John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Scary women

30 September 2004: Women can be quite scary. My g/f just called me and said those words no man wants to hear .. "I've gone a bit mad in T K Maxx, can you come and help me carry it, it's too heavy".

Smile, it's Bono

30 September 2004: Not satisfied with the snippet Channel 4 News provided of Bono's speech, I searched for it online and I think RTE is providing it here, however it's falling over due to demand atm. I suppose we'll have to keep trying.

But, this is the first major commercial implementation that I've seen of SMIL, the standard for multimedia presentations over the Internet. We did a SMIL presentation at uni, but my images were eaten by viruses so I can't quite show it you atm.

New chair

29 September 2004: I've hired a new office chair to test the model's OK, and someone came to pick it up the other day. Ah, I'll be honest and say it's an Aeron. I tried to deal with my nearest dealer, TSK Workplace Ltd, but they wouldn't answer my emails, so I went to my next nearest, Creative Box in Birmingham, who have been great. Weird website tho :-)

The chair hire thing comes direct from Herman Miller, so this tale is a reflection on them, not on Creative Box.

At about 4 o'clock a dishevelled looking guy knocked on my door, asked for me by name, said he was here to pick up a chair, and waved a piece of paper. Fine, he's the official chap, no problem. I helped him out with the chair .. it's heavy. He'd come in a small family hatchback .. I remember it as an Austin Allegro but obviously it wasn't.

Anyway, a few minutes later, he knocked on the door again. He was having real difficulty breathing, and wheezed "can I use your toilet?". "Sure", I said, "are you OK?". "Asthma, I've an inhaler in the car". OK.

So now, this is going to get detailed, but basically, he was quite a while in the loo. And while I'd pointed out the bathroom too to him, he didn't wash his hands. I wished him a safe journey, and on he went.

When I got back upstairs, the loo is right next to my office, so I expected, well, smells. But there weren't any. Weird. So what did he spend all that time doing? I can honestly say, I checked every inch of our lavatory for hidden cameras, LOL. When I told my g/f about this as we went to sleep, she wanted me to check the cistern for a bomb, ROFL. I didn't, but .. hang on ... no, no bomb.

So. If you're a driver, you get to know where the services are, and time yourself. When I used to drive a lot, I restricted my liquids so I knew I'd be fine. Maybe he expected me to be a business. That makes sense. And maybe he was gathering his breath, taking a moment. Perhaps I'm being unfair.

Even so. He's the only person I've seen and will see from Herman Miller, and I'm just about to buy from them. Yet he seemed to be more likely to have come from Henry Miller. It's not a good image. If Eddie Stobart can have tidy drivers, I'm sure Herman Miller can.

I couldn't remember Eddie Stobart, so I put "famous northern UK haulage company, drivers wear ties" into Google, and that site was at the top. How famous is that?

Crass

29 September 2004: I used to love Crass. I still do. Apparently Sagittarians love variety and difference, which is very true. Actually that wikipedia description is the most accurate I've ever seen. It's why I love the wayward, the different, the independent, why I hate sameness, and why I can't just do a 'me too' website. It's why marketing matches with me, because it's all about differentiating yourself from your competitors.

Suffragettes

29 September 2004: January 1918 was when women gained the right to vote in the UK. Just an amazing 86 years ago. Their struggle does not appear to have been a small one either.

If you haven't worked it out yet ..

29 September 2004: .. the rest of those Salad Fingers episodes can be found off here. They're quite the most unsettling thing I've seen in a long while, yet addictive too.

Dark cartoon

28 September 2004: I rather like this dark but entertaining cartoon. It seems there are others with tap thoughts.

More Reeds Rains

28 September 2004: I just wandered into Reeds Rains and it came up that there was no matching property in Scarborough on their website. She said it takes about 48 hours for property to arrive there (still suggesting the system I envisaged previously).

She talked me through the search facility. If you go here and enter Scarborough in the box above, you're OK, but if you click the map (we're on the East coast, the block that includes the North side of the Humber Estuary to the little bit that sticks out (which is where we live)) you end up on a detail search page .. oh, well you did, I just got "Provider error '80004005' Unspecified error /GlobalInc/dbfunctions.asp, line 15". Another Microsoft site falling over under pressure (the page is search.asp, asp is a Microsoft technology), because on my third click it's back up again. So, you get a detail page. If you select "Scarborough" from the drop down there, as far as I can tell, you can put what you like in the rest of the boxes and you'll only get one or zero resulting properties. Seems like a database query problem to me, they can get quite funky, I've just been battling one on the log cabins site here.

Labour party web site isn't working

28 September 2004: An article in The Observer about Bono made me want to watch his speech at the Labour Party conference but the website's awful. Where's the menu? I need to see whether Bono's speaking to the main hall or in a fringe meeting, when, and how to get that live feed. The live feed menu just says "labour party conference". Are you really expecting me to sit through it all without an agenda?

Ah. Looks like Wednesday afternoon.

Interesting

27 September 2004: An interesting approach to the web. It might be persuasive, but how would you ever find it? It will never be listed in search engines.

In the eye of the storm

27 September 2004: Since hurricanes have become so popular, I have some questions.

I'll ask them, then I'll see if I can find any answers. Firstly, if the storms are actually moving at only about 7mph, that's a comfortable jogging speed. If the centre of a storm is suppose to be calm, that suggests you could jog along quite happily in the middle.

If you did that, well, firstly, how big is this centre of calm? If you outstretched your arms would your fingertips be in the storm, or is it a question of a mile or so?

Imagine now, a vinyl record. You drop the needle or stylus on the outside to start, and at that point, the stylus is travelling fastest relative to the vinyl, and it slows down as it reaches the centre. It's all 33.333 rpm (or 78 if you're very old), but there's more 'ground' to cover on the outside. So. In a hurricane, is it the outside of the storm that's fastest? If so, there must be a place where it's fastest, and then it must slow down again as you get further out. That doesn't make much sense. Or, is it fastest in the centre? In which case, how does it transition between the calm in the dead centre, and 120mph very close to the centre .. is there like an acceleration lane between the two? That doesn't make sense either.

Imagine if there was no acceleration lane, if you could stand in the centre and put your fingertips into 120mph wind. Under what circumstances would your fingers create a vapour trail? And would that vapour trail travel at 120mph around you and come past your fingers again in a split second to be added to by a second layer, and on and on. What wonderful patterns you could build around you.

I did wonder about the occasional news footage showing how a storm of about a house width had devastated a line of those wooden houses that American's seem so keen on building in hurricane areas (have they never heard of the three little piggies .. not the ones who went to market, the ones who got their houses blown down). That suggested a hurricane is most powerful right in its centre. Then I realised, no, that's a tornado. So what's the difference between a tornado and a hurricane?

OK, now for what answers I can discover. If you look here, you'll see the eye can be from 8km to 200km in diameter, and the edge of the eye is where the most severe winds are. OK, that kinda does it :-) I'm happy now.

Sewage in, sewage out

25 September 2004: I'm wondering whether Peter Bazalgette, the man who brought us Big Brother, is descended from Joseph Bazelgette, the man who created London's sewage system.

BodyBoarding

25 September 2004: Went surfing with Ali last night.

No. No no no no no, that's not what happened. Scrub that. Start again.

Ali went bodyboarding yesterday evening, and I watched from the beach wrapped in a warm coat. I'm sure she faced fifteen feet high waves .. she's five feet tall, that's her in the pic. How lucky am I to have such a funky chicken as my girlfriend? Surf's up in Scarborough's South Bay

Scarborough can be exceptionally beautiful in the Autumn. Scarborough's South Bay looking south

Scarborough's South Bay, from the beach in front of the Spa

Reeds Rains

25 September 2004: I've just been playing with the Reeds Rains website, a national estate agency. I tried to search for a property in Scarborough that I know they have listed, it shows nothing. In fact, it shows nothing for Scarborough.

This suggests that their process is something like .. get details from owner, type details into Word, add the photograph, print them out. Then sometime later maybe never if we get around to it possibly add it to the website.

You should only be creating the details once. So ideally, you'd complete some online forms, then it would a) populate the website, emailing people who have expressed an interest in similar properties, and b) provide you with a suitably formatted document to print. The photographers should be able to submit the photograph while they are stood outside the house, so it's available to buyers as soon as humanly possible. Remember how quickly houses can sell.

