John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Another case study for you: 31 May 2007: Bramblewick Guest House. There are a couple of nice pics of Peasholm Park here too.
Scarborough from the air: 31 May 2007: Wikipedia has an aerial shot of scarborough.
Daphne: 31 May 2007: Loving Daphne the non-blinking kitten. You think it's not going to be funny, but then it gets you and it very is. Makes me laff.
The half life of a DTXpress III: 30 May 2007: For those of you who don't know, I'm a drummer in two bands, and I use a DTXpress III, I don't actually own a proper drum kit. I never have, really, unless you count that pearl effect dance kit I owned for a week or two when I was about fifteen and didn't know I was a drummer. Prior to this I had a Simmons kit, an SDS 9 I think.; Anyway, I think I've discovered the half life of a DTXpress III.; Now, I don't consider myself a heavy hitter. I don't play AC/DC covers and I'm not trying to give myself RSI. However I am a big chap, I do go to the gym, and I do enjoy a good solid beat.; I know someone else in Scarborough who also has a DTXPress III he got around the same time as mine, he practices about the same amount as me and his is pristine. My snare pad looks like this (it should be smooth all over like it is at the edges):; So, when I discovered, on the morning of a local festival gig, that my hi hat pedal had ceased to function, I was a tad annoyed (and had to borrow from my fellow DTXer, thank-you enormously).; And it got me thinking. I've replaced, since I've had it, both cymbal pads, the bass drum pad, the power supply and now the hi-hat pedal and clearly the snare drum pad is on its way, I've probably replaced half of the kit barring perhaps the brain.; I've owned this kit for thirty one months, and I try (and fail) to play for about an hour a day, but the days I fail are probably made up by a weekly 2-drumming-hour practice, plus nowadays perhaps another hour in practice with another band (2 hour practices, but more ad-hoc). So it probably does average out an hour a day. So maybe the half life of a DTXpress III is 942 hours.; I could maybe repair some of the knackered pads and may yet, but I don't really want to get up on stage to use a system that I've repaired. Not unless I have replacement bits anyway.; I wonder if any Roland owners have any comparable figures.
Larger: 29 May 2007: I'm working on the website for a larger-size dress shop so I'm researching keywords and discovering what people are searching for on the web. Of those searches that included the word "larger", on the database I'm looking at there were 1,024 wanting a 'larger penis', 867 wanting 'larger than life', 487 just wanted 'larger', 350 wanted 'larger breasts', 299 wanted to know 'how to make your penis larger', and 244 wanted 'two pints of larger and a packet of crisps'.; Which just goes to show the state we've got ourselves into.
Falcon Festival: 27 May 2007: We enjoyed Saturday at the Falcon Festival. Favourites were, I think, The Surf Sluts .. a sort of cross between The Cramps and a surf band. Exceptional.; The Revolutionary Poetess was good too :-)
More running pics: 27 May 2007: I've uploaded the pics from my running camera. It's 1:34am on Sunday morning, lots has been going off, all good, and my mind was racing. Mostly with running images, which I might remember to explain.; I went on a ten mile run last weekend. I just headed north up the old railway line as far as 50 minutes would take me, and with overseas readers, particularly those Hong Kong chums I talked of earlier, I just wanted to show some of the glorious British countryside. I couldn't decide between these three so I thought I'd just show them all. Remember, the running camera's the knackered old Pentax so don't expect supreme quality.; This weekend's was twelve miles. I'm pretty proud of that, it's the second longest run I've ever done, the longest being the 12.6 mile half marathon last year.; I decided to take the Cleveland Way coast path south from Scarborough this time, basically running the clifftop that you see in the webcam. This is where I'm headed:; You can follow along with the Ordnance Survey if you start at Scarborough and just follow the coast down. I think this is Cornelian Bay. There's an old pillbox down there on the beach, and a few more later and on the clifftop.; Stunning wild flowers; I've always wanted to wander around in this, what looks like, perfectly unspoiled bit of coastal forest, but obviously it wouldn't be unspoiled if I were in it, so I never have.; This must be Cayton Bay, from Osgodby Point (or Knipe Point as labelled by the National Trust). I'll end up on top of those cliffs at the end. It took me 36 minutes to get here (plus the ten minutes walk warm up).; The run goes through some beautiful woodland. I just wish I could take the proper camera to record it.; I nearly pizza'd this little fella. He just didn't move, so I was able to get almost within arms length of him to take this shot. I'm thinking a young Yellowhammer, any advance on that? It's a bit early, surely, for young birds to be leaving the nest. Update: apparently not.; Update 10 March 08: I just received "Just been on your website, and the bird in your picture is actually a Self Yellow Green Canary. An 'escapee' in other words!" Awwww, my heart's broken for the poor thing. He (she) didn't fly away because he was used to human company. All confused in a big world with cats in it and no food! Honestly ... big awwwwwwww. If I'd known I'd have rescued him.; This is weird. The only thing I've done with the following image is what I've done with all of them, which is adjust the brightness to overcome the broken exposure system on the Pentax, resize it and sharpen it. So why does it look like an artist's impression, or a model village? Anyway, it's part of the holiday village at Cayton Bay. The flowers look the same. I must have breathed on the lens, or accidentally taken some magic mushrooms on the way; It makes you want to eat a