Caught red-handed

A few days ago, I received an email from PayPal - so what? Well, the email popped into a mailbox address that is not registered with my PayPal account. It read Dear Customer, Our Technical Service department has recently updated our online services, You are required to verify your account security details in order to start using our PayPal services as normal. due to this upgrade we sincerely call your attention to follow below link and reconfirm your online account details. please ensure that all security details are entered correctly in order to avoid loose of account. Thank you for helping us protect you. PayPal I need not draw attention to the terrible grammar, diction and punctuation of the piece. A quick call to PayPal proper confirmed the fraudulent intent of the mail. An email from a genuine company will always address the customer by name. My subsequent Google search revealed that a multitude of these ‘phishing’ emails are loose on the net. I also discovered that the link included with the above email could have unleashed spyware onto my computer – if I had clicked it. I did not. So beware, and take care… https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/securitycenter/general/RecognizePhishing-outside

The Great Battersea Saga

The great Battersea Power Station saga has taken another turn. In 2010 I reported that “Real Estate Opportunities, the firm that bought the site in 2006 has just had a £5.5 billion ‘retail and housing’ plan approved, with the proviso that the Northern Line is extended by two stops to facilitate the shoppers and visitors who will certainly want to go there.” I finished the post by saying “we can only wait and see.” See we did. Last December, Real Estate Opportunities fell victim to the implosion of the Irish property market in general, and the ruination of Irish property tycoons, Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett, in particular. Just to recap the history of the building: leading architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, designed BPS in 1933. John Mowlem & Co built the main building, and the total cost of construction was £2,141,550 – billions in today’s money. It was 1953 before BPS was fully in operation as a coal-fired powered station. By1975 the day of coal as a major provider of electricity was over. In the meantime, the building had become an international icon. BPS has both the blessing and the curse to be the largest brick building in Europe. Its expansiveness makes it unsuitable for the type of development of Bankside, its sister building down the river (Tate Modern). Besides, the other end of town has the benefit of City finance, a privilege the Battersea site lacks. Over the years, proposals have come and been banished, one by one for a variety of reasons; among them a dearth of funds, opposition by heritage groups and of local residents. Now, the latest news is that Malaysian property developers SP Setia and Sime Darby Property have outbid Chelsea Football Club by putting forward a £400 million plan for the development of the site. In addition to this, the duo is putting forward £250 million for an extension of the Northern Line to the site. Already, a chorus of sceptical voices, the lowest of which is not Chelsea, is dooming the project before it has even begun. As I said at the outset, we can only wait and see.

Disgusted, etc

Excuse the title, but I am still reeling from the mess that was last night’s Apprentice final. I, and many other people, had been looking forward to it for weeks. My mouth was watering over the thought of all those lovely-jubbly business pitches growing in the minds of Britain’s Brightest and Best. You know what I mean; an amazing niche restaurant, or a boutique of extraordinary clothing, or a widget to revolutionise all our lives and save the sinking economy. Of course, I ought to have known that there is no money in making and selling things any more. But even if the plans of the candidates were going to focus on organizing, and communicating, and presenting, they could have done loads better than finding a new way to, er, buy groceries. There was the candidate who wanted to open a series of those wonderful things, call centres. She didn’t even bother to find out if the web name on her business plan was actually available and buy it – one of the easiest things in the world to do. Then there was the geezer who wanted Lord Sugar’s money to help amass an enormous gambling fund – what a project for the country’s business tsar! The ‘winning’ plan will at least create a few jobs by placing other people in jobs. But what a letdown the entire series has been. I hearken back to the blog I wrote a few weeks ago, expressing a wish that Lord Sugar would summarily fire the whole lot of them and hold over the quarter mill for the next series. One thing; the entire episode has answered the question I posted on my last blog: why do Americans get to go to the moon while the British get the steam punk trophy?