John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Today: 31 August 2006: It's been a very strange day. I had a new client I've been working on, and yesterday I sent them the first draft of their website. It's only a small one, just a few pages, so there's not been much time for the client to become used to the way I work or to the progress of the design. Their reaction, among other phrases, was that they were "mortally disappointed".; Assuming the client lived to see the morning we had a meeting booked to talk it through. OK maybe it wasn't the best design I've ever done, my partner didn't like it for a start, but nor was it finished, and nor had the client provided any materials to work with .. oh no, I received a drawing. We'd discussed using the person who'd done the drawing to create the page furniture .. buttons, lines and so on .. to make the whole thing consistent, so what I'd put together was more of a functional design than a finished look.; I wrote to say "not to worry", that the way I'd built the site, separating content from the 'look and feel' meant it was easy to change it. That it was for discussion, that (not that I'd lean on this but) it's often quicker and easier to put something together and find out what the client doesn't like about it then make what they do like than attempt to divine all of a client's tastes using endless questions.; I learned that when moving the office around in my marketing company. I'd get some graph paper and make a scale plan of the room, then cut out squares for desks and chairs and the photocopier and move them around the plan using blu-tak in case anyone sneezed, and we'd get everyone involved and agree a plan. Then we'd grab desks and move them. Then someone would say "what if we ... " and I'd want to scream "no, the time for design was on paper, now I'm humping big tables about and I'm not about to do it five times while you rub your chin over which way is best". OK, maybe that's a bit inflexible, but the point is, around the fourth desk-move I discovered that maybe I can imagine the room from a plan, perhaps others can't. And maybe it's the same with websites. We can talk colour schemes and page layouts as long as you like, but until it's built, perhaps it's expecting a lot for people to imagine what it will be like.; Anyway, nothing I wrote or said made any difference at all. The client cancelled the meeting and the project today.; The thing about it is it wasn't rational. I'm perfectly aware of males hiding behind 'rational behaviour' when actually we're all a turbulent mess of emotions and feelings, but I think perhaps there are two things I'm disappointed about here. The first is, I really liked this client, I thought maybe they'd become a friend in due course. I still do like them. Perhaps they liked me too, perhaps that's part of it. They said they'd "completely lost faith in my ability as a web developer .. it's like falling out of love with someone, you can never really get it back". Perhaps that provides more than a little insight. But the major thing is, here's someone who is dissatisfied with what I've done and who has denied me the chance to discuss it with them, to understand, to rework it if necessary. If I need to learn something from this, I want to learn it. And now I've got someone knocking around who has a bad tale to tell about me that, from my perspective, isn't going to be right. I want .. I think I deserve .. a chance to put my side.; I think what went wrong here is that I know what stage in the process I've reached. I know what is near complete on the page and what is completely up for change. I know, therefore, what's important when judging the site (the things I've completed) and there are aspects of the page I'm completely disregarding because I know they will be fixed in a later part of the process. The client doesn't have that knowledge so is judging everything equally.; I do follow a process, and for the majority of clients I put up a progress site so they can see what stage I'm at, what's been taken into account, what's coming up, and how different elements of the page come together. It's an opportunity too for a client to spot cul-de-sac's early on: the earlier the better as far as cost and time is concerned. For instance, I'll choose a colour scheme and a layout before making the page, and I'll choose a 'mood' and an audience before that. If I'm wrong, that can be fixed early. The client said they "weren't impressed by all those reports and diagrams". There's a major misunderstanding here that I need to address for every future client. That's my process, I do it for myself in order to maintain and build quality and repeatability. I provide a window into that process for those clients who are interested and possibly excited about their new website and who want to be involved. It doesn't cost any extra for me to do it, and you don't have to look at it (but you might save yourself some money if you do).; I've only really had this kind of irrationality a couple of times before. Once, as a marketing chap, I was out on the road selling, I'd gone down to London and got a client one day, the next day I was elsewhere (so hadn't had the chance to brief the team back in the office), but by midday the next day the woman had called to cancel the project because we hadn't been in touch fast enough.; Another time I was a student hitching from Leeds to Nottingham and got in a chap's car and when I put my seat belt on he stopped the car and asked me to get out, since I obviously didn't trust his driving.; Finally, there's another thing going on. If you employ me, you employ a professional engineer and designer, and you do that because you haven't the skills, ability or time do the job yourself. An engineer proceeds on the basis of science. I can justify everything I do. So at what point does it swing around full circle that the person who employed me as a professional can dismiss what I've done without even listening to the rationale? I've always been of the opinion that if you employ an expert you give them room to do what they do best. Somehow, I got that from watching the credits at the end of a U2 film.; So, there was all that. And then later I went to see a brand new client and I worked on their PC and website for an hour or so and they made me cups of coffee and I fussed the cat and met their mother and halfway through they said "I like you, so don't worry about anything, we'll go ahead". And as luck would have it, that project is worth twice the one I lost.
