John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Green Internet: 31 October 2006: In case we've forgotten, the Internet and the World Wide Web can contribute a great deal to reducing paper and other media production, printing, and distribution and their contributions to environmental pollution. Didn't Bill Gates say that BluRay DVD would be the last physical media format?; Computer manufacture, however, is a polluting process, and so is discarding old computers and components, so keep the one you've got for longer. There are Linux distributions aimed specifically at enabling the efficient use of lower specification, perhaps old, computers. The speed of a modern computer means the habit of replacing computers after three years is now wasteful.
Cheryl Tweedy: 31 October 2006: I've taken to waking up to Channel 4's music program in the morning and today they interviewed Girls Aloud about their forthcoming greatest hits album.; My problem is, walking down the stairs to my office (it's a hard life), I had "Cheryl Tweedy" in my head. Now, I don't consciously know that Cheryl Tweedy is in Girls Aloud. I wouldn't know which one she was in the interview. I don't know who she is or what she looks like or anything about her, besides that her stock is up in the celebrity market. But that connection is there. How?; I did a little research, in the interests of science you understand, to see what all the fuss is about. She's FHM's second most sexy woman you know. Oh, you do. OK, well maybe it's just me that doesn't. Anyway, it all does nothing for me.; Actually it puts me in mind of a programme I caught the other day about guys who *have dolls* .. these were very realistic looking dolls and the guys had very real relationships with these dolls, dining with them at the table and so on. It took me a little while to realise that, yes, these were sex dolls. I imagined sex dolls to all be of the comedy balloon type. Anyway, I'm not saying Cheryl Tweedy's not a nice person, I'm banging against visual sameness, boredom, homogeneity. Altogether now: "I'm just a love machine, feeding my fantasy ... "; Male sexuality has commonly been about variety (leading some to sleep around). If women are more able, partly through plastic surgery, to take their looks towards the same average point, won't men get bored? Won't there be a backlash?; By contrast, there was a very sexy picture of Rowan Pelling in The Independent on Sunday, sorry I can't seem to find it for you. I understand she knows a thing or two about erotica, not that I've ever experienced any of her work, but that really comes through in the photograph.; Previously, for different reasons, I tried to find a picture of what Shirley Manson actually looks like. Try it. It's very difficult indeed. After a zillion publicity photographs you do get the idea that maybe you'd recognise her in the street. I got to wondering whether there was a higher purpose to that. Rather than just attempting to find an interesting image, whether actually there was an attempt to disguise her looks. One benefit might be that she'd still be able to do normal things, such as go shopping, without being mobbed.; With men, it's different. I can bring to mind lots of male singer's faces. Robbie Williams trades on his face. Mind-you, there's Madonna, we'd recognise her.; Well hasn't this been exciting? OK, I'll do some work. Actually, I must go buy The Independent before I start, hopefully they'll have a major writup about Mr Stern's report on gas emission and I suspect it may sell quickly.
Rory Peck: 30 October 2006: I need to see all these, where can I?; Channel 4 is showing something about one of the nominees at five to eight every night this week.
Morning: 29 October 2006: Morning. I spent the extra hour I got when we shifted to GMT changing all the clocks in the house: the alarm, my g/f's desk clock, the one in the bathroom, the central heating clock, my grandma's mantlepiece clock, the cooker, the music player in the kitchen, the kitchen clock, a mains timer, my mobile phone, the office clock, my running watch, two video recorders and usually there's the car clock too but that's away atm.; The DTs played a blinding gig last night at a private party, a relative of one of the band's 18th in the village hall at Aislaby. It's a lovely hall just the right size, although its no-smoking policy meant half the attendees spent their time outside. We had lots of people dancing .. songs like Tiger Feet and 20th Century Boy really worked well. That fulfills the whole point of the band.; A strange thing did happen though. At the previous gig about halfway through the second set I had a momentary major loss of confidence, and afterwards put it down to having slugged a little too much beer. But now I don't think that's what it was. It wouldn't have helped, of course, but at this gig I didn't drink at all and at around the same time I felt a separation .. I don't know the proper term for it .. but that feeling that you're not actually really connected to your body, that your mind has separated and is somehow an external observer to what your body's doing*. That's a tad scary when you know that you have to play some more songs that require your full attention. I don't mean I had an OOBE. I think it was some sort of natural high, the physical exercise, the adrenalin, the appreciation from the audience, the endorphins, and a growing sense that I was drowning in bass.; * Update: depersonalisation, apparently, but that term's most often used in cases of depression, which I certainly don't suffer from.; Update: That bass issue was a real phenomenon, it's discernible on the video. I don't know much about it, but standing waves is where I'd start to look if I had to.; I've been trying to tie in better with Andy, the bass player, an interesting error has crept in recently, the only solution to which has been for me and Andy to lock down. Otherwise there's no way of re-establishing the count and so no way of ending the song. So I've taken the opportunity to try to listen more for the bass and work to make sure we're locked on .. everyone else must follow us. So this sensation of the bass just stacking up into an amorphous, growing mass was disconcerting as I started to be unable to discern what was being played. Everyone involved said they hadn't turned anything up, so it might just have been that song or that as we reached our climax (we were just a few songs from the end) perhaps we were playing harder, or maybe it was more about how I'd started to feel.; Afterwards I just sat. I didn't want alcohol or food or anything.; A chap said something along the lines of "bloody well done", and "that's a great kit you've got there". But also he said he'd sat through the first few songs and thought "yes, this is a band I can sit and listen to". Good oh :-); Actually afterwards came a proper DJ, I'll get his name for you (Chris Morgan), but he was fantastic. Back in the seventies, well before DJing went through its recent revolution .. Steve Wright was still at Radio One .. I wanted to DJ like they do nowadays. This is one instance where I was very much ahead of my time. I wanted to mix up sounds, put that against a video backdrop and so on. I just never actually did it. But this chap, he didn't have video but he didn't need it, he did everything I would do. Seriously groovy. So I just sat and videoed that for a bit. I don't dance.
