John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Why do I hate this so much?: 31 October 2005: Why do I hate this so much? The picture I mean. Many ISPs nowadays (eg) use pictures of attractive women on their advertising. Isn't it just like the seventies when the motor show was full of half naked women draped over the new cars?; It's more than a knee jerk reaction to stereotyping though. That it's stereotyping is a given I think. There's the guy in easy casual clothes, legs apart (obviously .. why do guys do that?), he's been working all day at the sort of job that pays him enough money to buy a media centre PC and have the time to work out what to watch on it and then to actually watch it. His woman's no housewife, that's clear. She certainly seems likely to have an equally rewarding job. But here's the guy providing a protective arm, and taking control of the programming. She is clearly enjoying the programme, but he's not laughing as much. He's probably seen it before (he's experienced, worldly wise) and is introducing her to something he's decided is good.; Now, I know that in selling something you really need to bring home the benefits. I would go the same route .. what is the benefit of getting a media centre PC? OK it allows you (the guy is who we're really talking to here) to play your music and watch tv and surf the net, but those are not benefits, they are functions. The "so what?" test is the normal way forward. The "so what?" is it gives you control and choice. Nope, "so what?" So, basically, when you settle down to an evening with your woman, you are almost guaranteed to have a great evening's entertainment, whatever your mood. From a guy's point of view, if he plays his cards right in an evening like that with luck and a fair wind it might end in some form of sex. OK, so now we're getting somewhere. That's the "so what?" we're after. I don't mean that in a particularly cynical way. We all lead stressful lives and it takes a while to wind down from the day, and sex can be part of a loving relationship and hopefully it's good for both those involved who are willing participants in the whole strategy, so all is well.; Obviously Acer can't show a pair of knockers and go "buy this media centre PC and get to play with these". That would be tasteless. The sexual element is in the loose clothing (and the lack of jewellery or a watch, suggesting they've showered, which again shows they're both willing participants in the evening's strategy), the clearly warm environment, the sense they're on a sofa, their closeness, and the fact that, while there's not a lot of touching, she does have her hand between his legs. So all that is suggestive.; So, what is wrong with that? Well, it's nonsense for a start. We don't have comfortable jobs like that, we don't look like those two, and some of the audience isn't in a loving relationship. Buying the Acer media centre PC is only part of the formula for that life. So part of my problem can be discounted because it's really just standard sales and marketing. That's how it works, get over it. Perhaps the messages are becoming more ubiquitous nowadays, but I did buy and read the magazine voluntarily, so I can't really claim that.; So is my problem sexism? Is it that the image portrays the man as wise and capable provider, and the woman as being receptive to that? Funnily enough, I just mentally ran through the women friends I know .. from the course Dawn, Karen, Suzie, Binka, even Linda, then friends Chris, Madeleine, Sally, my partner Ali, her sister Debbie, neighbours Ellen, Ali, Julie, Barbara. Not one of them will accept any nonsense, they are all strong characters, the majority of them very intelligent & capable. Many of those people would absolutely stand up for themselves in any argument or indeed a physical fight. They would seek out an argument if they thought it important to make a point. The real-life women I know are not passive.; I'm not saying that they wouldn't enjoy an evening similar to the one depicted. But they are not the woman depicted there. They are not passive receivers. They are engaged, switched on, taking part. They are strong equals and they won't do what they don't want to do.; I think that's nailed it. But to reach this point I really had to think about what my problem was. So my real problem is that I'm the one in a million who has done that with this ad. I don't mean I'm above the others, I just mean most people don't have the marketing background while reading a computing magazine combined with the will and time to delve.; So the majority of the people seeing the ad would receive the photograph and its messages unconsciously. The problem with that is that it sets up in the reader's head an aspirational standard of passive acceptance for women to reach. When a real woman doesn't do that, it sets up dissatisfaction in the guy which, when there are many such ideas around, could lead to all sorts, maybe even violence or depression, perhaps the breakup of a relationship that would otherwise have worked. In extreme cases maybe, but considering how much marketing there is, is it that extreme?; The curious thing is that that's really pollution. It's the by-product, the outflow discharge from what the ad agency is trying to achieve. They will have created the ad to push the buttons in the largest number of readers and will be monitoring the results closely .. "how many media centre PCs have we sold?" .. and that is it. They won't be monitoring any of the social effects of what they're doing, just sales. It is the equivalent of a factory pouring effluent into the river in order to manufacture a product.; Whatever. I am repelled by the image, probably more because I think I'm being subtly manipulated, and would never buy from such an ad. Maybe adland knows different. Maybe my conscious mind says I wouldn't, but my unconscious still does.; Or is it just jealousy or envy? Do I think I already have that lifestyle and the image shows me I haven't? Or do I really want that lifestyle and know that I can't achieve it? Or did I have that but now I feel older compared to those two, I'm not as good looking as he is and never will be, and more to the point, young women are no longer available to me? (They never were, I'm not looking, and I'm more than happy with my life partner, I'm just exploring the psychology). Is all this just so much intellectual bluff and posturing to hide my own inadequacy?; I've been reading about writing copy that is attractive to the various DISC personality types (so you see, I'm on the marketing side too). It's possible I don't like the photograph because of my personality 'type'. I'll come back to that.
