Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

TAM seemed to take quite a bad wrap for the harassment that has been reported (albeit never officially according to JREF president D.J. Grothe).

I’ve just read Amy Roth’s comments on the incidents that upset her at TAM. She notes that they had a team of 19 people tackling harassment and once she had raised her concerns, a member of the team regularly checked up on her to make sure she was OK.

While unfortunately, I didn’t make Amy feel any better, it certainly seems that TAM have been responsive to harassment concerns and implemented some positive steps to trying to prevent such issues.

When did it become fashionable to start referring to the Union Jack as the Union Flag? Well, we probably all know when.

It was then this man appeared on our screen and, in the middle of a rant, his assistant helpfully snapped “That’s the Union Flag. It’s the Union Jack only when it’s flown at sea.”

It might have worked well in the heat of the moment, but it had one lasting problem – everyone believed it, even though it simply isn’t true. As the Flag Institute notes, this whole concept is a relatively new invention; and the flag, both on and off dry land has long been referred to as the Union Jack.

So stop arrogantly correcting me when I use the term Union Jack. I know you think you’re big and clever because you can parrot back a phrase you heard on the telly, but you’re not – go read an actual encyclopedia instead 😉 .

When I was young, there was a lovely shopping centre in in the city named The Headrow Centre. It was located on The Headrow, hence the name. Inside there was a statue of a man holding a bunch of balloons and on the top floor was a toy shop packed to the rafters with everything a child could want (in terms of material possessions). Happy memories.

However, in 2008 they decided to kick all the shops out and renovate the centre, re-naming it The Core. Turns out this was a mistake. Indeed, probably one of the biggest mistakes in Leeds’ retail history. The Core is now a barron desert of white walls where shops used to be, and posters desperately trying to attract new businesses.

But of course, who would want one there? It has almost no foot fall; it is simply three floors of emptiness. I doubt they could even give the retail units away.

If that wasn’t the end of their trouble, they’re now surrounded by much more exciting retail prospects on all sides. Most notably, the new Leeds Trinity will form the showcase shopping centre of Leeds when it opens next year.

An entirely renovated Central Arcade sits just of Briggate too.

If that wasn’t enough, the development of the Leeds Arena has led to the Merrion Centre throwing a lot of money into renovating a lot of it’s units too, in the so called “Arena Quarter”.

No wonder the investor is going bankrupt. Sad times.

Last month, a report by the Commons Culture Committee concluded that our gambling legislation was “outdated” and “ill-equipped” to deal with globalisation.

I strongly agree. Having worked in the industry for years, I know first hand that our legislation is lagging behind.

For example, you can only have four FOBTs (fixed odds betting terminals) in a bookies. But over the last ten years, traditional betting has been almost entirely replaced by the use of FOBTs, and without them high street bookies would close. You could argue this is a good thing, but with millions out of work do we really want to go slashing many more jobs?

Secondly, we simply don’t have the legislation to deal with new technology. At Buzz, we developed a bespoke wireless terminal for our games. But what does this count as? A FOBT? It’s just a tablet computer in a case. Does that mean we can put them in pubs? Probably not. But if you took your own tablet into a pub, you could then gamble online. The Gambling Commission simply didn’t know what to do.

Thirdly, because of the online nature and high taxes in the UK, bookmakers can just move abroad – and most of them have. Running a website is the kind of thing you can do from Gibraltar, so they do. Not that it’s cheap – you have to pay staff a lot more money to go work out on some god-forsaken rock, but the tax difference is so great that is still works out cheaper. If we lowered taxes, we would bring that income back to the UK.

This is becoming more and more apparent, as services continue to move online. For example poker tournaments and live dealer casino games, once exclusively the preserve of the real world have now moved onto the internet. You can sit, at a table, with a live dealer, on the internet. When the technology is this good, we need to ensure that our legislation can keep pace with it, or we’re only hurting ourselves.

Banks are a joke. While most shops are offering increasingly extended opening hours, most banks continue to open 10-5 on weekdays, preventing anyone with a job, and therefore money, the very thing the banks are after, actually being able to go there and use it.

