29 November 2006: The Choir, BBC2 from next Monday, is at a school where one of my best friends from school is headmaster.
While I'm at it, if you've not been watching Simon Schama's Power-o-fart then it's been a life-changing experience. I love it. We sit agog, not daring to speak in case we miss some essence. You've still got chance to catch the last two. Fridays, BBC2 9pm. This week: Picasso's Guernica, next week Rothko. I've never heard of Rothko, but I'd never heard of Bernini either, and just look. I'm still recovering from the Bernini programme.
29 November 2006: I crashed last night. I've been working solidly, weekends and evenings for the last few weeks and my brain just stopped yesterday evening after two early starts .. one planned, the other cat-driven. I got a take-away and a beer and watched a couple of films.
I've never really watched the old Hammer Horror type films but I recorded Bride of Frankenstein because the review said it was exemplary, so it was the first time I'd ever seen it. I didn't realise it would be played for laughs, which is why I remember an old schoolfriend laughing and recounting bits and me not really understanding why they were funny .. I was thinking he was pointing out how crap it was, like enjoying Blakes 7 for the wobbly sets, but actually he was going along with it's point. But also, I never realised how much Father Jack from Father Ted (what an awful website, and within C4 too) seems to be based on the monster in this film. I love the 'design' of the bride, and the whole lightning/machinery/kites sequence .. even the design of the kites. Hang on. She was in wraps one minute, then had that fantastic crazy conical hairstyle the next, how did that happen? And yes, I know you were hoping I'd fall into the trap of calling the monster Frankenstein so you could jump up and down and point. But I didn't. So nerrrrr.
I also watched Natural Born Killers again. I'd forgotten how much it was a comment on the media industry. I first watched this in Amsterdam. I was on my own, it must have been for a MapInfo conference (but I can't think why I was alone, there was usually something to do every evening). The film had just come out and there was a lot of expectation. Being in a foreign country I asked at the counter what language the film would be broadcast in. I think that's a reasonable question .. in France aren't there language protection laws and wouldn't you expect it to be overdubbed in French? And I didn't want to pay and discover later I couldn't follow it. Anyway the chap looked confused and said "well, it's an English language film so we'll show it in English", so then I felt stupid. The other thing about that cinema was there was a bar, so I sat down, all very civilised and comfortable, with a beer, to watch this very loosening film in a foreign city famous for the breadth of its pleasures and .. it was quite an awesome time. It's freeing to be alone somewhere new, let alone to watch that.
And just in case you're reading between the lines something that isn't there, a) I didn't take any drugs (I don't, barring alcohol, I take vitamins for my kicks), and b) I didn't do anything untoward afterwards in the red light district (and never have), I went back to my hotel to sleep.
28 November 2006: Nah, I can't get it to work. It's fine me mumbling on, here, about broken kettles and how do you decide what size your letters are for posting, but it's hardly going to make a riveting podcast is it? It will be me liking the sound of my own voice. And if I concentrate on something .. what? I'm a generalist, I know a lot about a lot, but I'm not the best at anything specific. I may be the best website developer in terms of your project, but that would be because I'm very good at lots of things that in combination make me a great web developer, things like marketing and database design, visual design and accessibility, usability and heavy programming, project management and people.
I could make a podcast for small business people who have websites, but I want to put music on there or it's just me mumbling about CSS. Why have music on there? I'd have to talk about why, and then I'm being a generalist again. I could shlup right back to accessibility and just provide an audio version of my blog, but that doesn't even work for blind people, at least if they are using a screen reader they can jump forward by paragraph if necessary. To put music on requires a £200 pa PRS licence and agreement from each record company for each tune, so it's marketing budget, and I hardly think it'll lead to enough work to cover that. If it's not a smooth production, if it jumps from XHTML to a song by The Kinks, to what happened to my lawnmover the other day, the website chap's going to be turned off by the Kinks, the Kinks fan's going to have turned off already halfway through the XHTML discussion, and only my mum will be left to listen to my lawnmower story.
I suppose the point is, a podcast is a linear programme. You have to listen to it sequentially. Whereas this text on this page will be indexed by Google and if I write red hot banana here, when someone types red hot banana into a search engine they'll drop right to this bit (actually that's not true, they'd have to search the page (see), but it would work if I created an index with links to all the blogs). They don't need to read my joke about the Korean CEO below, or whatever I write next above, and all's well. Different things. So, I think I'm over it. No podcast.
28 November 2006: Following on from my previous blog on my new laser printer, it arrived the next day .. well, the day after that because I was out when it was delivered and so were all four of the neighbours I'd nominated (but not told) to receive it in my absence.
I waited till the weekend, opened the box, followed the instructions: installed the toner, some paper, plugged it in, and I just got a red light. I checked the manual online, and it says if you've done the above and all the doors are shut, you have a major fault. So I called Printerland and spoke to Ashley who said I should call Samsung first and get them to accept it is faulty and provide a returns number. Then Printerland would accept it back.
So I called Samsung and got a message about them receiving high call volumes, but after four minutes spoke to Alex who took my details and gave me a reference number and tried to put me through to the IT department, but they were busy and I waited a couple of times but he said he'd get them to call me back in half an hour. That was Friday, before lunch.
On Monday I tried Samsung and got the message "Sorry, we are unable to answer your call at this time, please try again later". I checked with Printerland that there was no time limit on this process as it was soon to be seven days since I received the printer. They tried to put me through to Samsung too, but got the same message.
Apparently just because of my call on Friday, Thomas Curry called me from Samsung on Monday at 11:00. He wanted to get a same model printer in front of him while we discussed it, but theirs was with another engineer. He asked me to check all the printer doors were closed.
That reminded me that I did find a piece of plastic, the same colour as the body plastic, clearly broken off, in the paper-out tray. I'm the only one who had touched the printer, and I didn't notice it when I got the printer out of the box, although it's possible it was there then. I had opened the top door to check for any problems, and it was after that that I found the plastic bit. It looked like the sort of prong that was used on a door to push in a switch to tell the printer electronics that a door is closed, and as I talked this through with the engineer, although I'd checked all this before, I found where it had come from: the top door. When I pressed in that sensor, the printer was fine.
I offered to just use some plastic glue to put that back, but Curry said that would invalidate my warranty. So I just needed an authorisation number from him.
Well. No. Apparently that's not how it works. They get a lot of this. Printerland need to go through their Samsung sales rep, and he gave me a telephone number for Printerland to use. There's no need for a returns number.
I called Printerland and got through to Danielle. She sounded fed up and was rather insistent that I needed a number from Samsung. But I stood my ground. I'd called Samsung, and they wouldn't give me one, and Printerland had sold me the printer, it's up to them to solve the problem. She wasn't sure. She needed to get the Samsung rep to call me. Or an engineer to come out. She took the details of what was wrong with it, and said she'd call back in fifteen minutes.
After that, everything was plain sailing. Danielle was obviously proved wrong, although she wasn't going to admit as much. At 12:09 she called and said, yes, pack up the printer and we'll send you out a new one, and pick up the old one.
That's a lot of messing about for a very simple fault. And I'm left with a bad impression of Samsung whose customer support lines are so busy. I'd have thought a Japanese company would have rather died than supply fault goods. But there's my mistake. They are not Japanese, Samsung is Korean. Let's hope their chairman never forms a band with someone called Gus: "please welcome, live on stage, Kun-hee Lee 'n' Gus".
Update: Wednesday 11:30. I stayed in all day yesterday and nothing arrived. I called Printerland again. I explained to the woman who answered the phone and she said she'll try to put me through to sales (so who was I speaking to)? She asked for an order number, something beginning with D, but I hadn't got one, so while I was on hold I wandered down to the printer in its box and removed the thing on the side that contains delivery documents. Inside is an advice/packing note from Micro Peripherals Ltd about delivering an Acer P4 to Accountancy Systems & Training Ltd in Stirlingshire. What does that mean?
She put me though to sales but didn't introduce me so I had to explain the whole thing again. The chap I spoke to read the notes on file and wondered what time I spoke with Danielle .. so conversations aren't time-stamped? Anyway, it was Karl I think, he looked into it, called me back, said the delay was because they had to wait for Samsung's confirmation, but it was sorted yesterday and should be delivered today.
