John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Manfat Voodoo: 29 June 2007: Manfat Voodoo were on BBC Radio York yesterday, and very excellent they were too. Have a read, and a listen.
Floods: 28 June 2007: I don't wish to sound callous and unfeeling, but I am so that's how it comes out. I'm bored now with the news coverage of the floods.; People whose home has been flooded to about three feet who come to the microphone with their kids and partner and extended family and say "I've lost everything". There was the chap who said "I've lost everything .. " and then broke on the next phrase " .. all the food in the fridge". All the food in the fridge? All the food in my fridge disappears regularly my friend and I don't get upset about it. OK, it's upsetting, it's a shock, wouldn't want it, but all that's happened is the ground floor of your house and your garden is knackered. What a lot of work to put right. What a lot of money and time lost. But you've got your family, your health, still got your house, you haven't lost your life. Six months and you'll be back up to scratch and most of you are insured.; The farmer whose field is flooded. OK, I sympathise. But then a) "it floods every winter, that's what makes it so fertile" (so, you've benefited from this phenomenon so far), and b) "I can't get insurance against floods". You'd have thought the fact that you can't get insurance for something would tell you that the risk of it happening is high. Together with the fact that it floods every winter.; I don't think it's their fault. They are rightly upset, anyone would be. I really sympathise. My problem's the media, I think, trying to build it all up. Oh the shock, it rained in June and we're all floating. My estate flooded when I was a kid. They built flood defences. It didn't flood after that.; Here's a story about some people who have lost everything in proper weather. And here's someone who likes that sort of thing.
Dawn: 28 June 2007: I spotted those wispy white bits in the blue in the top of this image from my window and wondered what the whole sky would look like, so nipped up the road to take this just before dawn. It's with the Nikon, and it hasn't been titivated (it's what it really looked like).; You'd get this view from any of the sea view rooms along the North Bay frontage, Hotel Helaina won the Discover Yorkshire Coast Tourism Awards' Guest Accommodation of the Year last year, but you can click left/right from there.
Good light: 27 June 2007: I don't know much about surfing, but this looks like good surfing sea to me.; Then when I went out for a run later, the sky and light were terrific as a storm passed out to sea. Sadly, these pics are on the old Pentax.
Rain news: 26 June 2007: Scarborough escaped major rain and flooding issues yesterday, however my sometime collaborators in Pickering, Cloud Nine Design were concerned about their office this morning (but they were OK). This was taken at 10am, note the tidemark on the travel office window.
Pub walk pics: 24 June 2007: We wandered off to Scalby Mills Hotel last night for beer. It was a beautiful night (in all sorts of ways).; We have new beach huts ('chalets', apparently). You can hire them from the council. Go on, you know you want to.; Might even use this one for my desktop.; There used to be a Banksy-style bit of stencil graffiti featuring an African boy holding a rifle with words something like "do you know where your child's been today?" on the old loos past the spa, towards the old pool, now the Astronomical Chart, and it was featured on a stencil website, but now I can't find it. So I thought I'd best catch this stencil graffiti penguin leaving the Sea Life Centre before it, too, vanishes.; And the previous night we were in the Highlander, this is the Coronia (or the other one) coming into harbour in the evening light.
