26 November 2007: This is all very well, but I'm not sure she intended this to be publicly viewable. It's actually nice, though, to see the real Alison, if that's what we're seeing. I kinda like the idea she has that sense of humour.
26 November 2007: I've just had another call from a client who has been struggling with programming. This time he said he'd worked from 8am till 10pm yesterday trying to get something to work. A few days ago a different client called and said more or less the same thing. In that case, given that the client could see exactly where the change needed to be made, I could make the change almost straight away. The cost? £22.50.
Now that client told me early on he has short arms and long pockets. But for chrissakes, it makes no sense to spend a whole day on something you don't know anything about. You might be saving money, but you're wasting time and that's a worse crime. You can always make more money, but we can't get back time.
I'm guilty of the same thing though. One time when I ran a PR company we sold our own software and I persuaded the database programmer we used to allow me to look over his shoulder while he worked. The idea was that I'd done half a Computer Science degree, I was an IT person, I'd written the programs that ran my company, installed the network, all that. I was IT savvy, so I should be able to pick it up.
It was embarrassing. The depth of my ignorance was cosmic.
It's the thing about "Oh, Derek, you're in IT, can you fix my PC?" No matter that Derek is, what, project manager for IT procurement at the MOD (and therefore unlikely to know a fat lot about Windows PCs), or a database programmer, or an IBM mainframe technician. It's that feeling, in ignorance, that IT is IT is IT. I thought, because I had a good grounding in IT I could pick up FoxPro database programming. I was wrong. There's a lot to know.
So anyway, if it's standard web stuff or Javascript or PHP programming I can probably help, don't waste your day.
26 November 2007: Wow, did this really happen? I can't believe what I just saw. Stunning. If I'm not being fooled somewhere, that's just fabulous. Probably everyone else knows about it, but I hadn't seen it.
26 November 2007: As I write, if you type "GPS tracking system" into google.co.uk, we are the top listing. Even I'm impressed with that (given the competition), and I got them there!
26 November 2007: This is the blog from the brother of a friend of mine. We've not been over to see this house since they finished it, but it looks impressive. Must make the effort.
I feel flattered to be asked, and shortly afterwards was listening to Bobby Friction doing his increasingly attractive new British Asian talent discovery thing on BBC Asian Network and that got me interested in the relationship between Britain and India.
The PR clinkers from our involvement there are roundly positive, at least through British eyes. The impression left is, OK we were probably twats, but roundly we set up some governmental institutions that have stood the test of time. Perhaps that's one reason we thought we'd get involved in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, I've no idea whether that's true or not and my gut feeling is it probably very isn't, so maybe that's another book for my wish list (India: A History). (Update: a friend says there are better books).
I also got called by someone in India (I get calls every week from software companies wanting me to outsource what I do) who, for the first time, I felt I might actually be able to work with. I've no intention of so doing: the problems of mismatched languages and value systems are not worth the effort for the sorts of projects I'm involved in, but at least this person sounded like it was possible to talk to him. But what's interesting is he's sat in Bangalore or wherever calling me for my business, so there's suddenly a real link between me and someone in India.
I got to wondering why, when we put so much store by the special relationship with America, why I can't recall anything like that being said, ever, by a British politician with regard to India. Don't we have a special relationship with India? Isn't that an enormous strength?
And yet, the other week I got one of those unsettled feelings I occasionally get when the stars line up. That week it was a report in the paper about the dollar no longer being the favoured currently in the world. It's been obvious that the dollar is propped up by borrowing for many years now, more or less the whole Bush presidency although he didn't create the problem, and that's coming home now in the lowered value of the dollar versus, for instance, the Euro. While that's been known for a long time in financial and business circles, it apparently became cause for a big article when a rap artist chose to flash a wad of Euros rather than dollars in his latest video.