Flake doesn't it? So what's new, I always want to eat a Flake.; So now I'm heading towards Lebberston Cliff on the south end of Cayton Bay; Alright, so now we're getting to the reason I'm up in the dead of night catching up with my blog. I was trying to get to sleep, but this image kept coming to mind; Now, although the whole point of the Cleveland Way is that it's along the clifftop, much of the time it's not really a cliff, it's more a very steep slope where bits of what you're standing on have slipped downwards a few decametres or so (I'm not trying to be clever, I was taught decametres at school and I can't think of another way of saying less than a hundred metres, but more than five or six, and I've already used 'bit').; The problem here is, this is a proper cliff, and it's a climb to here .. it's bloody high. Nothing between you and actually assured destruction. And there's something about this bit where you're sandwiched between the fence and the cliff that really has me bothered, in retrospect. When you're there you think, well, geological time's a long time, and the weather's been fine, and it's a big lump of rock, what are the chances, it is a public footpath, it will have had a health and safety inspection, etc. But I wouldn't do this on a windy day. Nor after rain. The thing about it is, it's real. It's not a simulation, this isn't a game, there's no safety rope. It's really there. Right there.; Looking down (this picture really compresses the distance and doesn't do it justice); it's not that the demons sit on my shoulder and whisper "go on, jump, you've not done anything interesting for a while, go onnn, it would be interesting, exciting, everyone would notice you, you'd get out of your routine, go onnnnnnnn, just one step, weeks of laying in bed recovering while people bring you cups of tea, you've always wanted a ride in a helicopter, go onnnnnnnn, dying's not so bad, you get to find out what happens next .. go onnnnnnnn" .. they really don't. But that those thoughts are pitter pattering around as I'm trying to sleep is a thing. Don't worry, clients and family, I'm not about to toss myself off (ahem), I'm just dramatising, playing with you. It's certainly a clifftop walk though, and it is worth mentioning if anyone's scared of heights and is contemplating the walk. Like they would. Like claustrophobic people sit there thinking "I could just pick up that phone and book myself a flotation tank experience".; You thought you were going to get pretty flowers and baby birds and I've cunningly sirened you into the darkness of your subconscious.; Anyway, here's a pretty view of how far I got.; Just, more of the same really. Once you've seen one cliff, you've seen them all, they've all got more or less the same layout (that's a direct quote from a friend who we'd taken up onto the moors one day when the heather was out (should have left him there really), except, just substitute 'moors' for 'cliff'). We use that quote in all sorts of situations in memory of that moment, probably, a decade ago.; Those caravans are the ones in my previously blogged twilight pics, that must be the Blue Dolphin holiday park at Gristhorpe Sands and right at the end of all that should be Filey Brigg, which I thought I might reach .. maybe on a longer run another day.; So then if I'm at the place I can see on the webcam, I should be able to see where I live from here:; There are times when you think "do I really have to run all that way back?" But it looks a lot easier if you zoom in:; Back up Lebberston cliff again:; See what I mean about it being a proper, vertical cliff and a very long way down?; Well you'll be pleased to know my camera ran out of battery after that so I can't bring you the really stunning views of unspoiled beaches I experienced on the way back. But rest assured I won't let that happen again. Till next time ..; Oh. 1,775 calories. Just in case you wanted to know.
Olympia case study: 24 May 2007: This case study has been around for a while, for some reason we just never got around to clearing it. It's an interesting website, I really enjoyed doing it. Take a look .. it's different. Fancy a game of bowling? I'll have a go if you're up for it.; My partner really hates the seagull flying off with the offers thing, no-one else has commented on it (actually all the testers who I asked said they really like the site). I like the seagull's feeling of action, as if it's flying away with the offer so there's an unconscious feeling of grab it while it's there. I also like its crappiness. Because it's disjointed from the rest of the site, it's noticeable. It's a busy site, there's a cognitive jar there that, I think, will make people notice, consider and possibly even act on the offer. If people don't even notice it, the battle's lost. So that's why the crappy seagull is there.
Painted buildings from all over the world, with text in Bulgarian: 24 May 2007: I thought "yeah yeah", but actually some of these are really inspirational.
Hubble pics: 23 May 2007: My problem with this is .. were we to stand at that point in space, is that what we'd see, or has that image been seen in some spectrum that's invisible to our eyes and then translated and enhanced so we can see it. I want to go "cor blimey that's beautiful", but not if there's a chance of me being fooled. I don't want to spend a thousand light years travelling to see it if it just looks like black space when I get there. I want the truth, dammit.; Update: a friend of a friend said this: "There's a similar image here with some details of how it was obtained. It is taken at optical wavelengths (i.e. its not a false colour image of IR, UV or X-rays) but it is 'colour enhanced' (explained here) which basically means they have assigned new colours to particular wavelengths to enhance the differences. So what would have appeared as two different shades of red appear as red and green. So if you were there it wouldn't be quite so colourful, but that is basically what you'd see."
