John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Lesbians: 31 December 2006: Ever had one of those experiences that's given your head so much to process you feel like just sitting for a few hours to try to make sense of it all?; So there I was at a party full of lesbians. No, really. It's not a world I know anything about, but here's my sense of what was going on. First of all, I have a feeling that there are people who don't like groups of lesbians, and I've no information on why. My only experience was going to a drum circle many years ago where a group of lesbians turned up who didn't really mingle, and one woman I was speaking to somehow referred to them disparagingly. I can't remember, it was a long time ago. Personally, I'd look at each individual just as, obviously, one would in any other situation, but this person had them grouped and found something wrong about it all.; I worked with a gay man who upset me by really not having any use for women at all. That felt really awful .. as if the only point of women was for sex and other than that, they could be dismissed.; Back to the party: a newly met couple kissed and hugged, and I was speaking with a woman who disapproved: "they should keep it behind closed doors". That's an oppressive view, surely. But then I'd probably feel a bit weird if two blokes in a party started snogging. Actually, it would feel weird if a hetero couple did. So part of the problem is that it seems inappropriate to be tongueing each other in a party regardless of the participants' orientation, and then there's another issue if the participants are gay. The former seems to be part of the 'challenge' thing I get on to below, the latter seems to be all about the viewers values and prejudices.; A lesbian who we'd both gotten along with very well put her hand on my g/f's thigh. If that was a bloke, he'd have got even shorter shrift. We've outcast a bloke who copped a feel one drunken stumble home. She was clearly asked to disconnect. That was part of a really messy sexual thing going on, as if anything were possible, as if there was no morality to anything. Maybe it was a freedom a long time coming, and maybe I'm prissy. I imagine .. I've even less experience of this, but the media at least portrays the male gay scene as being promiscuous and a lot about getting your rocks off. This felt the same. I didn't expect that. But if you've spent your life denying your sexuality, it seems only reasonable that it would bounce back and overcompensate before settling.; My g/f and I have been together 22 years, but that didn't seem to matter. Perhaps it was a challenge. If I say I'm vegetarian to an omnivore it's often received like a challenge. Some are interested .. they have a kid who is or wants to be, and they have questions they want answering. But more often it's as if I've challenged their life, their decisions and they feel they want to either attack or challenge me, or to defend their decision.; The fact that we've chosen a life together rather than a more fluid one seemed to raise that sort of reaction, not overtly, but there was a lot of "you're lesbian really, you just haven't come to terms with it yet" aimed at my g/f, which is the same thing that comes through my g/f's gay friend aimed at me: "I can do things for him that will make him turn." Err, well, no, actually, I beg to differ. If I were Jewish, would Muslims challenge me the same way? If I supported .. I was going to say Arsenal but maybe I'll say Manchester United, a Chelsea fan might rib me but wouldn't make a serious effort to convert me. There's mutual respect, surely.; And all that seems weird when set against the fact that there was a fair bit of dyke-style at the party. All of that, whether it's goth, punk, dyke or whatever is, I think, about pushing back against the world .. stating your identity and, in a sense, challenging the world to deny it. We were perfectly happy and accepting and joyful about those lifestyles. So I feel we should have been afforded the same respect.; But the weird, weird, weird thing I heard again and again was this. Not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but essentially the story that came from these women through the night that .. I'm embarrassed to say it but it's essential to the story so here goes .. basically, if they'd met a nice man like me, maybe they'd have been or stayed straight*. Accompanying that were tales of men who weren't nice, or of abuse.; Anyway that's rocked my model of lesbianism. I'd have thought you're either born gay or not. Well, it's a percentage game, not a binary one, but I thought it was fairly clear it's in your genes. OK, maybe you want to conform and then fail and then it all flops out .. "ah", you think, "I'm gay, that's the reason". You were gay all along but just didn't quite get it.; Then there were the 1970s and 80s feminists who eschewed maleness with the rule "all men are rapists", and took to lesbianism as an act of political rebellion. Here's an interesting article on that, btw.; But I'd missed or forgotten this route which was to reject the perpetrators of abuse or cruelty and turn to other women instead. Doubtless I've missed a load of others too. This gives some background and insight into this world. It's interesting, I wonder how much radical feminism would have been classified as terrorism if it were happening today.; It feels like many of the people from this party had taken the latter route. Which, as the drink flowed, made it a dangerous place to be. Well, I'm sure they'd say, not half as dangerous as living their life: "you big girls blouse", something like that. It felt like their lesbianism was part of their psychological journey from some form of abuse to working out who they are and what is their worth.; In the face of the article above, I can absolutely see that citing any sort of psychological basis for this could easily be seen as calling upon a knowledge system built by men and used to oppress everyone else. I'd love to understand in other ways. But I'm a child of the system and here's how I interpreted it.; If you have an oppressed life and come to lesbianism from that background, and join with others in a similar situation, that's going to be a joyous revelation, a breaking down of all the oppressive rules you've been trying to live by. Having finally found an identity out of the maelstrom, you're going to defend it. I'd have thought you'd be pretty damned angry at the forces that kept you down for so long. So an overt show of lesbianism .. snogging, adopting lesbian visual styling .. is a choice and is intended as a challenge. It's meant to repel those who were probably oppressors anyway, discover your supporters, build group loyalty, strength and identity, and change people's minds so that others might find the journey easier in the future. Now I'm all for that. But in retrospect at some point this shifted slightly beyond my comfort zone. The antennae came out for any subtlety in facial expression or vocal intonation that might show that someone or other might disapprove. And because people were hungry to have their worth confirmed, getting a group of people around them telling them not to fight and to calm down and so on was another way to build group cohesion and buoy their self esteem .. imagine if all their colleagues said "yeah, fuck it, fight, I'm just chatting with a friend here". So sure enough, with an embarrassment of drink around, those problems were found and fought about. It was a big bag of snakes.; I've said this before here, and I tried to argue it last night. Germaine Greer decried the current need for people to 'tell it straight', 'tell them what I think', as if a) that's going to make any positive difference, b) it had worth in itself and c) it made you somehow a better person. Apparently c) is true, since the contestants in Big Brother are most often slated for being two faced, and often lauded for being honest and true to themselves. Greer wanted more