Traffic increase down to simply updating a static site

25 September 2004: I've had the pleasure of updating a friend's site who hadn't made any site changes for over a year. It's a straightforward static site (ie. containing unchanging data, like a brochure, rather than being database driven where, for instance, products are continually added and removed) with maybe six pages. We added a couple of new pages, and updated a couple more. I've just been looking at his site statistics.

His traffic went from 384 pages viewed in June, to 644 in July to 1,515 in August, his highest ever (since 2001). I went looking for the source of the rise.

I analyse the server log files every month for my clients. The server log files contain information on every visitor to the website. Here's a selection of data from the referrer report (showing which pages contained links to ours, with identifying data made anonymous):

 120: http://www.google.co.uk/
 104: http://search.yahoo.com/
 102: http://www.google.com/
  45: http://www.miragorobot.com/
  38: http://www.google.com.ph/
  31: http://www.littletikecentral.com/
  19: http://sudanafia.org/
  17: http://www.google.com.au/
  13: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/
  12: http://www.marbella-compudata.de/
  11: http://www.touchlocation.com/
   9: http://www.ask.co.uk/
   9: http://web.ask.com/
   8: http://uk.search.yahoo.com/
   7: http://wizard.yellowbrick.oz/
   6: http://search.netscape.com/
   6: http://www.google.ca/
   5: http://www.google.co.nz/
   5: http://www.google.nl/
   4: http://aolsearch.aol.co.uk/
   4: http://search.wanadoo.co.uk/

He'd started an advertising campaign, at about £10 a day, with Google Adwords. I wonder if the 13 pages served attributed to pagead2.googlesyndication is the sum of all that. If so, that's not particularly cost effective compared to the 437 he got completely free of charge from various search engines. The touchlocation link is another ad he placed I think in a local directory. So 1% of the traffic came from advertising sources, yet cost hundreds of pounds.

This leads me to think that Internet advertising is a waste of time and money, compared to putting that effort into free search engine listings. I'm wondering whether it simply plays to our psychology of feeling more comfortable being in control. With advertising, you're in control. With search engine placement, you're in the hands of the search engines.

It's exactly the same dynamic as the one between editorial and advertising. With advertising you can say more or less what you want, the way you want, when and where you want. With editorial, you have to persuade editors to write stuff, which they may or may not, in any issue they fancy, and then they'll edit your text or write completely original copy about you and your product. Advertising budgets are far larger than those for PR. Yet it's precisely because the editor has some control over the publication, and the journalists are independent, that their copy is respected by the reader. After all, no-one buys a newspaper or magazine solely for the advertising .. they buy it for the editorial. Editorial (and search engine placement) is therefore a much more powerful persuader than advertising, solely because we know companies haven't simply paid to be there, and someone has exercised judgment in placing the article where they did.

So, if it wasn't the advertising that gave us the huge increase in traffic, what was it?

Let's look at the traffic to the individual pages (I've changed the file names, again to hide his identity):

 704:  5.49%: 25/Sep/04 03:59: /main.htm
 699:  3.82%: 25/Sep/04 03:59: /contents.htm
 190:  2.75%: 24/Sep/04 12:07: /wr.htm
 185:  2.48%: 25/Sep/04 04:00: /ba.htm
 182:  2.08%: 24/Sep/04 14:45: /ne.htm
 154:  1.05%: 24/Sep/04 23:12: /en.htm
 147:  0.97%: 24/Sep/04 14:49: /pu.htm
 142:  1.02%: 24/Sep/04 14:27: /ma.htm
 125:  1.10%: 24/Sep/04 14:13: /gl.htm
  94:  1.13%: 24/Sep/04 14:47: /te.htm
  77:  0.51%: 24/Sep/04 14:10: /tr.htm
  68:  0.34%: 24/Sep/04 14:41: /li.htm

Firstly, are all the new people visiting the two new pages we added? The two new pages, tr and te have been there just over two months, and all the data in this report covers the last six month period, so we can maybe multiply those two pages' page requests by three, making te 282, and tr 231. That would make them the third and fourth most popular pages on your site. Interesting. They certainly contribute to the increased traffic. The traffic to the new pages could also be because we've flagged them as 'new' in the menu.

It's not enough to explain the massive increase in traffic though. The other possibility (besides natural fluctuation in page rankings combined with the continuing rise in Internet users) is that Google and others have raised the page ranking simply because we've updated the site. It looks, to Google, like the information is more recent.

That idea is born out by another site of mine, also static which, having last been edited almost exactly a year ago, had the following traffic pattern:

Sep 03	827
Oct 03	1,977
Nov 03	2,062
Dec 03	1,551
Jan 04	3,221
Feb 04	3,017
Mar 04	2,657
Apr 04	2,367
May 04	2,056
Jun 04	1,791
Jul 04	2,028
Aug 04	1,754

It peaked around six months after the last edit, and traffic has continually declined ever since.

Can we pull a strategy from this? I think we can conclude a few things:

Internet advertising doesn't work.
If you want a good search engine ranking your site must change at least quarterly.
Changing a site makes your ranking rise. The changes you make may not necessarily be good ones, so a site that's getting worse (say, from a usability point of view) may provide good psychological strokes to the operator when traffic rises. It doesn't mean the sites' actually improving.
Any search engine marketing company will initially get good results, simply by making changes. The key is to have a long term strategy that's meaningful for the site users and sustains and improves your good position.
It takes six months after your site is complete for search engine traffic to peak.

Regional search engine

25 September 2004: I just spotted the crawler for this search engine in my log files, and took a look. Interesting, a regional search engine. A little confusing to use, but a good idea maybe.

Favourite Green Wing character

25 September 2004: So. Who is your favourite Green Wing character? We can't decide between Guy Secretan, the anaesthetist, for (in our "we don't know anything about acting" opinion) some fine acting, and the wonderful, well, what is she, the training manager? The one with the camel in her office. The ping pong ball .. fantastic. The dancing to the ringtones .. inspired.

Actually, I've a theory that the whole show is the result of some extraordinary teamwork. There are so, so many new and funny ideas, the way it speeds up over the boring bits, the unbelievable ways the training manager, if that's what she is, can waste time and ensure nothing gets in her in-tray. Yet also it all glues together, so I was going to say there's a pretty special director in place, but one director couldn't have come up with all those ideas, so it's pure teamwork, with every part of the show able to express itself, from the writing, the acting, the soundtrack, the camerawork .. anon. Really exceptional stuff.

Faithless video

24 September 2004: I found a place to watch that Faithless video I blogged earlier. It's not the best quality, but it gives you the idea of the sheer size of the show. Awesome.

Sony are bastards / is a bastard

24 September 2004: I recorded a band practice session about six weeks ago on my Sony Minidisc. As time went by it was quite something to hear our first efforts at some of the new tunes.

So I've been diligently editing the minidisc over that time, and set about deleting the spaces inbetween tunes today.

Except, it said "delete all? (press enter to say yes)". Well, I wanted to scan down to where it says "delete this one", which is how my phone works. There doesn't seem to be that option, and as I pressed all the buttons to find the down scroller I happened upon the one which, for this function, serves as the 'enter' button. There's no final confirmation, so, it all got deleted. And there's no 'undelete' function.

So, if I ever meet whoever wrote that piece of unusable software I'll be erasing the contents of his personal organiser for him.

What's this caterpillar?

23 September 2004: I found a caterpillar on my cabbages that I wanted to identify and then found this site. It doesn't seem to work. Yet again a site falls over on usability. That top right drop down .. what use is that to normal folk? When you enter a few keywords in the bottom left box you get shedloads of stuff about caterpillars that aren't even in this country, most without photographs. And when you finally find the photographs, they're a bit small and numerous and, hey, they haven't got what I found.

A rather magical peace protest idea

23 September 2004: I've just come up with a rather magical peace protest idea. Ready? OK, here goes. You know the thing about a butterfly's wing beating in Australia could cause x/y/z to happen here .. is it chaos theory?

Well, as a comment on how democracy hasn't worked with regard to the Iraq war, saying, pretty much, "democracy doesn't work, we may as well try chaos theory", or more succinctly "a butterfly may have more power to influence events than I do", why don't we all hatch butterflies and maybe release them on a particular day?

We could choose a particular type, maybe a Peacock, there might be one with a relevant name, a Gatekeeper for instance but it's not likely to catch the imagination so much (it's smaller and less bright, also the Peacock has 'eyes' so there might be an opportunity to create a line about us watching .. all seeing).

You can buy butterfly eggs and caterpillars, then they just need to be fed nettles for a while, they pupate, and get released. Oh yeah, you couldn't release them all on one day because they'd need to get out when they hatch.

