Joe's Jottings

Category: Personal Stuff

  • RATM vs X-Factor – Corporate Music Win!

    moneyThere’s a lovely comment in the movie ‘Con Air’ in which the character Garland Greene, a psychopath played by Steve Buscemi, watches the inmates on a prison transport plane celebrate their take over of the aircraft by having a mid-flight party to the song  ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd.  This encourages him to define irony as:

    Bunch of idiots dancing on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.

    Now, for those of you who’ve spent the last few weeks slumbering in a deep, dark cave in the Outer Hebrides (or who’re outside the UK and so don’t get exposed to this sort of rubbish) there’s a TV show called ‘The X-Factor’ – a sort of ‘talent show’  for wannabe celebs – that was this year won by a young chap called Joe Mcelderry.  The tradition in recent years has been that show’s impresario Simon Cowell would take the winner under his capacious wing,  get him / her a deal with his recond company (part of Sony BMG), and, usually, grab the UK Christmas Number One Chart Spot (a place in musical history usually occupied by such rock and roll phenomena as children’s choirs and Mr Blobby.

    With me so far?  Well, this year a bunch of radical, anti-corporate rock fans decided to set up a campaign to ensure that whoever won the X-factor wouldn’t be getting the Christmas Number One slot.  The group – here – decided that the tune to do the job would be Rage Against The Machine’s 90s hit ‘Killing in the name of’. 

    Sounds good in principle, yes?  People power overturning the desires of a Corporate Media Monster like Simon Cowell?  Evil vanquished by the marvels of Facebook?  The chart returned to ‘real rock for real people’?

    Here’s where the ironic reality check comes in.  It’s quite rich…

    1. The whole business has kept Mcelderry, X-Factor and Cowell being talked about.  This typically equates to money, promotion and PR opportunities.
    2. Both Simon Cowell and RATM are part of the Sony Behemoth.  Sony will get wealthier whatever happens.
    3. Mcelderry was given a dire song this year – the sales of the song would probably have been less had the campaign not taken place.  It might be that the campaign has actually boosted Cowell’s earnings directly as well as indirectly via the Sony connection.
    4. It’s great that £77,000 has been raised for Shelter, and RATM have promised a proportion of the profits will also go to charity.  However, another runner in the Christmas Number 1 race this year was Peter Kay’s novelty record for the BBC Children In Need, which had managed to raise £170,000 for children’s charities by December 9th without all this palaver.  Maybe….the effort could have been put behind this song?
    5. There’s a delicious irony in the choice of a song that is probably most famous for the refrain ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ being used in a campaign where people are….told to buy the song.  And as for choosing a band who ‘rage against the machine’ whilst being on a multi-national corporate label like Sony – irony meter just hit max. 

    Whilst it’s been quite an achievement to get the chart manipulated in this way – and whether folks want to hear that phrase or not, that’s what it is – if the aim was to poke Cowell, X-Factor and corporate musical pap in the eye then I’m sure that Cowell, the X-factor team and Sony BMG are smarting with discomfort all the way to the bank.

    I’m just going to put Sweet Home Alabama on and have a boogie around the kitchen….

  • After the Goldrush

    There’s a song by Neil Young called ‘After the Goldrush’, which he wrote in the 1970s.  There’s a couple of lines in there which for the last 20 years have sounded increasingly like a warning:

    “We got Mother Nature on the run, in the 1970s

    Look at Mother Nature on the run, in the 1970s”

    Well, 40 years later it looks increasingly like Mother Nature, somewhere along the way, stopped running, turned around, grabbed us by the nose and started kicking our sorry asses.  I have no doubt that this morning in Copenhagen there are some serious hangovers – probably not all alcohol fuelled.  There will be serious hangovers in the offices of those Governments, NGOs and other groups who’d hoped to get something legally binding and lasting from Copenhagen, rather than the half arsed fudge that we appear to have been delivered.

    There’sa good piece from the BBC’s Environment spokesman, Richard Black, in which he suggests that the days of internationally agreed, ratified and binding steps towards climate control are over.  I have to say that I agree with him – we’ve had, off the top of my head, Kyoto, Bali and Rio – all of which have under-delivered and have been hailed as first steps on the way to something better.  I hate to be negative, but just how many first steps does this baby need?  And do we have enough time to allow a new set of first steps to take place every couple of years?