History: 22 May 2007: History was my worst subject at school, I just couldn't relate to it at all. Nowadays I understand myself better. I know I'm not great at understanding the subtleties of tightly written language .. I've done a test about it so it must be true. I'm good at language, just not when it involves lots of relationships, like legalese does. I also seem to have a gene missing that stops me readily knowing what a nephew is .. I have to work it out from first principles each time. So when I was faced with a dense text about how King A wanted to defeat the rebels because previously they'd defaced his tabernacle because they felt A wasn't nice enough to the Bs, I'd be lost. My lowest exam mark ever, 19%, was for history, although we didn't have a teacher for half that year. I can remember being sat in that class as clear as yesterday .. although what happened yesterday is pretty murky.; Plus, I also couldn't relate to what we learned about. Stoneage man just seemed a little bit removed from our experience. I wanted to know about the war, because that seemed relevant. Thinking about writing this blog, I wondered about that. It doesn't seem so relevant now. But that's because back in the seventies when I was doing my O levels, the second world war had ended just thirty years previous. Wow. Now, it's sixty years ago. Then, I was surrounded by people who had fought in it, or grew up being bombed by doodlebugs. I travelled on the train once and got talking to a woman who lived in Canada and knew Britain only from the air, because she'd flown supplies up and down the country in the war (see this, this, and this). Now the people who served are mostly dead. I wanted to know about recent political history so I knew what left and right were and could relate to the people I saw on the tv. I wanted to know what unions did, they had a huge effect on society around then .. the three day week comes to mind, all sitting around with candles.; I asked a non-Brit once what they had been taught in history: was it British history or the history of their own country, and they laughed and said the latter, of course. I knew it was a naive question, but I still had to ask it because I genuinely didn't know. Was British history the history of the world? Don't Americans categorise antiques by the English monarchy? I blame my embarrassment at having asked that question on my school history education. It was taught as if English history was the only history, which is nonsense. Amazingly, we just completely ignored, for instance, Chinese civilisation. Imagine physics without heat, or French without the past tense .. in every other subject you get an overview don't you?; It's strange, but now I feel very interested in history. I even have a book on Israeli history on my Amazon wishlist .. because I want to understand what's happening there. I can't quite grasp the idea of just creating a country by international agreement .. is that really what happened?; Perhaps I'm old enough now to have my own sense of historical perspective. I know it's all a bit middle of the road and any reader who is into history and is right now egging me on will snort into their darjeeling, but Victoria Wood's recent programme, Victoria's Empire, helped. Clearly my existing knowledge is still at a rather basic level. I had sometimes wondered why there were black, African types in the Caribbean, and had no idea they were all there as a result of the slave trade, mostly driven by us Brits. That's rather blown me away, I really had no clue. I wonder, in a completely amateur and probably offensive, not to mention ignorant, way, whether that's why 'freedom' seems highly valued in popular culture there.; Then, Wikipedia had a featured story on the California gold rush and how there was no easy way to get there. Sailing seemed a good idea, but what happened was, when they arrived, the crew jumped ship and dug for gold, so ships just arrived and languished in the harbour, and so no-one with a ship wanted to sail there. There's still that feeling of urgent and huge money, and of optimism in California (what do I know, I've never been there).; Finally, I couldn't really get excited about the Chelsea Flower Show piece on American wild flowers, where they went around appreciating the fact that someone had gotten wild flowers to grow, err, in the wild. I couldn't help thinking a) America is renowned for its gung-ho approach to the environment and liking for intensive farming methods which rather destroyed lots and lots and lots and so very lots of wild flower meadows (or something .. do Americans have meadows?), and b) we are dealing with land that was taken from an indigenous people so stop looking so damn smug, and c) it probably looked perfectly beautiful before you (we) arrived.; But last night, I can't remember what programme but it was Channel 4 about 8 o'clock, a respected journalist went in search of an understanding of the Israeli Palestinian thing, another instance, on the face of it, of a people taking over a bit of someone elses land. An interesting attitude came out of that: an Israeli attitude of "we have built a perfectly good, working democratic country here in sixty years, what did the Palestinians do with the land in gazillions of years", which is an interesting slant on the whole thing .. I'm not saying I agree or disagree, just, I hadn't looked at it that way. If that works it might justify us whiteys taking over America, but of course it only works if you think modern western society is clearly, obviously better than what went before. It's fascinating what you can do with your head, isn't it?
Fraud: 22 May 2007: Hmm, this is interesting. I had a call, out of the blue today, from June at [myBank] fraud department saying they'd seen a transaction that could be fraudulent, and would I confirm whether it was genuine or not. It was £2,153.39 to Cathay Pacific on the 13th May, so, no, it wasn't genuine. Not to worry, she said, we had declined it anyway.; Which account was she talking about, I wondered? She asked for my month of birth and then my mother's maiden name and I balked, it sounded like the beginning of an agreement staircase. Hang on, I don't know who you are. So she said I could call her back using the number on the back of my card, she gave her name, and her extension number. I did that, and Heather there said they'd never heard of her, that my accounts were fine and nothing was showing. But they didn't have access to another type of account I had, so maybe I should try them.; I spoke to Sheila there and it seemed to be the same story, and then she said, oh, hang on, we do have someone by that name (June ... ). She would email her and ask if she'd called me and ask her to call me again. I said that's no good, because if she was a spammer she might call me back anyway, so I'd be in the same boat, so she said she'd call me back herself.; She did, she gave a direct number for June, which I called and it rang and died, repeatedly. So I went back to Sheila and got to speak with another person who just basically kept saying no until I said "well, look, I'm in this situation, I need to speak with the first woman, what do you advise", she advised putting me on hold for a bit, and then she said she'd get Sheila to get back in touch with June. She did, June emailed Sheila with the number again, Sheila called me back, and the number I'd been given the first time around had an extra digit. So now I could call June.; By now, June had cancelled my account, issued a new one, and will send me three months of statements to check, and if I saw anything else I was to call and request a debit form.; Only the other day I was speaking with someone who doesn't do much online shopping and they have a card for online use, and they use none of the others online. Hmm, I should really do that, I thought. But I asked June whether she knew how "they'd" got my details and she said there was really no way of telling .. it could be a virus (unlikely since I use Linux), could be cloning, wasn't necessarily online at all.; I also said that I'd heard that when companies have penetration tests done (to check how easy it is to break into a company network), the testers reward the most vigilant staff members with cake*. I said I looked forward to receiving a special [myBank] cake as a reward. She said no, that wouldn't be happening.; Let's hope the day gets better. Here are some resources to help it be: CardWatch.org.uk, Wikipedia, APACS, BBC; * OK, it was just the one instance, where the testers spotted the woman in the canteen who had stopped them and bought her a cake as a well-done.; Update: It turned out I thought she was talking about one account when she was talking about another, so when I put away (nearly cut up) the card I thought she had cancelled and tried to use the one I thought was good, it got rejected. Cue more phone calls to work out what we were talking about. I think we're straight now, although I hope it's just the card she's cancelled and not the actual account.