But if enough people did it, there'd be loads of peacocks, and every time anyone saw one, they'd be reminded of the anti-war protest and of that comment about democracy. For years to come too.

It's a crap idea isn't it? People couldn't be bothered to look after the caterpillars, especially if they have to deal with nettles every day. Not enough would survive to make any difference. It interferes with the natural balance of the environment. It rapes and pillages a natural animal for our own ends. And it depends too much on the publicity to get across a very complex idea .. so only the protesters would 'get' it. Oh well. Nice idea tho :-)

When bobbies got invented

23 September 2004: Weird historical thing. Robert Peel as Home Secretary in 1829 created a/the police force in London. That's why they're called bobbies. Weird to think there was a time, and not very long ago either, when there was no police force.

The postal service too .. created by Sir Rowland Hill in 1840. He was one of the founder members of the fantastically named Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Now that's a club I'd join.

You lot probably know all this, but for me it's a voyage of discovery. Wow .. 200 years ago there was no police force, and no postage service. Blows your mind. So what did you do when someone put fireworks through your letterbox? And while I'm in that kind of mood, why did they build Windsor Castle so close to the airport?

Nearly missed it

23 September 2004: I nearly missed it. My blog was a year old yesterday. I think it's been a success. I really enjoy it. I think, psychologically it helps me. I pour out all the stuff I'd normally say to my work colleagues .. but since I work alone it's either this or a chalkboard in the lavatory.

It hasn't succeeded in finding me work. No matter. For now, I've a queue of potential clients as long as your arm. Actually, as long as my arm ... mine's probably longer.

Part of the purpose of this blog was to address the problem of how to deliver my personality to someone who might want to work with me, but because of distance, will probably never meet me. Not that I think my personality is important enough to deliver. I do think, however, that if I were a client looking to embark on a long term working relationship with a sole-trader, I'd want to know whether they are suitable, whether they are healthy, and whether we were likely to share similar values.

Maybe it doesn't matter. Money, trade, is supposed to provide a firewall between opposing cultures. We can still sell to people we don't like, and we buy from oppressive regimes every day. We don't have to let oppressors into our houses, because we just pay for goods and services. Money forms a common language, a neutral interface.

Perhaps, too, people who are interested can see there's basically a long queue. Perhaps, come the day when I need a client and I say so here, a client will come. We'll see.

Anyway, happy first birthday blog.

Search engine optimisation

23 September 2004: The Tin Shop site is just over two years old and recently I added new links to each item designed to help search engines find themed pages, for instance, the most popular are Oxo products or Huntley and Palmer. The idea is to try to provide those people who are, for instance, Oxo, collectors, not just tin collectors with a link when they type 'oxo' into a search engine. Try it .. type 'oxo tin' into Google.

It looks like this has been a resounding success. Traffic to the site continues to rise and if it carries on growing at the current rate September's traffic will be almost double that in April, with over 13,000 people finding the site from search engines in the last six months, and much increased sales.

The site has been built from the beginning to appeal to search engines. Way back, actually, before I took my degree, I got the job of publicising another company's website. They already had a web development company. Right from the start, I knew the site needed a re-design to make it attractive to search engines, and I didn't have the skills to do it. There wasn't a lot I could do to get a good search engine position for a poorly designed site.

So, I'm wondering what the myriad Search Engine Optimisation companies do in that situation. If there's an incumbent web design company the SEO company will be constantly asking them to change things .. that doesn't seem satisfactory. Or does the SEO company take over the site? Really, if you're going to try to get a good search engine position it needs to be part of the design right from the very beginning. Either employ both companies to work together from the start, or use a web development company with demonstrable success in getting a good search engine position and with some awareness of what users actually want. Rather like me.

The other thing this taught me is that a good search engine position comes right at the end of everything. There's working out what you, the client, wants and what your customers want, planning out the project and estimating the timing and price, then working out the content, then working out how the content fits together, then fitting it together and building the site, testing it, and making it public. All that comes before working towards a search engine placement, which can lag by six months or so.

It's not even that though. Typically you'd go live with a basic site, then go back into development to add new features. After some new features your search engine placement may rise. So, the very best search engine placement comes after many development iterations. It comes when you have the very best site, and that, as shown by the Tin Shop site, can take years.

Buster Keaton

23 September 2004: Neighbour, friend & fellow band member John Pattison's written new music for Buster Keaton's The Balloonatic, so last night we went to a screening of that together with GM which he also wrote the music for, and Steamboat Bill Jr, another Keaton.

I noticed a few things. Although I recognise that the format the video was played in .. distorted to wide screen .. made everyone look short and fat, all the women in the Keaton films were robust and capable, certainly not fey, and were all the more attractive for it.

I'm not familiar with Keaton so I don't know whether this was him or the character, but in the last film, Keaton uses a number of facial expressions and body language cues which today we'd say meant he was gay. I wonder how it was perceived then, whether the link was made? I'm thinking of Morecambe and Wise who lived together and shared a bed in their television programmes and it never occurred to most of the British public at the time to make the jump and start to think of them as being gay. I'm not making a big issue of gayness, I'm just curious whether at the time, 1923, it was so totally unacceptable that, essentially, you could be as camp as you liked and no-one would even dream that of you. Rather like, in May 33rd the subject of the film has a dissociative identity disorder because her adopted family use and abuse her in satanic worship. The officials simply think she's mad because they can't make the mental jump between the middle class suburban family home they see, and such extreme behaviour going on behind closed doors.

It's the second time I've been to a public showing of a DVD played on a Windows computer, and both times the film has suffered from jitter. This time it seemed to get fixed, but previously it completely wrecked the showing. I presume a Linux machine would do better.

Kinda irritated

23 September 2004: I'm kinda irritated today. It's a minor thing, but regular readers will know that I got the use of a small piece of allotment a few months ago, and me and the cat go up there every day now to get a few lettuce leaves for lunch.

When we got the use of the land, we asked the owner about the longevity of the arrangement. She said she had no plans to move house or anything, and expected to be there for a good many years yet.

Yesterday evening, we noticed a 'for sale' sign on her house. Dammit! She's not come round to let us know, she works in the day, I'm out tonight, so the earliest we'll know anything about her plans for the garden is on Friday night.

ArgoUML vs Enterprise Architect

22 September 2004: I've been using Argo UML (v16.1) for a project and I quite like it, but it's completely fallen off a cliff now I've reached the design stage.

I can't believe I can't do the diagram I need, and there seems to be nothing that automates the passage from one stage to the next. I seem to have to start all over again.

Someone said I should try Enterprise Architect. Interesting. Affordable. I downloaded the trial. Usable it said. Yer, right.

Actually, I think web designers are at the pinnacle of usability. When you design a website, you are designing for the world's people in all their variety. Unless you've done a user test, you can't imagine the infinite ways people can misunderstand what seems perfectly plain to you. When people talk to me about things being usable or intuitive, I imagine they're talking at that level. Most often, they aren't. That means, usability is very important to web designers, so even those of us that don't really pay that much attention to it are actually ahead of most. Since I put a lot of effort into usability, that means I'm actually 'doing usability' to a very high standard. Which finally means I keep getting disappointed by products that claim they are usable because more often than not, they aren't.

Saddam for president (not of America, obviously)

21 September 2004: Can you believe this? Can you imagine if he got voted back in? How would the Americans handle that, especially if the elections this time were agreed to be free and fair? Obviously, they simply won't let him stand, but how are they going to stop him? By brute force in the face of international law .. just like always (and exactly what they accused Saddam of). It's a beautiful piece of Saddam, it's what he does expertly .. "if the Americans believe in democracy so much, let me stand, let's have a popularity contest". Either that or, obviously, the story's total rubbish.

While I'm on the subject, I'm just wondering how many Iraqis Saddam killed, on average per month while he was in power, and how that compares to how many Iraqis the Americans have killed on average per month over the course of this adventure. I don't think the figures are available, but here are some reports from a brief Google search: hundreds of Iraqis 'killed by cluster bombs', ordinary Iraqis killed: 11,500 and not counting, officials: Hundreds of Iraqis Killed By Faulty Grenades, AP Toll Says 1,361 Iraqis Killed in April, & more Than 10,000 Iraqis Die in Baghdad.

I'm not saying Saddam is cute and cuddly, I'm no supporter of him either. But is it any wonder we're not getting popular Iraqi support?

Eco-bowen 2

21 September 2004: The programme below's annoyed me even though I didn't see it. I heard someone talk about them using eco-friendly roof tiles.