I'd been watching Downfall, which is quite an incredible film, and again I'm stunned by that only being 60 years ago. That's no time at all, and I could drive to Dresden from Scarborough before sunset so it's not far away either (which, incidentally, if I had one of these I'd do right now just for the crack, or should I say 'craic'). So there's no comfort in distance there because there is none. I really need to understand how that all happened in a democratic state, and how different Hitler going into Poland+ seemed to the German people of that time versus Blair going into Iraq this time. There was nothing we, the British people could do to stop Blair, that's what scares me. Cue another book for the wish list.
What really wound me up was the story about China building an enormous virtual shopping centre with which to take our money. Basically, we shipped our dirty manufacturing industries to the far east where we can't smell them so that we can get everything made for next to nothing. I know lots of people who have been to China, bring stuff back here and then mark it up enormously, as well as people who are learning Chinese, people who are marrying Chinese people and people who have gone there to work. The Nottingham University business students are all learning Chinese. When discussing what impression to give on one of those people's websites, he said, more or less, "whatever impression you may want to give, the fact is, everything's made in China or thereabouts".
But it suddenly feels like we are being outflanked by the people who have 50,000 year business plans. If we, ordinary people, will soon be able to go wandering around a virtual mall in China to buy our stuff, what will be the point of our service industries? We gave them a morsel and now they want the whole restaurant. How rude.
China and India's populations together (and these are just the most populous nations in whole regions) come to 2.49 billion people. The US and the whole of the EU comes to 0.8 billion people. Add in the weak dollar and an increasing lack of fuel resources here in the lovely west, and there cometh a day of reckoning.
So I think I've unconsciously made a few new tests for Brown, forged in my deep ignorance. I wanna do that Guyana rain forest thing. I wanna sign up to the green Supergrid, and I want the EU to ban GM. Then I'll be happier.
One last thing I don't understand. How come a fist sized hole in the hull of a ship designed to sail around seas containing lots of fist sized sticky-out bits was able to sink the ship? In my childhood innocence, I was told that Titanic had sealable doors so the area around any puncture could be sealed off and contained, so it was unsinkable. The only reason it actually did sink is that everyone thought it was unsinkable so left those doors open.
Then there's the thing about shoving an ocean-going umbrella through the hole, opening it, and the pressure of the water presses the 'umbrella' against the ship's hull to improvise a seal. If it's only a fist sized hole and you've a boat with a thousand people in it, where was the umbrella engineer?
23 November 2007: As an adolescent I once borrowed from the library a Made Simple book which I think was Creative Writing, and in there was a tip that I've enjoyed ever since. It said to listen to people's conversations, for instance, as you travel on buses. Those conversations will often be the inspiration for stories.
So here's a snippet I heard from two young men who passed me one night in Scarborough:
Warm up the sofas Jeremy Kyle, I've someone for you.
21 November 2007: I don't know a lot about eBay but I'm trying to clear my desk and thought it might be easier to post bits of it to people, so I'm attempting almost my first eBay listing.
21 November 2007: Oooh eh, I've had a brilliant idea. Let's gather and store the details of everyone in the country on a database and entrust it, not just to government agencies, but private companies too, and to any supplier company, such as maybe EDS.
Weird. The only thing I 'know' about EDS is that Ross Perot started it and he's linked in my mind with a beard ban, an essential fact not noted on his Wikipedia page. Musta been the British press having fun. These companies are very difficult to understand, who knows what goes on, and where the data goes?
I felt the most uncomfortable when I heard the discs are password protected. I see people's passwords all the time and they are rarely great. LetMeIn's a good one. 123456, fantastic. apassword, yep. Shouldn't take too long to break through that. In fact, we built a password breaker at uni as a lab project in parallel processing (labs lasted maybe a couple of hours). The missing word is 'encrypted'. It feels like once any ne'er-do-well was through the password it would be almost like looking at an Excel spreadsheet.
Personally, I'd want an audit of those downloads. I'd want a message to security whenever that 'download' button was hit so they could turn up at the person's desk, check it was legitimate and ensure the correct procedures were being followed.
