Electronic time

So the clocks have changed here in the UK ( we lose the hour we gained in the autumn).

Time is a strange old thing and generally relative .. when I worked in TV broadcasting I became aware of how long 10 seconds (for example) can be and when I was a child I became aware of how long a boring Sunday evening could be. We are all now obsessed with time minutes and seconds are a relatively recent aberration and we all think we're on tight schedules but waste time watching nonsense on TV.

I had always thought that e-mail was pretty reliable and fast, if something failed to arrive it was either miss-addressed or the spam filters were over zealous but this week I've witnessed a strange occurrence where an e-mail took two and a half days to arrive and it's replacement came far quicker than that!

Looking into strange delays in e-mails there was surprisingly little information on my searches regarding delays in e-mail but I did find that

" E-mail delivery is affected by Internet traffic. This means that if the Internet as a whole is busy, it may take longer for your messages to be delivered. Many companies and servers process e-mail messages before they are delivered. To further investigate, provide a full message header of the delayed e-mail. Here’s how:

1. Right-click the e-mail listed in the message list and select “View message source.” This will open a window with the message source."

so I did that and this is what it told me ..

X-Apparently-To: timothy.bourne@btopenworld.com via 217.146.188.87; Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:18:46 +0000
X-Originating-IP: [85.189.39.70]
Authentication-Results: mta838.mail.ukl.yahoo.com from=vlv.org.uk; domainkeys=neutral (no sig); from=vlv.org.uk; dkim=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 85.189.39.70 (EHLO smtp-out-a.mail.griffin.com) (85.189.39.70)
by mta838.mail.ukl.yahoo.com with SMTP; Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:18:46 +0000
Received: from VLVPC01 (unknown [83.148.137.183])
by smtp-out-a.mail.griffin.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id D96653D00B3
for ; Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:18:05 +0000 (GMT)
From: "******" <*****@vlv.org.uk>
To:
Subject: VLV Visits
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:18:07 -0000
Message-ID: <00d201c9ad54$85670870$90351950$@washbrook@vlv.org.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_00D3_01C9AD54.85670870"
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0
Thread-Index: AcmtVITmqe4ac4lYR+i7dBfI2wpzDg==
Content-Language: en-gb

Which didn't really tell me a lot.

Searching further I got a page that explains a bit about how e-mail works if you're interested look here.

MPs expenses hit headlines again.

So the Jacqui Smith expenses story is likely to run on and on, to me the £10 or so spent (by the taxpayer) on films is rather less significant than the £116,000 we've shelled out on her rent .