BT: 29 August 2006: My in-laws want wireless broadband, so about a month ago we ordered that. Being older, they are with BT for their phone and dialup and they feel comfortable with a brand that's served them well for decades. I'd not used BT for Internet services so I too thought they would provide exemplary service. Since my in-laws aren't very confident with such things, we arranged switch-on to be last Friday so I could be there to install it (for various reasons we couldn't meet up before then). They had to stay in to receive the hardware, and broadband would be switched on at the exchange.; On Friday, they received the email saying everything was up and running and that they would contact us if there was any problem. The parcel arrived by 10am. So on Sunday we drove the 140 miles to their house to set the thing up.; The instructions in the router say to install the filters and plug the router into the phone line and into the mains and wait a couple of minutes until the broadband light lights up. They say DO NOT plug the router into the computer until asked to. The broadband light didn't. The fix for this was to check I had a phone signal at the point where the router was plugged in (I had), and then to remove everything else from the line, use a different filter, and plug directly into the line socket without anything else (eg. extension cable) in the way. So there I was, squatted by the front door. No light (I had wireless, so the unit was powered). So I phoned their technical help desk (that was the next step).; Everyone I spoke to from here on was, I think, Indian .. I'll assume so. It's worth pointing out because it is stressful calling a technical helpline, and dealing with a strong accent, whether it's Indian or Scottish, just adds to the stress. It also increases the feeling of being out of control. Not many people would accept that the call centre in India has access to the same dept of information available to the engineering department here.; So anyway, she said "What operating system are you using?". So I started to explain that that wasn't relevant, that if her next step was to say "OK, look in control panel ... " that the router isn't plugged in, that I hadn't installed the CD, that that computer was in a different room, and that if she wanted me to get it all connected I'd have to ring back, and also that I'm just following the instructions BT have provided, and she said "What operating system are you using?".; So that put me in mind of how call centres work. I've never worked in one or for one, but I have set up telemarketing scripts, I do have a good friend who is an expert on such things, and I have helped to set up the relevant software, so I do know something. Telemarketing scripts are flowcharts. I don't know whether it's the same for technical support, because you'd have to capture all eventualities in the first few questions which would be difficult and error prone. Anyway, that rigid response from the first woman, and the fact that I'd called the number from the broadband installation instructions, made me think they were working from a script. That would be why any sensible conversation would fall on deaf ears (anyone can follow a script, they don't have to know what they are talking about and their only way out would be to stick more rigidly to the script). It's also infuriating to someone who knows something about what they are doing, because sometimes, as in this case, you can see the wrong road you are on and are helpless to get off it until they realise it and you can say "I told you that five minutes ago, am I being charged for this call?". So I said if I needed to connect my PC to my router I'd have to call back.; Back at the desk, I called again and the chap said, almost straight away (what a star!), "your broadband hasn't been activated yet".; So, there I was, on a three hundred mile round trip that could only be arranged with a month's notice, which I'd proceeded with because they'd sent everything saying it was up and running, and it wasn't.; I phoned several times after that trying to get through to the installations or engineering department, but it's a weekend and a bank holiday. The installations department actually made me laugh: "Our normal opening hours are 8am to 6pm on a weekday, and 9am to 1pm on a Saturday. Goodbye".; What if this was actually important? What if the phone line had died, surely there are engineers on call. Surely there are staff around. One Indian chap said of my problems trying to speak to someone out of working hours "I know sir, we have the same problem".; I had a phone call at about 10am this morning from my mother-on-law, the broadband light's come on. Well whoopiedoo. And yes, they could attempt to install it themselves, but look at what just happened to me. They just aren't confident with the computer so what are the chances?; BT should have let us know if they hadn't been able to activate our broadband. They said they would. That would have saved the trip. No problem. Well, they'd had four weeks notice .. what stops them activating our broadband ahead of time? We still couldn't connect because we wouldn't have received the router yet.; So I come back to The Corporation principle. You wouldn't do this with a sole trader or a partnership or a charity or a school .. but corporations only operate on money. So I find I can no longer say that BT provides an acceptable service.; You'd have thought, wouldn't you, that BT would know how to operate telephone support? My experience was completely appalling. I called three people and got three different answers to my technical issue. Not one of them acknowledged the installation stage I'd reached. I called probably five or six different numbers and got nowhere. My problem wasn't solved until it was too late. And they didn't do what they promised.; I think their complaints centre is at BT Yahoo!, BT Complaints Centre, Durham (or "Durr Ham" if you're an Indian call centre worker), DH98 1BT.
Tall people are smarter: 26 August 2006: Of course, I always knew it was true (I wouldn't be that smart if I didn't, now, would I)?
Scarborough venues: 25 August 2006: The band went on a tour of local venues last night, and rather than write it all up somewhere else I thought I'd write it up here so everyone can benefit.; We started at The Lancaster at the north end of south bay, opposite the harbour, near the funfair. It's got a fairly large rectangular room, a stage, a PA, lights, lots of bands lined up to play including The Variants, but not much in the way of real ale. Still, we liked it and shortlisted it.; The Newcastle Packet was next. It's quite large with a small corner stage, some lights, a PA. It's got a distinctly working class pub air about it, which took me back to my adolescence .. it felt 'real', good and warm to me, but not everyone agreed.; The Merchant we know about, there's a small room to play in downstairs but it's too small for us.; The New George is more set up for dancing, the doorman said they don't have live music.; Olivers doesn't seem to have found its niche yet. It advertises an International lady DJ, which is fine, but the furnishings look like a school canteen. Anyway, nowhere to play, so that's that.; The Pickwick has a nice sized and shaped room downstairs with a bar but everyone we've talked to used the word 'dive', so I suppose the place could do with being spruced up a bit.; Scholars is a nice place with good beer, if a bit expensive, a stage, some ceiling spots, and a clientelle that are used to listening to good music .. there's jazz there regularly. So we liked and shortlisted that.; Liquid is the real thing, an underground venue with a proper stage, full PA, lights but also lots of big leather sofas to lounge about on. Excellent, but quite large so it's possible to rattle around in it. Maybe we could do a support there, or if we get ourselves a following then it would be good.; The Old Vic has live music on a Monday night but didn't seem like our sort of thing. The New Tavern at the end of Falsgrave also has music, Johnny Jump Up were listed. It's divided into two by a staircase. The room where the music's played is where the pool table is, they jack it off to the side and cover it when music's playing. Dunno, this one didn't catch us.; The Tap and Spile, well now. It's a great real ale pub, but there are lots of people who don't get on with the landlord, including us .. we've boycotted the place for years, partly because he wouldn't let our friends with no brolly shelter from a deluge, even though the pub door was open and the Tap and Spile was their destination (there was a large group of us), because it was ten to twelve and they opened at twelve .. stupid stuff but real too. But that's obviously not holding the place back, it was full of our kind-of audience, the right age group, the room's good. They have no PA or lights to use, but otherwise it's perfect. Oh, they only have live bands on a Sunday, except every 5/6 weeks they have a live weekend, so Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Anyway, that's shortlisted.; Cellars on Valley Road is too small for us and completely the wrong shape.; The Ramshill has a good student clientelle and a big room. Johnny, the chap behind the bar basically signed us up there and then for a future Friday, so that's shortlisted.; We were too late for The Cask. People keep talking about the room downstairs but I remember it being too small. We ended up in Bacchus and they have live bands downstairs, but again it's small. One for the cv though, possibly.; We didn't make it up North Marine Road, Indigo Alley has regular live music and the landlord was happy for us to play, but it's basically two rooms .. it's just a strange shape.; A friend recommended we didn't play the Albert. The Cricketers used to have good beer but has changed hands. It has a nice room upstairs, a bar, and panoramic views of North Bay (so it can be a cold room in winter). We've heard The North Riding is alright but we've no idea about music there.; So two of us are tasked with organising gigs in two pubs each, I've got the Tap and Spile and the Ramshill, and the guitarrist's got Scholars and The Lancaster. You'll hear about gigs through the band site, I suppose.
