John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Doddy: 26 August 2007: I spent much of last night wondering about prostate trouble. I was standing next to other grown men trying to urinate and I was failing. I was only there because I thought I really ought to while I had the chance. Turns out I didn't really need to go. Ken Dodd brings that out in a man.; His reputation is fearsome. He plays for five and a half hours, you're in (urine?) at 7:30 and don't get out till one in the morning. And he shames those who get up needing the loo.; So I found myself feeling desperately uncool among a seaside audience whose average age was probably 65+ watching seven kids in costume singing a wartime medley. It's probably either un-pc, or too expensive, to employ midgets nowadays. Or maybe that's a malformed memory. I have to say that, although it wasn't to my taste, the kids were very good indeed.; Yet, while the other oldies were laughing loudly at the jokes, I found myself struggling to hear them. It's almost like Doddy knows them so well he delivers them in Pitman Script .. so you have to tune in. But in the interval there were complaints about the sound system, so it's OK, I don't need a hearing aid.; Yes this is old school, in the 'wartime medley', music hall sense. But in another, the set was structured just like a Ben Elton or Eddie Izzard set, although I recognise those are distinctly old school now. Short gags at the start, long stories towards the end.; I thought I would come away with 2,000 jokes to tell, but I can only remember two. Bloke goes to see a psychiatrist: "I think I'm a dog". "Hmm" says the psychiatrist "just lay down on the couch a moment". Bloke says "Oooh, I'm not allowed on the couch".; and; "I tried to take my dog to obedience classes but he wouldn't go".; That sound system kinda messed things up a little. We were an uncooperative audience. Questions to audience members about which motivated them most "sex, power or money", seemed to be greeted by a shrug, a "dunno", or an "all three" until Doddy just moved on.; But what really upset me, after five hours, was as Doddy was clearly winding up for his final song (and he has got a great voice), lots of audience members started getting up to leave. OK when the kids come on and just before the interval you can see their motivation .. get to the bar quickly. But at the end, give it another couple of minutes for chrissakes. I wanted to go backstage afterwards and apologise for the audience's sheer bloody rudeness. He got a standing ovation, not for the night, but because people were upstanding ready to go home. And no encore.; So it was a struggle for him, I think. But not for me. I had a great time. 5 hours didn't feel long at all. Apparently Dylan Moran came and went in an hour and a half and was more expensive (and not as many people turned up). For Doddy, that's just the warmup slot before the first break.; Give the man some heartfelt respect. He may be more long in the tooth than most, but he is still one of the best. His talk of life and love made me long to go home and hold my girlfriend and thank my luck stars. He turns eighty this year. I'm disgusted by my fellow audience .. have some respect!; A friend tells me they worked in the community with lots of age groups of people and in the end grouped generations together. The generation that's now 80 or 90 are stoic and self sufficient. A wartime generation that believes in self sufficiency and wants and expects nothing. The generation that's around 70 now, Doddy's audience for the night, grew up post-war in an idyllic time, the NHS would care for them, pensions were guaranteed, they've retired and want what they always expected to get. This generation expects everything and does nothing and have honed their selfishness to the level that they feel no problem with paying to see Doddy and leaving as soon as he's uttered his final joke. No matter how Doddy feels, and no matter that that disturbs the rest of the audience.; What if Doddy looked at last night and thought, 'you know what, maybe I am getting too old for this? I've lost my touch?' What then? Then selfishness will have won.; Doddy's message is warmth, humour (of course), and love. I'm sure he knows what's happening and won't let rude people put him off. We can all learn from Doddy.
The Heathrow climate camp: 20 August 2007: There was a beautiful writeup of the Climate Camp in the Independent on Saturday by Johann Hari which really made me want to be there to learn from their methods of inclusive decision making.; In case we've forgotten about them, Indymedia reports gloriously on this sort of thing.; I'm chuffed it's all gone so well, for both sides really, although protests seem to be happening today so I hope I haven't spoken too soon.
