Tag: Car

Finding a missing person in South America (and elsewhere)

I promised, ages ago, that I’d write up some tips on how to find somebody who’d gone missing in South America. Recently I had an email from somebody in the same situation which has spurred me into action.

Since 1997 I’ve found or been found by my mother, my brothers and my sister. Here I’m sharing some ideas and tips that I wish I’d known when I started.

Before I start

What I’m going to tell you may help improve your chances of finding somebody who’s missing. It may not, but I suspect it won’t hurt because these are things to add to what you would do naturally anyway. I can’t promise they’ll make any difference, but had I done them I may well have found my father before rather than after he’d died. But hindsight is always perfect. Hopefully by sharing this I can help you.

Whether finding my father would have made my life or his life any better, I don’t know. And you’ll have to think about that for your own situation. Sometimes people hide or disappear for a reason, and finding them may not help. On the other hand, they may have no idea that actually they’re still loved in spite of what’s gone before. Who knows?

I hope that if you use these tips they help you achieve what you need to achieve. It’s not easy missing a friend or a family member. It’s not easy finding them. It’s not easy reconciling what’s happened. The important thing is to be open, forgiving, and at peace with yourself when you set out. If you want them to say sorry, to be humble or to suddenly love you then you should probably not start out. If you want to show them your love and be a person in their life, even if that’s a small part of their life, then go for it. Anything else is setting yourself up for disappointment and heartbreak.

I’m going to refine this post over time. It’s not cast in stone. What you read is based on nothing more than my own personal experience and understanding. It’s not definitive. You will have your own things to add.

So let’s get searching

I’m going to break this up into a few parts to break down the problem.

1. Gather all the data

You’re going to need every address, phone number, email, photo and location possible, because that’s where you’re going to look. You can do a lot of this without leaving home, if you’re organised. Get it together. Scan or photograph everything so that you can store it somewhere off-site like Skydrive or Dropbox. These will be important documents in your search – don’t risk losing them. Don’t carry them with you on a trip. You’re going to use this data to create a one page letter and email to send out to as many people as possible.

2. Think about differences

There are key things that will differentiate the person you’re looking for compared to those in the country they’ve settled in. Language, looks, and so on. But there will also be their interests. Were they big tennis, pool, or football players? They may have taken it up in their new location. List everything that is distinctive about this person relative to where they live. I’d divide this list into culture (languages, country of origin etc), interests (sports, pastimes, hobbies), and work.

Then, tackle each one. If you’re dealing with an English speaker, perhaps they’ve tried teaching it in order to make some money? It’s a common way for travelling types to make ends meet. If they’re mad keen on pool, they probably headed off to the local pool halls. If they’re computer programmers, they may have tried to do that. This gives you targets in your search.

3. Find the matches

So, now you have a list of things about the person, and some data. Start to work out how to match things up.

For example, with my father he liked pool (and billiards and so on), gambling, drinking, watching sports, puzzles, and he spoke English and Spanish. With the data I had there were about 12 cities which he seemed to have written from and talked about. So, for English I need a list of all English schools in each of those cities. For pool, every pool and billiard hall. Gambling is trickier – but casinos can be worth checking out. For sports and drinking, think sports bars. Link things together. You have limited resources, so look at the best possibilities based on the data and knowledge you have. Did most letters come from one city?

Then there’s the most important – embassies, consulates and honorary consuls. At least, that’s what they’re called in Britain. You need to contact as many of these in your target regions as possible. The people who work at these places are often well connected within their local communities. They may not be able to facilitate directly, for confidentiality reasons (after all, not everybody wants to be found) but they can pass a message on.

4. Time to get organised!

OK, you know what you need to think about, now it’s time to get organised. I’d personally create a database or spreadsheet into which all this data can be pumped in. That means you can later run a mail merge to produce letters to each of these targets. In my naivety I only sent mail to all the embassies in South America.

