John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Trees 3: 28 February 2006: I just had the following response from Phil Yardley, Tree and Woodlands Officer, Scarborough Borough Council:; The trees on Queen Margaret's Road in Scarborough were removed due to root damage being caused to the footpath surface, the pin kerbs around the tree pits and the highway kerbs themselves. The roots were of such a size that the trees could not be safely retained if they were pruned / severed as all were major structural load-bearing roots. As is the responsibility of Scarborough Borough Council, these hazards have to be addressed and the risk to pedestrians and other road users minimized.; Many of the trees were large mature specimen and the footpath reconstruction works which are now taking place are allowing for the replacement of twelve trees along this stretch of carriageway. The hope is that twelve more trees will be planted on the opposite side of the carriageway in the fullness of time.; Unfortunately, the ageing tree population within the Borough means that from time to time mature trees have to be removed due to the condition of the surroundings as well as the tree itself. Wherever possible, and when finances and site conditions allow, it is the Council's endeavour to replace felled trees. This is an unfortunate part of positive management of such an important natural amenity that when there is potential conflict involving risk the outcome has to be so drastic. I can assure you that the decision to remove healthy trees is not taken lightly but when there is an overriding health and safety issue involved these matters have to be resolved.; I thank you for your concern and taking the effort to e-mail me. Whilst the content of this reply does not resolve your (or my) disappointment, I hope you appreciate the reasons why this difficult decision was made.; OK, I'm happy with that.; prev
Trees 2: 28 February 2006: I just got a response from Janet Jefferson regarding the cut down trees. She apologises, first of all, that her email's rather dodgy. She says she's spoken to the Tree and Woodlands Officer at the council and gave me his details. She then explained that she's an Independent Councillor covering the Castle Ward which is basically everything from Castle Road down to South Bay and along to the Valley .. so it includes much of town, the Crescent and the old town.; She's copied her letter to the Officer she identified. Predictably, I haven't had a response from the council site. Lovely system .. you write your complaint and drop it into their complaints system and it routes it to the required person and then nothing happens. It's not what you want. People don't want to be part of a 'complaints process' .. they just want to make their point to someone who will listen.; prev - next
Splat!: 25 February 2006: Wow. A friend just pointed out there's a market for Ron Johnson records on eBay, and here someone's selling the EPs from my old band, Splat! That first ep pictured, I sat on fellow band member and Ron Johnson Records' impresario Dave Moscow's floor and hand rubber stamped the middle of every single one of them.
Dark Heart: 25 February 2006: I'm reading Dark Heart by Nick Davies at the moment, published in 1997. I would normally write it up at the end, but Labours announcement about making a cabinet post with overall responsibility for poverty makes it timely. Thanks to Ali's bro for giving the book to us.; The book's of particular interest to me because it studies in detail two areas I know .. Nottingham (I grew up 10 miles away from this, my home city), and Hyde Park, Leeds where I lived as a student for two years.; The next para is distasteful, so skip it if you don't want to know.; Davies starts by identifying and talking to boys of maybe eleven years old who were selling themselves on Forest Fields as Goose Fair was being set up around them. They'd toss you off for a tenner, or you could fuck them between their thighs for twenty. But they wouldn't take it up the arse, and they didn't do blow jobs.; He moves on to Hyde Park in Leeds, which I don't recognise from his description, but I know the street names. When I was there in 1981/2 it was primarily an asian area. I remember watching an asian family buy a carpet from the shop across the street. They unrolled it in the street and stood around discussing it. It felt like a real community .. I liked it. All the shops sold samosas at the counter as snacks.; I didn't go back for a long long time. Recently, I think it's more of a student village. I have the idea a lot of the asians have moved out.; Inbetween times, this community imploded, culminating in a riot (sorry about the popups (sometimes they happen, sometimes not) but it's the only article I managed to find) in which the Newlands pub, which was being used by police for surveillance, was burned to the ground.; Davies finally eventually gets to his point, which is that poverty caused both problems, that no matter who works it out, nor how, the figure keeps coming back to about 12 million (one fifth!) of people in Britain were then living in poverty. Poverty sufficient to strip away hope and to make life sufficiently painful that those trapped within it sometimes find it better to switch off their conscience, to switch off pain and pleasure and all feeling bar, perhaps, adrenalin and artificial highs that also help you forget.; It seems for some in that situation, the easiest thing is to switch off your emotions to save yourself from going mad. In that emotion-free state, they are no longer motivated by pain or pleasure, so you can't appeal to their better nature, nor threaten them with violence or incarceration because it's all the same to them. Promises are always broken. They've switched off from love or empathy.; Oh, and there's yet more data for my opinion about organised religion (it's corrupt). The churches pulled out of Hyde Park as it descended because it became too expensive to maintain their property and/or no-one wanted to take that area. Yep, that's right. As