Hackney +: 28 October 2006: I wouldn't normally just list articles, but this one about living in Hackney hit home nicely. This story about the Iraqi equivalent of Big Brother did the same. Then this article pointed to a link between mobile phone use and quantity and quality of semen and concluded that "scientific and technological advance unmans us". Ah well, at least we don't lay eggs.
The Linux User Awards: 28 October 2006: I've specified and set up a few business phone systems and I'm always shocked at the costs involved. The handsets, the PBX (the brain behind the system .. the bit that allows you to do things like put a call on hold and pass it to another extension, or determine the inbound ringing pattern), the maintenance charges .. it all seems a far cry from the world of computing.; VOIP offers one solution. The promise is you can get rid of the cost and heartache of all that phone hardware nonsense and all the phone system wiring and just use your computer network, but there are complex issues to wrestle with. Anyway, no-one's asked me to look into it yet so a) I know how it works in theory but not in practice, and b) it seems to be something more in demand by larger enterprises.; But then there's Asterisk, winner of this year's Linux User's best Linux/OSS Application award. OK, it's not free as in beer, in fact I'm not sure there's much of a saving there, but it is open source. It's just interesting to see open source pouring into other markets. So now, if you're a business, you can run your phones on Linux too.; The Linux User Best Embedded Linux Product award went to Trolltech's Greenphone, a test device for developers of Linux software for mobile phones. When I bought my phone it was unclear what software ran on any particular model .. I'd have bought a Linux one if I could have found out which phones ran it. It seems Linux is coming to a mobile phone near you.; Readers voted Joomla! the best content management system, Ubuntu, unsurprisingly, their favourite distribution, and Positive Internet best ISP/host.
Demetri: 27 October 2006: I have a Google Alert for Demetri Martin, in the hope he'll come over here and play a few gigs but that never seemed to happen. It turns out, though, he's going to be the face of Microsoft's Vista viral campaign. Something like that. So maybe he's not cool any more. Anyway, here's Demetri Martin on social networking websites. It's a little lame, but I wanted the opportunity to say I was looking out for him before Microsoft came along.
Meeting Miranda July: 27 October 2006: Oh bursting wow, this person accidentally met Miranda July! No, wait a minute: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. That's more like it.
Narrowboat tales 7: 27 October 2006: My dad remembers that every night an express (mail?) train used to come from Edinburgh to London along the tracks at the side of the Erewash canal and Stanton Ironworks. It was an experimental service.; With an hour to spare, the people at Stanton started to bring a coal delivery across the main track. No problem. Until it got stuck and wouldn't move.; All the signal lights went red for miles up the track of course, but the express train didn't stop. Something to do with its 'experimental' status, maybe they thought they had priority regardless.; The resulting carnage made the local doctor ill. A paper-thin driver and mate, and bent metal everywhere.; Actually that's interesting. I see a similarity between my dad and me here. As you'll see as these tales go on, he talked about this sort of thing a few times. Not for its goryness, but somehow there's a resolute, permanent acknowledgment of reality and a refusal to gloss over it. The dead girl in the borehole. There's a happiness here. A sense of .. I didn't die in that crash, I didn't drown in the borehole, I'm still here, I'm doing alright. I think that same thing's here in my blog, from me. The uncomfortable things I sometimes write are always real.; I do that as a marketing person, to somehow acknowledge that we are the product of biology, a sac of fluids and chemicals that's far removed from the digital world we've created. I don't buy the idea that a survey or a focus group gives us any real, in-depth insight. There's more than iPod. And also less than iPod. Most marketing is trite and primitive. We have soul, we can soar, great art and marketing can take us beyond. We are analogue. Infinitely variable. Infinitely subtle. Forever beautiful. To live in marketing's world is to die. To live in gorgeous analogue reality, to feel the now, to enjoy the moment, to balance on the top of history, smell the air .. to feel. That's the stuff. And the further away we get from friends and feelings and the whole analogue mess, the more we push our soul away, the deeper into this new world we get, the more dangerous things seem to become.; I emailed Ilkeston library to see how I could find out more about the crash and the barstards haven't emailed me back. Honestly, you pay your taxes .. (they did, actually, later, see 'next'); prev - next
Butter: 26 October 2006: Apparently, comedians are very intelligent. The speed's the thing, the instantaneous matching of ridiculous things. It's like a duel, the fastest with the quip wins. I caught a snippet of some panel show where Joan Rivers was obviously being asked about titles and she wondered where Dame Edna Everage had got hers from, and from the other panel "yeah, Count Duckula, where did he get his title from?", and there was another, equally quick, that I can't even remember.; I, on the other hand, am a ponderer. My insights come after minutes, hours, days or months of wondering.; But once, I was very nearly fast enough. I was in the local Costcutters buying the ingredients for some cake or other .. sugar, flaked almonds, etc. and about three pats of butter. At the checkout I made some irritating middle-aged-man faux matey let's chat comment about healthy eating and the checkout chap said "are you baking a cake?" and I mumbled my assent and as I took my change and my first step away I realised, the correct response would have been to look quizzically at him and say "no, I've just been watching Last Tango in Paris".
Stuff: 26 October 2006: My g/f complained that I've not blogged for days. Well nothing much has happened. I'm not an entertainer, if you want entertainment go to the cinema. I've had a headache for about three days. I can't go running because my foot still hurts. But I am looking forward to a private party gig coming up for The DTs, and we've decided to cover Battle Flag by Lo Fidelity Allstars, now that's exciting.; I am demotivated from leaving my office as it seems every time I do I discover new and creative ways the cats have discovered to vomit, so the longer I stay in here the better. Maybe I'll get a primus and a colostomy bag. Plus, one cat's discovered that the best way to wake me in the morning is to slowly coax glass things off the shelf. I'm trying to out-psyche her by not reacting in a rewarding way.; Hopefully there'll be some website news soon. Coming out are a toy shop and a house swapping website, and I've just got the contract for the website for a specialist car spares business.