And what are we saying? That there's no secure connection between HMRC and the Audit Office?
I know it doesn't quite work to blame the system. If I take a rolling pin and wander into the street and knock someone over the head with it, it's not really the rolling pin's fault, or its manufacturer. But that's a very clear breach of good behaviour, whereas posting a disc of data to another government department that (presumably) asked for it isn't clearly bad, especially if its your job to answer such calls. It needs training to understand why that's bad. And anyway, the discs went missing. If they'd arrived, all would be OK. So either they are lost, or someone nicked them. It's more the thief's fault isn't it, if that's what's happened?
Personally, I kinda like the idea of id cards. It makes sense. But that's because I'm thinking in absolutes: we like efficiency so from a data point of view, have everything in one place .. sorted.
The truth is, this was bound to happen and it will happen with an id card system because life isn't perfect. But I don't like the No2Id card campaign's tone: "Together they mean officials poking into YOUR private life more than ever before." It feels like a backwoods American telling us he should be allowed to carry a gun "to protect my freedom".
I'm reading an autobiography of someone who suffered child abuse. I like the smoking ban. I needed to be forced by blue bins and alternate collections to recycle. We need officials poking their noses into people's private lives, basically because we want a good society and it's rare nowadays to find anyone who thinks about others much.
The other thing I like about this is that we know about it. Wouldn't it have been tempting for Darling to delve behind a filing cabinet and go "aha! here are the discs, I've found them, no problem, everyone go home it's all OK". The fact that we know about it is fantastic.
I'm still undecided about the id cards thing. I'm kinda glad this ammunition has been given to the 'no' campaign, but I can't bring myself to support them directly. Anyway, now the government's given all its money to Northern Rock we probably can't afford to develop the id cards.
I wonder how the NHS IT project is coming along. Ooh look, first line of 'criticism' in Wikipedia: "NPfIT has been criticised for inadequate attention to security and patient privacy." £20bn of our money's in there. But again, I support the project. I'm not sure how such a high cost is justified, but then, I'm not involved in it so I've no idea. It might be a very tight budget for what's required.
Update: I want to say, too, that I hadn't realised EDS were actually part of it when I mentioned them. Also, I know these things get bound up in layer after layer of controlling stuff, but on the face of it, 'disaggregating' the data is as simple as, instead of saying * (for all data), listing the fields: name, NInumber, age. That's it. I know it's an enormous database, but at root, that's all that was needed. The whole point of a database is to allow easy access to and control of a mass of data. What's at fault here, then, is the management of that whole process, from the specification of the system onwards. Why do I feel like this is a consequence of choosing a supplier based on price? It's probably not that, it does sound like a consequence of merging tax and vat. Dangerous times for Gordon.
17 November 2007: The phone rang. It's morning. I ran downstairs to where I'd left it charging on the cradle the night before. I picked it up and answered it. Before I'd finished a woman said "Hello". Err, hel "This is an important security call from ?????? Card Services, please press any key to continue". So I looked at the phone, and pressed a key. Silence ensued.
Of course, I'd pressed the key that ends the call. Well? She said "any key"! I'd just run down the stairs, I was a bit flustered, and it was the biggest key. Usability: I absolutely love it.
Some people use this sort of thing as evidence of people's stupidity (and, by implication, their superiority). I don't. I know I'm simultaneously a supreme being in my area, and a completely embarassing prat at, say, dancing or game culture. Even in my area of expertise I can make mistakes .. I made a good one this week. Sometimes it depends on your environment, how you're feeling, whether you've woken up yet, and so on. And I know I'm not stupid. So I find people's daftness online lovable and comedic, and it makes me love humanity for its quirkiness.