politeness. She said politeness oiled the wheels of society, and I think she's right. So I made my point and hopefully made a little bit of difference. I hope that when the person who was going to "tell that bitch what I think of her" actually was more true to her next voiced strategy of "I'm going to go and put things right, wish me luck". Jeez, in the light of that article .. don't I sound like the know-it-all patriarch. I just contributed my view, I'm not saying I was right.; So maybe many people don't like groups of lesbians for all those reasons, and maybe this group had similar experiences .. they did say they rarely went out into the 'normal' world. After inviting them to my local, a middle aged real ale pub, for New Year's Eve I did start to wonder whether they might catalyse a reaction. They certainly provide a lot to think about. For the first 98% of the party, these were beautiful people and I loved every minute of talking with them. We may see them again soon. I'll look forward to that. The promised meeting with a male Irish millionnaire who dresses as a woman, has a fabulous brain and a great pair of tits .. well, I wouldn't miss that for the world.; I do need to say that I certainly don't want to cast all lesbians in this light. I can think of four that I know who are entirely different again. So I'm in no way trying to box people up. But I suppose I am trying to understand and that requires generalisations to be made.; Anyway, here's to 2007 and all it may bring. Happy new year!; * Update: I've had a bit of reaction to this along the lines of "calm down boy, you're getting a bit full of yourself", and 'arrogant' is another possibility. I dunno. I report the good and the bad here .. you see my failures and my successes. I don't for one millisecond think I'm the guy who can turn lesbians straight, that's just wildly wrong. What I reported was said to me, and that raised questions for me and that's why I reported it. I hope to show that I have a questioning and flexible mind. Yes this blog is all about me and my opinions and my view. That's the point. The idea is that you can get to know me even if you're in California or Adelaide so you know whether we are likely to get along. It's not crucial that we do, but it's nice when it happens. But perhaps because this blog is a distilled set of thoughts, it's gotten a bit concentrated. Oh well. To counter that, I had someone write to me saying "Good article that, very incisive and thought provoking - I could never string so many ideas together into such a cohesive passage." I suppose the point is, I should be pleased I got a reaction. It wasn't a bland article. I don't do bland.
Personality tests: 29 December 2006: I've been doing some personality tests to help with my g/fs studies. And I'm allowed five minutes to write it up because I'm waiting for an upload (people often say they don't know how I have the time to do this).; First-off, I did this which came out this way which was a bit "yeah, so what?". You don't reach 45 years old with an enquiring mind and not know yourself.; Next off, I did this Myers Briggs thing which came out with the rather pleasing INTJ result (and here).; I'm, apparently, Introverted (44%), iNtuitive (62%), Thinking (25%), and Judging (22%), which is a moderately expressed introvert, distinctively expressed intuitive personality, moderately expressed thinking personality, slightly expressed judging personality, which is a type only 1% of the population have.; Which is all very flattering and leads to the possibility that people will pick and choose the most flattering tests and results. Is there a result that says "you are a waste of space and will probably spend much of your life in prison"? Do such tests have to be written positively, to give their subjects a good feeling about themselves, in order to get purchased and used? Do I, therefore, have to read between the lines to find my faults? Try the test .. see if you feel good about your results too.; Nevertheless, there are some very succinct sentences that really do sum up parts of my character that I've never managed to satisfactorily explain to others.; "INTJs are perfectionists, with a seemingly endless capacity for improving upon anything that takes their interest." Exactly. That's why I love Tom Peters so much. "What prevents them from becoming chronically bogged down in this pursuit of perfection is the pragmatism so characteristic of the type: INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion 'Does it work?' to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms." How cool is that? And exactly right.; "INTJs are known as the 'Systems Builders' .. perhaps in part because they possess the unusual trait combination of imagination and reliability." It's what I say in my introduction .. I have a background in marketing so I can imagine what your audience wants, and the technical ability and application to build it.; There's also "When it comes to their own areas of expertise -- and INTJs can have several -- " .. quite, I've always been a generalist, not a specialist, although I say that to people and they argue vehemently that I specialise in t'Internet, or whatever. I'm really not a specialist .. I deal all day with people who are better programmers, better database people, better SEOs, better HTML coders, better at CSS .. but .. they are not better than me at all of those skills. My Unique Selling Point comes from knowing a lot about a lot. I may not be a world leader in anything, but for me the magic comes from how different worlds connect. There, lurking, is the root of what they call pragmatism above .. my geekiness is always tempered by the reactions of real life people, and idealised dreams are quickly minced through usability, affordability, desirability, buildability, legality, and expectations versus cost/time blades, with problems solved along the way, until I can come up with something that looks right from all angles. Anyway .. "they will be able to tell you almost immediately whether or not they can help you, and if so, how. INTJs know what they know, and perhaps still more importantly, they know what they don't know." .. so there you go. If I can help, I'll say so, and if I can't, I'll say so too. No nonsense.; This is the killer one, though: "Natural leaders, Masterminds are not at all eager to take command of projects or groups, preferring to stay in the background until others demonstrate their inability to lead." That's me, and it irritates others because they don't understand it. Sorry about that .. at least I'm not a murderer tho, eh? I see it in a wider sense as being a good supporter, which is really what you want in a web developer. And I'd see that scenario, where a group is led by others unless it's clearly not being led in which case I'll step in, as being supportive too. If others want to lead, and can, fine, I'll support. If not, then the group probably needs a good leader and I'll do that for the group to the best of my ability. It's adaptive, bending according to the situation, and that's surely a good thing. In the role of web developer, for you, I'll be behind you and your business all the way. I don't seek the limelight, I'm happy to be your transport to take you where you want to go. Just dream up where you want to be, and commission me to take you there. What's stopping you?; My Belbin team role scores are on my my skills page.; Bugger! I've just tried to leave the office for the evening and can't get my head out of the door. Errr, heeeelllppp!
Figaro: 29 December 2006: A friend, I just discovered, drives a Nissan Figaro, which I'd not heard of before, but it's rather a cool thing, despite losing a bit of cachet for being designed to be cool. The first rule of cool is that the coolness happened by accident or unknowingly (like I know).; It goes without saying that she's an import. Just moved up from London. Scarborough island doesn't have Figaros.; Now, what am I going to wear for her party?
