The People's Democratic Republic of Birmingham

In the battle for energy efficiency every little thing you can do will help; today I cam across a tiny little application that gives you a massive amount of control over your PC and how much power it uses; best of all it estimates how much CO2 you’ve saved and allows you to aggregate your statistics with everyone else who uses the program.
Go check it out at www.localcooling.com

I am in the habit of collecting arguments that refute superficial and facile support for large and contentious issues. (the fact that the kind of people who support such issues are typically fat, self interested bigots is entirely besides the point…)

One of my current favourites is when I say that I am against ID cards and the reply comes back – with a certain sick innevitability – “wll, if you ain’t got anything to hide, what are you scared about”…

So I reply: “Really? – how much did YOU earn last year?” – and “what websites did you surf to all of last year?”

And then comes the killer; if anyone is stupid enough to actually trust the government and come up with a “we’ve nothing to fear – they would not use this info against us” REALLY?! ARE YOU MAD?! You could have just as easily stated the exact same thing in Germany in 1930 – or in Rwanda in 1990, or in Bosnia, or in Armenia, or Stalinist Russia … The State is Not Necessarily Your Friend; if it gets taken over – and they DO get taken over – this ID database will be the most potent tool against the people.

Do you trust every government that will ever come into power? – if you do you are stupid.

Campaign against ID Cards; at the very least sign this petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/IDcards/

So; I went out on Satruday to the rather splendid Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham – home to the now iconic Selfridges building.

Whilst the First Born Son was asleep and the Significant Other was stuck in a queue I thought I would stick my nose into Vision Express and get them to tweak my glasses which had developed a small but annoying twist in the frame.

This proved to be my mistake. Going into a shop as vehemently incompetent as Vision Express that is.

I sat down and the assistant gleefully took my glasses to be adjusted in the “laboratory” (without I might add indicating in any way at all that there was any risk associated with untrained apes jumping up and down on my glasses in a laughable attempt at “adjustment”)

So; I am sitting there in a hideous daze of uncorrected short-sightedness, counting my one and only blessing – that First Born Son is blissfully asleep and unware of the horror about to unfold. So; the assistant returns with the glasses in two parts. Seems that the apes had tried to just twist them violently. Now, even I as an untrained, non-expert diletante knows when to stop twisting the glasses so that they do not break!

And at this point you’d have thought wouldn’t you that there would be some hint of an apology, some indication of remorse, but no! – in a branch staffed entirely by people below the age of 30 no one dared to admit that they had done anything wrong! No indication that taking my property and damaging it beyond use was in any way at all a bad thing!

The assistant tells me that they will of course replace the glasses; fair play on that point and credit where credit is due. (this apart from the fact that I would have caused utter unadulterated mayhem to that branch if they had not done so….) and then goes on to tell me – with a straight face – that due to the queues I would have to wait an hour and a half until I could see an optician to get my eyes checked so they could work out my prescription and make up a new pair of glasses.

This nearly caused me to go postal on the spot – I mean, they are the ones that broke my property and would stop me driving home that day… so how the hell was I supposed to get my Son home to feed him when he awoke? I proceeded to apprise them of these facts; in detail and at length, and they managed to get me in to see an optician straight away.

Then they told me to sit and wait for an hour and the glasses would be made up in their lab. So I did.

At the end of the hour I was desperate to use the gentlemen’s facilities and asked if I could use theirs: the nearest public one was halfway up a flight of stairs and therefore inaccessible to me with the baby in the pushchair. They refused, saying they were not for customer use. Fair enough I reply; give me my glasses and I will leave and find some others somewhere. The minion duly leaves to find out where they were.

Nothing.

An hour and ten minutes later I ask again where they are. Again nothing.

An hour and twenty minutes later – and just about ready to piss in their pot plants – I ask again.
Some underage idiot starts to soft-soap me “please be patient; I will go and check now” etc, etc (but again – no apology) – and he fails to move and do ANYTHING – just stands there mouthing meaningless platitudes. I have to cut across him and say “SHUT UP AND JUST GO AND GET MY PROPERTY THAT YOUR COMPANY HAS BROKEN! RIGHT NOW!!“

So he did; FINALLY. I left there with such a bad taste in my mouth it is unbelievable. Not one person got it into their head that I might be annoyed that they had destroyed my property and did NOT APPRECIATE being forced to sit in their shop for 100 minutes of my Saturday. They could not see that even being asked to wait in the queue was not my idea as it was not my fault I was there! And not one of them could conceive of the fact that to just apologise to me – EVEN ONCE – would calm my temper down massively. Not one person owned the problem; no manager came out to say sorry; and HOW THE HELL DOES A SO CALLED PROFESSIONAL OPTICIANS BREAK THE GLASSES WHEN TRYING TO FIX THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

Avoid these idiots at all costs.