15 November 2007: Just so we are clear, Thursday night is telly night, OK? We have: the new series of Never Mind the Buzzcocks at 9 on BBC2, which was kinda also-ran until my lovely Simon Amstell took it on. Now, it's funny, and not many comedies are. Not sure why I can't find a promotional site for Buzzcocks, even on the BBC, which has left a link dangling to where the promotional page was. Controversial.
Then, there's the new series of The Mighty Boosh at 10:30 on BBC3. Can't quite make that site work, but there y'go.
It's not such a happy night on boring on analogue, so if you do and haven't then maybe today's the day you should. We did.
I'm not sure I could choose four better comedies right now, and having them all compressed together like this is like laying in a bath of warm sticky toffee pudding while your girlfriend occasionally refreshes the fingerbowl, safe in the knowledge you don't have to go to work the next day.
Given that image in your head, here's another. A soon-to-be ten year old person said he could imagine me in my dressing gown, and then encouraged others to do the same. Then he said "with hairy legs sticking out the bottom" and the assembled crowd pulled faces simultaneously, unbeknown to each other, but I saw them all. But then he did say he was glad to be reaching two figures, was going to make the most of his teens, study hard, get a good job, and then buy a good toothbrush, so frankly I question his judgment.
14 November 2007: Ken Rockwell seems to have the right approach. His photography pages just draw you in and you read and ten minutes later you're at the bottom of the page feeling uplifted and full of possibilities.
It goes a bit unPC at times and his car stuff's off centre, but the photography pages are good and the overall approach is, too.
I just went to the car spares shop to buy microfibre cloths on his recommendation.
14 November 2007: Get a pen and paper and draw a few (ten/twenty) separate, equally sized circles, randomly arranged.
Now draw lines connecting those circles so that each circle has at least two lines to/from it. Lines may cross, but (for neatness) don't drawn them over circles.
For each circle, put a double slash across one of the lines connecting to it (near the circle it relates to), and a single slash across one other such line.
Now. Choose a circle. Exit that circle following the line with the double slash. Repeat. There's one exception. If you enter a line through its double slashed line, exit it using its single slashed line.
Where do you end up?
Try entering the system at another circle and follow the same rules. Try again.
Are you ending up at the same loop? Or are there two or more loops?
The loops you end up at are called stable loops, and the system is a self-organising system. Whichever way you arrange circles and lines, and however many there are, if you follow the rules, you'll end up with some stable loops.
Here's where I think you have to take a leap of faith. He says this is how perception works. Perhaps this is how neurons work. It's how we can form stable perceptions from the world of chaos around us. In fact, he says, the way our brains are organised makes it inevitable that we will make stable perceptions whatever the input.
That's quite beautiful, but I'm not sure it's strictly true, but hey, what do I know compared to brain on a stick De Bono? Nice idea though.
Anyway, De Bono calls that notation you just drew a flowscape, and reckons you can use it to view and then consciously deal with, alter, and improve your perceptions.
Why? What's wrong with your perceptions? Well, if your head's a self organising system, it may well have settled on a loop (a perception) in one place where, if you just change one of the circles, your system will re-organise and your system may well then settle in a different place. You'll have changed your perception.
That gives us a tool to change how we think about things, or perhaps how others think about things (although that's much more difficult to do, since you can't see inside people's heads, they have to do that themselves).
Still, what's wrong with our perceptions? Well, you can perceive whatever you want. None of it's really real. This was in Anthony Robbins' Awaken The Giant Within too: our beliefs are just the summary of our experiences.
We need a system that does that. Basically, lions are dangerous and if we meet one in the jungle one day, we need that summary thought that we should run, otherwise we'll be lion dinner while we work out what it all means.
Incidentally, I think this has great importance in the fight against racism and sexism and ageism, in that, it's actually unnatural not to think summary thoughts about all sorts of people: those who drive their kids to school in 4x4s, tall people, those who drink cans on the street in the morning, drummers. So it's quite hard not to be racist, sexist or ageist if that means not thinking summary thoughts about people as they fit into those categories. So perhaps it's not the thoughts, it's having a layer above that that recognises that although you may think all tall people are gentle giants, that doesn't mean they all are and you shouldn't take any action that stops them being who they actually are. That's tough to get across.