    We’re in an interesting dilemma – governments and multi-national corporations with the power to make things happen abrogating their responsibility and apparently unable or unwilling to actually make decisions.  What we require now is leadership from our governments – one is forced to wonder whether the international ‘leadership’ from the US and UK that threw hundreds of billions of dollars in to the throats of the world banking community was actually leadership or whether it was our governments doing the bidding of their bosses in international finance.  And all this happens whilst the climate clock keeps ticking; a deadline that cannot be fudged or avoided by our children and grandchildren who will almost certainly live long enough to see the start of the major long term impacts of climate change and environmental collapse on this planet.

    What can we, as individuals, do?  I’m a Libertarian; a believer in governments having the minimum possible involvement in our day to day lives.  I do, however, expect my government to take some responsibility at it’s level of power, and one thing that has emerged from Copenhagen and all the other failed international initiatives is that governments are unwilling to do anything for the long term benefits of this planet, mired as they are in the short term requirements of staying in power.  I’m therefore left painfully aware that climate change is going to happen, and that the best that we as individuals can do is, I believe, as follows:

    1. Work within your families and communities to do what you can to reduce your own environmental impact and encourage your communities to do the same.  Involvement in local environmental initiatives, and wider organisations such as the Transition Town network and the Permaculture Association can only help.
    2. Consume less – in terms of energy and resources.  Support the local economy at all levels – services, food, whatever.  Watch your food miles and the carbon footprint of what you eat.
    3. Put your elected representatives on the spot, and vote them out if they’re not delivering.

    In all goldrushes throughout history, what’s left behind after it’s over is a mess.  Except this time, it’s the whole planet rather than a few hundred square miles of land.  What we can do to help put things right is very little, but it’s a start.     And at the very least when your grandkids ask what you did to try and make a difference, you can look ’em in the eye and say ‘I did all that was possible for me to do.’

  • A Modest Proposal to focus Climate Negotiator’s Minds.

    globalwarmingIn the last few minutes of the final episode of the TV series ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’, Blackadder and his Company are poised to go ‘over the top’ from their trench to charge the German lines.  In the background, artillery guns are shelling the enemy trenches; it looks like the end for our boys.  Suddenly, the firing stops.  Silence.  Birdsong.  Private Baldrick dares to suggest that the war may be over, and for a moment we start to think that the series might just have a happy ending.

    George: Well, hurrah! The big knobs have gone round the table and yanked the
    iron out of the fire!

    Darling: Thank God! We lived through it! The Great War: 1914-1917. 

    And at that point you realise that it’s not to be, and our chaps charge forth in to TV comedy history.  

    Over the last few days I’ve been willing the ‘big knobs’ around the various tables at Copenhagen to bury their differences and come away with some sort of legally binding structure that  will at least help my God-daughter, niece and all other rug-rats known to me to grow up in a world that is not an ecological disaster area.  I guess that deep in my heart I knew it was likely to be a hard job – a few weeks ago I attended a ‘Climatewalk’ event and expressed the view in debate that Copenhagen was unlikely to deliver, and at the time of writing it looks like I was right.

    And so it goes on.  Politicians and non-Governmental representatives make statements about returning to discuss a binding deal in 2010, and then you know what it will be – 2011, 2012, and so on.  And all the time the global climate systems get closer to the ‘tipping point’ beyond which we cannot predict, let alone influence, what will happen.  Perhaps the task is too big for our elected representatives – maybe they’re holding out for some sort of miraculous intervention, or even hoping that something will happen in 2012 to remove the problem.  Some Governments are no doubt relying on being out of power in a year’s time, and thus leaving the problem for others.  And others do probably care more about keeping their own national interest sound than anything to do with the wider picture.

    And anyway, for most people involved, when the coastal plains flood, when there are wars over water, when we have vast tracts of forests burning every summer – never mind.  They’ll have their bolt holes and armies to protect them on a personal basis.

    So….a Modest Proposal. 

    We live in a world stitched together by incredibly effective communications.  There is no longer a need for, for example, the UN to be in New York, or negotiations like this to be held in nice cities like Copenhagen.  I propose that we find a suitably sized, low-lying island or atoll in the Pacific – one that will basically drown in the next decades if we don’t get things sorted.  One where the food supply is governed by the climate, and that would best be in an area that gets a few typhoons.  We then build a massive conference centre with living accommodation on this island, and choose by lot people of senior executive level from Government, Non-Governmental and Business organisations to go there and stay there until deals are sorted out. 