Open source Windows: 22 May 2007: Here's a nice list of open source software for Windows for those who don't want to go the whole hog and install Linux.
Vexels: 21 May 2007: Further to the Deviant Art posting below, I've just discovered the name for the cartoony illustration style that we see a lot of nowadays. It's a vexel, apparently from 'vector' and 'pixel'. Here's how to draw one.
Deviant Art: 21 May 2007: I didn't realise artists could sell prints through Deviant Art.
Winspear: 21 May 2007: Another case study for you, this time a traditional wooden boatbuilder in Whitby. Actually, the site's not quite up yet, I'm just waiting for the host to set up, but the case study's there.
pdftotext: 20 May 2007: Linux might be a pain, but when it works it works like a dream.; I've been sent a 78 page PDF and I needed to search it for particular words and every time I scrolled around the document it took an age to load (and mine's not a slow machine), and text search just eventually died. I've a feeling there was something a bit strange about the file, PDFs usually work fine. One could say it was a failing of Linux, or the app I was using to read PDF, rather than a Linux success story, but let's ignore that.; So I went looking for a way to extract the text from the PDF, and sure enough, there's a Linux utility called pdftotext, it was there on my system, it works like pdftotext my.pdf my.txt, and two seconds later, job's done. When it works, it works. Am I right in thinking in Windows you'd end up buying some software utility to do that (that one's $44.95)? Or would you argue the PDF would be functional in the first place.
Molasses: 20 May 2007: .. and there's John Marr's Murder Can Be Fun. Apparently he's written a historically accurate account of the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Where else are you going to read about that? And what's the difference between a historically accurate account, and a plain old accurate one?
Tyler Starr: 19 May 2007: I'm really enjoying DIY: the rise of lo-fi culture, by Amy Spencer. Well it certainly beats Tolley's Tax Guide anyway. I'm on this bit which is dealing with zines, basically small print run, amateur magazines which, because they are under no editorial constraints end up writing more freely than mainstream press. It seems to have much the same ethos as open source software development (and art), that people do it for the love of it, they swap magazines with each other.; I was never into it, although I had friends who were, but the things they bought, Fat Freddy's Cat, etc. were from America, and I've always felt more interested in our own culture and that American culture, while interesting, is used as a means to push American values and to set up America as the right way and the society to which we should all aspire. I reject that, and so I reject those attempts to persuade me, and so tend to choose British culture, music, and so on. Always have. I don't bear Americans any ill will of course. And nor is it really true .. Beefheart's certainly a hero of mine (and, err, wasn't Bill Hicks from over there?) .. but I don't make any claim to consistency (you know who you are). Plus I was above reading books with lots of pictures in them.; But that's all bollocks, I'm starting to understand. I'm getting excited by what a chap called Tyler Starr does (or did), he: "passes time at factory jobs by jotting down stories from his co-workers and sketching his surroundings for his zine". That sounds brilliant, there's a small example here.; Then there's David Greenberger, who while working at a nursing home, started talking to the residents, and started to ask some curious questions. Like, Spencer says, "Which do you prefer, coffee or meat?", and "What does it mean to sell out?". That's turned into this.; Doesn't it fill you with rage, don't you want a revolution? That there's such beauty among us, and we're supposed to be impressed by Friends?
Bill Hicks: 18 May 2007: For about ten years until the millennium I ran a PR company and we worked with a design company called Hartley Briggs and Ross, and when I used to go there and sit with them on projects, often they had Bill Hicks playing on the CD player (I can't do that, I need my brain to be concentrating, but I'm sure if you're doing visual stuff it's fine). I wanted to find out more. It's only now that Jamie from the band has loaned me a Bill Hicks DVD I'm able to. We watched that last night, and in it was Hicks' routine about Creationism (maybe this is it, I can't tell, sound isn't working for me atm).; Creationism seems really seriously dangerous to me. If we're going to ignore science then we are really screwed. But later, I was thinking, a Creationist who is as quick thinking as a comedian might well counter with this: how could the insect life cycle possibly evolve?; So there you are, a caterpillar, with a life consisting of one thing: eating. So you eat and eat and eat and all's well besides losing a few thousand friends to bird attacks. But then, late one Wednesday evening, you find yourself walking purposefully towards higher ground, finding a ledge or somewhere out of the wind and rain. And then your skin turns hard and, inside, you completely dissolve. You've turned to soup (what must that feel like)? But no, it's not just soup, you're completely re-arranging. All your molecules are re-configuring and, given a month or so, you wake up, break out of your shell, and you're a perfectly formed butterfly. You're beautiful, and you can fly for days on sugared water. Plus, you can find other butterflies that look more or less like you, mate, find a food plant for your babies (that you don't eat yourself, mind), and lay eggs there. All that, in a very small package. It makes technology look neanderthal.; OK, all that flying and egg laying stuff I get, I can see how evolution can create that. I even get how bees got to live together and dance to tell other bees about the sun and the position of some groovy nectar. But no matter how long infinity is, how could that life cycle possibly have evolved. It's not a series of little steps .. all those pre-insects a gazillion years ago that mutated into something that climbed walls, or whose skin hardened, or whose body turned to soup .. they'd all die without the whole package. I'd like to see this explained, where's Attenborough when you need him? This doesn't really sate my need. Looks to me like we don't know. That's a pretty big hole in the defenses for Creationism to just walk right in. "If science is such a big deal, what about insects, huh?" I'd buy the idea that the insect life cycle was designed. Scientists: get your act together fer Chrissakes before we all start believing this stuff.; Maybe the problem is I haven't evolved enough to get it.