Paypal testing: 28 December 2006: Just a quick technical thing. I'm working on getting a site to work using Paypal payments using a very simple buy now button with IPN (Paypal's Instant Payment Notification) and there's a sandbox for testing, from which I kept receiving 'invalid' as the response when I tried to make a payment.; The first thing you might do when attempting this is to cut the code Paypal provides and paste it into your own code to get the basics up and running. That's where I fell over .. the sandbox returned 'invalid' and I started to think their code was wrong.; To cut a long story short, the solution was this. If you're testing in the sandbox, you have to send your verification request to the sandbox too, which means you have to amend the code that Paypal provides in order for it to work under sandbox testing (and then amend it back when you go live). You need to send to www.sandbox.paypal.com rather than just www.paypal.com. I didn't find an enormous amount on this and it took a while to realise, so just in case others are having the same problem, there's the answer.
Behringer: 28 December 2006: I ought to record that I was on stage, halfway through the first song, when my Behringer KX1200 amp failed and left us with no drums. We got it wired up through the PA and were able to continue and it worked, but that's really upset me. People told me that Behringer has a reputation for unreliability, but I bought one anyway in a fit of EU support on the basis that, with this new model, they'd solved their unreliability problems. My logic went that a company with a reputation for unreliability would fix the problem and begin turning out products that were more reliable than anyone elses. Anyway, I was wrong. So now all my amp does is hum, low and loud, regardless of any settings. I'm consulting with the repairers.
Post Christmas: 27 December 2006: I'll break into work gently. Did you see the amazing fog sunrises before Christmas? Here's another view with a different camera. The sun burns a bigger hole in the sensor than is really there, but it was still stunning in reality.; We both had 2 days off over Christmas, starting with a very beery Christmas Eve in the Merchant and then an impromptu curry. Not our normal practice, but we hadn't really eaten through the day. That's our excuse anyway. It was very nice indeed.; I normally cook Christmas dinner but this year asked my g/f to, so I got all excited about working through Howard Goodall's How Music Works in the time I'd just saved (since I finally did get a copy of the rhythm one) making notes on the programmes, and then trying to compose a song using what I'd just learned; I loved it, even the rhythm one was an inspiration, but whereas it seemed to show simple rules for song construction, I quickly got the idea that actually it's a very skilled task that would have taken the whole holiday to do something useful with, and I really needed to record multiple tracks, which would mean disappearing into my office and using this computer, again, which I was trying to avoid. Plus, my efforts rather paled against the sounds of Snow Patrol coming through from the kitchen. I'm sure they started by plinking away on a guitar, but anyway, that was that.; I managed to get another mention on Mark Lamarr's Christmas Show. He's a star, I love the show. I really must try to listen to more of his other shows.; Boxing Day is traditionally Ladies Day in Scarborough, when the women, having presumably cooked and looked after everyone on Christmas day, get to dress up in fancy dress and barf their way around the hostelries. I like it.; We were up in time to see the raft race, which starts at 12:30. Another tradition, the idea is to get into teams, build your own raft and paddle it around the inside of the harbour while doing your best to sabotage your fellow competitors, mostly with flour bombs. This seems to get more and more audience each year, and it's only this year we've managed to see it all. The pic shows the moment of impact between two rafts (at the top of the picture).; The winners appeared to be four blokes dressed in blond wigs and plastic breasts. Either that or Ladies Day had started early. Oh, and maybe there's something about taking posession of a flag. Who knows? It's all a bit of an in-thing, but it's nice to watch nevertheless and, since lots of people come out, we saw lots of people we know, which was very nice.; This morning's breakfast news was talking about unwanted presents and how it's better to make a list. A list! And there's me thinking there was some subtlety about buying presents, that actually the real gift was in saying "I know you well enough, and think enough of you, that I've put in the time to find this gift that I think you'll really like", and in getting it right. A list! Scarborough's a bit behind the times, and sometimes I get the feeling that beyond Scarborough island the world's changed beyond recognition.; After that: 10 hours of telly. It's a luxury for us, so we really enjoyed just breaking down on the sofa. Calendar Girls (predictable but lovely), Pirates of the Caribbean (predictable) (but I kept calling it Privates of the Caribbean which I don't think my g/f noticed and she started calling it that so hopefully that'll come out in an inappropriate moment (except I'll be revealed when she reads this)), David Icke (there's something not working quite right there, that's the real truth), and, well, and so on.; Anyway, all rather boringly factual, but, like I say, I wanted to break in gently. See ya.