the society descended into hell on earth, the church, perhaps the one institution you'd expect to stay to provide hope, forgiveness, bootstraps, pulled out too. How can you respect that?; Apparently poverty became much worse over the Thatcher years. If you're poor but not destitute you can save a little just in case, and if there's a half functioning safety net, then there's hope. If you remove the safety net and make people not eat on the day before their money comes because they haven't enough money, or spend half their week with no electricity because they can't afford another card, then when something else hits .. illness, a robbery, pregnancy, the fall to destitution can be very fast because there was nothing spare in the first place.; How do people light their houses if they haven't electricity? With candles of course. Candles make fire. There's a horrendous tale of family poverty ending in a night-time fire that took two children.; Now, I struggle with this. The first reaction of a middle class white boy like me is all the usual stuff .. I'll bet they spend on fags, they need to budget better, they should have paid attention at school, I'll bet I could get out of it.; As a kid I once went on some weekend thing out to the Derbyshire countryside and we did an exercise in which everyone was given three counters and over the course of the next fifteen minutes or so had to shake hands with people and negotiate with them about their counters. The idea was to gain counters.; Amazingly what happened was people formed into groups (we didn't know each other before this), 'elected' representatives, and put our counters towards that person with their promise that when they got into a position of power they would represent our views and look after us. Wow. So that's available to people, no matter how poor.; The other thing I never understood, although if there aren't jobs then there aren't jobs and there's no point so maybe I do .. but why don't single mothers band together so they aren't all just looking after one or two kids. Maybe if they got together they could release half their time to get some sleep or go to work or whatever. I'm sure it's an ignorant idea, but I can't see why.; But I do think I'm wrong. Davies' tales are of people who grind away at budgets all their lives, saving pennies to make things happen. A woman who ate a slice of bread and some water for three weeks so she could buy insurance and feel safe. She was lucky, most aren't able to get insurance.; There are the Caribbean men who came to Britain in the sixties from a deeply respectful country where they were grounded for having, for instance, dirty fingernails, to a Britain where they thought they were going to train to be doctors. It turned out no-one wanted to employ them, so through the generations they turned to illegal clubs and pimping to stay alive.; There's Ruth, a man who lived as a woman until one day his dream of a sex change was denied, he ditched his short skirts and came out a very violent man indeed.; Now, I'm not saying it's everyone's right to have a sex change on demand, I've no clue how to solve that one, but the Hyde Park case is one where a combination of factors took the area down. Factories closing. Landlords buying second homes and renting to short-life tenants (students like me, probably) who didn't care about the area .. so the sense of community is lost.; The outfall of poverty .. the riots, the sex trade, the violence, the loss of good people, the thieving and twocking, the police, fire and NHS time .. is a price we all pay anyway. So why not do the right thing and give these people some respect (ha ha, that's the other way around to the way Blair means it, I think) and some hope. That, I think, was Brown's thing all along.; But also, I talked with my partner who works as a community Occupational Therapist out of Bridlington, not the most salubrious of places (but I just looked on here and it turns out actually Bridlington's not that bad at all so maybe that's the answer). I thought, if one fifth of us lives in poverty, she'd see it. It's her job to get people out of hospital and safely into their homes. She'd see the houses that have no electricity or food. I asked her. She's never seen one, in seven or eight years of practice. Maybe we just live in a nice area.; But part of the point is that you don't see this fifth because they can't afford to go anywhere or do anything. You're not going to see them down the pub, or at the cinema. But, he says, if you open your eyes, you see them. Like the young boys at Goose Fair. Just take off your shades and you'll see.; The point seems to be that Thatcherism was wrong. Increasing the disparity between rich and poor does not necessarily increase people's motivation by providing a bigger reward for hard work. In simple terms, he asks "when did we decide that we would motivate rich people by giving them more money, and at the same time motivate poor people by giving them less?" The people in Dark Heart would work if there was any. But if there isn't, if almost no-one in the community has work, and those who do are robbed of their gains, then after a while there's no point looking, and for kids, there's no point going to school because there's no job to go to afterwards. There's no point, in fact, to living. No reason to get up in the morning. If you're sat somewhere, there's no point getting up.; The bit where Thatcherism is wrong is to do with the poverty line. There's a point below which people lose hope, below which they can't escape no matter how they try.; Remember, pretty much throughout the Thatcher years we had millions of unemployed. Labour seems to have solved that. Labour implemented the minimum wage. And now, Labour's admitted it's still not succeeded in reaching the poor and is attempting to do something about it. That's all good. Barring the unpopular Iraq war, maybe we've gotten used to Labour and have forgotten what the Conservatives did.; I'm no Thatcher basher, by the way. I was a big fan. This book showed me another side.