Smashing my computer: 18 May 2007: When I got to bed last night I had repeated images (not dreams, I was awake) of smashing my computer into tiny pieces (each of which, irritatingly, could probably still do things I'm not capable of) using a very big metal hammer.; Why were these images here? I think it was this. Earlier, I'd been in conversation with a client and we were checking search results in Google and I asked him if he was in google.co.uk or google.com and I changed my google.co.uk to google.com and when I pressed the button, it went to google.co.uk. I did it again, and it changed again. Whatever I did, I got google.co.uk.; So now I can look at google.es for Spain, google.co.jp for Japan, but I can't see what Americans see in their google.; Now, I thought the browser sent country information to the server but a) I haven't the time to check what I'm saying, b) I can't find such a setting in Firefox or Konqueror, c) what I say in 'b' suggests Google is doing it another way (eg. by identifying my country from my IP address), and d) I might be mixing it up with the language setting.; So if there isn't a setting in my Firefox, I'm not in control of this behaviour.; Computers are mind tools. They let you play with ideas, explore them, communicate them and get stuff done. The more computers try to second guess us, the more our thoughts will be channelled along the same paths as everyone else.; Popularity charts, "people who bought this also bought that", and other popular navigation tools have the same effect. I'm not against them, but this is a downside.; Increasingly, we will think along motorways of thought, major channels, and won't be able to get off and travel the country lanes to find new places and new ideas. This is serious mind-control stuff, right here on the Internet where, once upon a time, free thinkers gathered.; When Word came up with smart quotes as a default, that was against what we, as web developers, need. Nowadays every time someone sends us a Word file we have to strip out the smart quotes, the long -, and the super clever ... and replace them with normal text so it will display on the web. In other words, Word cannot second guess that the document the person is writing is destined for the web. So don't try. Second guessing and getting it wrong is very bad. Second-guessing that I want google.co.uk just because I'm in the UK potentially stops me from doing my job.; But it's more than that. This, for me, is where Google stepped over the line. It's my Blair moment. From here on in, Google thinks it knows better than I do what I want. Well no thanks.; Update: It looks like you can do a search in google.co.uk, then edit the address to .com and that stays put.
Almost forgot: 17 May 2007: I almost forgot, I have another case study for you, Chris Pollard's Driving School.
Average UK Internet user: 17 May 2007: The most common UK Internet user is male, 35 years old or more, and spends maybe 2 hours every day surfing the Internet. That's how I read the latest Nielsen//NetRatings report (that link is a small PDF download).; The most interesting thing is that before 18 years old, the usage is much less. Perhaps it's associated with homework, or perhaps parents are protecting their kids from the seedier side of life. That seems contrary to our mySpace-led expectations.
Tolley's Tax Guide: 17 May 2007: The reason I haven't reviewed a book for you recently is that I've been ploughing my way through Tolley's Tax Guide 2005-6, a goal I set myself about fifteen years ago when my then accountant referred to it.; I want to understand tax, but find I can't. I've read the book .. yes, all of it from personal allowances to farming subsidies .. but I can't say any of it really went in. I've a few more vague impressions than I had before, that's about it.; The big feeling I did get is that having an arcane tax system is in itself a tax. Since we all have to pay tax, if we don't understand the tax system we have to pay someone to take care of our affairs .. that's a tax. It looks like an enterprise stifler too. If people think they might start a business but tax is just one more thing they have to think about, it may well be* the last straw.; Anyway, onwards to a more interesting book I bought from The Baltic bookshop last time. More on that later.; * that's another random website. Love the shop, but what a poor, actually illegal website. Where are the contact details? If you buy something, who are you buying from? And the shop is a sensual delight, the website .. they may as well be selling industrial fasteners.
