James’ Blog

Why oh why do musicians/publishers think that “hidden tracks” are a good idea? I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, but if not it’s when the final song on a CD has several minutes of silence after it, followed by another song, which isn’t mentioned on the back or in the sleeve notes. I suppose the idea is that it’s a pleasant surprise for the listener which makes them think they’re getting a bit more for their money.

Like hell.

It’s obvious it’s there - why else would track 13 be listed as being 13 minutes in length. All it does is winds me up, because I don’t really want to sit through 3 minutes of silence on the off chance that there is something worth listening to on the end. When I rip the CD into iTunes it gets completely messed up, unless I take the time to manually rip and clip the final track into two files. At least you can tell iTunes to only play a certain portion of the track, so it doesn’t mess up your playlists or cause similar problems on your iPod or when you burn to CD. However, you’ve then lost the extra track.

Either it’s good enough to be on the album or it isn’t. If it is, give it pride of place… if nothing else it bumps up the track count which is often pitifully low anyway.

Here endeth today’s rant.

PS Sorry for lack of posts in the past, eek, 2 months. You know what I’m like!

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Praise rather than ranting for a change - back when I used to have a regular radio show I used to download a lot of music from iTunes. Unfortunately my hard drive then crashed and I lost all the files.

Officially Apple say you can only download purchases once, and if you lose it without a backup it’s tough luck. However if you email them it seems they’re much kinder and let you re-download it all in a couple of clicks.

I don’t really see why they can’t let you do this as standard - clearly it’s technically possible, and I don’t see any copyright issues. Still, it’s nice that they give in when asked.

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So much for weekly. Meh.

Going, going…. not quite gone

Blair is finally off, and if that’s news to you then you really need to rely on more than my blog for news. Unsurprisingly this has unleashed a wave or articles, blogs, podcasts, etc. on what he has done for us since 1997, and what might come next.

On May 2nd 1997 I was 13. I remember being awake for most of the night (insomnia rather than political interest), listening to the unfolding saga on the radio. When Blair made his victory speech at dawn on the South bank, even I got the feeling something incredible was happening. It really did seem to be a new dawn, a new era for Britain where everything would be better. At this point I had no knowledge and even less interest in politics, so I didn’t really know how it would be better or why it was so bad now. I do remember thinking how odd it would be not to have the Conservatives in power… after all, they’d been there all my life.

And after the initial fuss, I forgot about it and sunk back into my teenage political abyss.

Flash forward ten years, and I’ve become a news junkie, lapping up the reviews of the twists and turns of the Blair government. On Thursday, in the most over-hyped and non-surprising resignation speech in the history of the universe, I actually felt a twang of some kind of emotion that an incredible era was coming to an end. For better or worse, Tony Blair has been incredibly significant in all our lives, and things are about to change.

There are far better informed people than me to judge his time in office, and really when we talk about what Blair has done we’re really talking about what “New” Labour has done, and to single him out would be both unfair to those around his - they too deserve the credit and the blame. For me, Labour have definitely done things I deplore - the Iraq mess, tuition fees (the flagship broken promise), and the general media manipulation, spin and deceit. However, there have been fantastic successes - Northern Ireland, the minimum wage, relative economic stability. Personally I believe him when he says he only ever did what he thought was best. I don’t believe he ever lied or did anything totally dishonest, not intentionally anyway. But really that’s not saying much… as Rory Bremner pointed out this morning on Sunday AM (no clip unfortunately, but it was hilarious, it even made Gordon Brown laugh), how many Prime Ministers would say they didn’t do what they thought best.

I don’t think, even with hindsight, that there will ever be a simple answer.

There was a fascinating piece on Newsnight a month or so ago which looked into what people thought of Tony Blair - some surprising results. Watch it here.

And what about Brown…. let’s save that for another time.

Madeleine McCann

Desperately sad, awful, awful, awful. There is nothing else to say on the story itself.

