Money! (It's a gas)

After almost exactly two years, I'm finally getting to the bottom of the eBay pile. Maybe I'm overstating it slightly in the title. There has been money, of that there is no question, but for the most part it's not been a gas. Much of it has been mindless tedium; there's been some rumpling disappointments (that's like a crushing disappointment but with lighter weights) mostly in the areas of postage - either miscalculating the cost of it or fragile things getting broken in transit - but also more general stuff like items not selling for what I thought they were worth, and some buyers being worse than moronic; some dogged determination (it took 22 attempts - almost a year - to sell that damned walker for instance); but there have been some highlights too, some of them even approaching exciting.

I could bore on for hours (or pages, since I'm writing) but to avoid putting you to sleep I'll choose two examples from each side of the eBay boxing match*. In the red (for excitement) corner, the highlights include:

The Biscuit Tin

When my Mum died in 2011 we spent well over half a year emptying her house ready for sale. We threw away loads of stuff, naturally, but I'd already had six months' examples of what would sell on eBay (ANYTHING), so things that I might previously have binned I decided were worth "having a go" with on eBay. Into this category fell the old biscuit tins that had lain gathering dust in the outhouse since my Dad died in 1993. He kept nails and screws in them, and I don't think my Mum ever went near a nail or a screw in her life. She certainly wasn't going to start after he'd gone. I thought there was a chance they might be collectable, so I took a photo of all of them - there were 5 - and put them up as a job lot for £7.50.

The next day I woke up to a message from someone requesting additional pics of one of the tins - a Huntley & Palmers one with a motif of common birds. In the original photo you could only see the lid. My initial reaction (that it was a bloody nuisance) gave way to a feeling that I ought to play along, so I posted pics of the other four sides. My interested party turned out to be a French collector of British biscuit tins:
"In France it is very hard to find good tins. British tins are so beautiful and elaborate."

After exchanging a couple of messages, the lady made me an offer:
"We are interested only in the HP tin (we like tins with birds) and wondered if you might be prepared to accept an offer of 85£ for it plus postage."

I had to read it twice. Eighty-five quid?? For one tin??? Was she serious? Did she mean Euros? No, she was serious and she was bidding in Sterling. Crikey. Later (once the tin arrived safely in France) she was kind enough to send me a photo of it nestling in her collection. It had been spruced up, polished and burnished, and sat proudly on one of the glass shelves that line her apartment (almost certainly a bijou apartment, being French and all). I got £25 for the other four tins in the end too.

The Buffalo Nickel

Word was, this is a very collectable coin. Not being a numismatist I had no idea, but a quick Google suggested it could be worth anything from $50 to $150 (most if not all the sales being in the US). I stuck it on for £14.95 - have you ever tried to take a photograph of a small coin so that a buyer can get an appreciation of the condition? - and watched excitedly as a bidding war started that saw it sell eventually for over £100. I sold an Indian Head penny the same week. Between them these two coins fetched £150. As always with these things, I end up wishing I'd had a few more!

Contrasting with the above examples, in the blue (for disappointment) corner, we have:

The Very First Thing I Sold. 

An early lesson in the black art of setting your starting price. The 14" portable TV with built in VCR that provided the majority of my entertainment in the apocalyptic days post-separation and, later, was all Nikki & I had room for in our first flat. Listed (before I'd learned to wait for Zero Listing Fee weekends) for 99p and sold to the only person who showed any interest for... 99p. So that's 89p after eBay took their cut.

The Ceramic Plaque 

I'd bought this as a Christmas present for my parents during their heraldic phase (a brief period following our holiday discovery that the Beresford family have a crest, and a coat of arms) and it hung on the living room wall for over 40 years. I never really did know whether they liked it or whether it was tolerated because it was a present. One of those things you hardly even notice is there after a while.

It sold for £46.50, which I was pleased with. I was less pleased that having survived 40 years with the Beresfords, less than 4 days in the company of Royal Mail was enough to break it into two pieces, requiring a full refund and a total failure of their "compensation" scheme (yes, I did make a claim and yes, it was denied). I think the guy who bought it was even more disappointed than I - it was the third one he'd had arrive broken.


So there you have it. I'm glad I've done it, but I'm glad it's almost over. The crates are all gone (well, they've reached the bottom of the stairs. They're on their way to being gone) and I took a load of cardboard boxes and other packaging material to the tip this weekend, so the study is returning to a semblance of order. By the time I've sold these last half dozen items we'll have made almost five grand in those two years (although "made" is another overstatement - you can hardly count it as profit when you sell, for instance, three grand's worth of bedroom furniture for 500 quid), which has bought us some nice new furniture for the revamped living room and allowed me to be unusually generous when sponsoring mad friends who walk, run, bike, or grow moustaches for charity.

*See what I did there? Boxing match. Things get posted in boxes. Eh? Eh? Sometimes I even make myself laugh.

Barring the code

I bought some printer ink yesterday. I know - rock and roll, eh? I had an urgent letter to print. Naturally the printer, which had been showing "zero ink" (a friendly black cross in an empty cylinder) for weeks, chose that particular day to start printing things as if intended for the spirit world (i.e. ghostly).