The first sense of autumn: 20 August 2007: Yesterday when I opened the top floor windows I got the first sense of autumn. I'd removed the last of the broad beans from the window boxes, the air was damp and a little cool, but particularly, there was the smell of decay: leafmold, things going back to the earth for the winter. I love autumn. The kids go back to school in two weeks, Scarborough comes back to us, I'll be able to walk around without crowdsurfing.
Weight loss from running: 20 August 2007: For some reason, I haven't lost weight during this training season. Right now, at the peak of training, I should be at my peak of weight loss, but actually I gained three pounds in the last week, and six pounds in the last two months. The last time I weighed this much was at the start of training last year after the winter snuggle.; The charitable view says that I've put on muscle, and there's some evidence for that. Thigh muscles are large and I do seem to have gotten a little chunkier there. But, I'm not as lean around the middle as I have been before at this stage.; But it could also be that a) I've actually only been doing 43% of the training I should have this year. Last year I did everything except when I pulled a ligament, and the year before I was very near 100%. This year, 43%. Hence, I suppose, my discomfort at the end of the run. And I can't complain that I'm not losing weight. b) I eat like a monster.; So I'm looking forward to next year when hopefully I won't be quite so busy and some of the things that are in train now will be making steady money but won't require my 100% input. Then I can do the training proper and hopefully see the difference. Yip.
20 mile run: 18 August 2007: I just ran 20 miles. Travelled 22 miles on my legs if you count the warm up and cool down. I ran from Whitby train station to Scarborough along the old railway tracks.; ... and I want some applause. Go on, right now, at your desk. Applause. I didn't do it for nothing you know!; Actually, I did almost stop a caricature old couple in Scarborough near the end .. grey macs, flat cap / woolly hat, short back and sides, sticks .. I really, really wanted to stop and say "look, I've just run from Whitby and I want a round of applause". I think they'd have given me one too. I'd have taken their picture, applauding, and put it up here. But I didn't.; For those who don't know Whitby and Scarborough, for comparison London's M25 motorway ring road is almost exactly 30 miles across, straight line north to south through Trafalgar Square (33 miles west to east). By road, I could have run from Heathrow into town, through Kensington, past Harrods, across Trafalgar Square and almost reached the Millennium Dome at Greenwich.; So yes. Did I mention I just ran from Whitby to Scarborough? I feel good now, but I must admit the last hour was a bit grim. They say the last six miles of a marathon are like running all the previous miles again and I can see that.; I should warn, too, that there's a fairly disgusting picture of the veins in my legs right at the end of this piece, so if you're squeamish, watch out (don't stop reading though, it's just after the pic of Dean Road and then the traffic island).; Now that Google Maps has given Scarborough high definition satellite images, and given that railway lines (even old, converted ones) follow graceful curves, you can probably follow along using that, but for some reason it never finds Whitby. This is the old viaduct just outside Whitby. You might want to zoom out a bit in order to follow the railway track curves at times.; So I started actually at the new railway station in the centre of Whitby, here's me near the start of the run remembering that I ought to prove I woz there (all pics with the crappy old Pentax).; Can't work out where this is on Google Maps, but it was only 7 minutes later (and I run at about 6 mph). Oh, now I've got it.; First glimpse of the viaduct. Sorry about the quality of these pics.; It's not, itself, triffically exciting seen from here; but the views from it are pretty special. Talk about building on a flood plain.; One old station now a cycle hire shop; It's uphill; I saw a deer, but the photo for that is so bad, I'm too embarrassed to show it. Here's