John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Putdowns: 30 April 2008: I remember clearly a government report that concluded (I can't remember what it was about, but I feel it was about some financial institution cockup about a decade or perhaps much longer ago) that the institution in question had been "insufficiently wise".; That's a serious put-down as a conclusion in a government report isn't it? In everyday terms: "We've had a good, long think about this, and basically, we all think you're stupid".; Here's a nice one from a mailing list I'm a member of. A: "I strongly believe that ...... ", B: "... (succinct summary of why he disagrees, ending in) ... so the merit of this belief is not obvious". Very nice.; It has a little more panache than a recently overheard putdown on the street on which I live: "shut up you foulmouthed c**t".
This web thing will never catch on: 30 April 2008: I do remember someone saying that to me. Anyway, I'm watching a site that supplies the details of people who want web work, and it emphasises my feeling that most web 'ideas' are crap. You'd be amazed at the lack of market research and preparation people put into their new business ventures (often new life directions) .. well, let's say I've never had anyone come to me with a properly researched idea, nor a business plan, nor a realistic idea of costs and timings, never mind all three.; Here's one: Someone wants a site almost exactly like this for £2,500 by September. Sure thing.; Notice the date of the latest video? And the lack of comments? It's not working.; The other day the Independent published a list of 101 really useful websites (if you find a link you want isn't clickable, there are probably spaces in it, cut and paste the address into your browser where you can remove them). Here are possibly the top of the pile of ideas. And I still think half of those aren't that great.; If you are looking at starting a web business, talk to me right from the start. I can help you to research your intended project online, and I know something about web trends and how to steal a march on your competition. Don't have an idea and go with it. Ideas are ten a penny. They are the easy part, and truly, I don't think you need 'an idea'. But if you must, you need a mill to put them through, and a hundred ideas to put through it. The one that comes out of that is the one to try out to see if it works, not the first idea you got excited about. And if it doesn't work, you have to be ready to ditch it and move to the next.
I am unhappy: 28 April 2008: I just spent an hour farting around with hairballs and toilet roll middles and lunch from five days ago trying to sort out what's recyclable and what's not. What's recyclable and accidentally got into the non-recyclable container and vice versa.; Outside, there's a collective space for all our bins. It was a blue day today. No-one put the blue bins out, so they're still full. There are suspiciously fewer blue bins than there should be, too.; One thing that annoys me is the councils request that we wash our plastic bottles before putting them out to recycling. It seems to me that they'll go through a process akin to washing to remove their labels, so .. does it matter? I think yes, in as much as the plant doesn't want to stand the cost of processing its waste water. It wants us to pour the exact same stuff down our drains. Very green.; Here's what I think.; Back when sex was new and men sported beards and flares, the people wanted a green world. And they kept banging on about it until more people listened and finally some of them got enough power to make it happen. But, in the meantime we lost all sense of society and decided that the cheapest council tax is the best council tax. We want recycling, but heaven forbid us having to pay for it.; The only political solution is to get us to do the work. And in a fit of "we'll show 'em", they designed a system that makes us dance as punishment for all the years of moaning and unreasonable demands for more and more and more with less and less and less. Everything must have an outlet, and here's the councils.; So now we have double the number of bins. There are huge bright blue bins, a colour perfectly opposite to lovely brick, calculated to stand out in every otherwise beautiful village and housing estate. We live with our rotting meal remains for two weeks.; All of our time spent splitting hairs from pear cores is free to the council. They've pushed the whole problem down to us.; One of the green issues that will hopefully be tackled over the next decade or so is companies using the environment for free. So, if they can pour effluent into the river or gas into the air and there's no charge, then there's no charge. Fabulous. The green idea is that every company should pay their environmental costs. Funny, then, that this appears to be the same sort of behaviour on behalf of a green initiative, the only difference being that the resource they are using for free .. is us.; I just wonder whether anyone's worked out the cost to national productivity of wasting our time like this.; I just wasted a whole hour. And I'll end up doing that every week.; Plastic bottles are recyclable in our system. But last week we had lots of things to throw so went to the tip. Plastic bottles aren't recyclable at the tip.; Plus, and this is a considered opinion that may well make you splutter into your fair trade coffee: it all adds to my uncomfortable and growing feeling that people who are into the environment are not into people. So for them the choice is simple: people should. People should .. whatever. In this case, people should spend a significant amount of their free time working out how to operate what is supposed to be a simple public service .. getting rid of our waste. And if that costs people time, so be it, that's much better than pollution. I don't necessarily disagree. I don't know, actually. But I know that if green politics is to get anywhere, people still have to come first. The reason we want green politics is so we can live in the garden of eden. It can't be a politics of the earth over the people.; I can't believe we can't create a processing plant into which we pour our rubbish and out of which comes something useful. Compost, glass, jumpers, metal. We can. I'm sure. It's just, we'd have to spend an extra £1 a week in our council tax to pay for it. I say it's worth it. There's a backlash coming.; That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I think. Thank-you, and goodnight.; Update: Someone tells me they heard a government person saying that if they managed to get a fifth of people recycling they'd be happy. Clearly a centralised processing plant would recycle everyone's waste, not just the refuse from those who could be bothered to separate.; There's also the negative impact on the environment of manufacturing all those blue bins.
