John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Danziger's Britain: 30 January 2006: I've just finished reading Danziger's Britain, passed on to us by Ali's brother almost ten years ago.; Nick Danziger is a photographer well known for his black and white photography illustrating majority world issues. In this book, however, he travels the back streets of Britain to meet communities that society has forgotten. It was published in 1996, so I can only assume these communities still exist.; I hoped that after reading the book I'd understand better what it means to grow up as a child in a very poor area. I stroke myself with the thought that I, in that situation, would rise above it. It's very unlikely, but it's a comfort.; The book describes areas with the same problems described in Crap Towns. Areas with no facilities, so everyone gets bored and society implodes.; There seems to be a point at which there's little enough to do that the bored youth turns to destroying what there is left until there's nothing. Nothing nothing. No public call box. No shop. No bank.; Danziger describes areas (Newcastle I think) where there is no point owning anything. People will steal your sofa.; If you leave a house empty, people will steal the tiles off the roof, the glass, the copper wire, the pipes. One house even had its rear wall (not garden wall, the rear brick wall of the house) removed .. bricks are worth something. That was owned by a Londoner who wanted to sell it for £10,000, was advised by the estate agent to accept an offer of £5,000, didn't, and eventually had to sell for £2,000.; A woman had her washing set alight.; It's not that he came to much harm as he travelled about. The worst violence seemed to be the punishment beatings in Belfast, but you get that for challenging the authority of those in charge. Keep your nose clean and all should be OK.; People boarded up their houses but the bored people still get in, whether you're in the house or not. In one house, they couldn't get into the house directly so they broke in next door, got into the attic, made their way across, and came down through the ceiling.; Metal plates over the windows still didn't keep them out. They had cutters for that. And scanners so they knew what the police were doing, so if you informed, they knew. So people just let others come and take what they wanted. It was easier that way. One family bricked up the whole thing and drilled themselves some air holes.; So what do you do if you can never have anything? No telly. No Internet. No mobile phone. And there's no facilities, so it's just drugs, and breaking things, and graffiti. I'd like to think the way out would be in organising, or in love, but these are broken people so you'd have to push hard. But if you've no job, and nothing to do, isn't it possible?; That particular place got that way because a big local company shut. End of.; What part does politics play in this? Politics is broken here too. No-one votes in those places, so there's no point canvassing.; Danziger's frustration in not being able to concoct a solution comes through in the book, and I'm not sure I have a solution either. I suppose I just thank my luck I was born into a nice family. The odds, after all, are stacked against us.; It does make me appreciate more what my friends did. They adopted two kids from that sort of background. I suppose they saved them.
Arctic Chantelle: 28 January 2006: Arctic Monkeys, top of the pop parade for the second time (on last Sunday's chart, anyway) and with their album out this week, provided the soundtrack for my drive to Huddersfield (along with The Best of The Who).; Chantelle provided the uplift at the end of the day. The voters usually get it right, imagine if Barrymore had won, how depressing that would have been. Anna's really the only blot in their copybook, but that's water under the bridge I suppose.; Next Friday, there's The IT Crowd which started in my consciousness with a great trailer but since then the trailers seem to have gone downhill. Then I noticed Chris Morris acting in it, so who am I to judge. I suppose we'll have to see next week. It's a bit predictable though .. IT person watching comedy about IT people. Best order the pizzas and Red Bull early, there might be a rush on.; Interestingly, in trying to remember the name Red Bull I found this .. sixty cups of coffee would kill you? Wow. No references tho, so possibly all nonsense.; Oh, and DJ Godzilla came through with a recommendation of Sexy Coffee Pot by Tony Alvon and the Belairs. 'pon my soul indeed. I need to be able to drum like that. Maybe this is a source of inspiration.
Star Party: 26 January 2006: Scarborough's groovy Star Disk will be powered up publicly on Saturday at 7pm. Read about it under events here (it's halfway down the events page .. they make it very difficult for me to point you there directly but if I get to see Saturn's rings I'll forgive them (Update: I did, WOW!)) and maybe see you there.; I'm a little curious how the star disk is supposed to work .. if you read the instructions it talks about standing on the date and then being able to work out which star is which from the star disk .. but it'll be at night, how will we read the inscriptions? I'm sure all will be revealed on Saturday.