Oh everlasting desktop joy: 22 June 2007: It wasn't until I started using Linux that I realised the way Windows uses the desktop is all wrong. The desktop is supposed to be .. like a desktop. It's the stuff you're working on right now, which you put away when you're done.; Here's my desktop right after startup. The background's the default one, I really should just get rid of that. And I don't use the top two icons, so I could well get rid of those, although I hate to think what high happen if I dragged 'computer' to 'trash'.; Windows just doesn't do that. Look at anyone's Windows desktop and it's full of program icons. That would be a very messy office.; When I first started using Linux, Red Hat 9 I think, at uni, it had four desktops which you could switch between. When I installed Linux at home, the relationship between the desktop and gedit, the editor I use all day every day, was broken. If I switched to another desktop and opened what I wanted to be a new editor, it opened and displayed all the open files I was trying to leave behind in the other desktop .. the ones I was trying to get away from.; Then in a later version, I'm sure I convinced myself the four desktops had gone, so that was kinda that.; But I accidentally clicked something the other day and ended up on another desktop. I opened gedit, and got a clean, fresh, new one. Wow.; Plus, I've been trying to work out a way to box up this exciting new Internet Marketing world I'm learning about. It's very disruptive to have your stats open on the page where you're trying to work, and people trying to connect with you through chat or whatever.; I was talking to a designer chap yesterday about the difference between a design office and a programmer's one. In the design office, they've got music. That's because they are doing visual stuff, music just oils the day. In the programmer's office, you can't have music. You need your head. Interruptions are very disruptive, you need to fill your head with a model of what you are doing and really get in the zone. It takes time to fill your head with all the stuff it needs, and someone popping in to tell you about what they did last night just shorts all that. When they leave, you have to refill your head again. Get enough interruptions and you can reach the end of the day having done not a lot. Chat, emails that ping when they arrive, new sales stats, all that just interrupts.; An article in Saturday's Guardian backed that up: "One landmark study, based on observations of workers at two American technology firms, found that people interrupted in the middle of a task took an average of 25 minutes to return to it - if, indeed, they returned to it at all."; So now, I can just put all that Internet Marketing stuff onto another desktop along with its associated chat. I can visit it when I need a break. I'm in control. Fantastic.; It might seem like a small thing, but I really feel like I can concentrate, like a big problem's been lifted. Maybe I should have cottoned on to it before now, but the gedit thing was definitely a stopper.; Now, I can open up a clear desk when a client wants something, deal with it, clear the desk, and get back to what I was doing. Really fantastic. Now leave me alone and let me get some work done or I'll hide your desktop.
Here's a clue about where I'm at right now with the Internet marketing thing: 21 June 2007: I just had an enquiry from someone who, let's disguise him and say he has a home exterior lighting company. He's been in business a little while, and is getting thirty visitors a day to his site, but wants more. There were clues in his email that led me to believe I could be very informal (I'm not always so cocky), so here's how I responded:; "You know what? There's such a lot of great stuff we could do with your site I don't know where to start.; Firstly, I love the market .. it's perfectly niche for Internet marketing. And you're doing some great things to get search engines to notice you .. the guides and information, and the FAQ.; You need people to notice you, though.; Here are some things that need attention.; There are some things you need to do each day to earn traffic to your site. One is work on the social networking sites to create blog links back to your site. You can do that as yourself or under an alias or pay your kid brother to do it (or me, but I'm more expensive).; I'd suggest something like running a competition where people send in pictures of their house (maybe with a list of what they've got (which we could turn into links to the product)), then visitors vote, and the winner gets some snazzy new product each month. OK, you're giving away a product, but you're getting a fantastic set of pictures that you can associate with products (put onto product pages), but even better, that you can put onto Flickr and link back to your site. Once you have lots of pictures, get your people to Digg the page and get it into Stumbleupon.; You need to write bigger articles (or to pay me to) .. not war and peace, and they don't really have to mean very much .. these are for search engines to follow, not for people to read. How to install, the laws regarding, what looks cool, etc. Then syndicate them through various sites that provide content for hungry webmasters.; There's keyword research to do: which keywords are there, how can we form them into clusters and evaluate their worth and decide which are the ones to optimise for .. you can probably SEO for just a small percentage of what's possible, so you need to make a good decision here.; Something that will help is running a small adwords campaign whose aim is not to sell (although that would be nice) but to learn which keyphrases work for you, to help you choose what to optimise for. If something works on adwords, ramp it up.; Then you need to optimise your site for your keyphrases, and that can mean all sorts of things .. from improving the sales copy for each product .. take a look at www.tinshop.co.uk and drill down to a product. See the "more from the 1950s, more tins, more oxo" links? They allow people to follow their own interest around the site, it gives them options to stay on the site. More than that, when people click 'more oxo' they see a page full of oxo stuff. Google sees that and .. well, search for oxo tins. You could do similar. If someone's looking at lights .. show them lights. Do people follow colour schemes? Green light .. here are more green lights.; Once you have traffic, then we are into conversion testing and funnel management (I see you have analytics set up). So, what changes can we make to improve conversion .. to get people to buy stuff when they come to your site. Bigger buy buttons? Change the headline? Does everything do a job and do it well? If you can double your conversion rates, then you have twice as much income for the same effort.; And after that, what do you do with your customers? Do you let them know about new products? Send them offers? Get them involved? The first sale is probably not profitable. The rest are. Build your relationships.; And if you have loyal customers, then you should be looking globally for some really cool products for them to buy. Japan seems a likely place. Go see, tell people about your trip.; So now. How much do you want to invest in this :-); Have a think, then maybe we can work something out."