Narrowboat tales 6: 26 October 2006: Maybe now's the time to do the next narrowboat tale, so here goes. Actually it's not so much a tale as a feeling of the area. We were, this is last year, on the upper reaches of the Erewash which goes past Ilkeston and through Cotmanhay, a word that strikes fear into those who live in the area.; We had a couple of Guinnesses in the cheerily named Gallows Inn after mooring just up from the lock. It's where my dad drank in his youth. It's a completely characterless pub, but I suppose it had the space, the beer or the location sufficient to get all his mates together. My equivalent was the Royal Oak in Long Eaton. One hot evening my dad and his mates came out of the Gallows Inn and jumped into the lock, dressed in his best suit. His mum never noticed, and he had it dry cleaned. In the other lock they used to strip off and dive in.; There's a reason that sort of behaviour has fallen out of favour, revealed later when we reach the head of the canal where there's a cheerful notice about all the things they are doing to make the canal great. In among that text is a line that says that two thirds of the water in the Erewash canal is clean water .. from the sewage works. Just hold on a minute while I just wash my hands again.; Getting food around here was a problem. We tried The Bridge Inn, which my dad helped to build when he was an apprentice bricky, and The Bridge but none of them served food. I was sure I saw a sign that said they did. Punters at the latter said the Gallows Inn would serve food (a last supper?) so we tried to get there for 8pm and failed, but anyway food stopped at 7pm. 7pm! That seems to be something to do with the area. In most places food doesn't start till then. I think it's because the area's businesses are mainly light industrial and probably construction .. there are endless small units all with their back doors open to the canal: machining metal, packaging, mailing, making matresses. I think those people are up and working by 7am or so, and so they want their tea early and then to bed.; Actually this photograph has convinced me my camera's broken. Nowadays that picture would have been exposed differently .. when you look at the graph of lights and darks in The Gimp, this photograph from over a year ago, despite its difficult lighting, used the full range. Nowadays even straightforward shots use only the bottom two thirds of the available range .. anyway ..; We'd reached the end of the navigation that day. The Erewash is a dead-end, ending at the Great Northern Basin at Langley Mill, which is where the now defunct Nottingham Canal and the Cromford Canal join it. There's a winding hole, and few boat repair buildings. Anyway, we got a plaque for our pains ..; .. it's rather groovy, provided by the volunteer group ECP & DA (Erewash Conservation Partnership?) who managed this part of the canal until it turned out they needed to replace the original Langley Lock gates at a cost £20k apiece, so they sold to the Waterways Board.; The nice lady here told us that the reason we hadn't been allowed on the Soar is probably because it floods quickly. That's probably true. It's nice to find a reason.; Apparently my grandad on my mother's side used to pilot horse-drawn narrowboats along the Erewash bringing coal to Stanton. My dad thinks that's how he got the Stanton job. Actually the Stanton job probably killed him in the end (that and smoking, and being old of course), he used to work in the stone crushing plant without any breathing masks and eventually died of emphysema.; My dad remembers the Erewash with horse drawn narrowboats. He said you had to get out of the way of the horses because they'd just walk straight through you.; The tales were interesting. "That housing estate over there used to be fields for co-op horses". "Over there's the borehole. No-one knows how deep it is. They found a girl drowned in it one time". "There's where the time office was. If you weren't on-shift at Stanton you'd turn up there for your week's money." "That building there is the foundry. They used to say it made steel pipes and old men .. it was hard work in there."; prev - next
Geo IP: 23 October 2006: This is cool, a community based project to match IP addresses to geographic locations. You have a unique IP address that denotes your connection to the Internet, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) allocates you one when you connect.
Eggs: 22 October 2006: I had a disturbed night. I got to thinking or dreaming what the social protocols would be like if women laid eggs. You may or may not want to read on. Make your choice now and live with the consequences.; I mean, would egg laying be viewed as sexual or as motherly 'providing'? The eggs themselves would probably be about the size of a Sunday roast, so, the unfertilised eggs, would we eat them? Wouldn't that be weird .. eating something that's come out of your mother like that? But if that's what happened, biologically, what would the social norm be? Would being able to make the perfect souffle be a reveered skill? Or would we hide them, discard them, like menstruation and used tampons? Would there be special places to leave eggs in public conveniences? Would the destitute be able to sell theirs?; Clearly some people would find the whole thing sexual, but would it be normal to think that way, as it is about breasts? What would rap and pop videos be like (given their barely disguised sexualisation of almost everything)? What would hard-core egg based porn be like? Clearly there's the egg 'laying' that would be centre of attention, but I imagine men would also get off on the destruction and immersion of pushing their head through the shell and enveloping themselves in raw eggy suffocation as climax approached. Too much information methinks, but, just, well weird if truth be told. Even ordinary eggs are just weird, particularly as a vegetarian, never mind when your subconscious gets involved. Maybe there's a Cronenberg/Meyer collaborative film in all this. Yeah, I'd pay to see that.; Thinking of things that come from your mum, I do have a slight curiosity, alongside an equal distaste, for the idea of tasting human breast milk. I can assure you it's not a sexual thing, I'm actually just intellectually curious whether the taste would tickle some very very early memories, so whether it would be unlike any other drink. Maybe I should sell the idea to Coca Cola. Or maybe it only works if it's from your own mum .. a pheremone thing. I don't even know if I was breast fed. Anyway it's never going to happen and I've no intention of actually doing it, and that's fine. I'm not about to spawn kids just to find that out. I did, however, bring this up once in a social situation with a lactating friend and her husband in the room and she said, matter of factly (in the way that only women can), "well, you can taste some if you like". I'd been in control until that point, dangling this ridiculously shocking idea as a provocation, like swearing a little too loud or wearing too bright a suit, but she called my bluff. I mumbled something like that being a little unappropriate and she said "well, I wasn't offering for you to take it from the breast, I'd express it into a glass". Yeah, well, still. Aren't we having good weather for the time of year? Her husband said nothing.; And for some reason I also got thoughts of magazines I wanted to start. There's the magazine for dogging fans called Bone. Sorry, I just find that funny.; There's also the huge gap in the market, a magazine for criminals. Imagine the features "lockpicking in ten easy stages", "how to steal an identity, and how to make the most of what you find". What an interesting magazine that would be, in terms of working out how things like cons work and being able to set up counter strategies.; Anyway, like I say, a disturbed night. The moral of the story, if there is one .. I'd be surprised to find anything to do with morals in this blog .. is don't eat so much maple syrup and walnut pudding so close to bedtime.; No drugs were used in the production of this blog.
