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CSI Wellington

Picture the scene: I entered the house and there was something peculiar afoot. A bag of shopping that I’d brought home earlier had been knocked over. My assumption was that some feline interloper had been in through the cat flap and knocked it over while trying to rub against it, the way cats do. Must have been a big cat, I concluded, which discounted our borderline munchkin moggie.

Beware of first conclusions.

Awhile later I discovered a box of tea jammed into a corner of the room and the truth of the scenario dawned instantly. The tea in question wasn’t your average breakfast variety, but a relaxing tea, which counter intuitively contains catnip – and our cat loves em. Obviously, despite the tea being plastic wrapped, the cat had been desperate to get some, out of the bag she fished it; across the floor she chased it.

This was not the first time that returning home has posed a mini mystery to me but the previous incident was a lot, lot more disturbing.

My parents and I had been to my grandparent’s and by the time we returned home it was dark. Pulling onto the driveway everything seemed as it should, the lights were on as expected because my older brother had stayed home.

We hopped out of the car and approached the house. My dad twisted the key in the Yale lock and we entered.

“Hello,” someone called. No reply, came the answer.

So my brother had left the lights on but gone out. He’d left a lot of lights on, but maybe he’d only just popped out, most of his mates lived close by.

“That’s odd,” my dad said, “the phone’s off the hook.” And it wasn’t just off the hook; the receiver was completely off the hook and hanging off the side of the record cabinet that the phone sat on. I didn’t know what kind of struggle would only leave a phone in a moderately precarious state and touch nothing else, and clearly neither did my parents, so there was still calm.

Of the many lights that could be seen on form the outside, my brother’s bedroom light was one of them. I expect it was this that drew someone upstairs. There things became entirely filmic. There was a record on my brother’s turntable and it was still revolving, the needle tracing the infinity of the runoff groove.

Had my brother been listing to music while on the phone then simply vanished? Your own house isn’t meant to be like the Mary Celeste.

I expect my parents were freaking out, “Tales of the Unexpected” was a very popular TV show in those days, but they weren’t letting on.

Then my brother turned up. Not in a ditch somewhere, thankfully, but from next door.

He’d been listening to music when he’d wondered how loud it sounded outside. So he went out onto the street to find out. But he let the door close behind him – the latch clicked into place and he was locked out. He’d gone next door and had been furnished with a coat hanger. This he’d used to try to hook a set of door keys, all of which were conveniently hung up within close proximity to the letterbox. However, he’d failed to snare the keys and had only managed to dislodge the telephone.

Having failed, he’d returned to the next door neighbour’s house and awaited our return.

Obviously that was a mystery that didn’t need to be solved, my brother told us. If he’d been a cat I reckon we’d still be mulling it over now.

Jack Tramiel – Simply Greatness

Somewhere in a loft, in the fair and mighty county of North Yorkshire, there rests my greatest teenage dream. In 1987 I turned 12 and, apart from being besotted with the female of the species, I had a craving for technology, any technology, and when the Atari ST came into my sights it was love at first sight.

Rest in peace and thank you Jack Tramiel...

The following year I was extremely lucky and managed to snag myself a 520 Atari STFM – it had a built in disk drive (still the half meg version) and TV modulator!

And how I loved it.

I used that computer day and night – pixel art in Degas Elite, writing in First Word Plus, cranking out poems with some weird automated poetry writing software, failing to learn to program with STOS, even sound sampling – which really meant recording things then playing them backwards or at different pitches. And, of course, games, great great games, like Stunt Car Racer, Dungeon Master, Midwinter, Populous and the Secret of Monkey Island. Work (sort of) and play all in one perfect package.

That ST got used so much that the left mouse button stopped working with any reliability within a year, so my dad swapped the wires around so the right mouse button got all the action. Soon I had to get a new mouse altogether, a Naksha mouse, still the best mouse I’ve ever owned. The power supply even flaked out after a few years of merciless heat and had to be replaced, which is still the pinnacle of my electronic engineering endeavours.

The man that made this machine possible was Jack Tramiel, a survivor of Auschwitz and founder of Commodore. Under his reign Commodore made and sold a little computer called the Commodore 64, which is a blockbuster by anyone’s standards, bringing a proper computing into tens of millions of homes.

Corporate wrangling left Jack on the wrong side of the Commodore board room door, so he set up a new company, acquired the computer half of Atari and drove too hard a bargain trying to purchase the Amiga, allowing Commodore to step in and make a sensible offer for the technology instead. Incapable of admitting defeat, Tramiel and Atari cobbled together the ST from off the shelf parts (not like any shelf I ever had) and made my decade.

I’ve been working in video games development for nearly 17 years now, using skills I half learned with a clunky mouse and my first full keyboard. When people say “you know computers” to me, it’s Jack Tramiel and the Atari ST that deserve the credit.

Thank you Jack, for making the machine that made me, I will forever be in your debt.