Printerland is a mixed bag, it's close to being great, you get the feeling their heart's in the right place. They answer the phone, they have a system, they call you back, they have honest and clear answers .. it's all good, at many points it's a breath of fresh air to deal with them. With one more push at tidying up the user experience it could be great. It feels like they need a suggestion scheme, or an on-screen option to click to notify someone whose job it is to iron out issues like Ashley not knowing the procedure for returning a Samsung, and me not receiving the printer in the first place until I chased it.
Update: The old printer got collected about ten minutes after I wrote the above. He said he was down to have a new one to give me, but things are going late atm (he's with Business Post) and it's probably stuck in Manchester or somewhere so it'll be tomorrow before 12.
I document this sort of thing as an antidote to management's view of how business works. It's like Blair famously not realising in the last election campaign the fact that doctors surgeries make people call on the day they want an appointment in order to fix the stats. It's a real user's experience, and usability is what I deal with. It's all in the detail.
Update: After an hour, a new printer arrived by a different courier. City Link, I think.
28 November 2006: I'm working up to doing a podcast, but I just went to investigate existing podcasts using iTunes and it's hideous. How do you find a podcast? Well, you can go to a section: arts, comedy, technology. Where in that system would a podcast of my blog fall? All the podcasts listed in those sections are tightly focussed. Most of the podcasts are led by known names. Or you can look at the most popular podcasts, or you can look at the editors favourites.
And look at the categories here, it's mostly about entertainment. Podcasts about entertainment! It's circular. Next we need a film about podcasters, and a podcast review show on telly.
Those methods of finding podcasts are built to create a hierarchy. Established artists would expect to be at the top of that hierarchy, so what iTunes provides is an adjunct to the established entertainment system.
So, podcasting isn't a people's uprising, radio for the masses, a way of allowing anyone to produce a programme in their own way. It's a way to keep celebrities in the public's eye and bolster the existing system.
It also quickly becomes apparent how professional radio is. If these podcasts are at the top of the pile, what the hell is at the bottom? I'm not saying I'm going to produce something earth shattering, but I do need to find a way of putting across some interesting thoughts without giving the impression that I just like the sound of my own voice.
Why do I want to do it at all, then? The idea came from working on accessibility and with the local blind and partially sighted society, and from evaluating various text to speech packages where the voices being provided were very robotic and irritating. It was clear that no-one with a serious sight impediment would go through my blog under those circumstances. So I thought, well, I'll just read it out into an audio file. That would clearly be tedious. Plus a podcast takes time to produce, so I couldn't afford to do it very often. So I should probably choose a few topics I've found interesting over that period and discuss just those. Since the idea of this blog is to deliver 'me' to faraway lands (not for the sake of it, but so people can decide if they want me on their team), the podcast could do the same thing, but just accessible in a different way. It would be nice to demonstrate that it's possible, anyway.
I probably would use podcasting a lot more if I commuted. Then, I'd want something to listen to. Maybe I should have a website tip in every podcast. So my target market is web developing blind people on trains, who speak English and listen to podcasts. Now, where's my directory of corporate sponsors ...
27 November 2006: (I've updated this because I was wrong about not requiring BT Together). Having set up my parents-in-law's broadband through BT about ten weeks ago, and having set them up to call, more or less for free, using the Internet connected phone, we were all set to get cheaper calls. Imagine our surprise (debt to Viz acknowledged for that phrase) when, instead of their normal £75, the next invoice they got was for about £150.
£127 of that was service charges, comprising £37 of BT Together, £78.14 of BT Broadband, which is two months of the 'new charge' and then another quarter in advance. They didn't tell us about paying ahead beforehand. Then there was the home hub and microfilter to buy, £30.
So. Before all this, they were spending maybe £75, which presumably included line rental, which is what, about £10 per month, and BT Together which looks like it's about £12, so £22 per month, or £66 per quarter, leaving about £9 of calls.
Now, we have £15 for broadband pcm, or £45 per quarter, £4 or so pcm for the basic calling plan, we still, apparently, need BT Together so thats' another £12 pcm £37 per quarter so so a total of £94 per quarter in the future. The rest of our £150 bill is because you have to pay in advance, and buy the hardware.
27 November 2006: Howard Goodall's How Music Works is very groovy indeed. It's more like an undergraduate lecture than a TV programme. There are four in the series, and two have gone. BBC2 Saturday, about 7pm. The first was on melody and it started off talking about note spacing and I found myself thinking "I hope this gets more interesting" and then before I knew it we were into stuff I'd heard of but didn't really know about and it all got very interesting indeed. I recorded it on a separate tape so I could have all four together.
Then, because I buy the Saturday Independent and sort out my telly from there and we were working so I came to it late and I assumed Saturday night's telly would be rubbish, I missed last Saturday's programme. And it was on rhythm. And it's not repeated. And I'm distraught. Actually, I'm sure it will be repeated in the fullness of time, but that means I'll have to maintain a constant watchfulness, which is a pain.
So I put out a request to pretty much everyone I know asking if they recorded it. Many, as you might imagine, are involved in music one way or another. I've not found it yet. I've expanded my request to the students in the local music performance course, to the members of the local DIY Collective, and to the local music network, so I'm really trying. If you know of someone who has I'd be very grateful.
I have learned something about myself in this exercise. Not many people were aware of the programme, and I've found no-one who recorded it. It seems people's telly watching is very passive. Very, TV as distraction. The way my g/f uses it, actually .. she flicks until something catches her eye. Obviously there are regular slots too .. Coro, C4News, etc. I go through the telly guide, work out what I want to watch, record that, and watch it later. She can't be bothered, even with the fuss of me getting the right video and finding the programme. And it appears no-one else can either. So it's just me doing that, then.
So what do people use their video recorders for? Or is all that terribly old-fashioned? Even the (it's not an abbreviation is it) 'TV' seems awfully fifties all of a sudden. Perhaps there are so many channels, and so much Internet, that people can rely on there being a suitable distraction when required, so no-one records the telly any more. And maybe there's a feeling that the telly should come to us anyway nowadays, when we want it, rather than us having to make an effort. I think a few years ago I'd have found someone who had recorded it.
27 November 2006: I was frustrated over the weekend that I couldn't get The Gimp to do a particular spherical distortion I wanted. Too late, I've just discovered there's a registry of plugins that would probably contain something to do what I was wanting.
26 November 2006: This article in the Independent yesterday doesn't seem to address the fundamental point about blogging, which is that it's independent. Every method it mentions of making money dilutes the purpose of blogging and pollutes it with financial intent and corporate direction.
"Former Tory candidate Iain Dale"'s blog hosts ads from "pressure groups, lobbyists and others who want to get their message through to decision-makers in Westminster", and he says "I should get about £1,000 a month from these ads and this is something I wouldn't have thought possible a few months ago. I still can't earn a living from it, but ", and this is the crunch, "it gives me an incentive to keep attracting readers." In other words, from that moment on, he'll be writing with popularity or notoriety in mind, rather than just writing about what's interesting to him.
Apparently you can make money using Google Adsense. Well, I've earned maybe a fiver, at most, from mine over more than a year. And no, you can't borrow it.
And writing reviews for ReviewMe, and the chap who's terribly pleased with himself for making over £1000 from that? Well I think it worked out £7.50 per review, so that's, what, ten minutes, quarter of an hour, of a professional's time? Some review. So these are momentary first impressions from someone who is being paid to do it but otherwise has no connection with the product, and the blog is a collection of those. No thanks. It certainly shines a complimentary light on magazines and their product reviews.
All this feels like nothing less than corporate rape. A blog is like a conversation in the pub, well, one side of one anyway. If you went to the pub and spent a pleasant evening and then discovered that the things your colleague had been saying to you were the result of some corporate sponsorship, that he may, or may not actually like whatever brands, pubs, shops, products, bands, tv programmes you were talking about (you can't actually tell because he may or may not have been paid to say positive or negative things about any one of them), you'd feel miffed. Right? Blogging is a pub conversation made public.
Marketing and business were wrong-footed by it at first, particularly because of tools such as Googlism.com which collect together online opinion. Suddenly all their shoddy goods and shady practices would be revealed. But that's good isn't it? If you're an upstanding company with good practices, you'll be well lit while the others will be shaded.