    And just to concentrate the minds of politicians, we send their families there as well.  Visting rights would be arranged – we’re civilised.  Put the beaurocrats there from places like the UN, and let ’em negotiate.  Because they’re not coming home until it’s fixed.  

    Perhaps the world’s leading polluters could send the families of their leaders to this paradise – no expense would be spared in making it a beautiful and safe place to live.  It’s just one that will drown in a few years, along with everyone on it, if we don’t sort things out.  Maybe generations of people will grow up there whilst the big knobs try and sort things out.

    I know, it’s a crackpot, harebrained scheme – mad.  And, as Edmund Blackadder might have commented were he around today, who’d notice another mad scheme in a world full of them.

  • Iframes in phpBB

    I am currently tinkering with a phpBB3 installation for a forum I ran until the summer of this year – Coffeehouse Chat. I shut the site down in the summer, but am now contemplating opening it up again. However, I want to try a few new things out on the site, including some ’embedded content’ where I include content generated elsewhere on my site in forum posts and pages.

    The easiest way to do this seemed to me to be use the HTML IFRAME tag, but I wanted to do this within the context of Forum posts, and didn’t want to get in to having to create separate template pages for these special pages within Forum threads. I therefore decided to use BBCode tags and use those to code IFRAME tags.

    There are always warnings about implementing any form of BBCode that can in principle allow a user to put code from another site dircetly in to your page – and quite rightly so. However, I felt reasonably comfortable about the approach I was going to take, as rather than make available a ‘generic’ BBCode version of an IFRAME tag, I was going to create a series of BBCodes that would only insert an IFRAME tag with a pre-specified URL and other attributes in to the page.

    The approach was as follows:

    Install the code that I wanted to run in the IFRAME within a sub-directory on my web server.

    Tweak that code so as to run within a window that would fit comfortably within the space available for a conventional phpBB forum post.

    Within the phpBB administration screen, create a new BBCode to generate an IFRAME specific to the application in the sub-directory.  For example:

    phpbb-bbcode-1

    Here I decided that to add my game of ‘Battleships’ to a page I would simply create a BBCode tag called [battleships].

    Write the corresponding HTML code that will be inserted in the page when the phpBB is encountered.  In this case, it’s as follows:

    phpbb-bbcode-2

    Because the URL is pre-set to a location within my own site, there is no problem if users of the Forum choose to use the BBCode on their own posts within the Forum.

    The BBCode command can thus be placed on any page and brings in content generated from the predefined URL. I’ve used this approach to embed some Javascript applications in Forum posts, and it works very well as a means of delivering customised content within posts.

     

  • The Dr Johnson License….

    I appreciate that this is likely to be one of those posts that will annoy some folks, but, here we go. A couple of days ago I was invited by two or three separate people to join Facebook Groups and sign petitions against the UK Digital Economy Bill. Now, I believe that we need a Digital Economy Bill like I need a hole in the head; what we actually need is less red tape and a more hands off approach from Central Government to let entrepreneurs get on with the job without requiring a chit from a bureaucrat to go to the toilet. However, I didn’t sign any petitions or join any groups; why? Because the total pre-occupation of everyone was whether it’s right to have a legal structure in which it’s possible to remove or restrict someone’s Internet access if they’re guilty of or accused of sharing copyright materials. 

    There are some truly stinky parts of that bill, like there are with most pieces of New Labour legislation – but I want to look today at the filesharing issue in a wider sense.  

    Let’s start with the ‘The Internet is an essential part of modern life and it shouldn’t be possible to be cut off from it.’  argument.  Bollocks. Water is essential. A roof over your head is essential. Electricity and Power are pretty important. And yet you can lose all of these by simply not paying your mortgage and utility bills, ultimately resulting in being thrown out of your house and living in a cardboard box. If that’s possible, why on Earth does anyone living in the real world and not in Second Life think that your Internet connection should have some sort of God-given right of protection? And as for essential – quite a few people manage quite happily without an Internet connection, thank you very much.