Holland and Barrett: 25 February 2006: I was paying for my pecan nuts in Holland and Barrett the other day and I looked at the front page of the magazine they try to sell to you. Sometimes it's 40% tempting (but I never have) but this one was squarely aimed at women.; "How to deal with PMT", and "Cool moves for a great bum", were its headlines and I got to thinking how a bloke would react to that.; "I've already got a great bum" would dismiss the latter. As for PMT, I was thinking if blokes had PMT, that would be a really positive time each month for them. They'd come back with war stories .. "I went into the office and I told Geoff exactly what I think of his stupid idea. Ha! You should have seen the look on his face." It would be a time when you had the courage and strength to push through your agenda, while at the same time expecting others to understand that you just get this way each month.; Either that or I just don't understand what PMT really feels like. I am talking about PMT though, once the M bit started they'd be off ill.
The Go! Team: 19 February 2006: We saw The Go! Team on Thursday night at Leeds Metropolitan Uni. Did you see them on Top of the Pops last week too? You might be able to coerce their site to replay their performance. Then last night we spent all evening drinking wine and finding out more about them on the Internet. I still don't think we're satiated, we may have to see them again on this tour. The best quote I've seen is from Time Out: "like eating all of your favourite sweets at once".; I think it takes time to 'get' The Go! Team. They're so different. The Arctic Monkeys are so last week.; For some reason, all the time I'm listening to them, in my mind is The Double Deckers.; It turns out that Ian Parton is the founder and wrote the songs in the evenings after work around the time that I was doing similar things (although clearly less well). The idea of including banjo and recorder solos comes from being able to just choose sampled instruments at will from a drop down menu . I was doing the same thing with the same tools and thinking it was uncool :-); I really felt that this was a bunch of people who had gone through university together on some sort of performing arts of music course, but it's not how it happened at all. Parton, basically, got a serious gig and needed a band, so advertised for members.; I'm old enough to remember when The Thompson Twins were a political statement, when Rock Against Racism was necessary, and when it was normal to point out women drivers because it was so unusual. The Go! Team comprise six members equally split between ladies and gents, and with a real mixture of oriental, black and white members, and it's not a statement, that's just multicultural Britain. Wonderful.; Hearing the music's good, but it's only when you see Ninja, their vocalist, that the whole thing starts to mean something. After the gig, my partner said "I'm in love". Ninja wants you to party. She's so good I'd got it in my head she must have come through a dance degree or similar, but no .. marketing. She dances .. boy does she dance .. raps, sings and does all that's required to get the party going.; There were some technical things going on too. The Go! Team all seem to play all the instruments, only Ninja and Chi (their Japanese female drummer) seemed to stick with their roles. After every song everyone swapped around, but it appeared they'd practiced that as much as the songs because it was so smooth .. at one point one member held his guitar up on its strap for another member to walk into. Tuning up happened the same way, in the background while something else was happening.; The other noteworthy thing was to get a really big drum sound there were two drum kits. Chi and anyone else playing drums at the time wore headphones, so I'm guessing they were playing to a clicktrack, it certainly seemed like it. So that's how you co-ordinate two drummers .. otherwise, how?; While we're on the subject of lady drummers, support band The Grates from Brisbane had one too. Take a listen to their tunes on their site, it's good stuff. Peel would have loved them.; If you want to feel happier, catch The Go! Team on tour.; We were getting up for another T in the Park, I can't believe it sold out in an hour!