Yahoo!: 25 August 2006: I've used Yahoo! for a long time now, but just had a bad experience.; I came to my diary and found this ad for the Kia Rio Zapp appeared on my screen. OK, they are irritating but normally there's a way to click them off, or if not then they go away in the end. This one didn't, so it completely wrecked the functionality of the page. Even more irritating, in my effort to get rid of it I clicked it, so now they have me as a statistic, how Kia must be loving the number of clicks they are getting, something that would encourage more of the same.; So I thought I'd complain to Yahoo. There's no obvious link to do so. The page I did find says "We are always looking for ways to improve Yahoo! Give us your comments, feedback, and suggestions!". Like hell, the page either sends you to help pages, implicitly saying "there's nothing wrong with us, it must be you", or allows comments on only a very narrow band of topics, either abuse (but I don't think they mean abuse of my time), or questions about getting listed in their search engine. There appears to be no way to contact them through email, no phone, no postal address.; So fuckem, my moan is here and public. I suppose the service is free and until now they've done a great job. It's just irritating, don't they check their ads before they publish them?
Beached 5: 25 August 2006: Cap'n Ants has done a fabulous job of documenting Beached in photographs. This is me running past on the Thursday as they were building the stage.; The navigation at upforit.tv is a bit weird, but basically if you find the Beached poster, an orangey yellow thing currently in the middle towards the bottom of the screen and then click for webcam what you get isn't a webcam at all but a screenfull of thumbnail images, in reverse order. So the bottom pictures show the stage being built, and the top ones it being dismantled, and everything in between. You can kinda navigate by where the night shots are. There was a film screening on Thursday night, a big band on Friday, then two nights of live music.; Maybe Ants flagged a bit by Sunday, it doesn't look like he caught our performance, the first pic from Sunday looks like Chris Helme.
Caterpillar: 25 August 2006: I noticed one of our ferns was being eaten away, which surprised me, for some reason I didn't think ferns were eaten by caterpillars.; There were also huge unmistakeable caterpillar poos around the place.; Now I've found it, I can't seem to identify it. Well, not in five minutes anyway, but I wanted to put it up here so maybe when I've got a little more time I'll come back and have another go.
Eastborough: 25 August 2006: A friend has some great views of Eastborough from her flat
Neartou.com: 22 August 2006: I've also been working on a project of my own. Back in May I said I was going to implement one of my many fantastic ideas for online businesses. I've a list of about fifteen that, if time were infinite, I'd implement, but clearly it isn't so I ranked them according to their potential versus their ease and speed of implementation and any risk, and Neartou.com is what I've come up with.; All I'm prepared to say about it at the moment is it's a local guide to businesses featuring a photograph of the business premises. Once I take on the main shopping area the pictures will form a complete street but while I'm circling around my house it doesn't quite hang together. Try entering something like 'flats' into the search.; Clearly it's rather undercooked at the moment, but I wanted to get something started, even if it was basic, so I could start gathering data, introduce the idea, get some feedback and test everything. It'll grow and develop from here.; Neartou.com, you heard it here first.
M P Retail: 22 August 2006: I've another case study for you: M P Retail
Beached 4: 21 August 2006: Wow. What a weekend. I started on Saturday installing someone's new computer and getting their broadband up and running. Dell has gone down in my estimation.; Windows installation seems very simple indeed, just answer a few questions. But at some point, it may be still part of Windows installation, you get a choice of how you are going to connect to the Internet: I think it's through a LAN, direct through an ISP, or via cable. No choice for "I'm not". Yet the instructions that came from the broadband supplier (I recommended Eclipse and we appear happy so far) say not to connect the router until you've put in the CD and then follow its instructions. So we have a dilemma. Can't say "not yet" to the Internet question, can't connect the router. OK, the fault for that is probably Windows.; But once Windows fires up, all sorts of things kick off, most of which require Internet access. There were three different types of automatic updating going on. One from Dell, the Microsoft one, and InstallShield too. At one point I was asked the equivalent of "Do you want Bibbly or Bobbly?" with no explanation of what the two options were. And McAfee kicks in too. All this before I've had chance to get connected to the Internet.; Dell seems to be a bit self important. Its screen didn't allow minimisation and was always on top so I just had to move it out of the way while I sorted the Internet connection. And if you followed the Dell link above, you probably found you couldn't come back from it. Pain in the arse, and contrary to good netiquette.; Dell seems to have an arrangement with three Broadband suppliers. Why? Why not just choose one? So the desktop is littered with three icons and the user is required to make a choice. Now I better understand what the desktop is really for, that's a mess. So, Windows works, the hardware works, but Dell seems to fall down on the user experience part once Windows is installed, and it's all stuff Dell has elected actively to change. It all seems designed to flummox the new user, so I'm not happy.; Then I went for an 11 mile, 2.5 hour, 2,250 kcal run. Wow. It was only meant to be 8 miles but I couldn't do the route I planned. OK, after 8 I walked 5 minutes, ran 5 minutes which is partly why the time is slow, but until the tail end I really felt comfortable and happy with the whole thing.; If you stick YO11 1RN into the Ordnance Survey's GetaMap service you can follow my route. I walked the first ten minutes of warmup from there West to the orange traffic island at the YMCA, and then North along North Marine Road to Peasholm Park, I started running somewhere along there. I ran around the North side of the lake and then headed South West following the stream uphill through the cemetary (which is beautiful btw), across the old railway and continued following the stream to the red A171, turned right (North) along that and West up the side of Yorkshire Coast College and the hospital. I followed that yellow road around Throxenby Mere and around Raincliffe Woods until I reached the junction with Mowthorpe Road at Green Gate. That's all very beautiful but you do have to keep your wits about you with cars and corners and if two are coming from opposite directions you really do have to jump up into the bushes at the side, I wouldn't recommend the route if you are deaf, and it's not a route along which to listen to music.; Online I can see my error now because I can magnify it, but the map scan I made and printed out didn't clearly show it. My plan was to go South along Forge Valley, but follow footpaths up from the road and come out at Osborne Lodge. I managed to find the first path up from the road, but as you can see there's actually no path up to Osborne Lodge from there, you have to join it from Green Gate. What isn't