Musings

The CD Collection Challenge!

nigel — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 09:18:25 +0000

The CD Collection Challenge! nigel Sat, 07/07/2012 - 10:18

Back in 2003 I had a collection of about 1000 CDs, all nicely catalogued using the brilliant CatTRAXX system. I was living in a small flat and the clutter and piles of these CDs was driving me + my then partner to distraction. Something had to go.

I decided it was high time to rip all my CDs into mp3 format. Mp3 was the buzz word at the time - everyone was going crazy for downloads. So, it made sense - rip all my CDs and bin the actual discs along with the sleeve notes, jewel case, and inlay cards.

At the time I was working from home, so it was easy to feed CDs into my Redhat 6 Linux server and let GRIP do the rest. The entire process was completed over a few weeks and didn't distract me from my work since changing CDs in the CD drive was a task of a few seconds.

As promised, all the CDs were consigned to the bin, and all new purchases from that point onwards were downloads. And when I say 'purchases', well, I need those inverted commas.

Roll the clock forward the best part of a decade and that brave move in 2003 now looks distinctly foolish. True, I gained myself a lot of space but lost a great deal of audio quality at the same time, and I missed having the sundry paraphernalia around me to peruse. The decade has seen an enormous slump in CD prices, and a burgeoning secondhand market fuelled by the digital recording of CDs. Whilst CDs may not be indestructible, they retain their fidelity much better than vinyl, and punters are more willing to purchase a secondhand disc in the justified belief it will play exactly the same as a brand new item.

I have therefore decided to embark upon a new hobby: Tracking down my old CDs and repurchasing! Living in London, space is, and always will be, at a premium, so that reason for my collection's disposal is still valid. However, the JazzLoft now provide 'gatefold' plastic replacements for jewel cases that save about 70% of the width of a standard jewel case. So all purchased CDs can live in the plastic sleeves and the jewel cases can be jettisoned.

Furthermore, with the fall in the price of disk drives it is now possible to buy 1TB of storage for around £50 - a fact that obsoletes the need for the space-saving mp3 format in the first instance. Any new ripping will be achieved using the FLAC lossless codec. A CD full to the brim with music at 800MB will be saved in FLAC format - without ANY quality loss - in 400MB. This means a 1TB drive can hold at worse case 2500 albums. The added advantage of FLAC over mp3 is a 'cue' file is generated which is effectively a disc index, and means the CD can be accurately recreated byte-by-byte even if the original media is lost or damaged.

It would be way too expensive to simply go out and buy the entire collection again. So, this recollection hobby has been set parameters:

No more than £10 to be spent in any one week;
No more than £1 to be spent on any one disc purchase in a store
No more than £1.27 to be spent on any disc purchased online

The £10 per week constraint measures out to be the cost of about 2.5 pints of lager in London. Since I drink very little (although I am strenuously not teetotal) this is a very good substitution.

The £1 on a disc in a store reflects the lowest price usually available. There are exceptions to this in 'discount bins', but on the whole £1 is a good maximum.

The £1.27 represents the minimum price for a CD online using Amazon Marketplace. This breaks down to 1p for the disc and £1.26 standard rate for the postage. It is not possible to buy cheaper.

So, with these parameters it will be an interesting and challenging hobby scouring the secondhand shops of London! It is very unlikely I will succeed in replacing every single disc since a few are collectors items and fetch a premium, but let's see how far and how many I get.

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The Day I Met Rufus Sewell

nigel — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 10:23:43 +0000

The Day I Met Rufus Sewell nigel Sun, 02/01/2011 - 10:23

Well, when I say I met Rufus Sewell, I really mean stood next to Rufus Sewell. Actually, when I say stood next to, I actually mean I was stood in the same BBC lobby. The year was 1998, and I was a freelancer employed by the BBC at their Radio One offices, then in Clipstone Street W1. I was returning back to the office carrying a copious deli sandwich, full-fat soda, packet of crisps and slice of chocolate crunch. Over the intervening years my diet has improved and my weight returned to 'normal'.

Any rate, as I sauntered into the lobby in Clipstone Street I noticed the impossibly handsome figure of Rufus Sewell loitering around with his hands in his pockets, wearing an extremely dapper suit with Italian flair. It put my regulation Next off-the-peg to shame. I walked past him and called a lift, knowing I would be waiting quite some time in the tired Victorian building. I turned round to inspect him, in a metrosexual way of course, long before metrosexuality had even been invented. No doubt about it, this bloke looked like another species altogether. A species that could attract any woman it wanted, whilst at the same time soliciting the woman's partner's complicity. He was pure sex appeal.

I then noticed the old Security Guide marching towards him, an upright military trained stride with chest out and shoulders back. He was enormous, towering over Rufus who himself is well above average height.