5. The letter itself.

You’re going to create a letter describing the person you’re looking for, his or her names, and, most importantly, photographs. Nowadays colour printing is cheap, so scan in those old pictures and include them in the letter somewhere or on a separate sheet. If you’re on a budget, use a black and white laser printer.

So, you found them. Now what?

This is where it gets tricky. You find your missing person. Depending how that happens, you either have to initiate contact, or make friendly contact happen.

Here’s another list…

1. Don’t assume it’s really them

You get an email back. You need to meet up, perhaps, or something else… perhaps they need help? Do be careful you’re not being scammed. There are a lot of people who are hungry, poor, or plain greedy and they might just seize the chance to get some money out of you. Be wary. If you’re meeting them for the first time, ensure it’s in a safe, public and neutral place.

2. The pain

Here’s another potential issue – depending on the nature of the separation, establishing a fresh link could be incredibly painful. They could be in a relatively bad way. They could be angry about being found. They could be happy, but emotionally messed up about it all. Do not underestimate the problems here. Be prepared to be strong, to walk away if you have to. If I’d found my father and he’d tried to manipulate me like he did when I was a teenager then I don’t know for sure if I’d have coped. I’m far stronger today, but who knows? Would I regress? It’s impossible to tell.

So, make sure you have support on hand – either with you if you’re meeting in person, or on the end of a phone line.

3. And then…

Once you have re-established contact… you now have the long path. My sister and I coincidentally started to look for each other around the same time and we worked out where we both were. She approached me first, after months of deliberating about how to do it. I’d similarly been waiting for a while, and worrying.

The thing you have to remember though is that it’s not all going to be just like a normal relationship. The gaps and the different lives you’ve experienced will make things different. You won’t be visiting each other every week, or acting like brother/sister or mother/daughter for the rest of your lives – the relationship will take time and real work to make things happen. You’ll go to social events if invited. You’ll send cards and gifts. At times it could feel one sided – you may be overwhelmed, or the other person might be. All I can say is that once you know each other you can work on filling in the gaps. Don’t rush it. It’ll happen if you give it time.

The findability thing

In 1997 I hadn’t seen or spoken to my mother, father, brothers or sister for years. I didn’t know where they lived, what they did, or exactly how they might look. My half-sister and my half-brother I knew the least.

In 1998 I found my mother, brother and half-brother in a remarkable half hour of work one lunchtime! I simply rang every address and phone number I could find and asked if they knew them. Within no time I was speaking to my half-brother, that evening with my mother. Problem solved.

My father… well, you can read the story here on this blog and then viewing the newer posts in that archive. There are twelve at the time of writing, you should start with the oldest.

My sister… this is where “findability” works out. I consciously made a decision around 2001 that I should be easy to find online. Since around then I’ve been the top ranking “David Coveney” on Google. But that’s not what she first searched for, because she didn’t even know she had a brother…

It works the other way – if you have a blog and you’re looking for someone with a reasonably uncommon name, create a post about them. If you searched for “Chris Coveney” then for years a post on this site about my father would come up highly in Google. It gave a chance. I thought my father might Google himself. He didn’t. But his daughter did. And as a consequence, Maria, my half-sister, found me a few years ago. Happy days!

This is what I call passive searching – you set everything up to make things as easy as possible for people to either let themselves be found, or to find you. Because maybe, and you can hope, the person you’re looking for is missing you too.

If nothing else, running a blog will let them know how you are – they may not want to contact you, but they can follow your life, your loves and your family in a public and open way. Obviously, be careful what you publish.

Get out there, look around, be prepared, and be open. Good luck, and I hope you find who you’re looking for. If you have a story to share, please do so in the comments section below.

Why Gay Marriage Matters

Two people meet. They decide to live together and grow old together.  Let’s ignore whether they are a man and a woman, or gay, or two brothers without any other relationships.  Doesn’t matter.  What does matter is that they’re not married.