Goya: 23 December 2006: The first time we went on holiday to Tossa De Mar (I'm guessing around 2000, but my more accurate g/f suggests maybe 1998 or so) we found the Dali museum at Figueres and I saw in there a picture I thought I could use. A motivational picture.; It was a nightmarish vision in pen and ink showing time depicted as a monster, devouring people by tearing off their limbs and biting off their heads. Like I say, motivational.; After we left this image grew in importance in my head. I felt like that might spur me on to work better, if I had so graphic a representation of the fact that time is coming. I wanted it up on my office wall. But try as I might, I couldn't find out what it was.; Watching Simon Schama's programme on Guernica I realised. Part of my problem is, at the time I thought, or remembered, I was looking at some pen and ink drawings by Dali. Now, I'm quite sure they were by Goya. And they may not have been pen and ink, they may have been etchings, or something else.; I do remember the title of the piece contained the word time, but presumably in Spanish (tiempo).; Nevertheless, I still can't find the image. I suppose it may have been an exhibition of his little known works, or even studies for larger work.; Oh well. I'll press on. But if anyone works it out, you'll let me know won't you?; And there's me hassling about overt violence in rap. So why don't I want a picture of a vase of flowers?; Update: I discovered I'd taken a photograph of it
Fog: 22 December 2006: In all this 'TRAVEL CHAOS, how worried should we be, BA cancelled ALL domestic FLIGHTS' nonsense, one man stood out. I don't know his name. He was probably BBC, a reporter, probably yesterday morning and he said something like "well, I've not actually seen chaos. Yes people are fed up and everything's stretched, but it isn't chaos" and we both wanted to push our heads through the TV glass and give him a hug. Thanks for a bit of real reporting.; I can only think that a) the politicians are away so there's no news so they have to lead with something, and b) this is something that's affecting people wealthy enough to fly at Christmas, so they have a choice. It's not the Tsunami or Katrina, and it's not like the devil's come up to earth to shove hot coals into all our bottoms. It's a bit of discomfort and distress for people who are otherwise very comfortable and have the resources to cope. Can we talk about something else now, please?; The other story, the Ipswich prostitute murders, that raised a thing with a friend the other day when they said something like "no-one's bothered, and it's just because they are prostitutes", and for politeness we didn't challenge but one of the things that's come strongly out of this case is an awareness that those women were, as it were, just like you and me, and with families who knew nothing about their situation. Women who had fallen into drug use and became prostitutes to fund it. I've heard nothing but sympathy for their situation in the media, and contrary to what our friend said, I only saw support and sympathy and a will to do something about it. I'm rather hoping we might get some decent laws out of it to create a safer environment for prostitutes.; Now this is a world I know next to nothing about, but that won't stop me pontificating. I heard one politician say that they should target the demand, rather than the supply, but that seems to miss the point too. If the police target demand, prostitutes will surely just go to the places the police aren't working, the less well lit, less safe areas.; I walked out of my house the other day and a chap said "Hello John", he's a friend of a friend who had just been for a massage nearby (I don't mean to imply that was anything else, I'm absolutely certain it wasn't, I know all the people involved).; OK, I don't live near a red light district, but it seems to me if prostitutes could work like anyone else, then why would there be local disruption? There would surely just be a few blokes, err, coming and going, like that chap.; I've never used this sort of service and don't expect to, but I see nothing wrong with it barring the way its treated in law, so long as the women are doing their thing out of choice and aren't being pimped and haven't been trafficked. Although I do recognise that free will is a relative thing .. if you are addicted to heroin and have to buy it, what free will have you got? And I'm sure there are combinations of factors that make someone more likely to get into drugs in the first place. If, for instance, one of those factors is growing up in a poor area, well, how much does that, or any combination of factors, impinge on a person's free will? People act differently in different situations and circumstances.; Update: There's an interesting piece on free will in The Economist, which basically says that as we discover the genetic basis of behaviour, as we track illness' effect on what we do, and our social background's ability to predispose us to particular behaviours, where does that leave free will? Those causes will increasingly be used as legal defence. And, of interest to that magazine, economics is based on the idea of free will. If, actually, there's very little of it, where does that leave the dismal science?; Anyway, I hope what's happened in Ipswich will bring about some sensible changes to the law. Dare I say, legalise drugs too .. we have alcohol and nicotine. I don't do drugs either, but .. illegal? Makes no sense to me (as someone who knows next to nothing about it).; I can't find a difference between "compression of the neck" and "strangulation". Nor, indeed, "asphyxiation".
When the levees broke: 20 December 2006: I look out for things by Spike Lee, and When The Levees Broke, on telly the last couple of nights, was no disappointment.; It's a collection of interviews with people about hurricane Katrina and its effect on the people of New Orleans.; I didn't catch it all .. there's over four hours of it (and so there should be) .. but what I did see refilled my faith in America's people, so eroded over the last few years by what's delivered to us on the news and in the media.; One quote did stick out though. Someone said "we from looweezyanna, we don't believe Bush's boollsheit, whatever he does we ain't goinna vote for him". Wow. So maybe that's at the nub of it. Whether Bush and his party paid to improve the levees or not, it wouldn't win him any votes. So why should he? I don't remember noticing how democracy fails in that way before.; It felt, too, like the end of an era. As if it was clear as a frosty morning that while people believed they lived in an America where the all powerful army or other federal forces would sort them out in times of disaster, the fact was, it didn't. That felt like truth and sounded like a wheezing, deflating balloon.; With the American national debt rising, and us nearing £1:$2. With the costs of global warming around the corner. It feels like the beginning of an end.
Wow, check out the webcam: 19 December 2006: Wow, the fog's rolling off the land on the webcam, with a huge sun. It looks like another planet. It's even more stunning in real life. And if you miss it, that was good enough for me to create a Best Of page.
Resurgence: the roots of terrorism: 18 December 2006: I was given this issue of Resurgence magazine a few yonks ago and finally got around to reading through it, and inside I found, in just over an A4 page, the best summary of the root cause of terrorism that I've seen, written by Vandana Shiva. 'Best' in that it most succinctly summarises my own beliefs. So I thought I'd summarise it for you .. since it doesn't seem to be published on the web. There are no references, so I can only assume it's all correct. Actually this seems to be the main source.; When India became independent, its agriculture was in crisis due to neglect and exploitation. The agriculture minister prioritised the repair of nature's hydrological and nutritional cycles .. ecological farming principles.; However, the US sent advisers and experts to India and, working with the politically powerful, they attempted to shift the policy to something more intensive.; In 1966 a drought caused a severe drop in food production in India. America's president Lyndon Johnson refused to commit food aid more than a month in advance until India agreed to adopt America's 'Green Revolution' package.; That package has contributed to two social and environmental disasters in India. The 'terrorism' and 'extremism' in the Punjab were born out of the injustice of the Green Revolution, which centralised power and appropriated resources and earth from the people: the All Sikh Convention of April 1986 more or less called it slavery. And the Union Carbide gas leak .. I suppose she's saying the plant wouldn't have been there if the pesticides weren't needed.; There is now a second green revolution based on biotechnology and genetic engineering, which the US is pushing with India. I think she says the WTO Agreement on Agriculture was drafted by a Cargill official, the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement by a group of US corporations including Monsanto, a company whose products have led to the suicide of many Indian farmers.; I think I can summarise. America has a very strong business culture. Business is all about securing advantage and profit by all means. America has some very large and strong businesses, and they seem free to contribute to the political process. So America can put a lot of pressure on India in trade negotiations. The chap with a few acres of ground, or the farmer with tens of acres of land are no match.; The problem is so large it's difficult to see. If a powerful business culture is applying constant pressure to its advantage and against yours, it seems just a matter of time until they get their way. But you will never be happy about it, and that's the point.; I don't know how we fix that, but I feel the Green Party gives our best chance.