Timidly Rufus uttered, "Hello there, I've just done an interview for Radio One and I'm waiting for my copy of the tape to take home".

"Aha!" the old retainer boomed, reverting back to his Drill Sergeant era, "You're that Sewell chappy are you? Well just wait here whilst I go to the toilet". With that, he turned on his heels and disappeared into the bathroom not to emerge before my lift had arrived.

Whatever its faults, on that occasion no-one could possibly say the BBC was an awe-struck organisation pandering to celebrity!

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Upselling: The Customer Perspective

nigel — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 10:44:04 +0000

Upselling: The Customer Perspective nigel Sun, 31/10/2010 - 10:44

The chances are sometime in your life you have been subjected to the sales technique of upselling. Upselling from the retailer's perspective is providing the opportunity for the buyer to purchase related items they may not have considered otherwise, thus maximising sales. Upselling from the customer perspective is a pushy inducement to spend additional money when there is no desire to do so. These days it does appear that all businesses are indulging in the practice, and the fact they do this suggests that the technique yields results and any prospective business lost by being too pushy is mitigated by the greater revenues.

So who are the principal perpetrators? In my travels I seem to be coming across them more and more.

Caffè Nero: Whenever I go into one their stores for a coffee, I am always prompted with a "And would sir like a pastry with that?"
McDonalds, KFC et al: Supersize me! I am not in the habit of frequenting fast-food joints, but I have reasons to believe their Go Large offers are still extant
Dell: Whilst I would never consider buying from Dell being a PC builder myself, I have had to buy from them in a professional context whilst working for clients. Usually, memory, hard disk or Operating System upgrades are proffered
Sky: Premium grade content is always offered when dealing with these guys
Shoe Stores: It's impossible to buy a pair of shoes without the salesperson attempting to sell a protective spray of some description

It's difficult to know exactly how to respond to these techniques. When asked whether I want a Danish pastry the glib reply would be "If I wanted one I would have asked for it". Or how about "Are you offering it for free?". Neither are satisfactory. Losing your temper is certainly to be avoided - you will be the one playing over the conversation in your head for hours afterwards, regretting not coming out with something pithier. You are the one who will look foolish in front of the other customers. Vetoing the stores that indulge in upselling doesn't work either - as most do you will be limiting your coverage and cutting off your nose to spite your face.

So what is the answer? Upselling from the customer perspective is insidious, endemic and annoying. Until there is a cultural sea-change in retailing, us customers will just have to bite our tongues and tender a very polite "No thank you".

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The Curious Case of PC World Laptop Repairs

nigel — Thu, 27 May 2010 09:25:33 +0000

The Curious Case of PC World Laptop Repairs nigel Thu, 27/05/2010 - 10:25

I bought a new laptop from PC World in March 2009. It was an Intel Pentium Dual Core T3400 2.16GHz with 3GB RAM and a 17" screen, badged as an "Advent" product (i.e. PC World's own-brand). It became my Linux development machine and was used fron 8am to midnight, seven days a week. Fourteen months later (i.e. just out of warranty), in May 2010, it packed up - the machine's power light would illuminate but not actually power up.

Having seen this problem on laptops before, I had a good idea that the motherboard was fried. I took the laptop to a local computer shop, and armed with diagnostic tools, they confirmed my worst fears. So, this machine has lasted all of 14 months before expiring. Hardly a ringing endorsement for the quality of the components used by Advent.

Monday May 17th

So, I returned it to my local store for an out-of-warranty repair - for the exhorbitant fee of £229. This is a one-size-fits-all price, regardless of the severity of the machine's problem. The staff in the store were extremely slippery and would not commit to a repair timescale.

Monday May 24th

Called PC World Customer Services for an update. Their automated telephony system informed me they would not answer any repair queries until ten days into a repair. Ok, I'll have to wait until the 27th then.

Thursday May 27th

This is where the fun started. Having spoken to the technical repair centre, then PC World Customer Services, then Tech Guys Cusomter Services, I was told my laptop had not arrived at the service centre, was whereabouts unknown on the system, and was in the rapair queue at the service centre respectively. So, chose your pick as to which person you believe. All the systems were suggesting my machine was not actually picked up from my local store until the 24th - so it had languished in a cupboard until PC World could roster a pickup, which appears to be at best a weekly event for my store. So that'll be another week for the return journey then. Furthermore, I discussed the repair process with the Tech Guys. There is no triage system at the repair centre. A machine comes in, it waits until it is at the front of the queue, it is inspected and parts are ordered, it returns to the queue until the parts arrive. There is / isn't an escalation process for priority repairs. One person I spoke to said there was, two people (i.e. the people in a position to actually implement an escalation) said there wasn't. Right and left hand again, or deliberate mis-information?