my first view of Ravenscar, the highest point of the journey I think.; I have to run around this lot to get there; It was nice to reach somewhere familiar, Robin Hood's Bay. I played a gig in that pub a year or so ago.; For some reason on this pic the black writing looks like I added it, badly. But I didn't. Except for compensating for the Pentax's broken exposure system, I haven't touched it.; There's another bird lookout, but my pic's too blurred to show, I think it's the building to the right here on Google Maps.; These tree-lined avenues are rather special, not sure what tree they are, beech was my best guess from the leaves, but there weren't any beech nuts on the floor.; The combination of heather and berries and wild flowers is often very beautiful, this with Raven Hall Hotel in the background.; A bit of a landslip, and perhaps the cause? One can only imagine the fingerpointing that's going on here.; I got to the tea rooms at Ravenscar just after two hours, which was pretty much on schedule (6 mph). After the great blood sugar disaster I bought some lucozade energy drink powder and some energy gels, so my new routine is: an apricot and 150ml of energy drink every 15 minutes, and an energy gel every hour, and that seems to work. Obviously fluid intake depends on the weather. It's too much fluid to carry without some sort of appliance (I've seen belts), so my partner met me here with new bottles, and again just half an hour later at the next pub to give me enough to complete the journey.; Perhaps one of the most idyllic places to live, this is (I think) the old Staintondale station. When we last passed through here we were cycling and I saw a Great Spotted Woodpecker.; So now it's starting to hurt. I've been doing this for three and a half hours and something someone said on the Tunick installation at Newcastle came to mind "I'm bored with being naked now". At this point, I'm bored with running. In retrospect, although it's nice to run home the Scarborough end is more boring. Also, Scarborough's bigger. So when you arrive at Robin Hood's Bay it's like "nearly there, oh here it is, oh wow, look how far it is back". With Scarborough it's more like "ah, nearly home, here's Scarborough. Still in Scarborough. Hmmm, still in Scarborough". So I think maybe next time I'll run Scarborough to Whitby. The last thing you want to see when you're hurting is this; But at last, the finishing line .. just to the end of this street ..; The Dean Road / Columbus Ravine traffic island, my finish line, never looked so good. Where are all the cheers?; The ten minute cooldown walk from there must have been a sight. There was a point towards the end when I thought, I hope I don't come to a stile because I'll be trapped, I couldn't lift my legs up.; It certainly made my veins stand out.; I'd recommend a cold water footbath afterwards. I'm not a fan of sitting with my feet in a bowl, but this time it worked a treat, I could see all my toe joints had swollen so I thought it best.; Previously it's hurt a lot the next day, but I think I did a few things right this time. The footbath. Bananas and crisps and lots of liquid. A short walk out to the shop a few hours later. Doing the run in the morning so I didn't sleep on it. I didn't get cramp in the night either, and I fell to sleep fine: the natural high from doing this sort of thing tends to keep you awake if insufficient time has passed. My only adjustment would be to allow maybe three hours between breakfast and start .. all the blood goes from your digestion so solid food just sits around, you need your energy drinks to go straight through. I think I was still digesting breakfast which made for a sluggish start.; 20 miles, 3,911 calories and 4 hours 6 minutes for the running bit of it.; Otherwise, I feel fantastic about it. I'm truly amazed at having done it. And whereas straight after I was thinking, well, I don't think I could have added another six miles to that, now I'm thinking that after my taper (a slowdown in training to allow your body to be fully repaired and rested), and given that (I hear) at the back of the big marathons you're probably walking the first few miles anyway, a marathon seems within grasp. Just typing that is a thrill.