Nowhere nearby sells Lexmark cartridges, so I planned to drop by the PC World in Stockport on my way to pick Nikki up from work. During the journey I remembered that the evil Excel parking shysters had taken over at the Peel Centre (which used to be free for parking of less than an hour), and I'd come out without any coinage. Maybe I should risk dropping in at Staples, even though for the last couple of years they've never stocked the particular black ink cartridge I need?

Staples didn't have the particular black ink cartridge I need.

Off to Peel then. Risk another few months of illegal threats from Excel that they'll take me to court for the heinous crime of depriving them of their £1 for five minutes' parking, or pop along the road and pretend to be a customer of Dunelm Mill? The latter was the better option on this particular occasion, requiring a couple of minutes' extra walking in each direction. With the previous detour to Staples I was already running late and on arrival I discovered that this particular branch of PC World has had a complete refurb since my last visit and is now more of a Curry's - majoring in domestic appliances rather than computer frippery and having moved the ink to a completely different part of the shop. By the time I found it I was definitely late. I grabbed a couple of cartridge packets and headed for the till, but was beaten to it by a gentleman who would easily qualify for an ESOL course, with his undecipherable query about why he couldn't pay with the credit card he repeatedly waved under the nose of the till guy.

Was it my hopping from foot to foot, or my thunderous countenance that gave the till guy the clue I was in a hurry? Who can tell, but full marks to him for calling over an interpreter another operative to deal with ESOL so that he could attend to me. Only for some reason he found it impossible to scan my items.

Yes, well done Lexmark! A masterpiece of packaging design. Your plastic blister is smooth on five of its six surfaces, but inexplicably ridged on the side beneath which the ink cartridge packet has its bar code. The ridges diffuse, refract and reflect the scanner's laser light, rendering it completely incapable of actually reading the code. Till guy had to type it in. More delay.

He didn't spot that I had two of the same item either. So rather than entering "2x" of "this", we had to go through the rigmarole again: scan; fail; retry; fail; examine packet; retry with scanner at a different angle; fail; type the code in again.

I wasn't late, but it was close.

The letter didn't need printing in the end.

The crux of the matter

Here we are at a nexus...

Literally. A Nexus 7. Following the rapid and unexpected demise* of my iPad on Tuesday last, I was faced with a dilemma. Stand and fight (aka get it mended) or run (to Android, or away from Apple).

A friend of mine has previously been heard to say "I haven't picked up my iPad since I got the Nexus." Well… I've now had mine for almost a week. Long enough to get over both my initial flush of enthusiasm and the almost immediate early disappointment at the reality of its limitations.

There's no doubt that once you're used to the differences, the Nexus is a lovely device. With my limited experience with this month's book club book, I'd have to say the reading experience is better. The Kindle app is identical on Android, but the Nexus is more book-sized, easier to hold, and altogether more comfortable. And it has auto-brightness, so you don't need to keep adjusting it to read in bed vs daylight. It's also (hardly surprising) beautifully integrated with Google. Google Now and Google Play, to name only two, are really cool.

Much of the other stuff that I did regularly on the iPad is pretty similar. With dedicated apps for sites like eBay and Facebook - their image is *almost* identical. The few games I play (Sudoku, Spider Solitaire) are available on both platforms (same app in each case) and perform pretty much the same if they're not hampered by the smaller screen size. For sudoku, particularly, the smaller screen isn't really an issue and I'm even beginning to get used to the small cards on Spider, although it IS easier to play on the iPad. And I'm loving the Android 8-ball pool game that lets you play in real time against a real human opponent selected from those who happen to be online at the same time. That was quite a find.

The major drawback I've found is with browsing. Much of the time, Chrome on the Nexus delivers you to the "mobile" version of a website owing to the smaller form factor. I've always utterly hated this image and find it next to unusable in the majority of cases (especially Facebook, eBay, Amazon, searching, etc). The iPad gives a more "regular" browsing image, much more acceptable for me. I discovered today (thanks Annie!) that there's a setting to force Chrome to serve up the desktop image of a website rather than the mobile version, so I'll be trying this out later.

The only other slight niggle is with the Metro. I got into the habit of reading the daily Metro via the iPad app rather than the printed version, and it is a REALLY good app. It exists for Android, but has a number of limitations including being stuck in portrait format, and displaying one article per page. So LOTS of scrolling on the Nexus. iPad better. I hope the developers will sort out the portrait/landscape issue soon. I'm sure it would be more readable/usable the other way round. But for now, not so good.

So in summary, I'm currently leaning towards keeping both devices. Horses for courses. If I'm reading, or out and about, the Nexus is the stronger candidate. If I'm browsing, at home, or playing games with fiddly pieces, the iPad wins out. I don't think I want to adopt my mate John's "Nexus for everything" approach, especially if I can wangle a cheap fix for the iPad (thanks AGAIN Annie! :o))

Yodelling would have been more productive

"Please call me to arrange redelivery of your parcel" read the message on the little green card I found on my return home yesterday. It was from Yodel. Never heard of them, but a quick Google reveals it's the new name for Home Delivery Network. Sod's law, really. I was only out of the house for an hour. I've been in all week.