Credit cards over the web: 25 January 2006: While I've obviously set up a number of client's credit card processing sites, they've always come to me with the component parts already in place. The first was with NetBanx which still works well, but they had rather a large setup fee and their fee for making changes puts us off calling them (but see Protx's £20pcm charge, later, it wouldn't take many months before Protx becomes more expensive).; Another uses WorldPay and I haven't heard him complain about that (I think he said it costs about £500 to set up and about £250 per annum to retain), so I asked for a quote from them (and never heard back). I also contacted Durango but heard nothing from them either.; I set up the means for people to pay my bills using PayPal and then realised (wake up Johnny) I'd get charged a not insignificant fee for such things .. 3.4% plus 20p per transaction.; I did think that set up a positive feedback loop if my clients paid for my services by credit card and I recharged that cost, but it turns out not. For an example £1,000 monthly payment it ends up settling on £1,035.40 per month. Recharging the fee doesn't feel right somehow, however, so that's quite a cost to me. Update: actually, I think credit card rules might prevent recharging the fee .. not sure.; My specific problem is I have a client in Italy who wants to pay my bill of more than £1,000 per month by Amex. He also wants to sell things on his websites. So he tried to pay me on my PayPal page and as soon as he entered Italy the screen refreshed and he only got the choice of Mastercard or Visa. Their help desk misses the point but makes a different, probably also valid, one that my client will have to have a PayPal account if he wants to pay more than £500. He doesn't want one of those, life's too short.; Also myKitchen.uk.com is getting to the stage where we can actually start to sell kitchens. It's a shock, I know, but we're finally getting there. Between him, me, and their bank we are a model of incompetence and I don't know where the seed of that is but suspect it's the bank so I'm also looking for something to recommend to him.; There are other probable costs. There may be a setup fee. I wonder, if my Italian client opts to pay in Euros whether I'd be charged a currency conversion fee too .. I'm sure so.; Then, they don't actually transfer that payment straight into your account, they may settle every 7 or 14 days, or even every calendar month (on application Barclaycard Merchant Services offered us settlement in 45 days, plus the three days it takes to process the payment). Why, if not just so they can use that money themselves in the meantime?; AND they may keep a rolling reserve, for instance, 5% of your transactions for six months. Stunning.; I spent a morning working through all this. The Halifax has a callback facility but nothing specific to this (to be fair, they are a bank for consumers only (they don't offer business banking)), so I had to get called by their 'apply for a credit card' team who passed me on to merchant services with whom I had a completely crossed-purposes conversation resulting in me having to call the Bank of Scotland when they got in (it was before 9am).; I called the number. After entering my sort code and account number I spoke to Kelly Anne. She thought I was best served by business services so she transferred me there where I was greeted by Kirsty. I explained my thing about my Italian client and direct debits and she locked on to the first keyword I mentioned, decided I'd be better off in the International Division and transferred me. They played me some music and then an automated voice recited four options in a quiet but strong Scottish accent I couldn't quite grasp, but I chose option 1 anyway as it sounded most likely and I ended up talking to Ian who stopped me and said "What company were you hoping to speak to? This is the Ford Motor Company". That was partly why I couldn't understand the options, she was saying 'Ford' and 'car' in a Scottish accent and I was trying to understand those words in a banking context. Why do we put up with this? Sometimes I wish I was French, we'd just get some mates together and storm the call centre. Modern life is like Brazil.; As an aside, one day we walked into Halifax to convert an existing account into a joint one and they booked an appointment for us. It put me in mind of Tom Peters talking about the American consumers' reaction to car manufacturers that wanted them to wait several weeks for the car they just purchased to be manufactured and delivered. The reaction? "Why? Are you not making cars today?", implying, if you are, make mine! So, were Halifax not seeing people today? Did the whole Just In Time quality revolution pass Halifax by?; When we arrived, we saw someone who had to keep popping out to get advice on what we wanted. He sent off the form and then a few days later we got a blank form back from head office saying that we needed to complete it. We already had, so now they wanted us to do it again, and it wasn't a short form, there were pages of it. So I wrote a polemic about time wasting and eventually received our form back with just the one additional field