June 18, 2008

Chart-tastic

eMusic is running a survey to try to find its subscribers' favourite album. Well, the best one that eMusic can supply, which narrows the field quite some way. But it means that, whatever the winner, it's not going to be some multi-platinum monstrosity.

With the help of iTunes Statistician and the power of memory, I came up with a list fairly quickly, although some things I could swear I got from the paid-for download site have since disappeared, which entailed a bit of rejigging.

On top of that, the number one is a bit of a ringer as I didn't get it off eMusic. However, the live album they put up on the service for free was the come-on I needed to try eMusic in the first place.

And the winner is: The Pixies with Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim.

Followed by:

2. Twin Cinema - The New Pornographers
3. The Greatest - Cat Power
4. Walls - Apparat
5. The Life Pursuit - Belle & Sebastian

That is all.

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June 9, 2008

Blowin' in the wind

I've never really understood the point of leaf blowers. Even less so as I look out of the window today - in the middle of June - at a guy wandering up and down with a leaf blower in a street that does not have any trees in it.

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June 4, 2008

Dear Tom Tom, this is not a road

In Sicily for a holiday in the second half of May, my girlfriend and I decided to go to Pantalica. It sounds as though it ought to be a South American heavy metal act but is an enormous, sprawling necropolis that dates back to the Bronze Age. From about 1300 BC, the inhabitants buried their dead in caves cut into the sides of the gorge cut by the Anapo river. They cut thousands of square holes in the cliffs and dragged the bodies of their relatives up to them, ultimately to be uncovered and shipped off to museums by archaeologists.

You can get to Pantalica from two directions: Ferla to the west and Sortino to the northeast. The roads almost meet, but not quite. However, the Tom Tom satnav shows one stretch of road joining Ferla and Sortino by way of Pantalica. Before we got there, I assumed that there was a road there but it was no more than a dirt track for the section that ran down into the gorge and up the other side, as local maps show a break between the two sections of tarmac. This was on the basis that in all the stories of satnavs going wrong, most of the time the road actually existed. It just wasn't all that useful to regular motor vehicles.

Not so this time. The path down into the gorge pretty much dates back to the Bronze Age. You have steep steps cut into the stone that have been there so long they have, in some cases, been eroded into rock pools. No-one's going be off-roading down in the gorge unless they've given their 4x4 mechanical legs.

For a while, I thought Tom Tom's fake road might follow the path. But, having had the chance to compare it against the satellite images in Google Maps, it seems the connecting bit of road is total fantasy. If it existed, it would be quite a bridge. But there is nothing there other than a deep, tree-filled gorge.

The bright patch in the lower half of the zoomed image is the Ferla-side car park. The road from Sortino runs out of tarmac as it comes in from the right. It turns into a dirt track that kinks up. Then, in real life, it stops: the way down is a narrow path that is almost invisible on the satellite image. You can see the path that snakes up and to the left from the Ferla side. This crosses the river, eventually, towards the top where the gorge bends round. Shown as an overlay on the top image, after a bit of Photoshop work, Tom Tom's road just seems to be a spline that joins the Sortino half from the end of the kink directly to the bit where it dissolves into a sand-covered car park.

From the looks of it, I'd guess a little bit of over-enthusiastic error correction has been going here. I can't help feeling that someone looked at the map data they bought in, saw a break in the road and thought: "That can't be right." So they 'fixed' it.

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April 12, 2008

"We're sorry. This album is unavailable for download in your country"

So there I was typing away as an email from eMusic came in. In a bout of continuous partial attention, I clicked on it and thought: "Ooh, new Black Francis album. Glad I saved some downloads instead of splurging them when the subscription rolled over at the end of last month."

But, thanks to the byzantine nature of distribution deals in the music industry, it is, naturally, not available for download in the UK from eMusic. Then I remembered the Breeders album was meant to be coming out this week and that one, thankfully, is available here. And now downloading.

As is Black Francis' Svn Fingers as I decided to see if it was on iTunes. I could have waited to get the CD but as my mind normally goes blank the moment I walk into a record shop, decided to lay out a fiver on the mini-album there and then. Looks like it's going to a kind of ex-Pixies day.

But this is something that the music industry needs to get a grip on. There are people who do pay for music - when they can find it. It's crazy to have a situation where it's easier to find pirated versions than the paid-for recordings, particularly when it comes to back catalogues of minor artists.

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January 25, 2008

The last track

Oh gaad no. I'm stuck in Nick Hornby world and I'm not sure I can get out. I noticed that Chris Rand picked out some top songs to close out albums after picking up on a thread at the Guardian. And I fell in the hole. In between bursts of real work, I piled through the iTunes collection - a lot of it I've rated over the years so the job was fairly easy.

I tried hard to not bung in good songs that happened to be at the end of an album, but sound as though they were meant to be there as well and that nothing else would do.

The top two are easy. It's a toss-up as to which should come top but I reckon The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again (Who's Next) has to be up there somewhere. I'm surprised more people didn't namecheck it: that's an album closer if ever I heard one.

The masterpiece of structure is The The's Beyond Love on Mind Bomb: a masterpiece of delayed satisfaction. Matt Johnson said it's his favourite song, largely because of the lyrics. In all honesty, they're a bit too heavy handed. But the structure of the song is perfect. Not only do you have to wait for the end of the album for the song, you have to wait for the end of the song for the payoff of the full chorus. That's songwriting.

