Testing3...

Very bored first thing this morning, so I thought I would try posting using my Lumia phone, something which other people no doubt regard as normal, but it is not normal for me.

First step was to get into wifi, selecting a gang called the cloud at http://www.thecloud.net/, the only free one among those listed on this occasion, and which turns out to be a service from BSkyB. First thought was that I was not going to tell my mobile phone all the stuff that the cloud wanted to know. Second thought was that I did tell my PC all that kind of stuff all the time so why not the mobile phone. So I did, and after a while I find myself with an internet connection, albeit a little slow.

I was able to search for things using Google. I was able to inspect my own blog. Emboldened, I thought I might try a posting. But this was not so clever, as while some sites seem to know that you are using a mobile phone and adjust the user experience accordingly, blogger post was not one of them and it took quite a lot of fiddling about to achieve one small post, the one before this one.

By this time I have more or less woken up and realise that telling my mobile phone all about myself while connected to the internet by a wifi service about which I know nothing (although, to be fair, I had taken a peek at the 'about' page and it did look entirely OK, albeit entirely spoofable) was not the same as doing the same sort of thing while connected to the internet by BT, who might tell various people in obscure parts of government about what I am up to but who are, nevertheless, entirely trustworthy for my sort of more or less innocent activities. So the upshot of all this is that I am not going to do a lot of blogging from my mobile phone but I have given some of my account details a bit of a wash & brush up, something which was, in any event, a bit overdue.

Much flapdoodle, with some services going to quite a lot of bother to make sure that you are who you say you are before they will change such details. I shudder to think what would now be involved if either my email address or my mobile phone number were to change;  maybe even worse than changing your national insurance number with DWP or your unique person identifier with HMRC.

PS: in the course of reminding myself which branch of government looks after national insurance numbers, I find that a gang called who4 (corporate site at http://www.who4.ltd.uk/) come top of the google list, a gang who can help you to get yourself a national insurance number, presumably for a fee. At the bottom of their page I learn that 'neither WHO4 nor NationalInsurance.uk.com are affiliated/associated with HMRC or Job Centre Plus. WHO4 Ltd is registered to collect personal data under the Data Protection Act 1998 for the purposes of National Insurance number application services. ICO licence number: Z3139167'. I seem to remember that I just wandered along to some child supervision branch of local government when I wanted my first insurance card, with me being old enough to have had such a thing (with weekly stamps being licked and affixed by the pay office of whoever it was you worked for). No who4 in those good old days.