Cheap Jeans: 17 August 2007: Whenever it was that I went to the eternally spotless Designer Outlet on the York ring road, I went into Marks and Spencer's outlet there and bought a pair of 'value' jeans for just under a tenner. I've felt worthless ever since.; I stood in that shop and looked around and wondered why, even though it said Marks and Spencer on the outside, on the inside, there was hardly any M&S branding. Maybe even they didn't want to be associated with what they sold.; I still bought them. Why did I do that? I know that cheap clothes often mean low standards for workers in poor countries. I don't necessarily buy into the idea that a worker paid a dollar a day is necessarily poor in their own country, I think that uses our ignorance to fuel our outrage. But nevertheless there's plenty of evidence that worker's standards outside the white wealthy west are not as high as ours. When we buy cheaply, we often support those lower standards, and then we walk around proud of our cheap purchase. It's sickening.; I must have thought that Marks and Spencer would uphold reasonable standards. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, but I couldn't scrub the stain from my conscience. I buy organic from the supermarket not because it's worth the money or because it's nicer or because it's more nutritious or healthier, although it may be all those things. I buy it to tell the supermarkets that there is demand for organic produce, so they cause more organic produce to be grown and less of the other stuff. So now, I've told Marks and Spencer that buying cheap products is a good way for them to go, there's demand and a profit to be made. I am dirt.; I'm not saying Marks and Spencer don't uphold good standards abroad. They have high ethical standards generally, are pushing organic cotton, were quick to ditch GM, Ethical Consumer likes them. But jeans for a tenner? There ain't nothing free in this world, the pain has to be somewhere and if you aren't feeling it, someone else is.; If I'm honest, I wouldn't have felt so bad if the jeans weren't disgusting. I tried them on, they fitted, fine. I mean, at 6'6" I've got to take what I can get. But when I wore them for a while, I realised they really weren't the right shape. They bent badly, they cut in and hugged and scraped. They looked shapeless. I had bought dad jeans.; The material too. They felt like trousers made from a wax jacket. They were clammy, didn't breathe, felt sweaty and dirty even when they were clean. Too hot for summer. Probably would give you rashes in the winter.; Maybe it wasn't labour standards they cut down on. Maybe these jeans were designed to a price by Derek from the warehouse and used the denim no-one else wanted.; So. I bought a really crap pair of jeans: low quality, low ethical standards, little design. I gave away my soul for a tenner. That's how I feel. A tenner is my price, I'll give away any ethics I stand for, for a tenner. I'm annoyed and disgusted with myself. If I were two people, I'd leave myself.; Jeans for a tenner wasn't a bargain. And I'm not exaggerating how I feel. The cost was in how I feel about myself, and it was a very high cost indeed.; So I've taken off those jeans for the last time. I want to burn them so I know they are gone, but I can't think how or where. The current suggestion is to give them to Oxfam, but they really need to die. I need exorcism. I wonder if they'll go through the shredder?
Speed Cameras: 16 August 2007: Hang on. This comes when you click on text that says "Drive safely - get safety camera alerts on your TomTom today."; Safety cameras? Those are speed cameras. Drive safely? Sure, by driving within the speed limit. Will you drive more safely by getting an alert about where the speed cameras are? I don't think so. Unless you're the kind of driver that slows down for the cameras and then accelerates again.; What's really problematic for me is that this doesn't appear to be at all fair. I suppose the speed camera location information is available to all, probably most easily to those with an Internet connection, and of course the very poor won't be driving around anyway, I was just thinking those who can afford to pay for a speed camera warning device can also afford the fines, of course, or they are repeat offenders close to losing their licence. But the nub is that having money allows you the ability to spot cameras ahead of time, so speed cameras disproportionately fine the poor. I guess it was always thus .. the more wealthy you are, the more you can afford expert advice, whether it's on tax or the law.; But isn't there just something really, really distasteful in using a speed camera warning device? Not sure I could fully like someone who uses one. I'm sure the justification is usually along the lines of "I need it for my job (or whatever) and I support my family and I'll do whatever it takes to support my kids", and I haven't got kids so maybe I don't fully understand that, but it still feels very selfish. It's putting those desires over everyone else's safety. So, having driven too quickly and caused a crash, or if the crash would have happened anyway but we made it worse by our speed, do we not think the people hurt, injured or killed might also be doing their very best to support their family? Just drive within the speed limits!; But what's really got my goat is the Tom Tom text that attempts to twist words around so you feel like you're driving more safely as a result of buying their product. Dirty.