The growing reward fund troubles me however… celebrities seem to lining up to record appeals and add cash to the cause. I appreciate that rewards can help (the police say so, so I’ll believe them), but part of me is now finding it slightly vulgar. If someone knew something about this horrid situation I find it bad enough that a bit of cash would make a difference between them coming forward and staying quiet. Worse still, there now seem to be a feeling that £1m wouldn’t be enough… how about £1.5? £2m? What’s your price?

I have no doubt this is being done with the best of intentions, but there is a serious danger of seeming to use this story for positive publicity. The Sunday papers splash headlines declaring how they are pledging; the Sun prints appeal posters with their logo taking pride of place. This is turning into a media sponsored search, rather than a media reported story.

It’s all part of the grief frenzy, where we all seem to be desperate to prove our sadness and sorrow. A two minute silence for this, a vigil for that… who are we doing it for? The victims of whatever terrible event has occurred, or for ourselves, to try to make the world seem a better place than it unfortunately is?

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BBC - The Graham Norton Show - Overheard

It’s hardly a unique concept, but a nonetheless amusing collection of overheard conversations. My personal favourite:

Man walking down a long corridor ahead of me in work, talking to his wife on his mobile phone and says “is she being naughty”? “do you want me to talk to her”? “ok put her on” “hello Sarah, are you being naughty”? “well listen, you mustn’t be naughty because if you are naughty, when you go to sleep tonight, the house will burn down”.

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You Don’t Know Jack!

Sulkyblue posted this link - we used to play the PC version of this game back when I lived in Hammersmith. The Flash version is almost as fun…

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FAQ: your productivity tips from Guardian Unlimited: Technology

An interesting discussion on ways to boost productivity… until someone suggests blindly ignoring all emails/phone messages.

My comment:

I agree about being able to get away from email for a while is important - either by ignoring the new message alert while you’re in the middle of something, or the more direct approach of closing down Outlook/Thunderbird and only checking it every X minutes/hours.

But just ignoring email, or any form of communication, until someone approaches you directly or goes to extra effort to contact you is absolutely infuriating. In order to boost your productivity (not by doing more work, but by ignoring the part of your work that involves communicating), you have sacrificed mine.

Having said that we all need to be careful not to CC people here there and everywhere, and our emails need to be to the point (without being overly abrupt) and, where possible, make it clear what action/response is required.

If you don’t want to receive emails, don’t have or publicise an address. Don’t give the illusion of being willing to communicate if you’re not.

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It’s been a while, but it’s back - my utterly irrelevant, thoroughly inconsequential and largely pointless take on the week’s news.

And before anyone makes a crude joke, the three stories in the title are not related

Prince Harry in Iraq

Should he stay or should he go…. na na na na na na na na. I’ll mention that’s a poor pun/reference to the Clash record, seeing as my written recital of music is almost as bad a my vocal.

My first reaction was he should - why should a member of the royal family be any different to any other soldier. And then it hit me… like it or not, he IS different. Not more important, but definitely different. As has become perfectly clear, he is a specific target for the insurgents, and therefore will draw even greater enemy attention to his unit. Of course they’re not “safe” anyway, but we shouldn’t be giving the enemy any more reason to attack than they already have.

I’m sure that there would be no pressure from the family or the MoD to take special consideration for Harry, certainly not officially. But with the greatest will in the world, anyone with influence over his deployment would be terrified of losing him on their watch. It’s a distraction, and all just to secure one more solidier. This isn’t about the risk to Prince Harry, it’s about the risk to those around him.

I have nothing but respect for anyone who is willing to fight for their country, including Prince Harry. He has gone into this with the best of intentions and it would be ridiculous for his training to be for nothing. But the mistake was made long ago when he started that training.

If you say the royal family shouldn’t be treated differently to anyone else, then they would not be the royal family. Personally I don’t like that we have an arbitrary family running our country, but we do and we have to live with that. They’re not like you and me, and I don’t expect them to be and certainly don’t want them to pretend to be.