The thing that's annoyed me is that the program will have done it as a themed 'eco-friendly' makeover. A special project for someone who cares about that kind of thing. One day we're doing a room for someone who likes Moroccan style, the next, for a green.

The problem is, it marginalises it. Green stuff for green people. Everyone else can carry on as normal. The environment friendly theme should be there throughout the show, in every show. Taking account of the environment should be part of every designer's decision process every time they make a decision. If they decide not to go for the environment friendly option on this occasion because of price or fitness for purpose, no problem, but the environmental impact should be considered.

Eco-bowen

20 September 2004: Fancy giving Laurence a slap? Well you can tonight, there's a new series of Changing Rooms and they're doing a room in the most eco-friendly way they know how.

There's a 99% chance of being able to sit there shouting "You prat! Don't you know what that'll do to the Norwegian Bat Eared Bat?" And there's a 1% possibility we might learn something. Nah, scrub that last. A chance to watch the death throes of a format and go "eurgh, I couldn't live in that".

Curious

20 September 2004: The web was supposed to be the death of distance, right? And all our jobs are going to China, because they're willing to do the work we don't want to do, right? So why can't I find a Chinese company's website offering to print me t-shirts for next to no money? Actually, seriously, I was looking for t-shirt printing and wondering what I would find and I just found western companies. Yet it's exactly the kind of low-tech work I expected to find some fair trade Namibian collective to be offering. If everything added up OK, I'd have purchased. Yet, nothing.

Is it that I'm searching in English? But surely if that fictitious Namibian collective were looking to the west for its orders it would create an English website. Is it that they don't have access to the web yet? In which case, there's an explosion coming. Is it that they don't have electricity and food, never mind the web. I'm starting to think that's the wrong way to think of the third world.

I looked at the Fair Trade site and it seems to be exclusively focussed on the corporate, on big business. Surely it would help third world companies to have a diverse customer base, not to be reliant on one large and possibly fickle customer.

Why can't I trade with the majority world over the web?

Democracy

20 September 2004: I thought I'd spotted some possibility of worthy consistency from the Bush administration the other day, and so from American foreign policy, but sadly it appears not from this.

And what a great democratic nation we are. Wooohoooo for freedom. I've just been reading about the Great Reform Bill which, in 1832, and against great Tory opposition, managed to expand the vote so that one in seven males could. So, so very far from women getting it, and this is just 175 years ago. What a beacon of happiness we must be to the world.

Fonts

20 September 2004: It occurred to me, watching the excellent May 33rd that if I were a font designer, it would be interesting to work with people with various mental disorders, examine how they write, and make fonts from them. I could split the rewards with them.

That ties in with what a psychologist once said (I think it might have been Carl Rogers) about people who occasionally enter a catatonic state (dramatised in the excellent film Awakenings). He said they should get jobs as artists models. He was serious. What he meant was, they are acceptable as they are, and should build on their strengths. It's quite a beautiful relief.

Classic car rally

20 September 2004: We read on the front of the local free newspaper that there was a classic car rally on Sunday, and a bus was to take people from the Spa roundabout every forty minutes. We waited more than forty minutes and nothing came.

Morning Tesco

20 September 2004: The weekend started well for me, I was in Tesco at an unprecedented 8am on Saturday and noticed two things.

The clientelle at that time divides into two. There are the retired people who nap all day, wonder why they can't sleep, are up at 5am to get out weeding the garden and then greet everyone else with "you've missed the best part of the day".

Then there are the thin women who live on their nerves.

I've known I was going to write that for a couple of days, and after a while it became clear to me that the latter was unfair. That the women in question were probably now, or had been in the past, the central hub of a family. The one that cleans the football boots, puts food on the table, and cleans the shower. They probably are at Tesco at 8am because that's the only time they can squeeze it in. They're working hard before I've finished my muesli.

Anyway, the other thing I noticed was that Tesco have stopped playing music. It makes the place seem rather eerie (I had to look that up in case I'd spelled it eyrie, as in "Dunno what's going on with Tesco's nowadays, it's gone all eyrie. Everything's covered in straw, but the eggs are huge").

My partner did one of her placements at the mental health department in the main hospital in Mansfield which has a Morrisons right next door. She stayed in staff accommodation along with many others staying away from home. Morrisons played the most depressing music possible .. the classic being "If you leave me now" by (the hideous) Chicago. We think that was a deliberate attempt to get young people staying away from home to comfort eat.

Given the enormous efforts put into creating the right environment for shopping, including things like piping baking smells to the entrance (and the stomach churning smell of roast factory farmed chicken, despite the possibility that 7% of the population is vegetarian), this lack of music must have been deeply considered. Either that or their cassette player's broken. I'd love to see the studies about that.

Thatcher

20 September 2004: I awoke, politically, to Thatcher. For me, although obviously her policies were not always popular, she was the quintessential leader. I always remember seeing, I think live on tv, her stating in a speech that the budget for something was going to be £x million, and there were stunned looks from the audience. There was a whisper in her ear, and she came back with something along the lines of "I'm told that's a lot more than you expected, well, that'll teach them to brief me properly".

We watched the tv program on the Brighton bomb in which they interviewed the bomber himself. The bomb hit the night before the final day of the Conservative party conference, when Thatcher would give her main speech. The morning after the bombings, Thatcher appeared as normal and said to surprised reporters "the conference will proceed as normal", and at 9:30am, it did.

I suppose, to become a leader like that, you must believe in 'the system'. She gave every impression of being confident that the security services would do what was necessary to protect her. She probably believed that if they failed, it was God's will. I don't think many people trust large systems anymore. We all check and double check the tax office, the health service, our wage packets. You can waste your whole life doing that. She seemed to want to do her job, and to trust other people did theirs. That's a very freeing, empowering way to live your life.

Years ago I had issues with (I've probably blogged this before actually) training companies coming into the company I worked for at the time and assessing us, then putting together a program to plug the holes. The theory was obviously to get everyone to a minimum standard. Well, all that's going to happen there is you'll get a 'minimum standard' company. Better, much better, to work out who is good at what, and encourage them to be the best. Thatcher could be the best at leading, because she concentrated her efforts at that. Success comes from knowing yourself, and concentrating on your strengths. Fixing your weaknesses is a soul destroying waste of time.

I got a similar feeling from a U2 film. An interviewer asked Bono a question and he said something like "Oh, The Edge deals with that side of things". Complete delegation and trust. Then the credits for the film went on for months, citing pretty much everyone involved from the book-keepers to the litter pickers. I liked that.

I'm not sure I trust organisations. Actually I'm very sure I don't. There's so much room for error, mediocrity, indifference and procrastination. Even when dealing with an enthusiastic person, they usually spend their time battling inertia. I'm currently ordering a chair from a very nice and keen person in Creative Box in Birmingham and I want to choose the fabrics. I did read out a list of the colours I was interested in, but when she sent samples, I got all the greys, nickels, silvers and charcoals.

It's why I prefer to work alone.

TOTP

17 September 2004: My partner's out for the evening so I got to watch Top of the Pops (instead of Corro). I couldn't believe I was watching Marilyn Manson, incidentally the man who seemed to speak the most wisdom in Bowling for Columbine. That took me back to when I used to watch TOTP and get all excited when a punk band was on. That'll make the young goths who hang around Woolworths happy.

I recognised the song, Personal Jesus. A little research reveals it's a Depeche Mode song from 1990. I liked them for the first few singles, then I've actively avoided them ever since.

Then there's Ashlee Simpson. I'll say no more, you have to guess what I might say.

More history

17 September 2004: Further to this, it's only 200 years ago that parliament passed a law limiting child labour to twelve hours a day in the factory, and thirteen hours a day down a mine. We still had slavery, and women couldn't vote ... I'm sure I'll have dates for those as I work through the book.

Made me laff

16 September 2004: This made me laugh.

Hypocracy?

16 September 2004: My first reaction to the Bush administration's take on Putin's reaction to Beslan was anger at what appeared to be blatant hypocracy.

Now I'm thinking maybe the American government is being consistent. Maybe it's simply doing its best to defend and promote democracy, which it views as the best thing for everyone. It's a bit rich coming from the loser of the election, and it's very American in its monocultural aims, but at least I can glimpse an understanding of where they're coming from.

A good morning

16 September 2004: It feels like a good morning. I woke up to hear the parliamentary vote against fox hunting was 339 against 155, the Countryside Alliance appear to be using tactics that will marginalise them (although their website redesign seems more considered), and Kofi Annan says the Iraq war was illegal. Funky stuff. I wonder how long Kofi Annan will last now .. or is he close to retirement anyway?