Poetry: 16 May 2007: So there we were in the Alma (no-one who has reviewed it on that site's mentioned the jukebox), when an end-of-night bloke leaned over and asked "do you like poetry"?; My first instinct was to say "no", because in truth, I don't. I find it irritating, usually. Particularly if it's amateur poetry either written by fey women in purple skirts or men attempting to show their sensitive side as part of a strategy to attract a mate. But you never know in Scarborough, we might have been talking to Roger McGough and then we'd have been sorry.; So we replied cagily and out came the sheet of paper and we duly read it and actually, using the patent Allsopp amateur pub poetry evaluation metrics it was a significant 12% better than the mode, which gave us confidence, but I wasn't prepared to break down in tears over it just to satisfy the author. "Timeless, that", he said, "I wrote that in 1973". He had a pint (and several points).; Cut to last Saturday's Culture Show which featured performance poet John Hegley reading a poem that contained a line which has stuck in my head just as strongly as songs often do. It went something like this: "Eddie don't like furniture. If you buy him some for Christmas he'll return-it-t'ur" which is just, well, poetry. Every time I hear him I think I really, really must make the effort to go to one of his performances. Sadly, the tour dates link on his website's knackered, which isn't poetry at all.; Which got me thinking about Ivor Cutler, who I (and many others) love. Really love.; And John Cooper Clarke, who, magically, is still going strong.; So maybe I do like poetry. Maybe everyone likes poetry, they just have to find the stuff they like in the same way that everyone likes music and food and holidays, it's just, we have preferences.; Scarborough's a backwater, so I may well be realising this ten years after everyone else has, but many bars are opening, and many pubs now have a "for sale" sign up. Young people don't go to pubs any more, they go to bars while wearing branded clothes and they drink brightly coloured, quirkily named drinks out of their bottle in the hope that the mass of brand associations will help make them look good and bring good fortune. I don't think drunken poet man would go* to a bar. Pubs are increasingly for old men. That's a problem.; The pubs are dying. They're up for sale but no-one is buying.; I'm a poet, but I don't know it.; * I'm wondering if it would be fun to include a random link in my blogs. In other words, by a proper random method, choose a single word from a blog and link it to something. Not sure whether to mark it up differently so you know which is the random one, or to leave you to seek it out. Or whether it'll catch on. What do you think?
Arty day off: 11 May 2007: We had an arty day off yesterday, starting at the Moors Centre in Danby which has a new adjunct in which they intend to show art. The artists change every week, and the artists themselves are supposed to be there. I think that's a grand idea, it's a chance to meet the artist and for them to add that little extra something that might clinch a sale. A week's a little short, including only one weekend, so from the artist's point of view sales success maybe depend a bit on the weather, but at the same time, who wants to spend more than a week sat in the same room? In practice, the manning of the room seems to get delegated somewhat.; Anyway, the room seems to be purpose built, with lots of natural light, which seems to work well.; I haven't managed to find their website, but the room, bottom right of the pic, did seem to have a fairly well functioning web-capable computer-based directory kiosk from Dicoll which linked out to Andrew Cheetham's website, but not, funnily enough, to Jim Wrights whose exhibition it was we went to see.; For anyone with an interest in bread, cakes, or tea shops (are there people who aren't?), the Stonehouse Bakery in Danby is about as close to heaven as you can get without dying first.; After that we went to MIMA, which is well worth a visit .. don't believe the rather understated impression they give on the website that the current exhibition consists only of things they've had lying about in a cupboard.; Thrill of the day was seeing a real Auerbach. Not being art trained, I'd first heard of him when I read this Independent article which was accompanied by a beautiful close-up of a huge gloop of paint, which turns out to be the way he does things. The painting in MIMA thrilled me. It felt like a loosening of all the rules. It made me want to really experience the joys of life.; The Mah Rana work is also very beautiful.; We spent more than forty minutes watching video from two artists whose name I didn't write down (update 13 June (oh yes!), just received an email from MIMA saying it was called Notebook 2004 by John Wood and Paul Harrison), consisting of short snippets of video pranks and surprises which throughout, never failed to be creative, surprising and funny, I just sat with a huge grin on my face and never once got bored or thought it predictable. Toying with perspective and angles, and all centred around a table in a small, neutral coloured room, to give my favourite example, you see a yellow pencil at the left side of a white tray. Then a load of other yellow pencils all fall from the right to join it, the sound of them rolling amplified. When they hit it, they stop against it. The surprise, the visual joke, being that at first, you don't imagine that you're looking at a tray that is at an incline (allowing the other pencils to roll leftwards). You don't know about the other pencils, so given what's happened in other videos you've no idea what's going to happen. And when the new pencils roll, you don't expect the first pencil to be stuck down. It's just lots of fun.; I've two beefs, though. The MIMA building itself was a disappointment. In the end, it felt like it was built on the cheap, not enough attention to what was possible.; My second is .. insufficient attention given to sound. Sound was a big deal in the video artists' work. The sound of the pencils rolling down the wooden tray. At other times things were flung or fell or crashed. All this was give to us in a reasonably big room using two speakers which would struggle to cover the area of the screen I'm typing on. Now I know speaker technology has moved on since I last read hi-fi magazines, but I'd say there's no way those speakers could render the sound of a plate smashing sufficiently well. As I understand it, you need speakers that can do 100 in order for them to easily take 20 in their stride, to deliver the hit in an instant, not blurred after mustering all they've got. These speakers were being asked to do 20 but were maybe only capable of 15, so it just didn't work. It's a bit like a car. Maybe you can only do 70 in Britain, but driving a car that is capable of 200 .. even if you never do it .. will still blow your mind, whereas driving a car only capable of 50 will wear you out. From Pattison I know that sound delivers the emotion, vision only delivers the context. So I'd say they need to spend a whole lot more attention to how they are delivering sound if they are to reach us in any meaningful sense.; Similarly, MIMA has a Sound Terrace, which, despite having music developed especially for it, delivers its sound using nothing more capable than a single liftmusic speaker. Ummm .. surround sound, people, wake up fer chrissakes. Go stand on someone's garden decking and phone Dial-A-Tune for the same effect.; We ended at the mighty Cheetham's exhibition at Bianco Nero in Stokesley. There's some grand work there, too and it's a very nice gallery, very well run. See for yourself .. click the image on that site and you'll see most of the works in a PDF. I think I like Hail Snow Sea best.