Hostroute: 18 December 2006: A client is hosted with Hostroute. They purchased that before they came with me. I made a change to a file and uploaded it. The site stopped working. Where my uploaded file should be, there was an empty file.; It turned out this client was over their disc space limit. I couldn't do anything except delete files. This may be the standard way it works, I wouldn't know, I don't think I've ever hit my hard disc limit. That'll be because while this client is paying £4.95 per month for 100MB, I'm getting 4,000MB (4GB) for less than £40 per year (and so will you be if you take hosting through me). Anyway, it felt rather draconian. I couldn't even write a new contact email address in the admin page.; I tried to delete files from this server, but the FTP server was incredibly slow and kept dropping connections. At least, maybe it was that. The site itself ran quickly. When I raised all this with tech support they said "you are paying for a set disk quota, therefore you have to keep within those limits, to upload files or make modifications to your contact e-mail you will need to free up some space or upgrade" and closed my ticket.; I re-opened it .. and what about the slow server? "This server is currently operating within limits, please check that your ISP is not experiencing any problems". In other words, whatever it is, it's not us guv. Why do I have a sneaky feeling they checked the web server, which was working fine, and not the FTP server, which I don't think was .. either that or something about my lack of disc space was slowing the whole thing down. Lovely. No chance of "Thank-you for your enquiry, we've given you an additional 20Mb for 24 hours while you get a chance to tidy up" then.
Source: 18 December 2006: Could everybody please stop 'sourcing' things and just 'buy' or 'find' them like normal people. Even the BBC's doing it. It makes you sound like you think you're better than everyone else, and that's divisive. Be nice to everyone, be inclusive, 'tis the festive season after all. Plus, it's probably an Americanism .. turning a noun into a verb is their sort of thing. And you'll get into a proper mess when you want to source sauce. I'm off to do some web paging now, I'll talk to you later.
BadVista: 15 December 2006: If you need any excuse to keep your money in your pocket, BadVista is a Free Software Foundation campaign against the adoption of Microsoft Vista. The site doesn't look right to me, it looks like something someone made in five minutes in their bedroom, but the FSF is a serious force, so it should be interesting.; This is a vulnerable point for Microsoft where people wake up from their slumber and perhaps have to consider upgrading, and perhaps paying for that. Mind you, I don't really know whether it is. Those who upgrade are enthusiasts who won't listen to the FSF. Everyone else will just get it automatically on the next PC they buy. But anyway, it's the first time Linux has been relatively mature and in any way comparable at the same time as Microsoft is managing a changeover, so the campaign should be interesting. No doubt MS has a serious amount of strategy in place to ensure all goes well for them.
Replete: 15 December 2006: This chap seems to be a friend of a friend. Nice site, very nice work.
Bananas: 15 December 2006: Wow, things have gone bananas this week. I expected things to calm down and everyone to become difficult to talk to as we sidled up to Christmas but quite the opposite. My marketing seems to have matured. I had enough enquiries that moved to the stage of receiving proposals from me this week that it took almost ten hours to write them all. But what I got back, just this week, was just short of £10k of work.; Now, I was expecting a burst like that perhaps in January, in fact I was going to attempt to engineer it, but before Christmas? And there are more enquiries outstanding.; So now rather than being stressed about not having enough work, I'm now stressed about getting all this work done and satisfying all these new clients. Wonderful. Right. Stop messing about. I'll see ya later!
Buying things: 14 December 2006: Buying Muji gel ink pens (they came recommended and are the only pens that seem to work for me), the purchase form wants my credit card number without spaces. But I enter it with spaces because that note is to the right of the field and I only read it then. But why make the customer act in a particular way? It's a trivially simple piece of code to strip out the spaces.; Then they are revealed. It rejects me because of the apostrophe in my address. St. Mary's Walk. Well that's just nonsense, my address isn't correct without it (a friend, Mr O'Neill, said "try having an apostrophe in your name").; Then they fail my form because I'd worked down the left hand column and missed out the right hand column about delivery address.; I'm irritated anyway because this is something I order regularly yet they haven't remembered me. Amazon does. eBay does. So I have to type my details in every time.; Then the final confirmation is a new window which gives me everything I need to know, and I want to print it. It says to use the print option on my browser (you could just give me a button to press, but hey ho) but they've ripped out the browser functions so there is no ability to print.; Then when the confirmation email came through it has ?s instead of £s; Also yesterday I was in Thorntons buying chocolate and there are two places to pay. Thorntons in Scarborough is mostly a coffee shop now. One looked like a place where you select individual chocolates to go in a box and the woman was busy scraping at a chocolate fountain. There was no clear till in sight, so I queued in the coffee shop queue where there was a till and people were paying. That took a while because she made the coffees for each order. I clearly had my item visible, and when I got to the till she said "Oh, would you mind paying for that over there". Oh, really, OK. So of course by now that till had a queue, and that lady was wrapping people's Christmas gifts for them. All it would take is a sign, or even for the coffee shop till lady to have checked with me earlier! Or, indeed, the ditching of such a ridiculous rule or the provision of a till and software that had the ability to separate the two businesses, which I presume is what was going on. IT driven customer repulsion.; I'm trying to buy consumables for two top selling printers and can't seem to find a place that has both products. My normal place seems to have gone out of business .. that's the problem with buying on price .. so I'm searching around Froogle for places that seem like they won't just take my money and close the next day. Some don't even seem to provide their company name and address, eg. Toner Cartridge Depot. Others have a full range of printers except the one I've got. Weird .. is there some sort of cartel thing going on like the one that says a shop only sells Coke or Pepsi but not both because of how the fridges are supplied? I ended up phoning the local Cartridge World and he had to phone his tech support to work out the laser printer, then he wanted to talk me into refilled inkjet cartridges at a tenner each when new are available online at around that. I ended up placing two separate orders online.; Oh, and I went back to Boots and for the third time my hair gel, shown as £2.99, came up as £3.49 on the till, so, since the checkout lady was relaxed I discussed my experiences with her and she fetched the manager who wiggled her nose and waved a magic wand over the till and said it was fixed. I'm just wondering. Will it be fixed in the sense that the till will give £2.99 next time, or fixed in the sense that the shelf will read £3.49? Or .. and I feel a little revolutionary thinking this .. fixed in the sense that the root cause of the problem was discovered and fixed and all the errors it caused corrected?; The point is, it's all usability. A quick and cheap user test would spot these problems and enable these companies to fix them. And I manage a group of testers .. so if you want your website to be user tested so you can be the best you can be and reap the sales rewards .. let me know.