Thursday June 3rd

Not heard anything from PC World (quel surprise!) so I called their repairs arm, Tech Guys. The first thing of note is my laptop entry on their system has no update so its status is either unavailable (unlikely) or no work has started on it yet (very likely). Then I was informed that once it gets to 28 days in the repair shop I am entitled to my money back. So let's get this straight - it took a week to get to the repair centre, would undoubtedly take a week for its return, plus the 28 days it spends languishing doing nothing, and they will give me my money back. Exactly how does that help me? A six week wait to be told they didn't get round to repairing it! Do they have any concept of Customer Service? I have my doubts. The final nugget was being told that repairs normally take 10-14 days but are currently taking longer because they have just moved to a new repair centre. Huh? That's totally at variance to the staff at my local store who told me that the new repair centre was speeding up repairs!

Tuesday June 8th

Call 1: My first call was to Tech Guys. The phone rang for 15 minutes until answered by a young lad clearly on his first day. After five minutes of spluttering and um-ing and ah-ing, he put me on hold then the call was cut off.

Call 2: Back to the Tech Guys again. This time I was patched through to Dennis. I know he was Dennis because after he had shouted at me, was sarcastic with me, and had generally tried to be as unhelpful as possible, I requested his name. Mind you, I would probably have given a false name in his position. He couldn't open my record on the computer - it was giving him an error. Why? Because I couldn't give him a job number and without that he can't see the details of my records. That, he sneered at me, is My Problem. And there's me thinking it should be nothing to do with me, but apparently the store to which I returned my machine should have given me a job number. They didn't - so I have been told I need to contact the store and get this job number, notwithstanding the fact that no-one during previous calls as requested this job number and no-one else has had problems accessing my records. Oh, and by the way, PC World don't publish store phone numbers so I can't call the store for my job number.

Call 3: Ok, I tried PC World Customer Service and asked for an update. Sorry mate, I need a job number. Hmmm - you're the second person today to want that - jolly well call the store and obtain it for me then please! I was put on hold for another 10 minutes, then success! I have a job number, and without further prompting, the kind gentleman interrogated the system with this job number to find the status of my repair. "An engineer has been trying to diagnose a problem with your motherboard". So, I'm no further forward then. But, they did offer to send an email to the engineering department for an update and call me back once they have a response. An email? A call back? I have zero confidence that will happen. Let's wait and see.

Wednesday June 16th

I never did receive that callback from PC World. So, I called the Tech Guys requesting an update to my repair. They told me they couldn't give me any details because they sent my laptop to a 3rd party repair company on the 25th May! It was sent there apparently as standard procedure when Tech Guys are too busy to deal with all the broken equipment that is returned to them. I was faithfully promised a callback from this 3rd party company by 5pm. Guess what? Yep, no callback.

Thursday June 17th

Further chase of the Tech Guys; their representative informed me my laptop would be looked at 'today or tomorrow'. He would not confirm whether this would be an initial diagnosis or a repair. I was passed to Customer Services Complaints where I logged an official complaint about the service I have received. I was informed here that the Tech Guys had tried to call me that morning but were unable to leave a message. Presumably they called whilst I was making the complaint. I was then passed back to the 'Chase Department' where I was told that the machine arrived at the workshop on the 27th May - that's two days later than I was told the previous day. I was also told a new motherboard was on order and an engineer had looked at the machine on the 2nd June. They would not provide me with a part number or a supplier name so I could not call the parts supplier and check on parts availability. Today I am really depressed with this/these company/companies. They appear to hind behind a Byzantine structure of conflicting internal IT systems, and because I am dealing with two organisations, neither will take responsibility for the level service I am receiving.

Tuesday June 22nd

I received a phone call at 19:15 saying my laptop had been returned to my local store. Yippee! I'm picking it up tomorrow!

Wednesday June 23rd

I arrived at my local store and checked out my laptop. First panic - a different BIOS splash screen. Uh-oh! They had replaced my motherboard with another one, hopefully of similar specification or better, but it got me worried that the HAL in my Vista partition my now not work correctly. A Google search suggests that it shouldn't be a problem if I have got a retail version of Vista. But have I? I also thought it prudent to check the wireless connection in store. I didn't have my hard disk installed so checked against a bootable openSUSE 64 bit CD image. No WiFi. Ok, could be a Linux vagary. The store tried with their XP diagnostic disk. No WiFi. Hmm. Explained by the store that WiFi functionality is excluded from their diagnostic disk. Against my better judgment, but lacking firm evidence, I had to accept this and sign off the return of my machine.

I got the laptop home, and nope, no WiFi on either openSUSE or Vista. But, if I moved my laptop next to my ADSL router it worked - with a range of about 10ft before the connection was dropped. Sounds to me like the repair engineer has forgotten to couple up the antenna to the new motherboard - or worse, there is an incompatibility between the antenna in the machine and the new motherboard, with it being a different model. Ho-hum - back to the store tomorrow then.