But anyway, that created a marketing opportunity. Some bright spark with the morals of a shark and a big house and 4x4 to pay for can come up with the idea of paying 'leading' students to talk-up particular products or go to particular bars, or ways to influence blogs and turn bloggers into corporate spokespeople. If they manage the latter, they may not realise (but the corporates will), they can destroy the power of blogging. If the reader can't tell whether a blogger has been bought or not, their opinion, the opinions of the whole blogging community, are worthless and the bomb has been defused. You and I will be poorer.
I considered, for a second or two, the idea of providing a way for people to contribute if they found something helpful. I do sometimes post useful stuff. But that really goes against the grain of open source, where information is free to share. I use a gazillion open source resources I haven't paid a penny for. If I want money for my contribution, that just makes me a selfish money grabbing git. So no.
Something like Girl with a one track mind works. OK, maybe she designed it from the start as a saleable possibility (or maybe she didn't), but that didn't seem to affect her editorially. One part of the Independent article I do agree with is Dale's comment "One of the secrets of being successful is injecting your own personality". 'Girl with a one track mind' certainly succeeds there.
So I'm not going to be adding more ads, or asking for money. I shan't be honing my subject matter to attract a certain type of person. This blog is about me and what I want to talk about. It's here because you might like to know something about me if you're going to ask me to work with you on a project. You might not, too, in which case, what are you reading this for .. go do something useful. It's also about being outside of marketing's influence, as far as possible, and looking at its practices from a distance. I don't know whether it's gaining me friends or putting people off, but I don't have to be Coca Cola and appeal to everyone. So if there's a vegetarian, marathon running drummer out there who needs a website, you know where to come.
26 November 2006: I got a call from a chap who said "how much is a website? I can tell you now if it's hundreds of pounds we won't be doing it". It turned out it was just a few small pages, he'd written everything, worked out how it should be structured, and got the photographs ready, so for just implementing something like that, not a huge lot, so he was happy.
I met him. He said "I understand there are different pages, we want to be on the first page".
I explained that I thought he was talking about search engines and that it depends on the key phrase people use when they search. If someone searches for Scarborough [his business] he may be on the top page, well actually if they searched for Scarborough Yorkshire [his business] given how many other Scarboroughs there are in the world (it's a suburb of Toronto, a town in Maine, and .. oh well there are lots, maybe I ought to take a month or so off and visit them all in one big round-the-Scarboroughs trip, sometime when I've more money and time than I know what to do with .. like never). He'd glazed over by this point, but seemed satisfied.
I mention this because people are often satisfied to find themselves at the top of the first page of Google when they type in www.theirdomain.co.uk as a search term, and that really highlights the enormous gulf between, say, my understanding of what's going on, and that of .. I was going to say Henry Normal, but that's something else. And at least that's easily achievable so long as Google knows about them, which is just a case of making a link to the new site and waiting. And then, often, people are happy.
This harks back to the browser blog I wrote earlier. Jeez, it just occurred to me. When people ask to be on page one of the search engine I obviously think of the amount of effort and money it would take to even have a chance at achieving that for a major keyphrase, and whether it's worth it, and how it affects the business strategy and so on. Perhaps often when I'm asked that, none of that is in the client's head. Perhaps all they want is to 'erroneously' type their domain into the search part of their browser and find themselves on the first page as a means of efficiently getting to see their own site, rather than having to go to page two of the search results, and beyond. Maybe they aren't even thinking about customers and searching, but about their own daily irritation of being unable quickly to go to a site they want. So maybe when I start talking about search terms, they really, really have no idea what I'm talking about. Perhaps they haven't actually clocked the relationship between their websites, search engines, people finding their site, and any form of success. Wow.
I suppose that's more evidence to support the idea that I should be marketing to other, perhaps more sophisticated, markets than just 'anyone local'. That much is, and always has been, obvious and I will and am doing, but I wanted to establish a base hum of straightforward work on which to stand, and also I know I'm not pulling the wool over the eyes of people who really haven't a clue. Maybe I'm on a moral crusade. Maybe I like doing things for the community. I may not be as cheap as using your nephew who read a magazine once, but I know what I'm doing and you'll get a good result and be treated professionally.
25 November 2006: Internet Explorer 7 just arrived on my XP machine. I'm not one to hang on to the words of the marketing people before a product is launched, telling me all the lovely features that will be in a product, only for most of them to be dropped just before shipping because they didn't meet the deadline. Seems like a waste of time to me.
So I wasn't expecting IE7 and had not a lot of clue what it was going to bring. The thing is, everyone should really be using a lovely other browser (Firefox, for example) but most people would think "why?" and so we rely on IE, which has over 90% market share. If IE doesn't support something, we are pretty much knackered if we are targeting the bulk of users.
So hurrah for png transparency support. Png is an image format that provides an alpha channel with graded transparency, so now we can fade things out. Until now we've had jpg which didn't support transparency at all, and gif which supported on or off transparency and only 256 colours. All ridiculous in this day and age. And yes, of course, there were ways to make IE support png transparency, but this is supposed to be a world of standards and we're not supposed to be using kludges any more.
Hurrah too for there being less IE on the screen, and more of the website you want.
Hurrah for their rather exciting support of RSS. So now it's easy for you to 'subscribe' to a website without having to give out any of your details nor worry about how you're going to ever get unsubscribed. I haven't checked how it actually works for the user though, but the fact it's there is very exciting.
All the excitement about tabbed browsing just doesn't work for me. I want a window to contain a single thing, and then I choose between all my open items using alt-tab. If I have to alt-tab to IE and then do something else to look through the tabbed windows, then back to alt-tab again, that's just very irritating. I've no idea why people want tabbed windows. Perhaps its partly because of IE's equally irritating habit, not fixed in IE7, of duplicating the window you were looking at when you create a new window. That doesn't seem right. Obviously if I wanted to see the window I've just come from I wouldn't have chosen to open a new window. Give me my home page maybe.
Despite the setup asking me which version of Google (or whatever) I'd like to use in their search box, and despite it being set up correctly in the settings, a search using the search box still takes me to Google.com, so that's broken. I'll still use google.co.uk as my home page, and go there to search.
Oh, and there's this lovely bit of comedy in their setup. It puts me in mind of, I think, Hattie Hayridge doing a routine about putting PTO at the end of a letter. As if people wouldn't turn over. She read out a letter that ended the page mid-sentence and went off into "well, that's funny. Why did she end like that?" I look at that page and think: well, that's funny, "Making the web" "Taking a quick tour of the". How strange. (I've the Google toolbar installed in this screenshot, that's the whole bar starting with the Google logo on the left).
And a big revolutionary "What do we want, SVG. When to we want it, NOW" BOOO! for lack of SVG support. I think, I haven't actually checked it, I've just spent a minute or so mooching around wondering. SVG is a standard for vector graphics. In other words, Flash, but standard. If it were implemented in IE, as it is in other browsers, we could use that to get seriously funky and fast. But there you have it. A new product, and serious disappointment. Just not good enough. Par for the course really with Microsoft. It's five years since IE6 was launched. So are we looking at 2011 before we get SVG support? Jeez, we'll all be underwater by then.
17 November 2006: I don't know whether this is an old printer thing, but I'm printing some medium sized documents onto an old LaserJet III and I wanted to stop the rest of a print and, thinking the rest of the document would just be sat in the printer buffer (the computer having long since sent it and forgotten about it) I switched off the printer hoping it would forget it. No such luck, there was clearly some left in the computer's printer buffer and, when I powered up the printer, I got page after page of crazy stuff because the printer had, effectively, received a print job mid-queue without any preamble telling it what to do.
I put up with the first few pages and then realised they were all the same, so powered the computer off again to get rid of what was in its buffer, hoping that was the last of it. But no. This went on for a while until I thought I'd better work out where the computer-side, Fedora Core 6 print buffer was so I could cancel the job.
That's one of those things you don't know about Linux unless you know. It's certainly not in the menus. I found mine on the CUPS maintenance page, which is a website on your PC which you access through a browser (you'd have been able to guess this, right?), at http://localhost:631/admin. I was able to see the print queue and delete the job.
Yours may be different. I understand CUPS isn't universal.