Spam: 21 October 2006: I've a spate of clients getting irritated about spam, and I'm irritated that they are irritated. Get over it. Spam's like spitting. You can no more stop people spitting on the street than you can stop spam, that is, if you want people to be able to contact you at all by email. Sure, I can put in measures to control spam with the best of them, but if one gets through, just delete it, how hard is that? I suppose my inbox is full of all sorts of incidental stuff I just take it for granted that email is 90% stuff and 10% what you want and it takes five minutes a day to sort it out.; Update: Actually I partly take that back, one client actually had a real problem with hundreds of spam emails every day which I tracked down to a setting that routed all the email to his domain to his personal email. And I have to take responsibility for that setting. Sorry.
MOD stats: 21 October 2006: These MOD stats, are kinda interesting. Just 185,870 people in our military. That's, what, 0.3 percent of the population. I wonder what the US figure is. Ooh look, ask and you shall receive. So if there are 2.6 million available US troops against a population of about 300 million that's about 0.9%.
Café Heart: 20 October 2006: Wow, I just heard, my client Café Heart, just won Cafe of the Year at the Yorkshire Tourism Awards ceremony.; Rex, Lisa and Debi really have created something special .. I mean, just take a look at their menu. And it's all cooked to perfection. It's our first choice if we're out for lunch. They work extremely hard and deserve it.; All that is a preamble so that I can safely say they were told that part of the reason they won the award is their website. So, [takes a bow], thank you to all my friends, my family and everyone who knows me, I love you all.
Bridlington Half Marathon, pic: 20 October 2006: A friend just gave me this pic of the Bridlington Half Marathon start .. not a big crowd at all.
An artists' table: 18 October 2006: I got invited to a friends for tea and liked his kitchen table. He's an artist, so it's full of funky things, don't u think?
Half Marathon - results: 18 October 2006: The results from the half marathon are through. I came 572nd out of 653 at 2:06:34 according to their clock, which I'm pretty chuffed with. I don't know if they provide age weighted results, I'll ask.; As for any other aftermath, I must admit to feeling a little down. I don't get depressed, I'm moving average Allsopp .. I feel no great joy or great pain, I just bumble along reasonably happily. But my body's knackered. It's hard to move it around, and that gets you down after a while. It's not painful, it's just still recovering and repairing. It's a bit like being ill but without the Handy Andies. So I should count on a few days rest after the marathon next year. I read somewhere that running a marathon's like being in a car crash for your body, there's a hell of a lot of repair to do afterwards.; The recovery plan says I should do cross training (training in something else), and start yesterday with just a short session. I did, but my cross training is weighlifting at the gym, and it just so happened squats came up and I tried that .. just one set .. and I knew it was wrong, and I pulled my achilles tendon. So I'm limping atm. Prat.
Loughborough: 18 October 2006: A friend just spent a couple of days in Loughborough, which reminded me of what happened to me there. It's within cycling distance of where I grew up.; We went to see The Adverts, a punk band at a venue on the side of the market square. John Peel used to play lots of reggae and at the time there was the whole Rock Against Racism thing going on. Equally, punk was itself quite energetic which found favour among people with a penchant for violence. Sham 69 found itself followed by skinheads who habitually caused trouble at gigs, in the end causing Pursey to shut the band down (all from memory of the press at the time), and there were punk bands aiming at that market too.; So in their wisdom the promoters of The Adverts had put, I think I remember, a reggae band on first, which is OK but Peel also used to receive a lot of complaints about his playing of reggae on the show so it didn't appeal to everyone.; They followed that with a traditional asian band, complete with the coffin with bellows, etc. This was completely outside our experience. Loughborough has, I think, quite a strong asian presence. Certainly neighbouring Leicester has. So perhaps it was all about integration.; Anyway it was getting towards something like eleven o'clock and the crowd certainly had the feeling that The Adverts hadn't actually arrived yet and everyone was hoping they hadn't stood for four hours watching all this nonsense for nothing. And then a fight broke out in the middle of the crowd, and it escalated.; We were far enough away from the epicentre but close enough to see plenty of bystanders get hurt, I do remember being in the entrance to the building and seeing people, who looked like they were 'innocent bystanders', with blood pouring from some head wound or other. We decided to leave.; My friend called his dad and his Reliant three wheeler and we sat for a while at Loughborough train station waiting for him until finally we got home. So we never saw The Adverts. Rumour has it they did play though.
My blog's bigger than your blog: 17 October 2006: The biggest blog in history? Maybe I will, maybe I won't. We'll see.
Washing symbols: 16 October 2006: I've taken to doing the clothes washing and I made lovely neat piles according to the washing symbols and when I got to making a load my g/f just piled a load of them together and said "you can mix them up and wash according to the lowest common denominator", which I knew, but I'd forgotten what the washing symbols actually meant. What's the difference between 40 bar and 40 double bar, for instance.; I used to do the PR for someone who sold the ink for use in washing symbol labels. If you think about it, they've got to remain visible after many washes, so you need proper stuff. So I did know about the symbols at one time.; Anyway, this explains it.