Meet The World: 21 June 2007: This arty, flaggy, political thing's cool.; Now, I don't want to appear tasteless or lacking in feeling, Alan Johnston seems like the kind of journalist I wish there were many more of, and as seemingly the only mainstream reporter on the ground in Gaza telling us lot what it's like, he seems like a weird target to pick. I certainly wish him a safe and speedy return home. But is it only me who thinks, from their logo, the people who have captured him look like martians dedicated to capturing our butterflies?; Here's more on Palestine. Not sure I heard about the London demonstration earlier this month.
Internet Marketing: 20 June 2007: As you probably know, I have fifteen years of experience in marketing, for ten of those I ran my own PR and direct marketing business. I then jumped out, did my degree in Internet Computing (first class, thank-you), and that gives me my Unique Selling Point: I combine human sales and marketing stuff and copywriting skills with the technical ability to make it happen.; All well and good, and I've proved myself. This business is running well, it's profitable, and I'm stupidly busy right now. My clients get great search engine positions, traffic, and they make money online. Search for oxo tins and you get Tinshop, my first proper e-commerce website.; But of course the Internet is changing (everyone's talking about Web 2.0) and actually my degree taught me absolutely nothing about Internet marketing, and we had only one lecture that I can remember (and that from someone who had just done the masters course the year before) that covered, in part, graphic design. So what I know about those things is self taught. Nothing wrong with that, a degree teaches you to teach yourself.; Now, I have had dark days .. what business hasn't .. remember the recessions of the eighties and nineties? I've looked at the get rich quick offerings. The Penny Share Guide was one that I think I subscribed to at the time for a short while. The problem is, if the activities described in the Penny Share Guide worked, the authors would run them themselves and make all their money that way. Why would they go to the trouble of making the Penny Share Guide, unless, they couldn't make all the money they wanted from their own system. So the rule I got from that was this: no advertised scheme works, or it wouldn't be advertised, no matter how persuasive. I've had that confirmed: brokers in the city saying "do you think if I knew how to make money I'd be sat here doing this?"; Within the world of Search Engine Optimisation there is a monumental amount of junk and a small amount of good stuff, and hopefully I was able to use the critical faculties and knowledge I got from my degree together with experiments I ran myself (this blog being one of them) to verify what people were saying and work out which sources of information I trusted. And I did find people I trusted.; When I talk to clients I hear so very many incorrect thoughts about how to improve yourself online.; Now, probably well over a year ago, one of those trusted sources wrote saying he was going to join a new organisation called Stompernet, and I could join (as a customer), if I wanted. It was $800 a month. Err, no.; But last month they came up with a scheme that was almost free, to enable people to sample what Stompernet offers and to go through a set programme to create an online business and start making sales. Did you hear the 'almost free' bit? I signed up. Well why not?; If you believe them, they got 'literally thousands' of people to sign up too (just short of 2,000 by my reckoning). We organised ourselves into teams and I got together with another four people in Skype instant messaging and off we went.; It turned out to be fantastic. Really. I feel like I'm in the first few weeks of university all over again. I'm learning so much new and useful stuff that I can apply right now. In fact, in just that short amount of time, most of the work I'm doing for people now is related to what I'm learning. My business has spun around to have a much stronger emphasis on Internet marketing.; The programme turned out to be a very well thought out series of activities that took us through market research to find a potentially profitable niche using a product marketplace I'd never heard of, some great new ways to think about keywords, keyphrases and keyphrase research, a website creation tool that I think I might even recommend to some clients in the future, a great system for writing good sales copy, how to run a great pay per click campaign, analytics, and then an introduction to two worlds I knew next to nothing about: social networking, and article marketing, to help build inbound links and traffic. I'm even learning loads about blogging. All this is delivered on a daily video, not my favourite choice, but it's working well and I'm in the habit now.; All this got me so excited I couldn't sleep. Literally. I've been getting up at 4am because my brain's rattling over some aspect of this programme. It's disruptive.; So what makes Stompernet different? How does it not fall foul of my rule? I think it's this. I really think of it as an Internet marketing university. I feel like I'm on a masters (but not with anything like the same pressure of work). The guys (and they are all guys) who are faculty members really lead their field in specific areas, whether that's link building or keywords or blogging or pay per click. One chap builds multi-million dollar online websites, sells