I called the number as soon as they opened this morning. 8am. It went to voicemail.

Hello. This is the Yodel service centre at Ashton.

Well, let me stop you right there. Because surely to justify the title "service centre" you have to, you know, provide some service. And I've been calling that number all day and getting no reply, so I ain't seen much service to speak of.

All our operatives are busy dealing with other customers.

Maybe it's just because I've dialled the number over 100 times today, that I have a vision of "operatives" being just one overworked postal worker rushing between the office and the storage depot. The alternative vision jostling for ascendency in my mind's eye was of a depot full of operatives dressed in festive costume sitting around sipping sherry and eating mince pies, telling each other to "let it ring - it's Christmas!"

But if you leave a message and a contact number we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Well, no you won't actually, because immediately after the conclusion of your message that nice lady from BT comes on to say

This mailbox is full. Please try later.

And close the call. The only option is to ring again. Which I did. Over and over.

Now I know what you're thinking. Maybe there was no-one there. But while the majority of calls went to voicemail after 30 seconds, just occasionally one would be diverted immediately, suggesting that someone was on the phone at that very minute. During the morning, such an event would spur me on to dial a few more times, thinking if there was someone at the desk right then, I stood more chance of getting through. In this case, more chance was equivalent to two or three times nothing. Still nothing.

While I ate lunch, I dialled the number constantly for over half an hour with no luck. Then, I got the engaged tone. Back came the nice BT lady to advise me (in case I didn't recognise the engaged tone which, you know, hasn't changed for at least fifty years):

The number you have dialled is busy. To use ring back, key 5 now.

Yes! Ring back! Great idea. I keyed 5.

Ring back is not available on this number.

Well why did you offer it to me then you utter arse?

In sheer frustration I Googled "yodel couriers". I had typed only half of "couriers" when the second suggestion in the list changed to "yodel couriers complaints". Oh dear - that doesn't look good. I followed the first link, to a review site.

First time I've ever known a company to have an average of 1 star (yes, out of 5) after 1203 reviews. That's a pretty impressive indictment. I'm surprised any online retailer still uses them.

My package turned up around 3pm. I never did get through to the "service" centre.

"Ah, Yodel!" I cried as the courier handed over his ruggedised tablet for me to sign. "I've been trying to call your depot all day."

He looked sheepish.

"Wasting your time there, mate."

Tell me about it.

How not to invest £6000

So*, we were at my Mum's** the other weekend and I decided to tackle the stair lift.

This'll be the stair lift she had installed in 2007, used approximately three times and then decided she'd move a bed downstairs and not bother going up there at all. We came across the bill for it shortly after she moved into the care home. £6000. I researched the company that installed it, hoping that they'd have a scheme for buying them back. Yep, you guessed it. A flock of pigs just flew past.

Worse than expected, not only did the company no longer exist, they'd been the subject of a BBC Watchdog investigation into the shady practice of selling stair lifts for way more than they were worth to vulnerable elderly people, often with dementia. Disgusting. As my Nan used to say: "their hands should drop off." Another brief stint of Internet research suggested she'd been overcharged roughly double what it should have been.

Back in June I was reluctant to write off such a massive amount of money. Surely someone could make use of what was effectively a brand new machine? OK four years old, but hardly used at all and still in perfect condition. Three mobility companies were advertising in the local paper. Two of them didn't return my calls, one said they were only interested if it was a straight staircase. Well, it isn't.

It turns right 180° at the bottom, and again 90° at the second kite wind further up. I found an Internet stair lift trading site, snappily titled stair lift trader dot com, and posted this photo there. I received two phishing replies within a couple of weeks, then nothing.

There was a brief flurry of excitement in September when someone telephoned to ask about the stair lift, but it was just one turn too short. The guy's upper landing was another three stairs and a final right turn away from Mum's, so no go.

By the time the end of November was upon us, I'd pretty much resigned myself to having to write-off the majority of the cost of this damned device. But getting rid of it was another conundrum altogether. Professionals would charge for removal which was like throwing good money after bad. I decided to do it myself, so this particular weekend we arrived in Nottingham armed with a set of Allen keys, an adjustable wrench, Mole wrench and anything else I could think of that might help get it apart.

I'll spare you the details. It took me about six hours to get it down, starting on Friday afternoon and finishing on Saturday morning. The tricky bits turned out to be the "hidden" Allen bolt that held the rail sections together (one more bolt that the other 5 that had visible heads), and working out how the heck the seat/battery pack/motor/gear assembly was connected to the rail. But eventually it was a pile of (very heavy) bits. Nikki wondered whether there was a local scrap merchant who might be interested. At least we'd make SOME money back. Good idea! One Google search, one phone call and one short drive later and we were unloading the bits into a skip.

Skip was duly weighed, and the scrap man handed over our dosh. 102kgs of mild steel at £100 a tonne: the princely sum of £10.20.

*All the best posts, and replies to questions, begin with "So" these days. Just ask the Today programme. They've debated the phenomenon several times already. Usually followed by a package in which the interviewee begins all his or her replies with "So." So I'm only keeping abreast of the trend, before you start. What's that? You weren't going to start. I'm sorry. It must be the way you're sitting.