Tracker: 15 August 2007: I wanted to know how much a Tracker system for my car would cost, so I went to the website and it's very irritating indeed. Particularly the page where it says, in among a load of white space, "Four TRACKER stolen vehicle recovery products are available, depending on what level of service you require. Please click the product in which you are interested: TRACKER Retrieve, TRACKER Monitor, TRACKER Horizon, TRACKER Response". You mean, you really, really expect me to click each one of these, remember what you've told me (given that it's clearly too much information to just present in one page), compare and contrast, and come to a decision, all in my head right now? A sentence on what these products are would help.; It breaks my golden rule. Always talk to the reader in their terms. Retrieve, Monitor, Horizon, they mean nothing to me, may as well be Flarg, Bonnet and Thwurb. But if your life's easier Messrs Tracker, then that's all right then.
The Twins: 14 August 2007: I did resolve not to talk about Big Brother, but I can't help this one. I just wanted to say, aren't The Twins on Big Brother beautiful? Watching them is like peering into a pool of morning dew. They're like fairies, there's nothing bad about them, they never moan or bitch, they just play and .. it's just breathtakingly innocent and beautiful.; Watching them explain politics was quite something .. it's a sign of my age I suppose. Their explanation of politics seemed to be that Labour came to power in 199? and Gordon Brown used to be in charge of the finances of the world, or the UK, and now he's prime minister, and there's also George Galloway who runs the (sing along now) R-E-S-P-E-C-T party. Unless it was edited out, no mention of the Tories, which makes me laugh.; Oh and Brian's history of music was, basically there was the Beatles comprising that Lennon bloke and (needed help from the audience for the other members), but what revolutionised things was Christina Aguilera's Dirrty video which gave women permission to act dirty. I mean, I'm not saying it's not a noteworthy video, but let's maybe drill down to the suffragettes and then recognise that that's as far as my depth goes and, given that that was the peak of a movement, that there must have been a big history to reach that stage that I don't know about. But hey, I was that person, too, arguing that punk was everything against an older friend who was arguing for, for instance, the Kinks, Free, Beefheart, Zappa and Hawkwind.; It's all a hell of an insight, reminder perhaps, of how little depth there is out there sometimes. Some of it's youth, if we aren't like this now we've probably all been like it. I also remember leaving school not knowing how to wire a plug, and being in the incredibly political (at the time) Leeds University and feeling very separate because I didn't actually know what left and right in politics actually meant (probably still don't, and, actually, there's a comedy lesson there because now it doesn't seem that relevant: don't bother learning anything because your knowledge will go out of date anyway). And of course, there are those who are actually pretty bright and pretty old who might read this blog and think "goodness, this man's got a lot to learn".; We are all ignorant in one way or another, too. I had no idea Turner was British, I thought he was probably a French impressionist, for instance. I didn't think the Brits had painters, I thought they were all Flemish. Not sure I can name another British painter barring the bloke who painted people diving into swimming pools and evidently I can't actually name him. Hockney, there, did it.; And I couldn't get to sleep last night for thinking of Jonty telling everyone that his employers called him in to give him a project, saying they "really needed someone mature". This is the chap who turned up with three teddies. Made me laff. I do like him more and more.; Anyway, I've decided, The Twins to win, just because sometimes you have to relax and realise there is beauty in the world. That probably says more about me wanting a holiday than anything, although by some odd quirk of fate I do appear to be booked into the Oceana (Wikipedia) for two weeks.