Scarborough storm: 28 April 2008: Those in Scarborough will be bored with this already, but there was, last night, an amazing and beautiful thunderstorm. One of those electrical, coastal storms that doesn't go anywhere, it just hangs around. There was almost continuous lightning for a good half an hour and sometimes torrential rain.; Later, much of it was over the sea. As always, I regret not going out with my camera.; Anyway, my g/f found a couple of really interesting sites as a result. We all know by now that Metcheck is king, but I hadn't noticed its thunderstorm monitor that appears to work from live data. Here's a thunderstorm predictor, but here (prepare to get excited) is a live lightning detector which, last night, showed lightning over Scarborough and a few miles out to sea, which is how I know for sure that's where it was. If that's really linked to some network of sensors I'm thrilled.; Then there's this a weather cockpit for Scarborough from someone up near Scarborough golf course .. lots of interesting people seem to live around there (my 82 year old Linux chap's around there somewhere). Want to know the wind speed and direction without actually looking out of the window? If blokes like measuring things, this is heaven. I wanted to do this myself actually but no need now.
Some recent pics: 27 April 2008:
Rhythm: 26 April 2008: I was told recently, emphatically, that no-one could write like I do if they didn't have rhythm. This person loved my writing, and appeared to be stunned when I said I had no interest in poetry (barring all the things I've written about that previously).; It was my writing, he said, that made him and his partner want to work with me.; Fabulous. And I'm a bit taken aback to be honest, because, I just write, that's all. It's in my head, I write it. It's not that hard.; How did I learn to do it? he wanted to know.; Well I was never that interested in English at school, I don't read fiction (perhaps a novel a decade). I read a lot of factual books, and the newspaper, and magazines. I certainly wasn't in the slightest bit interested in English Literature at school.; But my first serious job was in a PR company. My primary function, barring maintaining and programming one of these, was to read closely all the press releases that left the building, understand them, extract their essence, and create for each a list of magazines that I thought would be interested. Maybe I learnt writing from reading those press releases, where the first paragraph was to contain the essence of the story in one succinct bite.; I can't think of the scenario, but I do remember in that job having my writing checked and hassled and riddled until I got it right.; I've certainly done my fair share of sales copywriting in my time, too.; But I think what I try to do is simply this.; I write as if I'm speaking. As I'm writing, I hear my voice say the words. I hear the emphases, the pauses, the rise and fall of my voice. Generally, and I offer this as advice, I read through my text using my inner voice at the very least once before 'publishing' it. It helps to get the commas right, among other things.; And the rule is, although I've relaxed on this of late, but when it's important, the rule is: write as if you're explaining it to your mum. Let's try it (this is true, too, I was going to blog it separately but may as well do it now):; I'm working on the website for The Organic Farm Shop and I've increased the number of people visiting that site by 16% just by improving how the site looks, and by writing a new page about what's new on the farm and what new products are in the shop. Just doing that improved traffic by 16%. That's good isn't it?; Now .. there's also a problem. We can measure how many people arrive and leave straight away. They call that the bounce rate, and it's the percentage of visitors who arrive and leave immediately. That's gone up 18% in the same period.; That suggests some of the people have found us when looking for something we don't provide. It could be that we've been a little clearer about our location, whereas before people had to look harder (so they wouldn't show up as bounces). In that sense, it might be a good thing.; What? Yes, mum, I have brushed my teeth today.; Mum. That was important. I wanted you to understand what I do. No, I don't fix people's computers.; ...... yes, OK then. So what did you press just before your computer stopped working?; (my mum's not like that really, but that scenario is a common one among techies, but hey, I never understood what my dad did at the power station either. No .. he never talked about those days at Three Mile Island)
Apple: 26 April 2008: On my recent, thoroughly exciting one-change, 7.5 hour each way trip diagonally across the country from Scarborough to Brixham, Devon (near Torquay), an irritating man (one of many) sat next to me and fidgeted.; Then he ate an apple in a really annoying way. Lots of fidgety little nibbles .. like the apple was endless. I almost asked "haven't you finished that yet? With me, three bites, sorted, only the stalk as evidence.; Then he sneezed. I was looking out of the window at the time.; When I looked back, there was a little bit of apple on my notes. I had to move it with my finger.; So what's that? Karma? What goes around comes around? Divine retribution? If you don't know, here's what I mean.; There are also the people who arrive and put on BLAH blatt blatt bla bla TADA brbrrrrrrrr bla bla bla music on their headphones for all to hear. Metallic stuff that sounds like our train's developed a high speed bearing fault in all the bogies at once and the cafe guy keeps dropping the cutlery. I understand in one sense, I used to do that, I also use music to energise me (not to relax) and the sound of Japanese monks playing harp isn't going to help me. Nor is that any more appropriate.; Two otherwise equally attractive, equally young, and from the outside otherwise equal ladies sat opposite me for part of this journey. I know that's an awful judgment to make, but I'm saying it in the interests of science. I simply mean, let's imagine they're the same. One was wearing headphones and playing music loudly enough for us to plainly hear what she was listening to: the cutlery and bogies song. She never once acknowledged either of us.; Me and the other woman acknowledged each other, worked out where the buffet car was, almost ate together (because when she got her food, I plucked up the courage to eat my effeminate salad I'd made earlier, with burnt nuts in it (effeminate and 'WTF is that black thing?')).; I conclude, from my scientific experiment, that not listening to the cutlery and bogies song makes you nice. Listening to it, makes you cold, angular, insulated, and hard.
