No, not a typo. This is about money.
For years now, we’ve been slumped in economic gloom. Jobs are being lost, the banks have all gone bust. Interest rates are lower than the tone of an after-dinner conversation with Katie Price and whatsherface from Atomic Kitten and the Iceland adverts.
Everyone is complaining of having no money, of tightening their belts, of only being able to afford one holiday this year, and how little Dwayne has to hop to school because we cooked one of his shoes for tea last night.
Which is why, as the BBC themselves note in the headline, this is quite surprising. UK retail sales rose by 0.9% in January, following on from a 0.6% sales increase in December. That’s right, we’re all poor as paupers, but throw Christmas or January sales at us, and we’ll still crack open that wallet, fish out the credit cards and spend spend spend. Then spend the rest of the year complaining about it of course, after we’ve just lost the job we had.
I think that, in Britain, we’re all a bunch of morons. I say this with conviction because I include myself in the category. In three and a half years from the last seven, I earned over £117,000 after tax. That’s an average take-home of £39,000 PA, which amounts to a £63,500 year salary, taking into account deductions and student loan payments. That figure isn’t accurate, as I earned significantly more in one six month period than in one of three years, but still.
It’s a shit lot of money.
I spent it all, naturally. I rented accomodation, I bought computers, iPhones, an iPad, a BMW, a TV, lots of designer clothing, lots of expensive food, and I travelled a lot of miles (fuel is expensive, if you hadn’t noticed). But however you look at it, £117k is a lot of cash to burn through in not a lot of time.
Since settling into ‘permie life’ and thus earning a much more average sum year on year, I’ve struggled to bring the costs down. It’s hard adjusting to a life where everything needs to be budgeted for, when you were used to just buying what you wanted because the following week you’d receive another cheque for £860. I think I’ve done it though, more or less.
Yet, I’m still not averse to the odd binge on something nice. Even low-cost items that add up; music is my weakness. I can spend a surprising amount in a month on music.
It seems, however, that I needn’t feel like it’s just me. In these harsh times, the figures show that despite the country having massive debt and no jobs, we’re still managing to hit the high street and buy Shit We Don’t Really Need.
So the country bitches and moans about austerity measures, increases in taxes, decreases in public spending and on and on and on … and then goes out and gets further into the debt that got us all into this sorry mess in the first place.
Idiots. All of us.
Well, I’ve just seen the Mercedes-AMG W03 and I’m now even more glad that Mclaren have stuck with the low-chassis concept all these years.
I think it’s safe to say that HRT and Marussia will follow the trend, so we now officially (as if it were in any doubt) have the prettiest car 
What I find interesting is the train of thoughs going on in each team. To my mind, Red Bull and McLaren are the only ‘original thinkers’ when it comes to overall car philosophy.
Whilst every car is unique in many different ways, clearly Red Bull fostered the ‘high chassis for undercar airflow’ theory. Newey and his team obviously thought the whole package through, which is why it was so fast; everything worked in harmony.
As time went on, everyone else started copying, to the point where everyone has the high chassis concept, because ‘If Red Bull did it, it must be the best’.
Yet McLaren, who have been the only consistent challengers to Red Bull’s dominance, have gone an entirely different way. Low-chassis, a completely different concept. Yes, we weren’t always as fast, but at the close of last year we were often as fast, if not faster.
Since then, Newey has admitted that RB7 was designed around the blown diffuser – the source of its power – and McLaren have admitted that they tried their own version and had to quickly copy RB. It makes me think that last year wasn’t an effective comparison of the high-chassis vs low-chassis concepts.
If McLaren had had testing / development time in all the tests as they should have, might they have been more on top of Red Bull from the get go?
Which brings me to the point. Red Bull went one way, McLaren went another. Both cars traded wins, fastest laps, qualifying positions, and so on over the years that the concepts have been in use.
So why has the entire grid only copied one team? There is no definitive best way – if there was, surely Red Bull would have finished 1-2 in every race?
Red Bull and McLaren, the only two original thinkers. Contentious? Absolutely! But I think it’s a theory that makes a certain sense …
Yesterday, Apple announced the latest iteration of its OS X operating system, called Mountain Lion. Unsurprisingly, the major hype is all about the continuing convergence of iOS features with OS X.