More on ink cartridges: 31 October 2005: Following on from this I've just finished my second lot of W H Smith branded ink cartridges. OK I could have carried on a little longer with them, but I was printing out the BBCs "The Glass Wall" (detailing their website redesign process) and wanted to be able to see the screenshots and diagrams.; I printed 811 pages the first time, and 723 this time. Like I say, the printer hadn't actually stopped working yet this time, hence the lower figure.; The problem is, when I first got the printer it had HP original cartridges in it, and it printed 1,369 sheets plus nine photographs.; From the W H Smith website, HP no. 56 black cartridges cost £11.99, while the W H Smith equivalent costs £9.99. In colour, the HP 57 costs £21.99, while the W H Smith equivalent costs £18.99.; Now, in the shop they often sell cartridges on a 3 for 2 offer. I don't know whether that only applies to WHS products, but let's see if it's worthwhile in that worst case.; Because I'm using Linux, I haven't got the HP management software so I've no idea whether I can replace just one cartridge when it runs out .. I can't tell which one is empty. Perhaps I could if I knew what symptoms I was looking for, but I don't. So I drive the thing until it falls over, then replace both at the same time.; So lets go through two WHS cycles and buy three black and three colour cartridges costing (3 x £9.99 + 3 x £18.99 - 2 x £9.99 (the offer)) / 3 = £22.32 to print (723 + 811)/2 pages = 767 gives 2.91p per sheet (ink cost only).; In the worst case, if the HP cartridges aren't subject to that offer, I'd pay £11.99 + £21.99 = £33.98 to print 1,369 pages, = £33.98/1,369 = 2.48p per sheet (ink cost only). Cheaper. Gotcha!; Not only that, I was accidentally sold, last time, a number 58 cartridge equivalent which seems to be to do with photo printing. Anyway, it doesn't go into the colour cartridge slot (it looks like it replaces black), and since I haven't got the software to put the HP into photo printing mode, it's quite possible I couldn't use it. Anyway, I don't print photographs. However I did open the cartridge before I discovered that, so it's just going to dry up in my drawer, so if anyone wants it, yell. Or shall I put it on eBay for a laugh? OK, if you're a friend and you want it, you can have it if you yell in the next day or so, otherwise I'll eBay it.
Free to choose: 29 October 2005: I read Milton Friedman's Free To Choose not so long ago and there are some important passages I wanted to come back to. I'm going to blog them to try to help me understand them. I tend to favour free trade, so this was a chance to see if there were any demons I needed to know about.; 1. If jobs are good in and of themselves there's no problem with unemployment, we can just create jobs for people digging holes and filling them in again. Rewarding, fulfilling employment is what's important.; 2. Why are exports seen as good, but imports bad? We can't use goods we send abroad, but we can use those we import .. bananas, Japanese cars, Italian shoes. What we gain from foreign trade is what we import. We want to pay as little for that as possible, so we want to export as little as possible in order to pay for as many imported goods as we can get. The terminology is wrong. A 'favourable balance of trade' means exporting more than we import. Surely we want to pay less for more, but that would be termed an 'unfavourable balance of payments'.; 3. OK, this is the big one. Let's try to get to grips with foreign exchange. Translating his dollars to our pounds, let's play with a hypothetical and simplified situation where we, a high wage economy are trading with China, a low wage economy. English workers are paid in pounds, Chinese in Yuan. We compare these using the exchange rate, but what determines the exchange rate?; Suppose 100 Yuan = £1 to begin with, and suppose at this rate the Chinese can produce and sell everything (cars, ice cream, paper) for fewer pounds than we can. Under a free trade system, we'd buy everything from China because it's cheaper.; We'd pay the Chinese in pounds. What would they do with those? There's nothing in the UK they'd want to buy because everything's cheaper in China. They want something real for their work, though, not useless pieces of paper.; The Chinese exporters would try to convert each pound to 100 Yuan in order to spend those Yuan on the cheaper Chinese goods. But who would buy the pounds? Everyone finds things cheaper in Yuan. The exporters would discover they had no market for their pieces of paper at that rate, so they'd have to drop it and take maybe 90Yuan for a pound, or 80.; If the exchange rate becomes 80Yuan to the pound, it now takes more pounds to buy the same number of Yuans we could purchase before. The price of Chinese goods in pounds, to us, has gone up. Conversely, it takes fewer Yuan to buy a pound, so British goods are cheaper to the Chinese.; The price of the pound in terms of the Yuan would fall until, on average, the pound value of goods the Chinese buy from us is roughly equal to the pound value of goods we buy from China. At that price, anyone who wanted to buy Yuan for pounds would find a seller. The foreign exchange rate is a self levelling system.; Yes, the real system is more complicated because all currencies have to balance with each other and money goes around in all sorts of loops. But the system works the same way.; Although an improved product may be developed somewhere that would hurt sales of a (now) lesser product which, if it's ours, might be construed as hurting our workers, Friedman says it's "simply not true that high-wage (English) workers are, as a group, threatened by 'unfair' competition from low-wage foreign workers". On the face of it he could well be right. Low wage foreign workers outnumber us manyfold yet we do have high employment here and have had for a long while. So the threat is non-existent, or at least, yes it might create local turmoil when a business closes but he's perhaps saying there's other work for those people to do. Either that or other non-free-market techniques are in place to