immediately apparent is that woodland is set on a 45 degree slope and much of the stuff you'd want to grab onto to haul yourself up is either holly or rotten and just comes away in your hand. I ran along the path for a while and then decided I had to make a go for it up that slope. It was fairly hostile. I did emerge through the bushes on the top path but then had no idea how far I'd travelled. I made the wrong decision and continued South. I could see a building to my left but it was very square and very modern and didn't seem to match with the words Osborne Lodge and I couldn't see whether there was another building on the map.; So anyway, that's why the run was longer than planned. I ended up running South on the Easternmost path along the edge of the woods, which irritatingly, after I'd fought so hard to reach the top, headed back down to the road. I then headed East along the woodland path opposite the weir, and headed North along the path with The Tongues on my right, past Keepers Cottage which is a dog kennels, continuing straight to the aerials on Row Brow. I thought I was knackered, and it's a long industrial-farming area with nothing much to enjoy, but looking back it was one big long hill. Never mind, what goes up must come down, so I'll get a lovely slope downwards. No. Heading North on the path from the aerials was a steep slope along a muddy path filled with rubble. No going fast on that. It would work much better in the other direction going up that hill and then taking the long slope down. Once I'd joined the yellow road I could make my way back the same way, except knowing I was late I didn't come back through Peasholm, just took the shortest route home from the cemetary. So the outgoing part was great, but the coming back wasn't. Next time I think I'll try coming back along the sea cut, just North of Raincliffe Woods.; Then there was Saturday's Beached, written about below, and Sundays. Sunday started with me and some of the DTs (Jamie & Kyle) supporting Leafy (also in the DTs) doing her song that she wrote in Beached Academy. I should have video of the view from the stage in due course, I'll upload that. I found myself nervous mid-song, but only in my left leg which was shaking all over. Lucky, then, that the hi-hat wasn't working properly (it was always open). As we went on the stage manager said "a word of advice, 'no wibbling'. Don't play bits of guitar or anything, just go on, play your song, and come off again". So I wasn't allowed to hit the kit before the song started. So there's me used to an electric kit, on a real kit I'd never seen before, about to play a song I'd played three times before with the final version only five minutes before in the tent around the back. Anyway, it all went fine barring the heavens opening.; Next up was Kyle, his brother Kane, Jacob and I think his girlfriend Lea with their natural history song, also written the week before at Beached Academy, about beavers. I love it. I should be able to upload video of that.; Highlights of the rest of the day, for us, were Con-fe-dance, Kava Kava (try 'Bank Job', my kinda thing), with Roy Wood lookalike Pat Fulgoni on vocals and groovy synth, they have a sorted out rhythm section and two groovy dancing saxophonists. Yep, it comes through great on the records too .. I'm a fan.; Chris Helme (this I think) had a really great voice. The Scaramanga Six were excellent, but the stars for me and my g/f were Amsterdam. This is perhaps the first time I've felt a Wikipedia page to be biased or full of marketing hyperbole.; When I was a student first time around (this really tells you what I'm like) I used to get shivvers down my spine at great bits of music. The difference with me is, I made a list of them and ranked songs accordingly. The winning song, the one that gave me the most spine tingling moments, was Temptation by New Order (available on the album Substance). As you get older and fewer things seem fresh and new, those spine tingling moments become rarer. Amsterdam gave us both a spine tingle with their passion and energy and power. Great stuff.; The final shout has to go to the sound man, Pete Turner I'm told, who after a quick google may well have been the sound engineer for the Sisters of Mercy. Anyway, great sound throughout. Thanks, it really makes a difference.; So on Sunday we treated Scarborough like a holiday resort: ate ice cream and freshly fried doughnuts, had coffee in the nice new coffee place Cielo's (opposite the harbour), had a pint in the Merchant, met all sorts of friends and stood for about ten hours watching bands through torrential rain and sun. And in the darkness at the end of the night, watching the fire-eaters and spinners on the beach, looking around at the sea and the stars and the lights from the arcades, and watching the crowd and the band we had an emotional moment. We live here. It's the end of the summer. Everything's changing again.
Beached 3: 20 August 2006: Looks like it's back up and running. Oh, no it's not, it's hacked again. If you did see the hacked version using Windows, best do a virus check. The Enemy (NME?) were the best I saw and they weren't even listed. Devvo was a complete tosser, raising boos from the audience. When they announced him I thought we were going to get some ageing Americans singing "Are we not men?", I'd have been impressed. Apparently though it's all an act and he's a nice chap really. Racking my brains where I've heard Vib Gyor before, it's a computer thing from my time in the 80s I'm sure, and even then harking back into the origins of computing, like Foobar. 4 Sept Update: Oh! Of course, it's the rainbow colours mnemonic (violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red).
Beached 2: 18 August 2006: Well, that's nice of some Turkish geezer to hack the Beached website so no-one knows what's on. If you're using Windows I wouldn't recommend visiting it to check in case there's a security risk. I may remember to post when it's back up and running, or if I don't by Sunday the show will be over anyway.
Beached: 17 August 2006: The Beached festival is upon us again and this year's worked really well so far. They organised Beached Academy last week in which interested people could spend a week learning about the music industry in one of two streams .. musician or techie, free of charge. Three friends from the second band I'm in, now officially named The DTs, went through the artist stream and had to write a song which they then play on the Beached stage on Sunday. I've been coralled to play drums on one so .. wow .. I'm playing Beached!; One resulting band sounds really excellent, can't wait to see them.; The result? I'm going to have to face mySpace. It grates against my very being. MySpace is owned by Murdoch, is almost unusable, is full of ripped off copyrighted material, takes so much time you haven't any left for real life, is media led (you like Friends? Hey, I like Friends too, we have so much in common), and it makes me feel like an old person trying to use the video.; It's also incredibly popular which just makes it worse. While I'm pushing the messages of usability and accessibility, of good design, of doing new original work and so defining your own brand, everyone's flocking to mySpace without a care in the world. It's very bad news.; But I have friends I very much respect who swear by it. Imagine: me a proper web designer, them telling me how fabulous mySpace is.; Anyway, in a professional capacity I ought to find out wtf's going on, so, against every part of my soul, I've set up a mySpace page of my own. Can you still be my friend?