Anyway. So what's wrong with our perceptions? Well, let's take one of De Bono's examples. I don't want to explain the whole technique, you should read the book for that, but I wonder what your perceptions are about juvenile crime. Do you know, yourself?
You can list out your thoughts, join them up into a flowscape and see where the stable loop is and what ideas feed into that loop. In his example, the idea came out that while most people think of crime as an exception, there are those cultures where crime is the norm, and that's fed by, for instance, role models in music or film. So if culture's the issue and we can see what feeds into that loop, some solutions suggest themselves: developing more healthy role models and so on.
Another example .. actually the one I was thinking of in the first place .. is how to deal with a noisy neighbour. In this example, the stable loop cycled around that the neighbour was dismissive, that threats hadn't worked, and that the neighbour is aggressive. In order to break this loop, various lines of action could be tried to tackle the elements involved. For instance, court or official action might be more difficult for the neighbour to dismiss.
It might become clear that the initial complaint had set up the aggression.
Another possibility is (De Bono often considers all possibilities), if threats don't work, maybe play your own music just as loud.
Something else came out of this analysis, the feeling that no-one else was involved. This leads to the idea of setting up some form of neighbourhood association that might deal with such things.
The point is, the flowscape is an attempt to put onto paper our perceptions and it gives us the opportunity to see them, see how they are constructed, and to play with them.
None of which is a good example of changing your own perception and I can't be bothered to search the book for another, but I think you might be able to see that you might have an opinion, do this analysis, consider what drives your opinion, and learn from that analysis and that might change your opinion.
Furthermore, it's our opinions, those summary thoughts, that drive our behaviour.
Let's just ponder that a minute. We don't deal with the world in a big, conscious, considered, thoughtful way. We just bounce around it according to our opinions. OK, our opinions might be more or less informed, but in daily life we interact with the world according to our opinions, and those opinions are formed in quiet periods of deliberation.
If that's true, if we want to change our behaviour, it's our opinions we have to change. We may intellectually rationalise something, but when we get out into our day, it's our real opinions that drive us.
We can change our lives with this stuff.
So if you have a behaviour you wish to change, perhaps this is a tool to help. If, for instance, you wanted to stop smoking, you might be able to work out what your opinions of smoking are. It might turn out you think it's cool or rebellious and that those things are desirable qualities, and if you then work on those thoughts, you may find yourself stopping smoking without all the tense grimacing and willpower needed to fight yourself using the normal methods.
If the flowscape shows us which perceptions are important in a situation, Robbins gives us the means to change them. He says we form opinions based on what surrounds us, and we surround ourselves with people and things that support our opinion to form a positive feedback loop. I use Linux and believe in open source, so I don't read about the fantastic things Windows can do. I don't read the reviews, I don't upgrade the software, and I don't read any books on it. I do all those things for Linux, however, and I have Linuxy friends. If I got a job at Microsoft, I'd have to change my opinion or I'd be very unhappy, so I'd have to ditch all my Linux materials and surround myself with Windows books and magazines and Windowsy friends and my opinion would change.
Which means, perhaps I'm sitting here with my Linux opinion, and that's holding me back. What if I could work for Microsoft and earn a gazillion pounds every second? If I wanted that, perhaps I could change my opinions so they took me where I wanted to go.
Which means flowscaping is personal success tool, among other things.
In truth, I've not used it since reading the book. But I think if I had a problem to work on, I might, so I'm glad I got the book and it's a nice tool to have for when it's needed.
12 November 2007: I happened to catch some of the Kylie Show on ITV at the weekend and it was fabulous.
I've never really known much about her, when lots of people walk towards something I tend to wander off in the opposite direction, so the only things that have penetrated my consciousness are the major hits.