Luckily, this is gradually, very gradually, starting to change. The HSBC in the city centre now opens on a Saturday.

So last Saturday I headed down there to pay some money in for CWF.

However, when I arrived, I found all the counters closed. So I asked the customer service person standing on the door, how I was to go about paying money in. “I’m sorry sir, we don’t offer that facility on a Saturday. It’s only Monday to Friday.”

Apparently, because I had some coins to pay in, and they don’t operate a counter service on a weekend, I couldn’t actually pay any money into the bank account, despite the bank being open. You couldn’t make it up…

The recent global recession has been a real boom time for me. I’ve switched jobs several times and now gone self employed. When I was lead developer over at Buzz we couldn’t hire people fast enough, and even when we could, the often ended up going elsewhere as other companies desperately tried to attract them with ever spiraling pay increases. Kick backs for referrals started reaching four figures.

Never the less, I heard a lot in the media, and from other people, about how hard it was to get a job and about the record levels of unemployment. The news is full of headlines about how bad things are.

I put it down to the industry I was in. We must be an island, resilient to the global economic downturn, ever-expanding while the rest of the world was reseeding. Sure it was easy to get a job if you worked in software development, but everyone else must be struggling.

Then, in April, Elina moved over to the UK. She had just graduated and had no real work experience. But together we wrote her a CV, put together a “job hunting action plan” and did some interview practice. Within two weeks she had a series of interviews lined up and was offered two of the first three she went to.

In fact, they wanted to start her so quickly that she had already done two days work for one company before receiving a better offer and leaving to go another one.

This once again made me question as to whether there really were no jobs available out there. We certainly didn’t find a lack of them when looking for Elina – just trawling through Gumtree threw up dozens of local vacancies each day.

Having spent three years working at McDonald’s, I have quite a few friends still working in McManagement. Conversations with them tell a similar story to the IT industry – they’ve been pretty much continually recruiting throughout the entire recession.

Last weekend, I also spoke to my auntie who works for a charity shop. While she took the job part-time to give her something to do in her retirement, she is currently working full time because they can’t fill the two paid vacancies they have at the moment.

So if the industry I work in has plenty of jobs, the industry my friends work in has plenty of jobs, the industry my relatives work in has plenty of jobs and Elina can get a job without any real work experience in only a matter of weeks, how then can you make the case that there are no jobs available?

The answer is, I’m not sure you can. The last resort of an answer I could pull up was perhaps due to age barriers as most of my friends are young – but as I’ve already said, my auntie has retired once!

That then opens the question up as to why there is so much unemployment.

Two answers spring to mind.

First off, people just won’t take the jobs available. It’s almost certainly no coincidence that the biggest constant in recruitment are companies like McDonald’s – nobody wants to work there. Many people consider themselves too good to work there. You can argue that it is demeaning for people with a degree to go work in fast food, but I think that is a real insult to people like myself and Norman who did go work there – and we’ll both tell you that we learnt loads!

Not to mention the fact that a bachelor’s degree is far from anything special anymore. But more to the point, it’s totally reasonable for employers to want to hire well rounded people, who have some knowledge of the real world outside of academic the academic environment.

Secondly, I think there is a failure of our education system to prepare people to job hunt. When I finished school, I will put my hand up and admit that I didn’t know how to job hunt. We had gone over writing a CV at school but that is about where it ends.

Job hunting is a lot of work! Loads! I actually much prefer being in a job (although being self-employed is even better) than looking for one because it’s LESS work. When you’re job hunting you need to be putting in a full 40 hour week, you need to be up first thing in a morning, looking presentable to go round speaking to people. When I’m working I can role out of bed any time up until 10am (I like to be in the office by 7:30, but the point is I could go in at 10), and turn up in “whatever you wake up in” – that’s a quote from one of my manager’s.

But I didn’t realise how much effort was required. Nobody at school ever said to me, “it should be a 40 hour week and you need to make sure you have an action plan and a spreadsheet of who you have contacted and when you’re chasing them up.” School should be teaching that because otherwise, it is no wonder that people are unable to find themselves one of the many jobs that are out there.