Cat-Gon Jinn

I was reclining on the couch watching something on TV that I have completely forgotten. So I was wasting my time. My little netbook was closed and on the coffee table, within arm’s reach. When I put it there, it didn’t seem to matter that it was on a slippery plastic folder.

While I was slackjawing before the goggle box the cat appeared. Up she hopped onto the coffee table and then sat upon the netbook, as cats do.

Qui-Gon, was it his plan to be stabbed in the stomach? Slacker...

The cat sat there looking at me. I looked at the cat. I probably said ‘hello’.

Then the cat leapt for my lap. Launching herself mostly horizontally, a horrible demonstration of action-reaction unfolded before my eyes. As the cat went one way the netbook slipped on its low friction surface, flying off the table the other way.

Purely on instinct my left hand shot out and grabbed the netbook just as it cleared the edge of the table. At the same moment the cat landed on my lap. Then my body caught up with adrenaline and whatnot and my heart started beating again.

I was like Qui-Gon Jinn when he catches the whatever it is that falls off the table in Episode I.

Considering the reckless way I fence, there’s a chance I’ll go out the same way as Qui-Gon too. 

Let’s Really Have Some Competition!

Currently there’s much talk about slashing business regulation to increase competition. It’s a concept that anyone can see the sense in – if you don’t have to spend money on jumping through hoops then your company can be more competitive.

Competition is a good thing and I’d like to see the parties of the right embrace it even more fully, I’d like them to really liberate the potential of the system and address…

Political Parties

Democracy isn’t as democratic as it should be, there are flies in the ointment and the flies are called political parties. The point of democracy, at its least interactive level, is to be able to influence the political system by casting a vote. However, the candidates on offer who will actually be in a position to affect policy are chosen by powerful political parties, and that normally means just two political parties. A choice of candidates from only two parties represents little choice, especially when the difference between the two parties is much less significant than it should be.

Some might say that this is the fault of the electorate, they could after all vote for a minor party or independent candidates. But to suggest this is to underestimate an important part of human psychology: People like to back winners. At a deep neurological level they don’t want to side with a party they don’t believe can win, hence the polarisation of the majority of votes towards two parties.

Even worse than the abject lack of choice on offer is the fact that no matter who you choose to represent you they (be they a member of the ruling party or the opposition) have a master higher than the electorate. I do not mean god, I mean the party, and in politics the party is god. For anyone who wants to make any kind of difference in the world of politics the only choice they have is to join a successful party, and then do what you’re told.

It’s known if a politician does what their told, and votes the right way by the very simple fact that it’s done in public. The fib to justify this is that it allows the electorate to judge whether their elected representative is voting in their best interest, but the truth is that it allows the party to know how their members vote. Closed ballots were introduced for the public to stop the corrupt from forcing them to vote a certain way, instead the peer pressure was pushed up the line into the peaks of power, which means the corrupt only have to bend the ears of a few, rather than the many. And if a politician doesn’t vote how the party wishes then all that power they derive from being in a party begins to dissolve, their career stalls and they are reminded of their “obligations”.

The obvious solution to the lack of competition in politics is to break up the political parties; they are, after all, only unions of politicians with a common goal, the goal of attaining ultimate power. And it’s clear that the needs and desires of the party will always take precedence over any other master, even the country as a whole will often take a back seat to the success of the party. So abolish political parties and allow the electorate to choose from a wide field of candidates on merit, and not candidates with a party affiliation who will only go on to vote the way the whip tells them to.

In many countries around the world this would require some modification to the political system to accommodate it, but the US seems to have built a system that’s begging to be converted to party free politics, genuinely competitive politics where the only regulation is “no political parties”. In the highest positions of government this system would be extremely easy to implement, especially at the highest level of the White House, where so few of the President’s key personnel are elected officials anyway.

Tune!

Yesterday I spent about an hour of my time on hold, waiting to talk to a human being while being piped music and being told that they were suffering a higher than expected number of calls. However, I’m not mentioning this to draw sympathy, because it wasn’t actually as bad as it sounds.

How could this be? It’s not because I am a well adjusted and chilled out human being, that’s for sure.

Partly it was because I occasionally got told what number I was in the queue, so I could at least judge that I was making progress down the river of ignorance, getting ever closer to the sea of answers, or a life threatening hurricane, I didn’t know which.

I also knew that at the end of this journey I would definitely be taking up my fair share of time, reducing the unfortunates in the queue behind me to the phone equivalent of kicking their heels and wondering if it might be better to send an email.

But mostly, it was because the music being played to me was actually quite good – Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, I think. Cheerily I listened to it, thankful that there were no vocals to drive me insane. However, it also occurred to me that not everyone would be impressed with this choice of tune. Some might hate it, some might long to hear Whitney Houston (rest in peace pop princess) warbling away.

The world don’t move to the beat of just one drum and music taste varies so much that I heartily recommend that no one ever discuss what tunes they like at a dinner party, especially not with me, because I hate having to be polite when folk tell me how much they like Coldplay, or Celine Dion or any number of anodyne infectors of my brain mind.