Free WiFi around Scarborough harbour: 26 April 2008: Free WiFi for Scarborough's been a goal for many years, since I was a member of the local computing group, can't remember what it was called now. Probably wasn't Scarborough Harbour Information Technology. Anyway, out of the blue (for me at least), it's gone live, so Scarborough harbour now has free wifi Internet access, which is rather groovy. Well done to everyone involved.; What it does mean is everyone who is moored gets free Internet access, which is fabulous.; I wouldn't like to think of the process that came to the decision to do it here, and not for the beach or the town. Yachties with money vs plebs on the beach, all that. Maybe this is stage one and it'll get rolled out to the beach in due course. But I did like the idea of sitting on the beach and being able, with an iPhone or suitable mobile device, to check what's on that evening, find somewhere to eat, or even arrange yourself some accommodation. I suppose that will be possible at least at the harbour end.; I've been banging on at clients for years to let me create mobile versions of websites and no-one seems in the slightest bit interested. Again, if they don't do it then surely no-one else does too. Perhaps this will underline the need.
Dave Dark and the Sharks: 21 April 2008: As a precursor to developing my first Facebook application, I took a quick look at the fanbase of local bands in Facebook and mySpace. I expected people like Stony or John Hutchinson to have leagues of loyal fans, but it looks like their fanbase doesn't bother with such piffle.; Want to know what the hottest band or musical artist is in Scarborough? Well you'll have to friend me in mySpace or Facebook to find out (mention this).; Here's a clue though. Dave Dark and the Sharks has a couple of videos, this: Man Alone from 2006 and Strangers on a train, both shot in Scarborough, the former is all within 5 minutes of where I'm sat sitting, and the other is along the route I habitually run .. I'm generally trying to outpace the train if it sets off at the same time as me.; I heard rumour that One Night Only will be headlining this year's Beached festival.
Oh where do you go to my lovely?: 21 April 2008: 'Cus I'm leaving, on a jet plane. My head's full of songs like that. It was Grod's birthday yesterday and he'd organised a bash at local hostelry Cellars along with various local luminaries, we went along and our soul was refilled.; Firstly, Grod himself seems to be a thoroughly nice chap. As a busker, and a busker who got God (and then got atheism), making friends with Grod would seem to be opening oneself up to the risk of having him sleep on your sofa for the next three years. Actually, he has his own place, so you can befriend Grod without risk.; Basically, the evening was beautiful. Simple, & soulful. Scarborough at its best. I'm not sure why I can't find the words to describe it right now, I think because it just was and that was its beauty.; As far as I could tell, present were people like Jesse Hutchinson & the magnificent Julia Wray, the very excellent Acoustic Project, & The Jaw-line of Julianne Moore. Maybe the local paper will summarise better.; Grod's a great host, friendly and easy to listen to, and he just sort of comes together when he puts on his guitar.; Oh, and I demonstrated how Facebook works in the real world too. Present were all sorts of people who I'd 'met' only on Facebook. Despite that I knew who they were, what they'd been doing recently, and what their involvement in the night was. One chap, I passed him on the way to the loo, he was part of one of the bands and it was between songs, so just enough chance to say "alright?". That's what genuine friends would do .. just one word is enough to acknowledge each other. But we'd never met before. But that "alright?" was an acknowledgment that we did know each other and had interacted in a meaningful way. OK we weren't bosom pals, but we had established a relationship and had we sat down, I'd have been able to ask him about his work, his recent trip, about a project he does that I'm interested in, and so on. It works.; Footage of the whole night should end up here in due course.; Grod's last name is Walker. Every Walker we've known has been as 'different' as Grod, every one with the same wanderlust. One thing that inspires me about this whole thing is .. Grod's carved his own life his own way and it seems to be working for him. Nothing beats that.; The party continued at Bacchus. We came home :-)
Content: 19 April 2008: A B&B. Choosing between B&Bs. Differentiating the B&B that you are tasked to market from all the other 350 B&Bs, guest houses and hotels in Scarborough, all of whom want to be on page one of Google (and can't be).; "So", I said, "what are you interested in?"; "Nothing much", came the reply, "he plays a bit of golf now and then".; "OK", I said, "let's write a review of local golf courses".; What I got as a brief several days later was, I felt, a tad perfunctory. There wasn't a lot of detail, just "there's this course, that course, and the other course and they're all pretty much the same". Not a lot to go on. And the client didn't exactly say "wow, what a great idea". I think they thought it irrelevant at best. But hey, I'm an ex PR guy, I can still make a story.; The thing is, there are