More excessive money extraction

BBC has The AA saying 'increased profits from VAT on fuel' should be diverted to fixing pot holes.

I disagree.

Rather than just extracting more money from the denizens of this fair isle perhaps VAT on fuel could be reduced to help out the consumer and instead the money the government collects from the population and then doles out to anti-motoring charities could be diverted to fixing potholes first.

Fakecharities reckons:-

• Campaign for Better Transport Charitable Trust recieves £447,305 from the state
• Living Streets recieves £438,213 from the state

To this I add:-

• Road Safety Foundation who were mentioned in the BBC report, their website financial statement has them getting £127,126 from the Department of Transport in the guise of the Highways Agency.

Sure, trying to stop people being killed by cars is a noble endevour, but road deaths are at their lowest level ever, so surely now's a fine time to reduce the state funding for such organisations, so they can thrive on voluntary donations from people who's lives they've touched.

Referral spikes

This one time in 1998 when I was a fresher at Strathclyde University, going to King Tuts to see bands a few times a week, I once went on a mission to pull Kenickie. They were on tour, passing through that venue, and we a fine looking bunch of girls. I'd rounded up a couple of fresher chums, we acquired our tickets and headed along.

The gig wasn't the most crowded I'd been to, but the girls were on top form, their acappella version of Come Out 2Nite was a particular highlight of the set. The band had two new members for this, their final tour, some bloke and a hot keyboard player called Dot, who'd later go on to play with Blur.

My attempt at pulling Kenickie got as far as saying "Hey, how's it going?" to Dot. She smiled.

So, thirteen years later when my website charmed former Kenickie lead singer Lauren Laverne on her radio show, it was like completing a ancient quest.

As a result of getting talked up on the 6Music show, the website got a wee blip of traffic.

Lets compare it to other spot traffic blips I've received on several of my blogs:-

• Boing Boing mention - 24,000 hits
• YouPorn blog feeder - 500-1000 hits
• Lauren Laverne on 6Music - 450 hits
• Ian Dale new blogs mention - 200 hits
• Half-arsed Devil's Kitchen mention - 150 hits
• EU Referendum - 60 hits
• WardmanWire - 40 hits
• Britblog round-up - 30 hits

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

Big Blue walking left to right

Here's a rip of Lauren Laverne gushing about my website, accompanied by a video of Big Blue walking from left to right

I haven't been this excited about being mentioned on the radio since I Mark Radcliffe read out my emails in 1996 when he reckoned that Transformers were 90's rather than 80's.

London Indiepop EyeSpy

Rules
1. Points given for Eye-Spying Indiepop people in and around London
2. No points for yourself
3. You don't get points for the same Spyee twice
4. Points are awarded at the first instance
5. Double points for sleeping with, having sex with, or assaulting the Spyee
6. Final score for any 24 hour period

All rules are debatable

Other rules
7. Extra half point if the Spyee is doing their shopping in a supermarket
8. Extra point if they're wearing a hipster stripey top
9. Minus points for considering talking to the Spyee, but not following through
10. No points for spotting bands at their own gig

Bands and Artists
Pocketbooks - 4 points per member
The Loves - 3 points per member/former member
The Bobby McGees - 3 points per member (no points for calling Jimmy Bobby)
MJ Hibbett and the Validators - 3 points per member
Tender Trap - 2 points per member
Moustache of Insanity - 2 points per member
Allo Darlin - 2 points per member
Veronica Falls - 2 points per member
Arthur and Martha - 2 points per member
Electrophonvintage - 2 points per member
White Town - 2 points per member
Darren Hayman - 2 points per member
Comet Gain - 1 point per member

Scenesters
Kitten Painting - 3 points
Bob Underexposed - 3 points
Ill and Ancient - 1 point
John Marshall - 2 points
Nat Davis - 3 points
Camilla - 3 points

Promoters
Trevor OddBox - 2 points
String Bean Jen - 2 points
Ian HDIF - 3 points
TomB - 3 points
The Twee As Fuck ladies - 2 points
Anastacsia So Tough So Cute Baby Honey - 2 points
Rory So Tough So Cute Baby Honey - 1 point
Crystalball - 3 points
El Presidente - 1 point
Team Come Out 2Nite - 2 points per member

DJs
Rocker Rosehip - 3 points
Steve Lemaqc - 4 points

Anyone I've missed or incorrectly allocated points, let me know in the comments.

The dramatic return of Glasgow Indie EyeSpy

Years ago I used to run a website called Glasgow Indie EyeSpy. It's premise was that you got points for spotting folk from Glasgow indie bands in Glasgow, in the street or at gigs.

The reason I mention this now is because on this morning's Lauren Laverne Show on 6Music, as part of their Indie Travel Guide slot, a gentleman called Tony Kienan mentioned the site and I got a wee blip of unexpected traffic.

