"Hello this is an urgent announcement for people on benefits"

We have been driven mad by those endless junk calls. That hectoring woman's voice - did she work for the Inland Revenue's unpaid tax department in a previous life? -  pressurising you into ordering boiler work: "Press 2 now, do it now!".

This morning, in exasperation, I dangerously opted to press 9, the option to opt-out.

The computer immediately dropped the line.

[Update: this doesn't work, by the way. I was called again while writing this.]

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I had thought that BT's free service, BT Call Protect, might be the answer. It does seem to have seen off some nuisance calls but you need to load it with the miscreant's phone number. The My BT app is so badly designed that this takes around five minutes.

"Hello this is an urgent announcement ..." are in any event more cunning. They change the number every time - in fact the apparent caller-ID isn't even well-formed, they're spoofing it.

In theory the telco the spammers connect to could police that. But there's a misalignment of incentives. It's more profitable to take the spammers' money as the telco doesn't directly suffer any financial consequences on account of the pain of the victims. Indeed, BT makes even more money by selling anti-nuisance-call products and services to its customers.

In this kind of market failure, only regulation works. Don't hold your breath.

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There is a technical solution in the form of a sophisticated call blocker.

You set up the white list of numbers allowed through, and put hurdles (voice authentication, for example) in the way of everything else. A good device is not cheap.

Still, insensate fury carries you a long way. I put the order in this morning:

Amazon link

I know that configuration will be a pain. I know the excuse, 'this costs no more than a big shop at Waitrose', isn't completely compelling.

But short of taking the boys round, what can you do?

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Update (Friday 3rd February 2017):

The trueCall device arrived lunchtime today. Setting it up proved pretty easy. Just a matter of reading the enclosed instructions carefully and plugging it all in. The lengthy part was uploading the 'star' list of numbers to be allowed through to the trueCall website. The format they want is CSV:  phone number comma name, one entry per line.

It turned out that I had 37 phone numbers I wanted to allow through. Extracting them from Google Contacts and reformatting took a while (no embedded spaces in the phone numbers).

Still, done now and the device is synchronised to the website.

Now to enjoy unaccustomed quiet.

(I was going to write a piece on option-pricing and Black-Scholes this afternoon, but that will now be deferred to tomorrow, I guess).

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Update (March 6th 2017):

It's worked brilliantly. There have been no more nuisance calls.

Classic pix: spot the murderer

More pictures from before this blog got started, back in 2005.

2005: Even then the author tried his family's patience

How am I getting on with my Christmas present, "Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur"? Thanks for asking. You see, QFT is like a big jigsaw puzzle where each of the pieces is itself pretty incomprehensible. You spend a long time delving into Lagrangians (that's a piece of the puzzle), quantum simple harmonic oscillators (another piece), calculus of variations and the Euler-Lagrange equation (another), and so on, without much sense of overall direction.

Gradually, the individual pieces themselves begin to make sense (you grasp enough of the trees to see the local wood) .. and with enough pieces under your belt, you can begin to assemble them to get a picture of QFT as an entirety. (Also see this interesting piece from Sean Carroll).

You see why the big picture of quantum field theory is so inaccessible. I'm about a third of the way through the book, currently looking at quantum (operator-valued) fields. It would be a pretty special amateur to get through the whole of this book, that's for sure.

Meanwhile, Clare is preparing a new hat for me, to update the one in the picture above. Seems to feature the letter 'D' ...

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2004: working on a contract with Samsung

I was assigned to help Samsung with their bid into BT's 21st Century Network (their transition to a multi-media IP network). My task was to help them both with understanding BT's idiosyncratic ways and with the phrasing of the English response-text. As usual, on the last day we pulled an all-nighter. Young Samsung engineers were out for the count, lying on desks and flopped over chairs. I was busy till dawn when the Samsung VP approached me in surprise. "We were told that all you westerners were decadent; that you all went home at 5.30 at night. We were the ones who worked till we dropped!"

It was clear that that Samsung executive had never worked in consulting - nor experienced a Western corporate bid team in action!

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One is en vacances, the other is an author with a penchant for murder (2004)

Click on the image to probe further ...

The hell of changing the router in a connected house

Today my BT Home Hub Wifi died and I entered the hell which is the installation of a new router.

I happened to have a spare BT Home Hub which I duly installed via the CD, carefully arranging not to have BT-Yahoo as my home page and not to be parasitized by the Yahoo toolbar.

My first mistake was to change the WiFi security password. The laptop immediately dropped the wireless connection and refused henceforth to recognise the router - and could not be persuaded otherwise. Trying a re-installation with the CD, it wouldn't accept my preferred password. So back to factory defaults and at least the laptop can now access the Internet.

What's easy? Mobile phones and tablets are no problem. They find the new SSID and the password is accepted no problem. Other devices are more problematic.

It seemed impossible to configure the D-Link cameras to the new router wirelessly. I have had to connect via Ethernet (in one case by dusting off my old Netgear Powerline devices).

The printer was a pain when I forgot that entering hex using UPPER CASE characters is never going to work. Eventually I did it again - properly - tapping away on the front of the printer's tiny screen.

The Sky Wireless Connector, used for iPlayer and similar, is reconfigured through the Sky Box itself and after (a) refusing to throw up the necessary screen, and (b) denying it had succeeded, it eventually worked.

It's amazing how many devices around the house are wirelessly linked to the Internet, and ludicrous that it took me two hours of messing around with diverse management interfaces to get most of these devices rehomed.

What's needed is a standard all-device management interface which is universally implemented, so that a home management system can do the whole thing once and for all. The amount of human input actually needed is zero - it should all be plug and play.

The decadence of Europeans

A few years ago,  I was employed as a consultant to a large South Korean telecoms company which was bidding into BT's 21st Century Network (their transition to IP).

The Koreans were mostly bright young engineers in their twenties but the Lees and Parks were not fluent in English - there I could add some value.

One area of usefulness was with photos. Most of them hadn't been to Britain before and although the M3/M25 motorway conurbation would not thrill a native it was pure exotica to my Asian colleagues.

Unfortunately their company had locked down their laptops. No way their pics could be emailed back to wives,  girlfriends and family. I was happy to help.

It is traditional on the final day of a bid to pull an all-nighter. I was there at 2 am as we feverishly rewrote crucial sections; I was there at 6 am as my Korean colleagues sprawled across desks and office chairs sound asleep.

The material was sent to be bound at 8 am and as I prepared to walk to my car for a brief nap the Korean executive in charge looked at me in some wonder.

"Still here?" he blearily asked,  "We were told you Europeans wouldn't work hard and that you all packed up in the evening."

Yep, there are some prejudices still floating around out there. And another thing - I quite took to Kimchi. My Korean friends did not win the contract by the way; they were beaten on price by Huawei.