Thursday June 24th

A journey back to the store. The chap in the support kiosk was very friendly and took the back off the laptop to reveal that the antenna cable had not been fixed back on to the motherboard - exactly as I suspected the previous day. In addition, the webcam is not working, again it is suspected that it wasn't reattached to the motherboard. So, it's a journey back to the Tech Guys service centre for the laptop, but interestingly the guy in the store mentioned that the delay the first time my laptop went in was because of a 20,000 backlog of broken laptops caused by the closure of a service centre. Furthermore, this backlog has all but disappeared and a turnaround of 10-14 days should be attainable. We will see.

Thursday July 1st

A phone call from my local store! After a mere week away, my laptop has returned again! The store were unable to locate my Windows partition on my hard disk so could not confirm that the WiFi had been fixed. Eeek! That's got me worried - I had stupidly kept my hard disk in the machine when I returned it to the store, and I hope to goodness they haven't reformatted it! So, I dropped everything and hot-footed it to the store. In fact, all the partitions were present and correct, and WiFi was operational as was the Webcam (another fault with the first time it was returned). Looks like the engineer had forgotten to connect both back to the motherboard. That is seriously sloppy. Anyway, at long last I have a fully working laptop!

I'm minded of the time my Acer laptop's motherboard died. I called them and they gave me a courier to book for a home pickup, and an account code so the courier charge was paid by them. The courier arrived the following day. The machine was repaired and returned 48 hours after that to my home address. PC World take note. PC World staff struck me as beleaguered, more than occasionally surly and brusque, yet sometimes helpful and courtious. It was certainly a salutary lesson for me - never buy equipment you depend upon without thoroughly researching repair facilities. I can't see me going anywhere near PC World again.

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Sky Sports 3D Review: Chelsea v Wigan 2010-09-05

nigel — Mon, 10 May 2010 09:42:19 +0000

Sky Sports 3D Review: Chelsea v Wigan 2010-09-05 nigel Mon, 10/05/2010 - 10:42

The venue for my first foray into the wonderful world of 3D broadcasting was The Rising Sun on Tottenham Court Road, London. The pub itself is a traditional Victorian corner house with wooden floors and high desk tables and seats in a long galley. Like many boozers these days the sale of food is foregrounded, and on the occasion I visited, a few punters were tucking into nachos and dips.

The event was the final round of Premiership games for the 2009/2010 season, and the Chelsea v Wigan game had been selected by Sky Sports. The pub has just one 3D television, although there are many other 'regularly aspirated' sets dotted about. The set being used for 3D broadcasts was the 47" LG LD920 (formerly LD360) - a passive 3D 720p which was intended to be LG's first 3D consumer level television to market. However, a change of direction by LG means this is no longer the case and the model is now only available for commercial installations.

This is where we got lucky. The two most prestigious seats in the pub, right on top of the 3D screen, became available just before kick-off when a lumbering 20 stoner fell off his bar stool, dusted himself down, and staggered towards the exit. We paid £5 deposit per pair of polarising glasses and waited eagerly for the fun to commence.

Sky Sports are capturing all their games using both the passive and active 3D systems, although currently only passive are being demonstrated in pubs across the country. The passive system uses polarising lenses, whilst the active system has powered spectacles that sync in time with the television.

On to the experience itself. The scorecard in the top left of the screen jumps straight out at the viewer, but mysteriously, the Sky Sports Live logo in the top left actually reads 'L L I I V V E E'. The camera view for the match is much lower than is normal for sports broadcasts; just above the dugout. This is presumably to highlight the 3D capability, but in reality the entire image lacked sharpness and clarity. The camera position was in line with the centre line - sorry, the center lineS - the system actually split the centre line into a large 'V' disappearing into the background which is extremely disconcerting. Ditto the fact that all the players appeared to be marginally out of focus so there were two slightly overlapping cardboard cutouts of each player.

The 3D effect is most noticeable when the action is near to the camera, and becomes less pronounced (i.e. non-existent) the further away the players are - so for instance any player at the other side of the pitch will not have any 3D effect. On an all too infrequent basis the 3D effect worked for a passage of play of a few seconds, then it would disappear and the viewers' eyes would have to endure out-of-focus double images.

This was totally bizarre - the 3D effect did work - but only fleetingly. The centre line, for 99% of the game a 'V' shape diverging into the background, did occasionally snap back into the correct '|' shape. This leads me to wonder under what circumstances the system worked and what circumstance it didn't. There was no clear correlation, making me wonder whether the success of the broadcast is contingent upon the skill of engineers who patch the signal together.

To summarise, this technology is nowhere near perfected, and I would suggest is years away from being anything other than a curio and a pub discussion point. Furthermore, the constraints of the system, from the lower camera angles to the awkward polarising spectacles, reduces the enjoyment of the game and far from mitigates against any 3D effect.