Aye, about 55 minutes in here.

Whilst I did have doubts that it would become a stalker's charter, it was broadly well received, and received a tonne of traffic for bands searching for themselves.

I had a party once at my flat in Glasgow's leafy south side, and found myself chatting to the King of Partick and Robbie from IoMoPS about who'd you include in a Glasgow music scene Top Trumps and what the scoring would be. A few weeks later it had evolved into EyeSpy and include mostly folk you always see at gigs rather than a list of bands.

Whilst it was a great idea for a website, it was never going to be mega-popular, its constituency of visitors was too small. Sure you could repeat the exercise for other cities, but that would be a whole lot of work and it doesn't scale well.

Glasgow is a city of a specific size, all distances are walkable within reason. Decent venues are close enough together so you can cover lots of ground in one night. Not like London, where once you're in Brixton or Shoreditch, or Kilburn, you're there for the night. In Glasgow the indie band people are ubiquitous, from Stephen Pastel selling records in Mono, uncle Brendan from Teenage Fanclub lounging in the 13th Note to seeing Camera Obscura playing records at The Flying Duck, in one afternoon.

Although I once saw Penelope Keith near the Serpentine and Andrea Spinks in Brick Lane in the same day, its hardly the same thing. It wouldn't work.

In Glasgow you can pencil in twenty minutes to get home after any gig anywhere in the city, for London its more like an hour, or two hours if you go by bus.

Maybe Manchester's the right size for this sort of thing, I dunno, its been fifteen years since I indulged that music scene.

If I were to pick up the batton once more, I'd use Songkick and Last.fm data, rather than the old google, myspace and technorati algorithm.

Hmm, maybe "London Indiepop EyeSpy" would work...

Faulty CaterCheck 3 Thermometers

I did resolve as a New Years Resolution to "crush my enemies mercilessly", and now at last I have found an enemy, namely the CaterCheck 3 thermometer from Comark.

I feel a little bad writing this blog post, the designers and engineers don't deserve this. Maybe they work incredibly hard for very little pay, designing the waterproof enclosure, the circuitboard, the display layout, spending weeks testing it, before a manufacturer elsewhere assembles hundreds, or thousands on a production line, minimum wage or lower workers spenind days hunched over their workstations, soldering and screwing them together. Or maybe its all automated, barely improved since version 2, the designers and engineer's role having evolved into the innate Dilbert-like cubicle existance, surfing the internet aimlessly for hours avoiding the being caught by the boss's, collecting their adequate paycheck every month, not quite appreciating how lucky they are.

I'm going to assume that this blog entry is going to figure quite highly in the google results when you try searching for "CaterCheck 3" and although I'm procrastinating, this is about how failure-prone they are. If it makes you feel any better, this blogpost may also serve as a googlewhack tripwire, someone in the management chain here, investigating faulty units will find my blog, read my previous moany blog entries and after very little investigation and ruminating, I get dismissed from my job.

These thermometer probes are used in the catering and food production industry, at my factory we have a dozen or so of them, they're probably very popular. And they knacker.

We start off with loads of them, working fine and a few weeks later only two work properly and those are the one's I use every day.

The screen is blank, it doesn't switch on. Or the display fills with characters then goes blank once more.

On closer inspection, there's condensation on the inside of the screen. Blotting the battery compartment shows that its moist in there too.T

Maybe my colleagues have been misusing them. Dropping them in waterbaths, or leaving them on radiators. It is quite a moist and humid environment in here, its kind of understandable.

But very frustrating.

Drying out the stack of faulty CaterCheck 3 units doesn't work. Opening up the battery compartment and using blotting paper then replacing the batteries, that doesn't work either.

I've tried unscrewing all the screws I can find but that doesn't open up the casing, so there's no drying out of the moisture in there.

The one month failure rate here is about 80% and sure there's probably warrantees and a service plan that gets them fixed, but its still incredibly frustrating.

That feeling of helplessness, that these thermometers, so vital for our paperwork and statutary obligations, that they fail so quickly and are impossible to fix with a screwdriver and absorbant tissue.

Maybe there's a better model that is more resiliant? I dunno, its not my call to spec out and order these things. I just have to use them. I just have to wade through and ever-growing pile of faulty units to find the one that works, to do my job.

World Saving Product Idea #58

Is there a market niche for a cheap(ish) and scalable software MRPII system? Kind of like Sage 50 but more geared towards manufacturing companies.

Out of the box it'll have all the tables and columns you'll ever need, all the forms and reports and queries and graphs. And with a standard right-click you can hide anything that doesn't seem relevant. And an easy way to add new fields, that get's reported back to the folk who've written it so we know what features get used the most and which are used least and what new features the users would like to have.

So, you can use it for your home kitchen, for recipes and what's in the pantry, and then it's good for small hi-fi manufacturing companies and nationwide chains of cafes.