Back with the iPhone was originally announced in 2007, a big deal was made about how the device ran a ‘mobile OS X’, and that was part of what made it so good / powerful / magical. Since iDevices and iOS market share has shot off into the stratosphere, rather than OS X shaping iOS, the inverse has started happening.
Apple still has a very strict separation between ‘mobile devices’ and ‘computers’ (some would argue that the MacBook Air classifies as a ‘mobile device’ but not for the purposes of this blog). Mobile Devices are all about touch interaction and focusing on one app at a time.
In actuality, this is the way we work best. Forget all the bullshit about ‘women are better at multitasking than men’ and so forth, the fact is that, as humans, our brains are not built to multitask.
Studies have shown that productivity increases when a single application is presented on the screen. We focus on that app, and the work activity taking place in that app. When more is on the screen, our attention is divided, even if the other content is dormant.
For example, right now, my screen is shared between this browser and Outlook. I’m keeping an eye on Outlook, as I’m waiting for an email to come through, and the notifications don’t quite work as I’d like. However, even though my eyes will pick up the email from the periphery of my vision, I still keep checking manually. My attention is divided.
With Lion, Apple introduced full-screening of applications, bringing a similar style of working across from their mobile devices. It actually makes sense, works well, and with the multi-touch gestures available, is very nice to control (and better than multiple-windows-on-one-screen as you get in the Windows world (by default)).
With Mountain Lion, they’re going a step further, bringing across things like the Notes and Reminders apps, the Notification Centre, and so forth. For some time, tech pundits have speculated that OS X will become iOS, and it seems that things are moving in that direction with no signs of stopping.
I have a theory that by the time we see OS XI (or whatever it’ll be called), computing power for mobile and non-mobile devices will have converged to the point where the experience is the same on either. Whether OS X drip-feeds this change in, to the point where we don’t notice the difference, or whether Apple is working on OS XI in secret, ready to drop the bomb on an unsuspecting world at some point in the future will be interesting to see
All of this, however, is causing a lot of the Mac Faithful to get awfully upset. View the comments on any of the latest OS X releases, and you’ll see people ‘getting off the Apple train’ because they don’t like the way it’s going.
But where will they go?
Taking a look over the fence at the Windows world it’s plain to see that, although Microsoft came late to the modern-mobile party, they’ve pulled out all the stops to catch up.
Windows 8 is being designed specifically with mobile devices in mind, with the Metro interface from Windows Phone 7 being adapted to the ‘daddy’ software. Microsoft still have a way to go, and it’s foolish to suggest that the desktop is being lost forever – corporate customers would never have that – but both Microsoft and Apple are realising the same thing; the user experience is key.
They’re both moving away (either in part or altogether in some scenarios) from the tried, trusted and true interface paradigms that have shaped desktop computing thus far.
That isn’t a bad thing. Just because something is familiar, it doesn’t make it good. I’ve used a mouse ever since I’ve used a PC, way back to the boxy, square-buttoned mice of the RM computers we had in primary school. But after using the touchpad on my MacBook Pro, I now HATE using a mouse. Gestures are brilliant, end of. I hate using my work laptop, because it doesn’t support them. The trackpad is lousy, it’s over-sensitive. It doesn’t seem to know what I want to do the way the Mac did.
I loved it so much that, when I bought my iMac last year, I bought a ‘Magic Trackpad’ to go with it. Now the only time a mouse gets used is for playing Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Which, I guess, is a perfect scenario to illustrate the point that I’m laboriously trying to make (and often try to make in life) – use what’s best for the task at hand.
A mouse is best for playing games.
A trackpad with gestures is best for navigating a desktop.
To everyone decrying the mobile-isation of OS X or Windows, have you ever thought that the new way just might be better? Have you given it a chance? If the answer to one or both of those is ‘no’, then I’d suggest a rethink.
The future is coming, whether you like it or not.
Up to November last year, I was on a road. The road is my career, work life, call it what you will.
It was a motorway. Occasionally the lights would be out, sometimes for some distance. Occasionally the road surface would get incredibly rough and there always seemed to be roadworks slowing things down. The car I was in was pretty comfortable, though the heating never seemed to work properly.