I managed to convince my dayjob to send me to an emarketing masterclass run by e-consultancy in London, and the day was almost entirely as I expected it; excellent insights into making your online marketing more effective from a very good emarketing consultancy.

One highlight for me was to meet Bryan Eisenberg whose blog and website I have read for many years and whose book I already own. I emailed the organisers in advance and asked them if he would have copies of his new book – “Waiting for your cat to bark; persuading customers when they ignore marketing” – Waiting for your cat to bark; persuading customers when they ignore marketing“.

Then on the day itself I am sitting up front making sure that my company get’s their monies worth and I recognise Bryan from his book photo. When the break arrives, I sidle up to him, mumble the usual inanities that you do when you meet an author whose work you like and asked if I could buy the book. He just said “I don’t really have enough to sell – but I bought a copy over for you; here it is.” He wouldn’t take my money saying that because I was the only person to have emailed in advance and talked to him about his book thaen I deserved a review copy.

So – it’s obvious that this blokes effectiveness at online marketing also extends into the real world and he knows exactly how to connect with people. I sure as hell ain’t gonna forget his thoughtfulness and I am gonna do my best to get the most senior marketing decision maker in my organisation to read his book. (and if at all humanly possible to engage his organisation; how’s that for a return on investment!?)

Now all I have to do after that is to convince them to give me the resources to implement the ideas expounded in his book – but that’s another day, another battle!

It was my birthday the other week (and no – I am not going to tell you how old I was – suffice to say I am “old enough to know better but young enough to do it again”)

I had created the usual list of stuff I would like to get, and on there was an old, old friend: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

This looked just stunning: EVERY single Calvin and Hobbes strip ever printed, on high quality paper, with extra goodies from Mr Bill Watterson himself.

Anyway; the day arrived and I am handed a HUGE present by the Other Half. And then (and this is the priceless part) as I start to unwrap it I refer to it to First Born Son as “loot”! – and for anyone who has never read Calvin and Hobbes (shame on you by the way!) – this is what Calvin himself in the comics also refers to presents as!

Then I get the paper off it and see what it is, and I am not ashamed to say that I was moved to tears. A huge part of it was the profound thoughtfulness of the Other Half at getting me such a great present – and the other part of it is the UTTER unmitigated bellowing-out-loud-delight of owning this thing.

Calvin and Hobbes has through the years given me more unadulterated pleasure than almost anything else. Ever. Amongst so called cartoons it is peerless; it is an eternal delight to read – there are layers upon layers of apt meaning – and it is funny as hell too. The warmth and humanity shines from the pages; the authors deep understanding of the foibles and imperfections of the human condition show through every panel….

… and all of this is acheived in a comic strip!

I cannot begin to tell you how good this comic is; I can only urge you to buy it at your earliest convenience.

And if Mr Bill Watterson ever happens to read this, all I can say is thank you for Calvin and Hobbes… were financial recompense required at an equal rate for enjoyment engendered then I would be in debt to you for the rest of my life…

… and I would not begrudge a penny.

Why the hell would you ever buy anything disposable anyway?! Such things are always cheap and shoddy by their very nature, but above all they are the most anti-ecological thing you could ever do.

Think about it; who pays for the cost of disposing of the item? – you do ofcourse! This means that the manufacturer has shifted the cost of getting rid of their junk from their pocket to yours.

In my opinion all disposable items should incur a tax rate of 100% – but only if that money was ploughed back into the environment. At the very least you should stop buying disposable stuff and pay that little bit extra for an item that will last a lot longer – and then make sure at the end of it’s life you recycle it!

As I have mentioned before, I run the official Bryan Talbot fanpage; and I have done so for over ten years and kept it updated once every two weeks through that entire time.

This is a massive labour of love for little or no money and people often ask me why the hell I do it. Then I sat down and worked with Bryan for 18 months of evenings and weekends and created with him the Heart of Empire CD-Rom; from which I estimate to have made less than £1.00 per hour of my time that I spent on it.

Again; why the hell do I do this?!