Together, these two people set up home back in 1970 in a house for which they paid £8000.  Thing is, one was quite poor, really, so the other bought the house from his own funds and it remained his.

Both are now elderly, and the one owning the house sadly passes away.

If they’re married or in a civil partnership, everything that the deceased partner owns passes (unless otherwise willed) to the living partner.  But in any other relationship this doesn’t happen.  That house is now worth £500,000 – to the pair it’s still the same humble house they bought in a part of London that’s become quite trendy lately.  But that doesn’t matter – everything to be inherited over £325,000 is taxed at 40%.  So, you have a tax bill of £70,000.  The inheritee may not have the money to pay that bill so is left with the problem of selling the house, or borrowing against it, in order to pay the bill.  And that’s where the trouble starts.  Imagine having to pay £450 a month to continue living in the house you lived in for the past 40 years?

Even worse, when that poor person dies, their estate will *also* be taxed at 40%.  This compares to the married couple’s non-taxable estate which is effectively £650,000.

And it doesn’t end there.  Pension funds often can’t be transferred to anybody other than a spouse.  Family health insurance (particularly relevant in the US) often doesn’t cover anybody not in a legally recognised relationship.  And so on and so forth.  If there are married people’s tax allowances, they apply too.

So Why Be Against Gay Marriage?

I’m always fascinated by motives.  It’s quite clear why a government would be against gay marriage, or even against making it really easy to marry or divorce – in doing so they get more tax.  That’s simple then.  From a purely fiscal point of view, governments get more tax from two single people than two married people.

And we have the religious lot – right now we have a dolt like Cardinal Keith O’Brien calling plans for gay marriage something that would “shame the United Kingdom in the eyes of the world”.  I mean really?  Why would that be?  OK, there are states in this world where gay people are killed for it.  I guess we would look pretty shameful to them.  Do I care?  Not really – we’re strong enough to let people live their lives how they wish to.

So the religious folk are worried.  In part I know why – right there in Genesis (so believed by many Christians, Jews and Muslims as being important) is an instruction “And you, be you fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.”  It’s translated in lots of other ways too.  But the key message there is that you should go out and reproduce.

Which makes sense.  If your religion can outbreed another, it can do very well.  And you know something I’ve noticed about gay folk?  They don’t have many children!  Of course, many do.  And it would seem that their children may even fare better than their peers.

So Are Anti-Gay Marriage Campaigners Being Rational?

Nope, it’s unlikely that rationality comes into it.  So let’s simply say this – they’re doing what most people do – look after their own interests first, then worry about the next level down because that can affect them too.

The joyous thing right now is that in the UK the mainstream political parties are pretty liberal about all this.  They know that happy people work harder and make more money, which means more tax money, which means more power for them.  The churches are no longer so relevant.

But in the US it’s a more dangerous situation – the significant Christian right can be an illiberal bunch, and the leading Republican candidates to run for president have come out with some deeply concerning statements.

In the UK we’re setting an example to the world.  Let’s mock Cardinal Keith O’Brien and his antiquated beliefs – he’s not relevant any more, and let’s keep it that way.  And if you hear somebody repeating anti-gay-marriage rhetoric then point out to them why somebody would object and why it’s so hard on gay couples.

Why You Should Be A Secularist

All these arguments about Britain being a ‘Christian’ country at heart (see Baroness Warsi here, here and most importantly here) are so much bull, and I’m tired of it.  It’s part of an attack on the growing secularist movement but framed in such a way that it’s designed to scare the religious into thinking they’re going to be stopped from practicing.

We’re No Christian Culture

The point being, it's easy to make a logically inarguable statement that is still utterly and completely fallacious. "Jesus Saves" could be another one - maybe he does, but there's no way to prove it.