highlighted that they actually wanted us to complete. We got our joint account. Given all that, I think it probably would be more stress than it's worth trying to get Halifax to do anything Xtra.; This is why I exist. My purpose is to deliver us from the awfulness of uncaringly designed automation. I care. This stuff matters. What is life without quality? Why should we waste our time because of another's incompetence when time, ultimately, is all we have? At the end of the day too, I have a need and it's taken me a morning so far to get precisely nowhere towards getting it sorted. If the Halifax was organised, they'd have my business by now. So it's not just about being nice and everything being neat and tidy, it's about growing your business by being the best. That's what I'm here for. Use me, before we overheat the planet by ever more quickly chasing our own tail.; Anyway, either Kelly Anne or Kirsty told me that I couldn't raise a direct debit from a personal account. It appears, however, I'd be in for a load of charges if I converted to a business account. 55p to handle a cheque? Must be a misprint. Update 10/02/06: then again, if Protx requires a business account I've found free online business banking through the Royal Bank of Scotland.; I must have called or enquired to Barclaycard because they called me a day later. It's a tad confusing but they seem to have a system called epdq which I presume is meant to make us think of pdq, their handheld terminal systems, but online. I'm sure it makes sense to them. It's a classic mistake though, thinking we customers know (or care) about how they define or name their product line and that we'll make the effort to learn. Nope, we just want a solution to our problem. It takes a risk assessment and credit checks before they'll accept me, two weeks, and thereafter it'll cost £25 pcm plus 2% of each transaction if less than £10,000 in a month (otherwise 1% on all transactions). Oh, and £250 setup. Sounded fine. I grunted my assent.; She had only been taking a breath. Then there are the processing charges, all Visa and Mastercards and derivatives were charged at 2.198% of value, company cards at 2.476% and debit cards at 53.8p per transaction. And I'd need a business bank account, it wouldn't work otherwise (see those charges elsewhere in this blog).; They wouldn't accept Amex. I'd have to register with them to get a separate merchant number.; Then she talked about additional security systems costing £50 to start up and £10pcm and wondered if I thought I'd like to use those. I'd fallen off my chair some minutes earlier.; These people seem to like Protx but the latter doesn't make it immediately clear that you have to have a merchant account to use their services, and the per transaction and percentage fees come from that, so I don't yet know if it's any cheaper (but see later in this blog). Protx charges a flat fee of £20 pcm. Signup takes seven pages and gets quite involved, but it's a very flexible service.; One time I ordered a special offer amp from Richer Sounds only to be told they'd run out of stock. I tried to insist they hold their end of the deal, but they pointed out to me that my 'purchase' was only an offer to purchase which had to be accepted by them before we had a contract. OK, but they charged my credit card. Of course they refunded it too, but somewhere around there's a law (maybe it's American) that says you can't charge someone's credit card until you ship the goods.; How do you do that if you want someone to pay by credit card there and then on a website, but it will take a few days for you to fulfil the order? Maybe you have to order from your own supplier. Protx (and I'm sure they are not alone in providing this service but it's the first time I've seen it) offers a 'deferred' payment type which allows you to get authorisation and then take the payment later.; That works for gaps of up to five days, but for longer 'preauth' and 'repeat' work. That'll be good for myKitchen.uk.com which might take six weeks to manufacture your kitchen. Update 20/02/06: According to Barry (I think) at Barclaycard Merchant Services, 'preauth' and 'repeat' are only for car hire and hotel companies, so we can't do that. I'm thinking we should probably take a deposit and then ask the customer to come back and settle the account before delivery. He says there's nothing to stop us taking the full amount straight away, only whether the customer will accept that or not.; Protx setup does take a while. It took me 45 minutes to complete the form, then maybe it takes 48 hours for them to setup my account, then I have to implement and test it, then it's perhaps 72 hours after that the system goes live. In the meantime, I've about fifty pages of instructions to read. But about a third of that is about fraud prevention and it explains things I've not seen before, so I think I'm being treated like an intelligent adult and I'm up for it.; Update 11/02/06: In fact what happened was they sent me an email saying I'd forgotten to enter my bank account details. No, I didn't, I definitely entered them, their system lost them. When I came to re-enter the details I used my new quiet PC on which their text overwrote the [next] buttons so I couldn't proceed. This is on top of several website screen formatting cockups that made the whole thing particularly difficult .. at one point in the original entry I had to go to the page source to discover what the text was that appeared to be intended for 3d viewing (red separated from green). I sent in screenshots and comments three or more times for different things and haven't yet received a response. I'm left irritated. Update 25/01/06: They did reply to the red/green thing with "Thanks for highlighting this issue. It is something we are aware of and need to resolve. It's basically down to the way that various browsers handle CSS and we'll be looking to fix it shortly." Well, yesssss, but actually it's down to inadequate testing, which is a bit worrying when you're dealing with my money.; Also, I've been calling it Prot X, whereas the Amex person pronounced it Pro Tex which sounds nicer.; Ah, problem. The reason my bank details keep getting deleted (as opposed to resulting in a sensible error message) may be that it's asking for a business bank account, and that's not what I've got. More charges loom. I queried this and they added my bank account manually to the system. We'll see if I receive the money.; Update 30/01/06: I set up Protx for a client who banks with Barclays and already has a normal merchant account for a different business, but we'd need a new merchant account for the web site, so I called Barclaycard Merchant Services from the number they provide and went through the rigmarole with Mat who had a similar accent to the beautiful storytelling chap who's been on after Channel 4 News this last week (Northampton) and who finally said two things. Firstly the rate would be 1.675% for normal personal credit cards, 55p for debit cards, and there's no joining fee (update 18/02/06: that's plus VAT). Secondly that the whole conversation we'd just gone through would result in a printed document which they'd send to us. We then send that back and the review team would consider our application. They'd decide within 72 hours whether to accept, accept with terms, or decline. If we accepted, the account would be set up after 10-14 working days. All very belittling, but I suppose that rate is worth prostrating ourselves for. Update 18/02/06: we were accepted with the security condition that they keep our payment for 45 days (plus 3 days to process). That's almost seven weeks, begorrah! If my client pays his supplier in 30 days, he's almost three weeks out of pocket.; Update 20/02/06: The other interesting thing, looking at the Barclaycard Merchant Services pack, is a sentence that suggests, and 'Barry' backed it up when I called, that our terms and conditions are overridden by the VISA and Mastercard terms and conditions and the vendor should never try to apply their terms and conditions when a credit or debit card has been used. "Can I see those terms and conditions?" I asked, "no" said Barry. In summary he said, the customer is king, so their agreement with their card provider (VISA and Mastercard run the system, so it's one or other of those) is the one that counts. I can't see their agreement because it may be different for each user. Interesting. So if I accept cards, I accept an unknown liability that I'll discover when something goes wrong.; I did see somewhere that Amex also charges a fee if I want to accept their cards, which I do. So I looked at their site and raised my questions with them. A couple of days later a bloke with a Newcastle accent called from Madrid as a result, I think, of my Protx enquiry and, basically, signed me up. He explained that the reason some banks have wanted me to either pay extra or have a separate Amex merchant account is that Amex isn't aligned with any bank, although he says that's changing with new arrangements with Lloyds and with Natwest.; From Amex's point of view, Protx acts like a credit card terminal, in other words it takes the credit card details but there still has to be the transaction handling system behind it .. which I think is what the merchant account gives you access to. The costs from Amex are: free setup (usually £75 but it's free through Protx), and 3.1% of any transaction, that's it. He gave me an Amex merchant account over the phone, there and then. Well, it'll be four days for it to go live, and it solves my immediate problem but it's not much help for most e-commerce because not everyone uses Amex and that's all they accept, but it's a start.; Merchant Account Forum seems useful, if a little weird about non-US business. Then again, I don't hide my criticism of America so maybe I shouldn't take the huff when they say that "UK website design services tend to create sites solely for how attractive they are, generally having little idea what actually 'sells' on the Internet." Oh go-on then, I will. WTF? No, absolutely not. Anyway, most websites look like a tray of cutlery, so no, just no. I was looking at a British website design company the other day that hadn't a clue about aesthetics.; Then there's the derisory insinuation that us Brits don't know what works on the Internet. It was a Brit wot invented the key web functionality I'll have you know! Tim Berners