Boat trip websites: 13 December 2006: I got a call the other night from someone wanting a website for a new holidaymaker's boat trip service out of Whitby. They wanted something like this, which seems to me to be an unusually low bar to aim for, so I had a look around.; I found this which seems much more like it. Just the fact that I found it on a search for 'boat trips' (or something like that) means the site really works.; Now the former would cost a few hundred pounds to create, the latter several thousands of pounds and I was trying to work out how to put that to my enquirer and I came up with this.; There's the rule that says the first money you spend gives the most payback. If you spend, say, £100 on getting the most basic website up, at least you've got a website, which is infinitely better than not having one (I know that's not necessarily true, but I'd stick by that most of the time).; The next £100 makes the site a whole lot better. But as you add more £100's, it would seem that your money is buying less and less .. sure, you're getting a nicer looking website with better written text and so on, and overall it will make a difference to your business, but it's no revolution. And in a sense what's happening is you're getting closer and closer to the average amount that people in your market have spent and so perhaps you're working to reach sameness. Well, I think I'm genetically averse to that. To my mind, a business should differentiate itself, emphasise its strengths over the competition, and on the web that's even more appropriate because writing about those differences provides keywords that the search engines will use to bring people to your site that want what you offer, which makes converting visitors to customers that much easier.; So then what happens if you keep going? Well then you do start to differentiate yourself from your competition. The efficiency of your spending rises again. If my Whitby chap can spend several thousands of pounds on his website, including some great photographs, tales of goings on, information about what you might see, times, safety, customer comments, all that, and spend the time to give a really good warm and welcoming feeling to the whole thing, they could turn their idea into a must-do event for holidaymakers. A professionally developed site that comes up high when people look for things Whitby, and that's persuasive when they visit it, could make a huge difference to this chap's business. But to make that happen, he would have to spend more than his competition .. that's the whole point. He has to 'get it' and invest in his website to make it the best it can be, and then all the good things will happen and it will become an effective marketing tool for his business, possibly transforming it. And unlike an ad, once it's there, it just keeps on working for minimal expense.; It doesn't seem to make sense to break this down and, say, spend £1,000 a year until it's great. To make it great requires diving into it fully, working on the graphic design as well as the text and photographs and content all at once. Nibbling away at it, for this client at least, isn't right. How would it work? Could he spend the first £1,000, and divide it .. a quarter on each of the graphic design, the text content, the photographs, and the website implementation, then again the next year? Maybe with something like the text that's possible, you can always write new stuff, but the graphic design doesn't seem to increment like that. We either need to do it right or do it light, I'm not sure what lies in between.; So this enquirer has a choice to make and he's off to think. Let's hope he 'gets it'.; Incidentally, I think there are times this theory works and times when it doesn't. My car spares chap's site is utilitarian, so these questions don't come up. If you want a new bumper for a Hillman Hunter (or a new carburetor for a Volkswagen Jetta ..... ...... can you hear my brain working? ....... or some new tyre cleaner for your Ford Cortina (send me yours if you like)), then you don't want a load of stuff in your way. You just want to buy it and leave.
Gig last night: 9 December 2006: We played a gig last night in Whitby which all went very well. I drove two of our singers there. One is a rapper, awwwwwww, she's a) young and b) weeny. Anyway, she wanted some hip hop played on the way up so she could get her head full of rap so she could do her thang on stage. What she gave me was a CD of British hip hop compiled by Eeezy Pantz feat hYxTatTTic. OK I made the last bit up.; Now I may be a wuss. OK, I am a wuss. We all have this image of rappers pushing, promoting, singing about violence. I just thought that was the Daily Mail talking. But jeez. This was serious, in your face, graphic, full colour, detailed, in depth descriptions of the violence to be done. Listening to these raps was just one step away from having horrid things done to you. And it does affect me .. I don't like it .. I don't want it. I don't see the point of thinking about what visceral violence could be happening to you, when you could be thinking about taking a holiday or making love or what your life's going to grow into or having a meal with your loved one. Why would you choose that? OK, if you live in that world I suppose it might help you to harden your soul, but why would anyone else buy into that?; I'm questioning myself. When I choose tv programmes I tend to choose fact-based stuff about hardship. Unreported World. I've chosen to record The True Voice of Rape later this week, rather than watch, say, Jonathon Ross. I suppose I'm trying to bolster my beliefs in the underdog, to feel empathy with those in a worse position than I am. And I guess choosing to listen to rap is the same thing. Maybe there's no sense in intellectualising it, maybe I'm just squeamish .. but I stand by how I feel, and I would worry that if I didn't feel that way about what I heard on those tunes I'd have killed off some human part of myself.; My partner claims to have chanced upon something about the history of porn on telly the other day, and the bit she saw said that when Americas porn laws were strictly against, people bought violence instead. Us Brits didn't have that prohibition and so didn't do the violence thing so there again, another reason why such violent rap isn't actually that relevant to us.; Anyway, the rap she put on on the way back was an altogether different affair. The chap was religious and into personal growth, apparently. Well, I wouldn't have lumped all of rap together, but that shows there's a range of stuff to listen to in the genre. I was just really surprised to find it in my car, in my town, from my friends .. right here on my doorstep. The Bronx this ain't, and black we ain't.; Update: Groan, I finally got it. I have turned into my parents. I'm not supposed to like it, it's a cleaver to separate young people from older ones, and I fell into their trap and tumbled into the 'older' net. I'm the dad who moans about not being able to hear the words on Top of the Pops. Obviously even those four words put me in that space. But hey, even as a punk I never actually gobbed on anyone (or anything) so maybe that's the point too. I was happily able then to distinguish the imagery and energy of punk from what was acceptable behaviour, extract what I thought was good about it (self sufficiency / diy, energy, being involved and politically active) and make my own choices. Now everyone is thirty years more media savvy. So surrounding yourself with violence in songs, video, games and so on doesn't necessarily mean you're going to translate it into the real world. The whole thing comes down to my personal taste. Bugger! At last it made me think for a couple of days.; But on to something nice. I'll cherish a moment. We were at Whitby Pavillion as part of a whole event and so there were dressing rooms and when in there waiting to go on we did an impromptu acoustic version of P J Harvey's The Wind. Fantastic. Me just drumming on my knees (which sounds like it would be crap but is surprisingly effective), the guitarists doing their thing acoustically, Helen singing, and Jo rapping. That was really special. Thanks everyone. When we came out of the room to go on stage, the security chap said "wow, that sounded really good".