And that printer buffer stuff .. the way I think it works is your computer sends your requested printout to your printer, but the printer is much slower than your computer, so it accepts as much as it can (to the limit of its memory) and then tells the computer to stop sending. The printer prints what it's received and allows more of the document through from the computer as and when it has free memory. Towards the end, the computer has sent the whole document through and looks to you as if it's printed (and maybe starts sending the next document) and the printer finishes working through what's in its buffer.
17 November 2006: I ordered a PC Pro recommended Samsung ML-2510 laser printer from the PC Pro recommended supplier for that product, printerland.co.uk, last weekend and, given that normally you'd expect things the next day and it hasn't arrived yet and nor have I received a delivery notification (but I have received an invoice and a 'we have received your order' confirmation email), today I thought I'd give them a ring.
It turns out, well, what they said was, they didn't have stock at the time, but that didn't raise any action so nothing happened. They have three warehouses, she could see stock at one, and could get it out to me for Monday and "it's unfortunate you've had to call". There must be a legal reason why she couldn't say sorry. Admission of liability I suppose. It's not a huge problem, they answered the phone .. I mean, wow, they answered the phone, none of this press 3 for this and 8 for that nonsense .. she was able to sort me out, knew the answer to all sorts of questions (I said I wouldn't have ordered if the website said there wasn't any stock so it must have shown stock, to which she said their website doesn't show stock levels, and she's right, it doesn't), and hopefully I'll get my printer. It's just, being out of stock can't be that unusual and you'd have thought my order would have been caught in some safety net somewhere. Oh well.
16 November 2006: I don't know what's going on at Channel 4 News, they've dispatched Alex Thompson to Afghanistan seemingly to let us know that some good stuff is happening, at least in the bits where the Taliban aren't. There are pictures of British troops handing out sweets to hoards of schoolkids, and I certainly got the impression that, although the government was a mixed bunch, including various people from Afghanistan's bloody past, a third of the parliament were women. A third! Wow, that sounds like more than in the UK or anywhere else. What a progressive place Afghanistan must be. And there they were as the camera panned around.
Why, then, can't I find anything to back this up? I went looking because I wanted to update my past blog on the subject. Certainly RAWA don't seem particularly chuffed with how things are going, and the numbers at the bottom of that report certainly don't back up the impression I got from Channel 4 News. So. What? Is Channel 4 News ahead of everyone else having spotted that, actually, Afghanistan is the new California? I'm all for good news, it's just, I can't find anything to back it up, which just seems weird, and what's on the Channel 4 website seems not to have the full content and is disrupted by a bloody great ad for the latest Johnny Depp film. It all begs the question, has Channel 4 News been leant on? How would we know?
15 November 2006: I think I said somewhere that I don't know much about repositories, but in attempting to get audacity to handle mp3 files (Linux distributions often don't open mp3 or other multimedia files out of the box because of licencing issues) I found out about the Livna repository which contains all that stuff. And lo, it provides Kino too, so it turns out it was licencing issues all along. Hmm. Spoke too soon. Kino's there in my menu, but nothing happens when I click it. Never mind, that's another day, at least I have progress.
15 November 2006: I wandered into town today, I had to replace the replacement to the kettle. To replace that we bought a Tefal Vitesse which lasted all of seven months, despite there only being two of us here. It's hardly a building site. The lid catch failed so the lid wouldn't stay down, and if the lid won't stay down the kettle won't switch off when it's boiling. That, and there seems to be a thin coating on the black handle that had started to wear away and look unsightly. So Tefal seems to be a make I can't buy again too. Where's Tefal from? France. Clarkson's stock may be down, but he's still right about many things.
I'd been to the office stationers beforehand and, as I often do, I peered at their screen in a hopefully surreptitious manner to work out what software they were using and I was surprised to see a DOS accounting package, running on Windows, called Ledgerdomain (or maybe leger or demain). That's significant because in probably 1990 or so I met the chap who wrote that software, Peter somebody, in Buxton. Well, at least, it was his company that wrote it. He had the air of a successful software developer. There is an air: a cleverness, a fast brain, and a confidence. A beard too. I rather liked him. I can't remember how it came about but I learned something from him. I think I asked him what would happen if he stopped supporting his software (ie. if he went bust or lost interest) and he said .. well, the software wouldn't stop working.
Actually, he was also excited about something called Concurrent DOS which was DOS that allowed several processes to work at once. He was getting good results from a box running that, with lots of PCs connected to it acting like dumb terminals, actually that page says as much and dates that 1987 or so. I was thinking Windows must have been in a very early stage. Anyone else remember the happiness that came over everyone when Windows provided the ability to run more than one piece of software at the same time? Now that really was joyful progress. Was it Windows for Workgroups that ran single apps, and 3.1 that provided the breakthrough? I can't tell from that, Windows '95 seems to be the first mention of multitasking. Oh, there's mention of multitasking for Windows 3.0. But no, when Peter Somebody was talking about Concurrent DOS, Microsoft was coming out with Windows 2.0, so there must have been quite a hubbub about being able to multitask.
He was excited about a deal he'd made to tie in with some big office wholesaler whose name escapes me (Staples?) but it's the obvious one, I think it was to take their database and integrate it with Ledgerdomain so that stationery suppliers everywhere could just pick products and order them, quote prices, and so on. I think I was there in my role as a PR person, and I think that's the press release we/I wrote and distributed. Anyway, shock, after all this time, there's the software still doing its thing. I can't find a company website though and the woman in the stationers said "we have nothing but problems with it" and then proceeded to use it without fault to order what I wanted. So, nothing but problems and the ability efficiently to run your business, then.
Tim Keen was another confident software developer. When I came out of uni the first time the language we used then was Pascal, the new thing over fuddy duddy Fortran and COBOL (but actually more of a teaching language I think), and I tried to get a job with Keen Computers in Nottingham who actually did use Pascal, but they rejected me for not having experience. Good job really, because later, in my capacity as IT director of a local PR company, we were offered bits of equipment from Keen Computers in settlement before the bailiffs took the rest. I had to go, with our software provider, to Keen's office to pick and choose equipment. I think that's how we got our first PC in the company which we used to run accounts.
The rest of the business was running on a DEC PDP11/23 miniframe running RT11 on which I was programming in Dibol. While I'm at it, if you look at that fantastic PDP11 picture, the top and bottom thirds of the cabinet were the RL01 or 02 disc drives, one for the system, the other for the data. I keep wondering about the capacity of those discs: I thought so 5 or 10Mb. I think I may still have one somewhere. You can look into it and see the disc surface, even stick your fingers in if you want. And if you banged it, a little indicator changed colour and you'd broken it.
Keen had the temerity to poke fun out of the idea of upgrading our hardware in a later visit to us surrounded by his team of yes people, rather than making the software more efficient. Interesting, Peter Somebody had a team of yes people I seem to remember too.
Anyway, so that's Ledgerdomain sorted. I can't remember what the second thing was that I was going to tell you. That's age for you. I may come back and add to this if I remember .. gah! that'll bug me for ages.
I remembered. It was the kettle. I also met the managing director of Dualit one time. There was a moment, I'm sure it was PR driven which was why he was happy to see me (as a PR chap), when the Dualit toaster reached national consciousness as a style icon and rugged toaster. I met him probably six months after that had really kicked in, when he was obviously working out how to make the most of his brand and was working on the design of a kettle. When I walked into the room he had the body of one of these (with the top handle) in one hand, and the handle in the other and he asked me whether I thought the handle placed thus seemed too far back, compared to where he wanted it. I can't remember how I responded, but clearly the product design people won that argument. The handle does seem 'back', but that's the whole point. Anyway, call me a sucker for brands and good design, but I swapped that piece of Tefal crap for a Dualit jug kettle (because Debenhams (I'm hating this) didn't have the one I didn't help design) and it's lovely. We'll know if I'm a sucker in seven months.
15 November 2006: I was disappointed to find no video editor in the Fedora Core 6 standard repositories. I've wanted a video editor since Red Hat 9 and you'd have thought it wasn't an unreasonable request nowadays, but no. I've spent many an unhappy hour trying to install Kino over the years. Anyway, a quick Google today found avidemux which, with a few tweaks to yum (the package installer), seems to have loaded and runs, although it does claim to be a simple tool so perhaps there'll be things I need to do that it won't. Cinelerra might offer a way forward in that case.