limit their impact.; So is 'foreign workers taking our jobs' another example of government by fear? If we worry about that, paying the mortgage, getting good schooling, the cancer treatment postcode lottery, terrorism, the size of our gonads and so on we're less likely to cause trouble.; Straying from the point more than slightly, I don't know which route I'd take if I was diagnosed with cancer. Alternative therapies, apricot kernels and the like, or conventional treatment through the NHS. I think I decided I'd try alternative therapies while using the NHS to monitor the situation and see whether I was winning or not. Obviously a) that would depend on the cancer, and b) I'm sure the reality is the NHS wouldn't play along with that plan at all. I'm sure I'd have to relax into NHS treatment. Anyway, it's been comforting to know that Kylie's clarified her position .. it's conventional medicine for her, so that decides it.; Next week, understanding British Summer Time :-)
Benchmarking: 27 October 2005: I've a client who is having terrible problems with a network I installed a year or so ago. It started when his power supply overheated and started smoking and his wired network connection started playing up.; First things first, reboot everything. Check the cables. Another machine wired in was working fine, so it seemed to be this computer's Ethernet card perhaps, so try another. No joy. To cut a long story short, this has gone on for a while until we've basically swapped the entire system barring the Linksys WAG54G wireless router, the wireless part of which works OK and which, because a) it was the newest component and b) the other computer was fine, seemed to be OK. Also, Linksys is owned by Cisco, the world's biggest network components manufacturer and the company people woke up to during the Internet boom, so you'd think all would be well.; Not so fast. Although I went for Linksys originally because of recommendation, now it feels like everywhere I look people are having problems with the WAG54G.; I saw those comments too late to stop me ordering a new one and anyway, aren't you supposed to use wireless components all from the same manufacturer to save gyp? I mean, some of the problems are overheating, the solution being to put the router in the fridge, or stand it on its side .. can you believe it?; Anyway, the new one arrived, they're up to a version 2, and I've been testing it this afternoon before installation at the client's tomorrow. I'm using it now. All seems fine.; So as part of the test I thought I'd satisfy my curiosity about another problem this client has, which hopefully will be solved tomorrow .. slow Internet. All they seem to use the Internet for is dawdling around eBay looking for things to buy, yet they have a Tiscali 2Mb ADSL connection. Mine is 1Mb (and not from Tiscali), so they shouldn't be having speed problems.; Router problems aside, I wondered whether the limit might be their old machines. Now, since we left the safety of 386s and 486s I've been confused about CPUs. How much faster is a Celeron than a Pentium III? Haven't the foggiest, and nor do I care.; However, since I'm getting more involved in building machines, advising people on buying new and secondhand machines, and wandering around buildings going "ooh, that one looks old" based on things like how dirty the monitor is, I thought I'd better have a system. I found it here.; Now, there used to be a rule that you replaced your computer every three years, but that was when the increase in processor speed made a difference to your life. Nowadays unless your modelling the weather or doing ray tracing your PC is probably quite fast enough, so I think the renewal rate has dropped back to about five years based on the fact that your hard disc might fall over and take your data with it, and that shortly after that your office starts to look like a museum and you stop understanding what people are talking about down the pub. "iTunes?"; Anyway, using this I can now go "ah, well, you see that 400MHz Celeron was introduced on the 4 January 1999, which makes this computer replaceable now, while that 796MHz Pentyummy III down there was introduced on December 20 1999 which gives it about seven weeks to live". Suddenly, it all fits into place. All the processors fit on the same 'scale'.; So I was wondering. The client's using a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 born in 2001 (those other two processors are the ones I use for work). I was wondering if that might be the slowest part of his system, if that might be slowing down his Internet download.; I got my stopwatch out and timed the download of a big blog page with lots of pictures and got (yes, I cleared the cache between times) various times from 4.69 seconds to 11.66, randomly, so I thought that was more representative of the load on the server than anything else, so I copied a 19,763,014 byte file to the server for testing.; The router says I have a 1,152Kbps downstream rate. That's bits, of course, not bytes, so the file is 19,763,014 x 8 = 158,104,131 bits big which divided by 1,152 gives 137.24 seconds, or 2 minutes and 17 seconds to download it assuming nothing's trying to do too much.; I tried it. On the 796MHz Pentium III with Windows XP Home, 512MB RAM and Opera it came down in 2 minutes 35.2 seconds. While it was doing that I worked out that 10/100 Ethernet with Cat 5 cabling is cable of 100Mbps so that wasn't going to be a limit.; I tried it on the 400MHz Celeron with 256MB RAM and Linux Red Hat 9 and it came down in 3 minutes 5.76 seconds. A tad slower, but still perfectly comfortable. The client's machine, being faster than both those, isn't going to be the limit. Its 128MB of RAM trying to run XP might be, I have an upgrade for that, so we'll see. Their problem has to be the router.; The other thing I was interested in was wireless performance, so I took the iBook G4, which has Airport Extreme, which is 802.11g, and it downloaded the same file in 3m 0.66s in the same room. I live in a fairly basic house that's two rooms wide, and I moved down one floor and across one room and the speed dropped