£150 to reserve a domain name: 7 December 2006: I went to see a new client yesterday who had started up in business about four months ago, and he said shortly after he started he received a letter from a company in Warrington suggesting they could reserve hiscompanyname.co.uk for him for just £150, and he seriously considered it.; Well there are two things about that. Firstly, there's no such thing as reserving a domain name. You either buy it or you don't. But 'reserve' is a much softer word than 'buy' which has all kinds of budgetarywallet considerations. For me, that's the start of an attempt to pull the wool over someone's eyes.; The second is, .co.uk names are sold for just £4.99 per year. Granted you have to buy the first two years using the providers I use, but still. OK maybe some might charge an admin fee on top of that (I don't, I could probably buy you a domain name in less than two minutes), but not £140 of admin fees.; I'm a member of the British Computer Society because I like abiding by their codes of conduct and one of them is basically this: don't take advantage of the ignorance of your client. It's this sort of thing that that code of conduct seeks to stamp out. The client said "well, I don't know what's involved". Precisely. That's why you employ a professional, to take care of your interests.
ESMA: 5 December 2006: While my g/f watched Neighbours, I treated myself to an old edition of New Internationalist, a special edition on genocide.; In there is a story of how Juan Cabandié discovered that the people he thought were his parents, weren't. His mother, 17 when she gave birth to him, was held at the Naval Mechanical School, otherwise known as ESMA, where an estimated 5,000 people were tortured and murdered during Argentina's military dictatorship from 1976-83. Juan was born in an ESMA cell.; After fifteen days during which his mother breastfed him, she was removed and most likely killed: drugged and thrown into the river. He was given to a police officer and his wife to raise as their son. They gave him an almost military education.; The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (groan, I notice U2 got in there) are dedicated to piecing together the lives of these, perhaps 400, 'stolen children' and have confirmed by DNA analysis that Juan's parents were detained at ESMA. His mothers cellmates survived and were able to tell him his name. Juan is his mother's chosen name for him.; In July, forensic anthropologists recovered the remains of Azucena Villaflor, the founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, from the bottom of the ocean. Back then she had been flung into it from a military plane. This confirmed the existence of 'death flights'.; Now, I know it's a big leap, but something's been bugging me. I'm a softwary, databasy kinda guy so my first reaction is that, yes, an ID Card system in this country sounds sensible enough. Obviously, you'd want everyone in a database, makes perfect sense.; And I've even come to think that even the bad decisions of this government, Iraq obviously, were taken in good faith. Blair isn't out to do bad things, he's a good guy trying to do good things in a very complicated world.; But mass state sponsored killings don't seem to be that unusual. Rwanda, The Holocaust, Congo, Uganda, Cambodia, Chile, East Timor, Armenia .. I've reached page 14 of the magazine. For those who think those too far away in time or geography, there's Yugoslavia, and we do have the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 which allows indefinite detention without trial and in that pillar of righteousness and justice the USA, Guantanamo Bay. It's all very well for middle class middle aged Daily Mail reading Brits to say it'll never happen here, but I suspect there are many from less traditional backgrounds who already feel targeted by officaldom.; It appears to me many of the arguments used by government can be used against cards. Thatcher once said of the IRA that she has to be lucky every time, they only have to get lucky once. With id cards, the reverse seems true. While most British governments are likely to be mostly harmless, it only takes one: Hitler was voted in, wasn't he? And once in, there doesn't seem to be much available to remove a prime minister or government from power.; And the argument about us retaining our nuclear deterrent because we can't tell what the Ruskies or the Arabs or the Pakistanis will be like in a few years time .. it's an increasingly unstable world .. is surely an argument that, yes it is, the BNP are getting more support and it's not completely wild to imagine a world where they gain some power. If that's a world where everyone's data is immediately accessible, who knows what could happen?; I met a friend whose opinion I respect, and she said the principle is that you give a government only as much power and information as it needs to govern, no more. I gave my "at some point you've got to accept that people, particularly in politics, are trying to do good things (whereas companies aren't acting for social good)" point, and she countered with how many organisations would have access to this data, both government and corporate.; I've also always used the argument that if you do nothing wrong, no harm will come to you. I'm a goody goody, so I can sleep at night. Except that that troubles me too. Am I, actually, being coerced by threats of government violence? But I like the idea of a society in which our DNA is held centrally and every rapist and murderer is caught. That surely means I can walk the streets, confident that I won't be murdered.; So, I'm not sure about the ID Card thing. Part of me thinks, actually, the main reason for it is to support industry and jobs, just like the road pricing scheme and the NHS IT project. But in case it's of any interest, there is a campaign against. But if I'm not sure, then I won't mobilise against, and if lots of people are the same, it'll happen, despite the risks.; A friend mentioned Primo Levi, so I added "If this is a man" to my Amazon wishlist. I'd heard of him, but couldn't have said who he was.
The first IE7 results: 5 December 2006: I maintain an analysis of the browser and operating system combinations the people who visit my sites use, and a test suite so that I can check your new site in the most popular combinations. It's going to be exciting because it's the first time I've been able to watch the uptake of a new version of Internet Explorer, and a new version of Windows.; The first results in, for the whole of November for one client, 7,725 visits were made using IE6 versus 358 using IE7.
Honda S2000: 4 December 2006: My girlfriend wants a Honda S2000, so phone me now and buy lots of websites (we are so very far away from it even being possible .. first, get a house with a garage). That is a joke, btw. Don't start thinking I live the life of Riley on your hard earned cash.; I'd love to give you a link to the official Honda site about the car, but they've used smelly pants Flash in a way that foils my efforts. You'll have to work it out yourself from here.; I was trying to work out if I was going to trip down to Nottingham on my birthday. At £43.80 one way on a saver train ticket, I hardly think so. Interestingly, that journey takes 3 hours 45 minutes while the National Express coach from York takes just a little longer, only because of fifty minutes waiting around in Leeds, but costs £13.80. However their website foils users' attempts at use by hitting us with extra irrelevant (in both senses) pop-burst-in-your-face siteage about dating and nothing in particular. Yes, one site was about nothing in particular. It was a magazine type thing. It makes me think they'll employ people to shout "Did you see the size of Jennifer Anniston's dress?" in my ear while I queue to buy a ticket. No thanks.