Therefore, when it comes to being on hold, there should be an option to choose a station to listen to – Press 1 for Funk, Press 2 for Prog Rock, Press 3 for Hardcore Industrial (parental advisory, explicit lyrics). This is surely a lot cheaper than employing the correct number of staff to answer the calls and would partially diffuse the potentially furious callers who call up and launch into a time wasting tirade.

Of course, there might be a fault with my plan. Many call centres are metrics based – length of the queue, time to answer and time to deal with the call are all numbers to be kept as low as possible. So I strongly suspect that some call centre manager deliberately choose the most annoying music possible so that you’re encouraged to hang up, get the queue down and make them look good.

Don’t let the bastards win! Stay on the line people!

Bill Johnson’s 5 Things – Crap Pet Names

Over in Bill Johnson land he proffers forth 5 pet names you should never ever consider. Please note that Bill tells it like he sees it, which has absolutely nothing to do with the way it is!

Why Big Business Is Stupid

If there’s one thing that big organisations, from the US Government to Sony Pictures, are good at it’s not facing up to reality. This is probably down to the fact that these leviathan’s can, to some degree, define reality. They just can’t do this to quite the degree that they think they can. This makes them slow to adapt and poor at exploiting genuinely great opportunities. Instead they try to keep things the same and maximise their tried and tested revenue streams.

Big organisations hate change, unless it’s their idea, which it rarely is. Copyright bills are great examples of this. Has any copyright law so far actually reduced copyright infringement to any great degree? I doubt it and I doubt that any ever will, so there really is no point wasting precious government time on bills like SOPA and PIPA.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for people being able to profit from their creativity, I am pro-copyright, I should have the right to own these very words that I am typing now. However, the notion that copyright can control the reproduction of work is, in this day and age, simply out of date and entirely impossible to enforce.

The definition of copyright has changed before, and it should change again. Outside of the US, books used to have a resale clause in them, telling you that you must not resell or even lend the book to someone else. They don’t carry that message anymore. Is this because the general public didn’t acknowledge it as being valid? Books are resold everywhere, and they have been for a long time, and I don’t remember hearing about the Salvation Army being busted for having books in their stores, despite the fact that the second hand market appears to be distribution without profit, at least for the original maker.

And this is pertinent, the second hand market for books, DVDs, videogames or CDs appears, on the surface, to generate very little wealth for the creator of the material, either the creative artist or the legions that operate the channels they work through. The only benefit is publicity for the creative behind the work, so if you picked up a second hand copy of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth cheap and liked it, you might buy her latest book first hand. Perhaps the second hand market is the viral advertising of physical media.

So what’s the viral advertising of digital media? The actual media, of course! Piracy wouldn’t be a problem if no one wanted to copy this media. Surely this very fact can be leveraged in some way.

Big media cares little for copyright, it cares about profits. If one business model doesn’t work then these companies owe it to their shareholders to find a new one that does. For the TV and movie industry I think there’s a very obvious technological solution that will create a great viewing experience for the viewer, and revenue for the makers, all without misguided legislation that will only ever damage websites of genuine value.

I pay a subscription to have Sky TV, some of the shows are sponsored, so why the hell do I also have to suffer adverts? Many shows can be watched on a website, which is quite convenient, but they also have adverts. But no one likes adverts; folk don’t like shouty adverts for the latest thing to get a flatter stomach or a brain like a computer. Do the pirates rip shows and leave the adverts in, of course not, who wants to watch that.

But what if the adverts weren’t explicit and were instead implicit, like product placement, but a lot more sophisticated. TV shows are full of saleable items – clothes, music, furniture, food, anything, they hurl ideas at us about what we can buy. And on a computer all these things can be clicked on – like a jacket on the lead character, just move the cursor to it and click, or tap on it on a touch screen. With an authored layer over the whole show or movie this click would mean something, it would mean you bookmark the product and then, when the entertainment ends the internet opens up and gives you places to buy these things.

“How cool was Brad Pitt in that jacket? I want it!” and still bathing in the afterglow you go to an online store and buy it. The best thing about this is that the makers of movies and TV shows can actually take advantage of the fact that everyone’s copying and distributing their content around the internet. When all moving image media can identify itself and link to websites selling stuff then the more times its copied the better. And because the companies that make the films and TV shows in the first place are posting their material to the torrent sites first and at a good quality, it stands to reason that their click/touch encoded version will be the most popular to download.

This isn’t rocket science, but it is an opportunity to make a lot of money, definitely as much as any the big media producers are generating at the moment. When the world changes, you have to change with it, that’s what the rest of us have to do. So, big media, stop whinging, grow up, catch up with the world and employ some people that have the vision to see what using other peoples’ bandwidth to distribute your content really is: The greatest opportunity your industry has ever had.

BJ’s Got His 5 Things On Again

Over in the land of the Bill Johnson blog we have 5 more things that rile the old curmudgeon – this time Bad Pets.

I searched for "Bad Pets" and I got a picture of Dr Oz - ah, the unusual world of Google...