Half Marathon: 16 October 2006: I did the Bridlington Half Marathon on Sunday and must admit to being pretty proud of myself.; I came in at 2hrs 6 minutes and something. If you've followed my progress so far you'll know I've been hovering around 6 mph in training and not really gotten past that. But I took a little from the 10k experience and raised my pace gradually throughout and was ahead of schedule on every mile marker. At 6mph I would have passed the finish line at 2hrs 12 minutes and something, so I'm happy.; Another thing I'm happy about is that quite a few people at the back end of the race where I was were struggling with breathing, gasping along labouredly. I was fine, no problem there. My weak area was, at that faster pace (a heart rate of 155 bpm up to 160 in the last few miles against a training level of 142), I started to be unable to feel, or really control, my legs. I felt if there'd been a serious downhill at the end I've have been plain dangerous. So my limit seems to have been muscular, but I suppose it could have been cardiovascular in the sense that the reason my muscles were starting to pack up might be because my circulation wasn't removing toxins fast enough. Anyway, I was happy that my training meant my breathing was comfortable. So yes, let's try the marathon next year.; The other thing that worked is that, following last year when I ran the 10k on a relatively undulating course after training on the flat, and with this year's training involving longer distances, I have been running hills and country paths in training. So when this course gave us some very shallow hills, but one quite long one in near the middle, it was no problem for me at all.; As for the route and organisation, that all seemed very well done. The only thing I was disappointed in was the scenery .. it was all a bit boring, frankly, running along country roads through featureless agribusiness. The route, fyi, was Brid, Flamborough, Bempton, Brid. Sure we got into Sewerby Hall grounds for free, and the descent into Brid was nice .. it was nice to descend at least. Compared to my normal runs, I suppose I'm just very lucky to be able to run in such picturesque surroundings and I'm sure there are some very fine health and safety reasons why we couldn't run around Flamborough Head.; I was worried that there wouldn't be sufficient lockers at Leisure World, and I had to get there by bus so required one. But I got a locker and changing without a problem.; What I do want to know is this. What do people do about having a wee on runs like this? It doesn't matter how many times I go beforehand, the jogging around seems to stimulate everything and I always need a wee on a run. And that's with me trying not to take in much water beforehand, contrary to advice which is to make sure you're fully hydrated. So I managed to get some fairly serious scratches running into the undergrowth to find somewhere where I wouldn't get arrested for being a public (pubic?) nuisance. But I didn't see anyone else require it, and certainly for women it's all a bit more complicated. So there must be ways people manage all that. I think I've just got a weak bladder from being free to go whenever I want, whereas I'm sure there are many people who have to hold on until certain times at work, and that would make those muscles stronger.; Anyway, that's all detail. I've run a half marathon! Wow. And I'm perfectly functional today.; It looks like the training for this now winds down slowly and is picked up before it reaches nothing by the marathon training that starts mid February. By June next year I'll be running half marathons as training runs .. there are four distance training runs over 13 miles (a 14, a 16, an 18 and a 20).; I think I deserve a slice of that plum and almond cheesecake I baked over the weekend.; Update: see results
Five minute pitch 2: 14 October 2006: I have to admit to being disappointed. I did my five minute Dragon's Den pitch yesterday to general, well, misunderstanding, really. One of the panel said 'you are obviously a propellerhead', which is funny and cool, but the thing is, propellerheads rule at the moment, so call me that, recognise that, but give me also the kudos that comes with it.; I think the problem is the panel weren't propellerheads and couldn't grasp the whole idea from a five minute pitch. That's the bit I found disappointing. Three of the panel were professional idea evaluators. I expected more. But they got off on the other two presenters .. one, a glass artist who gave them a piece of glass art to hold and got their attention that way, and a school leaver with an idea for a local Internet radio station that would form an outlet for local musicians. He had 'a great idea with lots of potential'. I'm sure that's because they could understand it easily.; My idea isn't that complex for chrissakes and I simplified it as much as is possible. They picked at it. They took parts and liked them but not other bits. The problem is, it works as a whole or it doesn't work, you can't cherry pick the bits you like. They misunderstood bits, as if they heard one or two words from the sentences I said and then glued them together all wrong. As if I'd said I want to make wooden steering wheels for old Austin A40s and they talked back at me as if I'd said I wanted to build wooden cars: "well, wooden cars, they'll never catch on, think of the splinters in a crash, and they'd expand in the wet", yeah, I agree, but that wasn't what I proposed. They came up with situations in which something a bit like what I want to do didn't work, but didn't recognise the situations where it absolutely does work.; To save time the compere had matched us up with two panellists who would make the most comments afterwards. My chosen evaluator clearly just didn't get it at all, others said so afterwards. It's cool not to get the idea. Ask some questions for chrissakes. But I think we were in posturing and acting territory. They were the experts required to pronounce and say something interesting. It wouldn't look good if they showed ignorance.; Part of the reason for doing this is that, as a combined technician and marketing person I can see these things coming, and it's getting a bit frustrating when things take off in the public's imagination regularly three or four years after I got excited about them. MySpace and YouTube are not innovative services. I'm also getting, not frustrated or bored or annoyed or anything .. I love my job, and I really love my clients .. but there is something wrong (and you're going to say it's my presentation and maybe it is) when the ideas people are paying me to implement seem so very simple, and if I make the case for something deeper, with more levels, more innovative, more exciting, something that makes the client different and makes them stand out, gets them noticed, generates interest and business they very often ... just ... don't .... get it.; So this is all about getting something out there that demonstrates what I'm talking about, and I thought for once I'd be able to break through all that normal-person nonsense and deal with someone used to making quick decisions about innovative business ideas. But no. They were normal people too, cooing over the things they could hold and radio stations that are like radio stations .. but on the Internet. Jeez. I'm not knocking my cohorts, it was very nice to work with them, they were both great people and I wish them well, really, from the heart. I'm knocking the panellists. I guess I'm kicking against a world that progresses step by step when I feel I'm one of the few with a telescope.; I suppose the point is, it wasn't real. Maybe I took it too seriously. Actually, a weird thing happened. Just as I was about to get up and make my presentation a naked man walked past his window in a flat across the road. I wondered what that meant for my presentation. I mentioned that at the start. So they commented on that. Briefly, it's true, but .. don't mess about, talk to me about the project.; Maybe it was just entertainment. The compere introduced the panellists and made the point, after introducing the venture capitalists, that there was no money on the table today. I thought there was going to be. I should have just stood up and said "in that case, I'm off, see ya". But one moved to put a mock wad on the table as if to say "there is if the right idea comes along", so I stayed.; What made it work for me, what underlined it, is someone said afterwards that my presentation transported them somewhere else, that they felt they got a glimpse of the future. Exactly right.; So now I've danced a little with my idea what shall I do? It was safe, all boxed up and never spoken of, but now it's out. It's a race, isn't it? Now I have to implement it before someone else does. Ah, maybe not exactly that (I have a living to earn), but maybe if I don't pursue it am I not a man of my convictions?; I think, watch this space. There are ideas afoot, and you'd better stay vigilant. These propellers can take you places once they get moving.