Recently, we witnessed the London 2012 opening ceremony, and what a sight it was to behold. Breathtaking and magical, it was enough even to warm my icy tax payer heart. It’s architect, British film director Danny Boyle, received almost unanimous praise from the media and twitterarti alike.

However, it stuck me that both the TV pundits and media writers the day after, essentially wrote a conclusion that said something along the lines of “it was never going to be as good as Beijing, but Danny managed to do the best second best that we could hope for.”

I take exception to this.

The Olympic opening ceremony that took place four years ago in Beijing was indeed an amazing ceremony. It’s a perfect example of what a totalitarian state can do when it throws enough money and slaves at something to really impress the rest of the world. But that’s all they had. While a big fireworks budget and lots of synchronised dancing is very impressive, it isn’t the only metric.

For example, we don’t recognise War & Peace as one the greatest novel because it’s really, really long. The quality of a novel is defined by the quality of its wordplay, the character of the story and the emotion that it generates. Not that Beijing didn’t have these, but London had them in bucket loads.

London had both. Clearly, we didn’t have grandeur on the scale of Bejijing, but it would ne nieve to say we lacked it entirely. An army of almost ten thousand performers were involved in the opening ceremony. Bejing may have had an amazing spectacle of thousands of drummers – but so did London.

As for character, soon after the ceremony it quickly became apparent how hollow the Beijing opening ceremony had actually been. The firework were pre-recorded and the girl who we thought was singing, was actually just miming while a girl deemed too unattractive sang from behind a curtain. Meanwhile, in London, we trotted out a series of heartwarming choirs, choirs that were actually singing, for real. In their need to achieve perfection, apparently, Beijing dare not compete with that.

We trotted out an endless list of amazing people – Isambard Kingdom Brunel, The Queen, James Bond, Mike Oldfield, Arctic Monkeys, Dizzee Rascal, David Beckham, Tim Berners-Lee, J. K. Rowling, Paul McCartney, Rowan Atkinson, Emeli Sandé and more. Again, Beijing simply couldn’t complete with that.

While China does have a long and noble history, we were really able to shine in celebrating our recent accomplishments (recent being the past few hundred years). Whether it be providing a shining beacon of socialist utopia as the world looks to the NHS as the model for universal free healthcare or a mega mix of the last fifty years of music, gently reminding everyone that the only people even in the same league as us when it comes to producing internationally acclaimed an enjoyed music is the United States, the ceremony reminded us all that Britain is both a cultural and social world leader. With a civil liberties record the likes of China, Beijing couldn’t complete.

Nor could it compete when we celebrated the two greatest turning points in modern society – the industrial revolution, that brought our economy from primary industries to secondary industries, and the creation of the world wide web, that took our economy from secondary industries to tertiary industries. Both owe their origins to Britain, allowing us to casually at the end of a house party scene, drop in “oh, btw, here is the guy who fundamentally changed how the world communicates.”

All that while respecting our own citizens Human Rights. And mostly^[1] respecting other people’s as well.

So don’t be so quick to judge the London 2012 opening ceremony as the best we could do as an inevitable runner-up to Beijing. In so many ways, it was Beijing, that was hopelessly unable to complete with London.

References

¹ http://www.antislavery.org/english/campaigns/slavery_free_london/slavery_free_london/team_invisible.aspx

A few months ago, I wrote about how one of religion’s most insidious evils is the way it controls its own members through guilt. Since then, I’ve referred to what I call guilt culture in several blog posts. However, I can’t remember where I wrote the original post. It doesn’t seem to be on my blog. Or on my computer. I just don’t know where it is. So I’ve decided to re-write my thoughts again, albeit it in a shorter form.

The most successful religions maintain an absolute grip on their adherent’s lives. A believers whole existent revolves around the faith they follow. This is often associated with cults but can equally be observed in the practising mainstream followers as well.