Well, it’s simply really; Bryan’s comics – and specifically the Adventures of Luther Arkwright – changed the way I look at the world – and only the very best literature can do that. Reading them was an utterly moving experience and it was almost 5 years before I ever met anyone else in person who had read them! So I took it upon myself to spread the word and tell as many people as possible about them….

At the same time I was working as a software trainer, training people on stuff like Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark – and it being 1995 the web was just breaking and the first graphical website editors were coming out. I learned the software to be able to teach it and I know from personal experience that the only real way to learn something is to do some real work in it…. so I cast around for a subject and realised that the only thing I cared enough about to update regularly forever was Bryan’s work…. I think that even at that stage I knew that if you started a site then you should just keep it going forever; or else retire it and delete it.

Hence the Bryan Talbot fanpage was born – and I got to meet my personal hero!

Today after much work and care and attention I finally completed a really long held dream and made live the webcomic of the Adventures of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot.

To say that this comic changed my life is an understatement… first of all when I was thinking of getting into web design I cast around for a subject that I cared enough about to update a site every two weeks without fail – and the only think I could come up with was the works of Bryan Talbot… so I started work on the official Bryan Talbot fanpage, and I have not stopped work on it over the ten years since then. All I ever learned from making a website usable and compelling I learned on that site, so in some ways it is responsible for my entire career and every penny I have earned since that date.

However, that is the superficial level – the level that everyone else can see….

On the deeper level it affected me profoundly – it rearranged my mental landscape and changed the lens through which I look at the world. Incidentally it also probably ruined almost every other comic, because none of them could ever quite live up to the emotional depths and heights of that novel in graphic format – that masterpiece that is the Adventures of Luther Arkwright. It showed me the unspeakably poignant and soaring crescendos possible in the comics form and touched me on a deep and personal level. It took me to places I did not know existed and showed me things about the human condition that were shocking but true.

And all this from a comic! Say it loud and say it proud – the most compelling work of art – of literature I have ever seen in my entire life is a comic!

After all this how could I not create a website publicising the work and it’s author with the stated aim of telling more people about it!

And then, as a result of working on the website I got to meet my own hero – the man who had created this work that affected me so deeply.. the one person on this planet (perhaps alongside Nelson Mandela, and contending only with Bill Watterson and Freddy Mercury) who I would be truly and utterly impressed by … and then he goes and makes me a mate! – not by any cunning design, but by his genuine human warmth and decency. How amazing is that?! – the person I hero worshipped like a star struck schoolgirl becomes a mate?! YES!!

And then – after many years another fan re-scans the Adventures of Luther Arkwright, and it is finally at a level that Bryan is happy to publish as a webcomic.. and I have another mate who can do all of the programming – and then suddenly there it is; the Adventures of Luther Arkwright is online as a webcomic. The degree of satisfaction that this is online is just overwhelming… and that people are paying money to read it is just stunning… (only five quid by the way!) – and finally that I am able to bung the comic maestro Bryan Talbot honest cash for his work is just amazing. This is just great you know?! It really don’t get much better!!

As I said in a previous post, wouldn’t you feel safer in an airship than in a plane in these days of terrorist wankers trying to cause maximum fatalities?

For a start an airship does not rely on an utterly smooth, unpunctured fuselage for structural stability. A plane will crash if there is the slightest tear in it’s skin – or god forbid – there is an actual hole in the fuselage.

An airship though?! A bomb might kill people in the immediate vicinity – but it would not mean the automatic death of everyone on board – and once these people cannot achieve their spectaculars they do not bother.

The trouble is that all it will take is some investment and forethought as these airships don’t yet exist. Personally I would far rather travel from city centre to city centre at a leisurely 120 mph or so at about 2000 feet up; secure in the knowledge that I was not a target for terrorists and that if we crashed I would have half an hour to finish my meal and get ready to step off the airship in a field instead of at the airport!!

Nuclear power generation in the UK will not only take a long time (a minimum of 10 years to come online – which could be too late…) – but it is also HUGELY expensive.

And this is without taking into account the costs of disposing of the waste – which are usually ignored and taken care of by the tax payer…

So why not spend the price of one new nuclear power station on generating renewable energy?

And since distributed microgeneration usually has a large start up cost why not use the cash for interest free loans to householders to install solar, wind and ground power schemes?

These could all be online in a very short timeframe and would have instant benefit. And the single biggest barrier to people generating their own power would be removed.