Verdict: Check back again in 2013

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The BadZilla Free Diet: Lose 20lbs in 3 Months Without Counting a Single Calorie

nigel — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:27:26 +0000

The BadZilla Free Diet: Lose 20lbs in 3 Months Without Counting a Single Calorie nigel Tue, 04/05/2010 - 10:27

Chances are at some time in your life you have been on a diet. Chances are the diet failed. It probably failed for a number of reasons: Boredom, effort to prepare special meals, effort to read through dry text books on the subject, or maybe even severe hunger.

I realised I needed to lose 20 pounds once I got to the stage an old friend I hadn't seen for a while mentioned that I was looking a little 'porky'. In fact, I was up to 203 - a lifetime high. To get back down to a more reasonable 182 pounds, my "fighting weight" I needed to diet. However, I did not like the idea of buying one of the fashionable books on the subject and religiously sticking to the arcane and obscure recipes contained in the book.

For a start, that would require the purchase of special ingredients and special preparation above and beyond the normal family meals. So, double the trouble. Secondly, I dislike the whole notion of dieting. If asked, I can just about manage a "I'm cutting down" but would never admit to being on a diet!

I needed a regime that wouldn't interfere with the other family members, that doesn't require faddish purchases and that doesn't require the onerous counting of calories. After a day or so's thought, I came up with the BadZilla Diet, stuck to it for 3 months and lost my 20 pounds. There were times when I was tempted to stray, but the reality of it is, this diet is relatively easy to stick to because there is little inconvenience and no additional food preparation.

Ok - so how does this work? Reproduced below is my formula for success. Later in this article I'll discuss each of the points in turn.

Breakfast: Small bowl of muesli with semi-skimmed milk, Coffee with no sugar and semi-skimmed milk.
 
Lunch: Two large deli-type sandwiches filled with ham or cheese or tuna mayo. Banana to finish.
 
Dinner: Main course of 75% your normal dinner; Low fat yoghurt; small bowl of grapes.
 
Daily Exercise: 60 minute power walk (4 miles) + 10 minute jog
 
Daily Drinks: Tap water or "no added sugar" barley water
 
Weekly Treat: Packet of peanuts (salted)
 
Rules
=====
NO SNACKING
NO DESSERTS
NO TAKE-AWAY FOOD
NO RESTAURANT FOOD
NO MICROWAVE FOOD
NO ALCOHOL
KEEP YOURSELF OCCUPIED AND BUSY

Stick to that and you should lose weight, although the usual caveats apply - firstly see a doctor before you embark upon a diet, and secondly your weight loss may vary depending upon your own starting point.

Ok so lets look at the diet in detail.

Breakfast: Small bowl of meusli with semi-skimmed milk, Coffee with no sugar and semi-skimmed milk.

As the saying goes, only fat people skip breakfast. You can substitute fruit for my muesli but stricktly no chocolate flavoured cereals! I need a caffeine kick to get me going.

Lunch: Two large deli-type sandwiches filled with ham or cheese or tuna mayo. Banana to finish.

If you eat too little, the diet will fail and you will snack. Therefore make sure you get a decent lunch inside you. Now whilst I say "deli-type" sandwich - don't take this to extreme. I mean a couple of sandiches with a filling and low-fat mayo, lettuce, tomato and cucumber. What filling you use is up to you, but if you use cheese, and can see teeth marks in it when you bite, then you are obviously taking too much. One slice of ham, thin slices of cheese, half a tin of tuna with low-fat mayo would be my choices.

Dinner: Main course of 75% your normal dinner; Low fat yoghurt; small bowl of grapes.

This is the good thing about this diet - you can eat the same as the rest of the family - only less of it! Downsize your plate, don't take second helpings, eat slowly and you with feel full. You may need some imagination with the 75% - if you have a burger and fries meal, then it is unrealistic to eat 75% of a burger. Cut the fries down to a small quantity you could feasibly count quickly if you were so motivated. The food you should be preparing is what I would consider to be regular "family" meals - e.g. spag-bol, chili, meat and two veg type meals. If your current diet consists of food at the junk end of the scale, you may find it more difficult to lose weight and an overhaul of your entire dietary needs should be undertaken.

Daily Exercise: 60 minute power walk (4 miles) + 10 minute jog

The sad fact is to lose weight calories in has got to be less than calories out. That can only be achieved by a combination of changes to the diet and exercise. By just cutting out the food, your metabolism will slow down to compensate and you will not burn any energy off. So with some exercise, weight loss will occur. I am recommending a 60 minute 'power walk' - which equates to four miles. If you have a sat-nav facility on your phone, you can use that to determine the distance covered, but it must be completed at a good clip rather than a gentle amble or there will be no gain. I finish off with a 10 minute stretch walking up a 1 in 6 incline, but if you don't have a steep hill handy, finish with 10 minutes of jogging instead.