Anything's got to be better than attempting to use iMovie on the Mac in the real world although I do now understand better its non-destructive editing policy, just don't get even close to filling your disc or you get yourself cornered .. I've a couple of days of editing work that I can't back up, can't export, can't do anything much with except delete because there's no way of making the original file smaller. I might be able to get it out to VHS.
I don't know about getting video from the camera in to the computer though so that's only part of the solution, although I bought a TV card for that some time ago. In fact, it was the installation of that and its software that royally screwed up my Windows '98 installation and provided the initial impetus for a full move to Linux in the first place. Maybe sometime I'll stick that in. Then, I can watch telly on my Linux PC .. I notice it comes with software to support that.
13 November 2006: Ilkeston library did email me back on the 2 November, apologising for the delay saying the rail crash I referred to earlier occurred at Stanton Gate on Friday 6th December 1963. The Railways Archive will hopefully have something on it in due course although I can't find it at present. It's mentioned, however, in this report on the Itchingfield crash because I think it says both crashes were caused partly by the driver and mate falling asleep. Crashing out, you might say. It says here the express was a class 45 locomotive number D94.
There's a report, the MINISTRY OF TRANSPORT Railway accident: Report on the collision that occurred on 6th December 1963 at Stanton Gate in the London Midland Region of British Railways. H.M.S.O., 1964 which I'll see if I can get by inter library loan.
13 November 2006: It's very common to find that people go to a website they know the address of, for instance, yahoo.co.uk, by searching for that address and then clicking on the first result. Trying to communicate the difference between this and just going to the website in what I'd consider the normal way is quite difficult over the phone. That takes time and can lead to a difficult conversation. It's important that I know we are both looking at the same page, but to you, the client, getting this right can come across as being picky or pedantic. After all, this is going to feel like hard work when we haven't even reached the problem you called about. So to aid our efforts, here's a visual aid.
There are probably two places in the top part of the browser where you can type, and your screen layout will most likely differ from mine, so their position isn't relevant, it's their content and purpose you need to know.
The one that already contains a web address, usually starting with 'http://www', is the address field. If you know the address of the website you want, type it in here. If I ask you to go to a website address, type it in here. I've circled this field green and ticked it.
If you don't know a website address, but know what you want in terms of keywords, even if that keyword is Yahoo, or Google, but it might just as well be "size 11 red wellingtons", type that into the search field. Often this has Google's G in it, it might be blank or contain the words from your previous search. Anyway, I've circled that field red and crossed it because I can't think of a scenario where I'd ever ask you to enter anything here, partly because, even if we were wanting to compare search engine results as part of your search engine optimisation process, I wouldn't know which version of Google or other search engine that field is linked to without a lot of faff.
The difference is this. If you type a web address into the correct place, the address field, you'll be taken straight to the website you want. It's quicker.
If you type your web address into a search field, you're asking Google (or another search engine) to search its databases to find that web address. You are then presented with a set of possible matches. You have to choose the most likely match and click it. That's less efficient, you've had to wait for the search engine and you've added another click to the process.
It's also very possible, if I'm creating a website for you, that you may not have been discovered by Google or any other search engine yet. Therefore, typing your new website address into a search field won't find it.
When it comes to telephone support, if you take the latter route, I can't be sure you've actually gone to the right address, because which Google result you've clicked is in the lap of the Gods, whereas if you take the former, I know we're on the same page. Literally.
Of course, in everyday use, if you can't remember the web address, you have to use Google (or any other search engine). I search for, for instance, mySpace or youTube or whatever using Google because I haven't yet remembered their web addresses. That's probably why it's become habitual for most people to use that field.
While I'm at it. If you are not sure what a browser is, it's the software you run to access the Internet. If you click the blue e, that's a browser called Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser. That's what's pictured, although I've also got the Google toolbar running (that's the upper line with the red circle) which you very probably won't have, so mine looks a little different. There are alternative browsers, Firefox is one, Safari (for Mac) is another. You may click icons labelled BT, or AOL or Freeserve and that might well load and run one of those browsers (Help will probably tell you which one, if you're interested). Whatever you click to get onto the Internet is very probably a browser, so that's what I mean when I say "go to your browser". If it's a web browser, it will have somewhere to type a web address and generally there'll be an address already there and you can type over it.
Finally, you don't generally need the http:// bit up front, you can just type, for instance, www.yahoo.co.uk. But it's probably good to click and hold (left button) just to the right of the existing address, then drag the mouse to just before the . after the www, so it shades the part of the address you don't want, then let go of the mouse button. Type, for instance, yahoo.co.uk, and it will replace the old address and save you typing http://www. Check you were accurate about your shading and have got one . after the www. Not all websites start with www. Wikipedia's address for instance, for us Brits, is http://en.wikipedia.org/.
13 November 2006: Apparently this, contains an eye opening video called 'evolution' about a normal looking woman transformed into a 'beauty' for a poster campaign. I've seen it, it is eye opening. I think the part that surprises most people is the neck elongation.
But I saw it on Mac, and just now, again, on Internet Explorer on Windows. But Linux users are barred because, I think, it's presented in Flash version 8 format, and the highest available for Linux is 7. That's what I read, anyway.
I love the Dove campaign, I've blogged so before, but if you're going to set out to include people, then include people. I can't see anything in the video that requires Flash 8, so it could have been done in 7 and allowed Linux users in, or maybe it didn't need to use Flash at all .. it's video after all, not line drawing.
I thought I'd drop them a line to say so. The form fields to send an email are Flash driven and broken.
I have to say, too, that the Marks and Spencer ad campaign that's culminated in the one with Shirley Bassey in it, is inspired. I love the fact that it's appealing to its age group and making them feel great. Twiggy and Shirley Bassey are virtually prehistoric to today's teenagers, with, afaik, not a great deal of general public awareness. A relative of mine wouldn't accept that that was really Shirley Bassey in the ad .. such is her kudos and importance to that generation. It would be a bit like getting The Queen to do an ad. Yet for Bassey, I think it's a godsend, a huge lift to her awareness. And just before Christmas too. So I love the campaign for really thinking through the possibilities and discovering a real win-win strategy. Although I rail against marketing, it's usually poor, boring, me-too, standard marketing that gets my goat. When marketing and advertising works well it can really change things, and I love that.
A few weeks ago, before all this, my partner and I stood and stared at a 5x lifesize face photograph of Twiggy in our local M&S, first of all trying to work out if it really was her. It had been airbrushed so much it was almost unrecognisable, not just as Twiggy, but almost unrecognisable as a human face. It was alien, very strange, almost no skin texture. So yes, best get the M&S campaign to its peak before HDTV or they'll really scare the horses.
10 November 2006: I just got the feeling that people don't make decisions any more. A decision implies that something's going to stop. It's a fork in the road, a door that you close in favour of a better path. I don't know whether it was always this way, but I'm wondering whether, in our culture where everyone can have everything, decisions have become much more difficult to make. The whole idea of denying yourself something, even in order to get something better .. suddenly seems very difficult to do.
I got the feeling when thinking about the email choice I've blogged about below and that particular client and the conversation I'll have and I started to think .. why am I forcing this decision on this client? Isn't it hard work, is it painful, is it necessary, am I being difficult, will it be hard for them to think about all those aspects and come to a decision?
Are decisions more difficult now because we are out of practice at making them? And do we feel bad after we've made a decision, do we mourn the loss of the options we had?
Or is it part of my role to make clients get their act together and move on, stop sitting on the fence, stop just following their nose and the whims of the day and move forward. Because a journey is a series of steps and those steps take you in a direction and if you're going to get anywhere you have to make decisions. To gain, you have to lose. But if you make good decisions and head off in the right direction and all your decisions are made in support of the same journey, to reach the same goal, you gain much more than you lose.
And as a society, if we lose the ability to decide, then what? Are we not more vulnerable to just moving around, heading towards the next shiny thing marketing-world will put in front of us. Do we not just consume and die?
Am I feeling like this because I've decided to work with local, small business people? Perhaps larger companies would have strategies, agreed policies: decisions.
So should I change my marketing? Aim myself at larger companies? Or am I OK where I am? Not sure. Dunno. Can't decide. Let's just see what happens, eh?