Lee still leads web development and focuses on functionality, not visual attractiveness.; Finally, if there is a lot of visual design coming out of Britain, that's because we lead the world in our creativity and we are red facedly, splutteringly proud of that. You can always tell an American website .. in fact, I tried this the other night when I was looking through a client's competitor's sites and some of them weren't clear where they were from, but I could tell from their page layout and design whether they were American or not (I verified my guess, of course). I think the received wisdom among Brits is that Americans don't know about graphic design.; Let's think of an example of American design. The Apple range. Oh no, designed by a Brit.; Still, Merchant Account Forum has some recommendations for people like me. Paysystems appears to have run off with people's money and has a stream of dissatisfied customers online. Multicards from that page seems too expensive.; Then they seem to like 2Checkout which my hosting provider uses, so that's an endorsement, so I raised a query with them. By the next morning Rhonda G from 2CO Customer Care had replied: Yes, 2CO currently accepts: VISA, MasterCard, American Express, Discover/Novus, Diners Club, JCB. All derivatives of these brands are also supported. 2CO will also accept: Electronic Check Drafts - also known as ACH or Digital Checks, FXSource - Direct electronic funds transfer service. So I signed up ($49).; It turns out the way they work is, from a legal perspective, they momentarily buy the product or service from you, and they resell it to your client, get payment, and send the payment to you less 5.5% (gasp) and $0.45 per sale. The idea is you register products with them and then when you sell something you just tell them to sell n times the product code. I'm stuck now though, because I don't sell products (obviously yes, I do sell services, but every month's bill is a different price, I don't really want to have to create a record of each monthly invoice in their system, and anyway, each of those 'products' is only saleable to one specific client). It seems like the products you register appear in their database and seem to be buyable straight from their half-arsed shop. I don't really want my invoices listed in there, it makes no sense. So I've another query raised.; The answer seems to be to create a product called, for instance, 'web design', where the customer is able to enter their own price, and then to send a request for payment for the amount outstanding. And there's a way to stop it appearing in the 'shop', which I'm told is to answer "no" for the field entitled "product complete" during setup, which seems at best counterintuitive.; I think, though, to solve my immediate problem of the Italian Amex chap, I'm going to go with Protx and the Amex merchant account. Actually he's paying more like £1,500 pcm, so with Protx and Amex the cost would be Protx's standing charge of £20 + 3.1% x £1,500 = £66.50 pcm.; With 2Checkout, the cost would be $0.45 (25p) + 5.5% x £1,500 = £82.75 pcm. I suppose there's a threshold cost where these two are equal .. hang on .. I reckon with a single monthly transaction like this, if it's under £822.92 then 2Checkout costs less, otherwise Protx costs less. I think that threshold gets lower the more transactions there are.
Shameless: 25 January 2006: I'm finally 'getting' Shameless, it's the kind of humour that stays with you and makes you laugh again an hour later when you're doing something inane, like washing up.; Am I wrong or did I see in the trailers for next week's show, my favourite Spice Girl Mel C? Groovy. Err, probably wrong. Looks more likely to be Kate Halfpenny. Oh well.
Newcastle upon Tyne: 23 January 2006: We went back to Newcastle Upon Tyne at the weekend to pick up my free participant's picture from the Spencer Tunick event last summer. The exhibition's on at the Baltic till the 26 March 2006. This isn't my free picture, it's a snap of me standing in front of one of the exhibits. I'm only in the shot once, so you can put away your magnifying glass.; If you buy one of these notebooks, you have a product with a photograph of my penis on it. How bloody weird is that? Maybe if I'm vague and mysterious enough in conversation I can have people thinking I'm a dildo model.; The press has written about the exhibition The Guardian, The Sun, Sunderland Echo, Saga magazine.; Newcastle is a really fantastic city. We were there for two nights wandering around. We never felt unsafe, that's the first thing. It's an incredibly friendly party place, and it's not just for young people, those out on the town were of all ages. We came away with a very positive view on life.; I'm theorising here, but, it's not that big a city. I'm wondering whether it got a great historical sense of solidarity because everyone will have depended on Tyne-based industries. In Scarborough you get glimpses of the sea between shops as you walk around, but in Newcastle it's the football stadium. You can see it from all over, and on Saturday we could hear the roar of the crowd from outside the Sage, across the river in Gateshead. That sound meant we felt involved, we knew the