Blog: 16 February 2006: A client wants a blog. Shall I build one myself or use something commercial? I looked around. I got involved in this. Gosh what a lot of non-English blogs there are. Actually I've been working on a blogging tool anyway so I think we'll use that.
Valentine: 14 February 2006: Happy valentine
Link permission: 13 February 2006: The bit about 'links to this site' here (near the bottom) is nonsense. If websites could control who linked to them the web would fall apart. It's a bit like trying to stop people talking about last night's television programme. It reflects badly on the company wishing to impose such a control too, as it is certainly not in the spirit of the Internet. It's wishful thinking on the part of the lawyer who came up with it.; OK, you might be able to do something if someone links to you with a libellous phrase but that's just libel, nothing to do with linking. I think the whole Googlebombing thing says that in general you can't stop someone linking to your site.
Tunick: 11 February 2006: I appear to be on display at Newcastle Airport too. Interestingly there appear to be more images on display there than at the Baltic, perhaps the airport comprises some of his other installations. previous
Trees: 10 February 2006: I just sent the following to the council through their website (and contacted Janet Jefferson too):; Sorry to be 'irritated from Scarborough' but driving along Queen Margaret's Road the other day I noticed the trees had been cut down. That's very upsetting indeed and I can't think of a good reason for it.; Who took the decision, why, and how can I stop those decisions being taken in future?; Best regards, John Allsopp; next
Alone: 7 February 2006: Can't anyone leave anything alone? The Dinosaur footprint was incredibly special in context (can't get a decent cup of tea for miles) and made even more special by the moonscape journey you had to take to see it. Hayty gazillion years it stood there. It took people just two to carve it up and make it prissy. Bunch of arse! (And thanks Steve for pointing it out).; I have some pics of the place from yonks ago. That's me, my nephew and my s/o. Taken with a Kodak MC3. I mention that so you know never to buy one (the quality was shocking).
Silence at last: 7 February 2006: Wow. I finally, at last, after all this time, have managed to find the will, time and knowledge to transfer all my data to my new quiet PC. Thanks to Dave for help with the final bit.; It's got a one of these enclosing one of these, a this, a that, and a this.; All I wanted to do originally was to upgrade my original machine, but then it turned out to be better to build a new one from scratch. I've built it in stolen time, snatched moments here and there, and learned along the way, so it's taken a comedic fifteen months to get to this stage. Tragically, I'm comfortable with that. Better that than take time out from client projects.; I didn't have any cost constraints in mind, I just blundered happily through lists of test winning components and ended up spending £1,477.13 including an Iiyama flat screen and 2Gb RAM (the idea is to use it for video processing, since a number of clients are asking for that) and perhaps thirty seven and a half hours overall. Obviously it's not worth that now, it's too old.; I know most of you work in noisy places and have to put up with it, but I must be hypersensitive to that because I really want quiet in order to be able to think, always have. I wonder whether, actually, everyone's like that it's just only few people kick off about it. Or maybe most people gain more from their cohorts than they would from silence.; Anyway, I just this minute finally shut down the old machine and all I can hear now is a very, very quiet fan hum, an occasional faintly disturbing thud from the hard disc, and this bloody loud keyboard I'm using. That ticking clock on my wall will have to go too.; I absolutely recommend that quietness is part of your requirement for any product. That way pressure will come to bear and we won't have to wear ear protectors to do the hoovering any more.; If any of you feel even faintly reassured that I know what I'm talking about, then take a look at my network management package.