Daily Drinks: Tap water or "no added sugar" barley water

Your good work should not be undone with high-calorie drinks. I have a preference for barley water, but it is extremely acidic so clean your teeth after use or your tooth enamel will dissolve!

Weekly Treat: Packet of peanuts (salted)

What? A diet which recommends peanuts? Aren't they fattening? Well, if you are a horse or a cow, then yes. However, I don't believe too many of our equine or bovine chums will be reading this. Humans cannot digest peanuts so despite the fact they contain loads of protein, we can't break that down and they pass harmlessly through our system. In fact, they can be good for a diet to a certain extent - eat a packet and you will feel extremely bloated, thus removing hunger pangs. Don't over do them mind you - you don't want to be continually stuffed feeling uneasy due to peanut abuse. And categorically do not buy any of the coated varieties. They really are fattening!

Rules
=====
NO SNACKING
NO DESSERTS
NO TAKE-AWAY FOOD
NO RESTAURANT FOOD
NO MICROWAVE FOOD
NO ALCOHOL
KEEP YOURSELF OCCUPIED AND BUSY
DON'T HAVE 'SNACKABLE' FOOD IN THE HOUSE

Most of these are self-evident and don't need further expansion. The final points should be noted. If you tend to collapse in front of the TV at night, there will be enormous temptation to snack later in the evening. Try to keep yourself occupied with puzzles, crosswords, anything really to take your mind away from the diet. Don't watch cookery shows on TV! Don't keep anything in the house that can be nibbled on - try to ensure that all food needs some preparation time which will hopefully act as a deterrent from snacking.

Hopefully my diet will work for you. It worked well for me and fitted nicely with my circumstances. I found it relatively easy - there were times I was sorely tempted to raid the fridge, but I thankfully remained resolute. If you follow my guidlines you should see the sort of weight loss I achieved, but obviously your circumstances may be different. Let me know your success or failures, and armed with that, I will tailor my recommendations accordingly!

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Movie Reviews and the "it's Good" / "it's Crap" Binary

nigel — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 10:46:32 +0000

Movie Reviews and the "it's Good" / "it's Crap" Binary nigel Sun, 24/01/2010 - 10:46

We've all done it. You file out of the movie theatre and your partner turns to you and asks, "Well, what did you think of that?". There's a 99% confidence interval that the response will be either "It was good" or "It was crap". It seems that all moviegoers flip-flop between giving a one-word good or crap verdict before a more considered reply is proffered walking back to the car.

But why is this? Back in the early noughties I decided I needed more mental stimulation so enrolled on a A2/AS Film Studies evening course in Richmond, Surrey. For non-UK readers, A2/AS is university entry-level standard, and under normal circumstances a student wishing to attend university would require 2 or 3 passes of this type of exam to qualify for degree level education. Any rate, the night school course was arduous (surprisingly) and academic (unsurprisingly) and the notion of value judgement was drilled out of students from lecture 1.

Systematic deconstruction of movies followed textbook lines, and subjective opinion not backed up with hard evidence was not accepted and would incur a severe marking down. So despite this schooling, for which I surprised myself and received a double-A, I could still hear myself falling into the good/bad chasm once graduated. Worse, my tutor, in her less guarded moments, could be caught out doing likewise.

Undeterred, and seeking fresh challenges, I embarked upon a Masters Degree in Film Studies at the University of Westminster. Now, the University of Westminster is famed for inventing the study of cinema as an academic pursuit in the 1960s, and furthermore during my time there the esteemed Professor Vincent Porter was still lecturing, and he was instrumental in its inception.

The credentials of the staff could not be faulted. On a personal level, I consider the course one of the most stimulating and rewarding projects I have ever undertaken. After lessons with the clock past 9pm, we would troop into the local hostelries for a slaking beverage or two. We would be accompanied by the lecturers and we would shoot the breeze and discuss our latest viewings. So with the weight of all that academic experience, including many published authors, you would never expect a good/crap binary anywhere. You would be wrong, and the more beer imbibed, the more it would be trotted out.

So what is the answer? For us in the cognoscenti, us educated in the ways of cinema, we use the good/crap binary as an academic shorthand. We are saying - we have read all the books, studied and deconstructed all the films, tossed it all around in our heads and formulated the opinion of all that experience that it is good. Or it is crap. You, on the other hand, without the A2/AS level certificate, and the Masters Degree after your name, will have to do better and be more imaginative.