so the file came down in 3m 55.24s. The computer was still capable of playing iTunes snippets and so on, so it was perfectly usable.; Regarding the distance, I wandered out along the back alley. The router is on the back near a window. Now, do radio waves travel like light, in straight lines? I know you can get reflections and so on. It must do, didn't I learn that light and radio are the same thing one day at uni? Anyway, if it does travel in straight lines, then I was asking it to go at a fairly acute angle through a thick stone wall. The signal died after I got two houses away from mine. So mine, the neighbour, their neighbour, and on the boundary of them and the next one I lost the signal. That doesn't seem vary far, but I do wonder about that wall thickness thing and whether if the signal was required to only pass through adjoining walls perpendicularly whether it would reach further. I'll test that later.; All fascinating stuff, and at least I've road tested the client's kit and it works without a glitch. If it doesn't sort the problem tomorrow, I think I'll go and sit in the fridge for a while.
GM in Africa: 27 October 2005: Just a quick summary of the position on GM in Africa
iBook: 25 October 2005: The iBook arrived, so that put a smile on Ali's face. She spent the evening trying to get it to recognise her voice, getting it to say 'dodecahadron' and 'git', and having discovered there are no games (barring 'tile') included as standard she suddenly brightened with the thought that we can now watch DVDs. We've had one or two as gifts, but never bought a player.; So we watched Bagpuss. Frankly we were shocked. Trades descriptions act! The show's called Bagpuss, but he hardly does anything. The mice did most of the work while Professor Schnaffel pontificated. Typical know-it-all too, he didn't know anything about the bits of wood in the bottle in the first half of the show, but then suddenly he knew that ships in bottles have hinged masts.; I kinda got bored up to the bit where there were loads and loads of bare breasted mermaids and a song about them sitting on the captains lap.; I yam tipsy.
Arctic Monkeys: 24 October 2005: So, we watched Top of the Pops yesterday. McFly were gorgeous.; Another star of the show was Katie Melua, not my cup of tea, but the way TOTP treated her was just weird. The song's quiet and gentle, and TOTP's style is brash, so they did the quirky intro, threw loads of spinning graphics, brass samples, big noise, flappy crazy speed whizzz kerrrrunch cut to Katie.; Katie had been cued a few seconds before, had taken her first breath, and her first note was bang on cue, but we needed a moment's space. Such a gentle song. It felt like I'd tumbled down a rocky cliff to land in soft, sun warmed sand. You could see it in her face. I thought "this isn't going to work". But after the first chorus, she had control, she'd taken the mood, wrapped it around her and warmed it. She showed those X Factor chumps what it means to be professional.; Anyway, then, number one, Arctic Monkeys. Who? We looked at each other. "This is like a sixth form project" I said. I'm old enough now to do what my parents used to do .. take the mickey out of people on TOTP. We watched it, hardly hearing the song over the sound of our brains working out what had happened here. This is a band we've never heard of, it's their first single, and they've a video that's like they just played the song once in an aircraft hangar while three camera operators wandered about, and the song is, well, it needs a second listen.; But at the end we rather admired the fact it was possible, and rather liked the whole thing, and look if you want to see them you'll have to go to San Francisco. On Thursday, they're on Jools Holland.; Later with whispering Jools Holland seems to be what the Old Grey Whistle Test used to be, a place for those who like a little skill with their music. I don't think the Sex Pistols ever played it. The two shows are equivalent really, their audience isn't the young, it's mature people who sit and rub their chins while the music's playing and wonder whether to ask for the album for Christmas.; I was reading somewhere or other that the history of the chart pretty much divides into two. Up to a particular moment maybe sometime in the seventies, number one tunes got there by gradually working their way up the charts, finally reaching number one when enough people had heard it and bought it. Then someone worked out that you could go straight in at number one if you built up the pressure on a song with airplay and tv appearances prior to the actual release. The day the song comes out is then like knocking the valve off a pressure cooker, there's a mass release as everyone clamours to buy the single, and hey ho, it's number one in the next chart. Once that was clear, everyone did it that way.; What I'm working up to is this. Clearly Arctic Monkeys have built up an incredible head of steam online. They've obviously been working hard, writing songs, playing gigs, but all under the radar of the masses. I count myself there, obviously there's no reason I'd spot anything like this going on.; This is the week their lives change. This week they'll go from underground stars, to overground ones. The BBC Look North presenters were talking about them today for chrissakes. This is the week they'll be launched into the mass public consciousness. Fuelled by the Internet, they've been able to build up outstanding pressure. For all their amateur appearance there's some really canny marketing going on here.; But also, watching Girls and Boys: Sex and British Pop there were plenty of people in the history of pop who did things just to wind up their parents and any stuffed shirt they could find. What's a band to do nowadays when they can be turned into lounge fodder overnight?; Or am I being old fashioned by expecting that? Is my desire to see McFly energise a stage simply a throwback to my own youth? Are they not retro? Are they not The Undertones nearly thirty years on?; Who knows? Maybe I'll write and ask if I can borrow a fiver. They'll probably be so happy they'll say yes.