I do wish the news would stop sneeringly referring to the security men at the Houses of Parliament as 'men in tights'. There's nothing wrong with tights. All our superheroes wore them, plus a large number of historical figures (none of which I'm prepared to name in case I'm wrong). It hardly gets in the way of them doing their job.

Back into gear

15 September 2004: Scarborough seems quiet. The world has kicked back into gear. No more summer freewheeling. Kids are back at school, students starting their studies. It's heads down now until Christmas.

Scarborough is at its most beautiful at this time of year. Built for tourist hoards, the streets are airy, the shops pleasant, the weather clean and fresh with the hint of winter storms in the waves. At this time it's popular with retired couples who huddle, wrapped up, and stare out to the horizon.

The Roland website

15 September 2004: Roland UK has a bad website. Firstly, it's not persuasive. I went there to be persuaded to buy a Roland electronic drum kit, and there's nothing persuasive there at all. I struggled to find the drum kits for a start, the menu option "catalogue" takes you to a list of products, but I expected it to take me to a catalogue request page. That's bad information architecture.

Since they seem incapable of making an attractive webpage, they've fallen back to providing their printed brochures as PDFs. Painful enough, but in order for me to get brochures, they want me to provide all my details and create an account. Nope, sorry. Particularly when I see no privacy policy. The request for this feature no doubt came from the sales department, and was probably triggered by a neuron link that says "we must collect contact details from people who want brochures" that was originally set up because brochures cost money to produce and to send by post. But they don't, on the web (well, a microscopic amount).

That leaves the demos page, which starts off (in Firebird) by providing a load of VBScript (a programming language) ("<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> <% Dim Repeat5__numRows Dim Repeat5__index Repeat5__numRows = -1 " .. etc.). It's not the only page that does that. If you scroll past all that you get to what the page should be like. If you then squint, you can see product pictures, and you can download video of them in action. I presume you can anyway, because they're in a Microsoft proprietary format that I can't read. I've an idea .. why not provide them in a format everyone can read?

This website has been built with Microsoft technology for Microsoft users, and, basically, everyone else can go whistle. It's weird that the sales team has been so keen on insisting on collecting names and addresses (do they do anything with those?), yet seem happy to entirely reject anyone not using the latest Microsoft operating system and browser.

To be fair, one thing they do do very well, is they put up the contact details for every staff member. I love that. I think every company should do that. Update 20 Sept: However, I wrote to the sales and marketing director (email address directors@ ..., so it obviously goes to all, or to a human splitter), and have received nothing back. At least I got a response from Farrow and Ball They reassured me their web site was secure. I don't think so .. I may do more work on that..

So what am I left with? I've no idea how the Roland digital drum range fits together, I've no idea which is the top of the range and why it's better than the others. I've no clue about prices, nor any idea who my nearest dealer is. My visit to the Roland website was more than a waste of time. It's made me favour Yamaha. Oh yes, that's much better. I just got from the main Yamaha site to the drum kits in a few clicks (that's wonderful, imagine how many products Yamaha makes), I now have an idea of the range, and I know my nearest dealer.

Saturated colour

15 September 2004: I went jogging this morning. North bay was as fresh and beautiful as can be. If I'd taken a photograph of the sea, sky and grass, I think you'd have bet money that I'd ramped up the colour saturation. Stunning.

Blinded by the light

15 September 2004: What I want to know is .. if you look straight at the sun, it burns your retina and you get blinded, right? So what if the sun is in your peripheral vision? Is it not burning merrily away at that part of your retina? Maybe you just don't notice the damage. And if it isn't focussed there so the damage is being done more slowly, it's still damage.

I read somewhere that as you get older, you see things less brightly. You need brighter lights to be able to read with. Could peripheral sun damage be partly to blame?

Gospel

15 September 2004: The stars of The Ladykillers, a slightly humorous film (in a "driving Miss Daisy kind of way") which we saw last night was the gospel choir. Gospel's so good, I can't believe I haven't got any CDs of it. I think gospel's the only thing that could get me to church. So uplifting.

William the Conqueror

14 September 2004: You may have spotted a rogue historial vector in my recent blogs. That's because I'm working through The British Millenium .. I'm really enjoying it, in fact, that's my review on the Amazon site (it will be when they process it). Friends bought it for my birthday last year (thanks Rory/Theresa).

Anyway, I've a question. At the start of the book is a picture of William the Conqueror. What technique is this?

The whole image is composed of dark lines (see close-up). Why?

William the Conqueror died in 1087, so it's a while ago. I'm thinking it's to do with the materials used. It's not cloth, like corderoy (daft idea, I know), because the lines aren't all in the same direction. Yet they're all over the picture not just in the places where you'd want texture, like his coat. They're on his cheek (which is what the close-up shows). Is it a wood carving? But why? The colours were painted, obviously, so why not paint it on something more normal? Has anyone any clues on this? I tried searching Google images but can't find the same pic. It's the kind of thing that'll keep me awake at night.

Wikipedia

14 September 2004: I can be slow sometimes, and the Wikipedia has crept up on me, but the article's right, it works.

Snake Eyes

14 September 2004: I'm not making light of this, but in Snake Eyes, the baddie claims justification because he once commanded a ship that had been hit by a torpedo which blasted a hole in its side. He had to make the decision to close the doors and condemn 28 men to drown, and 'they don't die quietly'.

I've two questions. First, if there's a great big hole in the side of the boat, why don't the trapped men swim out of it and get rescued?

Second, if the hole is below the ceiling of the floor they're on, there'll surely be an air pocket the men can use. I obviously don't understand .. I was just wondering.

While I'm at it, Michael Howard

14 September 2004: I heard on the Today programme that Michael Howard said that he would commit the UK to sorting out global warming, and persuade George Bush to sign up to Kyoto.

Actually, reading the speech, it sounds possible. But it's hardly Conservative territory. What I felt, when I heard that, was "Michael Howard will say anything to get elected, what he does in government will be different". More than that, there doesn't seem to be a central core, a principle, in the centre of it. They're just cherry picking.

As a kid I used to go fishing. I even entered a few matches. I even got a book out of the library on how to win matches (but I don't think I ever caught anything in a match). According to the book, there were two strategies. Either go for the big fish, which is what everyone's doing. Or optimise for catching tiddlers. He described a way of using barbless hooks so even the time spent removing them was reduced, and a way of using groundbait to get the young fish into a feeding frenzy. I think that's Howard's strategy. He's going for small pockets of dissatisfaction and offering them someone to turn to. But a lot of small catches does not make a cohesive policy.

Whether you agreed with her or not, Thatcher had principles. Blair too. I don't think anyone can say what the tories stand for .. whereas we used to when Thatcher was there, and I think we can with Blair too.

It feels like what's needed is a stake in the ground .. here's the dead centre of Conservative Party policy, and we occupy the space for ten miles around. If we overlap with Labour, fine, but this is us.

Charles Kennedy

14 September 2004: I just took my partner her morning cuppa and switched the telly on so she can wake up to it. The problem is, Charles Kennedy was being interviewed, a person who can construct the world's largest and most convoluted sentences. He makes you fall asleep, not wake up. I've noticed whenever he comes on telly, Ali and I tend to strike up a conversation. Anything but struggle through Alphabetti Kennedy.

I always feel like I need some sort of automated assistant to work out what he's talking about, something like a soldier's helmet with a head up display that shows all the co-ordinates of the enemy. My Kennedy Helmet would accept what he said, throw away 75% of it (could discarded Kennedy verbage be recycled?), then glue it all back together and play me the essence.

For example, interviewer "Do you think we should withdraw from Europe", Kennedy "Well there's a lot to consider, notwithstanding the current situation, and I've been working very hard with my constituency colleagues in the Liberal party ........ , and then take a vote". What I'd see from inside my Kennedy Helmet: "No".

JASC Paint Shop Pro

14 September 2004: I hate the way Paint Shop Pro hogs my computer while it starts up. It takes a while to start up on my fairly slow/old system .. not a problem. What I do is I double click PSP, then I want to alt-tab to something else to work while it's loading. Most programs let me do that, but not PSP. PSP is so full of itself, so important, that once it's managed to load its splash screen it wants it on top of all my windows, all the time. No matter how many times I click the underneath windows or alt-tab to what I do want, PSP is always on top. So not only does PSP take a while to load, it also stops me working while it does. I don't like that, not one bit.