Portastudio: 12 October 2006: When I was a lad, the Portastudio was every boy's dream. Well, those boys that weren't thinking of motor bikes, football or women, anyway. And tonight we got to play with a Tascam Portastudio 2488 which is a really lovely piece of kit.; We recorded all night and when we were packing up I unplugged my drumkit and .. umm .. the Portastudio was plugged into that extension. And everything we'd recorded was lost.; Now, OK, that's comedy, and annoying and all that, but what's really, really annoying is that the product allowed that to happen. Humans do that. There are power cuts. What rarified laboratory was this product conceived in? Products that make me look like a prat are not my friends .. not because I've some highfalluting opinion of myself but just .. you spend your hard earned money and if you can't get some care and attention and respect out of the products you buy then it's a poor show.; I'm wondering whether I can twist this around and say that, if the software that drives that product was written using open source methods, 'automatic save' would have been a feature that someone wrote in pretty quickly.; What is also annoying is that clearly all those recordings were written to disc, there's nowhere else with the capacity to store them. What hadn't happened is the disc directory wasn't updated with the filenames because I pulled the plug. It's not asking much for it to occasionally update the disc directory. If you read the manual there's a button to push to get it to do it. So why doesn't it just do it? It's not asking much, either, for a rescue facility that works through the disc and adds a directory entry for the files it finds. Closed source. Closed development. Closed products. It's not real-world enough. It's not usable.; I liked what fellow band member JP said: "never mind, we could live in the Gaza Strip and have real problems to worry about". Oh well. Same again next week lads?; Update: The next week we saved as we went and come the end of the evening wanted to make an audio CD, but it seems it wouldn't let us without going through all the mixdown process. So we opted for a data backup. It started that, and presented on its display about nine unfilled in blocks and started to fill them in. It was 'creating the image file'. When it filled in the final block, it blanked them all and started filling them in again. We thought maybe it was doing that for each track, but after half an hour of watching that nonsense, we tried to abort it. It wouldn't let us. So. No real progress report. No idea if we'd have to wait days or minutes. No idea ahead of time that this might take some time. No reason for it to be slow .. the processor has to be fast enough to process, I think, 8 simultaneous tracks of audio. Discs and CDs are as fast as we know they are. What if we really had to unplug and leave .. I mean, that's likely isn't it? I had to be brought back home, while the last I heard the guitarist was going back to see if it had made any progress. All this is really unbelievable in a mature product like this.; Update: It hadn't made progress, they had to leave it all night. Later he challenged them on an exhibition stand at the NEC and they pre-empted him .. they knew what his complaint would be.
The Note C: 12 October 2006: I just had a run around in South Bay underground car park in an attempt to trigger all of the motion sensing cubes in Chris Eckersley's The Note C. I felt like a kid again :-) Very impressive. The idea is just that, there are motion sensing cubes around, each of which, when they sense your presence, play the note C, but each recording is of a different instrument. He plans to place it in Gloucester Cathedral, I think he said. The acoustics and reverential atmosphere there should be even better. Great fun.
Partner: 12 October 2006: It happens fairly regularly, but I met again with the enquirer I blogged about here and they want me to come on board as a full partner. I always resist. There's clearly an advantage to them in suggesting it, usually something to do with not having to pay much now in lieu of various fantasy sized payments later when the whole thing's a smashing success. In other words, will I share the risk with them because no-bugger else will, and since I'm not equipped to assess financial or business risk like a bank is, it's sensible to turn down such offers. It is, however, very flattering to be asked. I must be doing something right.
eBooks: 12 October 2006: Suddenly everyone's asking about eBooks. I don't know what publicity people are seeing to cause the interest, I've not seen any.; I'm resistant. To my knowledge, an eBook is an idea from a few years back when the corporates suddenly woke up to the fact that they had no control over the Internet. Intel and Microsoft have been working on their DRM solutions, and the idea was, between all of that, you could have a file format for eBooks that would allow control over usage so that payment could be extracted, for instance, for each copy and making free copies for your mates would be prevented.; For the record, I think DRM will take a long time to be accepted. If Microsoft pushes it too hard in Vista, I think they could provide a strong motivation for people to move to something else, like Linux.; Anyway, when you look up eBook in Wikipedia you get a much broader definition.; A look around Amazon and eBay suggests that what people are selling as eBooks are just PDF files, which presumably the buyer can either resell or copy for their friends. This must be the source of the interest.; So what's the difference between a PDF file that you read on your computer, and a website (built using HTML)? A PDF file comes with the page design intact and unchangeable. A website can be changed to suit your requirements. So a PDF file might look a little more attractive, and you can zoom in on it if your eyesight's not so good. But a website is a lot more flexible than that. If you're on a slow connection you can elect not to download images, for instance. You can display the text in any font, colour or size you wish and adjust the line length and spacing. You can get a reader to read it out for you if you prefer or have poor eyesight, and you can cut and paste parts of the text and quote them in your work. HTML can also be more intelligent than that and mark up things like the author's name, the title of the work, and so on so that software can, for instance, categorise or list the eBooks you own. A web page can be more interactive, for instance, presenting alternative endings, and you can implement multiple layers of charging. And because a web page is publically available text, it can be indexed by search engines and so you're more likely to find the information in the first place.; The web is a system designed for the delivery and display of text onscreen in a way that's most convenient for the user. All the other formats have greater benefits for the publisher, and fewer for the reader.; The traditional publishing industry offers something that eBooks don't. Why are people publishing in eBook format? Publishers filter out the dross and publish what is worthwhile. Could it be that those who are publishing in eBook format have been rejected by publishers, or know in their hearts they have little of substance to offer? Where's the quality control? How do we know that what's published in an eBook is correct? One person enquiring about eBooks gave as an example an eBook that purported to give the buyer a foolproof method for avoiding speeding fines. If you bought that, you'd find one sentence "Don't break the speed limit". No publisher, no peer review, no editorial control. I suppose you could say the same about my blog. Well, do you want to pay to read this?; Even if they do have something worthwhile to offer, it's against the core spirit of the Internet to prevent access to that knowledge. I know it's a lot to ask, but eBook publishers are using a system built on sharing, and then not sharing. I would hazard that the content of many eBooks started life on the Internet. If you share what you know, people regard you as an expert and they feed back to you so your knowledge grows. Money making opportunities come from that. That's the Internet way.; I also find it a little distasteful, in the sense that it uses people's ignorance against them, something I'm pledged not to do (it's part of the BCS code of practice, or ethical conduct, one or t'other). Many people who are not particularly net savvy use the Internet mainly for eBay and don't stray far from it. An eBook may look attractive to them, but that's because they are ignorant of what's available for free and how to find it.; But taking the big view, the whole idea of an eBook is based on the need of corporations to wrest back control from the Internet. There's nothing you can do in an eBook you can't do on a straightforward website. eBooks are an attack on the Internet and, if you value a society where information is available to all, not just those who are already successful, they should be resisted. I'll meet you on the barricades.