A bit more obscure is Hotel Womb by The Church from Starfish. Forget Under The Milky Way - the only hit single for the Aussie band (and resurrected in Donnie Darko). This is the real gem on the album: what would you put after this?

Some at the Guardian site put in Teenage Fanclub's Is This Music? But it probably tries a bit too hard to be an album closer. S*T*A*R*C*A*R at the end of Julian Cope's Autogeddon suffers from the same issue.

Also in the trying-too-hard department: It's the Sun by the Polyphonic Spree from The Beginning Stages Of... However, the whole album desperately wants to be liked - but that's its charm. Even if it does make you wonder if you are being surreptitiously brainwashed by some crazy Adventist cult.

Most of the lists tend to swing towards rock rather than anything else. In reality, with the exception of Prince and early Michael Jackson albums, most just shove the best songs up front and let the album fizzle out.

In the electronica and dance department, Orbital arguably has the best offering. Out There Somewhere? is dangerously close to being prog techno and not in a progressive house kind of way. The Girl With The Sun In Her Head is the real star of the album but this one builds and builds and builds to the final minutes making it a damn fine album closer.

Six Six Sixties which finishes the original version of Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats is the fitting finish to this album, with a cover shot at suicide spot Beachy Head.

On a happier note, there's Sensoria by Cabaret Voltaire on Micro-Phonies – the original from the LP rather than the much more famous single version mashed-up with Do Right which now sits at the end of the CD. The single is arguably better but it wouldn't work as the end of the album proper.

In the crazy corner muttering to itself, we have Beast Box from er...Beast Box by Luxuria. Lyrics are nutty as only Howard Devoto can do ("So, I'm in the beast box with my kid brother and there's all these scenes of awful suffering going on") but it's the song you've been waiting for all album. Well, the vinyl version anyway (it took me years to buy a CD player). Unfortunately, the CD adds a sub-par 'bonus' track.

Also in the mad as batshit department is Battle of Britain from Jah Wobble's utterly unhinged first solo album Betrayal. It's got one star in iTunes to make sure it never comes up on an smart playlist. Yet it's the ideal song to close out that album. But the world's wobbliest bassist (and I mean that in a good, 'why is my sternum vibrating' way) gave us Om Nava Shiva at the end of Heaven & Earth. Laaaarvely.

Guns'n'Roses didn't know where to go with Sweet Chile o'Mine on Appetite for Destruction, but they knew how to end the album with another song that's practically two glued together: Rocket Queen.

Motherfucker - Redeemer, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Yanqui UXO. This probably falls foul of the prog-rock test (ie would be half of the album). But the chamber rockers don't really do short numbers.

And the rest...it's a long list (in no particular order and after a little bit of whittling down):

Love & Communication, Cat Power, The Greatest

All The Way, Ladytron, Witching Hour

A Prayer For My Death, Foetus Interruptus, Thaw

I Am The Resurrection, The Stone Roses, The Stone Roses

Runners Dial Zero, Beck, Mutations

This Must Be The Place, Talking Heads, Speaking in Tongues.

Disappointed, Morrissey, Bona Drag (Worth it just for the crowd's moan when Morrissey changes his mind)

Suffer Little Children, The Smiths, The Smiths

A Song From Under The Floorboards, Magazine, The Correct Use of Soap

Shoot Speed/Kill Light, Primal Scream, Extrmntr

Run Wild, New Order, Get Ready. (But you can't help feeling they kind of lost their edge after Factory went poom.)

OX4, Ride, Going Blank Again

I Can't Sleep Without Music, Modeselektor, Happy Birthday

Here Come The Warm Jets, Brian Eno, Here Come The Warm Jets

Stars Of CCTV, Hard-Fi, Stars Of CCTV

Last Will & Testament, Pere Ubu, Story Of My Life

Seeing Out The Angel, Simple Minds, Sons And Fascination

Chesh, The Black Dog, Spanners

The Secret Life of Arabia, David Bowie, Heroes

Coelocanth, Shriekback, Oil & Gold

Pretending To See The Future, OMD, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark

Fisherman's Tale, The House of Love, The House of Love (1988)

The Next Life, Suede, Suede

Just For A Moment, Ultravox, Systems Of Romance.

The Mercy Seat, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Tender Prey. (I'm not sure whether this one counts as it's an alternative version of the opener.)

WXJL Tonight, The Human League, Travelogue

Donimo, Cocteau Twins, Treasure

Stacked Crooked, The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema

Sixty Sixteen, Banco de Gaia, Igizeh. (Not a great album by any stretch: this number helps it punch above its weight by leaving you with a good memory of it. It's not exactly a crowd pleaser, but the Shephard Tone effect that de Gaia conveys in the music sets it apart.)

Antarctica Starts Here, John Cale, Paris 1919

Rhapsody, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Peepshow. (A friend once described this as the perfect hangover album. It starts with warped, unsettled syncopation of Peek-A-Boo, goes through the paranoia of Burn Up and closes out with the haunting Rhapsody.)

Here Comes The Flood, Peter Gabriel (1)

Blue Sky, Fluke, Puppy

Gone, Kosheen, Resist (assuming the album ends here rather than the weak remix edit of Hide U. The album itself suffers from too much of-the-moment drum'n'bass sample trickery that, were it released a year before or a year later wouldn't have been there.)