Richard Hawley: 12 August 2006: Just in case you haven't noticed, the cover of the Mercury Prize nominee Richard Hawley's album Coles Corner is a photograph of him stood outside the front of Scarborough's very own Stephen Joseph Theatre.
The Beauty Myth: 12 August 2006: As I think I've mentioned before, I've been re-reading The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, a late eighties feminist work about how women are kept down by a requirement to be beautiful.; Maybe it's easy to mock, but I think this book has really changed me. It made total sense, and opened my eyes as I worked through it.; If I can summarise mostly from memory: firstly, there are an increasing number of jobs women who are not 'beautiful' are barred from. Reading the news. Receptionist. Art gallery worker. Any job in advertising and PR (I've sat in the reception of several London PR agencies and watched the staff walk by .. it's shocking). Working on the cosmetics counter. Air hostess. Dancer. In fact, anywhere a non-beautiful woman might justifiably make an adverse difference to the company's profitability, anywhere a woman comes into contact with the public, or with a man. That's not like saying I, as a 6'6" male am barred from ever flying fighter jets because I wouldn't fit in the cockpit. I may be barred from that by my physical characteristics, but in compensation all sorts of opportunities are open to me because of my height. A corresponding set of opportunities do not open up before the non-beautiful woman.; How should women dress at work? Case law paints an extremely confusing picture. There's basically no way to win. Women are to dress "to be businesslike yet feminine". Wolf states that 9/10 women experience harassment at work. A worker at the John Lewis Partnership, a beacon of good management, was told she "needed some improvement from the neck up". These requirements overlap, so it's impossible to win. Men just wear a suit. There is no equivalent. Men just have one pair of shoes, women must have shoes to match. Women need 'outfits' in order to compete 'equally' with men in the workplace. They need to learn and regularly apply innumerable beauty techniques that men don't bother with. Yet women in two-career families still come home to do 75% of the housework. In fact, globally, women do twice as much work as men. The requirement to be beautiful too is the equivalent of a third shift, it's another thing required of women that's not required of men that acts to keep women chronically exhausted and poor.; Incidentally, John Molloy wrote "The Women's Dress for Success Book" after studying womens' clothes at work and relating it to their success and stated the skirted suit is the female equivalent of the male suit. Women who wear (wore (80s, remember)) it were more successful. But the fashion industry, seeing a potential decline in their influence and sales, had other things to say on the subject.; A system that pays more for men's skills than women's at the same time pays more for women's bodies. Women earn more from selling their bodies than their skills, and women know this. According to Wolf, "Employers admit that 'one way of weeding out women applicants for a job is to readvertise it at a higher salary'". Women have learned to doubt their own worth.; In popular culture, things happen to the beautiful, and not to the ordinary. Women are judged on their looks. Margaret Thatcher, a great leader but you wouldn't want to shag her. To my shame I discovered I do this too. I watch the Channel 4 News and if they cut to some government scientist who happens to look like a normal fifty year old woman but who is wearing, because she has a serious message to deliver, a serious face, when she appears in a flash on the screen a little voice in my head goes "bloody hell!". And if she's nice looking, what happens then? Do I listen to what she has to say, or do I daydream through her words while trying to work out whether it's her mouth or her nose that's prettiest? I consider myself enlightened. So what chance do women have of being heard?; Where is feminism? Where are the forums for sharing the experience of being female? Womens magazines carry great journalism about women's experiences worldwide. But they also carry beauty pornography, advertising from the beauty industry, image after endless image of the perfect body. Except they are not true. Every image has had age and imperfection airbrushed away (I've done it myself), making attainment impossible. And since those advertisements pay for the magazine, the editorial is prevented from writing about anything that might damage their income. The Beauty Myth may never be written about there.; The Beauty Myth is so ingrained that women are no longer sure they want it any other way. This reminded me that when Dove started advertising using real women, it ran into opposition. Women didn't want images like themselves, they wanted images to aspire to. Or was that a message I received through a medium that distorts reality? Were those complainants agents of the beauty industry? Why is that snippet of unverified information in my head?; Whereas naturally women share their experiences together and through the generations, this is happening less and less. We are more independent. We buy what we need. But also, the Beauty Myth casts women as competitors. Since women are judged on their looks, who is the most beautiful woman in the room? "Bet you wish your girlfriend looked hot like me". "Who let the dogs out?"; "Everybody look at me, me
I walk in the door you start screaming
Come on everybody whatchu here for?