Alcohol and children

Alcohol Concern this week called for parents who give alcohol to under 15’s to be prosecuted in a bid to deal with the serious problem of under-age and binge drinking in our society. It would be stupid to pretend that we don’t have a problem with alcohol in this country, especially with young people both above and below the age of 18. My question is whether prohibition is the answer.

My answer, to be blunt, is no.

Banning things does not make the problem go away - look at drugs. I’m sure there will be examples found of kids of disgracefully young ages drinking to excess, and obviously this is wrong. But there will also be plenty of examples of children occasionally drinking socially at home, or even with peers, which does no harm. I was allowed to drink wine at home with my parents on special occasions like Christmas from about 11 onwards. Alcohol Concern would want my parents arrested for this harmless act which hasn’t left me with any kind of drink problem.

Telling children they can’t do something naturally makes them want to do it as part of their instinct to push the boundaries. Clearly this doesn’t mean they should be allowed to do everything they want, but by drinking responsibly at home children can be shown that drinking does not need to be synonymous with getting drunk. It de-mystifies the whole issue, and removes the peer pressure element which drives a lot of the problems.

In some cases parents go too far, either because they are misguided or due to more systematic abuse. But that makes them bad and dangerous parents, and we already have laws in place to protect children unfortunate enough to have such poor guardians. A blanket, one size fits all policy that criminalises the harmless majority in order to deal with a dangerous but small minority will only make the situation worse.

Terror leaks

The UK’s counter terrorism chief has said that lives are being put in danger by the repeated leaking of information about police anti-terror operations, most notably around the arrests in Birmingham earlier this year amid claims of a plot to capture a British Muslim serving in the armed forces. It’s almost certain there had been a leak to the press before the raids took place - unless of course a Daily Mirror team just happened to be passing at the crack of dawn when it all kicked off.

Is it serious? Well it the person in charge of protecting us from terrorists says so, then who am I to disagree. Most fingers are pointing at the government, but it could also be the security services or the police.

There needs to be an inquiry to find out who leaked this, and why. The government says they won’t respond to speculation and will only open an invesitgation when evidence is presented. And by evidence, they seem to mean evidence pointing to who is responsible. The obvious evidence that a leak has occurred is not sufficient (in their eyes) to prompt an investigation to look for evidence as to the cause.

An analogy: someone dies, cause unknown. There is no particular evidence pointing to any one condition. The government would shrug their shoulders and brush it under the carpet. Most sane people would do a post-mortem to find evidence, and ultimately the cause.

When I first heard this story I didn’t think much of it. Then I thought again… it’s sensational, and all the more so because we have become so used to this kind of nonsense from the current administration that we barely take any notice.

Another leak

Personal details (including criminal history, disabilities and sexual orientation) of junior doctors were made freely available on an NHS website until spotted by Channel 4 News. It sounds to me like someone wanted to make these details available to an authorised colleague, but thought the quickest and easiest way to do this would be to stick the Excel spreadsheet on the web, albeit on an unpublicised URL.

Putting my IT hat on, I want to rant about how this illustrates that IT systems in big organisations don’t work. If this was the easiest way for the information to be shared, they need to sort their system out. Not that that excuses the massive error of judgement that took place to cause this controversy in the first place.

With disasters like this becoming increasingly common, I’m beginning to understand why people are so worried about their personal information being stored on computer. It does seem that with the best will in the world (which many wouldn’t credit the government with anyway), there are still some incredibly stupid people in positions of authority. It’s not a problem with computers (this information wasn’t accessed by hackers), it’s a problem with people. You quite often hear that computers are fallible, but the far more important point is that people are infinitely more fallible. And since it’s people that develop computer systems, and people that use them, computers are therefore at their mercy, not the other way around.

That’s all for this week, no fluffy and finally story here. Thanks for reading, feel free to comment and pick holes in my arguments. More next week…. perhaps.