Turner prize: 4 December 2006: Ooh, I successfully predicted Tomma Abts would win the Turner prize. Excellent. Hers was the art work that affected me the most in the Channel 4 previews last week. Plus, it turns out, she's rather attractive in a quietly confident, "I'm not going to spell it out for you" kind of way.; And what a weird thing for the Channel 4 reporter to say "we have a feeling Phil Collins really wants to win it". What, so the others can't really be bothered? A slapback at the person whose work is exposing the media, perchance?
Yellow fields: 3 December 2006: I spent a little while working this one out. I found some fields in a web form I was designing came out with a lemon yellow background, while others didn't, but only in Internet Explorer over XP. It was there in IE6 and had survived to IE7. I didn't know the significance of the yellow, so wanted it gone.; I did notice that the yellow happened after the page had rendered, but it wasn't Javascript that was doing it.; I checked the stylesheet, checked the page code, and couldn't see any significant differences between the fields.; I created a copy of the page and gradually stripped it down to nothing, but I was still getting the yellow, and a CSS command to set the background to white had no effect.; It turned out that the description was what set off the yellow. Since the description isn't the same object as the form itself, that's really curious. But if I changed the description from 'email' to something nonsense like 'emale', it didn't display yellow.; I was flummoxed, and posted this test up to the community for some assistance. It soon came back. It wasn't IE, it was the Google toolbar highlighting a field that could be filled in automatically. Apparently the Yahoo toolbar does a similar thing and is more common because it's bundled with the Flash player. Wow.; Now, how many users would know that? So, how confusing are those yellow fields? Who says yellow will go with my client's colour scheme? I say keep things simple, don't install things you don't really need. I'm turning the Google toolbar off. I only installed it out of SEO curiosity, I've never actually used it. Thanks to Tim, Jason Handby and Donna Jones for their help.
Printerland.co.uk, third installment: 1 December 2006: Further to the previous shenanigans it took a whole morning to install the printer on an iBook using USB. The printer worked, printed a test page, and the software installed, although there were two things to install and no real clue whether I needed one or both, so I tried all the combinations. I got a print queue, I got a printer, but the print queue never moved.; I nipped out to get a new USB cable. No, it wasn't that.; I uninstalled all of that, downloaded fresh software from the Samsung website, and followed the instructions there and that worked.; But, when I printed out some documents, we now have an occasional, regular, fuzzy white patch in our prints. I tried different paper stock so it isn't that. The manual says my toner cartridge might be defective, put another in, and if it's not that, the fusing assembly might be damaged.; So I called Printerland and they asked me to call Samsung which I did at 14:24 and their engineering department is going to ring me back.; Incidentally, one fault: "an unknown image repetitively appears on a next few sheets", is, according to the manual, caused by "your printer is probably being used at an altitude of 2,500m or above". There's some Tibetan monk somewhere (Tibet, probably) thinking he's seen the face of Buddah who's going to be very disappointed when he finds that out.
Templates: 1 December 2006: I met someone yesterday who had purchased a web template from Perfectory.com and who called wanting someone to transfer the text from his old site to this new one. He didn't mention it was a Flash template, and said there were just a few pages and all he wanted was a text transfer, so that all seemed very straightforward and I said I could do it for a nominal sum, so he popped over with it.; It turned out .. well so many things. Firstly, it was Flash, and I'm not a Flash developer. I have got it, but I'm a fish out of water with it so that was kinda that.; But it turned out, too, that it wasn't a straight transfer of text by any stretch of the imagination. There was no destination for the text to be transferred to .. that had to be created. And the template was so full of images there was no space for text.; The text itself seemed to have been ripped straight from a manual translated badly from the original Japanese. It used abbreviations I had no clue about, was full of mistakes and poor grammar, and didn't really do the product justice. It wasn't even clear what was being sold.; The final wonder of it all was that the chap said he didn't really get along with computers, but he'd bought this template, they are fantastically cheap, but in order to edit and change them the authors recommend the following software:; and he'd bought all that, which I estimate would have cost, well, for the latest versions of each of those (none of which I've got (except Flash MX) or need, I might say) (£454 + £340 + £75 + £225 + £507) £1,601, unless he just got ripped off copies from a mate in which case he's on the wrong side of the law. Interestingly, as if to make my point for me, I was unable to attempt to purchase Adobe Photoshop using my Linux computer because the purchase form was created using Flash and the thing just broke.; So, then, he would have to learn how to use all those professional software packages. How long would that have taken? I, with all my experience and knowledge, have spent 15 hours of my life learning Flash (this I know .. I keep records) and I'm nowhere near calling myself anything like even the most straightforward user, I'm still clueless. I've spent 12 hours formally learning The Gimp, the open source alternative to Photoshop, and over 550 hours using it, and there's plenty for me still to learn. That doesn't include the time I've spent learning the principles of what's involved: all the different aspects of graphic design, digital photography, and so on.; It's a bit like buying a copy of AutoCAD and thinking you can design and build your own home even though, to date, you've been a vet, or an accountant.; And all this without any guiding principles whatsoever. Lets see now. Would this site have been findable by his client group using a search engine? Would it have been accessible? Would it have been usable? Would it have been persuasive? Would it, in the end, have benefited his business. You know the answers: no, no, no, no, and no.; Perhaps it's a recent thing. We are beyond the times when we had to stockpile sugar or coffee because there were world shortages, we don't have to worry much about inflation because, thanks to the sweat and labour of the people of Azerdonkeystan who are obviously helping themselves out of poverty (and we are helping by buying from them, so that's good), our clothes can cost less than a pizza, or we just turn to eBay for whatever we want and now we're used to it. We can buy anything we want. So why not a professional website for $49? Just buy a template and it's done, right?