**Strictly speaking it's not my Mum's any more, of course. It's mine. But it still feels disrespectful to even think of it that way, so I think it'll be "my Mum's" for a while yet. Probably until it's sold and we don't have to refer to it at all.

Down tools. Oh... they weren't up.

My inner planner (Yes, I do have one. Yes, he's well buried) has sat slightly on the irritated side of the fence throughout this kitchen refurbishment business. My estimates for how long things should take, and when (and in what order) they should happen, suggested an optimum elapsed time of between 6 and 7 weeks for the whole job.

This perfect, shiny, back-to-back plan was thrown off kilter as soon as we left the blocks when the builder offered July 9th as a date when he could come and alter the chimney breast. So effectively, we've been forced to live out of the dining room for a month longer than *absolutely necessary*. In an ideal world. But, as is often brought home to us, it's not an ideal world, and most of the tradespeople who have come and gone during the works have commented that the elapsed time we ARE achieving is still pretty good. All things considered.

But, you know, when "living out of the dining room" means this:

...and this...

Then it all gets a bit old after a few weeks. Still, it's not all bad. At least we still had a kitchen sink until the start of this week. The start of a week that had been even more carefully planned than usual so that it dovetailed perfectly with the start of actual kitchen fitting on Monday, thus keeping to an absolute minimum the time when regular living is even more of an obstacle course.

Plans, as we've proved over and over again with this project, can change with a single phone call.

In this case, the phone call from the kitchen unit makers, to say they were very (very) sorry, but they wouldn't be able to deliver the units for fitting on Monday. One of their main joiners had broken his leg in a motorbike accident and they'd tried everything but they just couldn't honour the date. We've been pushed back a week. The knowledge that this is much more of a disruption for the Actual Kitchen Guy, since he now has to twiddle his thumbs for a week and then explain to all the customers he has booked in that their fitting will be delayed a week too, is no consolation. It doesn't make us feel better to know that other people are affected too.

No, there's nothing to be done apart from suck it up, and live out of the understairs cloakroom for another week. So you'll understand why, having been slightly on the irritated side of the fence, I'm now well into the middle of the irritated garden.

Nice horsey

When I was a young lad - we're talking pre-teen (yes, my memory really is that good) - Saturdays could occasionally be really boring. If the boredom reached #8 or #9 on the scale, I might put the TV on and watch the afternoon sport, which in those days inevitably consisted mostly of horse racing.

It wasn't long before I discovered a talent for picking a winner, just by going on the name that appealed to me most. I can almost hear the experienced race-goers groaning at that, but this was years before I discovered that's a typical noob approach to racing and utterly frowned on by the cognoscenti.

Fast forward to Easter Sunday 2011 and here we are waiting for the turkey to cook and the guests to arrive, with one of Neil's favourite TV programmes hammering away in the corner: horse racing. And guess what, following immediately on the heels of my first win (I've already forgotten the name, but it was significant enough for me to pick it) comes Forever Awesome - chosen purely on the basis that its name is very similar to Forever Autumn, one of my favourite karaoke tracks of all time - and it's romping home by about five lengths.

So I've still not lost it. You can be 100% certain that if I were ever to start putting money on these nags, my gift would disappear as mysteriously as it came.

How's your geography?

Sorry that the scoring bot was apparently out of action after I played this, so there's "no score" to beat, but I thought it was worth posting anyway as the game itself is a bit of fun. I had two goes, and my highest score was something a bit over 20,000.

First round you're given a choice of blobs as the target city. Second round you only get the countries. Third round you're left alone with just the landmass to play with.

How can you do?

Random last-minute jobs

Most of the time, procrastination is my middle name. Just occasionally though, those little niggly jobs that I usually put off forever have to be done RIGHT NOW. Today was a day for jobs like that.

1. The keyhole cover.
After decorating the hall, I replaced the brass keyhole cover on the front door. Trouble is, I didn't get it *quite* right. I reckon it was somewhere around 5° off the vertical. Not much, and not enough to make it impossible to lock/unlock the door (or I'd have had to fix it right then), but just enough to require a bit of key jiggling and make opening the door harder than it should be. Reason for procrastination? Initially, annoyance at myself for getting it wrong in the first place. Subsequently, not being arsed.

I took it off and spun it those 5°.

2. The shower light.
Our bathroom has 10 spots. Eight covering the main area of the room, on one switch. Two above the shower cubicle, operated off a separate switch. One of those two blew a few weeks ago. Reason for procrastination? In the 4 years since the bathroom was reconstructed, I've not had to replace one of these bulbs, so I don't know the type and I've been constantly forgetting to (a) bring the stepladder upstairs and (b) pull one of the bulbs on a shopping day so we can be sure of having spares.

I pulled a bulb from the eight and swapped it with the blown dude, checked our extensive collection of random spares, found a match and replaced it.

Umm... that's it. Fish will need a 50% water change on Wednesday which will last them until we get back, at which point I'll do another 50% change. But other than that we're all set.