them, and then builds more.; No-one's said this to me, but my view is that these people have earned their stripes. They all sold programmes of one sort or another before joining together to make Stompernet. Now what they want is a bunch of people to support them so they can continue to learn and deliver their knowledge. That's a whole different thing to the get rich quick schemes I rejected.; The other thing is, genuinely this is an exclusive club. The price, for a start, is a stopper for most people. It's a stopper for me, I'm still in the kiddy pen. But I'm thinking, once you're in, the community is a community of people who know what they are talking about.; But also what's happened has shown that I'm pretty good at what I do.; One of the big deals about the programme is "follow the process". Do you remember my blog about Ellen MacArthur? She was fastest around Top Gear's racing track one year, second only to a proper formula 1 racing driver. I believe she managed that because she listened and did what she was told.; So I resolved to do just that. We were urged to just follow the process. They said "people come on these things and they think 'well, that sounds ok, but maybe if I just do it this way', and 'I can improve on that' and in the end, it doesn't work, and they ditch the programme, but they never followed it in the first place". What's the point in that? Do what you're told, you might learn something. Then you can try to improve it.; Now, I'm not saying the programme went perfectly. One team member dropped out for personal reasons, and later, another two because they were professional educators and they felt aggrieved that Stompernet hadn't delivered knowledge effectively. Personally, I think Stompernet is like a consultancy company. It's a mess, but it's a beautiful mess. It's meant to be a mess. Universities are a mess. We are all adults, we make it work by interacting. I would not be interested in Stompernet if it spent all the subscription money on educating well. I want that money to support the guys who are really researching what works and staying on top of their game. I think of them as lecturers. Lecturers aren't educators. They just know a lot about their subject. It's our job to extract what we can from their words. It's an active process. Maybe having been through uni recently stood me in good stead.; Those two who left went on to pay money for other systems. I think they are in hell. Dancing from one programme to another, never sticking to anything. We are still in touch. Both have been trying to get their money back from the alternative programmes they chose.; So me and the remaining guy went in search of another team, and we found quite a big one, and joined. This team seems to have fallen into disrepair. Most are well behind the process, and there seemed to be no mechanism to get the team together. We set up Skype instant messaging and just left the channel open all day and seem to be picking the team up a little.; It turns out some fell over on copywriting, others fell over on technical stuff. I, of course, have both, so didn't fall over at all. I found it easy. It turns out, too, that the daily tasks for this business involve writing good copy and managing the numbers. All stuff I'm more than happy with.; I think the programme has had a high dropout rate. By my estimate, about three quarters of the people who started it dropped out, and only about 6% (1/15, about 125 people, worldwide) are up to date, one of whom is me.; I like that. I like that it isn't easy, that people can't do it, that there are loads of judgment calls along the way. It gives value to what I do. After all, if anyone could do it everyone would, and no-one would buy my expertise.; Update: I had a call from someone who wanted me to put a page together to sell some info product and it became clear he was following some form of scheme. He'd called around to get a quote for his one page from some professional copywriters in the UK, and they were charging, if you're sitting down, between £2,000 and £15,000 plus 5% commission to write a landing page. Wow. Now, I can't claim to be a professional copywriter at that level, but I am pretty good.; So the visible part of what we've been working on is here: learn Spanish basics.; Yesterday, two magical things happened. I got sales through that site. But more than that. I think I'm the first in the programme to get sales. OK, I've not popped the champagne yet, sales are good, profit is the next step, and then ramping it up after that. But the website and the environment I created around it works, yee harr, and the thing is, as well as building this business, the process can all be repeated to create other businesses. And these businesses are built to be saleable.; It's not cynical either. Yes, the site is built to sell, but I absolutely believe in the programme that's being sold.; The top level 'rule' that I've got from all of this is "do what you can to improve your chances at every stage". That starts with market research. It's great to have an idea for a website, but for sanity's sake check someone wants to buy what you plan to offer before you spend time building a website for it.; I don't believe being unique is the key to business success. I've been there and done that and it's hard work. People make lots of money selling apples and toilet rolls. I think those who sit wanting to start a business but are "just trying to work out a unique niche" are just intellectualising. They'll never do it. I