    In the context of this argument, what the Internet HAS done for some people is to allow them to access, free of charge, a large tranche of media that they would have had to borrow off of their friends 20 years ago.  The actually physical act of borrowing and copying probably restricted copying in that few people had the brass neck (or stamina) to borrow 20 CDs from a friend and copy them in one sitting, for example.  The Internet is, no doubt, an essential tool for people in ripping off media.   I’ve heard most of the arguments, and there are some good points on both sides of the debate. Rather than re-hash the usual debates, here are a few observations to provide food for thought for anyone approaching this argument with an open mind.

    We have a number of open licenses like Creative Commons, Open Source, etc. Why shouldn’t it be possible, therefore, for a creator of software, film or music put their material out through a proprietary license that requires payment to use the material? After all, I am restricted with what I can do within the GNU licence, for example; I have to allow other people to copy the material – it’s part of the GNU licence and I am more than happy to play along with that. If you want to have a recording of a film, then you should surely, by the same logic, abide by the license of that film. Typically pay money and don’t copy it. No one is forcing you to adopt that license – you have the choice not to buy the DVD. Similarly with Open Source; if I don’t want to pass on my source code to other people, I choose to write my own code and not use the GNU license. I can see no difference.

    I’d be interested to know how many people who regularly engage in file sharing of copyrighted materials have ever created something non-trivial and original and have tried to sell it. I may be wrong but a quick poll of folks I know (outside the professional digerati) would indicate that the answer is ‘not many’. Perhaps to have experienced running a small business that deals with created works like software, or publishing a book, etc.  might change people’s attitudes a little.  Same argument as above; if I wish to place material I create in the public domain or under GNU or CC, then it’s my right to do so, and your right as consumers of media to take advantage of my action. If, on the other hand, I choose to publish under what I might start calling the Dr Johnson License (‘Only a fool writes and doesn’t get paid for it!’) then you have a right to not purchase what I produce, and I have the risk of not seeing my works go out in to the world. If you make an illegal copy of my work, then I have a right to pursue you to make you abide by my Dr Johnson License – just as the creators of software licensed under the GNU license can pursue someone who breaches that license under the law.

    I’ve heard the argument of ‘try before buy’ and it’s a good one.  Which is why I have a Spotify account – legal music downloading, free of charge, some advertising, no actual physical ownership of the music outside the service even if I pay a monthly fee (which removes the ads).  I have to say that I find the latter a pain in the rear – there are some advantages to having physical ownership of the files – but then again, it’s THEIR license and I choose to go with them or not.  It’s an imperfect system.  If you download stuff on a ‘try before buying’ basis, then perhaps the case could be made to allow you to download any piece of media with a built in duration, that renders the media unplayable after, say, 30 days unless you buy it – the act of purchase then generates an unlock code.  The argument has been expressed that downloaders tend to be purchasers of music – again, I’m yet to be convinced.  Anecdotal evidence from people I know would suggest that whilst they may purchase material, the value of that that they download illegally vastly exceeds that which they purchase.

    To all the freetards, can you explain why wrong for me to put the material I’ve created out in to the world, want to be paid for it, and take action when I’m not?  I am exercising my personal, creative freedom to want to be paid for my work.  If my view of my own value is wrong, don’t pay me – but don’t copy either. 

  • In Praise of Drummers

    mattheldersThere’s an old joke amongst musicians – ‘What do you call someone who hangs around on stage with musicians?’ The punchline? ‘A drummer.’ Well, I like drummers – most of them, anyway. I think that the first drummer that I became really aware of as a personality within a band was Charlie Watts of ‘The Rolling Stones’ . To start with he always appeared older than everyone else there, and looked more like an accountant who’d accidentally found himself sitting behind the drum kit. But by gum, he could drum! And as the rest of the band age, Charlie barely seems to alter. When his colleagues find themselves in the glare of publicity, Charlie stays behind the scenes. Solid. Reliable. Literally a safe pair of hands. And that’s how I regard drummers. There are exceptions to this rule – Keith Moon being the obvious one – but let me run with this!

    When I went to University, I remember the death of John Bonham being announced on the radio. It was quite a surprise to me and I think it was possibly one of the few ‘Kennedy’ moments I’d had in my life up to that point – you know, those times when you can remember where you were and what you were doing when a particular news item breaks. The opening drumming of ‘Rock and Roll’ is quite something.

