s to 7.05Mb/s).

So overall marginally worse than last year, but still quite good when you consider the variability of home broadband connection speeds. And given the level of customer service I received recently, I'm in no hurry to switch broadband providers.

I finally decided to upgrade my ageing Orange SmartPhone E650 (which is just a re-branded HTC s710) to something a little modern, namely the HTC Touch HD. It’s kind of like an iPhone, except that it runs Windows Mobile. Also, the screen is larger, and has more than twice the resolution of an iPhone. The built-in camera has a 5 megapixel resolution, which is nice (also more than twice that of the iPhone). The only thing is that it doesn’t support multi-touch, but I’m not too bothered about that. The full-screen video streaming experience is enough to compensate for that. And it comes with a handy little soft carry pouch, to protect the screen from knocks and scratches in your pockets. Very practical!

It’s nice to see that HTC has made a brand name for themselves, and entered the market without re-branding their gear. They even sponsored one of the pro-cycling teams participating in the Tour de France this year, so they must be doing well! (It looks like they made a good choice in team to sponsor too, because Columbia-HTC was the team with that guy who’s a bit good at winning sprints, and breaking British cycling records: Mark Cavendish.)

After last time I negotiated an upgrade with the Orange “disconnections” department I knew that a hard bargain was the route to success. By the end of the conversation they were offering me a free phone upgrade, on a cheap contract, with unlimited minutes and texts, and unlimited mobile internet for free! (This was after the previous guy I spoke to advised me that for ~£7.50 per month I could have up to 250MB of mobile internet browsing per month, but told me there was absolutely no unlimited plan available from Orange.) I really think the “disconnections” (i.e. “customer retention”) department has pretty much free reign to offer you whatever deal is needed to keep you on as a customer.

Alas, Orange discontinued the HTC Touch HD a few months ago; something to do with software problems — perhaps as a result of the branding “customisations” they do on the phones they sell — although I didn’t find out the reason for sure.

Instead I decided to go with O2 as a provider, who have a (publically advertised) unlimited web bundle for £7.50 per month, and very good contract deals available through mobiles.co.uk. My base contract is only £20 per month, with a good chunk of minutes, unlimited texts, and a £5 monthly discount on the O2 Home Broadband which we already have!

So far, so good.

Lance Armstrong may not have won the Tour de France 2009, but let’s not forget that he won a few Tours de France before that. Lance Armstrong: Tour de Force, by Daniel Coyle is a book about one of those tours.

The book is not just about the 2004 Tour de France — only the final one-third covers the Tour. The first two-thirds are all about the rest of the season before that, the wider pro-cycling peloton in 2004, and all the things around it. Training and preparations for the tour, including long hours in the saddle during the off-season, meticulously procuring the best equipment available (which Lance affectionately terms “The Shit”) and the equipment which he hopes will blow away the opposition (“The Shit That Will Kill Them”); Lance’s every-day life, interactions with his then-girlfriend, Sheryl Crow, and his kids. And although Lance is obviously the main subject, Dan does a good job of covering a number of other riders and teams as well.

Dan has an engaging writing style and covers a lot of interesting details, from the style with which Floyd Landis entered the road racing scene, to the words coming over the radio into Lance’s ear during the final time trial. I don’t think this book is just for the cycling enthusiasts; I read a little to my wife (who has no interest in cycling) and she was pleasantly surprised, saying that the writing was a lot more colourful and dynamic, talking more about the riders than the technicalities of cycling. Dan also includes a succinct appendix which can get the complete novice up-to-speed on pro cycling, types of races, teams, tactics, and cheating, in under 9 pages.

“Riders eat and drink the equivalent of three Thanksgiving dinners a day during the Tour.”

It was Lance Armstrong that said cycling doesn’t get any easier; you just go faster. Which essentially means that cycling is a competition about how much pain you can tolerate. Thus, it attracts some truly spectacular competitors. Such as one of Lance Armstrong’s former teammates, Floyd Landis.

Here is a description of Floyd’s initial entry into the cyclist road racing scene:

He showed up for his first road race wearing a garish jersey, a visored helmet, and a pair of brilliantly colored Argyle socks, pulled high. He made his way slowly to the front row... wheeling a bike with a monstrously big 56-tooth front chain ring, so large that it resembled a pie plate. A slow crater of disgusted amazement widened around Landis... Then in a loud voice that rang with Mennonite clarity, Landis said what he'd planned to say, a reading from the First Book of Floyd:

"If there's anyone here who can stay with me, I will buy you dinner."

Laughter. Landis remained quiet, then replied.

"You shouldn't laugh, because that gets me angry. And if you make me angry, then I'm going to blow you all up."¹

More Laughter.