iPhone in a blender: 14 August 2007: If this is what it seems to be, then it's a beautiful piece of marketing. Perfectly styled, succinct, a brilliant display of the product's capabilities, so well matched to the zeitgeist it's like it came from God, and 100% what makes America great. If it's a spoof, I can't spot it. Blendtec
Beached: 13 August 2007: We decided to give Saturday's Beached a miss, it all seemed rather tediously guitar based and samey and we thought it would attract a Saturday night kinda crowd. Some people I know commented negatively about Saturday's lineup, but I think Beached pitched it really well.; Saturday night's for those who want to get off their face. Sunday was always a more interesting lineup. With the film on Thursday, and a big band on Friday, I reckon it's pretty much sorted. Plus, they stuck really closely to the itinerary which is really just polite and a great boon to organising your day, and on this page you can see who is on and click each one to read about them and hear their tunes. So if you turn up and don't like what you hear, well, you had the opportunity to check beforehand.; As if to underline that point, I know someone who had a tooth broken by someone's fist on Saturday night. On Sunday night as we walked back just as the last band was finishing, stood together at the bottom of Blands Cliff was a young couple engaged in vigorous mutual masturbation. So I think we picked the right night, make love not war (but neither in public if at all possible).; Finally on this subject, I don't think adding more variety is necessarily a good thing. More variety makes the day jagged, rather than a seamless whole. I think Beached has a feel, a brand, and going from rock to dance to Latin American to country and back again wouldn't make it better, particularly since each band only got about half an hour.; That brand is partly given to us by lack of funds. Beached has to find up-and-coming new bands who won't cost much, and then live in later years on its reputation for discovering bands that made it to the top. Amy MacDonald was this year's early success.; Remember, you haven't paid to get in to this, it's all free.; I honestly think there's a lot of experience and, actually, wisdom, in the Beached camp nowadays, and I really wouldn't worry about trying to appeal to everyone, that direction's where the heebiegeebies live.; So Sunday looked a lot more interesting and the morning looked a bit like this (all Nikons, these) so off we toddled.; Beached starts off relatively quietly; People got the Pimms out; We had bands and stuff; It started to feel a bit busy; what with the tide coming in an'all (that's the mixing desk); but some people have the knack of getting a good time out of any situation; To be honest, most of the bands passed me by without touching. Kharma 45, though, were spot on, energetic, good solid Irish rock (in the early U2 sense), so I'll be tracking them. Interestingly, they cite The Chemical Brothers as their first influence in mySpace. I'm very tall so occasionally I'm lucky enough to be eye contacted in the crowd, but sadly I hadn't settled on my shutter speed by then and it's a momentary thing so you've gotta be fast.; We retired for lunch with Alabama 3. Not really, we just happened upon the same restaurant. I didn't even realise until I queued for the loo with one of the guitarists. I thought he was a Beached punter. If I'd realised, I could have shook his hand and we'd have momentarily connected the start of the day (where I should have been playing with Manfat Voodoo but we had to cancel through illness) with the headline act. But hey.; There's some money to be made on Scarborough seafront. While we were eating, a chap turned up in his Rolls Royce. We worked out one of the boats must be making about £100 an hour. And another seafront owner has a nice Ferrari. I don't think I've seen that side of Scarborough before.; Amy MacDonald was on when we got back. We made a special effort for her since she'd graced the covers of many a weekend newspaper about a couple of weeks ago and we liked her tunes. Not sure I was grabbed, but many, many people came down to see her.; I hadn't spotted this before under the Spa Bridge, from our local Banksy-alike.; The Hoosiers were a bit like watching the guys from the 118118 ads, but in band form. I guess that was the joke, but The Go! Team do fun right, although The Go! Team's website is a currently a perfect ad for how Flash websites are harder to keep up to date. And they weren't playing Beached, more's the pity.; Sometimes all you want is a decent cup of tea.; A friend tried to upstage our Alabama 3 ligging story by claiming to have bought burgers with Foals. Nice try, but Foals were just plain annoying. Look at the amazing audience interaction. I don't know how they got to be second on the bill, which led me to thinking there must be some form of seeding system, like Wimbledon. And if there isn't, maybe I'll invent one.; Ed made an appearance. He died a few months ago of a heart attack. He was one of the festival organisers.; You know I wouldn't ramble on like this unless I had something worthwhile to give you, so here it is. Alabama 3. A few things. Firstly, while they weren't old, I suppose they appealed to people who have some appreciation of the musical shoulders on which we all sit, and somehow they made being mature cool, which is refreshing. Secondly, they successfully welcomed us into their world. Thirdly, they grooved like hell. Gorgeous. That chap on the right on the keyboards with the mop of blonde hair .. he looked like he wouldn't see through the next few hours at the restaurant, but he was egging us on like a goodun. Oh, and they're not from Alabama (they're from Brixton), there aren't three of them, and they don't play country music (well, not much anyway). Yeeharrr.; So I say, go out and buy Alabama 3 stuff.