    I suppose the thing that bought this train of thought to mind this morning was reading a review of a gig I attended a week or so ago – The Arctic Monkeys here in Sheffield. Specific mention was made of Matt Helders, the drummer, even to the degree of comparing him to Bonham. For me Matt pins together the whole Monkeys sound. Forget the pretty boy front-man Mr Turner – he may be talented but Matt is the Man.  Solid, tight, disciplined and delivering the beat that everything else hangs from. Exactly what you want from a drummer.  Whatever else happens with the Arctics, Matt will be kepeing it ‘High Green Real’.

    My other favourite contemporary(ish) drummer is Sean Moore from the Manic Street Preachers.  Sean was always the ‘forgotten Manic’ but he was absolutely critical to the sound. The drumming on ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’ is up there with the best – brilliant.

    I’d also say that one of the best tests of a sound system and the acoustics in a gig venue is what it does with a good, crisp, drum set.   Is there a ringing noise just audible around the drums? Does it sound ‘mushy’? Does it break up or even start forcing feedback? If so, the chances are that the drum kit isn’t miked correctly or the sound system isn’t set up correctly; if the latter then the chances are strong that the rest of the band isn’t sounding it’s best either.

    Of course, I couldn’t write about drummers without mentioning Phil Collins. And having mentioned him, I will move swiftly on…. Oh, and while I remember…no 12 minute drum solos!

  • Playing the game of War

    StrangeloveOne of my ‘guilty secret’ films is the 1982 John Badham movie ‘War Games’, in which a teenager inadvertently starts the countdown to World War 3 by hacking in to a military computer system. He thinks he’s playing war games, but the computer thinks that it’s the real thing and starts counting down to a real missile launch. At the end of the film, the youth and the computer’s inventor manage to convince the machine to stop it’s attempts to launch the missiles by telling it to try out various game scenarios in which the result is always the same – mutual destruction. The computer, smarter than most politicians, remarks that nuclear war is an interesting game; the only way to win is not to play.

    Shame General Jack D Ripper didn’t get the message….(left)

    I was reminded of this film the other morning when I read on the BBC’s web site that a couple of Swiss human rights groups have published a paper in which they protest that it’s possible to commit war crimes in many modern computer games. Now, the fact that this is deemed newsworthy in a world in which war crimes of varying magnitudes are committed every day of the year is quite depressing of itself; perhaps these chaps need to look up from playing ‘Call of Duty’ and see what’s happening and what has happened in the last 15 years in the world – not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but closer to ome in Sarajevo and Kossovo. Seriously, the fact that games are discussed in this context brings little credit to academia and belittles the true war crimes that go on. Does this mean we should re-visit films like ‘Platoon’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket’? Should we ban ‘Star Wars’ with it’s depiction of whole planets being zapped out of existence? Do we purge episodes of Star Trek and Stargate from our collective media experience because of their story lines? 

    There is little evidence to suggest that playing these military oriented games desensitizes young men; many Western soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will have played games like these and are still traumatised by what they see. War crimes have been a feature of warfare from days immemorial; we can go back to places like Lidic and Malmedy in World War 2, the use of gas warfare in Iraq in the 1920s to subdue local guerillas, etc.

    The academics comment that the games ‘permit’ war crimes to be carried out in the game scenarios; I wonder if they’re suggesting that the games should somehow prevent this. Some games do have game play that ‘punishes’ such activities in terms of the chance of ‘winning’ n the game, but are the academics suggesting that the games actually forbid activities that are war crimes in the real world? I hope not….and here’s why.

    The gamers have free will within the context of what the game allows them to do. They will almost certainly behave in a way that they wouldn’t behave in real life, and I do think that most people playing ‘Call of Duty’ will realise that there is a difference between Xbox mediate pixel slaughter and real world combat. If the activists are suggesting that the ability to commit a war crime in game is more likely to encourage people to do the same thing outside of the game, then there are two options; some sort of modification to the game play that punishes such activities in the game by a modification of the game scenario, or some sort of total block that restricts the course of action of a player in these scenarios. Now, if the academics believe that gamers might suffer from blurred reality when they commit a game based war crime, logically they must also believe that that other game events also might affect their view of reality.