The race began, and Floyd rode up to the leaders. Then past them. He pressed the pace, slowly at first and then faster and faster, pushing his pie plate until it hummed, until the others felt like they were trying to follow a motorcycle.

"You like my socks?" he asked. "How do you like them now?"

They gasped for air.

"I'll take that for a yes," Landis continued. "How about if I go a little farther up the road, and you can tell me how they look from there?"

Landis won his first race by fifteen minutes, including a stop to repair his punctured tire. He won his second race by 45 minutes.

"Get Floyd emotionally involved and there's no way he'll back down," Geoghegan said. "He will go until his heart literally explodes."

           — Tour de Force, by Daniel Coyle

And before his entry into road racing he was a competitive mountain biker, known for riding wheelies during races... going uphill.

Footnote:
¹No, he wasn't threatening terrorist activity. In cycling, to "blow up" means to run out of energy, usually in a spectacular and catastrophic manner.

It has been nearly a year since we signed up for home broadband with O2. I remember they had top customer ratings at the time, but I didn’t really have any opinions myself — since nothing had gone wrong, I didn’t have any occasion to deal with customer services. Until now.

Thursday Morning 6:30am: Internet connection is not working. Try re-setting the modem (very occasionally we get connectivity problems that are fixed by a reset — this is probably the only thing I could complain about with my O2 Broadband experience to date). Mess around with the computer: try the Windows 7 networking wizard, reset network adaptor, run the O2 Broadband software CD diagnostics, reboot, pray to the gods, cross fingers, etc.

6:45am: Still no joy. Call the Customer Services number on the CD case. Someone picks up on the first ring. Wait a minute, it’s 6:45 in the morning and there’s someone to take my call? I wasn’t actually expecting someone to pick up so it takes me a moment to answer.

Me: Hi, there’s a problem with our home broadband. The “Broadband” light on the router is alternating between being off, and being lit red. I’ve tried resetting it.

CSR: Okay, what’s your home phone number? Let me see... Okay, there was a fault reported at your exchanged 17 minutes ago. Let’s see here... Okay, we have an engineer on-site at the exchange who is working on the problem right now.

Me: Wow, okay. I guess I’ll just wait for it to be resolved. Thanks.

It’s 6:45am and they not only have the Customer Services call-centre up and running, but they have engineers on-site with a sub-15-minute response time on exchange faults? Can you spell LOCKDOWN?

The icing on the cake:

9:05am: (Text message) O2 Broadband: We’ve noticed a line fault that might affect broadband in your area. Sorry. We’re working on it and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s fixed.

(I wonder if this message would have come sooner if the fault had not arisen so early in the morning.)

10:00am: (Text message) O2 Broadband: We got your broadband back up and running at 9:30 today. It should be back to normal now.

Talk about keeping your customers informed!

I’m sure O2 will keep their well-earned top ratings for Customer Service and Reliability — this is by far the best Broadband internet experience I’ve ever had, or even heard of!

The book I recently finished, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, by Sudhir Venkatesh, is essentially the extended edition of Chapter 3 from Freakonomics.

Aside:

The book Freakonomics was an interesting look into the economic forces that drive everyday things. It doesn’t look like I ever got around to reviewing this book, but it comes highly recommended. Don’t let the “economics” put you off — it is suitable for those who are not inclined toward economics!

Chapter 3 of the book is “Why do drug dealers still live with their Moms?” and covers “The economics of drug dealing, including the surprisingly low earnings and abject working conditions of crack cocaine dealers”.

As a sociology student, Sudhir finds himself spending time with a local gang leader and discovering the intricate details of gangland Chicago.

The structure of a drug gang is not unlike that of a multi-site manufacturing company. There is a hierarchy of bosses who make decisions at various levels. People try to climb the ladder to get more money (and safer work). Violations such as stealing are met with standard disciplinary action.

Gang wars are often the result of “foot soldiers” (the peons of the drug gang) starting fights due to their inflated egos, but are highly undesirable in the grand scheme of things because violence drives away customers. “Turf wars” are more often conducted in controlled inter-gang meetings where negotiations take place without violence. Gangs even engage in mergers with other gangs!

The resemblance to more conventional enterprises is uncanny; I’m curious if this evolved completely independently, or if some gang boss once upon a time happened to have an MBA!

Police and ambulances often don’t attend calls in to gangland, so the gangs and local residents have to make their own structure and justice system. It’s like a miniature country with its own structure of jobs, policies, and taxation (by way of extortion, bribes, protection).

Sudhir, now Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Columbia University, spent a decade studying the gangs and local residents in Chicago’s South Side.

This book is a truly fascinating glimpse into a world that few outsiders get to see.