On the flip side, when I was stuck in traffic, or broken down on the hard shoulder or with a flat tyre, there would always be someone – or a group more often – to share the hardships with, have a laugh with and ultimately feel that it wasn’t so bad.
Then I came upon a service station. It was bright, shiny and wondrous. I stopped off, went inside and had a look around; it was like nothing I had seen. When I got back to my car, I saw two exits: one leading me back to the usual road and another that appeared to promise more of what made this stop-off so intriguing.
I decided to take the new exit. I bid farewell to my travelling companions and headed off down the well-lit path.
Only, after a short while, things didn’t look so shiny. The lights went off, plunging the road into darkness. All around me traffic flowed steadily, each car with dim lights and grim, solitary determined-looking drivers inside. The road was smooth and noiseless, but rather than being a calm, relaxing drive this silence gave the journey a more sinister quality. The sat nav on the dash no longer remembered the route to my destination, but it felt like I was moving further and further from the right route.
Occasionally I stopped off at a roadside café, the lights flickering overhead as I drank tepid tea from styrofoam cups, huddled against the backdraft of wind from the ceaseless rush of cars passing me by. On the odd occasion I’d meet another like-minded soul who would tell of a similar story; of the service station on their route with the bright lights and shiny trinkets, of the change of exit and the all-enveloping grimy darkness that followed.
So I’m driving now, through the void. Every turn of the wheel takes me further from where I think I need to be. There’s no way back to where I came from and that path has already moved on, anyway. Now I look for every exit, but each one carries a No Entry sign.
Well, the blogosphere is practically aglow with the amount of people not giving a crap about my previous post, so naturally here’s an update for nobody out there!
The really expensive shoes went back, and I’m waiting on a refund any day now. The ones I’ve been wearing look and feel really good. I expected that; it’s not like a company of McLaren’s caliber to turn out shoddy merchandise, but it’s still nice.
Sadly working in isolation as I do nowadays, with no female friends at work (or indeed, any friends at all, boo hoo for me), the only person to admire them is me.
Yes, that IS the sound of the world’s tiniest violin playing just for me.
In other news (DA DA DA! (… that’s my ‘news’ jingle)) I’m seriously considering replacing my very huge and expensive Canon 50D + lenses with a Micro 4/3s camera such as the Olympus PEN E-P3. A friend just got the Sony NEX 5N which I’m hopefully going to get to play around with on Thursday, so watch this space.
Well, I guess watch that space, since that’s where all the photos are.
I have a shoe problem. Specifically: too many of the damned things.
Before Christmas I visited BrandAlley and discovered McLaren (as in the F1 team) footwear on sale. A pair of executive leather boots for £75. I decided to treat myself and thought
I ordered brown shoes.
Come the new year, McLaren themselves discounted their footwear range, the shoes coming down to £45.
I decided to buy a black pair also.
They arrived, and I was dismayed to discover they were size 7, not size 10.
Disaster was averted when my friend decided to buy them from me, though I have to keep them until I see him in March. I promptly ordered another pair in size 10. These arrived today and are wonderful.
Unfortunately, I then discovered that I’d ordered black from BrandAlley as well. Faced with the possibility of having another pair of shoes that I already had, for twice the price (almost), I contacted BrandAlley. My argument was that they still hadn’t dispatched them; surely I could cancel?
As it turns out, no. They’re actually on their way to me now.
>_<
Last night on the way to the gym (which isn’t long, it’s just across the road) I hashed out a way to increase response times to emergencies by paramedics, employ thousands of extra staff and create more work for a niche industry, all in one fell swoop.
My idea?
Ambulance-Hearses.
The conversation began with my housemate and I talking about ambulances (one of which had just left the gym) and how the emergency-response Volvo estate cars are more plentiful these days to increase respond time.
“The problem is,” my housemate pointed out, “That if it’s a serious trauma there’s not much they can do.”
“I’ve got it,” I stated, completely floored by my own genius, “Turn hearses into ambulances.”
This was met with considerable mirth, but I ploughed on, eager to make my point.