It Never Rains, Dire Straits, Love Over Gold. (However, if I listen to this one I generally go straight from Telegraph Road to this one. More of a 12in single than an album in that context. And this one doesn't wake up until the bridge two minutes in.)

It's No Game, David Bowie, Scary Monsters.

False Goodbyes, Echo & The Bunnymen, Reverberation (This is the one without Ian McCulloch. Just try not to listen to the words. You won't be able to walk properly for hours if you do.)

When I'm 84, The Beautiful South, 0898.

The Chauffeur, Duran Duran, Rio

A Crack In The Clouds, Julian Cope, Saint Julian

Gouge Away, The Pixies, Doolittle

Sugar Baby, Bob Dylan, Love & Theft

Is This Desire? PJ Harvey

Hail Mary, Ultra Vivid Scene, Ultra Vivid Scene

Fight, The Cure, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me

End, The Cure, Wish (no-one does maudlin end-of-album downers like The Cure)

EMI, The Sex Pistols, Never Mind The Bollocks (what better way to go out than with a love letter to your last-but-one record label, on the last proper album you'll ever make.)

Automobile Noise, The Blue Nile, A Walk Across The Rooftops

Love And War, Paul Haig, The Warp Of Pure Fun

Hung Up, Paul Weller, Wild Wood

Track 8, Sigur Ros, ()

Decades, Joy Division, Closer

Cutman, Meat Beat Manifesto, Armed Audio Warfare. (This one probably doesn't count as it's really a compilation and Cutman wasn't even on the original pressing. But it's an album's worth of sampling in one hit.)

Question: should there be a special category for uncredited last tracks that are great closers? I offer up Train in Vain by the Clash from London Calling, REM's cover of Superman on Life's Rich Pageant and the Dead Kennedys' Moon Over Marin from Plastic Surgery Disasters - I haven't got a vinyl version to check against but I vaguely recall this one going uncredited.

I'm glad that's over.

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March 21, 2007

Steven Furtick's imagined insults

There's nothing like getting your retaliation in first. There was Ryan Jordan (or at least I think that was his name) acquiring a fake persona to avoid stalkers on Wikipedia long before anyone thought of stalking anyone associated with Wikipedia. Now, we have the curious case of a US pastor who has foresworn Technorati because of the bad words people have for him in their blogs. He decided to ignore what blogs write about him because, according to him, they have said nasty negative things about him. Those negatives thoughts might cause him to leave his ministry. I have always been deeply suspicious about people who say: "I try to stay away from negative people." They often know how to judge people, and not in a good way.

The strange things is, up to March 19 when he announced his decision, it was hard to find any slings, arrows, sticks, stones or even mild chastisement in blog posts that might have caused the pastor to take Technorati out of his bookmarks list. To be honest, it still is. So, why do it? Publicity stunt? The move has, after all, temporarily propelled his name to the head of Technorati's top ten searches.

I had to use Google blog search for this rather than Technorati as it was down. But he started blogging, it seems in September. From about December onwards, the chatter started, but mostly from people who knew him from school or college or were members of the church. Those early postings note that Furtick's church was getting close to a 1000 people to turn up.

You get various eulogies through January and February. "Amazing dude"; "This church has blown up"; "Steven Furtick has said all I ever wanted to say about church"; "There is no doubt that Steven Furtick and team at Elevation are just freaks." Ooh, possibly near the mark. No wait: "I have NEVER heard of a church that is doing what they are doing in such a short amount of time." The other 99 per cent is similarly treacly.

Then, on Monday he decided he didn't like Technorati: "For every 10 guys with blogs who think I’m a hero, another guy thinks I’m the anti-Christ". I'm still searching for just one comment that even goes near calling him the anti-Christ. The publicity stunt theory certainly sounds more appealing by the minute, especially given the breakneck speed at which this pastor seems to be trying to build up his church - there are now two in Charlotte, apparently.

However, this story might have more to do with a commenter called ty23 who took offence to a mildly critical post about Furtick's atttitude to 'church shopping' - finding a church should not be like buying shoes, basically, but creating a church? It seems that in some quarters, you don't have to have shoes you don't like, you design your own shoes.

Ty23 delivered a lengthy rebuttal. Ty23 claims not to be Steven Furtick but ty23 has a similarly direct writing style and starts to refer to doing what he can in "my church" in a follow-up post on the same blog. Note the mention of how people find posts about them using Technorati. Those pesky sock-puppets. Always getting into scrapes.

Furtick's wife says of the response to his post about Technorati: "Now there are people posting about him because of this. Go figure." Yes, quite. Not drawing attention might have been a good idea.

Posted by Chris at 8:30 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

March 13, 2007

Comment snafu

Apologies to anyone who tried to post a comment here over the last few days and got nothing but a 403-Forbidden error for their pains. The gremlins crept into the system and decided it would be fun to alter the permissions on one of the blog software's folders. Normal service has been resumed.

Posted by Chris at 1:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 28, 2007

Quote of the day

"...all they need is the endorsement of Peter Mandelson and that will finish them off completely."

Ian Davidson MP was clearly not enamoured of the stalking-horse website set up by Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn when he spoke to Channel 4 News. But it wasn't all bad for them, he's even less of a fan of the EU trade commissioner.

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February 25, 2007

The mad, mad, mad, mad world of advertising

In an industry that gives out gongs almost on a weekly basis it seems strange that there isn't an award for Dumbest Unconventional Promotional Gimmick. You've got to wonder at the geniuses who thought planting a competition prize in a graveyard, let alone one with a lot of historical significance, was a good idea, particularly when there's a great big public park a few yards down the road.