The rest of the morning was taken up with lawn mowing and a spot of digging, leaving the afternoon free to watch Glorious 39 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Handkerchief. I'd not seen Glorious 39 before. Definitely one for the eBay pile - we won't be wanting to watch it a second time!

Book Swap

Chorlton’s "Big Green Festival" today and the book club were invited to man a book swap stall again. I did this once before, at our first book swap back in 2007, but hadn't been involved the last couple of times. This year the previous organisers of the book swap table weren't available, but this coincided with us having rather a lot of books we wanted to get rid of, so I volunteered. I turned up this morning with one plastic crate full and another containing half a dozen hardbacks.

The festival proper opened from 11am to 6pm, but that's a long time to be stood behind a table full of books smiling politely while passersby sift through the multiple copies of book club cast-offs looking for a good read. I never intended to stay for the whole afternoon, but I'd assumed - since several other book club members had volunteered to help man the stall - that I wouldn't be the "last man standing" and could hand over to someone else. This cunning plan also hid the main reason for leaving early: not to be left with piles of books to look after.

We may have only done four of these, but that's enough experience to know that we always end up with way more books than we start with, and I was under strict instructions not to bring the remainder back home. But at 4pm, having been left on my own since my only two helpers had to leave around 1.30, I had no option but to pack the books back into my plastic crates (which were now BOTH full to the point of books falling off the top) and start to carry them to the gate.

In between carrying off one box and returning for the second some generous individual had come along and dumped FIVE carrier bags full of books on the table. My reaction by that stage was "you have got to be joking." Less than two hours before the event closed? I left them there.

Even so, returning home with two full crates is not the most popular move I've ever made :-/

Warble

It's been a long time since I've sung karaoke, so when I heard that Chorlton Players had organised a karaoke fundraiser, I was among the first to sign up, and the first (apart from DJ Annie, and Simon who was playing the part of doorman for the night) to arrive.

I was conditioned from a very early age to turn up right at the start of events like this. My parents were always the first to arrive at (and usually the last to leave from) any parties, weddings, or family gatherings to which we were invited, so naturally I grew up thinking this was the way it was done. I don't recall any pithy phrase of my mother's that accompanied these early arrivals, so this story won't feature in "shit my Mum says"; it just was. As I  got older, I soon realised I was in a minority in this respect, and sure enough with a posted start time of 7pm it was after 8 when the first of the "real audience" turned up, by which time I was champing at the bit to get going with the song I'd had cued up almost since I arrived.

A traditional starter for me - Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street - an easy melody to get the pipes warmed up. As I progressed during the course of the evening through a series of my most favourite karaoke staples, I realised just how long it had been since I sang any of these in public, and how easy it is to get out of practice with the nuanced phrasing of songs like Vincent, Desperado, and Englishman in New York.

Still, you know, it's karaoke not the Royal Opera House, so who cares? We all had a lot of fun and some good choons got sung. Not sure it was much of a success as a fund raiser - I think they needed 30 people to break even and I counted 29 at the busiest point - but if *almost* 30 people can have such a good time for a whole night and not actively lose money, it can't be that bad.

I Write Like...

Apparently...

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

but there again, earlier in the same novel,

I write like
William Shakespeare

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

and later in that same chapter,

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

So all in all I reckon either (a) I'm unwittingly suffering from multiple personality disorder, (b) I haven't quite settled into "my voice" yet, or (c) I Write Like is just another one of those crappy Facebook apps that doesn't know wtf it's talking about.

Earlier this month

I lost a spreadsheet today.

I've been keeping track of the artists selected to Storm the Charts at the end of this month and having had an Excel blitz at the end of last week it had dropped off my MRU list. No problem obviously, I'll just open up the folder where I keep all my spreadsheets...

Oh.

Ah! Must've saved it in my "reference" folder.

Um...

OK, how about the folder where I keep everything to do with StC (not to mention the Weird & Wonderful files)?

Nope.

OK, well there's still nowt to worry about (right?) because I've got the good ol' Windows Search facility. Now I *know* I edited this file last week to add the four artists that were chosen last Sunday, so what kind of date filter do I need? Ah yes, here's a handy-dandy one called "files that were edited earlier this month" and I *know* it'll be on my data drive somewhere, so I'll just search the whole damn drive for anything that's been edited "earlier this month."

Er... Shit. Where is it? Not there, apparently. Which is mad, because I know it's there. It was there last week. Everything else is there. Why isn't this there? It has to be there.

So hang on, cos I haven't used Windows Search ON WINDOWS 7 before. And it looks like there's this cool date widget that I can drag across and select "anything that's changed between June 1 and June 14"

Holy Crap!! That's about ten times more files than my first search found! And... yes! There's my spreadsheet! (breathe small sigh of relief). Last edited on... Monday morning.

OK I have to ask. In what dark festering corner of the entire universe is "earlier this month" NOT THE SAME THING as "between June 1 and June 14" ???

Google and Pac-Man

Google's "doodles" - the changes to their logo they make every so often to celebrate some national or international event, holiday, or hot news topic - have quickly become legendary. In fact one of the only complaints I have with the iGoogle home page is that we never see any indication that there's a new doodle to enjoy.