8 November 2006: I just read through an article in .net magazine from a year ago: "50 search engine marketing techniques: drive your site to the top spot using insider tips and tricks". I was pleased to note that, not only did I know everything they suggested, I felt as if they were telling me really obvious things. It's only noteworthy because it's one area in which I'm sort-of self taught. It was certainly never touched on in my degree. I'm always trying to benchmark myself to make sure I'm still worthwhile. In fact, that was the whole point of me doing a degree in the first place, to get a first in order to prove to myself I was comparable to others. It's something to do with being tall. Being tall you get to be a gentle giant .. diffident, polite .. and so you get ridden over sometimes by people with big mouths. And my question was .. do the people with big mouths know more than I do, or have they just got big mouths? Now I can say, at least in my area, they've just got big mouths. It's nice to know that's also true in a service area which I offer to my clients but where I haven't actually been tested.
I'll counter any possibility that you now think I'm full of my own self-importance by saying that one of the biggest lessons I learned in doing my degree is respect for others' knowledge. I used to have the vague idea that I might be successful in politics. Now I know. There are people out there studying politics, history, sociology. My idea was based in ignorance. Having knowledge myself, I have respect for other's knowledge and a proper sense of where my skills start and end.
Some nonsense website about blogging and photo sharing in the mag made me check out Indymedia again, I think they were mentioned on telly at some point too. It's a beautiful thing.
Otherwise, there was nothing of interest in the mag. I suppose what I'm trying to navigate to is that there are plenty of web designers out there whose knowledge is based mainly on reading magazines and adverts. I don't often read Internet magazines (there's usually really nothing of interest to me in them .. I feel like I could have written the articles better myself) and it was good to have a rare look at an Internet magazine and confirm that yes, I really do know much more than those readers do about what I'm doing. The point, finally, being, that when you choose a web developer choose one who knows what they are talking about.
On the other hand, I did like this article in PC Pro. That sentence about the company having no support contract in place, so the support company is just reacting to problems rather than solving root causes is why I created my network management service.
8 November 2006: It's been so long since we got any good news from the US my word processor's attempting to autocorrect the sentence saying I surely didn't mean to put positive words in the same sentence as 'US'. But at last, we can breath again. That despite the hideous twisting of the timing of the Saddam verdict to aid the Republican campaign. I don't believe they will carry out the hanging, there are too many ways out: for one, the appeal process takes him beyond 70 years old after which the death penalty can't be applied (apparently .. what do I know?). So it was just a good, convenient headline. This era is coming to a close. Thank Christ for that.
8 November 2006: A friend playfully called me a nonce the other day, and I wondered what, actually, it really meant. It took this slang dictionary entry to answer the question.
Update: An acquaintance got in touch with me about this blog and said it made uncomfortable reading, "to think of clients reading that".
Part of me agrees. The reason I blogged it was partly for the shock value or entertainment. It's like letting off a firecracker in the middle of a boring lecture. You never know what I'm going to blog next and I like that, I think that's part of the attraction of my blog, it's partly why people read it, and so doing that is marketing. It's also partly because I'm interested in good English and in words and I sometimes encourage friends and acquaintances whose first language isn't English to read my blog .. it covers current events and it's fairly well written, and it's a place where you can learn some colloquial English. I also wanted to reflect male humour: calling someone something like a nonce is a male bonding ritual. Women don't do that. That's interesting.
But I also agree that sometimes .. it happened again in the Independent on Sunday last weekend .. you read something in an article that you really wish you hadn't. Something violent, perhaps, described in detail. And I always wish, when I read those things, that I hadn't and that there was a warning somewhere that would give me a chance to avoid those things. My partner and I warn each other of such articles.
Clearly, we all agree, child sex abuse is abhorrent. Maybe I'm unusually distant from it. I've never known anyone affected by it, and I don't have kids so it really just isn't something I've had to deal with. Update: Actually, that's not true. I know three people who were sexually abused as children.
I do warn people if I think what I'm going to say is going to offend or disgust, but equally I'm not going to pussyfoot around. I didn't go into any detail, I just wondered what 'nonce' meant, and was mildly curious in what I found. That's it. I don't think that's uncomfortable reading, I think that's me taking an interest in the English language. And since I write articles and website text for clients I think they'll be happy that I take an interest in my work.
I also think reality is important in marketing. That's my meta-message, if you like. I want to talk about uncomfortable things because that's life and through that I think I demonstrate marketing and corporate culture to be an oversimplification. The implication that I hope more insightful clients will infer is that I would provide a more sophisticated product or campaign, rather than one that just ticks boxes or strokes everyones ego. I provide some magic dust on top, some insight that makes the whole thing work. And that won't happen unless I'm listening to life, open on all channels.
In case it helps, here's the full context: I was meeting my friend for coffee one lunchtime, actually it was a working meeting too, I wanted his advice, and afterwards I wanted to go to the gym. It was cold, so I put my big coat over old jogging bottoms, trainers and a t-shirt and as I walked out unshaven I became aware of how scruffy I looked and worked out an excuse for when I met my friend. I made up a story that I'd been reading Vogue and I'd based my look on something in there. "Apparently", I said, "it's just-escaped-from-the-mental-hospital chic". I said I feel like I have my coat on over my pyjamas. That's when he said I looked like a nonce. Then, a paedophile. OK, he went too far with that and we both knew it. I resisted the temptation to call him a serial rapist back (I've been waiting for the opportunity since Chris Morris did so). But that's when curiosity set in. Was there a difference between a nonce and a paedophile? I realised I didn't know what a nonce is.
There are some parts of professionalism I buy, and some that I don't. I certainly buy the part of professionalism that requires the delivery of exemplary work on-time, on-budget. But I always remember a graphic design friend many years ago, he's dead now, he was nearly retired then, turning up to a meeting wearing mostly red, proudly showing off that he was wearing red socks too. Is that unprofessional? Some would say so. I say there's context to consider. As a graphic designer, you'd expect him to be visually exciting, to be able to draw your attention visually, otherwise what sort of graphic designer would he be? My job is to make client's websites successful, and to do that I need to understand their customers, not in a superficial way, but deeply. I need to see their soul, live their lives for a while. Then I can build a website that really talks to them. A friend affectionately calling me a nonce: that's a loving tease. It makes the world go around. It's part of how people relate to each other, and that makes it my territory and a valid inclusion in my blog.
8 November 2006: During my previous jaunt around local pubs looking for gigs, I'd spoken with the landlady of the Newcastle Packet, and all she really wanted to talk about was how fantastic The Supertones were, and how they have the crowd screaming, literally screaming, for more. So I made note of the next date I could make, and went down with a couple of friends last Friday.
I thought the Newcastle Packet had a reputation as a rough pub so I'd never been in it, but it's not like that at all. In fact, it takes me back to my early adulthood spent in the pubs of Long Eaton .. I was filled with warmth in the place, it's all a bit honest, working class, straightforward, so now I'm a bit of a fan. The only downside is there's no decent draught real ale so we had to fall back on Guinness.
We sat, accidentally, next to a couple who, through the night, we got to know. They are Polish, she was over here for a holiday, he's working as a decorator. Her English was non-existent, his a little better, but both were very warm. The last time I felt like that was in the Hole in the Wall when it was good, and you could go out with friends and meet new people who became friends too.
I gave them a pen and piece of paper to write down their names. Grzegorz and Mirka (perhaps Miroskawaa). They seemed to struggle, as if our alphabet was completely foreign (like us trying to write Arabic) so I wondered if Polish has a completely different alphabet, but seemingly not. My g/f has a Polish friend who says with Polish people of this age the most likely reason was a problem with literacy.
Anyway, The Supertones are billed as a sixties cover band (sorry I can't find anything on them online) so as a piece of research I wanted to see how much better they are than either of the two covers bands I play in (which also play songs from the sixties, although we play songs from the fifties through to now).
For a start, they look good. They are five guys, none of whom you'd want to pick a fight with, all dressed in a black or dark suit, shirt and tie. And they sound good. No, they sound great. Whereas I'm used to taking a few songs to warm up, these guys were straight in with some nice Beatles tracks .. I get the impression they are Beatles fans at core.