Ali's birthday: 23 October 2005: It was Ali's birthday recently and co-incidentally I'd been listening to recordings of Peel Christmas programmes in preparation for a ten minute Christmas gig we're planning.; So when I was making breakfast in the kitchen and Ali was sitting in the other room I had the sudden thought that music might make the moment special, so ran upstairs to grab the minidisc I'd just been, quite co-incidentally, listening to.; I put on the beautiful Melys who played the leg weakening 'Chinese Whispers', live at Peel acres.; Then I put on Hefners's All I'll Ever Need (just scroll down that page for the lyrics). I don't think I even said anything so cheesy as "and this is for you darling", but in that moment I could hardly see the scrambled eggs for tears and three quarters of the way through Ali came from the other room, tears running down her cheeks, and we hugged like it was all there was.; It made the scrambled eggs overdone, but was the best part of the day. Shopping in Leeds was crap. A whole day for one grey t-shirt. KRCS at least had a 12" iBook for us to play with, but still didn't have one in stock, so I've ordered from the Apple shop.; I did, however, introduce Ali to Hansa's which is simply supreme and unlike anything we've found anywhere else.
Light bulbs: 23 October 2005: The bulbs in both the work lights on my desk have broken, so I'm working in the dark (but, intellectually, no more in the dark than usual).
David Shrigley: 23 October 2005: David Shrigley is one of the good people.
iBook woes: 20 October 2005: This must be normal, I'm just out of practice with buying things so I hadn't noticed how normal it's become. I'm trying to buy a 12" iBook. The local Apple shop (they're not 'stores', that's where Americans shop), Jennings turns out to sell PCs too (I always thought they were Mac only) and answered my email within 24 hours to say iBooks are in great demand, they haven't got any, and their next order would be at the end of October. Actually, they answered my email in four incomplete parts followed by a complete one and an apology. So much for Mac's ease of use.; I thought that was bad enough .. in sales aren't you taught never to interrupt the buying process? Don't put anything in that process that might wake the buyer from their somnambulistic journey to parting with their money. Don't we think that not having the product available is a bit of an alarm clock? Yet it seems to be happening time and again.; The benefit must be that by stimulating demand to a level higher than you can supply, you keep the price high and stock low. Having stock is deadly when you're dealing in technology products.; The other thing about Jennings is getting a pretty poor service when I wandered in to make initial enquiries about Apple laptops. What I know now is that there are two series, the iBook, which is perhaps aimed at home users and recognised by its white casing. There are two models with 12" and 14" screens respectively. The other series, perhaps aimed at business users, is the PowerBook with 12", 14" and 17" screens, faster and larger everythings, an aluminium case, and is about £400 more expensive. That's what I wanted from my first visit to Jennings, that top level understanding.; What I got was "I'm looking to buy a laptop". She gestured towards a display of PC laptops. "Oh, I thought you only did Apples, I want an Apple laptop". "Oh, well we've got this one in .. " and she proceeded to show me the Powerbook in the window. WTF? What am I supposed to be making a decision on, the plastic casing? Where's "certainly sir, are you familiar with Apple products?" "what would you like to use it for?" "what's most important to you about this laptop? (could be price, speed, hard disc capacity, looks, ergonomics, bluetooth, quality of the speaker, weight, battery life)". Where's "well if you'd like to get to know the Mac a little more, there's a one hour presentation every Saturday, you could come and find out the possibilities and then ask questions afterwards"? Where's "would you like us to send you a regular email newsletter .. can I take your details"? She didn't know anything about me, and when I left, she had nothing. Yet I'm really trying to spend £700.; Last time I was in PC World there were lots of Macs there, so I emailed them too, to find out if they had a 12" iBook in stock that we could look at. They don't even list it on the website so I'm assuming not (they don't list Fedora either .. I was kinda assuming there might be a retail pack for that). We do want to see one before we buy it to check its weight, ergonomics, and the noise of the DVD drive which is reputed to be disconcerting, and the size of the screen. They haven't replied yet.; So I started looking around at online purchasing. The one that comes up best in Froogle is Computer Warehouse but there's no indication anywhere whether they have stock. I've been there before. I need to see stock before I order. So I emailed them. No response. I tried chat .. iChat actually, which appears to be an Apple thing so it didn't work on Linux or Windows. I'm sure I could get it to work, but c'mon folks, shine a light. Isn't it as obvious as day follows night that a goodly percentage of those wanting a Mac haven't already got one, so can't use iChat but are in disproportionate need of help?; It's a good job I didn't order from Computer Warehouse because they probably haven't got stock because the other possibility, Dabs, hasn't.; The Apple shop doesn't show stock either. I shouldn't have to work this hard to part with my money.