Some more uni advice: 11 October 2006: I think you've got to be a bit arrogant to get through uni. Remember all the hours guidance I provided before. I've had a couple more hopefully useful thoughts if you're reeling from the shock of serious study.; The first thing is, and this is a Margaret Thatcher rule (she put it the way only she could, but the essence of it is): you set sail for your goal and it matters not whether the wind or tide are with you or against you, you set your sails and your rudder to cope and you keep heading for your goal. Sometimes you'll slip backwards, but you're always improving your position.; A similar thought is that you should be like a blade of grass in the wind.; Academia is a pot roast of incompetence. You'd think because there are a lot of clever people in one place everything would be sorted, but far from it. It's normal to not receive your door pass until week five and not get the password to the university portal until after you need it. That's their problem. You must concentrate on what you can do, what's within your sphere of influence, and don't get het up about what you can't. Just work on the things you have the materials for, and catch up with the other stuff when you are able. Be flexible.; The other thing is: academics. Like actors, they're full of themselves and their own world. Where does an academic get his or her social strokes? Not from other academics, they don't understand each other's world .. everyone's in a specialist area that no-one else understands. And if someone does understand their subject, they'll lock horns. Academics can't talk about their work because others will nick their idea. They can't admire someone in their own field because that demotes their status. It's all about one-upmanship.; So it must be lovely for them to stand in front of a bunch of thirty fresh faced young people and show just how amazingly clever they are without challenge. And the more they throw at you, the more clever they feel. "Take a look at Flanigan and Allen, October 2003", they say "you really should know that", knowing full well that it's 60 pages of words averaging ten letters long interspersed with heavy statistics. Boy that must feel good.; From your point of view, you have to cut through all that. You're there for one thing only, to pass the exam. Really. Really really really. They can't test you on anything they haven't told you, and you've no time for anything else. All the points in the exam are gainable from the lecturer's slides. So if you're struggling to get a grip, here's my advice.; Deal with the lecture slides as soon as you can after a lecture. Make sure you understand them. Use books like you would use a dictionary. If you don't understand a concept from the slides, look it up in (more than one) book. Then close the book. Don't read around the subject. Because you may need multiple books to understand something, this may be best done in the library.; Work in fifty minute blocks, you can't take on anything beyond that. Take a ten minute break every hour.; Plan out your week before it starts, on Sunday night. Work out when you're going to spend your hours for each subject. Stick to your plan (unless you need to sleep, in which case, do, and don't stress about it .. your health comes first).; If you find you have spare time at the end of the week, then if you're interested, you can look at the further reading your lecturer has suggested. But that's really for your own pleasure and interest. Don't worry about it.; Oh, I've another rule, this one's from running. If you miss going to the gym today, don't try to make it up by going to the gym tomorrow as well as your scheduled run. That will only lead to injury. If you miss the gym, you miss it. Let it go. Do your normal schedule tomorrow, that's all. What's past is past. So don't think that because you only did thirty hours study last week when you should have done forty, that you should do fifty this week. You'll kill yourself. Just do your forty, and let those ten go. Sure, use the fact that you'll never get those ten hours back to motivate yourself to stick with today's schedule, but don't keep dragging your past with you. Each morning brings a new day, and a new opportunity to do the right thing.; Of course, I may be wrong, so follow my advice at your own risk, but that's definitely how I understand it.
NearToU.com gets SIC selection: 10 October 2006: I've just added SIC selection to NearToU.com. It kinda works.
The five minute pitch: 6 October 2006: Oh shit, I appear to have just agreed to pitch an idea in the Digital Scarborough equivalent of the Dragon's Den. Think I'll do 'radio restaurant'.
Four large horns and a whole lot of fun: 6 October 2006: A friend and I happened across Four Large Horns and a Whole Lot of Fun at Indigo Alley last night (they seem to play the first Thursday of every month, although I only know for sure (ish) about the November one). Someone said they are a 'swing' band but I wouldn't have said so.; There are nine members. A singer, four horn players, a keyboard/vocalist, drummer, 5-string bass player and perhaps, hidden away somewhere, there was a guitarist although that's in doubt (I didn't see him or her (Indigo Alley is shaped like that), any guitar I heard could have come from the keyboards, and there was a sound man so perhaps he was the ninth member (the main man said there were nine members)). All really good musicians, anyway, very tight, playing from music. So good, it felt like there'd be an exam to get in. My friend (who knows a thing or two about brass) said it best "these people are hand picked". Their singer's spot on too .. plus she can play the tambourine which I think is actually a deceptively difficult instrument to play. Many of them seem to work at Bernard Dean's, the local music shop.; Normally a drum kit is the loudest instrument in a pub band, even if it's not miked up, but this was very low in the mix, the brass really coming forward.; Apparently (can't quite believe this) there's another band with the same name, so they're having to find another and took suggestions from the audience.; I did enjoy them, but if I'm honest I love the power and spirit of brass, I love the idea of fifties big band, dance hall stuff: brass just has the power to lift your soul, but last night was just a weeny bit, well, middle of the road for me. We only caught the second set and they started with some fairly serious brass which sounded great, but once the singer came out we got into tunes like "Just the two of us" Bill Withers is the song I've still got in my head this morning, and I remember them playing something by Al Jarreau. Nothing against the singer, she had a really good voice and it's good to break the all-blokes thing, and you couldn't remove her without removing a big part of the band. This says more about me than them I think: I was programmed during punk, I always want something a bit different and with the power this band packs, I'd have loved something .. well, different. But I think that's not going to happen, they are great at what they do, aim squarely at the centre ground, and do it really well so good for them, and they obviously do it for pleasure because a pot came round for donations to the band. I looked around at the packed pub and asked "do you not pay them?" and the barmaid shook her head.