say, find a big river, get on and scoop some bucketfulls of water for yourself.; But that top level 'optimisation' rule exists throughout. Be smart about every development stage. And when the business is running, optimise the hell out of it every day. Plug the holes, build on what's working. It's continual improvement, managing the numbers. And the great thing about the Internet is you can do numbers so completely: watching visitor behaviour on your website, running split tests to see what works best.; How to pass that on to 'ordinary' people who want 'ordinary' websites I don't know. Since starting this web development business I've been genuinely shocked at how many people just want to tick along. Give them a choice between a £300 website that just 'is', and a £600 one that will bring in more business and pay for itself many times over, people often go for the £300 one. OK, budget might be an issue. But I have felt that I maybe didn't make the difference clear enough. Now, the problem's even harder. Now, a successful website is only partly about building the site, it's as much about all the work you do around it to generate traffic and convert visitors. Maybe my market's changing.; I've already learned a huge amount but I know there's so much more, and it's all applicable to you and your business, so come on in and let's apply it.; People: I'm about to turn into a butterfly. Catch me while you can.
Shiny Binary: 19 June 2007: Impressive digital art.
Run: 16 June 2007: I'm quite scared. There's a bloody great orange thing in the sky. It's been so long, I'm thinking ten days, I've forgotten what it is. Oh, it's OK. It's gone again.; It wasn't there earlier. I did my longest run ever today, 14 miles and 2,200 calories. Yes, I feel sore. You know you're on a long run when your shoulders ache (your legs are expecting it, your shoulders are aching with holding up and swinging your arms for two hours). Because of all the rain I didn't do the coastal paths, I ran up the old railway line and got just past the Hayburn Wyke Inn which is well known in these parts. It's here. There's a patch of really good quality satellite imagery on Google Maps there, basically because Fylingdales is in that spot. Scarborough doesn't get such treatment.; I've just a few pictures with the crappy Pentax. The greenery was really vividly coloured. I haven't enhanced that in these shots. It either was raining or has just finished raining and everything glistened.
Fatah/Hamas: 15 June 2007: I found this helpful in understanding the background to what's going on there. This too.
Words: 13 June 2007: There's a problem with words.; The clearest example, to me, of the independent nature of the different working parts of the brain, is me trying to play along with the metronome on my electronic drum kit.; If I turn it up and use the PAH ping ping ping PAH ping ping ping sound, no problem. If I turn it down and try to play along with the flashing indicator .. nigh on impossible. I think that's because sight is so very complicated, that by the time the sight of the flash has been processed and made accessible to my arm and leg controllers, the time is well past.; I've never really understood the need to talk about a piece of art. The artist made the art in the medium in which they felt most comfortable expressing themselves. Why ask them to express the same thing in words, a medium they obviously rejected initially? Perhaps just because that's the medium the journalist chooses. The artist is forever on the back foot. Thought doesn't just happen in language.; I don't mean talking about art isn't pleasurable. The problem is in taking the artist and plonking them in front of a journalist and getting them to justify themselves. May as well put them in a swordfight.; In Channel 4 News tonight on Zavion Glover, the world's greatest tapdancer (! "what do you wanna be when you grow up, Zaavvy?"), the interviewer asked Glover the difference between what he does, and how Broadway does tap. Watch his response, it's beautiful. He, I don't know the word for it, does a huge tap dancing solo, but vocally: "this is me", and then "this is Broadway": "tap, tip tap, tap tappety tap tap". Hardly any words. OK journalist, you came to me, come into my world, this is what you get. Fantastic.; I'm enjoying reading about mail art, where you take an album and do something arty on page one, then send it off to someone you know. They do something arty on the next page and send it to someone they know. Blah de blah, ting ting, and the last person sends it back to you. Apparently it was all the rage in the early sixties, but part of the ethos was that everyone was equal, so it's also part of the ethos that what happened isn't catalogued, there's no written history, so there can be no heroes.; And who should pop up as being advocates of such frivolity. The lads and lasses from Throbbing Gristle, that's who.; One fine evening I went to a Throbbing Gristle concert in Manchester. I'd never been to Manchester before. I planned to stay on the floor at a friends house, but I hadn't managed to contact him (pre email, pre mobiles) and when I got there, he wasn't. So I spent the night wandering around Manchester city centre. Night buses. All night cafes and pubs I daren't go in. The morning newspaper being printed, seen through the building's glass walls. Throbbing Gristle made my flares shake.; Anyway. There was weather today. I photograph tit. Badly. Don't know why badly. Therefore, buy book.; It's rain, not mist.