Cat wind

14 September 2004: A cat in a strong wind has no dignity.

C'mon

13 September 2004: The most exciting thing I've heard in a long while is At Town Hall Party. C'mon Everybody, by Eddie Cochran in 1959 becomes not the tired old re-run that we hear so often, but a live, spirited, punk anthem. That must have sounded like pure freedom at the time.

Sadly, I'm even going to give you the lyrics. That "who cares" just tingles my spine. It's such a mixture of "I've been doin my homework all week long" .. stable, fifties, doing the right thing, mixed with, well, with "who cares". Gorgeous. Ready?

Well c'mon everybody and let's get together tonight
I got some money in my jeans and I'm really gonna spend it right
Been a-doin' my homework all week long
now the house is empty the folks are gone
Ooo C'mon everybody

Well my baby's number one but I'm gonna dance with three or four
And the house'll be shakin' from my bare feet slapping the floor
When you hear that music you can't sit still
If your brother won't rock then your sister will
Ooo C'mon everybody

Well we'll really have a party but we gotta put a guard outside
If the folks come home I'm afraid they gonna have my hide
There'll be no more movies for a week or two
No more runnin' 'round with the usual crew
Who cares C'mon everybody

Spin

13 September 2004: According to Channel 4 News, when the prime minister received lacklustre applause today at his speech at the Trade Union Congress, and no-one laughed at his jokes, the labour party's PR machine spun it as that they hadn't understood the profound nature of the measures he proposed. Wow, that's spin for you.

A place by the sea

13 September 2004: Last week's edition of Channel 4's A Place By The Sea featured a couple looking for a place on the North Yorkshire coast and contained so many errors it's impossible to list (I watched it because a friend was on it). The errors came mainly from a lack of co-ordination between the narration and the images. So the narrator said something about Scarborough's restaurants while the video showed Whitby's Magpie restaurant. The narrator talked about one beach, while the video showed a different one.

I know that's probably good enough for most, but anyone along this coast who saw that would instantly see the errors. And as the program moves around the country, it will gradually lose credibility with everyone.

Some might feel that I'm a perfectionist. For instance, I'm working with a company now, and I raised an issue about some figures in their catalogue that simply don't add up. They don't know why, and their parent company doesn't know why. Yet these are important figures. Am I the first to spot the problem? And sometimes the reaction feels like, "look John, just get on with it please". I can't, the figures don't add up.

I'm here to create best-in-class websites. If you hire me, you don't want just any old website, you want the best in the market. If I don't understand something, what chance does the person who visits my website have? I have to be a perfectionist. If I ran "A Place By The Sea", the narrative would fit the video or there'd be no program.

Breaking and entering

13 September 2004: Be warned, this one's unsavoury. Ready? Here goes. So, when you die, your body goes stiff with rigour mortice. There are tales of people having to break the fingers of corpses in order to get at what they held when they died. I'm not entirely convinced of that, but for the purposes of the piece, let's accept it.

Schwarzenegger has signed a bill banning necrophilia. Apparently the only thing they could charge those they caught with until now, was breaking and entering. What exactly did they break before they entered? (I did warn you).

Then there was the story of one guy who was discovered when people arrived for work, asleep, on top of a corpse. He'd had sex with 'her' the night before while drunk, and then fallen asleep. Now that's a morning after, isn't it?

Blessed car wash

11 September 2004: Why is the inside of a car wash always dirty? I asked that once, and the person I asked started to explain. He missed the joke.

Anyway, Scarborough has a new and exciting car wash at our new and exciting Sainsbury's. I was told this by a friend (hi John), who was going to take his kids through it later that evening.

We thought we'd experience it for ourselves. It was only when we were typing in our number that we noticed it was a Christ car wash. Maybe the second coming's happened, no-one's noticed, and he's decided to work his way up. I missed the option for getting my feet washed too.

While we're on the subject, there was a very stupid piece of editorial over the last few days saying kids could recognise Ronald McDonald, but couldn't recognise Jesus Christ. Cue shock and indignation. But isn't that something to do with the fact (fact? Am I right?), that we don't actually know what Jesus Christ looked like?

A friend

11 September 2004: I emailed a friend and pointed him to these pages because there was something I thought would interest him. He emailed back saying "I couldn't find it, but there was a load of weird stuff on there". Hmmm. "Ooo vudge welcome".

First frost

11 September 2004: If you're a gardener, you'll know that on one special night each year the first frost wipes out any remaining summer plants left in your garden, and you wake up to a new game played solely with hardy, overwintering plants.

I started to wonder when ours might be. It turns out, in late October. I could do with knowing the standard deviation around that, but still, it's much better than nothing.

Green Wing

11 September 2004: I didn't think it would, but Green Wing's got under my skin.

Mobile Phones

10 September 2004: I'm back to trying to upgrade my mobile phone. I've said before, I've an old Nokia, the guarantee for which ran out in 1997. It's getting a bit knackered now, and I want to test mobile Internet services, so I need to upgrade. However, I worked out, because all my accounts are in Quicken (and I love it), that I only spend about £12 a month on my mobile phone.

I went back into Phones 4u and had a different experience from the one I blogged last time. This time a sales assistant came up to me and asked how much I spend on my phone, I said "about £20 a month". I showed her my Nokia and said I was quite interested in the Samsungs because they looked nice. I use O2. I then explained I'm a web developer and I'm interested in testing online Internet services. She said "why not try a Nokia?". She hasn't been listening has she? If you go with Vodafone, you get n free minutes at weekends blah blah. My head glazed over.

The market's a classic confusopoly as I've probably said before, so I was rather keen to find a website that cut through it all. I didn't find one. I think that makes it a deliberate confusopoly.

There are a few things I know. I want Internet access on my phone, and I want Bluetooth. I don't want to spend too much, I want it to vibrate occasionally, I want my keys to be lockable, and I don't want it to shatter if I drop it. I want a phone that's worth upgrading to. Games, polyphonic ring tones, clip on fronts, cameras, video of the latest football results, are all worthless to me.

What I found in all the major network providers websites and most of the major retailers sites was the classic mistake. They all talked in their own terms, rather than in my terms. First choice, usually, was pay as you go vs contract. To be honest, I'm open to a contract if it doesn't cost me too much more, so I'm easy, I just need to know the costs. I don't want to jump either way yet.

Next, if it's a retailer, you choose your network provider. Well, how can I do that? I need to choose a tariff maybe, or to put in my postcode and see who has the best coverage.

Then I'm presented with maybe twenty or thirty phones and asked to pick one. Are you really expecting me to look at the details of each phone individually and make a decision? You must be kidding surely.

Oh, I got this from 3's site: "How it works: Each top-up gives you a choice.". Sounds good so far. "A package combining voice calls with a cash allowance to spend on any 3 services.". An allowance? You mean, like pocket money or what prisoners get? Fantastic. I'm lost already. Each top up gives me a choice. I guess that must be between the any 3 services I can get. Is that, any three services, or any service from 3? Anyway, I'll press on. "Or a combination of text messages, voice calls and credit to spend on any 3 services you like." Ah. So the choice was between the voice calls plus allowance, or text/voice/credit. Does anyone know what this means?. I'll give you the rest for the record: "Whichever you choose, you're getting the same great value as customers on a contract. Top-ups give you an allowance of voice minutes and / or text messages, plus a credit to spend on any 3 services you like - £5 credit for each £15 top-up and £1.50 for £25 and £35 top-ups. In addition, add-ons let you pay for any 3 service - you can use it for text messaging, international calls, football highlights, music videos, Tunes & Pix and much more. Banner example based on a £25 VideoTalk or VideoText voucher with a 30-day validity period. Certain calls excluded." I defy anyone to make that make sense.

What I need is a place where I can say what I know .. maybe I can say I'm with Nokia and happy, and I'm with O2 and happy. I need to be able to give it those decisions I've made .. I want Bluetooth, etc. Then it can give me some options and guidance. I want to be able to save my partial decision while my brain cools down, and come back to it to tackle the next part. I want the website to explain, for example, 3G to me and let me make a soft decision on it ("yes maybe", "probably not"). This is a fuzzy logic application I think.

I'm not buying, because I don't understand.

At least AVR Mobiles shows a list of the top ten phones. Social navigation, that's good. Nokia has a phone comparer, but it's by no means perfect. MobileShop does the social navigation thing too. Looking through review centre (whatever that is), it appears the shops with the highest rating do at least use best seller lists to try to cut through the rubbish. There's 'what plan' and others like it, but it still asks a set list of questions which I can't answer. I reckon there's a huge market for someone here, but obviously it's nothing I can do much about .. it would take a large dedicated team to make sense of this ever changing market.