reasons I make the decisions I do and want to do the things I do and more than half the time it would take simply too long to explain them because it's a real education that's taken me hundreds of hours of study to acquire. I want to do the golf story because that will mean people who search for golf and hotels and holidays will find you, and that works because of the long tail. The extra page and the links work because of PageRank and page reputation, and it all works because people like people who are like them so if you like golf and I like golf then we're off the ground at least. That's before I start talking about content sharing strategies.; It's the principle behind this blog. If you stumbled over this blog after searching in Google, and/or if you become a regular reader, that's because we share something. Some interest, some value .. something. And that's the start of a relationship and if we can see eye to eye perhaps sometime we can do business, and I'm not Pepsi, I don't need to persuade everyone, just a few.; The web is almost nothing to do with technology and almost everything to do with humans connecting.; So the web allows us to specialise (because we can find the few people out there who really connect with us) and, along similar lines, to be ourselves because we no longer have to get along with everyone in our village, we can find people to get along with anywhere on the planet. So: specialise, differentiate. Discover those things that make you different. And if golf's it, then golf's it.; Did it work? That's why I'm writing this. The first enquirer to this long standing B&B website since I added the golf article wants to book a party of 16 for a golfing holiday. See, I'm not mad. Bless our differences.; Update: Guess what? We got a first place position on the subject.
Our spanking new airport: 18 April 2008: Doncaster airport is our brand new, local airport. Their website has a list of destinations and it looks like Thomson flies to Reus.; Trying to find a flight on the Thomson website, that seems to say they don't.; So, back to Doncaster Airport's 'contact us' page. I fill in the form with quick question: who is right?; What I get is: "Error Type: Notice Error on page D:\webroot\www.robinhoodairport.com\docs\modules\contact_form.php Error String: Undefined index: send_offers Error Line: 29 Error Type: Warning Error on page D:\webroot\www.robinhoodairport.com\docs\lib\lib_insert.php Error String: error_log() [function.error-log]: SMTP server response: 501 5.5.4 Invalid Address Error Line: 253 Dear Mr John Allsopp: The system could not add your enquiry, please try again."; Update 21/04/08: even the error message turned out to be wrong, I got a reply from Doncaster Airport giving me the answer I needed (a link to where Thomson shows their flights to Reus).; Good 'ere innit?; Ooh quick, look at my Scarborough webcam, you can see the moon reflecting on the sea.; Actually, we often get this awesome sight, but we never tire of it.
Pic dump and Armitage: 18 April 2008: I've just emptied my snappy camera. I was looking forward to seeing these and I'm rather pleased how they turned out, I only wish I'd had the proper camera with me:; The time-prompt that made me get all the pics off my camera was seeing Simon Armitage this morning as part of the second Scarborough Literature Festival. I'd never been to a poetry reading before, save for a single meeting of the Hole in the Wall poetry club in which I read out some Ivor Cutler which a number of people thought was my work (even though I thought I introduced it clearly and was reading from an Ivor Cutler book).; Anyway, I think he's changed the way I see poetry, which is rather cool. So if you are like me, you don't really like poetry and certainly don't like wandering around and seeing hosts of daffodils, Simon Armitage might offer a way in.; I was rather put off by how he was marketed, previously. All northern. He seemed like a northerner for southerners. I acknowledged that was how he was being marketed, not the man himself, but still thought he should take some responsibility for how he was portrayed and if so, then he endorsed it, and if not, he was wrong to allow too much freedom to the marketers.; Anyway, there was none of that today barring audience-led self-stroking about local words. And since he incorporated some common web phrases into his poetry I was happy enough.; If you want to experience some of the glitz of the occasion, here you go:; He cited Ted Hughes as an alternative to also read. My struggles with poetry have been documented. If you are quick, you can still catch Benjamin Zephaniah doing Rong Radio Station on Channel 4's Three Minute Wonder website (scroll down). Rock and roll.; We bought his book, Gig and are currently reading a chapter a night. Not a lot makes me laugh, but this does, a lot. I can't quite point to why. I think it's just a subtly observed attitude. I flatter myself that there are similarities between this blog and his book, and you must agree, at least, we both do use words.; That link to "gig", btw, is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy stuff, I get a little something. In all the years I've done that, I've so far earned 10p. Buoyed by that success, I'll press on. I've set a goal of doubling my income from this source during 2008. Aren't goals great?