Blair: 10 May 2007: Before my memories of Blair get all messed up by what the media wants us to remember, I want to say this.; I didn't vote him in the first time, but it was a really momentous feeling that he got in. Jeez, the Major years were dire weren't they? Blair was a real breath of fresh air and a sense of possibility I've never experienced from politics before.; People poked fun at Labour's use of marketing techniques such as focus groups, but I liked it a lot. Here was a government that got in by listening to what people want. That's great government isn't it?; And his rules that he still adheres to today .. talk about schools, hospitals, jobs, and the economy .. the things people are most bothered about, are perfect. By contrast, in the local elections just past, the last newsletter from the greens just before we voted showed all the green candidates out litter picking on some country lane somewhere. Frankly, who cares about that? We want to know what the greens would do about schools, hospitals, jobs and the economy, and if they are not green priorities then they'll never form a government.; Thatcher was ousted for being too insular, taking her own way forward, not really doing cabinet government, and that seems to be the way long serving, successful prime ministers go. I turned from Blair the day after the MayDay riots when he said, and I remember this absolutely clearly, "if people can't protest properly, they won't be able to protest at all". Err, pardon? So that was that. No longer the listening party, now it was back to them and us. Strange how one thing can stick in your mind and face down ten years of hard work.; I don't blame Blair for Iraq, that was all "you're either with us or against us" Bush, we didn't really have a choice. I think Blair's a good guy doing a difficult job.; As for Gordon, the process has started, and the profile that came up on telly the other day showing him as an immensely clever high achiever, well I'm up for that. It's better than being led by Ronald Reagan anyday.
Harbour and other bits of change: 9 May 2007: 'They' are transforming the harbour area. We have French lamp-posts.; I don't know why I find that noteworthy, but I do, I've been thinking about it for ages to no real effect. That whole area is being redeveloped. They already dredged the harbour and put in pontoons for yachts.; Meanwhile on North Bay, Atlantis is being demolished. All these pics, btw, are with the Pentax I take running with me, so are of no great quality. You can click this panorama to get the biggy (5.5Mb), then click your back button to come back.; Back in the town centre, and after our two town centre music shops have closed down, now Mojo's is up for sale. This is important because this is where local bands can sell their CDs.; One of the derelict properties I highlighted last January is under scaffold now.; Scarborough's up and coming, there's a lot of building work going on.
Aliens: 8 May 2007: We were wondering, last night, what it would be like if aliens did land. I thought maybe they'd have already visited loads of places. Maybe they'd stay a couple of weeks and move on, and report back "Earth was interesting, but the food wasn't that good. Weather OK. Beds uncomfortable. Trees are a nice idea." A bit like Americans doing Europe.
Blue Tree Services: 7 May 2007: I've updated the Blue Tree Services website and its case study.
Long runs: 6 May 2007: I'm back to long runs now, and since I now have a new pocket camera I feel happy to take my old Pentax along with me, so apologies for the quality. Yesterday's was nine miles, and I decided to run along the Cleveland Way cliff path until my time ran out, and to discover the white building that sits on the cliff top near the dinosaur footprint. You'll have to suffer the slideshow I'm afraid. I've cheated a little .. one or two (cloudy weather) pictures are from a similar run the week before.; The journey starts here at the top of North Bay. The destination is the point that sticks out the furthest into the sea.; I'm incredibly blessed to be able to run along the beach (although not quite so blessed to have a camera that regularly messes up the exposure). I remember laying in bed as a kid about as far from the sea as you can get in the UK, reading books about plants and animals, and being a bit irritated by the amount of space the books gave to coastal ecology, thinking "I'm never going to live near enough to the sea for this to be useful to me". Well, now I right jiggly do.; The view along the beck from just above Scalby Mills ..; .. looking north along the Cleveland Way ..; .. and from a bit further. It's all right, there'll be a comfort break in the middle of this presentation.; England's green and pleasant land; In reality you can see this white pillbox from the journey's start, but my destination is just beginning to show up in the photographs.; It turns out to be the Long Nab Coastguard Lookout, a former wartime defence lookout post now birdwatcher's shelter.; In front of it is a thin spit of dried mud about two metres long and maybe half a metre wide and a vertiginous sheer drop either side. Very scary. Very tempting.; The views from it are pretty tempting though.; I lived to appreciate the wild flowers on the path beyond.; This is as far as I got, looking North. According to a bloke walking his dog, the dinosaur footprint was somewhere around that big headland.; And looking back you can see how far past the lookout I got. It's pretty desolate out here.; Nearly home again, the sun was getting low as I came over the hills to Scalby Mills.; The tide had come in a bit by the time I got back.
Packshots: 5 May 2007: Sometimes it's easy to forget that much of the time, no-one knows what the hell you're talking about, so after a client went "ah yes, those are nice shots" of a simple pack shot I thought I'd demonstrate what's going on. Now, I'm no photographer, but here's where I'm at, currently.; With a simple product like the BlueRanger it's easy to think that it's fine to just put it against a window (you would use daylight, right?) on a cloth and take the pic, and this is the sort of thing you get, even with a nice camera.; It's alright, you can see the product and read the size and the backdrop's not too intrusive, so OK. But the shadow's a bit stark, it's distracting and a tad gloomy and you can see the fold of the cloth underneath.; Using a setup like this, however:; (which, despite my professional protestations is clearly seen here set up in the spare bedroom) you get something more like this:; The shadows have gone, replaced with an even, almost religious light, which is clearly much better for a catalogue shot. The background, being whiter, is more easily removed using photo editing software. The use of a tripod means I can control the depth of field, too: using a smaller aperture gives more depth of field but means the shutter has to stay open longer to get the exposure and often that means it's open too long to be handheld without blurring, with a tripod and a static subject there's no worry about long shutter speeds. OK, it's still nothing like perfect, maybe it's a tad overexposed and we've lost some of the texture, and maybe I'd move to a longer lens so it doesn't look so imposing .. it's supposed to be a small, easily wearable thing not the latest sculpture in Trafalgar Square .. but as an illustration of the benefits of a light tent I still think it's a big improvement.; The whole thing takes maybe an hour to set up (including ironing the backdrop), take the shots and dismantle, so it's not too expensive either.