    So….where the game scenario is loaded against war crimes, a player may take the decision that they can do it anyway and live with the game consequences. There is no moral judgement here by the player; they’re operating purely within the game mechanics and dealing with the consequences of their activities in a game theory scenario rather than the more complex world of free will and morality. By the academic logic, the gamer would behave in a similar way in real life, ignoring the morality of the decision in favour of some vague ‘live with the consequences’.

    The second scenario is even worse – by the logic of the academics it would appear that a gamer attempting a real world war crime will be somehow prevented from doing so by a kind of ‘deus ex machina’. That hand of God? Friendly aliens? Just in time intervention from a superior officer? Who knows….

    Whether folks like it or not, a game is a game is a game. Whilst I find some game scenarios morally repugnant, if you accept that the lack of controls in war games to stop people doing certain acts may encourage them to do those acts in real life, you also have to accept that the ability to do any action in a game will encourage that act in real life. The result, therefore, should be to ban everything with the exception of ping-pong. If you don’t accept this, then you need to leave well alone and accept that freedom of will in the game world reflects freedom of will in the real world, and that what truly matters is the character and moral compass of people.

  • I think that I shall never see…

    oaktree…a thing as lovely as a tree, goes the poem.  We’ve been blessed this year by squirrels in our garden.  We live in a suburb of Sheffield with lots of trees which give a great playground for the squirrels, roosting places for birds, sources of sound effects when the wind blows through the leaves and variable satellite TV quality in the spring and summer when the leaves on a particular nearby tree get in the way of the incoming satellite TV signal!

    We’re constantly reminded of the importance of trees to the environment – most of us are aware of the phrase ‘the lungs of the world’ when applied to the rain forests of South America and South East Asia.  Astonishingly enough, even though the world has been on a 40 Capstan Full Strength a day cigarette habit for the last 200 years, those lungs have managed to keep pushing enough Oxygen in to the environment and drawing enough CO2 out to keep the planet livable – quite a feat.

    treeaerialWhen I was kid my main regret about our garden was the lack of a tree at the end of it.  It was a loooong garden, just right for a long-wire aerial to support my interest in short wave radio.  Unfortunately, there was no tree.  the traditional supports for a long wire aerial for short wave listening, as portrayed in numerous books, was a house at one end – check! – and a tree at the other.   Sadly, I had no tree, my parents objected to my plan of acquiring a telegraph pole and planting it at the end of the garden, and so my aerial stopped where the last washing line support pole was.   Ah well….

    I love ’em.  One of my pleasures in the summer is to find a tree and sit under it – not too difficult an undertaking in Sheffield as we have lots of parks and also lots of trees scattered around the city centre.  When I was researching something the other day I came across a few nice quotes about trees, so thought – why not share them.  And here they are, and what they mean to me.

    “The best friend on Earth of man is the tree. When we use the tree respectfully and economically,
    we have one of the greatest resources of the Earth.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

    A reminder that the ersources of this planet, though vast, are not large enough unless we do our bit in conserving them and replacing what we use.  And that trees are our our planetary lungs.  I like breathing – if you do too then start paying attention to the News when they report on yet another deforestation carried out in teh name of global capitalism.

    “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” – Traditional Greek Proverb

    I love this.  It’s long termism – something wonderful to witness in a society, especially today when our leaders’ view of the long term is the day of the next General Election.  There are several similar ideas to this in different cultures.  The story goes that when a famous French official told his gardener to plant a tree, the gardener turned around and told his master that the tree wouldn’t reach maturity for 100 years.  The Lord of the Manor suggested that there was no time to waste and suggested that his gardener planted the tree immediately!  A Chinese proverb says ‘The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.  The second best time is now.’  We’re so used to instant gratification – perhaps we should all plant a tree to learn what it is like to be patient.  Short termism will kill us all yet.

     “People who will not sustain trees will soon live in a world which cannot sustain people. “ – Bryce Nelson

     Depressingly true.  As I mentioned above, we need trees to act as the lungs of the world, and to be honest, as we don’t seem able to curtail our desire to consume, we had better keep these lungs healthy.   I have no doubt that somewhere in the world there are very wealthy people planning biodomes in to which they and their families and minions will be able to retreat when the planet can no longer easily sustain life.   I have a sneaking suspicion that these people are also the ones who have pillaged the planet dry in the last 100 years.  If the day ever comes when these guys do run in to their bolt holes, might I suggest that we concrete the doors shut and paint the windows black?