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The Regettable Rise and Rise of Franchise Coffee Shops

nigel — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:48:10 +0000

The Regettable Rise and Rise of Franchise Coffee Shops nigel Wed, 25/11/2009 - 10:48

The phenomenon of the coffee franchise didn't really hit me at first. Living in London there always has been a selection of traditional Italian coffee houses dotted all over the West End. Most of these coffee shops, and note how I avoid using the dreadful 90s phrase coffee boutiques, served the most delicious cappuccino and espresso, and there were always a myriad of temptations behind the glass counters should the diet be starting the following day.

The young pretenders, with their brash Johnny-Come-Lately logos and slick painted-on-casual-staff smiles, had lost sight of the one commodity they were there to sell. The coffee was, and still is to this day, goddamn awful. Here's the crux of the problem - if you are selling a colour supplement 'lifestyle statement' then the customer is going to have to pay for all those marketeers you have employed, all those fat-cat advertising executives and their expense accounts, all those ideas-men who talk 'concepts' and 'customer experiences'.

So you end up with a cup of coffee that, with a small margin, cannot be sold for less than £2.75. Now if a customer is going to spend £2.75 on a coffee, that coffee had better kick some ass because no matter how soft the furnishings are, the coffee is the shop's raisin-d'etre.

So what do you do if your name is Mr Starbucks, or Mr Costa, or Mr Nero? You inflate the taste of the drink to justify the price. Sounds reasonable until you sip the concoction - the result is coffee so bitter it curls your toes. To combat this the shops now offer a 1-shot-less option - they are catching on. But hold on, to dilute the product without diluting the price means those advertising executives are getting their free lunch.

There's only one solution - veto the franchises and frequent those third generation Italian coffee houses with their sublime blends of subtlety and flavour. I would love to say I am on a crusade and personally swerving the franchises. Sadly I can't say that is true. The convenience, the uniform nature of the product, the regularly checked toilets, the occasionally discarded newspaper all conspire against my better nature and mock my weak will.

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The Four Greatest Headers of a Football..

nigel — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:49:38 +0000

The Four Greatest Headers of a Football.. nigel Thu, 19/11/2009 - 10:49

That sort of title is bound to provoke controversy and I will concede that it would be wise to replace 'greatest' with "favourites of Badzilla". I have always had a fondness towards any footballer brave enough to stick his head into the firing line, particular as when I was growing up a sodden lacey football would come close to decapitating an unsuspecting schoolboy. It was only later in my footballing 'career' (using a somewhat grandiose word for someone who never graduated above university intra-departmental level) that I realised headaches could be mitigated by heading the ball as opposed to letting the ball head me.

Anyway, my favourite exponents of the art of heading are listed in order below. They all excelled in the art, were sublime climbers, unerring in their accuracy, and brave as lions.

Tommy Lawton

Tommy was one of the footballing greats and has been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Obviously I am way way too young to see Tommy play, but that does not preclude me from having knowledge of his craft. I first became exposed to the legend on Christmas Day, 1969. I was given a football annual for Xmas by my parents, and as a kid mad keen on football I read it avidly. The book was full of 1970 Mexico World Cup preview material, and one such article was a position-by-position comparison of England 1939 v Prospective England 1970. The journalist, obviously old enough to have lived through both eras, was somewhat dismissive of England 1939 and in most positions he was giving England 1970 the nod. That was until he got to the centre-forward position. Don't forget that then we had World Cup hattrick hero Geoff Hurst, Francis Lee and Geoff Astle. The author was contemptuous of these stars - Lawton was head and shoulders above and was the only England 1939 player to make this all-era team.

My second recollection revolves around the famous England victory against Scotland at Hampden Park in 1939. It was the 15th April and the weather was monsoon and bitterly cold. The match was dour and delicately poised at 1-1 with 2 minutes left on the clock. Then a cross came over that somehow evaded the head of Bill Shankley at centre-half, and Tommy Lawton rose to head the ball into the back of the net. The capacity 149,269 crowd fell totally silent. Lawton wheeled away and yelled "Get In!" which echoed around the moribund stands. The auld enemy had turned over Scotland on their patch.

Alan Shearer

Between 1994 and 1996 Alan Shearer was the greatest footballer on the planet. All the top strikers have sequences where they never miss. Rivaldo, when he scored against England in World Cup 2002, was going through such a rich seam of form. But Shearer, for the best part of three years was Deadeye Dick, and his stats at Blackburn of 112 goals in 138 is truly outstanding.

The greatest Shearer moment for me would be Euro 96. With a little forethought, and luckily a comfortable salary, I was able to secure two tickets for every Wembley-based game from opening ceremony to final. However, despite being there to witness England's spectacular 4-1 against the Netherlands where Shearer bagged two, it isn't that game at the front of my memory. No, it was England against Scotland - an emotional fixture at the best of times, but in the context of a major tournament, the prospect of defeat could not be considered.