Posted by Chris at 2:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

E-petitions: 'prat' doesn't go far enough

An unnamed minister dismissed the person behind Number 10's e-petitions website as a 'prat'. Having looked through the site and what it is doing, it's hard to find any reasons to disagree. The road-pricing petition has demonstrated what a disaster this kind of site is, not just for the government but for democracy. I can't think of something better placed to convince the voting public that their views don't matter to politicians. All that's happened is that 1.8 million people found out they can't sway the decision simply by putting their email address on a form. This will, naturally, lead them to conclude that the political process is broken.

When interviewed by the BBC about the e-petitions website his organisation implemented for Number 10, Tom Steinberg defended the idea, saying: "Academic research shows people are more willing to sign a petition than engage in any other kind of political activity."

Well that's great. But what good has any petition done in the past, either to influence politicians or make people think about what their request means? They are a publicity stunt, although you kind of lose a lot of the effect by not having people take a wheelbarrow full of paper to the door of Number 10. They are not a reliable lever for influencing political decisions. They are about as effective as writing a letter to Santa Claus, because that is what most petitions are: a wish for something to happen, not something that is even close to being implementable as policy.

Take a look at the e-petitions website and you will find all manner of wishes for change: each one a self-contained demand that does not bother with the implications of putting any of the decisions into action. Some of the petitions are reasonably well though-out or are limited enough in scope to form the basis of a simple legislative change - consider the one put together by saynoto0870.com, for example. The others are like hopeless prayers to a deaf God.

One petition demands that the restaurant mark-up on wine to be restricted. Another wants the recognition that rural areas are different to London. Then there is the person who us to stop killing animals or kill them more humanely. Make your mind up, please.

The various wildfire debates on unrelated discussion boards that sprang up around road pricing demonstrated the problem remarkably well. You would have people write in to say: sign this petition now and show the Government what for. Others would interject with opinions on how it's all about taxing the motorist off the road or just another stealth tax. Let's face it, it's hardly a stealth tax if 1.8 million people notice it enough to sign a petition. But, when challenged on what they would do about congestion, they rambled on about spending more money on roads or how great hydrogen vehicles will be (quite what they do for congestion, I'm still unclear).

Questions like "where would you like your taxes to pay for these roads?" would draw little more than a hostile response. Pointing out that demand for roads is elastic - that is, build more and you get more cars driving down them - was similarly dismissed.

The format of a petition does not confront people with the reality of the choices that have to be made to alter any piece of policy. It's just "sign this and something will happen". It's an infantile approach to influencing government, although it has been encouraged by the willingness of recent administrations to announce 'radical' new policies every time something bad happens. There is this idea that there is a piece of legislation to solve everything without any adverse consequences. All it does is create new and ever more impenetrable legislation that does nothing but invoke the universal law of unintended consequences.

Posted by Chris at 12:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 19, 2007

I'll have two barely cooked cow's arses, please. And a side order of reconstituted maize

On the one hand, we should be thankful that Sam & Maxie's, a bar and eatery on the Stevenage Fun Park, has not descended into pseud's corner menu puff - "goujons of tender breast of chicken permeated with a light saffron-tinged marianade". But the owners of this place, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the diner in Edward Hopper's Nighthawks - and that's during the day - maybe erred a little too far towards the blunt in its guide to how well steak orders will turn up:

Very rare: Cold red centre
Rare: Cool red centre
(Too grades I can't quite remember)
Medium well done: Hot centre, cooked through
Well done: No colour, somewhat dry.

Actually, on second thoughts, I'll skip the steak.

Posted by Chris at 9:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 7, 2006

The airport WiFi sweepstake

It was perhaps the look of resignation in the eyes of the check-in clerk for British Airways that settled the choice of how long I should order for the WiFi connection. Turning up two hours before the flight was due to take off from Lyon Saint-Exupéry, the signs were already showing a delay of one hour. Not a good sign.

Then she said, pointing to the boarding time on the ticket. "At 6:10, if you want to come back here to the check-in desk, we can update you with more information on the flight."

"Is it worth going through through security?" I asked.

She shook her head. No, that was a bad idea. "Aah, right. I see what you mean," I said, adding a quick thank you as I wandered in search of a cafe where I could hold up for a few hours.

Logging on to the airport Wifi, it asked if I wanted 30 minutes - too optimistic by far - an hour for €10, two hours for 50 per cent more or a whole day for double. I thought about it for a minute, did a quick calculation and plumped for the 24-hour pass. I'm not expecting to get out of this airport fast.

Once through the paywall, I saw the story about the North London tornado. Nice weather we're having. It's just tipping it down in southern France.

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October 23, 2006

Hedge funds for the rest of us

Poor old Chad, I think that's what he said his name was. He was on the line for 30 seconds at least before resorting to insults. But it's an indication that boiler-room salespeople just don't have the stamina anymore to get through those vital first minutes before losing it.

I think it might have been the point where I said, "That's two lies you've told me. Want to try for the third?" that sent him over the edge. He got off to a bad start, using cold-call lie number one: "Hi, I'm from X. I'm checking to see whether you got the information pack we sent you."