city was playing football today, and we knew how the game was going. I'm no follower of football, but that was an incredible feeling. The photograph shows the view from the Sage. The stadium is just to the right of the church steeple on the horizon, the horizontal strip of white light.; Architecturally, it's breathtaking. The way the old and the new mix .. I've never seen any city do it better. Almost everywhere you can just spin around and get completely inspired, I kept thinking of Fritz Lang's Metropolis:; The views from the Tyne Bridge are quite something, very continental I thought:; The Sage is very special, it reminded us of Corbusier's Villa Roche in Paris in that it's completely satisfying whichever way you view it.; The council seems to have paid out on some sculpture; .. this time a David Wynne; Is this Georgian? Probably. Is it sandstone? No idea, but if I ask someone will pop up and answer. I think it's Grey Street. It's blurred. That's because I was about to be run over by a bus. The architecture's very impressive when it's in all directions. Weird, it must not have been bombed in the war, yet Newcastle, being a big industrial city with lots of shipyards and docks, would surely have been a worthwhile target.; Bob Trollops is a very much recommended (by us) vegetarian pub (with Ruddles on draught) on the Quayside, and is in a 17th century timber framed building.; Just for the record, we stayed in the Holiday Inn Express, Waterloo Square which was very nice indeed. Normally we'd look for something a little more individual, but the service here was incredibly friendly and fast .. booking in was "I have a reservation", "Thank you sir what name is it?" "Allsopp, John Allsopp", "OK, would you sign here please, and here's your keycard". "Is that it?" "Unless there's anything else I can help you with". We asked for a quiet room and got one. Breakfast was self serve and great, we even sat in the lounge on Saturday night when we got back and relaxed on the sofas and the bar lady explained new fangled young people's drinks to us. Parking's a faff tho, it's basically elsewhere at additional cost, but I think they're building a new car park.; What more can I say, we feel like we've had a week's holiday. Must do some work now. (Tunick: next - previous)
Scarborough derelicts: 11 January 2006: My g/f and I were walking around town over Christmas and noticed again the huge flocks of starlings circling the skies in the evening looking for somewhere to roost.; This time was different though. While we were watching them circle around and around, suddenly one would dive for the ground and a huge swathe would follow .. and not come back up again. We resolved to work out where the starlings roost.; They seemed to be roosting behind the old hospital on south bay, but no matter where we went we could only get glimpses of what was behind there.; However, over a wall at the side, I could hold up my camera and get a picture .. wow, this is the first time I've actually seen it. Can you believe this is here, just behind the beachfront?; It appears, anyway, it's in imminent danger of being demolished by Candama Investors Ltd, you can watch planning progress here (using the reference from the photograph).; .. and that set us off taking pictures of knackered Scarborough buildings we love. There's The Futurist, the future of which is being decided upon. We can't decide (and nor can many of the people we've spoken to about it) whether that rotten old plastic nonsense should be removed and the marble restored to its former glory, or whether the whole rotten old building should be demolished to make way for a more modern facility.; The old Bell Hotel's been more or less like this since we moved here about ten years ago; But, see update.; .. and this, our favourite. Friends helped people get permission to buy this on the story that it was going to open up as a Jazz club, but it looks increasingly likely to be flats now.
Rapid Dentine: 11 January 2006: My case study list has been a bit neglected recently, mostly because my projects have been long term ones that haven't yet reached their finale. However lately I've worked on a few quick-fire projects, and this is one: Rapid Dentine.
Scarborough tide cam: 10 January 2006: Ooh look, a Scarborough tide cam. Thanks Dave for that, I went looking after you mentioned it and couldn't find it myself.
Sleepy Games: 10 January 2006: Me and the missus have been playing games to get to sleep. It started with a humming version of Name That Tune. Ali failed on Tainted Love, even when I hit the bedclothes to mark each synth burst AND gave her clues about the band.; Then we created a game where we imagined an ice cream and jelly combination each, disclosed them, and discussed how that made us compatible or otherwise. Mine was lime jelly and lemon sorbet, while hers was completely made up and so intricate I can't remember it.; Then last night, I threw one of the cats off the bed with an exclamation that reminded me of the catchphrase "you are the weakest link, goodbye". So the game was to alter that to make it more feline. I reached "you are the stinkiest mink, goodbye" before the game was declared null and void due to it being crap.