GM not welcome in Asia: 18 October 2005: Just in case you start to believe the propaganda about how wonderful the rice that produces Vitamin A will be, here's clear evidence it isn't welcome even there.
Narrowboat tales 4: 18 October 2005: Up to 1953 there was a series of bad winters. My dad was a bricky's apprentice, and they had a system whereby if he turned up for work in the morning but the weather was too bad to lay bricks he'd be sent home but would get two hours pay. After a couple of winters like this with no money, and seeing all his mates in the services with money, he signed up. Within a few weeks, he was in the army.; Update: I'm told that after the war teenage boys had to do two years national service from eighteen years old unless they were exempt for any reason. Those doing an apprenticeship or university course could defer their start date. When my dad gave up his apprenticeship, he had to notify the authorities and then he would be called up, which he was, at nineteen. They decided to place him in the Coldstream Guards.; prev - next
Narrowboat tales 3: 17 October 2005: Another tale from my dad's army days. The tale of when they were stationed on exercise on a cliff top. On the other side of the river at the bottom were supposedly enemy tanks. One of my dad's company sent a smoke grenade over, but it was such a good shot that before exploding it actually hit one of the 'enemy' tanks and they heard it ping against the bodywork. The next thing was all the enemy closing hatches and scrabbling to get safe.; prev - next
John Peel day: 14 October 2005: I spent most of yesterday at a client's listening to local radio, so I've a head full of Oasis' latest tune, and the Sugababes latest which (stop right here if you don't want to be mortally embarrassed, move on to the next para) (sorry mum) for some reason every time makes me think it's written in the style of a slow wank .. you kinda want it to go faster but it's very pleasant as it is and in the end keeping steady is more satisfying (I'm so embarrassed I've written that, but it's the truth). The Sugababes are good.; Driving back was to the accompaniment of Basement Jaxx which I'm beginning to understand and The Killers (from Las Vegas, to answer a friend's question).; Then enough time for a change of clothes and out for John Peel day at Vivaz. Wow, how fantastic was this?; I've said before how much talent there is in Scarborough and this really showed it. I went with a friend who works in the performing arts department at the local college, and I met someone there who works at the university which has a music technology course which, if I could add a few extra days to the week, I'd really love to study. Both said they hardly recognised anyone at the gig, so this whole Vivaz-full of people were from another community we didn't know (we're sooo out of touch).; I've a friend who is looking for a partner who believes he's met everyone interesting in Scarborough. He's wrong.; Wow, so many talented bands, where to start. E&OE, The Variants came alive with a really excellent Holiday in Cambodia, Manfat Voodoo did an acoustic set, something about Schumacher Levy 9, The American Quarter put me in mind, retrospectively, of Rip Rig and Panic, hmmm I'm going to get confused now, I thought I had this sorted .. hang on .. SixFootDaze seemed to be extremely talented songwriters with possible Coldplay influences (they say not, with an exclamation mark, that's a good thing (I've never liked Coldplay)).; There were two real trousershakers .. Olivine's singer has a Jim Morrison attitude, called us all "fucking useless fucking wankers" for not dancing. Now they were good, heavy, grungy, and did a version of Shadowplay.; The other trouser shakers were the ones with a groovy didjeridoo. Someone's telling me they were Olivine too. I can see I'm going to have to come back to this review and get it sorted, it's pathetic really. Send in any corrections/augmentation here if you like.; Maybe it was Puritan who had the really groovy Bass effects pedal and played a storming version of Rockin' in the Free World.; Colein stood up on her own and sang to a backing track, a very talented singer (not that I'd know), and if she did the backing tracks too, wow. That last song's backing was the biggest inspiration of the night. She had guts too because she did well despite not really carrying the crowd.; Oh God then there was the band who I thought "great, two girls two boys, good to get away from the testosterone" and then by the third song worked out the bassist was actually male. I think. Good style tho, all although they made me think of the (excellent) comedy songs the Smack The Pony crew used to do. So who were they then?; Speaking of comedy .. the curtain opened to reveal two blokes sat next to each other facing us, both at laptops. Seems like the beginning of a sketch, but they played some wild drum and bass stuff although God knows what they were actually doing 'live' .. they seemed to be holding a conversation with each other more than anything. They reminded me of a Nottingham band from twenty years ago called Robotnik who played exclusively Wasp synthesisers, perhaps the first popular affordable synthesiser, and managed to get them to do rhythmic things which we (we had two Wasps ourselves) couldn't manage. Not even after we'd copied down their settings after a post-gig chat in the Hearty Good Fellow.; Oh, and there were the two chaps doing American yokel things with a guitar and a banjo that, I think, never got played.; Fuzzgun Sniper is probably the only name I'd