As a journalist, I get PRs trying the goldfish-memory tactic every once in a while. ("If you recall our conversation the other week about meeting our client's marketing VP..." "No, I don't. But I think you'll recall I said no...") So, I'm used to it. That people try this one on never ceases to amaze me. I can only assume that, sometimes, it works. I told Chad or Chet or Jeb that he hadn't sent me anything.

For some reason he decided to then tell me he was ringing from "London, England"*. Which was curious because the caller display had INTERNATIONAL lit up on the LCD. (Why BT can't get it together to display most international numbers is still a mystery to me - it works the other way round.) I wasn't sure why he was trying to convince me he was ringing from the UK rather than some dingy basement in New York as all he was doing was convincing me that lie number two was in progress.

It all went wrong for Chad or Charles or Chuck at that point. I was less than convinced of his location so he offered to tell me the number of Dean and Bradshaw, the hedge fund for which he was selling so I could check them out. "Hey, I'm not going to give you that number because I think you're a dickhead."

I was waiting for the click, brr moment. But there was more. Which was nice, as I was a bit curious as to why a hedge fund was calling me for a financial injection. And I had to give our less than friendly boiler-roomee some credit. He was still trying to sell even after having called me a dickhead and somehow surmising that I must be a divorcee and that I've got to learn to trust somebody some time. I don't think he was expecting me to start laughing at that point, although he had a half-decent grasp of reverse psychology.

"You know, you sound like kind of a young guy. Most of the people I deal with are over 45. I guess you probably don't meet our criteria for investors," said Chad or Brad or Brett or whatever his name really was. Yes, I suppose it was worth a try. Try to insinuate that I'm not man enough to invest in a big boy's hedge fund in the hope that I will demand he takes fifty grand off me just in down payment. Having not had my brain sucked out and replaced with lemon jelly, I agreed with him: "I guess you're right."

No, the people that 'Dean & Bradshaw' (nice choice of name I have to say, got that ring of legitimacy courtesy of the D&B connotation) ring probably wouldn't know a hedge fund if it came after them with a large pair of secateurs. In some ways I regret having employed cold call tactic number one. I'm still curious as to what the patter is for selling what purports to be a hedge-fund investment over the phone. And I wasn't quick enough to think of the perfect retort when he said: "I guess you don't know what it's like being a broker for a fund like this. I only have to make two of these calls a year." Unfortunately, the rejoinder of "Yeah, I do actually. I used to work for Long-Term Capital Management" eluded me until after the call was over.

* A little tip for non-locals. Nobody who has spent more than a couple of weeks here calls it London, England. It's a city of seven million people. You're unlikely to mistake it for London, Ontario.

Posted by Chris at 8:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 21, 2006

Don't charm me with your telephone manner

My record for getting a call-centre rep to hang up is now at what I think could be an all-time low. The rules for this game are simple: time the call and, without resorting to insults or shouting, get them to either swear at you or petulantly hang up. Congratulations to some guy from what purports to be "The Phone Shop" to be off the line in less than 20 seconds.

It went something like this:

Him: "Hello, I'm calling from the Phone Shop. I want to ask if you've received your 10 per cent discount from Orange."

Me: "I think it's unlikely, as I told you yesterday."

Him: "This is the first time I've called you."

Me: "I don't think it is, otherwise, why would I mention yesterday's conversation?"

Him: "This is the first time I've called. Good. Bye." Click, brr.

I didn't even get as far as trying to get their address (generally impossible) or office phone number (probably false or permanently engaged). Other than hanging up on potential customers for no reason, I can't quite fathom what The Phone Shop's little wheeze is. They did actually call the day before (different operator of course) and we went through the dance of "Who are you? Where are you calling from?". So it took a little longer for that call to suddenly end. Before we got to that point, I was told, for some reason, they needed a house number and a postcode in order to "give me my discount".

At the time, I asked them why, if they were calling on behalf of my (soon to be ex) mobile-phone company - companies like this cold call with the permission of Orange - they didn't already have the information on record? The usual excuses about "needing the information to process the claim" ensued. If I hadn't before, I definitely lost interest there.

Posted by Chris at 9:29 AM | Comments (4)

August 4, 2006

Cool for crowds

It's not often that I find myself agreeing with Jeff Jarvis, which had me worried for a while as to whether I was suffering from a bile overdose. But I still cannot believe the thinking behind a resolution passed by a UK teachers' union, reported by the BBC, the Guardian and PA among others. Curiously, not the Daily Mail as far as I can tell.

At the Professional Association of Teachers annual conference, Wesley Paxton and Simon Smith argued for a resolution that has the look of many minor resolutions that get passed at union meetings: "Conference regrets that it does not appear to be 'cool' to be clever".

It's pretty innocuous stuff, but the speeches that went along with it were a bit more worrying if they represent what practicing teachers actually believe.

In his prepared speech, Smith said:

With a few exceptions, including sport, academic prowess is in many eyes not ‘cool’.

I have talked to various pupils from years 8 ,9 , 10 on this subject in the run up to conference. I got the message that “yes” they would like to be clever but it was expressed in the same vain as “yes I would like to win the lottery”. Not as something they could or would change by being in education. It was something you were or you were not.

And in true pupil style, being clever meant that you were boring, lacked personality, were a teacher’s pet and other things not polite enough to mention in company such as this.

Well, not much has changed in the last 30 years by the sounds of it. Clever has never been popular at school and, let's face it, probably never will be. According to the news reports from the conference, the situation is so bad that pupils are scared of being rewarded for effort or achievement for fear of falling foul of their dumber but more aggressive peers:

Ann Nuckley, an administrator from Southwark, south London, said many pupils in her school refused to come up on stage to receive awards. "I am ending up sending book tokens through the post because children won't come up and get them, which I think is extremely sad."