Can we do it in Ruby? And make it so it runs on Firefox, Explorer, Safari and Chrome and if you so desire it'll look just like Sage and Access too.

Can it have the same sort of revision thing as Ubuntu, so it just works and then a year later it works even better with more features and more users. Each release could have a funny name so that geeks and non-geeks will learn to love it.

Can I get a grant from the BCC and some code-monkey's who'll just make it happen under my benevolent dictation. How about a pricing structure where its free, up until you've got 20,000 entries then it's £50, and then £500 after 100,000 entries.

Will Dr. Peter Ball be proud of me?

The database fetish

I can't help myself. Every day, at about this time, when its quiet and I'm frustrated by having to copy out the same list of details as I did the day before and the day before that, I can't stop myself from loading up MS Access.

All the company computers have it installed as standard, and no one uses it. I know, I know, it isn't the best database in the world, but its ubiquitous.

Rather than try to explain the need for a database, how it would make my colleague's and my job so much easier, rather than be dissuaded and redirected to someone else to try explaining again and it all falling on deaf ears, I load up Access, click on New - Blank Database and I start creating it.

One table at a time, one purpose at a time. Sometime suppliers, sometimes products, sometimes specs, sometimes delivery times.

The information is all out there elsewhere, sometimes in Sage, sometimes in Word or Excel, or handwritten forms in folders on a shelf, all in a miriad of locations and format. But I know if I put it in my database myself then its right, the fields have the correct names, the crosslinks are sturdy, and its all sortable and searchable. Its all at my fingertips cos I put it there.

It takes me two minutes to set up the table, and then plugging the information in starts slowly, either by hand or importing, and debugging. By the time I look at the clock, twenty minutes have passed, the table is half complete.

Then I tremble in the knowledge of what will happen if my manager finds out what I've done.

I close Access, click through to the location where the database was saved, I press delete, and pause a moment before clicking the Yes button.

This job could be easier, more satisfying, less frustrating, simpler, more accurate and foolproof.

I click and ceases to exist.

Suicide, work and suggestions

When I was a schoolie I knew a girl, a teenage girl who's self esteem was so low, she once regaled to me a story about how she was going to slash her wrists in the bath one day cos she dreaded getting in trouble the next morning for some homework she hadn't done. So cheap she felt was her life.

My job is quite frustrating. I'm never quite sure if I'm going to get in trouble for decisions I make. At any moment, something I did yesterday or last week could blow up. Some minor discrepencies slip by as the older guys know they always have done, and some minor thing becomes huge.

I've no confidence in my duties or the bits of paperwork I fill in. One manager will tell me how to do one thing, their manager says to do it another way, the assistant manager confides with me third way, and another manager tells me something different.

Like that girl many years ago. I'm ready to jack it all in the next time there's trouble.

Just quitting my job mind, not killing myself.

I really want to work for Richer Sounds and Audio Partnership. They're nearby, they do hi-fi which was my career until I was sucked into redundancy and sandwich manufacture. And they have a well respected employee suggestion scheme, one of the best in the country. On average, according to the internet, each employee makes twenty suggestions a year, and every suggestion is read by Julian Richer himself.

Me, I thrive on making suggestions and improvements for how to do my job. But these have been swatted down and knocked back repeatedly with my current employer.

The mentality in my department is that the job's not supposed to be easy so let's make it as difficult as possible.

I have a degree and an IQ of 140, and about 60% of my job is writing out in long hand exactly the same list of items that a) I wrote out the day before and b) the guy across from me has on a Purchase Order printout.

So yes, I'm applying for jobs elsewhere. Any suggestions, leave them in the comments, and offers, email me.

World-saving product idea #57

In amongst the climategate, Patchygate and glaciergate contoversies which have stripped Climate Change of all it's data integrity, there has occasionally been reference to these two facts:-
A) weather is not climate
B) airport weather stations aren't ideal for measuring climate

So my idea for a thing that could save the world is a little internet aware climate monitoring station. Just a wee box with flashing lights that you can buy for your cousin or your gran for their birthday. Its got a thermometer, a GPS tracker, GPRS, humidity thing, sunlight sensor and whatever else you want or need to track the climate.

Its all hooked up to a website which tracks climate change, so that from this point onwards, regardless of the past, you'll have crowd-sourced data you can depend on. The website will have a big map on it so you can zoom in to see where the climate change boxes are located, where there's loads of them, where there's none. Geo-caching folk could send them out to sparser regions, schools could could sponsor units in developing countries or on cargoships

From the website you could see if neighbouring ones have vastly different readings and in real-time you could wander over and find out why.

The information would all be there, at your fingertips. No doubt about data processing biases or loast data from years ago.

£20 and it could be yours.

Dear Lazyweb, make it so.