LEGS: 6 February 2006: Before Christmas Long Eaton Grammar School, as it was known before I got there (Long Eaton Upper School while I was there (it was a comprehensive school)) gave ex pupils a chance to look around the building before they sell it to its new owner, presumably so they can turn it into luxury flats. The school has a new building. It wasn't a school reunion as such, but others from my year were around .. (pictured from left to right) Chris Wood who remembered me but I had no idea who he was (sorry about that), David Ford who went out with my sister momentarily, and a chap called Booth (?) who when I asked "what do you do?" answered "we make things out of foam" giving me a mental picture of comedy foam caricatures on Castle Donington market until he said "and our turnover last year was £6m". Gulp. OK. He didn't mention his profit though, and I was too polite to ask :-) Nice chaps to a man, perhaps it's the nice people who turn up to these things.; Now the thing is, I've recently spoken to Mark Grebby who used to be in Splat! and Chris Wood who travelled from somewhere in Norfolk to do this, and both work in the caring professions. But I also met Robert Govier. At school he was one year ahead of me and he went straight to Leeds University too and I stumbled across him there and he invited me to tea. When I got there me and his housemates got around the table and I reached out to take some food and he said "err, hang on, we'll just say Grace". Apart from school, I'd never done that before and it came as rather a shock. I told him that when we met the other day and he laughed. But then he said "how were you, I was worried about you, was everything all right?" Well, yes it was, I was just lonely and Leeds and its university aren't the most friendly of places and essentially because of that I eventually left after my second year. I was unhappy, is all, nothing in particular.; But how nice is Robert Govier to remember that? We weren't friends. It was twenty five years ago. Why would he remember that, and why would he care? Incredibly nice! But it has to do, partly, with the Long Eaton area. Maybe I'll talk more about that later.; Anyway, the main school building looks like this:; Inside, the corridors and stairs seem evocative:; These stairs are at the sixth form and we'd sit and wait for friends or loves to come up these stairs (I was sure I'd moved my sporran out of the shot):; It's the small things that fire memories (that's not a urinal, it's a water fountain in the corridor), and that stool is the exact same type we used to have in the science labs more than 25 years ago .. they really lasted that long, and that water jug's lasted too, amazing:; Somehow the sports area holds many memories too. The green place was where I used to play badminton reasonably well. The wooden gym I remember most as the place where I sat my O levels, during a very long, hot summer. And A levels, come to think of it.; Then there's this almost art deco entrance:; Outside and around the back of the school where we used to play ball games forever took me right back. This, though, I think they used to call 'the quadrangle'. Surprisingly I don't remember anyone ending up in that pond.; Anyway, say goodbye because it's all going.; The other thing very much worth mentioning is Long Eaton Library. While others were climbing trees, stealing motor bike accessories on foggy nights, experimenting with cigars and getting caught with someone's topless daughter, I was in here until closing time (7pm) most nights. You could take a maximum of fourteen books at any one time, and I did, everything from dry stone walling to sex. It's because of this place I worked out my religious beliefs and discovered nutrition and health. And by the time I had my first sexual experience (about ten years after almost everyone else) I had the female body and sexual response mapped out completely thanks to various Masters and Johnson books (and others) from here. Libraries made me the man I am :-); Actually, I remember being embarrassed about taking such books out, but my friend Phil Johnson (no relation) took out the first book but wore a disguise to do so. Imagine how funny that would have looked to the library staff, I don't know how they didn't just snort out laughing and point.; I can't categorise the architecture of the place, what are it's influences? And Andrew Carnegie gave it to the town. Wow.; In the school I read a letter of complaint to the council which talked about the scalloped walls which are still outside the library, but used to go all around the school too. They used to have railings of course, but those were taken in the second world war to be melted down and turned into things to throw at the Germans. But yes, the complainant was right, I know budgets are tight but replacing those walls as they did was a travesty.