And looking at the comments on YouTube for Kylie it's all about how fabulous her body looks and how Geoff from Braintree wouldn't kick her out of bed, and I just don't want to be anywhere near that.
But wow. I did note Dannie's comment somewhere inside the X Factor where she said how the contestants wanted the life without really putting in the work. She said, very strongly, it's a lot of hard work and dedication.
The Kylie Show just fascinated me, and I think that's because such a huge amount of work by all sorts of people had gone into it. Everything had received the full works: choreography, the clothes, stage design, lighting, sound production, the songs (of course). Like a great film, it's a peak of achievement by lots of specialists all the best at what they do coming together to make something fabulous. Drums were there too, lots of inspiration for that. So I just sat there and drank it all in.
Eeeh, it's a funny old thing, t'Internet. I never thought I'd be accidentally displaying parts of our laundry system to the world, but there y'go. If you can't actually see or hear the people poking fun at you it's kinda easy to do, and anyway, they only poke fun because they are jealous.
Can you all come to me for websites please so I can get a decent video camera?
10 November 2007: Gotta be equally uncomfortable, aghast, and amused at the American reaction to Turkey wanting to invade Iraq to sort out the attacks they are suffering: Bush: "There's a better way to deal with the issue than having the Turks send massive troops into the country". There speaks the voice of experience.
But the sheer bare faced honesty with which the Bush administration attempted to put down the vote about the Armenian genocide has really surprised me. I expected obfuscation and procrastination, but baldly saying that voting to call it genocide would simply hurt trade and get in the way of the Iraq war, that's so starkly honest I'm stunned. It's what people don't like about America: business and money, everything else can go hang. Rewrite history, ignore genocide, invade countries: so long as it's good American business, that's OK. You'd imagine people would want to hide that sort of ethic but maybe it's so ingrained it just feels like that's the American spirit, 'it's what this great country was founded on'.
I'm not saying that's what Americans are like (as if there's even a likeness), the thing is, this is what America looks like from the outside looking in. No wonder it has to buy its friends.
Anyway, Robert Fisk has something to say about all that but do take care, there's an action recalled from that time in the third to last para that I'd rather not have read.
All this can't be doing the Turkish desire to join the EC any good.
10 November 2007: As an art ignoramus I found fascinating the link drawn from Dada to punk in DIY: the rise of lo-fi culture, and how both informed zineworld and the DIY ethic. You might be interested to take a look at Dada too.
9 November 2007: Here's the sort of shot I took in the fading light that makes one wish one was actually a half decent photographer.
I got as far as realising that I needed a higher shutter speed so setting the camera to shutter priority and messing around with wave shots to get the right value (quite high I think, maybe even 250) and then knowing that I was badly underexposing as a result, but I think perhaps I could have: removed the polarising filter, messed with the ISO setting, got closer to the action, done the shots earlier when the light was better, been successful enough to be able to afford a better telephoto lens that lets more light in, known more about the digital darkroom so that I could rescue the shot more effectively.
9 November 2007: Is trackMARX.com good? I think so. Expect a ton of bricks on the concept of DIY (but not B&Q). I've been reading DIY: the rise of lo-fi culture, having bought it from the formerly excellent art bookshop that's slowly declining into a novelty gift shop, the shop at Newcastle's BALTIC mill art gallery.
One thing I noted to blog was trackMARX.com a British music zine that chose to publish online rather than through the more traditional photocopier. I'm not convinced of its Britishness, I must admit.
Hmm. There seems to be a link with ZigZag, which I remember from Splat! days. I think we got published in there one time.
The DIY ethic is fantastic. Do what you want, find others who like it and build a network of likeminded people. Do that worldwide and you can always find enough people to sustain you. Do it for love not money (and maybe the money will come). It's beautifully punk (you can do it, and you matter), it's lovingly anti corporate, it's fantastically interesting and full of variety, it's a burst of freedom and it's very open source. Barring perhaps that it won't pay the mortgage and so if you spend your life doing it I'll end up having to pay your rent for you, I can't see anything other than wonderousness here.