“Seriously, those things are much bigger than standard cars, but much smaller than an ambulance! Cheaper to make and kit out, they can carry a body, they’re quicker to respond than an ambulance and you can keep more of them in a given space.”
“Plus if it all goes wrong, you can just ship the bodies straight to the morgue?” replied my still-bemused companion.
“Well … we know they can carry a body, as well as the equipment.”
“Yeah but, with a body in the back, where’s the room for a paramedic to look after them?” My housemate pointed out, thinking that he had spotted the one fatal flaw in my plan.
I mused for a moment, before alighting on the perfect addition to my plan.
“MIDGET PARAMEDICS!”
Now he was definitely laughing.
“See, I’ve just increased response times, employed all the midgets that would otherwise have to join the circus or whatever, given precious added business to the coach building industry that makes the hearses, and SAVED LIVES.”
Then I spent 20 minutes on a treadmill, and burnt some damn calories. Fuck yeah!
Some time ago (I forget when), I adopted DropBox to share files between my devices, and have those files accessible online. They were the first viable provider of such a feature, and supported my Windows and OS X boxes, as well as my iPhone and, latterly, iPad.
DropBox became the de facto way for a lot of people to share content amongst their own devices and to other people. I used it on several occasions to quickly ping a copy of my CV to an agency, and over time the company became such a well-known name that Apple allegedly tried to buy them outright; iCloud being the result of that failed attempt.
I also like to use the excellent 1Password by AgileBits to keep my various online logins safe, secure and accessible for when my brain fails me. Again, they have Windows, OS X and iOS clients, and fully integrate with DropBox – if you have DropBox on all your devices, the encrypted database for 1Password synchronises across your devices, meaning everything stays nice and neatly up to date.
There are, of course, other cloud storage products available that do various similar things. My housemate was always fond of SugarSync, but my 1Password integration and the fact that on the face of it, they were both just cloud storage products, kept me true to DropBox.
So why, if DropBox is so good, am I now dropping it (heh) for SugarSync?
Well, I’m not dropping it entirely, but more on that later.
Since I moved from a MacBook Pro as my primary machine to an iMac (with the MBP being relegated to anything requiring me to be mobile that requires more than an iPad), I’ve been scratching my head as to how I can keep my information synchronised.
My photography (almost 100GB of data) has all been migrated over to the iMac, and is too big to keep moving around, so that’ll stay where it is. It would, however, be really handy to keep documents and so on synchronised.
I could do that with DropBox – just move all my files into the ‘DropBox’ folder in my user directory, install DropBox on the MacBook Pro and roll with it. But I’m a bit of an OCD freak sometimes, and I hate the idea of having all my folder structure shifted into ‘DropBox’ as well as it messing with default application behaviour – i.e. whenever I try and save something, it’ll point me at Documents or Pictures, and I’ll then have to navigate to DropBox.
Symbolic links could do that, but as I’m already using those to redirect my main Document-type folders away from the SSD on my iMac to the conventional HDD, that could get confusing.
With me so far? Good.
So, in comes SugarSync: Where SugarSync and DropBox differ is the granularity of control over the folders shared.
SugarSync Folder Manager
As you can see, I can pick individual folders to share between machines. I’m using ‘Prometheus’ (my iMac) as the source machine, as ‘Voyager’ (the MacBook Pro) has been stripped clean with a new install of OS X Lion. The iMac is my primary work machine so mostly files will be changed directly on the source.
Should I need to go away, or just fancy doing some writing whilst in bed or the lounge, I can now pick up the MacBook Pro and content-create away as much as I want, knowing that – provided an internet connection is available – I can shut it down, go back to the iMac and everything will be there ready to work on.
More than that, it allows me to keep whatever folder structure I wish, whilst also being able to pick and choose specific things to share to other machines that I may use (my work laptop, for example) – files are also available on the iPhone and iPad using the native SugarSync client, so if I need to, I can pick up a Pages document and edit it whilst out and about.
It really is the best combination, in my view.