Me and you and everyone we know: 5 October 2006: Beautiful film, the sort of film that will stay with you forever. Exquisitely written, there are some really cosmic lines in it. I may do what I've always wanted to do and disappear to the video shop to see if I can watch everything by Miranda July, but a) it's unlikely that will work as our nearest seems to be winding down, trying to diversify, struggling, and b) I've no time for such shenanigans. Maybe when I retire (which is a long, long way off).
HP: 5 October 2006: I like HP. Well, I did, I'm not so sure now. I replaced the black ink cartridge on my HP Deskjet 5150 today and afterwards the ink light wouldn't stop flashing and the printer rejected print requests. I tried another cartridge and that didn't fix it.; Nothing on the website told me what to do, so I ended up calling a 60p per minute helpdesk in India. I got it fixed, but the call took 22 minutes and 21 seconds, so I'm thinking £13.80. It's not a bad price, considering I was ready to box it up and send it for repair and/or buy another.; So, for anyone else with the same problem, here's what they had me do. Firstly, power it off, wait 30 seconds, then power it on while holding power button in. That didn't work for me.; Then, remove the cartridges and clean, with a cotton bud, the contacts on the rear of the cartridge and also those in the machine. Remove the power and USB lead and hold the power switch down for 30 seconds. I said "but what's this doing if the power's not plugged in?", he said it was to discharge static.; When the machine came back up, the ink light wasn't flashing any more and it printed perfectly.; So actually, that was great support. But if HP weren't thinking of it as a revenue stream, those techniques, once they'd been required a few times by customers, would be findable on their website. And when I was happy, the chap wanted another minute or two of conversation about sending me customer satisfaction emails and so on, which feels a little like the final sales technique of "would you like a matching tie" .. I've already spent money on the call, my printer's fixed so I'm happy, just get another 60p. And then there's the question of why the problem occurred in the first place.
Sigma: 3 October 2006: I had a Sigma shredder for the last couple of years. I don't use it much, but it kept blowing its plug fuse. That happened so much that I changed the 3amp for a 5amp and all seemed well until a week or so ago it died and a change of fuse doesn't fix it. I took it apart but can't see what's wrong or see a burnt-out internal fuse, so it needs chucking.; I thought maybe you can't just chuck things nowadays, it comes under electronic waste, but according to the DTI they are still consulting on it and it doesn't come into force until 1 Jan 2007, and you won't necessarily be able to take things back to where you got it until midsummer. To take this back I'd have to drive to Nottingham (or post it there) which seems to negate the environmental benefits. I don't have a car right now, so this is just going to have to go in the bin, which is really irritating.; The whole episode, including ordering a new one wasted about an hour, another argument for buying quality products first time around.
MetCheck: 2 October 2006: Hey look, I'm famous, I provide the Scarborough MetCheck weathercam!
The DTs: 2 October 2006: I just did a very quick (but slightly impressive) design for local band The DTs. I wouldn't normally consider doing a site with a large graphic like that at the top, but it'll evolve and improve from there and it needed to be done quickly.
High Tide: 2 October 2006: A new art, sport, culture and leisure events guide for Scarborough: High Tide, has been launched and it looks pretty good to me.
Scarborough Fair: 1 October 2006: It was the last night of the fair on Saturday and I persuaded a couple of friends to walk around it with me just to see what was there, but mainly so I could record the sounds. My microphones are rather large, so I wanted to go with someone who could quickly explain to any armed police what I was doing, in case of any misunderstanding.; I wanted to record the whole journey, walking to it, starting before I could hear the fair, so you hear the approach, through the fair, to more or less when the sound had faded away again. You can download the result here (it's a 16Mb mp3 file and lasts about 16 minutes).; Normally if you sit down in a dark room and listen to a recording like this, for me, it takes me right back to the event. It, more than visually, locks it down in memory. I can still remember being moored up in a narrowboat on a canal, feeding the ducks, and my g/f making a pot of tea .. I can picture it, because I recorded it in audio and listened back to it a couple of times. Somehow photographs and video don't seem to enhance the memory, they seem to replace it. Sound brings the real memory back, so I prefer it. I've no idea whether it would bring (other) vivid images to mind in someone who didn't actually experience it.; There are problems with this recording though. There's rumbling which I presume is something to do with how I'm holding the mics or perhaps a piece of clothing rubbing against them. There are sibilant s's but they could have really been there in the fairground equipment. But most of all, I'm disappointed by the stereo effect. For some reason it's not very stereo. Looking at the waveforms I can see there are differences, but it's not very marked. Anyway, I'll try better next time. It's my first ambient recording with these mics, and I've only just got audio-in to work on my Linux installation, and Audacity for processing it.; There's about five minutes of nearly nothing as we walk to the fairground. I've never seen them before, but there were two pairs of police horses out that night, which you'll hear. I refer to the flashing lights they were wearing. We pass a pub with some live music too.; The ride we couldn't believe was a huge 'propeller' with people attached to either end.; Also curiously, people normally don't like their own photograph. I've got the same effect with hearing myself talk, I sound like a right prat. My only excuse is that the friends I was with were tired and quiet, so perhaps I was trying to fill the gaps.; Finally, I've got this idea that the bands I'm in might benefit from considering the songs played in fairgrounds as possible songs to cover, since we're both into the same thing .. generating a bit of excitement. Nothing screams out from this collection though, apart from the people on the propeller.