Last weekend, two legends collided. It was the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, widely regarded as "the game that started it all" (even though, being first released in 1980, it trailed Space Invaders by two years), and in celebration Google installed its first fully interactive doodle - a working copy of Pac-Man with the maze spelling out "Google" and whose gameplay faithfully reproduced the original, including ghost behaviours, fruits, and even the original bug that corrupts the screen on the 256th level.

Media coverage suggests that the game didn't start playing unless you pressed the Insert Coin button (which temporarily replaced the usual "I'm Feeling Lucky"), but this certainly wasn't true for me. Maybe it's different on Chrome, but the game started right up after a short delay and I reached instinctively for the arrow keys (I was a huge Pac-Man fan) and began playing immediately. I reached the fifth level, which I was pretty pleased about given that I haven't played for, like, 20 years. Some things never leave you.

But celebrating Pac-Man's 30th birthday, and Google's inventiveness and sense of fun, is only part of the reason for this post. And it's the "sense of fun" angle that I'd like to concentrate on first, because to me that's what it was all about. It was a weekend, Google's doodles are a fine tradition that always raise a smile in our house, and this particular doodle gave Google's users the chance - briefly - to relive a much-loved time in their youth when it was OK to while away a few hours chasing an animated cartoon mouth around a maze.

So it was with a dawning sense of OMG that I read some of the 571 comments posted on the news article I found on the subject. Many of them mirrored my own reaction ("wow" "cool" "brings back memories" etc) but fully half of them were complaints about the noise, about the intrusion into their browser space, about the waste of time and money, and any other possible thing you could think of to complain about and even some that would never occur to most people I know. Incredible.

These comments drew stinging reactions from the supporters of Google's efforts, as you'd expect, with people pointing out variously that Google (and all its services) is free, that doodles are only ever up for a day (or two at most), that all computers are equipped with a "mute" function, and that in the end if they weren't happy, why didn't these people just close their browsers or navigate to another page? But all of that common sense couldn't hide the fact that there are vast numbers of people out there who have utterly lost their sense of humour, of fun, and of celebration. And what's worse, they're not even prepared to sit quietly while those of us who haven't lost those things get on with it.

It gets worse.

Someone who must recently have had a humourectomy has now calculated the world-wide LOSS OF PRODUCTIVITY that the Pac-Man doodle caused. Yep. Five million man hours, apparently, giving a total monetary value - based on a low-to-average U.S. salary - of $120 million. A figure arrived at using some broadly-drawn assumptions on the amount of time usually spent on the Google home page versus the amount of time spent there when the Pac-Man doodle was active.

Oh dear. Oh woe is me. For a few extra seconds, all over the world, people weren't making money. Strike us all down with a bolt of lightning. Good grief. One of the saddest aspects of "this modern world" which has crept up on us during those thirty years since Pac-Man arrived, is that too many people have forgotten there is more to life than making money. Lift your heads up from those desks, people. Take your noses from the grindstone for a few precious minutes and have some fun ffs.

Peachy

The Red Pearl cocktail from our recent Celebrity Night proved very popular with the family so I deployed the cocktail shaker again on Saturday night to use up the left over ingredients - peach vodka (not the "proper" kind according to the recipe but a good compromise as it turned out I couldn't find any red pomegranate vodka over here), peach liqueur, cranberry juice and pineapple juice, topped with a splash of champagne.

The result was slightly heavy on the champagne (we had an entire bottle left over) but still very tasty.

Even better, we took a break from gardening on Sunday afternoon to enjoy a glass of peach-flavoured iced tea that Nikki had knocked up with the short measure of peach liqueur left over from cocktail making. This was only a small glimpse of the life we'd *like* to lead in the garden - one of total indolence and relaxation - which is still some years of undergrowth-hacking, deck-building, and shrub-planting in the future!

Redeeming features

I couldn't tell you how long I've been a member of YouGov, but I was definitely filling in their little surveys before we moved to this house, so it's more than three-and-a-half years.

 Being the sort of person who likes to share his opinion (*cough* - well, come on, no-one writes a blog if they don't have something to share), I couldn't resist the opportunity to register my thoughts on brands (good and bad), product likes and dislikes, exactly which areas of society I think are going to the dogs, and suchlike.

The fact that most of the surveys accrue points, and these points can be exchanged for financial recompense, was never forefront either in my mind, or in my incentives to register these many-faceted and firmly held opinions. But even so, the knowledge that I would be on the receiving end of a cheque for fifty quid once I'd racked up a tally of 5,000 points was, shall we say, ever-present. Even if progress, at 50 points per survey (except those "prize draw" surveys which offered immediate cash, but only for the lucky few), did verge on the glacial.

Well, even glaciers reach the sea eventually, and today my tally rolled over the 5,000 point mark, and the "redeem your points" button was finally enabled. Suitable spending suggestions for the £50 which will shortly arrive on the mat may be made in the usual way. The proprietor reserves the right to ignore any or all of them, and blow the lot on a romantic meal for two :o)

Talent Week

One of the... advantages... of working for a large corporate is that occasionally you have the chance to pitch in with one of the corporate initiatives. The one in question today is Impact On Society (IOS), where the company get to feel good about themselves by "giving something back" to the local community.