previously heard of, they came and went with a long version of Rockin All Over the World. Obviously they're Corro fans too.; We left to the funky sounds of Radio Theatre.; What a fabulously varied night, and that, I think, was the real Peel legacy. How else could you put all this on stage and make it work? Great organisation, and very well mixed (sound-mixed, I mean, sound engineered/whatever). Actually I'd make him man of the match because everyone came out sounding great, yet each was so varied and only played a maximum of three songs. If we can get enough audience together or maybe if we can organise something with another few artists I can see Rah!Collector there one day.; Apparently you can read more about it at upforit.tv/gurilla.tv (which I've never actually understood) and in due course there's promise of being able to hear the full night in a podcast, that would be my first :-) (Update: not sure about that but the 'radio loop' is currently playing the whole gig). Then there's Shit Hot Records (horrible name, but what a great site), it all seems to have been organised via Beached, and the SEN wrote about it too. How awesome is all that for a town with a population of just 60,000 people?; Having said all that, the thing that was really missing from the night was anything non-white. It's not our fault, Scarborough is a white town (98.79% (look at the 'people and profiles' tab)). But it particularly came home to me last night. During the day, I parked my car near Huddersfield Railway Station and having paid for an hour and a half's parking just so I could nip into a computer shop, I took the opportunity to explore a market I spotted down a side street. Now that was multicultural (but still, surprisingly, 85.6% white, that just shows how wrong perceptions can be). Even Bradford, the community the media is focussing on currently because of the Kashmir earthquake, is still 78.2% white.; What was my point? Oh yes, the Huddersfield market, a real mixture of races, all the different foods, families, people greeting and hugging each other .. it had genuinely a great feeling. So I miss living in a multicultural place (I lived in the Hyde Park part of Leeds for a couple of years when it was an asian community, I hear it's now a student village).
Bleak outlook f-up: 12 October 2005: I've had quite a reaction to the story below from people (some of whom I don't actually know) saying "I have a send button". Screenshots prove it. It turns out the friend with the problem is probably using not only a ripped off Outlook, but probably a ripped off Windows XP too. FFS! Do people still do that?; If you want free (as in cost-free) software, use software that's supposed to be free, free of charge but also free as in freedom. Much free software runs in Windows too. Take a look at The Gimp, FireFox, Open Office, Linux.; You know, I'm not making this up, these are real, tried, tested, hard working, no-crash, feature rich, mature products. You'll still be able to play your music, to chat.; There's a beautiful world out here folks, you don't have to steal. Make the move (ask if you want advice on how). Your soul will be all the better for it.
Bleak outlook: 10 October 2005: A friend asked me to show him how to send an email in Outlook on Windows XP. Neither of us could work it out. There's no 'send' button. You write emails in Word (makes perfect modular sense to a programmer, but it twisted my mind .. Word handles files, so at the end you 'save' it don't you?). Stuff you write goes into the 'drafts' folder. We dragged something out of that into the outbox and hoped it would go but it didn't. We checked every icon, every menu option, and every option of the right click. What else is there? So much for usability. (If any of you know the answer, do let me know).; Time was when the users of Microsoft Word 6 complained that the following version of Word was too complicated and was hard to use. I thought Microsoft made noises about learning from that but it doesn't appear they have. The whole idea of a graphical user interface (GUI) is that it makes a computer usable. I don't accept I'm too daft to use Outlook .. I've worked in Windows every day since it was invented, I've a first class degree in Internet Computing and I design software for the Internet. How can it be that I can't see how to send an email in Outlook? That's not me, that's the software (actually not, see the update). If you have to go on a training course (or even read the helpfile) just to work out which arcane dance you have to perform to send an email, the whole reason for a GUI falls apart and we may as well work at the command line. Bring it on.; See update
Being shot: 10 October 2005: Isn't it true that in America you can shoot someone who breaks into your premises? Is it true that we are contemplating a change to the law along those lines here?; Well, yesterday we did a bit of heroics and broke in to someone's house. They were dazed and confused on the floor, and the microwave was on fire. Well, what happens if you can be shot for that. The person's dazed and confused, maybe drunk, maybe high, maybe very emotional, and you've just broken through their window in an agitated state .. isn't that a recipe for disaster? In this case, we didn't even know the person, so they didn't know us .. well, I'd met the person once but they were very unlikely to make the connection in that moment. So from their perspective they might very well be thinking "I'm unable to stand, my house is on fire, and now I'm being burgled too, bugger that for a game of soldiers .. *bang*".