Move your body around like a nympho
Everybody get your necks to crack around
All you crazy people come on jump around
I want to see you all on your knees
you either want to be with me, or be me": Maneater, Nelly Furtado; In this culture, women are repelled from each other. The Beauty Myth has destroyed female solidarity in less than a generation, defusing feminism, turning women into dependents.; When it comes to religion, I have blogged about part of this not so long ago. But it's worth saying that, according to the bible, men were created in God's image, while women were created from man's spare rib, a spare part. Men are naturally God-like, women are naturally like leftovers. Consequently, men are generally satisfied with their bodies. Women are generally dissatisfied with theirs.; The psychological drivers present in religion have been co-opted in the service of the beauty industry. Original sin is now original ugliness, and it's never too late to repent (at the cosmetics counter). "Women were genitally chaste for God; now they are orally chaste for the God of Beauty". Now women can enjoy sex for pleasure they may no longer enjoy eating for pleasure lest that cake might show on their bodies when they get in the bedroom. The link between being thin and being sexy is a very recent creation of the beauty myth.; To buy skin creams you have to believe. They no longer reduce wrinkles, they improve your skin at a microscopic level, protecting against unseen aggressors, giving you radiance and making you feel reborn using pseudo-scientific nonsense marketing names for their special ingredients.; The diet industry performs like a cult. Followers stick to a rigid regime from which they must not deviate, they renounce pleasure in food, they alone know how fat and ugly their body is (ignoring all compliments). There are mantras: chewing food thirty two times, putting the fork down between bites, drinking ten glasses of water a day. The day's calorie count always in her mind.; Wolf claims the beauty myth hit as soon as the second wave of feminism worked. I remember walking around Nottingham as a child holding my mum's hand and pointing out the women drivers. They were rare and new. Women were flooding into the workplace and, yes, learning to drive. My mum did the same. Something in the system had to hold women back to protect male power. The beauty myth was it.; Some of what follows is sexually explicit (but not too bad), so if you don't want to read that, move on. Women, in theory, are supposed have almost inexhaustible capacity for sexual pleasure. But that's not what women are getting. Wolf claims research shows the sexual revolution has left many women "feeling remote from their full ability to feel pleasure".; In essence, it goes like this. Sexuality is learned behaviour. Men have traditionally gained their cues from porn. Women don't have an equivalent. Where is the model of female sexuality? The only thing I've ever come across is Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden that documents women's sexual fantasies, but then I'm no expert on sources of such information (update: although now I'm wondering about it, the Girl with a one-track mind blog which I read about in the Independent on Sunday seems a possible source (it is explicit) since it began anonymously so she was free to write what she really felt (although obviously that was influenced by the Beauty Myth, so it isn't 'pure') and she says she's a feminist (I'm not totally convinced but a) who am I to judge, and b) part of the point of this blog is that I don't know what's happened to feminism, maybe this is what's happened. Dunno, there are things there that don't ring true). A quick Amazon search on My Secret Garden brings up other possibilities (people who bought this also bought .. ) although I think it wouldn't take many steps at all before you're out of the realm of works written to further the cause of understanding and into works written purely for eroticism which probably just make the situation worse. Probably better off with Fat is a feminist issue.; Wolf says when it comes to female sexuality there is a void that must be filled. Beauty pornography does that with the message: in order to feel like the women in the ads, I must look like that. It's a voyeuristic sex, sex through someone else's eyes, sex while thinking "do I look good?"; I'm curious about what female sexuality is really like when it's not shaped by this culture. Obviously Nancy Friday's book reflects societal norms. Back in the late seventies, pre-Internet obviously, I wanted to create a system of terminals available in record shops that did what Amazon does now, that tied together purchases to create a 'people who bought this also bought that' facility, so people could explore other music. The reason I didn't persue it is I thought "you can't trust the people" (not my usual thought) "because their opinion is formed by the likes of the NME". At the time, in my post-punk, New Wave world, it was. In other words, that's not a way to get people's true likes and dislikes, it's more a way of measuring how well marketing has implanted things in our heads. Nancy Friday's book suffers from the same problem, it may offer a useful glimpse of what women fantasise about, but it doesn't tell us what women would fantasise about if they were free of influence.; OK, here's an important piece from the book: "Heterosexual love, before the women's movement, was undermined by women's economic dependence on men. Love given freely between equals is the child of the women's movement, and a very recent historial possibility, and as such very fragile. It is also the enemy of some of the most powerful interests in this society. If women and men in great numbers were to form bonds that were equal, nonviolent, and sexual, honoring the female principle no less or more than the male, the result would be more radical than the establishment's worst nightmares of homosexual 'conversions'. A mass heterosexual deviation into tenderness and mutual respect would mean real trouble for the status quo .. the good news would get out onto the street: Free women have more fun; worse, so do free men."; "Women who have broken out of gender roles have proved manageable: those few with power are being retrained as men. But with the apparition of numbers of men moving into passionate, sexual love of real women, serious money and authority could defect to join forces with the opposition .. It would be the downfall of civilisation as we know it - that is, of male dominance, and for heterosexual love, the beginning of the beginning."; And later: "militarism (supported by nearly one third of the US government's budget) depends on men choosing the bond with one another over the bond with women and children. Men who loved women would shift loyalties back to the family and community .. serious lovers and fathers would be unwilling to believe the standard propaganda of militarism .. if men's love for women and for their own children led them to define themselves first as fathers and lovers, the propaganda of war would fall on deaf ears .. this percentage of the economy is at risk from heterosexual love."; The last thing the beauty myth wants is sexual contentment, what sells product is sexual discontent. The beauty industry wants women to hate themselves.; And hate themselves, they do. Anorexia and bulemia strike a million American women every year, 150,000 women die of it, every year, that's more than die of AIDS worldwide (late 80s figures, remember). A study of UK adolescent girls shows 1% are anorexic. There are 6,000 new cases every year and maybe 3.5 million cases. Why now? A generation ago, the average model weighed 8% less than the average American woman. Today (late eighties), it's 23% less. In a 1984 Glamour magazine survey of 33,000 women, 75% aged between 18 and 35 thought themselves fat (only 25% were medically overweight), and 45% of the underweight women thought they were too fat. The Glamour respondents chose 'losing ten to fifteen pounds' above success at work or in love as their most desired goal. What's happened is women's sense of their ideal self has been set at about a stone below their natural weight, which means they face a constant struggle against themselves, against biology. What's wrong is the image, not the weight.; Fat is a natural part of being female. A fifth of women who exercise to shape their bodies have menstrual irregularities and diminished fertility. Infertility and hormone imbalance are common among women whose fat-to-lean ratio (I've no idea what that means) falls below 22 percent, which Wolf says is (was) the ideal model size. Fat regulates sexual desire too. Apparently, plumper women desire sex more often than thinner women. "Subjects of one experiment stopped masturbating or having sexual fantasies at 1,700 calories a day". To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.; Dieting causes irrationality (replacing the idea of menstrual irrationality when that couldn't be sustained). 