Hayburn Wyke: 12 August 2007: Here's what Hayburn Wyke looked like last Sunday, through the Nikon.; And Robin Hood's Bay
Granite: 11 August 2007: I'm working on a few things at the moment. There's Sexy Sofas, it's not my code or site, but I've taken over the maintenance of it so it will gradually become mine. I'm still working on this fitted kitchen site. We recently launched the BlueRanger Starter Pack, a GPS tracking device for kids and people who wander (eg. Alzheimer's sufferers).; This next isn't my site, but I'm starting Internet marketing for Metcalfe Insurance, starting with pub insurance, so there'll be more to talk about there. And there's more to do for the Scarborough bowling alley at Fantasy Forest. That's before we start talking about changes to the Scarborough driving school, Chris Pollard, this learn Spanish fast site, a (much needed) upgrade to the Whitby Guest House, Storrbeck (not my site), and helping this pimp my ride, car customisation site with Internet marketing, again not my site.; It was with Granite in mind that I came across this classic error, see if it happens on your screen. I clicked around that for a while and it did nothing, then I scrolled down. It was only then I saw the 'enter' button. In the newspaper world that's called below the fold. Basically, newspapers want enough headline to show when the newspaper's folded in a traditional newsstand to persuade you to buy the paper. What's under the fold, you don't see until you've bought it. The same principle applies to websites, what's below the bottom of the screen often remains unseen.; You can use that to your advantage and place lots of lovely graphics at the top, followed by lots of text below the fold for the search engines to chew on. But in this case, making the whole presentation not clickable, and putting 'enter' underneath the first screen is unforgivably crap.
Tony Wilson: 11 August 2007: Did anyone else notice that when Mike Reid died the other week, almost no-one said anything good about him? The news wanted to cover his death, but everyone's comments were distinctly perfunctory.; So today, sat over my morning muesli, news item number 43 on the list was like "oh, by the way, Tony Wilson's died". The piece was so short we looked at each other and went "err, what was that?"; So yeah, Tony Wilson's died. I don't know whether he was a great guy or what, but he certainly made a difference, and that's the point. Here's his Wikipedia entry.