Price estimation: 9 January 2006: There's a paradox when someone asks for a price for a website. Of course, it's a 'how long is a piece of string' question, but you can't say that it's far too irritating. The price does, however, depend what you want.; The paradox is that possibly those who want a price are price conscious, but the act of determining a price takes time and so costs money, so by asking for an estimate (other than an off-the-top-of-my-head guestimate), they significantly increase the cost of their project.; It's not just the price estimation that costs, if a client is really determined the project doesn't go past a budget figure or is determined to ensure they are getting value for money, that requires more diligent project management, and again, that significantly increases the project cost.; I'm not against all that, I just think there's a paradox there. I suppose it's all about trust. I think a better way of managing web development for most people is to determine what monthly outgoing you are comfortable with and agree that. Then make sure we agree on what is to be worked upon, then carry on until you have what you want, then drop down to about 25% of what you used to pay per month, for a while, just to give a bit of time to iron out any final problems and to ensure the search engine position can be maintained. If you are in a competitive environment or your content changes often, you may need to continue at that level, otherwise you can fall back to more or less nothing in due course.
Scientific process: 8 January 2006: Something in the newspaper made me think about the Cleveland child abuse thing and I asked my other half what was the test that paediatricians were using to determine whether children had been abused. I remember it being something anal, that article reminds me it was called the anal dilation test.; I had in mind that what had happened, and what I've just skimmed seems to back it up, is that a researcher had published a paper in some paediatric academic magazine describing a new thing called the anal dilation test, and then the paediatricians had used that test in practice.; That seems to be missing a whole stage in the scientific process. Surely a new piece of research is submitted to an academic journal, peer reviewed by its panel and then published if it's well founded. At that point, it has not been verified, and that's surely a vital part of science. It's not knowledge yet, you can't use it. All you can do with it is set up your own study to see if you can replicate their findings. If two or three projects get the same result, then you're on to something.; But what if someone does set up that verification study. Regardless of what they find, is the academic journal going to publish their findings? I'm not so sure .. it feels like old news, or no news to me.; Within proper academia, that's fine. People leading their field will know all the research in their area.; But within Occupational Therapy for sure (and it sounds like even in the world of consultant paediatrics), their journal is full of usually fairly flaky research. When my partner trained, they pushed hard the idea of doing research. I think that was because the field is new and it hasn't got a huge body of knowledge yet. There's precious little real research going on, so part of the idea is that OTs see a piece of research in the journal and try to verify it.; The reality is there's no time or money for any practitioner to do that, and over time the journal comes to be seen like most printed media, as a source of truth. So if OTs do read the research, they often read it as if it's knowledge. My partner knows of instances where such research has been put into practice.; I'm just curious how widespread this blurring, this dilution of the scientific process is, and whether it's a problem with all academic journals .. proper academics know where academic journals fit in the process, but there's no policing or control of that boundary area where someone decides to publish dodgy academic research to people who aren't researchers. In the Cleveland case, that resulted in 96 children being taken from their homes in midnight or dawn raids under suspicions of abuse that were later dismissed, and Cleveland isn't the only place this was happening. So it's important.; I'll have to ask some proper academics what they reckon.
Olde recipes: 7 January 2006: This collection of old recipe books presented page by page with smart-alec comments is jolly good fun.
Credit cards: 6 January 2006: I have one credit card which I pay off every month, except when I bought the iBook I spread the £699 payment over two months, earning myself a £15 charge, wiping out three months of positive interest earned on savings for my tax bill. I hadn't intended to do that, but when it came time to pay I hadn't enough to cover it all.; But the interesting thing is, having done that, how many offers I'm now getting for loans and new credit cards. Suddenly I'm getting two or three offers per day through my door.; OK, if I were in their situation I'd do the same. My not paying off my credit card in full is unusual and it's a sign of financial stress they can easily spot, and I've no other loans so I'm a good risk. Still, it feels like I'm being circled by vultures and I worry about the morality of it all. They want you to borrow money, but not too much, and just so they can charge interest and make more money themselves. It's kinda fine in theory but if they target people at brittle points in their lives, that doesn't feel very kind or helpful to me.; Maybe my problem is personal. I've been down that tunnel and I know how dark it can get in there.; Oh, and there are residual 'rules' left over from that time too. First Direct refused me a bank account one time when I suppose I didn't match their demographics and I ruled then I'd never, ever deal with them. Now they're offering to open an account for me, to loan money to me. No, not ever. If you didn't help me when I needed you, I'm not going to benefit you now, why should I? (Which leads to the interesting idea of a bank being a bank for life and taking on bright or promising people early on).