The key to their sound is their ability to sing. I wasn't able to get a seat where I could actually watch, but it seemed like three of them sang and harmonised, and all in a relatively high key .. not Bee Gee's territory, but they did lend themselves very well to pop.
The thing that makes this band great is their willingness to play one hit pop song after another. Both the bands I'm in want to intersperse stuff you know with stuff you maybe haven't heard yet, and I support that. The Supertones go straight for what the audience want: "Under the moon of love", "Runaround Sue", and the start of the second set: "Midnight Hour", "Shakin' all over".
Once they'd got us all nicely warmed up, they released the Smokie virus: "Living next door to Alice". Gosh I was sure I'd blogged about that before but seemingly not, I must have ranted about them pre-blog. I energetically and actively dislike Smokie, partly because of their unashamedly MOR rock pop sound and desperate uncoolness, but more because the songs are so damned catchy it takes me a week to get them out of my head, it's like catching a cold. The audience had no such limitations, coming back with the Roy Chubby Brown sponsored lines "Alice? Who the fuck is Alice" throughout.
There's more .. I wrote some of them down .. "Do you wanna dance", "Get back", "The twist", "Can't buy me love", and for a third set: "Mustang Sally", "Another brick in the wall", Robbie Williams' "Angels" and as the night came to a close (they played three sets from 9:30 till 1am) .. "You've really got me", "Hi Ho Silver Lining" (which really worked well with the pubfull), "Sweet Caroline" and ending on "Hey Jude". Wow. Even the most cynical can't deny that sounds like a great night out.
The pub was pretty much full, and this is a big pub out of season. There's no doubt of this band's pulling power.
You don't often get the drummer's view of things, but the dancefloor was behind the band, so I took the opportunity.
It's easy to sneer at pop (as I just did about Smokie) and to talk about the latest bright young thing in the NME, the coolest people, the weighty music that matters. But there's honour and depth in normal working people having a bloody good time at the end of the week because they deserve it, and this, more than any I've seen recently, is the band to do it to. So I'm a convert. A fan. Go see. I'll do this again and not for research, for pleasure.
How do they compare to the bands I'm in? It's very strange, but we occupy different spaces, each good in our own way. How can you say one is 'better' than another? Rah! certainly has equal skill and ability, but we're not so populist and we want your attention a little more. We are harder work to enjoy, but we're bloody good for it, and we're adding more energetic, danceable, sweaty songs to our set so I think we're different, but as good in our own way. The DTs is a younger band, again a completely different thing. You might knock us on technical grounds, but we make up for it with sheer spirit. We're about letting go and having a damn good time. I think the Newcastle Packet audience might well like both bands, it would be very hard to predict which would go down the best, and given the chance, I think we'd build up a good audience. And at the end of the day, I've walked past the place one Saturday night when a completely useless covers band were on. Rah! and The DTs are just inches away from the Supertones, and miles away from what what going on that night.
8 November 2006: I just wrote all this lot to a client, and thought maybe if I publish it here, next time I won't have to write it again. Maybe it's obvious to everyone, but then I see many clients to whom this is all news, so here goes.
There are basically two ways to access your email: webmail, and using an email client such as Outlook Express.
The first is the one I use, webmail. Actually, I use (and can provide for you) squirrelmail, but Yahoo, Tiscali, Hotmail and all those are webmail accounts. I used to get an awful lot of spam to my Hotmail account when I used to use one.
The advantage of webmail is that you can access that same system from wherever you are in the world and on whatever machine. To facilitate that, I never save my passwords. That way I have to remember them every time, which means when I'm on holiday and want to access my email the codes will come easily to mind, rather than me forgetting I even need them because my PC stored them once for me two years ago.
The disadvantage is that webmail doesn't provide all the features that a dedicated client provides, and you always need a web connection for it to work. Also your emails are not stored on your machine, they are on your email server at your host. That makes it difficult to change host without losing your email history, and that is also reliant on your host not going bust, making good backups, etc. Finally, webmail only works with one email account. To read two accounts in one webmail account you'd have to forward one to the other. The downside of that is if the destination email address goes down for any reason, you would only have access to email through the 'other' email (which you'd have become unfamiliar with), and you may not receive any at all if they are immediately forwarded to the primary account.
Another possible issue, although it's unlikely if you're hosting with me, is you may run out of space on your hosting package if you store years of email history. Actually I recently came across a client who didn't store much at all but was hitting space problems regularly. The host wanted more money for a meagre space upgrade. You're with the wrong host if this is happening to you.
The alternative is to set up something like Outlook Express, which is probably already on your machine, although I'd recommend something (anything) else because features of OE, such as the address book, are frequent targets of viruses and malware. If I had to make a snap decision I'd choose Thunderbird. Here, your email is (optionally) removed regularly from the email server and stored on your machine. You could still use webmail while you're on holiday, and then when you get home all the emails you didn't delete would still be transferred to your machine, it's just that you won't be used to using webmail so could go away thinking you're prepared and then end up not being able to access it.
A decent email client will be able to check for your emails at any number of addresses and bring them into one inbox, so if one's down the other will work fine. It does often cause confusion when sending, though, as you're supposed to choose which account you're sending from .. if someone emails you at your yahoo account and you reply from your business one they're going to wonder who you are .. but most people forget and the accounts become confused. Why have two accounts anyway? Just settle on one account and be done.
Another feature people sometimes use in an email client is automatically to deposit, for instance, incoming emails from family and friends into one inbox, business enquiries into another and so on. I prefer to keep just one inbox, otherwise I'd just ignore family and friends.
You'd also be able to keep track of RSS feeds in your email client, whereas with webmail you'd have to run another application to do that. RSS feeds provide a way for you to receive news without having to give away your email address, and providing you with complete control over subscribing or not. For instance, this blog has an RSS feed (see the icon at the top). If you add it to your email client or RSS reader/aggregator you'll get a note like an email every time I add an entry to my blog. That saves you having to remember to keep track. There are plenty more RSS feeds about: bbc, Independent. More RSS than there is time in the day.
I think, I haven't tried, anti-virus products such as McAfee will be happier with emails coming into client software on your machine, rather than webmail, although they should still stop you downloading a virus-laden attachment and if I've set up email there usually SpamAssassin running on the server.
Using an email client your email is stored on your machine, so it's your responsibility to back it up, and if your machine is hit by lightning, stolen, dropped, the cat urinates on it (not as unusual as you might think), you have to re-install because of a virus attack, or your hard disc dies, you'll lose your history back to the latest backup. If it's stolen, that provides a lot of information to the thief.
So, how do you choose? Do you want to access your email from multiple machines? Do you take your laptop between home and work, and have you got a reliable Internet connection? Are you happy to move to one email address? Are you not bothered about RSS? All those would point to running webmail.
Do you always access your email from your laptop? Is your laptop password protected during travel? Are you likely to back-up your data regularly? Are you likely to become a sophisticated email user? That points towards an email client route.
There's a lot here, so I suggest maybe work through the things I've said and tick some things, cross others as you think they apply to you, then count ticks as +1, crosses as -1, and add up the scores to choose.
5 November 2006: I did a quick presentation to the Scarborough Linux Group about how I got the webcam to work, so I may as well write it up here.
The webcam is a Neu Fusion enhanced SohoCam NCS-330W from network-camera.co.uk, which tells you a few things. The first is, it isn't a camera you just attach to your PC, it's a camera that can be connect directly to the network. I thought that was more likely to be accepted by Linux. The second is it's wireless, so I can site it anywhere in the house without having to do the cabling, and I can move it around if I want.
I didn't want to punch a hole in my firewall to open up the camera to the outside world, I wanted to take the images from the camera and FTP them to my web server. I feel that's more secure.
I did get it working on Fedora Core 4, but I've just installed 6 and this is me trying to get it to work there.
The first thing is the camera has a web interface, so I stretched a 30metre Belkin ethernet cable from my office to the camera, opened a browser, and connected to its IP address. This showed the image from the camera, confirming it's working and creating an image .. it has power, it's in focus, it's pointing in the right direction and so on. Focussing this camera during initial setup was a real bitch.
Because the IP addresses on my network are allocated by DHCP, the address is often different from what I've written in my notes from last time, but since my router only has four ethernet ports there are only four addresses to choose from so it doesn't take long to work out which it's currently using.