Alex Thomson: 13 April 2008: I had a long deserved day off yesterday. Kinda accidental, really, I just fell into it. Friday was a gig that was so-so because really it was a leaving party and when co-workers get together they like to chat and unlike one of the bands I play in where we'd just turn up the volume so they couldn't, this band is the quietest band I've ever played in (so needs people's attention) and anyway, we were just a quick turn really not the point of the evening, so shouldn't have expected more.; So yesterday we were at Whitby's Pannett Gallery for the opening of an exhibition of local artists in aid of the local St. Catherine's Hospice. A few friends had work in the exhibition, and a couple of 'celebrities' were there, Len Tabner, a reknowned local artist and Alex Thomson from Channel 4 News was there to open it.; Len Tabner was built up to a God like status beforehand such that when I saw the work I was fairly nonplussed. Particularly when you consider you could probably have purchased all of the rest of the work in the exhibition for the price of one or two of his. I'm really curious about how an artist moves from one day being a working artist selling paintings for around a thousand pounds to the next day being taken on by a gallery and selling for, in this case, £25,000. The word is it's chance, but I think that's irritating fatalism at best.; I'll be frank, I was really looking forward to seeing Alex Thomson. Ridiculous really. He's chief correspondent on the Channel 4 News, a programme I hold in such high esteem that on our journey to the event my partner was pointing out to our friends how I arrange my days around it. Quite so. Nothing else meets their standard except perhaps Today on Radio 4. But they don't have pictures.; In retrospect I actually do feel as much love for the programme as I used to for John Peel, and a real sense that without it we'd be lost.; Alex Thomson looks like he's been in the forces, and tends towards reporting from the back of an armoured vehicle as it's careering off to sort out Fallujah. So I had this heightist thing that he might turn out to be short, rather like Tom Cruise or Andy Garcia. TV makes you taller y'see.; But no, he turned out to be perhaps the second tallest chap there (this tallness thing is important as you'll see later), so as I glanced around the room as I do, over everyone's heads, his stood out.; I wanted to meet him and shake his hand and thank him for his work, but obviously others wanted to speak to him too, and I kept trying to be in the same area as him ready to pounce when he found himself alone but it never happened. He must have started to think I was a suicide bomber.; Anyway, finally just before we left I took my last chance, and as he roundly ignored me and turned to speak to a couple next to him, I touched his elbow to attract his attention .. being unsure of his name because he'd been introduced as Alec for his speech .. shook his hand, said I wanted to thank him for his work, and all was well.; Being a journalist, he was easy to talk to. Journalists ask questions, so he was happy to ask me about living up here and how I got to hear about this event and all that, but I got my questions in too and after we got the event out of the way we were able to talk about Channel 4 News and that's when it happened.; He said that a significant percentage of the Channel 4 News' audience thought it was a satirical programme and I laughed, snorted perhaps, and a small (but significant) piece of spittle launched from my mouth, arced across controlled airspace, glistening in the low spring sun, and landed. Where? I couldn't tell. Had it gone in his mouth á la Judy Finnegan? I couldn't see it on his face. Thomson's used to gunfire and didn't flinch. Perhaps I'd gotten away with it.; Should I make a joke of it? Maybe make an in joke that it might take him back to interviewing Yasser Arafat or something. No, that was Kate Adie and bad breath and I wasn't fast enough to remember the names.; I'll bet Debretts doesn't cover this situation. Mind-you, I've never read it. Maybe it does: "On the matter of accidental spitting on another, point at something in the far distance with a surprised look on your face, and when your target looks that way, turn and run like the wind before they notice. Phone your PR on arrival home."; Anyway, politely, he pressed on regardless, evidently it wouldn't have been good for him to say "you just spat on me", it was down to me. I pretended it hadn't happened.; A few sentences later, there it was. His hand moved up and gently scratched his nose. Damn, he knew. And now I knew where it landed.; Oh well. It all ended well enough. But I should have made a joke of it. Maybe I could have said "it's OK, all my recent HIV tests have been negative". Yes, that would have settled his worries.; And the tallness thing? Not many people would see eye to eye with Alex Thomson, so not many people would have been able to spray him quite so effectively.; I met Alex Thomson, he's a very nice chap, and I spat on him. I guess I'll never mix in royal circles.
The most moving thing I've seen on telly: 10 April 2008: Despite Gail's irritating character on Corro embodying the idea, the most moving thing I've seen on telly for a long while was Frank Gallagher (Shameless) telling his daughter "I am your father. Nothing you can say or do will make me stop loving you." Gosh.