As I said above, I’m not completely dropping DropBox – the 1Password integration is too good to pass up, but I can comfortably run the two products side by side on all my devices without a worry 
So, afternoon of December 31st 2011. What a year it’s been. This time last year, I was sat in a Las Vegas hotel room watching the Back to the Future trilogy back to back. After that, we hit an awesome Tequila bar with, hands down, the friendliest management and bar staff I’ve ever known. They treated us like kings (probably because we had dinner AND were the only ones to take advantage of their New Years Eve deal), we had a Mariachi band play The Doors ‘Light My Fire’ for us … it was an epically fun night.
Since then and now, a fair bit has happened in my usually boring life. I’ve done some fun, challenging and interesting things at work with HP-CDS, then left them and gone to Logica. I’ve holidayed west in Aberystwyth and (very) north east in Finland. I’ve fallen in love and out of it again, finally ‘investigated’ a long-held crush, been burned by yet another woman, realised that long-held misgivings are sometimes insurmountable, and put my oldest friendship to rest on the flickering, dying embers of the year as it draws to a close. You’ve probably guessed, those last bits are all very much intertwined in what I can only describe as the most convoluted, foolish and, at times, retarded situation you can imagine. It could only happen to me.
I’ve hit highs in my professional life, hitting targets and milestones and learning new things. I’ve hit new lows, where my cockiness, however inwardly held it may have been, has left my weaknesses exposed and my confidence shredded.
I’ve avoided all fitness regimes and, as a result, weigh almost another stone on top of my already overweight 2010 total.
I don’t do New Years Resolutions, because they’re just something to make yourself feel better about saying and they’re forgotten a few weeks later. Instead, I’ve set out for myself a kind of manifesto for 2012 and beyond. In just over a week I’ll be 27, and I’ve been coasting in lots of areas of my life. Come next week, I’m taking up running, after being inspired by my sister running the Bristol marathon earlier this year. She’s assured me I can do it, and she’ll kick my ass if I don’t. I’m going to get my camera out and do photography. I’m going to start learning on my own – Microsoft certifications perhaps, rather than relying on companies to pull me in the right direction for my career. I’m going to start writing again. It’ll be somewhat derivative science fiction, but somewhat derivative science fiction is what I do best, and you should sometimes stick to what you know.
By the time I’m a week away from 28, I want to look back and say ‘Yes, everything I did there has made me a better human being’, and then find some new things to go and do.
I’m not religious. I don’t know how we got here, I don’t believe in a god or gods, but I’ve said before that I do believe that, however we got here, we owe it to the cosmic mystery to be the best that we can be. I’ve spent an awful long time being half-arsed, and it’s time to change that.
Happy New Year!
Almost sounds like an episode from a British ‘Big Bang Theory’.
Did you ever get socks, pants and bathroom products for Christmas, every Christmas, when you were a kid? I did. In later years it became a running joke; we’d be sat there opening a Christmas stocking:
- Chocolate snowman
- Terry’s Chocolate Orange
- Other assorted small gifts
- PANTS!!!
- SOCKS!!
- DEODORANT!
Every year it was the same thing.
Now, as a child and indeed a teenager, it’s very difficult to summon any measure of excitement about receiving undergarments as a gift. Certainly in my house, my mum would buy all that sort of stuff whenever it was required. It might sound a bit spoilt, but to receive a gift that you were going to get anyway seemed … faintly preposterous.
But then, something changes. You cast out into the bright, wide world, full of hope and expectation (soon to be crushed by the harsh, bleak reality of the dark, scary world we actually inhabit) and realise that you have to buy everything yourself.
After a few years, you’ve fallen into the usual trap of spending money on things you want, more than what you actually need. The rest is saved or spent on what you need – i.e. food.
So, like me recently, you’ve probably found yourself looking at a drawer full of washed-one-too-many-times pants/socks or bottles of almost-empty deodorant, thinking ‘damn, now I’m going to have to actually buy those damned things’.
This is where the motherly tradition of Christmas gift buying suddenly becomes a boon to which we look forward. We’ve just passed through another festive period, and I can now chuck out my four most-worn pairs of boxers, and I won’t have to buy deodorant, shaving foam or toothpaste for the next six months to a year. If I manage it, some items will be expiring just as Christmas 2012 comes around, and the cycle can begin anew.
God bless you mums, for always knowing what we need, even if it takes us years to realise it properly!