I mean, look at how we named our days of the week – there’s no “Jesusday” or “Paulsday” – no, we have Thursday = Thor’s Day, or Wednesday = Woden’s Day = Odin’s Day, and Friday = Freya’s Day.  At Easter it’s all about fertility and I don’t see many people chowing down on chocolate crucifixes.  OK, that last bit is pretty flippant, but the truth is, a lot of our culture has plenty in common with old Pagan rites and beliefs.

Religious Freedom = Good

So if you’re Christian then that’s fine, but any politician who says that to be secularist is somehow non-Christian is like a secularist saying that being Christian, or Muslim or Rastafarian is bad.  It’s important for all to respect all our beliefs – few are provably right or wrong, but if government ever becomes about religion, or driven by religion then it causes inevitable sectarian divisions that are frankly disastrous.  Not only that, but government moves away from being evidence based to belief based.

Scrub that last bit – a lot of government is belief based anyway, even when religion doesn’t come into it.  People are like that.  But secularism is a big part of moving towards evidence based governance and away from running a country based on peculiar notions of what is good or bad based on differing interpretations of where we come from and who we’re supposed to be trying to please in order to get a decent afterlife.

I’m a secularist.  Not a militant one, but I do believe that state and church need to be completely removed from one another.  In Britain we have a curious situation where there is still a small amount of religious interference in the state – it’s almost inevitable when your nation’s leader is also expected to be the head of the church.  Currently an English heir to the throne can’t stay as heir to the throne if they marry a Muslim, for example, unless the Muslim converts.  And that, if you think about it properly, is a serious worry, because it tells people that it’s OK to consider a different belief system to be inferior.  It legitimises religious intolerance, which is bad for all of us.

So let’s keep pushing for a secular state, and let’s encourage religious freedom.  I’m not going to reveal my religious beliefs here, but I’ll support yours.  Unless, of course, they’re based on intolerance – in which case, time to take a hike.

Bye Bye Skoda

It’s always sad when you decide to get rid of a car that you’ve enjoyed owning.  Not because it’s no good, but because your needs have changed.  And the biggest problem was that we’re now parents to one growing toddler and another relatively new baby.

Which nearly did my back in.  Both the Skoda and the Audi are relatively low cars, and as I have a weak back as it is, this proved too much and I recently found myself barely able to move for a weekend.  Not good.  I decided it was time to find a taller car.

So, with a heavy heart, I’m selling my 77,000 mile late 2004 Skoda Octavia vRS.  As you might expect from me, it’s been well looked after, has a full service history and no expense has been spared in its maintenance.  It’s a cracking car with great performance, handling and pretty good refinement.

I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.  If you’re interested, drop me a line in the comments below.  I’ll be adding a contact number on here shortly once the Telesafe number’s come through.

Price? Just £3100 – a lot of car for little money.  I’ll be sad to see it go.

The Liverpool Riots Do Not Indicate That Our Society Is Broken

Ok, the riots matter.  Especially if you’re unlucky enough to have had to face rioters in your district, near your home, or near your business.  In fact, the riots and disturbances are full of tragedy, deaths and ruined lives.  They are, frankly, horrible.

And strong action is needed to stop it turning into a joyfull rampage for our criminal underclass.

But what they aren’t is some kind of protest.  They’re a laugh.  If I didn’t have much to lose I suspect I might even find the thrill of a riot quite an attraction.  And in areas where there’s possibly not much to do if you’ve got very little money then I can quite understand the fun, the empowerment of feeling that police won’t stop you when they usually do.  Thing is, what nobody seems to be saying is that the number of people involved is tiny.

200/816216 = 0.0245%

Here’s a thing – the number of people kicking off in the Liverpool area has been reported as approximately 200.  In reality that means anywhere between 50 and 500.  But let’s assume that 200 is correct for now.  That’s a whole 0.0245% of the population.  Another way of looking at is that that 99.975% of the population in Liverpool didn’t feel compelled to smash anything up or set fire to cars.  I daresay the proportions around London are similar.