The Organic Farm Shop: 10 April 2008: We've been buying almost all of our groceries from The Organic Farm Shop in Pickering for many years now, particularly since we discovered they deliver to us for free.; I nibbled away at them for a while about their website which, while it didn't offend me particularly (although I know others felt more strongly) and actually was particularly neat and tidy behind the scenes (thanks Adam), did seem to upset people in a usability test. It was a bit green .. see screenshot.; The usability test was, as always, clear and surprising. People really didn't like the site and I ended up with a to-do list that included putting up e-commerce (which I didn't intend to do initially), but also they wanted to be able to see what they are buying. Oh, and we have to do battle on the 'organic is expensive' belief that everyone has (not if you farm it yourself and deliver it for free).; Most interesting for me was people liked going to the supermarket because they felt they would discover new things that way.; So I resolved to make 'discovering new things' easy on the Organic Farm Shop website.; So yesterday I finally got the chance to make the first changes to the site. We'll iterate forwards, no big "new site launch" or anything.; Another thing that came out of the usability test and the key phrase analysis was a big interest in organic skin care, toiletries and cosmetics. The Organic Farm Shop has a fair range already, but also there's a new range of shampoos, body washes and soaps out this month that is Soil Association certified (and that's unusual).; So I had a really great day yesterday taking photographs of those products, changing some of the site styling (removing the green background, but also choosing more natural colours (from real photographs of vegetables and fruit I took on my last visit .. natural colours are complex and interesting and a little less garish which reflects the sentiments of the market this site wants to reach), adding Google Analytics, changing the footer styling, turning all the pages to PHP (a programming language, so I can make the site modular), then making the site modular (in other words, for example, creating one menu file that all pages use, so in the future making a menu change is just one edit rather than a change on every page) and, to help people discover new things, adding the what's new at the organic farm shop page (my photos and my text).; Like I say, I'm going to improve it iteratively, but it's nice to make a few sweeping changes like that and make a big difference in just a few hours.
Bigtall: 9 April 2008: At 6'6" tall, but relatively thin (but not biafran (you know who you are)) .. well I used to look for trousers that were 36" 'square' (leg and waist) but for the last decade or so a 34" waist is more like it, and I might be tempted by a 37" inside leg.; Think of a 6'6" guy. Is your guy thin-ish or just giant? I'm thinking tall and thin is a reasonable kind of body setup.; And if we think shirts, I'm looking for tailored, slim fitting shirts. I don't want to look like I'm lost inside my shirt, a normal shirt often just makes me look like a puppy in a sack.; So how come the specialist clothes places like John Banks at bigtall.uk.com seem to have taken the big AND tall approach, rather than the big OR tall OR both one? High And Mighty always gave me the same impression.; I mean, height is genetic. So, there are thin tall people and fat tall people and everything in between. Given these shops are appealing to a niche market, why limit themselves to a niche of a niche? And it can't be that these things aren't available anymore when you can get whatever you want made up in China for thruppence and a small chip off your conscience.; For instance, a pair of jogging bottoms. Available from a 48" waist with leg 30 or 32". Or in the extra tall range, 40" waist and 38" inside leg.; Well now, I'm the tallest person I know. And I'm a little put off by a 38" inside leg, it feels like I'll be tripping over those or just have lots of cloth rumpled around my ankles and joggers don't seem like the sort of thing you can alter the leg length of.; And everyone I know who is near my height is slim. A 40" waist is no use.; Frankly, when the freak shops don't even stock what you want and make you feel like an outcast, something's gone badly wrong. And it's not me that's wrong.