Centre: 2 February 2006: A client asked "why don't we just centre the headline" and I said "I think it's an amateur thing to do" and he went "oh".; I'm really sorry, it just slipped out that way, and afterwards I wondered whether I was right.; I'd read it somewhere, that's the first thing. So had I just read it and regurgitated it? I spent my gym session wondering whether I really believed what I'd said.; Looking around the gym there were professional posters and amateur ones. One professional one advertised a training session called something like Powertrain. In A0 portrait it showed a muscular man lifting weights. The only text was a set of logos to the right, and some small print. The logos were centred, but around a line about one fifth of the way in from the right. One word, POWER, was turned by 90 degrees and writ large. The small print was also centred, but centred within the guy's dark bottoms.; The amateur posters used full page centering lots of times.; Looking around me I found only evidence to support what I'd said, and I started to pack the opinion with reasons why it might be true. If you're not going to centre the text, what are you going to do? You're going to have to line things up. Line things up with what? Well, with guidelines. Where should your guidelines be? Well, you're getting into grids now, and an amateur DTP person just doesn't want to get into designing a grid before they can layout their page. Centering is a sign of lazy, amateur design. Yes, the Powertrain stuff was all centred, but it was centred for a reason (because it complemented the muscular body and because centered is how you feel after you've exercised) and it was centred around two guide lines that were part of a grid layout, not just centred on the page.; So what could I have said, rather than "I think that's amateur"? Maybe I let it out, unconsciously, because I was momentarily irritated, not actually with that client, but with another as yet unmentioned one. I could have said "I'd prefer not to centre your headline because your page layout is governed by a grid which I worked hard on and which serves you well and to centre the headline breaks that grid and gives the unconscious impression that something's wrong on the page which could lead to the unconscious impression that you're not actually that professional which could lead to people forming an erroneous impression of you that could have a negative effect on your sales." That's a lot to pull together in an instant. I could write it all down, but I know that I already write down too much for my clients who, in the end, just want a good job well done.; The irritation comes from the realisation in that instant that this client seemed to have no idea that there were design rules governing the page, and so had no idea that I'd developed them (I mean, it's no big deal, but ..) and perhaps sooner or later might pop up and say "how come it cost £n to do this" and I'd have to start with all this explanation and have to handle the feelings that maybe I'd done something the client didn't want or didn't need or might never understand the need for.; I don't mean to sound pompous, but I am a deep thinker. I can't have music on while I work because I need to cogitate. Every decision I make about every aspect of a website is governed by innumerable influences and considerations. That, I suppose, is what you buy. I'm not saying I'm any different to any other professional. Go to your GP with a spotty rash and they'll do the same thing (lifestyle, nutrition, diseases, other local cases, past experience), and I suppose if you turn up with a printout from a website the GP would be quite within their rights to say "don't mess me about, I did five years of medical school and practiced for ten years on spotty rashes and you think you've got something to add .. and from the ungoverned Internet no less".; So what's this all about? In truth, I guess it's about feeling unappreciated. I can dress it up as much as I like in male intellectual clothing, but that's the nub. I work alone and if my clients don't understand or appreciate what I do then no-one does because unlike people who work for companies I don't get promoted or appraised. In sole-trading, no-one can hear you scream (or is it "on the Internet, no-one knows you're a dog"). I suppose that's why I collect and publish happy quotes from clients. I'm using them as a sword to fight off other feelings. Maybe that's why geeks are like they are. Maybe for them it's a combination of rusted social skills and a feeling of being unappreciated that makes them big themselves up. Maybe I'm becoming ever more geeky.; Supporting evidence: So there I was at a client's office, attempting to share a printer connected to an XP machine that was shared perfectly well with another computer but when I browsed the workgroup from a W98 machine it wouldn't display the printer. I'd taken two books along with me and neither offered anything much so I Googled for a short while and stumbled across the solution. Windows 98 won't recognise a printer shared from an XP machine if that printer is called anything longer than 12 characters. Actually mine was smaller than 12 characters but it had spaces in it and so on, and when I shortened it, it popped up perfectly on the W98 machine. Random or what? So XP had a feature (XP had suggested the printer name I was using) that broke the W98 connection. I'm sure that would never happen with open source software. Anyway I tried to share my frustration with my client colleagues and saw their faces cloud over with incomprehension.; In conclusion, yes centering is amateur, and yes clients don't understand and yes that's how it is. If I go to get my car fixed, I don't want to know about all the brilliant things the mechanic did to fix it, I just want to pay and go. I suppose that's the life I've chosen, and maybe I should think about ways to put forward my justifications more professionally.