Smith said he had the answer to the problem. Redefine it:

If we were to use the word successful rather than clever we could all achieve it at our own level and in our own way.

My belief is that we here as educators are responsible for the valves that children hold in this area, so we should do something about it.

I am sorry to say that at the moment a culture has developed that mocks being clever. We should fight against it. Change the language we use; change something.

So, basically, avoiding use of the word 'clever' and replacing it with 'successful' will fix the problem. Are teachers really that clueless about the mechanics of the schoolyard, a place where anything can be turned into an insult given enough thought and venom? It didn't take long for "special needs boy" to pop up as a retort, after all. Kids find reasons to be rude or violent to each other - it's that impulse that needs to be dealt with, not covering up differences between them.

It seems that now teachers have accepted the maxim of the decade - from blogs to Big Brother - that popularity is the most important thing someone can have. Don't rock the boat, don't stand out, don't be individual. Consensus is all that matters. It's like being taught by Homer Simpson.

Posted by Chris at 8:02 PM | Comments (1)

July 30, 2006

Warning: this post contains electrons

Spotted at the Barbican cafe, London.

I can understand labelling cakes with warnings about nuts for allergy sufferers. But you have to wonder what made this company decide they had to put this warning on top on a packet of butter. I'm going to start checking pints of milk to see whether anyone has decided to put "Warning: This product contains what it says on the label" to hammer the point home to anyone who might be a bit lactose intolerant. Or has the campaign of I'm Quite Sure It's Not Butter been just too successful?

Posted by Chris at 3:41 PM

December 12, 2005

I must remember never to shop at Heathrow, it only encourages BAA

When you land at most airports, being early is generally a good thing. That does not seem to be the case at Heathrow where it seems to lead to instant banishment to one of the few remote stands that the airport has. You would think, given the amount of time most aircraft have to stack over London to get close to the airport, ticker tape and bunting would drop out of the overhead bins at touchdown any time the pilot managed to sneak in early.

However, even on a Saturday morning, Terminal 4 is busy, busy, busy. So, after a long wait on the taxiway, the pilot announced that BA292 from Washington Dulles had drawn the short straw and was to be parked somewhere close to the perimeter fence and not very close to Terminal 4. The problem is that, even at the best of times, Heathrow is not good at dealing with remote stands. It's not like Frankfurt, or indeed Dulles, where you can expect a convoy of buses to be parked alongside pretty soon after you get there. At Heathrow, you can wait a long, long time for anybody to notice that somebody has parked a plane.

The buses, this time, turned up relatively quickly - by Heathrow standards. I've been on a late flight from Munich (one that often ends up being parked outside because the rest of the terminal is shut) where they had one bus driver left for the night and it took close to an hour to get everyone off. This time around, we had buses and almost enough for a nearly full 747-400. But no steps. Actually, that's a lie, we had steps. But no-one to drive them up to the side of the aircraft and give the nod to let people off. That took, by my estimate a good half hour to sort out. It took another 20 minutes to get most of the people off the plane. So, you would think that by the time even EU passport holders got through immigration, the bags would be waiting. I think you know what happens next. There is a big, empty rubber band going around but no bags. Apparently, BAA, the airport operator, did not just have problems locating people to drive steps around, but the baggage handlers had some difficulty getting to the aircraft.

This is where I guess BAA would argue this is why it needs Terminal 5. Yet, most of the problems come down to inadequate staffing levels and a general ambivalence to the traffic that passes through the airport. If you want to shop, great. BAA has stopped at nothing to renovate the shopping malls that seem to be spilling over larger and larger parts of each terminal. But basic facilities in all four existing terminals are tatty, dirty and a laughable advertisement for "the world's busiest airport". With all the gate fees BAA is scooping up, they might think about employing one or two more drivers to deal with the additional remote-stand traffic they get (although BAA does have to hand back £1.50 per passenger to an airline for each time it dumps an aircraft onto a remote stand).

BAA seems to believe that its incentive revolves around collecting more money from passengers in shops than providing them with a service they have already paid for. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) issued a consultation paper on this in November, having already canvassed British Airways and some others for thoughts - the bit about the £1.50 rebate came from a BA submission. However, as a near monopoly provider of airport services in the UK, I'm not optimistic about any changes. And the airlines only have themselves to blame. Just as I set out from Washington to come home, I got an email from BA saying the airline had decided to shift some of its Munich services from Gatwick to Heathrow. I guess BA likes getting that £1.50 rebate.

Posted by Chris at 10:49 PM

August 14, 2005

Redesign complete (more or less)

One crash course in cascading style sheets (CSS) has made it possible to dump the default templates supplied by LivingDot and MovableType and go for my own on this blog. Changing the design was only half the reason for doing this as I needed to learn a bit more about how MovableType itself worked. Having used a couple of Perl-based site-management systems in the past, it turned out to be quite straightforward. But, then again, I haven't tried to do anything fancy in PHP yet.

There are still a few rickets in the design when it comes to how it renders on different browsers. This was designed on a Mac, so works best in Safari. Firefox has a little problem with the size of the search box, which presumably can be overcome with a quick hack. I had to change the design for IE 5.2 for the Mac as the original design ran into the one bug in the renderer that has no workaround. D'oh. Opera seems to be happy enough with the CSS except for a problem with handling underlines in the headline links in the left-hand panel.