SLUG: 8 April 2008: It's been a while since I've attended my local Linux User Group (find yours here) but a neighbouring LUG (Ryedale) and Scarborough had collaborated to have a GPG Signing Party.; GPG is a version (if you're bored already, skip forward a few paras, it gets more interesting) of PGP, and PGP offers two basic capabilities as I understand it: to prove you are the originator of a message (eg. an email) in order to overcome the fact that if you are a bad person it's very easy to send an email pretending to be someone you're not, and to encrypt an email or message so that only the person you intend the message for can read it.; Emails are sent by plain text over the Internet. Back before I knew anything much about the Internet at all, I purchased software that harvested email addresses from the Internet. It must have had a part that sat watching Internet traffic, and I could enter, for instance "pork sausages" and I'd receive back the email addresses of people who had mentioned "pork sausages" in emails. Basically, what you send through normal email is visible to anyone with basic knowledge of the Internet and of networks, so encryption is one way to stop those people reading what you're sending.; To do this you end up with a private key (that you keep private) and a public key (that you make public). Part of the game is to actually meet someone you intend to swap 'keys' with to ensure that they are who they say they are. They actually bring their passport to prove it.; Having done that, you've created a web of trust. So if I've met Derek and accepted his keys and you've met me, accepted my keys and so trust I'm who I say I am, then you should be able to accept my say-so that Derek's who he says he is. We were a bit woolly on that because that could extend a long way, but I suppose if you know a few people who know Derek and it all ties together that would increase your confidence.; Anyway, what I really wanted to say was how nice it was to see everyone again. We have an 82 year old member who I always find to be a real inspiration. I think I've blogged about him before. He's trying new Linux distributions and exploring this and that, trying to work out what happened to an old RAF training plane that was lying wrecked in a field near the university in 1950 or whenever .. just doing all sorts of things that I do now and really hope I'm still able to do at 82 years old and beyond. His installation of Ubuntu is, he says, the start of a ten year plan to learn Linux. Fabulous. It's not all bowls and chequered brown jackets.; The other inspiration from the night was Open Street Map. If you think open source won't touch you, think again.; Back when I was the Europe-wide PR chap for Mapinfo, it was really interesting to watch Americans come from a country where, well, for a start, it was just one country, and where their equivalent of Ordnance Survey maps were available free of charge. In that capitalist country, the idea was that the public had already paid for the creation of the maps, so they were owned by the people. NASA photography is the same: Americans paid to send these things up there, so they get to play with the photographs.; Contrast that with Britain under Thatcher at the time (I'm no Thatcher basher, I liked her), where she made the Ordnance Survey become profitable and sold us the nationalised industries we already owned.; Anyway, so it was fun to watch Americans come over and realise that there were 16 different countries (then) in Europe, and to get MapInfo Europe off the ground they were going to have to negotiate separate deals with every single one of them, and most of them didn't even speak English.; We still have the same problem today. When Blue Tree Services wants to provide a map on your phone to show you where your friends are they have to pay not a small amount for that, and that is reflected in the price you pay for the product.; Fair enough. Mapping somewhere is labour intensive and no-one would do it if there wasn't a return.; Enter the Open Street Map project. Open source ethics but not for software programs. Local people getting together to wander their local streets on a sunny day with friends and GPS devices, probably with beer and cake involved, and then report their findings to a repository in order to create a map of the world that is free to use. Genius.; Open source phones. Open source maps. Keep thinking people, the effect of the Internet has a long way to go yet (Open Source wouldn't work without the ability to communicate worldwide, for free, instantly .. a function the Internet provides, so the two are interlinked).; The Scarborough Linux User Group has been meeting regularly each month but one of the people who organised meetings died a few weeks ago and I haven't seen who will pick up his baton, so if you are interested in meeting the best thing to do is to join the mailing list.
Sunrise: 5 April 2008: When I did the interviews for the Royal Albert Park website, one of the B&B owners said "the sun never rises over the sea where we are" and that bugged me because when we got up at about 4am to wander to the Spa to watch a solar eclipse rise over the sea, it rose just to the right of the castle headland, which would be about North East.; So yes, the problem is on North Bay many of the B&Bs are up towards the castle end, and the headland shields almost everyone south of what was the corner cafe from an Easterly view (Ordnance Survey (stick YO12 7HD into here) (and Google maps)). But the person making the claim was actually quite close to the corner cafe end.; The reason for my interest is I'm trying to replace the relatively crappy picture on the Selomar Hotel (Scarborough) (here if I've changed it by the time you read this) with something better. Actually that's a sunset, but I think it's a nicer idea in this context to talk about waking to the morning sun.; So the cats woke me at 6:30 this morning but it was cloudy so I opened up Stellarium (free, Open Source software) and played around with dates and times to see where the sun rises and when it's at its most northerly.; I couldn't do it precisely, but on about the 1st July, the sun rises at about 4:40 BST at just short of north east, which by my reckoning means everyone on North Bay would see it.; So I suppose she's right in the sense that, you'd never normally see the sun rise over the sea from North Bay unless you're a milkperson or insomniac. But it does. It just does it sneakily when you're not looking.; So now I know what I have to do to get a decent North Bay sunrise panorama.; As for the persistent rumour that if you stand at the right place at the right time you get a sunset over the sea in Scarborough, I still don't think so. It's mentioned in point 21 here so it may have its roots in a book about Anne Bronte.; I was once walking up past St. Mary's Church (at the top of our road) when a wild looking young chap with a full collection of piercings and tattoos targeted me such that I thought I might have a choice of either declining to give him 10p for a cup of tea or declining to give him my wallet, watch and jacket (there have been some muggings recently around that area). What he actually asked was "excuse me, could you tell me where Anne Bronte's grave is please?". We were right next to it. Just goes to show, yet again, you can't tell what someone's like by looking at them.
Grod Groddler: 4 April 2008: This chap occasionally busks in the town centre in Scarborough. I had no idea there was so much going on, but his performances are always fun and noteworthy.; He turned up to one of our gigs recently I think and I shook his hand and chatted for a moment. Seemed normal to me :-); Different lives, amazing.