Etsy: 13 June 2007: I was recommended to visit etsy.com. It's nice.
goose: 12 June 2007: I know I'm ugly, but there's no need to walk away; That's a determined stride, that's attitude isn't it? I mean, you can hurt a guy's feelings.; Oh wow, I only just realised. This is yer actual Goose-Step.
Fret: 11 June 2007: It feels like this fret's been in for days. My webcam failed a few days ago and I didn't realise until today because the image it was showing looked pretty foggy, like, it actually was (I've fixed it now). But today the fret really came in and stayed in. It's cool damp and oppressive, and the foghorn is sounding.; Update: and by the morning, it was gone.; Update 2: This pic, taken many days later, shows what it actually looks like. The cut isn't usually as full flowing as this, but we'd had a lot of rain.
M & S and Persimmon Homes: 11 June 2007: Whoops. I just had an email containing "Marks & Spencers, in conjunction with Persimmon Homes, are giving away free vouchers. Marks & Spencers are trying word-of-mouth advertising to introduce its products and the reward you receive for advertising for them is free non-refundable vouchers to be used in any M&S store."; Perhaps the clue is in the name. The company is called Marks and Spencer, not Marks and Spencers.; Anyway, it's spam, it's not true.; I also received another letter for another domain from the Domain Registry of America. Surprised they are still going, but that's bullshit too, (previous).
Ubuntu Studio: 10 June 2007: I just stumbled upon Ubuntu Studio and it looks pretty tempting to me.
Jo O'Meara: 8 June 2007: I've embarrassed myself looking back at older blogs and finding myself earnestly discussing Big Brother, but there you go, it's an interesting snapshot of something or other and the longer it goes on, the more it reflects how British society is changing.; Watching Jo O'Meara's interview on GMTV, shortly after she left the Celebrity Big Brother house under serious attack for racism, she appeared comprehensively broken and I found myself asking "who the hell is representing these people?" It turns out my instinct was right. No-one: her agent died pretty much at the same time.; But still, if you were Danielle Lloyd's agent and you knew she thought, among other things, that Winston Churchill was the first black American president, would you be able to sleep at night (for all sorts of reasons)?; I've been wondering too about the word 'nigger' that caused so much of a problem the other night in the current Big Brother. I can't think of an equivalent word that's as offensive. I'm thinking the reason is that the use of the word from a white person to a black person brings back so much of the history between those people, that that's where the power of the offence lies. If a white person calls a black person a nigger, they do it with a few hundred years slavery behind them and in an instant they transport their relationship from one of equality to one of power, and that's the offence. I don't know if I've got that right.; I remember reading about feminists reclaiming words like 'dyke'. Perhaps at the height of the women's equality movement a man calling a woman a dyke might have had some of the power weight.; In trying to find a word that's equally offensive, perhaps we'd have to look at other historical events where a people oppressed another. Perhaps there's an equivalent in the German language from the Holocaust.; I can't help feeling that in an age where young people rarely fail anything, rarely suffer painful punishment, and feel empowered to be themselves, that the enormity of that single word might not be clear. I know Emily is old enough to vote and make babies and get drunk and kill for her country, and I'm very sure BB will have made behaviour codes clear to all contestants, and I wouldn't have been happy for her to have in any way gotten away with it, but .. I just think that may well have been a surprise "grow up" moment for her. A friend said she's old enough to know what offence that word would cause, but it's only a few weeks ago I realised why there are black people in the Caribbean .. it's a very complicated world, we can't know everything. I suppose BB did right to act decisively.; One final thought. In Celebrity Big Brother, I think it might have been Paul Morley who said about the whole Jade, Jo and Danielle thing, that that moment might be the beginning of the end of celebrity. I'd go with that. What we saw then was that the celebrities we look up to are broadly vapid, and Jade particularly, rather than taking the opportunity to better herself simply took her celebrity as an affirmation of her character and just became more doggedly herself, warts and all. In seeing celebrities and all their faults, their attraction diminishes and we find ourselves, our neighbours and friends, to be much more interesting and worthy of our attention.; I'm told that someone was booed into the house this time with chants of "get a job". Perhaps Morley was right, I certainly hope so.