This year, that takes the shape of contributing to Business in the Community's Talent Week initiative. For several weeks, young people up and down the country have been logging on to a website to create their "talent bricks" - a brick-shaped doodle containing art of their choice, and a statement about what they think is their best talent and what they'd like to do with it when they leave school. Some of us had already spent a day in a local school talking to the kids and helping them with that part and now, in Talent Week itself, a selection of those bricks have been stuck up on a wall in the Arndale Centre, and there's a week-long programme of activities, demonstrations and stalls designed to connect the kids with the world of work.

And I got to spend the day on the Fujitsu stand.

We had a few banners, some information about the skills we use (obviously there's more to the company than just IT - like many companies we need managers, finance people, graphic designers, good communicators, sales and marketing, etc), and a taped-off rectangle of floor where we were going to play games.

Land the plane
A bunch of blindfolded passersby (the aeroplanes), instructed using only the words Forward, Back, Left, Right and Stop, by a smaller bunch of passersby (the air traffic controllers) in an effort to get them from one side of the rectangle to the other while avoiding the groups of cones (representing storms, pylons, etc) that we distributed around the play area once the blindfolds were on.

Clearly this game is all about communication skills, and realising that some people will interpret instructions differently from how you intended them. And... it's a lot of fun.

Rafting game
Small group (say 3-7) of people, same number of floor tiles, move from one side of the rectangle to the other stepping only on the floor tiles. The tiles can have a maximum of two feet and one hand on them at any one time. Any more and the tile is removed (it has "sunk"). Any tile left unoccupied for more than 5 seconds is removed (it has "floated away").

Again this is about communication, but also about teamwork and problem solving. The only way x people can stand on x-1 tiles (so that the one at the back can be passed to the person at the front) is by sharing tiles and/or standing on one leg, so you're going to end up hanging on to a total stranger. And... it's a lot of fun.

Lego building
Two boxes containing the same assortment (number and colour) of Lego bricks (well, Duplo if we're being entirely accurate). Only one box has instructions to build a tower. Three players. Player A builds the tower using the instructions. Player B watches, and relays the method to Player C (who cannot see Player A) so that s/he can build the same tower from the bricks in the second box. There is only one right way of building it, proven by being able to lift it up at the end when holding only the top layer of bricks.

This might have been a lot of fun, but no-one wanted to play it (although we did have a go between ourselves at lunch time).

So, you know, this isn't the kind of thing we do for a day job, and that was obvious from the design of our stand. BitC had done their bit by including something like "be Top Gun, learn how to land a plane" on the section of their banners devoted to Monday, but whoever designed our stand had somehow forgotten to include this important piece of information. There was absolutely nothing on any of our banners or posters that talked about landing a plane. We had "skills" and a list of customers, and the company logo. And a rectangle made of red and blue plastic tape. And... er... that's it.

If it hadn't been for the good offices of the compère, (the excellent Terence from BBC Your Game), I don't think we'd have had a single player all day. As it was, we handed out almost 100 raffle tickets during the day (play a game, get a ticket, win a laptop bag), and we got to see several demos by local cheerleaders, Olly the ball kid (Youngest Freestyle football World Champion - see him on YouTube - who knew keepy-uppy could be a life choice?) and a couple of boxing coaches who teach non-contact boxing as a keep fit regime. And we drank a lot of Starbucks.

Did we feel good about ourselves at the end of the day. You bet. Although my legs were aching a bit. And I could have done without the strange conversation with the gentleman who claimed to be "Amber Level."

Copenhagen

I've had a draft post with this title sitting in my bloglist since the Copenhagen climate summit opened. I intended to write about forlorn hopes, high ambition, good intentions and inevitable failure but to be honest, in the end, the whole thing was just too depressing and predictable.

More than a week on, and what I assumed at the start would be the inevitable end looks as though it is indeed coming to pass.

Twenty years of talking, of governments agreeing, or not agreeing, to emission limitations and then missing their targets by miles, while all the time the palm-oil industry destroys the rainforests at ever-increasing rates and every single government ignores their activities. It's hard to avoid the clichés when writing about this stuff. Vested interests driven by fat cats more interested in protecting their billion-dollar stashes and their "right" to drive across the street in a four-ton, gas-guzzling "sports" vehicle than in any notion of protecting the planet. Desperate presidents and leaders of island nations only a few inches above sea-level and hence in urgent need of, well, greater elevation at least, sharing their desperation with the world in the hope of some compassion and receiving? Not a lot.

And what would a "successful" outcome to Copenhagen look like? It's all talk anyway, so at best they'll all walk out, patting each other on their expensively-suited backs and congratulating themselves on agreeing to some vague target years in the future which no-one actually believes they'll hit and even if they did wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to anything.

Those who never wanted to restrict their emissions in the first place have dived on the emergence of what looks like evidence that some of the numbers have been... manipulated... with such shameless alacrity that you wonder they're not entering the 2012 Olympics as a new form of gymnast.