So actually, society functions well for almost everybody in it.  In fact, given that 45,000 18-20 year olds are indicted of a criminal offence in a year (sample from 1999) you can see that even the vast majority of young convicted criminals aren’t interested in rioting.  The numbers are so small that you can’t say that this is a problem with a consumerist society, a problem with poverty, or a problem with our culture – the sample size is too small.  It’s probably just some yobs getting the upper hand on the police and having some fun.

It’s a Policing Thing, Stupid

You can stop almost all riots.  All you need are an awful lot of police who aren’t scared to intimidate and bully their way through trouble.  It works.  Riots are rare in police states, for example.

So we need to ask if we really want brutal police officers?  What about when they’re not dealing with a riot?  They’re going to be the ones your son deals with when he gives a bit of cheek to an officer after being told off for cycling on the pavement.  They’re going to be the ones potentially wading in too early during an otherwise peaceful protest.

We must come to accept that these occasional moments of unrest are, unless repeated again and again with significant economic damage, a relatively small cost of living in a relatively free society.  Just as we mustn’t allow the few terrorists with religious agendas to change how we live, we mustn’t allow the few thugs out there to change the way we deal with protest and the way we run our cities.

Of course, the cost mustn’t be borne by the individuals and businesses affected – if our society is to accept this, it must also ensure that nobody is left harmed or significantly out of pocket by this either.  We need to be humane and adult about it all.

What we certainly don’t need is to start pressuring our politicians into making some dumb, knee-jerk changes that will take away our hard won freedoms.  Let’s take stock, let’s maybe ask for police to be a little smarter in apprehending the rioters, but let’s not give up and change too much.

Homage to Beatrice Warde or a bad idea?

I recently saw in the book “Just My Type” by Simon Garfield a poster by Beatrice Warde, the famous American born typographer who spent much of her career in the UK*.  There seem to be many variations of typesetting for the poster, so I’ve no idea if she designed one herself or if it was simply something that printers liked to produce.

But I quite liked the idea of a strong message to visitors of a print shop that what went on there was important.  So why not the same for an office of web developers and designers?  What we do carries great potential, it is world changing, and we facilitate amazing things.  Why shouldn’t we as an industry have something similar to help trumpet our cause?  And where better to start than a classic set of words by an eminent typographer?

I’ve set this in Gill Sans Std rather than Albertus of the original I saw, but perhaps there’s a better typeface?

I’m not happy with this quick draft just yet, but wanted to put the idea out to see if it would fly.  Comments please!

With a hat-tip to Beatrice Warde
With a hat-tip to Beatrice Warde

* Enough, in fact, that I believed she was British until the helpful comment below informed me otherwise.

Freedom of Information is Abused

In 2000 in the UK, the Freedom of Information Act gave us all the ‘right to know’ what our public bodies were up to.  We can ask for information about a huge range of items, and it’s a great idea.  Information should, in my view, be as open and transparent as possible.

But there’s a problem.

It’s become easier and easier to make FOI requests, for example using sites like the excellent http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/

I like this.  I like efficiency.  I like speedy, easy to use systems.

But what I don’t particularly like are some people.

Let me explain.  People, in general, tend to be quite nice, harmless, and socially aware.  But a significant proportion, perhaps 20%, are best described as spoiled, selfish, mean… you know what I mean.  And that’s an awful lot of people.  In our population of 60 million or so that means there are 12 million not especially nice folk around.  A smaller proportion, perhaps a million, will be genuinely unpleasant*.

So, what happens when a large number of people can easily make requests to the FOI that are, to all intents and purposes, selfish?

This is what happens, each set from just one user:

In each case the requests pertained to commercial information.  The diesel misfuelling question is by Nick Panchaud, who a quick bit of googling for the term “Nick Panchaud diesel” reveals him to be commenting around the place promoting the Diesel Key, a device to prevent petrol hoses being inserted into diesel vehicles.