The problem with zines when I were a lad was that they talked about music but there was no way to hear the music barring spending your life in the hope that John Peel would play it. You could buy it I suppose, but how different is that from buying Computer Music or Marie Claire and setting out to buy what's between those covers?
Now, blessed are we to have t'Internet, so it's just a few clicky fingers between trackMARX talking about Blood of the Black Owl and their plot in mySpace where you can listen until your ears sigh a gentle thank-you and make whispered plans to kiss your cheeks while you are asleep. Plus, it's well worth firing off the Proper Fart Breating video from the 4 July 2007 in the comments.
Zines in that form may well plug the hole formed by Peel's passing. So that's why I linked to trackMARX because until now, I hadn't heard of it, and you might like it. There. Am I done? I think I'm done.
9 November 2007: This is old news, but I'm trying to clear my desk because I'm sick of working in a room that looks like it's been tumble dried, and I'd put my recent readings up against my screen in order to blog them, and then not had the time.
I've been working very hard, in fact, I seem to have a constant stream of enquiries atm, often recommendations. That's a very nice and satisfying place to be, but it can sometimes be difficult to say no.
Anyway, a few months ago I got to a point where my eyes kinda stopped working. They jiggled, and I felt like at the point of focus a load of bacteria were dancing there so it was difficult to focus. Tiredness, basically, but I'd not experienced exactly that before.
I have, however, prepared for this moment by discovering and liking Better Sight Without Glasses when I was adolescent, buying it a few years ago, reading it recently, and now, hey, I tried just one of the eye exercises: cupping.
.. and it damn jiggly worked. A proper rest for ten minutes was enough to allow me to carry on and not go running off to the optician for £300 worth of glasses and treatment.
I think the crux is this: according to the book, if I remember it rightly, eye focus depends on the muscles controlling the lens. If the muscles are tired, they can't pull the lens enough to focus. So you need to rest the muscles and perhaps build them up too.
Here's the interesting bit. If you buy and wear glasses, that makes life for your eye muscles easier, which, sure, helps them relax. But it also makes them work less hard, and muscles that work less hard get weak. So you get a decline into worse prescriptions. Once you start with glasses, then, it's harder to get off.
Now, obviously a) there are lots of eye conditions you do need proper medical care for, and b) what do I know about the whole thing, I'm no expert, but that's what I'm left with after reading the book. It seems interesting, though, to think about the muscle fitness of your eyes when you're thinking of your body fitness. Do what you like with that, just don't sue me.
9 November 2007: Well your roving reporter's been out to see the storm damage as a result of the warnings from the Environment Agency .. and there isn't any.
On this shot you can see how far the sea got .. not even really as far as the seafront shops. In the background, the council digger and its prize of debris.
It's not just the boats that shelter in the harbour in a storm.
It did look pretty groovy though, but I needed a coat and gloves to experience it.
We sleep in the roof and had a pretty disturbed night as the wind tore at our roof all night, so right now I reckon the most danger I'm in is nodding off and bruising my nose on the keyboard.
8 November 2007: According to Alexa www.johnallsopp.co.uk is the 630,113rd most popular site on the web, globally, and the 43,201st most popular in the UK. I'm big in the Ukraine too. Musta been that blog about the Ukrainians. Oh no, there's Chernobyl, there was the orange revolution, and The Ukrainians. I do intend to put together an index of all this stuff at some point. See, it's not all shit. Thanks y'all.
8 November 2007: In our house we have an equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping. It's the silent step.
One day, our beautiful, loving, sweet cat Mitsy decided the first half landing would be the place she did her business. I mean, she wasn't dealing drugs or offering protection .. you know .. her business. No amount of slices of lemon or whatever worked, so we put a litter tray there and now all the cats use it. So we have a litter tray on the stairs, forever.