I don't claim to know whether the planet is actually in danger from CO2 or not. Quite honestly I don't trust any of them. These are all human beings with their own axes to grind and it's every bit as likely that the scientists' main interest is in protecting their research budgets so they can carry on producing their nice little graphs, or promoting expensive new technologies to "fix" the problem. On the other side of the scales sit the oil billionaires along with the other main players in the old carbon economies and we all know where their interests lie. There's an exact parallel between them and the cigarette companies, who for years denied any link between smoking and lung cancer, while all the time piling high and selling cheap death wrapped in small tubes with a filter on the end.

The world is even more addicted to oil than it is to tobacco and anyone who thinks that is likely to change any time soon is as deluded as the poor guy from the island nation who thinks any of his presidential peers is really interested in giving him a leg-up away from the encroaching ocean.

So no, I never believed Copenhagen had a hope in hell of fixing the planet. While individually human beings can exhibit intelligence and compassion in sufficient measure to solve the problem, collectively we are like lemmings heading for the cliff. See you on the other side.

Spa-tastic birthday treat

Carden Park. A DeVere hotel famous for golfing and its award-winning restaurant, and the venue for a fantastic relaxing overnight stay (with spa treatments incorporated) which Nikki treated me to for my birthday this year.

I guess those for whom visits to spas or masseurs are an everyday part of life will find it odd, but I'd somehow managed to reach the age of almost-fifty-three without ever having had a professional massage. I know! Shit just happens, doesn't it? So the bit I was looking forward to most of all was the back massage. But the package included another treatment, so I'd chosen (from the admittedly limited list of options) to have a facial as well. I don't mean to imply the options are limited at Carden Park - they're not - but this particular package only offered those two, or a manicure or a pedicure. I wouldn't impose my feet on anyone, and I'm not a nail polish kind of guy, so facial was the only thing left really. And in case you're wondering, yes. I did investigate whether it was permissible to have TWO back massages :o)

We arrived too late to enjoy our complimentary welcome drink, but a "spa light bite" lunch was included and after wading through the enormous bowl of chunky chips that accompanied my beef sandwich I was grateful the light bite was no heavier. We had time to kill before our treatments, which we spent checking in to our room (an extremely well-appointed suite as you can see below), wandering around the grounds taking advantage of the temporary cessation of rain, and relaxing in the bar with a swift G&T.
The appointed hour for our treatments (4pm) rolled around soon enough and we retired to the spa section of the hotel to change into robes and meet in the "Relaxation Room." A dimly-lit room with twiddly sylvan pipe music playing,

a large aquarium embedded in one wall, and a raft of couches, many of which were occupied by ladies in robes. Nikki later observed that the most populous Relaxation Room she'd ever relaxed in had contained one other person. This was positively packed. I didn't relax.

I'll spare you the details of the treatments. The back massage was fabulous and the facial was... interesting. And left me with an extremely gooey beard.

Our delightful evening meal, at three substantial courses, left no room for the cheeseboard which we'd hoped to carry back to our room to enjoy with another glass of wine. It was not to be - we were already overstuffed. So we returned to our suite for what was to prove the worst part of our stay - the bed. Or to be more precise, the mattress. A superking affair that turned into an all-night endurance test as it tried its damnedest to turf us out onto the floor. I have no idea how a bed can get into this state, but it was like sleeping on the side of a mountain, with the peak in the middle of the bed, and each edge in a separate valley. Lose your anchor point for a moment and you risked rolling out completely. Having come without crampons, we clung to each other for safety!

The ecstacy

I love the Internet. It didn't take much more than a few minutes online research this morning to give me a clue why the PS3 wasn't talking to the telly. Armed with this information we took our second cups of coffee downstairs and I got busy with the various remotes (of which we now have FIVE - strewth!).

Along with its built-in digital (and now totally redundant analogue) tuner(s), the Pioneer's media box has four AV inputs. Four SEPARATELY CONFIGURABLE inputs. This is the key piece of information I'd forgotten. My excuse is that you only ever need to do this stuff once in a while (about once a year seems to be the average) so it's easy to let something slip the shackles of your mind. It may look like the box is configured correctly but if you hadn't first selected the correct input then you're actually looking at the wrong set of settings.

The HDMI interface (this box is so old that there is only one) is hard-wired to INPUT 3. So select INPUT 3 first, scroll down the options and what do you find? HDMI: DISABLED.

No real surprise then that the screen is blank! Flip that setting to HDMI: ENABLED (having first disconnected the other cabling options, and removed the XBox from INPUT 3 to avoid confusing the issue) and everything burst into life. Into glorious, technicolour, full HD life.

Well, not quite full HD. 1080i, in fact. Back when we bought this TV, 1080p was only available on really high-end gear costing more than twice as much. But easily good enough to blow yer socks off. We finished the rest of our coffee watching last week's Casualty on the iPlayer, streamed effortlessly and wirelessly to the PS3 and with a quality indistinguishable from a regular broadcast.

After that, it was off to the PlayStation online shop to download some game demos. The wireless connection held up brilliantly, despite the router being one floor up and on the other side of the house, and within minutes I was rattling a pinball around a high-def table in the demo version of Zen Pinball. Awesome.