York Railway Station: 7 June 2007: York Railway Station looked a bit like this yesterday.; Update: It's amazing, I met two friends on that journey, another was on the same train and we never noticed each other, and another passed through the station just an hour earlier.
Message from Corbis: 7 June 2007: I got an email from the photo library Corbis which was titled "Your Corbis account has been .. ", its display was shortened by my email client at the crucial moment and I was trying to think which was most likely. Had I been upgraded? Have I been suspended.; But then I thought, well, what if it was destroyed in a fire? Painted green? Fired into space? Buried in the Blue Peter Garden? The most likely scenario seemed to be "eaten by bears". That was the one that wouldn't go away once it had settled on the park bench in my head.; Actually, I notice I've fallen out with Corbis. I've a note to say I felt they were expensive, that their enquiry form didn't work, but it did come back and accuse me of being dangerous when I was trying to send them a link to illustrate what I was talking about. That obviously wound me up at the time.
Battle of the Bands: 6 June 2007: Local club Vivaz has been running a Battle of the Bands competition for the last couple of months, and this Friday is the final, with £1,000 going to the winner. So if you want to see the best of Scarborough, pop along.; My band came last in their heat, but we like The Forefathers and we lost to them, so it wasn't so bad. Also, we are a covers band but we had to do our own stuff, so we were on our back foot. And we got more points than other bands on other nights, so all's well.; I saw the second semi-final featuring The Juxtaposed, The Forefathers, and Moonjuice.; Interestingly all three bands had very good drummers. Which just goes to show, kids, to reach the semi-finals you need a good drummer. Or something.; Actually the drummer for Moonjuice deserves a bit of special attention, particularly for spinning his sticks while playing:; .. flash git :-); I think The Juxtaposed used to be Radio Theatre, who I blogged about here. Anyway, they won, and The Forefathers and Moonjuice came joint second. For my taste, I enjoyed The Forefathers more, but for one reason or another they didn't play their best on the night.; The Juxtaposed now go head to head on Friday, for the £1,000 prize, with My Friend Juliet. Go see. I mean, if you want to .. you don't have to.; There are more band pics here. Hi-res is there, so use them if you want, just credit me.; Oh, another very worthwhile recommendation is the Westwood / Yorkshire Coast College degree shows in Costume, and Fine Art. Apparently the Costume course is very well regarded, particularly for its corsetry. Our favourites were these:; The first is by Louise O'Mahony, I've zoomed into the card next to the painting and I don't think it tells us the artist's name, but the work is called 'burshill II'. Update: Ah, found some postcards we picked up: here we go Charlotte Blackmore. The painting gave me a real thrill, landscape, but with additions .. I felt the bounds breaking. I also liked Jean North, and Susan Timmins. Lots of really cracking work.; The show is, I believe, on till the 9th, weekdays 10-16:30, Saturdays 10-12, so that means it finishes this Saturday. So stop messing about and get down there. Westwood is next to Tescos.; I should add, my condolences to the family of Mark Woodward, co-organiser of Beached, and The Falcon Festival, who died (according the local paper) of a suspected heart attack aged 41. His band were on a couple after us at The Falcon, and he borrowed Jamie's guitar after breaking a couple of strings.