36 young and healthy volunteers showing high levels of ego strength, emotional stability and good intellectual ability were placed on an extended low calorie diet in which their food intake was reduced by half, a not uncommon dieting regime. After losing about 25% of their body weight they noticed: food preoccupation, emotional disturbance: depression, hysteria, angry outbursts, psychotic levels of disorganisation. Then they lost their ability to function in work and social contexts due to apathy, reduced energy and alertness, social isolation and decreased sexual interest. They reported relentless hunger. Some succumbed to eating binges, followed by hysterical, half-crazed confessions. They were irritable, tense and full of vague complaints. Some required tranquilisers. The subjects were a group of completely normal, healthy college men.; "The compulsion to imitate (the thin ideal) is not something trivial that women choose freely to do to ourselves. It is something serious being done to us to safeguard political power".; What woman nowadays has not planned, for a moment, what plastic surgery they might accept? Maybe only a decade ago most women would not have considered it. Wolf considers it mostly violence against women.; Wolf is not against adornment. She points to a possible way forward. The beauty myth is harmful because too much depends on it. When women are free to play, when whether a woman has dressed up or not doesn't matter in any material sense, then the beauty myth will hold no more power. She urges women to be shameless, be greedy. "Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like."; I need to find out what Wolf is writing nowadays. How did all this pan out in the 15 years that followed its publication? The Beauty Myth appears stronger, capturing men too, although of course anything we do to make ourselves look better is more or less play. Certainly plastic surgery is now commonplace.; What I see, actually, is a completely different world. I remember seeing women actually burning their bras in the news as a kid. When I studied the first time at Leeds University, the whole place was political, every woman was a feminist, every student politically active. Punk and the music that followed it was all political. The Yorkshire Ripper killed Jacqueline Hill (more (unsavoury) detail) while I was there .. I remember turning up to the Student's Union the morning after to see banner after banner making sure we knew what had happened. Men were dangerous: we had codes of conduct I still follow to this day: if you find yourself walking behind a woman at night, cross over the road or hold back; if you accompany a woman home, stick around until she's safely got through her door. A judge ordered that a woman who wore a 'provocative outfit' was asking to be raped. It's there I sought to discover feminism and understand it. I'm inclined that way anyway, but also I wanted an intelligent, switched on, energetic, intelligent, political woman as a partner and I wanted to be a good person, to understand. I read every issue of Spare Rib. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be part of it.; What a difference nowadays. I don't think I heard the word 'feminism' once in my recent three years of study. Young women have all the fruits of that struggle, they are free to go into bars wearing very little (don't I sound the prude!), get wholesomely drunk, and they are more or less safe .. maybe I'm wrong about that, but it's surely more true than it was.; I'm wondering when all this will kick off. Perhaps when those young women who have the freedom to choose their career, to plan their life, to have children when they wish, perhaps when they feel the force of the beauty myth as they start to age, perhaps that generation will just expect and will mobilise when they don't get.; But in this age where no-one seems interested in politics, where politics is about managing us rather than representing us, when we go to war despite the majority view, we can be sure 'they' are well ahead of us. My guess is it'll take an almighty heave to get this to change. But when that heave comes, you can count me in. I hope I get to see it.
Running pace: 11 August 2006: Every month I check my running pace at the gym. How fast can I run at 142 heart beats per minute? Right now I'm getting into my heaviest training month, but last week I had to rest because I got a cramp in one of the small muscles in my back so I couldn't work out how to stretch it out before it knotted, so that was that and then, because my muscles were trying to compensate, I pulled my neck trying to replace an under-cabinet strip light in the kitchen. Anyway, the upshot is, I was off running last week.; So on Tuesday I checked my pace. At the start of June I was running at 6 miles per hour, which is slow but OK. At the start of July, 6.1 mph, fine. At the start of August, 4.8m mph. WTF? That's just ridiculous. I've been trying to work it out. Sometimes that happens because you're fighting an infection, but I don't think that's it. Maybe, actually, I'm doing too much and my muscles are repairing, but I'm really not pushing myself. Too little? But I'm doing more than before. Just a bad day, a poor night's sleep the night before? Not sure, I ran today and was slow. Too much beer, too few vitamins? Too much coffee? I am drinking more of that. Did that week off affect it that much? I suppose we'll know more when I test it in September.; I have managed to get my resting heart rate down from 53 to 51bpm which is pretty slow and, that's good, assuming I don't go too slow, then I'm either dead or dying.
Heathrow's website: 11 August 2006: Heathrow's website, well it's not down, but at 11:30 today it's just two plain text pages and you can't get access to the normal website. On the face of it, that's because their servers can't handle the level of traffic they are experiencing. You'd have thought, would you not, that such a website would be stress tested and built to handle emergency levels of traffic. Their website is surely a major source of information in such times and they must have drills and procedures for handling emergencies like these. So, I'm kinda disappointed in them.
Walk: 7 August 2006: Sorry ppl but I've been for another walk so you're going to have to suffer the photographs. We walked from home north along the Cleveland Way as far as the road into Burniston, had a shandy at the Three Jolly Sailors and then back along the disused railway line. It's a route I ran a couple of weeks ago and we reckon it's about 7.5-8 miles long. Although I can't give you a direct link, if you type 'Burniston' into the Ordnance Survey's Get A Map system you'll see what's going on, and/or there's Google Maps too.; First off, in North Bay, there's to be a new development and the Corner Cafe and the beach huts are to be demolished within the next few weeks. I thought it was going to be a few chalets, I didn't realise until just this second it was going to be a multi-storey Spanish resort type development. Bugger me! Actually looking at the plan, the beach huts and the miniature railway are set to stay, so that's better.; Anyway, here's what the site looks like now:; Update: and here's what happened next.; Dunno what's going on with my camera but on a sunny day I can't seem to get the exposure right, when I look at the distribution in The Gimp only about the 2/3 darkest values are used. Me stretching it all out does give the pics an old postcard effect which seems quaint. Getting a decent camera might be nice too.; As you might expect by now, I spotted a few natural things along the way, this, we reckon, is a Wall butterfly.; This, on the other hand, is a Painted Lady. Now: I went through an entire childhood interest in butterflies without ever seeing one of these, and yet it's widely distributed. The thing about it is this ...... drum roll ....... it flies here from North Africa. Yep, it's gotta be right, I read it in a book. Honest. Well, not the one in the pic, that one probably was born here, but its parents flew here from Africa, at a speed of about 150km a day, apparently. Look, it says it here too. So much for butterflies only living for a day. And .. and .. and .. there's little evidence this second brood flies back to Africa. So what's the point?; Our best guess with these is they are Yellowhammers. It's the only bird we could find in the guide with yellow shoulders and back of the neck.; This fabulous display is Great Willowherb.; The views are magnificent.; I just liked these shots.; We were followed (actually they progressed much more quickly) by two canoeists (or were they kayakers? (and how do you spell either?)). We rather fancied doing that, perhaps when things are more settled in a couple of years.; There's an interesting river that ends up at Scalby Mills. We were told that you can walk alongside it past the youth hostel on the bridge at the North edge of Scarborough on the coast road, but it's marked as owned by a fishing club with Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. Isn't it true that you can only be 'done' for trespass if you damage something? And what, actually, would they do to you if all you're doing is wandering the stretch of river bank? Clearly the friend who told us has less regard for authority than we do, so we turned back, but what they said is right, it looks absolutely beautiful. Further inland it's marked as a Sea Cut and it has a footpath, that looks like a possible running route. Inbetween those, where the old railway line crosses it, I managed to take this photograph so we could see what was over the high wall of the bridge. Idyllic.
