Week 113

Monday 17 May 2021

Months ago, probably last year, someone from the water company left a note to say they’d “exchanged” the water meter, like I was meant to know what that means. It turned out they’d installed a smart meter, which unlike a smart electricity meter doesn’t come with an “in-home display” (IHD) but does automagically transmit regular meter readings to the water company (which is especially helpful cos the meters here are all locked away in a mysterious central location we don’t have access to).

This week, for some reason, I became interested in (it would be wrong to say “obsessed by”) looking at the water company’s app, which is excessively theatrically secure (cos we wouldn’t want a criminal to steal my phone and sneer at how much water I use or pay my bill for me), and which, in the absence of an IHD can, after a fashion, show an hourly water usage graph (delayed by a day or two).

Alarmed by the allegation that I use “more water than other similar homes”, I’ve been consciously using less water. Like, turning off the shower during the soap-and-shampoo application phase – yes, it’s a bit hard to turn the poorly designed tap with a soapy hand, but we don’t do these things cos they’re easy. It won’t save much money, cos most of the bill is a standing charge, but it’s a fun game, and a reason to feel smug about having a slightly smaller environmental footprint. One day, get this, I used just 45 litres of water.

I had some arancini for, I think, the first time (!). Of course I’d seen Inspector Montalbano eating some before, and thought those orange balls look intriguing, and sure enough they are very tasty.

Some work.

• You know in TransXChange documents when you have a ShortWorking in a StartDeadRun? I was embarrassed to learn I’ve been mishandling those journeys – treating the DepartureTime as the start of the dead run – for possibly years. Oh well, those structures are surprisingly rare – which helped the problem go unnoticed for so long – and I’ve fixed my understanding now. Cool story.

• There’s a problem with fraud in the internet advertising industry – you know, robots clicking on adverts. The robots’ motives may vary from wasting advertisers’ money to making it look like website publishers are fraudulently clicking on their own adverts – there’s a supposed extortion scam involving the latter.

  This week, I noticed hundreds of pounds of extra clicks per day, all apparently from Germany – and that Germanity made me suspicious, because very few folks outside of the UK use a website about buses mostly in the UK. I found a bit of suspicious German traffic in the logs, which I blocked, but it made no difference. Then, as an experiment, I removed all the ad code from the website, and only the German clicks continued, proving there was nothing I could do – if I were a robot, I’d put the ad code somewhere local, and edit my /etc/hosts to point bustimes.org to localhost, and that (or something similar) seemed to be exactly what they were doing.

  The thing is, I haven’t had any emails about extortion. I have now filled in Google’s “Invalid Clicks Contact Form”. Either I get to keep all the money, or I get banned from AdSense unjustly and have to explore alternative business models (get a proper job), or something in between, which is probably OK.