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Not a lot is the short answer. That’s not to say I’m sat around doing nothing, just that I don’t have a lot to write about.

Most of my time is taken up doing more database work - yes, I know that doesn’t sound terribly media/radio like, and that’s because it’s not, but I have rent to pay and a lifestyle beyond my means to support. It’s still interesting, at a high level - there was a reason I studied computer science after all - but day-to-day it can be quite tedious, especially when you spend 3 hours carefully designing a form in Visual Basic only to decide it’s completely wrong and doesn’t work. C’est la vie.

I haven’t abandoned career change, it’s just on hold. Although phrasing it as “career change” makes it sounds as ominous as “regime change”, and we all know how well that last one of those went.

BACK TO THE POINT… yes, I have some meetings lined up this week and other opportunities on the back burner. Irritatingly I suddenly seem to have lots of opportunities, just as for the first time in months I’m actually committed work wise. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the current batch of work done, recharge my financial batteries and then have time to take up a very kind offer that is already on the table and hopefully coax more offers out of others. We shall see.

I feel like I should have more to say, but I don’t. Generally I’m happy, a bit frustrated that everything is happening at once, but I can’t complain that things are finally happening.

TTFN

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I’ve just caught up on this week’s edition of The Apprentice, in which Sophie was fired for being a crap saleswoman. Fair enough you might say, but when you drill down beyond the headline she claims that she can do sales, but only when she believes in the product she is selling and more importantly in the price it is being sold at.

In the task they were selling sweets to kids at London Zoo at a fairly substantial mark up, and Sophie wasn’t comfortable selling them because she thought they were a rip off. As a result we get the impression that she didn’t pull her weight, although there were no figures to back this up and you always have to wonder what has been left on the edit suite floor.

In the end she got fired, because Alan Sugar thought she was naive and wasn’t cut out for business. He basically gave the impression (and again he could be the victim of editing) that in business you sometimes have to be a underhanded in order to make money. I fundamentally disagree with this - if you have a good product at a good price, it’s a win-win situation for seller and buyer. Furthermore it’s obvious that it’s much easier to sell a product which you believe in, as opposed to having to cover up the problems that you know are there.

I suspect that Sophie wouldn’t be a great saleswoman anyway, but even so there is a lot more to business than just sales. Yes, sales is vital - everything leads up to it - but that doesn’t mean there aren’t equally vital roles to be done in other areas.

Sophie aside, the other two were far worse only. One, the team leader, decided to spend most of his time in a tiger suit rather than selling - fair enough, until you hear that he is a salesman by trade. Why not put Sophie, the (for whatever reason) weak saleswoman in the costume? Then there’s Natalie, who made a mistake on the product labelling but refused to admit it until really pressed.

I think Alan Sugar set a really bad example in this area and it will certainly make me think twice about the value of Amstrad products. The whole programme sometimes makes me shudder about how it presents British business. At one end of the scale is Alan Sugar - no nonsense, straight talking, all the other clichés. At the other is the bunch of yuppies who spend their time talking prized corporate tripe, going on about how they only know how to win and how they’re not there to make friends. In this week’s episode one of the girls was criticised for giving their sweets to kids and then demanding money from the parents. She responded that she knows it’s not a good way to do things, but that ultimately all she is worried about is making money. Great.

When I was in business I like to think I did things fairly, and I made money. Perhaps I could have made more if I’d been a bit naughty, but there’s more to life than money.

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A couple of companies I deal with have sent me details of their refer-a-friend schemes:

Love Film

30 days free DVD rental for you, nothing for me. I’ve used them for three months, they do exactly what they say on the tin. I’ve only got one voucher/code, so first come first served. Comment or drop me an email if you want it.

Sky

I couldn’t live without my Sky+, and now I’ve finally got their broadband it’s all quite good value. If you want it let me know, because we can both have £30 of M&S vouchers (mmm, chocolate puddings!) if I refer you.

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