Ethical websites: 4 April 2008: I've just come out of a discussion with a friend who was talking about this story in the Guardian about an 'ethical' trading website. This friend was of the opinion that every ethical website they'd visited had been unusable.; They warmed to their theme with the idea that perhaps people who are driven by ethical standards are not driven by 'normal' commercial values, and that that drives them to reject ideas from the world of sales that would make such a website easier to use.; Perhaps the tendency is to talk about issues rather than just getting on and selling stuff.; This concurs with my thoughts on organisations like PETA, who, having gotten someone who hates the bad treatment of animals to join their organisation, proceed to send them a year's worth of images of cruelty to animals.; For me it's the same thing: people going to an ethical trading site, or joining PETA are already converts. They already know about the issues. They could write the site's content. They are there, just like the rest of us, to buy something (or do something). And those sites, just like any other, should make that easy.; My friend's view is that despite me being an ethical sort of chap, an ethical website owner may balk at my marketing approach, whereas that's exactly what they need. And that's why she's never found a usable ethical website.; I have The Organic Farm Shop, Pickering's website to improve. Let's see what happens.
Showtimes: 3 April 2008: Hmm. In a forthcoming events list I saw "Horton Hears A Who!", wondered what it was, and entered it into Google. I wasn't logged into my Google account, but (it turns out it's a film, and) the first two Google listings were for showtimes at local cinemas. That's cool.; However, I then tried 10,000 BC and Meet the Spartans (I presume that's a film), and it didn't work for those.; Which implies, I think, that someone (the cinema owner?) has to do something to make that happen. Neither of the listings for "Horton" were Scarborough cinemas, so I'm guessing the Scarborough cinemas aren't doing what's required.; Interesting. So there's something cinemas and perhaps other venues can do to get a top listing in Google. Maybe it's driven through Google Local.
Neuroscience: 2 April 2008: Scientists creating the first hybrid embryos doesn't bother me (at all), particularly when you see that actually they've put human genes into a cow's cell (thus making it pretty much human), rather than mixed and matched genes. No problem.; That stance is crystal clear if you take the neuroscience view of life, which is that the brain makes up all this stuff about the soul and the self because it gives us an evolutionary advantage. According to neuroscience, there's no God. We make that up in our heads.; So, since those cells have no brain, basically, we can do what we want with them. That's assuming there's no danger in the process, it wouldn't be the same if they were playing with Anthrax or Ebola.; But then, I extrapolated that. At what point would those cells reach a point of consciousness where it actually matters what happens to them? The recent Horizon programme on memory seemed to suggest that kids only become conscious of their self around the age of 4 or 5. Even then, if there's no God to judge us and we make all this 'self' stuff up, what's to stop everyone just going out and killing each other? If we are just bags of chemicals and there's no more to it than that, nothing matters at all. I find logic takes me towards this view and I don't like it.; And my partner took a completely opposite line. If there's no God and nothing but what's here and now, we have a bigger duty to be responsible, to act responsibly, to take on board the stewardship of the planet and everything and everyone on it, to step up to the plate and stop passing the buck to God.; Wow. Isn't that amazing? I see a big role for leadership here.; I suppose, even if we take on the neuroscience view, there's no point in creating suffering, we may as well be nice to each other. That's more how I actually live my life .. I like being nice.; It kinda highlighted how our morality seems to stem from religion. I'm sure there are people around who actually know what they are talking about in this area who could shine a little more light on the whole thing. For me, it was interesting to explore the question: "if there's no God and no-one to judge us at the end, what happens to morality?"; I do find the western religious line on this research irritating. When we were protesting against GM, the church was allowing trials on their land and thought GM was fine, basically because God gave us the planet and all the flora and fauna on it as a kind of huge playcentre to do what we wanted with. But as soon as we start tinkering with humans, that's different. I don't agree, but I understand that. I just think GM was for money, while this research is to cure disease and I prefer to think the latter is more laudable.
Hofesh Shechter: 1 April 2008: Dance: a load of gay guys prancing about in leotards. Ballet, posh birds prancing about in leotards. Dad dancing at weddings. Line dancing. Come Dancing. Need I say more.; Actually yes, because it seems to be a really exciting time in contemporary dance, not that I know anything. But there was that Channel 4 programme about a dance group of disabled people that just made your jaw drop. Stunning stuff.; And then there was the opening scene of the latest Skins series that just stopped time.; It turns out from the last Culture Show that the reason that was so unforgettably great is because it was by Hofesh Shechter. And it turns out that not only is he an incredible choreographer, but that he composes the music too.; I find such individuality and ability a complete inspiration.; And quite how we can still be making interesting, motivating, exciting, new and innovative work with something as fixed and limited as the human body (which probably hasn't changed much over the last hundred thousand years) just fills me with awe.; Shechter is a reason to get up in the morning.