Mark Gubb: 5 May 2007: A friend wanted to be a character in my blog called Daisy Dangerous or something just as good, but I insisted she'd have to be called Brian. But I think not to the whole thing, this isn't Mark and Lard fer chrissakes, there's serious work to be done.; Anyway, Brian recommended I look at Mark Gubb's website (who he? No idea) because it was based on a tabletop with post-it notes and I thought yeah yeah it'll be a FlashFest, like J K Rowling's celebrated but ultimately irritating site.; But it isn't. It's all done proper, like. So, err, hurrah for Gubb. And I can do things like that, no probs. Thanks Brian. Now get your own blog.
Twilight pics: 3 May 2007: I don't think this actually works, but I like evening shots for their lighting and this is how the Nikon rendered an almost night shot of the caravans on the opposite cliff. I like it and I don't like it. Can't decide. The weird thing with this and the moon shot was it wouldn't autofocus and it was too dark to focus and setting to infinity was too far for the moon shot. So how far away does something have to be before I can set my lens to infinity? Cheap lens? Dunno.; Yes, for some reason looking at them now on the blog they are clearly out of focus, but I couldn't see that before. Oh well.; As a matter of record, this shows where the Flamborough lighthouse is when seen from our house. I didn't quite catch the fullness of the flash but it does the job.
The Moon: 3 May 2007: Apparently it's the sign of a bad photographer if they are trying to take a picture of the moon. I think I read the same article, decades ago. Something to do with the moon not actually being as big as it looks (particularly when it looks huge just as it rises), so you need an enormous lens. The Nikon's 200mm didn't do too bad.
YouTube: 2 May 2007: How come Napster got burned at the stake for file sharing, yet you can look on YouTube nowadays for anything you like (I looked for an old punk band The Lurkers and found plenty of stuff, searched for "Tiger Feet" and got footage of Mud on Top of The Pops) and it's Time magazines Invention of the Year (is it really? It honestly doesn't seem that hard to build to me, neither does mySpace) and worth $1.65bn?; The other day I checked on Google Earth and found on my map lots of icons linking to photographs taken at that spot, apparently it's all linked to Panoramio.; There are two things here. The first is that YouTube requires that you "own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize YouTube to use all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all User Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the User Submissions in the manner contemplated by the Website", and "you have the written consent, release, and/or permission of each and every identifiable individual person in the User Submission to use the name or likeness of each and every such identifiable individual person to enable inclusion and use of the User Submissions in the manner contemplated by the Website". This is clearly not being enforced.; More interestingly: ".. by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service.".; Now, OK, this isn't forever: "The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website" but .. here goes .. all the stuff we are uploading to YouTube makes the company worth $1.65bn. Now, I don't know whether there are 1.65bn items stored there, but if there are fewer, that means each video upload is worth at least $1. Let's imagine there are 1.65 million items on YouTube, making each one worth $1,000. I don't know where the real figure lies, but we are giving YouTube that value when we upload a video there.; Similarly, when we upload photographs to Panoramio, we provide them something of worth, free of charge. MySpace the same.; So how do we feel about that? Does the fact that those sites create value out of something that we probably wouldn't have extracted value from ourselves mean it's OK? Or are those sites ripping us off?; I don't know, but I'd have thought there must be some standard markup somewhere to allow us to say "this photograph was taken at this point on earth" and publish it to our own website, and then some search engine somewhere that is able to extract that and put it all together. The pic would remain on our site and under our control, and any income generated from it would be ours. I'd have thought, if you make popular videos and you put them on your own website you'd be more able to control and build your own career.; But that's me, a web developer, talking. Few others have my skills to publish their own material. Few, when faced with a free upload to YouTube or paying several sovereigns to me for a website would pay me.; Overall what's happening, though, is these private companies are taking the Internet's content and corralling it for themselves, when the idea of the Web was to enable self publishing and rely on search engines to piece it all together. What will be the endgame here? With software, the biggest is everything. There's YouTube and ... errr. MySpace and .... who cares? Those are all you need to know. So what was a miasmora of beautiful difference becomes maybe three companies that matter: Google, YouTube, and MySpace. And that's the Internet. The corporations won, in the end. The pressure from companies never relents.; What matters is standards. The Internet and the Web are built on them. If there is a way of tagging content that allows search engines to do their thing, we can self publish and keep control of our own value. I'll let you know when I stumble across it. There's this, and of course this is all obviously a semantic web type of thing. The problem with the semantic web is you need a head the size of a planet to understand it, and the more they work at it, the further away it seems to get. It feels like Stallman's GNU Hurd, the need for which was removed by the development of Linux, basically because Linux got there first and Hurd was stuck. Linux is a good thing. Corporatisation of the web probably isn't. So us developers probably need to try a little harder to support the semantic web thing and see if we can't help make it work.