    Enjoy the trees.  Preserve them – maybe think about artificial trees this Christmas?  When buying wooden items, use wood from sustainable sources.  Recycle your paper. Let’s keep breathing!

  • Wanna Blog? Get a train ticket…

    Regular readers of this blog will be aware that the blog has had a very patchy few days. Life, as John Lennon reputedly said, is what happens when you’re making other plans. I’d like to add that life is what happens when you step away from the keyboard and do cool stuff like go with your niece to ‘The Deep’ in Hull, go to see the Arctic Monkeys with my wife, attend meetings and do paid work – and generally do stuff involving the outside world.

    However, it was bugging me that I was slipping on my personal target which was to blog most days – ideally every day – and so I’ve been extremely lucky today to have to travel up to Harrogate again – a total of around an hour and a half on the train each way – three hours of sitting in Northern Rail’s finest carriages. Wonderful!

    And for once I’m not being sarcastic! I charged up the Netbook, didn’t pack the mobile broadband dongle and here I am between Wakefield and Leeds bashing out the second blog post of the morning in to Open Office. When I get home tonight I hope to have 4 or 5 posts based on ideas I’ve had over the last week but where I’ve not had time to actually type them out. I can then load them in to WordPress and publish as required. There are few distractions on a train journey (assuming you don’t end up sharing a carriage with football fans or small children) and if you disconnect any Internet access to your computer you can really settle down and get stuff done!

    And that’s the trick – disconnect the Internet connection . I find that Twitter and Facebook can be real time thieves. What I’ve now started doing when I want to achieve anything on a train journey is to either leave the Broadband Modem at home or leave it in the bottom of my bag. I don’t have email installed as standard on my Netbook – only if I’m going to be away for a few days – and so there’s rarely a reason to be on-line when I’m really busy. If I need to check a link or get a reference, I’ll make a note in my Open Office document and when I’ve finished doing what I need to do I can go back on-line and tidy up such loose ends, By not having a live Internet connection running all the time, I don’t get tempted to go swanning off on to web sites, I save battery power and am generally more productive and focussed.

    Maybe the next time I get REALLY far behind with things, or perhaps when I need to develop a stock pile of blog articles, I should just buy a day return to Edinburgh and spend the day on the train!

  • Keeping it up!

    The last week has shown me how hard it can sometimes be to keep blogging!  I’m sitting here with Marvin, our large long haired cat who acts like a dog (i.e. he shakes when wet and sits up with his paws on my lap when he wants attention, then after I stroke him he settles down by my feet!) and am struck by the fact that what is good for business and life in general is not necessarily good for blogging.

    At least not the blogging I like to do – I’m wordy.  I like writing long articles in this blog.  If I have anything shorter to write it goes to Twitter or Facebook these days.  No, to me, if it’s worth blogging it’s worth blogging well.  I do the odd short piece, but am generally happier with longer pieces and feel that a longer article gives my readers ‘more bang for the buck’.  Unfortunately, when work takes off, and family and other responsibilities swallow up time, the blog gets short shrift.  Which, I think, is how it should be.

    One side project that has taken up time over the last two weeks has been to return to an old site of mine, Coffeehouse Chat.  This discussion forum was set up in August 2008 and I closed it in August 2009 after declining usage due to a competing site hitting more right buttons than I was!  However, the world turns and I’m considering whether to refurbish and re-open the site with new facilities.   By the way – anyone who visits – registration and login is turned off but I would welcome comments about colour schemes, etc.  There’s also a nascent user-blogging system being set up at http://www.blogs.coffeehousechat.co.uk, and a development blog about teh site at http://www.coffeehousechat.co.uk/blog/ .  

    And then there’s been work.  Now, despite what our dear Leaders say, for most small businesses I think it’s safe to say that the recession is still biting our ankles.  The major change I’ve found this year has been that the vast majority of my work has been freelance work done from home, rather than regular contract work done ‘on site’.  This has been a great thing in some ways but I have to say the more regular (and higher) income from contract work has been missed.  So….keeping on top of work has become a major priority – and getting new work is an ongoing job!

    And there’s my third sector projects.  I’m a Trustee of South Yorkshire Animal Rescue, Treasurer and a Board Director of Hillsborough Forum and am also involved in the activities of Action For Involvement. 

    And I wonder why I can’t find time to blog….

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