Internet Computing degrees

9 September 2004: I graduated from Hull University, Scarborough Campus which has a strong open source component. I've recently had the chance to consider the content of some other courses, and found their approach rather more proprietary.

Microsoft, doing its 'thou shalt worship only me' thing is targeting universities with low cost licences. The problem with that is that Microsoft software doesn't really like working with software from other companies let alone open source software, so it tends to have a cuckoo in the nest effect (cuckoos lay their eggs in other bird's nests, the nest owner treats the egg as one of its own. When the egg hatches the chick grows faster than the other chicks, eats all the food, and one by one it literally shoves the other birds out of the nest).

The result will be graduates that at the very least tend towards providing a Microsoft solution, and at worst, don't know any alternative solutions. When you are recommended a solution, it may simply be that's the only solution the developer knows.

Of course, the same charge could be levelled at me. I would tend towards a J2EE/Java solution if the budget stretches to it, PHP otherwise.

Not only that, apparently there are other Internet Computing degree courses out there that don't include much programming at all, and there are students who want to study Internet Computing, and balk at courses with a big programming element. A large proportion of my Internet Computing degree was programming. The goal was to deliver competent programmers who know what's going on behind the scenes and can therefore use pretty much any language. So again, there are people out there with Internet Computing degrees who don't know how to program.

It's a crazy old world innit.

I'm different

9 September 2004: I'm typing away merrily and every time I type 'the' I seem to accidentally type 'teh' and I have to go back to correct it. Now, I could ask my editor to automatically spot those errors and replace them. I think most people would do that. But to my mind, that just means I never correct my error. I'm cushioned from my crapness, and later when I use a different wordy processor, or I'm at a client's desk or whatever, my crapness will be revealed.

I prefer to correct the problem at source. To program an alert in my head that whenever I type 'the' I need to concentrate for a second on getting the keys the right way around. That way, I improve my skills. After all, it's my skills and abilities that I market. They should be top notch. I shouldn't be working in a cocooned world. I need quick feedback on my crapness so I can correct it. I want fast and raw, not cotton wool.

Marks and Spencer

9 September 2004: I hassled M&S previously, now I'd like to praise them. They're moving exclusively to fair trade coffee in their coffee shops. Fantastic. Apparently people don't know much about fair trade tho.

They also showed quite a lead on the GM issue. I still regularly go there (nearest decent food shop) and they haven't got what I want though (I blogged previously about supermarkets not being terribly super). Yesterday I went in for organic milk and an aubergine, they hadn't got either. The other day, they hadn't got mini sweet corns .. imagine the outrage. Actually I really thought that would have been a staple M&S thing. I thought the customers would riot when they sold out of that, but no. When I went back with placards and tried to get a chant going (you know the sort of thing, "M&S, get our mini sweetcorns sorted or we'll go elsewhere", "where will we go?" "elsewhere"), they just shuffled off to the newly extended chicken ready meals section. OK, I made up the last two sentences.

One other thing about M&S is that I'm learning graphic design from them. Standing in the queue I face a wall of their posters. They're an exercise in making you feel comfortable, in not being challenging. They've chosen a square format .. unusual, but completely balanced. They divide it into equal parts, again regular, soothing, chant-like. Wouldn't wanna spoil their customers' comfortable lives.

It's not a question of morality

8 September 2004: Just about 470 years ago King Henry 8th was beheading his wives and proclaiming himself the head of the church (and hanging those churchmen who argued differently). Later, Catholic Mary Tudor had protestants burned at the stake, then she herself was beheaded by Queen Elizabeth.

Just 360 years ago, Matthew Hopkins sent hundreds of women to their deaths as witches, then failed his own test and was hanged himself.

360 years. That's not long. So what, exactly, is it that separates us from the evil Saddam Hussein? Were we evil 360 years ago? Or was it just the way things were done then. Undoubtedly we've improved since those times, but if our political and economic systems constantly work to our advantage, to expand difference and to hold back other countries, is it fair to round on them later with "hey, you haven't kept up with developments".

And while I'm at it, where was the speech by Bush and Blair in support of Putin's efforts to combat international terrorism? When 9/11 happened, Blair bounced around the world like a pinball. Russia seems to be on its own with Beslan. If you buy the Bush/Blair line of an international war on terrorism, then you'd expect them to embrace Russia at this time, and pledge to work together. For me, as if we need another piece of evidence, this underlines yet again the idea that the international war on terrorism is no such thing, it's simply a convenient lie to feed the people, while the rich countries plunder for oil to feed their unsustainable energy hunger.

I read in Friday's Independent newspaper the following: 2% of the world's population is British, and Britain uses 2% of the world's oil. 5% of the world's population is American. America uses 25% of the world's oil. Americans use five times as much oil as Brits.

The other interesting statistic in that report is the US national debt. $7.22tr (I love that .. "this national debt clock is brought to you by Camille's Cat Boarding House, Tulsa"). Ours seems to have been £434bn in 2002. If the US population is 294,215,590, that's £13,828 (I converted the currency) national debt per head of US population compared to 58,789,194 UK population sustaining £7,382 of national debt each. Actually, it doesn't sound too bad put that way. I mean, if you were a banker faced with the most materially successful country on earth and they wanted just £13,828 for every person in their country, that doesn't sound too bad a request to me. What is weird, is how come the most materially successful country on earth needs to borrow money at all.

I wonder what would happen if the UN decided that every country should have, say, £5,000 per head of its population of credit to play with, no more, no less. That would be quite a leveller.

Finally. Who is the US borrowing from? I guess that shows how little I understand about international finance.

Attenborough Nature Reserve

8 September 2004: I always thought of myself as a bit of a nature boy. I learned a lot about insects as a kid from the Observers books, but particularly I studied, collected, bred, kept, killed, and chased butterflies and moths. I'm not sure todays kids get the freedom that I did to wander unsupervised around the local fields (now a housing estate).

Our next door neighbours used to take me and their kids fishing to Attenborough Nature Reserve, and I'm sure I also cycled out there a few times. And this weekend, we went back there and wandered around.

Being back in that environment I felt all the same excitements from the flowers, the seeds and berries, the insects, birds, trees. All in wonderful anarchic variety. Beautifully delicate flowers rising out of a sea of blackberry thorns. Grebes diving for fish. I'd never seen Grebes until I went to Attenborough Nature Reserve.

Anyway, my point is this. This weekend, with the same feelings happening all over again, it felt like it was the place that provided that inspiration. It wasn't necessarily me being interested in the environment or wildlife, it was actually Attenborough Nature Reserve that, in part, made it happen. I got to wondering whether there are many kids today who never get the opportunity to get excited about the countryside.

Damn. You know, that word, countryside, has been usurped by the Countryside Alliance. When I talk about the countryside, I'm not talking about farmed land and farming life. I'm talking about wild nature. Copses, meadows, moorland and forest edges.

Nottingham traffic

8 September 2004: It kinda scares me to think that most people live like they do in Nottingham. As a kid, my dad used to take us to Bramcote swimming pool. The traffic island that's on, which was once just plain old traffic island, is now a concentrated piece of road engineering. It's got gantries of traffic lights. And if you make the wrong decision, as we did, at 5pm, you're stuck in a mile or two of standing traffic.

I used to drive 40,000 miles a year, but I don't drive much anymore. The car doesn't fit on my stairwell to take me from my bed to the office which is one storey down and across the landing. By g/f does tho, quite a bit. She enjoys listening to the radio as she drives back from work. The M25, the M6, parts of the M1, the A1, the M8, all blocked, while she's driving along the coast road, taking in the views of the bays and occasionally having to draw up for a moment behind a tractor.

What happens when you can't spell?

8 September 2004: My g/f wanted to know how to make a strawberry dackary cocktail. I'd never heard of it. I googled for it, nothing. I realised my spelling was probably the issue so I tried all kinds of ways, still nothing, and nothing useful from Google's spellchecker.

Wandering around a shop, I found a cocktail calculator which told me it was spelled daiquiri. How could I have known that? Internet success depends on you knowing how to spell.

My Halloumi Hell

7 September 2004: Every now and then I get demanding of this consumer world and I want what I want. I think the principle is something like, if we're going to have supermarkets wrecking shopping centres, they'd better do a good job, the job they promised.