The look is slightly different on IE for Windows - this seems to be down to the way that Microsoft messed up the box model in CSS. The problem only affects the link boxes at the left-hand side so the text alignment is a little off, but I have made no attempt so far to use hacks to make the designs match up. Given that none of the versions of IE that I tried (including IE 5.5 for Windows) didn't leave chunks of text busting out of boxes in bizarre ways, I'm considering myself to be quite lucky. Then again, it is only a two-column design at this point, so there isn't that much that can go wrong.

I'm trying to keep the overall design very simple and clean. I'm not a big fan of sites that litter links all over the front page. You're just asking people to get lost in the structure. Instead, I'm inclined to put a blogroll and similar stuff on a dedicated page. Right now, I can't see a good reason to have a forest of links in a column with no explanation of what they are for.

The banner image underneath the logo by the way is a small stack of DVD-R disks shot with a macro lens and then oversaturated in Photoshop. Once cut out, the image just happened to have the right shape and had the benefit of forming a vague link to both the media and technology.

Posted by Chris at 5:48 PM

August 10, 2005

Time-travelling tickets

I got a promising email this morning from a ticket agency promising me that it was ready to dispatch tickets for The Pixies, who are playing at the end of the month at Alexandra Palace. The tickets were going today and the company added they would be turning up courtesy of SMS: the company responsible for delivering a large proportion of the credit cards issued by banks to people living within the circle described by London's M25 motorway.

Normally, discovering that anything is being delivered to you by SMS is enough to make you wish credit cards never expired. You can sit in all day waiting only to find out that the people with the cards can a) ride a bike and b) read a map. But they seem unable to find the right door or even the doorbell if they can manage to get to the door. Letting them 'try' twice and then having them return it to the bank so you can pick up the card from a nearby branch is often the best bet. But no such problem this time. The tickets turned up Monday. Now that takes some doing.

Posted by Chris at 9:44 PM

July 30, 2005

The new name for...

Less than a month in, and I've decided to change the name of this blog. When I picked the URL, I was in a hurry and so just went for a bit of word association. I then had to pick a name and decided I'd try something else out. Now, I've decided "For More Information..." was way too bland and some people seem to like the URL more. So, it's time for something a little more...phlegmy. Now, I'm wondering why the MarsEdit spell checker hasn't flagged that one up.

Posted by Chris at 9:07 PM | Comments (1)

July 19, 2005

Address harvesting meets word association football

When I first set up this blog, I decided to pick a new URL for it and rather than sit down and try to come up with a phrase that would fit the blog, just played a bit of word association football: journalist, hack, hacking, cough. Simple. And all over in seconds. Just days later, I've got spam. Nothing to be surprised about even though I've not used the domain for any email addresses. It's simply a consequence of yet another directory harvest attack (DHA) I would imagine. However, it seems that some spammers have got past mailing "info" and "webmaster" and various combinations of first and last names to target domains and started playing word association football themselves.

It seems oddly fitting that the to-address of a couple of pieces of spam that I fished out of the webmail turned out to have been spawned using the very same process. But that is the only explanation for two messages that turned up addressed to "spittle". It took me a few seconds to work out why anyone should choose that word as an address until I looked again at my chosen URL.

I shall wait and see if "furball" and "splutter" turn up any time soon. And I will continue to wonder as to who the spammers were planning on getting through to, unless the purpose of DHAs now is simply to find any address that can get through the defences and possible reach a real person who will then simply hit the delete key. Or maybe its the sysadmins who clean out the flotsam that clogs up email servers who buy the most penis enlargement cream and who are most likely to see the weird names.

In the meantime, spittle at hackingcough.com will be forwarded to Mr BitBucket at DevNull Terrace.

Posted by Chris at 9:32 PM

July 5, 2005

Which way to the race?

There were a couple of first-time things that kicked off July 2005 for me. The first one took place on Sunday when I ran in my first 10K race around central London. The second thing I did for the first time was to set up a blog. The blog is not meant to have much to do with running but I thought I'd add a journal section to see how often I would post this kind of stuff. So, the first entry in this blog is about the curiously shambolic event that was the British 10K.

The first part of the competition was to find the start. For no good reason, I thought the race was due to start at 9am, not the 9.35am that was the official start time. Even so, I didn’t turn up ridiculously early. Sitting on Victoria Line from Brixton to Green Park, the train gradually filled up with people who were clearly going to the same place. The problem that faced us was working out exactly where the start was to be. Most people knew that it was outside the front of the Hard Rock Café on Piccadilly. A big clue was the big blue sign saying ‘Start’ on it next to a platform made of the customary wood and scaffolding covered with a few bits of tarpaulin. If only it were all that easy.

According to the guide distributed to entrants before the race together with a flimsy T-shirt and a discount voucher for some energy drink, runners were supposed to be honest with themselves and stand by the sign that corresponded to the time they thought it would take for them to get around the course. The only trouble was that there were just two signs visible, both for times well above an hour. Even I do can 10km in an hour. But decided to be more conservative than honest and perched opposite the 1.5 hour sign close to where the Hyde Park Corner underpass joins Piccadilly.