In System Administration>configuration there are a few settings to think about. Under Video are the quality settings for the camera, and under Wireless are all the settings to allow the camera to connect over wireless to my wireless router; obviously those settings need to match. Under Network I set the camera to get its address using DHCP. There's the date and time to set, and then there's Upload, which I set to FTP the picture every minute to my home directory. It needs to know the IP address of the FTP server, so on my main machine I found that from a terminal screen by typing /sbin/ifconfig. It gave me two addresses, 127.0.0.1 which is my local loopback address, and 192.168.nnn.nnn which is my actual IP address, and will remain so until I power something down. Yes, OK, this bit could be improved, but since I installed the camera I rarely power down, so I still prefer the plug and play benefits of DHCP over having to set IP addresses manually. I put that address into the FTP server host address field of the webcam's configuration screen and saved it. Now, if I disconnect the ethernet cable, the camera should be attempting to deliver its image every minute to my main machine's FTP server.
Do I have an FTP server on my machine? On my Fedora machine, under System>Administration>Server Settings>Services, it took me a while, originally, to work out that vsftpd is the FTP server daemon, the software that sits around waiting for an FTP server request to handle. That needed to be clicked and started and saved.
So now we should have an image being delivered every minute from the camera to my home directory. I used ls -l to get a full listing of that directory in a terminal window to see if the webcam image file date and time kept changing. I had to wait for more than two minutes before I knew for sure.
Nothing was appearing. I thought Fedora's firewall was probably stopping it. Under System>Administration>Security level and firewall, it shows FTP as a trusted service, so it should be working. SE Linux is installed here, whereas I didn't install it under FC4. I turned off the firewall to see if that's the problem. No, still nothing.
I powered up another machine to see if I could connect to my main machine's FTP service. The other machine's Linux too, I'm glad I could still remember my password to get in. I use a Linksys KVM 2-part switch so I can use the same keyboard and screen and switch between the two machines. I ran ifconfig on that machine too to check I was on the network, then tried to ping my first machine with 'ping 192.168.nnn.nnn'. That returned one line of data OK, then just stopped. Not sure what that means, but at least one line of data means we have a connection.
I tried manually FTPing my main machine. 'ftp' dropped me into that mode, and 'help' got me a bunch of options. 'open' seems reasonable, so I tried 'open 192.168.nnn.nnn'. It asked me for my username and password, that's a good sign that means I'm talking to the FTP server. I logged in using my normal username and password, and it gave me an error: "500: OOPS, cannot change directory:/home/John". Hmm. That needs a ponder. It sounds like a permissions thing, but it won't let me log in as 'root' to check.
A Google on the error turns up a few opinions, SE Linux may be the culprit, a look into the logfile with 'tail /var/log/messages' reveals a series of errors I don't really understand from vsftpd but including the word 'denied' which again suggests permissions.
Another wander around the security level menu revealed that, although I'd stopped the firewall, SE Linux was still operating, so I disabled that, and within a minute an image file appeared in my home directory. That opened and looked about right.
I put the firewall back up to check if I could run like that for now, and yes, the file refreshed.
So now I had to get that file to my web server. I needed two things for that, a terminal-based command to send the file over FTP to my server, and a cron job to call that every minute.
Previously I'd created a file called putCam.txt which contained the FTP commands, but it wasn't where I expected it to be after I transferred everything over to my new hard disc, so I used 'find / -name putCam.txt' to find it. Obviously its permissions needed to be set to make it executable (chmod). Here are the contents (you'll have to use the right URL and file names for your server):
ftp <<EOF
open johnallsopp.co.uk
binary
put /home/John/webcam.jpg /www/webcam.jpg
quit
EOF
So we're almost there, we just need to set up the cron job. 'man cron' reminded me to look in 'man crontab' because that's the file I needed to edit, and that reminded me that 'crontab -l' lists my cron jobs (currently giving "There are no cron jobs for John"), and 'crontab -e' allows me to edit it using a vi style editor. I need to add a line '* * * * * /home/John/putCam.txt', which in Vi means i to get into insert mode, type in that line, then ESC to get back to command mode, then :w and :q (obviously). Then wait and see if the web page gets refreshed. I don't like Vi, apparently the type of editor you get is set in the 'editor' system variable .. I know nothing about that.
It wasn't refreshing. Running /home/John/putCam.txt directly told me login was being rejected. I remembered why. The FTP program looks to a file to collect the username and password it needs to log in, and I hadn't set that up. Maybe 'man ftp' will help .. oh yes, near the end it said I need to set up a file called .netrc in my home directory containing machine johnallsopp.co.uk login [name] password [password]. That didn't work. Hmm. It turned out I'd saved it to the wrong directory. Duh!
Running putCam.txt directly I got 'Error - .netrc file not correct mode. Remove password or correct mode'. I checked the content is the same as the file on my old system. The solution turned out to be in the man page where it says that if .netrc contains a password for you, only you should be able to read the file. So chmodding 'read' off for group and other, meant the darn jiggly thing worked.
So now you can watch the Scarborough fireworks. Well, if you can make them out among the artifacts. Pity, there are supposed to be beach fireworks tonight, and that's the direction the camera is pointing. Maybe you'll see something. Ooooh. Aaaaaah. I just spotted one. No really, I did.
Oh, I'd forgotten to disconnect the network cable, so I just had to check it's still transferring the file OK from the camera to my server over wireless, and it was. Hurrah.
1 November 2006: Just short of a year ago I upgraded my old Red Hat Linux system to their new Fedora Core 4 and in doing so I followed a scheme I learned while studying for the LPI qualification, which involved carving up my hard disc into partitions the size of a DVD in order to facilitate backup.
Oh how my fellow Linux users mocked. "Nay", they said, "there's no need for that, lad". And I beat them back with stories of how runaway processes might fill the log files with error messages, and when the disc is full Linux will stop, so how much better to put /var into its own partition. And what would happen if you had a disc corruption? With one big partition you could lose the lot. With my scheme, I'd only lose a bit. They scratched their chin (I could see that, even over email).
I thought, too, that since I do Internet things, and Internet things are small otherwise no-one would ever spend the time downloading them, I wouldn't need much space, certainly not a DVD full.
But my 'work' folder became two, then three, then four, each on their own DVD-sized partition.
Eventually I hit the 16 partition SCSI limit. And I hadn't filled my disc yet. Who's stupid idea was this partitioning scheme anyway?
So imagine my surprise when I decided to reorganise my backup regime and a colleague suggested I install dar and I did and then I discovered I hadn't got enough room to turn around in my root partition. That made a sound like the prow of Truman Burbank's yacht hitting the sky-painted wall. The whole reason for my scheme was so that root didn't fill. And there it was full.
Open Office stopped opening my documents. Autocompletion, history, and my preferences stopped working in Firefox. My FTP client also forgot all my settings and history. And The Gimp gave me lots of error messages.
I hit the keys especially gently for the next couple of days while waiting for a new hard disc to arrive, and for Fedora Core 6 to come over BitTorrent.
Well, I'm sort-of out the other side now. I've a hard disc with everything I own on it but that's 7% used. If you've been through thirty years of computing like I have, there's something very, very funny about that.
At first glance the Fedora people seem to have been working on their software repositories. I can find things there that I really struggled with before. One click and I've installed a new software program.
I've probably overcooked it though. I got all excited and installed lots of things, the planetarium for instance, but discovered that doesn't close properly .. I had to find out where my reset button is for that one, I'd not had to use that before. There's a feeling of unreliability about the whole system. A later attempt to run the planetarium went without a hitch, but the next morning when I booted up, I ended up in a console. I rebooted, and my graphical shell was back.
I can't find, however, still, a video editor. That's a pain, I want, even need, one, and I've already spent many happy hours over the last year trying to get one working.
Open Office isn't in the repository either, so I suppose I'll have to work that out. There's sure to be an explanation. Oh, there it is, labelled Word Processor in the menu, and if, from there, you open a spreadsheet then Calc loads up. No idea how you get Calc to load directly.
I suspect Fedora's done something groovy with its screen renderer. It looks funny, I don't think I like it. Something's different, it's too warm and fuzzy. I suppose I'll have to read about it and come back when I can talk sense. Night night.