Scanner installation: 7 August 2007: Sometime back in the dark, foggy days, my Umax Astra 2200 scanner stopped working. Well, it connected, the OS knew about the scanner, but it gave 'invalid argument' errors or it scanned the first 45 pixel height of an image. Silly, irritating stuff. I imagine some Fedora update caused a problem and that was that. Often these things get fixed in time, so just keep updating. Sound stopped working around the same time, and avid readers may remember I got excited about Ubuntu Studio. I didn't realise at the time that it was in some sense 'unofficial'. I like official things. Anyway, sound came back on again recently so I stopped trying Ubuntu Studio.; I tried a few things to get my scanner back working. I've been in the setup files, I've tried everything I could find and everything anyone suggested but it didn't fix it sufficiently that I thought maybe I had a kernackered scanner, so I bought an Epson Perfection V350 Photo scanner having checked beforehand that it works fine with Linux. This chap strongly recommends buying Epson and here .. oh well there's a thing. Now, I promise you I absolutely checked thoroughly before I bought and it must have been listed here or I really, really wouldn't have bought it, but here's a list of Linux supported scanners and the Epson Perfection V350 isn't on there. Maybe it's been taken off .. I can't imagine a scenario where that would happen though.; There's even official Epson support for Linux partly comprising a set of drivers for the V350, which I downloaded and installed.; Anyway, I never did get the Epson to talk to my Fedora box. It just simply didn't recognise it was there. Ubuntu Studio didn't recognise it, and nor did the latest Knoppix (and that's supposed to be the best in the business at recognising your hardware), so I got back to thinking of hardware or cables being broken and today I installed the Epson on my XP machine, and it went on all beautiful like. No problem. So I scanned a couple of images and moved them to my Linux machine for editing and tried to open the files and they aren't valid jpegs. I can only imagine someone somewhere, between Epson and Microsoft, hasn't quite followed the file specification and Linux, like some comedy policeman, is jumping up and down saying "someone's broken the rules". So now I'm just bloody irritated.; Update: embarrassingly wrongo. I think it's because a) I haven't managed to connect my Windows machine to my Linux one, b) I haven't got a pen drive thingy because i) I don't need one, ii) the Windows machine I use hasn't got a USB port at the front, and iii) I can always do what I'm about to describe, c) I don't want to waste a write-once CD on two images on the Windows machine and d) although I can use FTP in theory to upload these files to my web server and then download them onto my Linux machine, I haven't got an FTP client I don't want to pay for one or to install a trial temporarily .. I dropped to the console and uploaded the files to my web server manually. I forgot to specify binary. Oh the embarassment of it all.
Control: 6 August 2007: I didn't realise that Control is an Anton Corbijn film. That's important.; I lived and breathed Joy Division at one time and although I poke gentle fun at a friend for listening to their songs now, when I hear them again ... there's just nothing so majestic or poignant.; I saw them at Leeds Futurama, 1979 by the looks of it. I remember it clearly. I also remember the days around Ian Curtis' death. I suppose he is to my generation what John Lennon and Kurt Cobain are to theirs. Perhaps even Elvis before that.; Curiously, the drum production by Martin Hannett was one of the things that made Joy Division stand out, and Stephen Morris' drumming remains my main inspiration to this day, deriving emotional power from its stability, inertia and lack of frills or showmanship.; We only ever read New Musical Express in those days, the music newspaper that had embraced punk. Anton Corbijn was the photographer of note, and Paul Morley the writer. We'd look through for those contributors before reading the rest, a bit like I go for Charlie Brooker now in the Guardian.; I even got off my train to Leeds where I was studying Computer Science to go to an exhibition of Corbijn's photographs in a bookshop in Sheffield.; I don't know what it is about Joy Division that deals with depression and loneliness while actually making me determined, filling me with power, but it does. It's a bit Godlike, it deals with love and death and all that we are and rather than making me feel insignificant, I feel important afterwards. Not in a grandiose way, but, that we shouldn't waste our lives watching television and recounting our favourite movie lines for a cheap laugh (that we didn't even write ourselves), but should do something that matters. We should all search our hearts and push hard to do what moves us. Otherwise we're just rearranging stuff. After listening to Joy Division, that's what I get up and do. You'd have to be a strange character not to be moved, changed, by a serious listen to Joy Division. So if you haven't, and you need a push to change your life, I say get listening .. a decent pair of headphones and a darkened room.; So reading this and watching bits of the film in those YouTube clips plugged straight in to my memories and feelings from that time.; I'm not one for nostalgia. Punk was absolutely against that. But this film has a lot to say, so I, for one, will be watching.
Marvin Minke: 4 August 2007: I wouldn't normally link the Scottish fishing town of Fraserburgh with the birth of artificial intelligence, but I can't help wondering whether the naming of the trapped Minke whale, Marvin was inspired by Marvin Minsky, a very interesting fellow indeed who was right there at the start of the development of neural networks. I used them in my final year degree project to not predict the rise or fall of share prices.; If someone did name the whale after Minsky, that's a good thing.