At one time I asked our local Morrison's every week or so where their organic cheese was. There was a label and a space for it on the shelf, but no product. I expected more than bland statements. I expected organic cheese. But their reaction was .. to remove the label. I hate them for that.

So anyway, I'd planned a recipe in which slices of halloumi were rolled up with slices of aubergine and then grilled. Sounds good doesn't it?

Our local organic supplier who delivers and saves us from the supermarkets has been on holiday for a couple of weeks so we had to use Tesco, and it turned out they had a shelf space and label for Halloumi, but no stock.

Time passed after that visit and I cooked other things, but when we got back on Saturday evening from Nottingham having eaten plenty of rubbish on the journey, that halloumi recipe was what we wanted. I'd forgotten we never did get the halloumi. So I got part way through the recipe when I discovered that. Halloumi has two important properties: 1) it's really, really nice, and 2) it's unlike anything else. By this time, we were both psyched up for this meal, so I did what comes naturally to me in that circumstance, I tested the system .. I got in the car to get halloumi.

I set off with the thought that Scarborough has three major supermarkets, so one of them will have halloumi. Knowing that Tesco was the one that failed the first time, I tried Safeway. It was an empty shell. It's being converted to a Sainsbury's.

Tesco next. Still no halloumi. That left the drive out to Morrisons. I arrived at about, well, at 20:38, and it was closed. On a Saturday night.

So what's the moral of this story? Very often I'll turn up at a supermarket with a list and leave without several items. So where is that promise of the one-stop shop? I'll end up getting that halloumi from the cheese board on Victoria road, which I prefer to do anyway. But that need, late one evening, is supposed to be where the supermarkets gain their advantage. Tesco is open 24 hours. It was open, yes, but didn't have what I wanted. The promise, without the delivery, is worse than no promise at all.

How not to sell a Honda

6 September 2004: We went into a Honda dealership (in Nottingham) this weekend and looked at a CRV, because my partner had seen they have a picnic table and a fridge. I know, but bear with me. Anyway, they don't have a fridge. The sales person described an ad with the Men Behaving Badly guys using a plug in fridge and a portable shower attachment (you have to carry your own water for that). Basically, it has a socket in the luggage space into which you can plug whatever 12v appliance you wish. Whoopeedo, a cigarette lighter in the back.

Anyway, he said "The middle panel is designed to take all the sizes of McDonalds meals". Sales rule number 1: know your audience. I wonder if it's the same bloke who told a friend (hi Rory) of mine to take his wife outside and give her a good slap. This is the friend who'd just edited and published, with his own money, Am I Not a Person, the life story of a woman who had suffered abuse.

Curiously, there was a time when Tom Peters ranted enthusiastically about a car with a coffee cup holder. It was an example of design catering for its users, of small ideas leading to big sales, of big metal products being fun, personal, friendly. I enthused too. But citing McDonalds isn't the way to sell to me or my partner.

Misogynistic garbage

1 September 2004: One of our next door neighbours is a playwright and she's working on an idea that might involve someone working in marketing and new media so she came to talk to me to get an idea of what this world is like.

I ended up telling her about a couple of sales guys I knew, and liked, but who .. well, what follows isn't pleasant so be warned. He talked about going into Soho one night and planned to be "up to my nuts in guts". This was a guy who acted like that at work, but when I visited his home for a meeting .. a very nice country cottage .. he made it clear that he wasn't like that at home, he had a nice wife and kids.

His mate talked about going to a strip club, and the stripper rubbed her groin against his face and he "made the mistake of breathing in, and the ammonia stripped the hairs from my nostrils".

It was pretty clear to me then and still is now, that this was pretty blatant misogyny. Maybe it was all just so much hot air, it doesn't matter. The worst thing isn't the use of prostitutes, and it's not even the double life, it's the attitude towards all the women involved and the broadcasting of that attitude.

Both were, on the face of it, nice guys. You never know what's inside people's heads.

The other thing I mentioned was the MD who instead of saying "and so on", or "etcetera" would say "blah de blah, ting ting".

Anyway, we'll see if any of this ends up in the play, if it happens.

I want a plotter

1 September 2004: I want a plotter. I've been working up to this for a while, and yesterday I went to an architectural services / printing place in town with three formats of raster output (.ps, .eps, and .svg) and none of them worked on his machine. If it had, an A2 plot was going to cost £4.50.

In my former life as a PR chappy, I used to do the PR for Graphtec. They did really great plotters (but evidently really crap websites), and you can buy secondhand plotters on eBay and Loot and so on, but I was a bit worried about having such a big machine with no real use for it. I'd use it so rarely that the pens would dry out between goes I think. Yet, when I need a big print, I need a big print.

But then I remembered Graphtec used to do pencil plotters. Wow. So that would get away from the whole cost of consumables issue. That's what I want. I can't see any of those on eBay, and I can't see an "alert me when a pencil plotter comes along" function either.

That was the company that took on a new UK managing director who, if you wanted to meet with him, would say things like "I've got four and a half minutes at seventeen minutes past three, is that OK?" He was Japanese I seem to remember, and also managingly directorised another couple of companies.

My Virtual Model

1 September 2004: I've just been trying my virtual model and, oh my, it's quite scary when you get something that looks like you.

It seems the only clothes company using it is Lands End, but the whole thing is pretty close to being good. There are personalised tips for my body shape, but I'm still confused. What is a "Men's Regular Long Sleeve Pima Interlochen Polo"? Mens, good. Long sleeve, good. Regular .. we have to understand American here, I think I'm a slim fit but there you go. Pima? Interlochen? Polo? They mean nothing to me. Polo is something Prince Charles plays, or it means a round neck, which isn't the type of neck this garment has, judging from the picture. Oh I see, they've chosen a whole outfit for me and that's what he's wearing under the coat. OK.

Well, two things. Firstly, I'd never tuck that polo top into my trousers, and I never wear blue jeans. I look like a virtual dork. Second, the model shows my sleeves coming down almost to the middle thumb joint (the one just above where your thumb joins your hand). I don't believe it, frankly. One of my 'things' is that being tall, arm length is an issue. Having big hands emphasises any shortness of sleeve. I'm hardly ever satisfied with arm length. Arms long enough to reach where it does on my virtual model would be unprecedented.

I'm reminded of a kitchen design company that said they do 3D line drawings of kitchens, because they've tried doing full colour drawings and all that happened was they got complaints about how the real thing didn't match the picture. I'm thinking, if I order this Interlochen thing because it says it's got long arms, and it hasn't, I'm going to want to send it back.

I also tried a coat that looked like it had arms long enough. The size they suggested, and remember, they now know more about my size than my mother, was medium. I'm 6'6" tall, does medium sound right to you?

I just showed my virtual model to my g/f and she said "the feet look too small". They never asked me a shoe size. I'm a 14, too large to be available in most shops. Why didn't they ask me my shoe size? When I press on the shoe size button the page is headed "get wise to your US shoe size". NO! Absolutely definitely 110% thrice backwards NO! I'm the customer. You bend to me, I don't bend to you. I'm British, we have our own sizes. If you want to sell to me, use sizes I understand. That's basic internationalisation. It's also something a computer can easily tackle .. breath in the US size, and breath out the UK size. No problem. Therefore, the reason they haven't done it, is they don't care to do it. And if they don't care about me, I certainly don't care about them.

OK, so now I'm upset. These clothes are like Marks and Spencer clothes. I've an issue with Marks and Spencer. People call it Marks and Sparks, but, there are no sparks. There's no life in M&S. No innovation. No excitement. It's MOR clothing, and if you like MOR anything, you've given up trying, given up having an opinion of your own, given up living. You're letting the marketers and the PR people drive your brain. Every time you go in M&S your soul dies a little. Have you ever seen anyone sexy in Marks and Spencer? I know the answer, it's NO. 'nuff said.

I can see enormous potential with this tho. The thing that's missing, for me, that would be easy to program, is a way to choose colours that suit your colouring, and a way to say "no blue jeans". But those are all coming I'm sure. It's great, it's just not great enough yet, but it will be. Imagine, you can send your model to someone, they could dress it, and send it back to you for approval.

I read about it as an example of 3D graphics aiding e-commerce. It doesn't have the feel of 3D, though. It's more, 2D with shading. It's to do with the limited views I think, if I could spin my model as I wished, then yes, it would feel 3D.

Finally, when the model starts, it's wearing just underwear .. it was quite disappointing to press the 'remove outfit' button and nothing happens :-(