Bacchus: 3 August 2006: It's been quite a week. Many years, perhaps almost a decade ago, I was taken to Bacchus, a renowned club on Ramshill in Scarborough. It's a place every Scarborian has a story about, from the big woman barmaid who was very capable of throwing out anyone who misbehaved, to late nights they can't remember, drinking when nowhere else was open. As the name suggests, it felt like somewhere normal rules didn't apply.; It's the only place I've been where I got a lot of eye contact .. from the guys. I just thought maybe they'd seen me around town or something until it all slowly dawned on me. No problem .. actually I was quietly flattered .. I just hadn't understood the demographics of the place beforehand.; We haven't been back since. Until last week, when we went twice. And it's great. They've painted it. Upstairs is a great place to go for drinks and so on. Downstairs seems to be where all the dancing to Duran Duran goes on, there's a small dancefloor there. Not sure it's quite a Wine Bar but obviously they are trying to change a few things. More power to their elbow, we're Bacchus fans now.
Borders: 3 August 2006: I don't like Borders, York's main bookshop.; I'm not sure I ever have. I've been overawed by the sheer size of it, and of its computer section, but I finally got it all loaded into my head on an afternoon out in York with friends.; All four of us had professional interests. Two went to the arts section. I went to computing. My partner to psychology. All of us were disappointed, if not bored, with what we found.; I had time to spare and walked the whole shop until I finally worked it out. Every part of the shop hummed with the same vibration: you must be better. Maybe York itself hums like that. Continual improvement.; Now, I find that an inspiration when it's a Deming / Kaizen affair at Honda or Toyota, so what's wrong with finding that in the contents of a bookshop?; The thing that really got me was the travel section. Where I hoped for a book on different cultures, I was faced with endless country guides: the best hotels, the best places to go before you die. If feels like a huge game of dinner party one-upmanship: "So Geoff, what's going on in your life?" "Well John, I'm learning Japanese, and I found this beautiful Innuit themed Husky roast in a male retreat in Nova Scotia".; Why is that irritating? After all, I run, I play in a band, these are themes that oil casual conversation.; I think the problem is, it's the Marks and Spencerisation of ambition. If 'they' - the nightmare puppeteers attempting to control our lives - can package up our ambitions (100 things to do before you die), they can manage our whole lives. Then, not only would they control our desires for a particular car or fizzy drink, they would control our entire lifeplan. Marks and Spencers cooks don't cook. You can't buy ingredients there, only pre-prepared meals to heat up when you get home. Potatoes, pre boiled, in a country that used to grow its own. Borders: Ambitions and goals pre-packaged so you don't have to think too much.; But it's more than that. People who seek their answers here are seeking escape from an unsatisfactory life: a working life that's so inhospitable that time off becomes so precious it must be worked, all possible pleasure wrung out of it until it, too, becomes an underperforming asset to be forever improved and, in the end, when was the last time you spent four hours lovemaking and eating ice cream with your partner (I know, I can't remember either), laughing with friends in the pub, walking the dogs on the moors. Or am I creating someone else's to-do list here?; I was talking to a new artist friend about intimacy, which to me seems to be about accepting and knowing yourself. If you're not in control of what you want, of your ambitions and desires, how can you be intimate?; Borders was also completely limiting. Most of the shop is air - it's a huge place with not that many books. I went in search of feminism and found nothing. Actually the most interesting book I found was Kim and Aggy's The Cleaning Bible, I got fixated by what should be done to clean a toilet.; But maybe that's it. The telly's full of self improvement programmes, perhaps that's how the world outside Scarborough is. Perhaps Borders is a symptom, not the disease. A friend reacted to this blog with a short phrase I can't remember, but it basically brought up the idea that Borders is simply a mechanism, a conduit, providing what people want, and publishers are too for that matter. Don't blame Borders for supplying what sells. I suppose what I'm saying, though, is that I've been to Borders many times now wanting to buy books and come away empty handed. So they are not selling to me, they are failing me. Such a huge bookshop should be able to cater for the popular, and a good handful of off-centre characters like me, but they don't reach me. Whatever, I won't be going back in a hurry. I prefer to follow my own path: Amazon.
Johnny's shop: 3 August 2006: I keep meaning to create some t-shirts, organic cotton, natural dyes, handpainted designs, but haven't gotten around to it. I have, however, been collecting slogans over the past few years.; I hate the idea of wearing a brand because the brand says something about your lifestyle and the kind of person you are. I only buy clothes with no overt branding. If I'm going to say something about the kind of person I am, I want to be in control of that, I don't want to buy into some nightmare, pre-packaged, idealised version: I want the real thing. People are complicated, ragged, untidy, out of control, emotional, twisted, different every time you look: they aren't brands. So I have my own slogans, my own messages, thank you very much (which you are welcome to buy, under the global John Allsopp brand).; So then I saw Cafepress and thought that might be good in the meantime, and then I didn't get around to that either.; So today, I thought "bugger that", and just did it (damn, slogans get everywhere). So here is my t-shirt shop. I haven't bothered to customise it (yet), but basically, that's the first slogan, and I can't seem to work out how to add the complementary one: I feel different, but that's coming. The mugs seem a bit of a risk, perhaps the slogan won't all fit on.; Well! Don't just sit there, buy something!