Narrowboat holiday tales 2: 7 October 2005: I can't quite get started so I'll do another blog, make a drink, then start. Promise. OK here goes.; With my dad on the narrowboat, we talked about his service days. Two years in the Coldstream Guards* with manoevres in Germany near Düsseldorf. He said he had the choice of Egypt or Germany and chose the latter. I think my g/f's dad, who chose the former, probably would agree my dad chose the best option. (* this has been updated, I wrote Grenadier before. I'm sure that's what he said otherwise it wouldn't have been in my head. I used to write up the days events each night to try to get some accuracy and this is from those notes.); He told the tale of hitching a lift on the back of a Belgian tank in the pouring rain, and covering themselves with a tarpaulin to keep themselves dry. Except, what they didn't know was they were over the air intake of the tank, so when it started up all the air got sucked out from under the tarpaulin and they were kind-of shrink wrapped to the bodywork. prev - next
Stereophonics: 7 October 2005: Yesterday, driving back alone in the dark from Huddersfield, I had a life changing Sterephonics moment. Since buying it back in August it's been in the queue waiting to be processed .. rip onto iTunes, record onto minidisc so I can drum along to it, copy it for the car.; Yesterday was the first time I'd really heard it. I'd played snippets before and decided it was a bit of a messy noise and I couldn't discern anything noteworthy.; I put it on in Huddersfield. By the fourth track or so, I was up for it. By the end of the CD I couldn't stop playing it, I had to go round again. Track nine, if I'm right, is good but in the end I just couldn't stop playing Dakota over and over again. The cover sticker says it's a number one single .. I'd never heard it. Last night I was driving into Scarborough jiggling along to Dakota, thrills running up my spine, the drum beat worked out, the awesome glory of it energising me. And now .. I've skipped the gym (rare) to play along with it. Heaven.
Can't ban GM locally: 7 October 2005: Apparently, we can't ban GM locally. Bollocks to that.
Free will astrology: 7 October 2005: I hope I'm reading this correctly, if so, what a fantastic idea and very well done. Free will astrology. Not astrology at all, but momentary entertainment and advice for those who believe we hold our future in our own hands.; I love it when a new idea makes me realise how much potential there is out there. I haven't properly watched this yet, but a couple of weekends ago I watched part of a programme (The Hip Hop Years?) about the start of Hip Hop. It told of a DJ who noticed that his audience danced more during certain parts of each song, and it occurred to him that he didn't have to play the whole song .. he could just string together all the most danceable bits of his favourite tunes. In doing so, he spawned a whole artform, modern DJing.; That just blows your mind doesn't it? Suddenly, it's obvious we'd been in a rut. That's why I love De Bono, he gives us the tools to do just that. So if you've an intractable problem, hit it with some De Bono and change the world. I love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it love it .
Littering: 7 October 2005: I can understand robbery and violence. I can understand abuse. I can even understand suicide bombers. But littering really, really annoys me. I think it's because I just can't understand what makes someone do that, I can't work out what combination of values a person has to hold in order to find littering acceptable .. or at least, if I get close to working it out, I'm repelled .. staring into the abyss .. too awful to contemplate.; Car littering is almost worse because it's so cowardly, your shameful action disappears at 40mph behind you, and anyway you're out of town, nobody knows you. Well guess what? I've decided to start a campaign of naming and shaming.; My first subject is the driver of E2 NAM, a (possibly dark blue (it was night-time)) Audi A4 who at 19:25 at Cooper Bridge near J25 of the M62 near Huddersfield, littered. I didn't see a passenger, there could have been a small person there, but I think the driver wound down the passenger window while we were queued in traffic and threw out two what looked like scrunched up white paper bags. Probably the leftover packaging from his/her teatime snack.; The thing is, there's a whole demographic thing here. What are Audi A4 drivers like? A littering Audi A4 driver brings shame to the others, so other A4 drivers should accumulate around him and absorb him like white blood cells dealing with a foreign bacterium.; So what are Audi A4 drivers like? German things are understood to be, in fact, are marketed as, emotionless aren't they? Well designed, well made, but essentially heartless. That ties in with littering ... I wonder if this person has a minimal house, never actually cooks (just buys M&S ready meals, if that), no pets, a functional but passionless relationship ("we're below our agreed sex quota for the week, darling, I can fit you in at 8:25 on Thursday .. if I'm late you start without me").; I think this has the makings of a campaign. I may create a database. Imagine, you go speed dating for a new partner, but they look up your car registration and discover you're a litterer. Power to the bloggers!
Resting heart rate: 3 October 2005: I measured my resting heart rate today. Before I started running, back in February, it was 55, and in April, 56. Then in June it had dropped to 53 (lower is supposed to mean you're fitter). I hadn't measured it for a while, but this morning, 48. 48! That's well out of range I think. Ooer! I only saw that once, otherwise it was 51, but then I didn't sample many times as I was laying in bed trying not to wake Ali, and every time I pressed the button on my heart rate monitor it beeped.