New Years Eve: 4 January 2006: Being, nowadays, veterans of the new years eve sofa, we were fairly surprised to find ourselves at Vivaz for Critical Beatdown, which presumably is self explanatory for anyone under 25, but for the likes of me, is explained as three DJs, one live band (Radio Theatre in this case), variously lit artworks hanging from the ceiling, and alcohol drunk by all.; I was persuaded to go by DJ Godzilla, aka Paul Toole (or is it the other way around) who played some really groovy funk on the night Rah!Collector played our first public gig, and I really wanted to hear more.; Well folks, it was a seriously uplifting experience. When we arrived at about 10:30 it was already busy, the DJs (who were they? can't remember, can't find a link), were excellent.; On the night Rah!Collector played, Radio Theatre came before us and really filled the floor. Interestingly, they filled the floor with gyrating nubiles who arrived for them and were certainly gone by the time we reached the stage. I've honestly never seen an audience like it.; Besides getting our ego stroked a number of times .. one time by a woman coming up to me and my girlfriend and saying how nice we looked together (how nice is that!), another by being spotted and chatted to by a new artist friend Andrew Cheetham, the big deal, and the point of this ramble, is to try to tempt DJ Godzilla to get in touch.; His set was really phenomenal and I'm now desperate to work out what funk is all about. A recent TV program had some of the musicians who used to work with James Brown explain how the rhythm works. Their rule was always to emphasise the first beat, after which you could fanny around until the first beat of the next bar .. for instance on Sex Machine: Get 1*UP*, 2 3 (4get on 1*UP*), 2 3 4Get 1*UP*, (get on *UP*), Stay on the *SCENE*, (get on *UP*), like a sex ma*CHINE*, (get on *UP*). The problem with that, for me, is it's kinda boring. The first beat is the most obvious. I also don't really like to see lots of musicians on stage, it seems bloated to me, so I don't know what James Brown was like at the start of his career, but most of what we see nowadays is that kinda thing. It's also American .. I prefer my music to be British, I can relate to it more easily. So, James Brown being popularly considered to be an entry point into funk and me not knowing anything else about funk, I'm repelled at that point and I haven't investigated further. Having said that, Godzilla opened his set with this and it sounded fantastic.; Looking here, however, I'm filled with the excitement of possibility. Deep Funk, now that sounds like my kinda thing.; OK, I've got to know more. This could be the start of something big. Godzilla? You said you read this (you stroked my ego by saying I should update it more often .. which I'm trying to do here) .. I haven't got your co-ordinates. Get in touch, let's get together sometime .. I'll buy the beers, you provide the music.
Tax training: 3 January 2006: Happy new year, btw :-) Maybe the trick to my blogging is to be brief.; I went on a tax training day in December. I think the tax office does an incredibly good job of making what is a labrynthine system clear to the majority of its users, but one thing stuck with me from the day .. besides the fact that I need to sort out my National Insurance contributions, that is.; Apparently if you're self employed as a carpenter and want to go on a course as a brickie, you can't claim the cost of that course as an expense on your tax return because 'that's another business'.; Well, leaving aside the problem that, as a sole trader, having to conceptually separate your being a brickie from your being a carpenter, and that the expenses of training as a brickie would presumably be claimable against that business so, what, exactly, is the point of that rule since it adds up to the same thing, and in an attempt to construct the world's most convoluted sentence, also the possibility that it's all in the starting definition of your business, so if our carpenter had never said they were a carpenter but had said they were a general builder, or for fun, a worker, or maybe a person, I was, at more or less the same time, reading about the Bauhaus.; Apparently the most interesting thing about the Bauhaus is that is allowed the students complete freedom to pick and choose their lessons. As budding artists, they could follow their nose around courses in ceramics, chair construction and architecture.; I just wonder how the tax office deals with Tracey Emin, who one day paints, another draws, and the next, umm, stitches things .. can't think of the word.; The thing I was left with was a profound depression about 'being a tax person'. Imagine being a tax person and thinking in such a boxed-in way. I would be suicidal. Except, I wouldn't actually do it because I would never be sure how to categorise the whiskey and pills in my accounts. Perpetual torment.; Oh, and yes I know you tax people read this type of stuff in an effort to discover what people are up to. It must be like watching life through the grille of a deep sea diving helmet.; I wonder what happens if you tweak the nose of a tax person.; Maybe this is psychological retribution because the last time I was inspected the chap caused the most immense smell to drift through the office after he'd been to the loo. Obviously, again, the sort of mentality that doesn't do number 2s unless he's being paid.