Natalie Davis and Keith Griffiths are harder to track down conclusively due to their more common names, but the requests they make would only really be of interest to commercial organisations, so I’m rolling with it.

What’s happening is that at least some people are making multiple FOI requests for commercial gain.  Yet there’s a massive cost behind all this.  I decided to do a little bit of FOI requesting myself.  My question?  How much did Nick Panchaud’s requests cost you to service?

I only asked three public bodies (let’s not build up the costs here!) and two responded ( http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/david_coveney ) giving costs of £87.63 and £50.  Not much of a sample size, but let’s roll with it – it may be representative.  Given that, you can see that to fulfil Mr Panchaud’s research it has cost public bodies as much as £41,900.  Money that has come out of tax payer’s pockets.

If we assume similar costs for those other requests I’ve listed above (it may be quite a bit more: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2010/11/12143737) , we’re looking at potentially another £87,700.  So three people with commercial interests have sucked over £100k from our economy.

A Possible Solution

FOI requests are costing the country millions.  People like our Nick Panchaud above are not using the FOI system in the spirit in which it was meant to be used.  Consequently they are costing us a fortune and we need to find a way, in these difficult times, to slash those costs.

I propose a change to the FOI system that makes all requesters pay a small fee.  It doesn’t have to be a lot – perhaps £10 each.  That would stop the scurrilous and wasteful requests, whilst still keeping the system open for those with a real purpose for the information they seek.  Even commercial researchers.  Obviously it should be reviewed in time – it may need to go up, or down, but usually people are economically quite selfish and they’ll consider more carefully the requirement.

I know this post is likely to disappear in the noise and won’t get much traction, but this has been bugging me for a while now and I had to say something!

* On the upside, there’s 600,000+ geniuses (depending how you measure it) floating around, so maybe they balance out.  Then again, perhaps 20% of those geniuses are evil geniuses.  In which case that’s 120,000 evil geniuses in the country.  That’s a lot.

Border Crossings and Empty Airports

I’m sitting in the emptiest airport I’ve ever experienced. I suspect they only operate a couple of flights a day from Tacna.  Consequently my only company appears to be a bored check-in attendant for a different airline and a barman who’s mopping the floor.

And I’ve finished all my books. I have little else to do except get the phone out, take advantage of the free Wi-Fi in Peruvian airports and get blogging.

So, let me tell you about how to get from Arica in Chile to Tacna in Peru.

The two cities are only some 40km apart, but transport between them isn’t what you might expect.

The simplest way is to get your hotel to order a taxi to your destination on the other side. They will deal with the crossing, but from Chile this can be expensive, running at around £35.  Similarly, in the opposite direction it’s perfectly possible to get ripped off, as I did last week when I arrived here.

You need two things…your passport and some local currency. In Arica you can take a taxi for £2 to the “Terminal Internacional” where you’ll expect buses but will actually see a huge number of USAnian cars.  You find a driver going to the border pay the station fee (200 pesos, 40p) and then go to an office to do some paperwork.  You then get shown to your collectivo.

These are always US cars of various vintage. I got a really seventies Crown Victoria driven by a brassy old lady whose hair waved in the wind out of the window.  The car contained 5 passengers…a handy one extra than a European or Eastern equivalent, hence more profit.  For her troubles you pay just 2000 pesos, about £3.

She took us to the border, made sure we were OK and left.  There, waiting, were other collectivos heading to Tacna. They all pass the airport, so no problem. You go through Chilean customs and then get driven the short distance to Peruvian customs, again in a USAnian car, albeit this time I got a more modern but nondescript GM thingy.  Cost here was 2500 pesos (they take Chilean money cheerfully.)

That’s it. For less than a tenner you can cross the border.  Don’t do like I did the other way last time and get ripped off by a driver taking you to the airport…you should spend more than about £5 to reach the border from the airport even by taxi as it isn’t far.  Ask first for the price.  Also check whether it’s all the way to Arica, or just to the border (say ‘aduana.’)