Those of you who know cats will know, occasionally they will hoist a piece of poo out of the tray as they exit and leave it about, in this case, on the stairs.
Our stairs are varnished wood.
So there's the normal sound of walking up the stairs: step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step.
And there's the dreaded sound of the silent stair: step, step, step, step, step, -, step, -, step, -. The soft silence of discovering a piece of poo.
I think that's funny, but I'm also curious what Google Adwords will do with a page that it thinks is mostly about poo. What ads will it serve? I wonder what the top site in Google for the word 'shit' is? How many of you reading this will resist typing it in to find out? There's also a class of schoolkids about to descend on this site to do a lesson about professionalism, so .. well .. y'know how it is.
7 November 2007: Right! Facebook is officially irritating. As if it was ever not.
It's good to make your software extensible so that people can create applications for it.
But just today I've been SuperPoked and someone's written on my FunWall and when I run Facebook it turns out these are things that have to be downloaded and then I (can't be bothered to think about it actually, but I presume I) have a normal Wall and a FunWall and a BigWall and a BungeeWall and .. it's like a big playground game of All Pile On. Except it's not me underneath struggling to breath and not shit myself, it's worse: it's my computer, where all my work is.
People! You are bigger than this. Don't you feel a little bit smaller every time you are SuperPoked? We are grown up now, we like subtle shades of grey. Don't be entertained by this nonsense. Read philosophy, talk to your friends in real-world, have sex, cook a curry! Do them all in one evening.
So that's that. You can all SuperPoke yourselves from now on, particularly those of you I'd struggle to recognise in the street. If you want me, I'm on email or in the pub. And no, I do not want to join your new Facebook group, I have things to do.
3 November 2007: Barry at Roasters on Aberdeen Walk is a little bit famous locally for making the best coffee in Scarborough and I found myself the other day being offered coffee that had been eaten by a bird first, and I was stumped.
It wasn't the whole "my drink is made from bird poo" thing, I assumed it didn't taste like that. It was not knowing whether this is genuinely as described, that the Brazilian Jacus bird eats only the ripest berries, and the enzymes in its gut changes the shell of the coffee bean and brings out deep chocolate notes (yeah, yeah, milk milk lemonade .. I hear you), or whether, in fact, at £8 a cup or so (London price), some bright spark in Brazil had decided to force feed otherwise contented birds coffee beans á la foie gras in order to fund his own desires for Aston Martins, something I certainly couldn't stomach (unless, of course, I got to play with the Aston Martins). It's a lot to get out in a coffee shop queue. A teacher at school (30 years ago) said I always want to look before I leap. That's absolutely true. Anyway, Barry smiled, his mate said "no shit" and I went ahead.
It was delicious. Very smooth, and chocolatey as described. I'm not too hot on the old 'mmmm gooseberry and diesel with a hint of Alaskan snow' thing, but it was a beautiful coffee and I did get the rare feeling that adding milk would be wrong. Very full, lots going on, I just can't name any of it. Apparently Brazilian coffee is very smooth anyway. You live and learn.
So now I'm trying to work out what dastardly process I've supported. Barry brought me out the pack and it said "Brazil Camocim Jacus Bird Organic". Google suggests "Jacus bird" might be "Jakus bird" and then gives me no results for either. I did find this Flickr and then, if you scroll most of the way down, this.
It turns out it's more a Jacú bird (Portuguese language), which is turkey-like (English version). I suppose Turkey guano didn't sound quite so appealing (nor probably as accurate).
So let's just get sensible about the poo thing: O level biology: berries are made for birds to eat so that the seed inside is passed intact through the bird so that, when it's excreted, it finds itself a) still viable, and b) in a different place where it can grow into another plant. It's one of the successful ways plants distribute themselves. So there's really no poo involved, the coffee beans just need a wash and then they are perfectly good and viable coffee beans. So you can take that look off your face now.
). (Update: a friend says there are better books).