To maintain this grip, they really have to get you over a barrel. Luckily (for them, not for us), they found an extremely effective way to do this – buy attacking us for just being who we are. There are lots of examples of this, but the best one is the way they try to control our sex lives.

We’re biologically wired to want to have sex. That is just who we are. It’s not just us – all animals are. We couldn’t survive through evolution by natural selection by any other means. We are attracted to other human beings and natural driven to procreate so that our genes can further their own selfish ends.

But the Church says no! You shall not be free to go to bed with whoever you want. You must only do it in accordance with our rules. These rules are as follows: 1. No sex before marriage (our special concept of marriage that is, in our Church). 2. No sex with members of the same sex, even if you’re attracted to them. 3. No enjoying sex, it’s only for creating children to further the religion.

So lets recap. We’re expected to deny ourselves our basic, biological urges and if we should fail to fight human nature, then we’re guilty of sin. That seems quite hard to avoid.

But it gets better (I use the term better very loosely). It turns out that just having the thought, it just as bad as doing the act itself! Not only are you not allowed to go to bed with who you please, when you please, just thinking about doing something naughty with someone else you find incredibly attractive is a sin too!

Inevitably, the believer commits a sin they don’t have a choice about it, they’re a human, they find other humans attractive, they’re biologically wired to want to procreate. They sin.

At this point, the Church is on hand to remind them that they are a bad person and should feel guilty for letting God down. You know, the all-knowing God that made them and knew they were going to do exactly that. Luckily, there is a way to redeem yourself. You can buy your way out of sin – and of course, there is only place in town selling it…

So the Church keeps its followers in a state of perpetual guilt, feeling that they have left a non-existent man in the sky down for just being who they are, and that the only way to redeem themselves is to band over thousands of pounds a year to the Church.

If anyone other than a religion tried to enforce such torture on a person, the United Nations Human Rights Council would be screaming from the rooftops.

Chirp is a fantastic new service that lets devices literally talk to each other.

Actually, by devices, I mean iPhones. It’s not specifically for iPhones, but that is the only client they have released so far. It does also work fine on the iPad as well though, so if you have both you can test it by getting them talking to each other. But anyway…

The idea is that a lot of devices these days have speakers and microphones – so rather than having to mess around with bluetooth pairing, instant messaging, emails that never arrive, etc, the devices could just talk to each other – using sound.

When you want to send a link, or a photo, or anything for that matter, you simply “chirp” it and your phone outputs a sound. Other devices listening in can then hear it and decode what it says. The simplicity of it is its brilliance – any device could talk to another, without having to connect, or pair, or any such nonsense. Finally you could share a link or photo to all your friends in the bar without having to mess around with some complicated system – even texting it to them requires you to have their number in your phone for example, but Chirp doesn’t.

It’s an amazing concept; you have to wonder why nobody has done it before.

One drawback I will note is that the devices are actually just communicating locations to each other – so rather than chirping a photo to each other, the photo is actually uploaded to Chirp’s cloud, then the device listening simply hears the location and goes and downloads it. This means all your data has to pass through Chirp’s cloud, which isn’t ideal, but as a chirp is inherently public to anyone who is listening in anyway, you should never use it to transfer private data in any case.

Given our recent blows in the sporting world (we’ve just lost at the European Cup, and by the time I publish this I’m sure Andy Murray will be out of Wimbledon too), it’s easy to think that we’re just rubbish at sport (as a nation).

But there is at least one sport were Britain dominates the world – Formula One. Although a lot of the key names thrown around are people like Vettel and Schumacher, when you look at the figures, Formula One simply revolves around this country. Here are some key figures.

• 8 of the 12 manufacturers are based in Britain
• 9 of the 14 technical directors are British
• 2 of the 4 engine manufacturers are based in Britain
• Britain has 3 drivers – only Germany has more (with 5), everyone else has less (Finland, Australia, Spain, France and Brazil have 2)

Here is a full breakdown of each team and where they are from. I’ve highlighed the British connections in yellow, though with hindsight, I probably should have highlighed the non-British connections!

…and this is before I’ve even founded Worfolk Racing.