It turned out that nobody told the stewards anything about starting slots. They had been standing for half an hour halfway down Piccadilly collecting runners who had dropped off their kit outside the Institute of Directors at Pall Mall armed with nothing more than a piece of string between them. Those runners who took a short cut through Green Park to get to the start line who found themselves milling around trying to work how the start was going to work. While they wondered, “Colonel Bogey” and a big-band version of “We All Stand Together” – better known as the homicide-inducing “Frog Song” – blared out from the loudspeakers on an apparently endless loop. A day after Live8, a day before the official WW2 commemoration started and three days before the announcement of the 2012 Olympic venue, the race organisers were milking every link for what it was worth. The music was just the beginning.

Then the stewards turned up with 10 000 runners behind them. The starting arrangement suddenly became clear: it was one step away from chaos. The idea of having people organise themselves into neat groups based on how long they expected to take was nothing more than a bit of wishful thinking. It was only after the start that I realised that I had a lucky break as I was well past the Ritz before the crowd waiting to get going ran out. And it took three minutes for me to get started even from what was a comparatively good position.

Before I and thousands of others were able to get through the start point, we had the usual speeches, most of them pumping up the London 2012 bid. The Westminster Town Cryer left most in no doubt that ringing a bell at every opportunity and shouting can lead to a separation from reality. As the first runners were away, including former Olympic champion Haile Gebrselassie, the Town Cryer suddenly blurted out over the tannoy: “Go on Spiderwoman. Er…no. Wonderwoman.” I don’t remember a Lynda Carter lookalike being among the front runners, so I still have no idea who he directed the comment at even after the correction.

Within a few minutes I was off. Unfortunately, exactly how many minutes remains a mystery as I completely forgot to look at the clock by the start line as I ran past it and did not bother taking a watch with me. Or a mobile phone, which seems to be today’s running accessory for those who don’t believe in iPod holsters.

Trafalgar Square, about 2km down the line, had another selection of wartime hits pounding out from the loudspeaker and it was not until the Embankment end of Northumberland Avenue that we got The Clash’s “London Calling”. On the Embankment a lone DJ and four girls from the Loughborough University dance troupe had pitched up to do a spot of disco-style encouragement. It was just after that someone shouted, “It’s Haile Gebrselassie!” And it was, the Ethiopian runner was hurtling down the Embankment in the opposite direction aiming to make a sub-30 minute time. There was a quick round of applause and he was gone. It would take me another half hour just to reach that point from the 2.5km point I was at.

The number of people all trying to run down the same stretch of road meant that they ended up mixing with the few onlookers who had ventured out comparatively early on a Sunday. But that was nothing on the situation that faced the amateur athletes as they got near the finish line. Getting to the finish meant running along past Blackfriars Bridge, doubling back up the Embankment and then taking another detour with a hairpin bend at the end on Westminster Bridge. After a couple of attempts I think I got the strategy right for dealing with the hairpins: take them wide and keep running rather than risk tangled ankles by cutting in tight and colliding with about ten other runners. Even after 8km, the crowd had not thinned out that much.

By 9km we were getting “Chariots of Fire” over speakers placed at the foot of Big Ben. The clock struck the chimes for half-past ten as I neared the north end of Westminster Bridge and turned for the final stretch. People were yelling out “Last few hundred yards” to anyone who was paying attention. Working out how many hundred yards was not all that easy as the organisers had managed to confuse just about everyone taking part in the race by putting in a final hairpin just yards from the finish line. But people knew they were five minutes away from the end as they turned back onto the Embankment for the final stretch past the Ministry of Defence building.
One woman running for a bowel cancer charity was cheerfully ringing up relatives on her mobile in an athletic version of the “I’m on the train!” announcements you can hear at 6pm on the way out of London on any overground rail service. “I’ve just passed the 9km marker!” she yelled. “Where are you waiting?” The phone seemed a bit superfluous.

The one thing I knew about the finish was that it was by the Cenotaph: the organisers were keen to maintain the link with the VE and VJ celebrations as well as the 2012 Olympic announcement, and anything else they could find as a publicity hook. The catch was that it was the other side of the road. Coming round into Whitehall, I realised that, as the end of “Jurasalem” played out from this set of speakers, there was at least one more turn before I could find the finish. So, at the end of Whitehall it was another wide turn to avoid a dozen legs and then a matter of running back towards the Cenotaph. The finish was easy to spot, although not because it had a big sign saying “Finish”.

There were two clues: one being the clock and the other the big crowd of people who decided that, once past the finish line, you can stop dead. So, the end of the race turned into the pedestrian equivalent of a motorway pile-up. Stewards morosely asked people to keep walking but they were meeting friends, family, anybody who wanted to say hello. So, the sprint finish I saved out petered out a bit in favour of avoiding a collision. The clock counted its way round to one hour, three minutes and 23 seconds, which meant I had taken more or less an hour to get round the course.

I found a piece of wall that did not have any people by it to get some stretches in as my left leg started to protest about the pavement pounding I had been doing for the last hour. Then I set off in search of my finisher’s medal, which was with the bag drop at Pall Mall. For reasons I can’t begin to fathom, the back of the medal carried a picture of St Paul’s Cathedral. You might think the Cenotaph might have been a good choice, or Nelson’s Column. Even the Hard Rock Café might have made an appropriate if tacky and incongruous image: at least it was on the course. But it summed up the organisation of the event: a nice try but not quite on target. And that was my first go in a race like this, just wait until I’ve done some more before I get really scathing about the organisation.

Posted by Chris at 11:06 PM