England played dreadfully. Stage fright had got the better of them and at half-time with the score at 0-0 the Tartan Army were holding their own personal disco. But shortly after the restart, the wind was blown from their sails. Gary Neville overlapped for the first time on the right wing and delivered the perfect cross. I knew it was the perfect cross because I was sat at the other end of the stadium, and from my position I could map the ball's trajectory immediately after it left Neville's boot. That's something no TV spectator ever gets the advantage of, and having mapped the ball I could see Shearer, Hendry and Calderwood converging on the ball, but it was patently obvious that Shearer would win the race. Sure enough, he ran straight onto the ball which cannoned into the net.

Peter Withe

Peter Withe was what is widely known as an 'Old Fashioned Forward' which is a euphemism for a tall, bustling striker who plays as a target man, always runs through the middle of the park and is somewhat rumbustious in his methods. But that would be wide of the mark - he actually had very deft close skills and tricky feet making him more than capable of wrong-footing the defense. Where he came into his own was his aerial prowess, and the vast majority of his goals came from him laying the ball off to a winger, turning and running to the far post where the ball would be duly delivered and he would nod it past the hapless goalkeeper. In Aston Villa's league winning year he scored 20 times out of 38 starts, almost all of them headers, and the majority of those at the far post. The reality is he preferred heading the ball to kicking it, and should the decision be marginal to do either, he would be stooping low to steer it with his forehead.

Two additional factors govern his inclusion here. Firstly, he started his career at the bottom of the footballing tree. Having been sacked by Southport after three games, he moved to Barrow - my own favourite team - languishing at the bottom of the old fourth division. He managed only one game there before being released, considered not good enough for fourth division football. Many years later, after he had been awarded 11 England caps and scored the winning goal in a European Cup Final, and was then managing Wimbledon, the Barrow Supporters sent him a speculative letter asking him whether he remembered his time at Barrow. Of course no-one expected a reply from a busy manager, but such is the accessibility of this footballing legend that not only did he reply, he penned an extremely humourous response, trotting out a couple of Barrow-based anecdotes.

Secondly, and this is something I have always had difficulty reconciling, he dated an ex-girlfriend of mine before I met her. I have always thought it incongruous that a bloke who's posters I had on my wall as a teenager would have a relationship with someone I also did. So now I can go around saying, I am two degrees from Peter Withe.

Billy Hamilton

Here's an admission - I never saw Billy Hamilton live. On the TV yes, but live, no. Regardless of this, I have always had a particular affinity to the Northern Ireland striker primarily because when I was studying for my undergraduate degree in Leeds, my room-mate was an avid Burnley fan who constantly regaled me with Billy Hamilton stories.

My roomy wasn't prone to romanticising his stories and every Sunday evening he would come back from Burnley with Hamilton updates. One particular sticks in my mind. Burnley were chasing the game against opponents I have long since forgotten. The team were piling forward, the winger crosses, but its actually behind Hamilton. Undaunted, he leaps, whilst still maintaining his running forward momentum, but arches his back and neck mid-air, and in an Isaac Newton-defying moment of sublime brilliance, heads it into the back of the net. Of course, that could all be baloney - it wasn't captured on camera anywhere, but I now have a memory of that goal seared into my brain despite being more than 50 miles from the action, and I will keep it with me until my dying day.

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Derren Brown - Showman or Charlatan?

nigel — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:52:32 +0000

Derren Brown - Showman or Charlatan? nigel Sat, 31/10/2009 - 10:52

I used to like Derren Brown. Really, I did. In the late 90s and early 00s he would bedazzle with his cunning, showmanship and sleight of hand. His shows were infrequent, tucked away on an obscure channel during the graveyard shift. His quirky, spooky and mystical look, replete with pruned goatee and bedecked in black garb cut quite a swathe. He was something new and exciting; his unbeatable rock-scissors-paper routine was awe-inspiring. His memory tricks baffling and intriguing and by his own admission achieved though "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship".

Once such routine involved Brown being given a weighty tome (500 pages plus) and told to memorise every word in 30 minutes. After 30 minutes a stooge asks him for the word printed on page xxx, paragraph y, line z and n words in from the margin. Brown dutifully trots out the correct answer with a flourish of showmanship. So how did he do it? Well obviously he didn't memorise the contents of the book - utterly impossible. So we can only be left with the assumption that the trick was dishonest. This is something Brown is at pains to refute - I am often dishonest in my techniques, but always honest about my dishonesty. As I say in each show, 'I mix magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship'. I happily admit cheating, as it's all part of the game. I hope some of the fun for the viewer comes from not knowing what's real and what isn't. I am an entertainer first and foremost, and I am careful not to cross any moral line that would take me into manipulating people's real-life decisions or belief systems.. Hmmm. A paragraph itself short on honesty yet long on duplicity and chicanery.

Over the years Brown has courted controversy. His theatrical self-imperilment in his Russian Roulette show achieved a record amount of complaints against the show's broadcaster. His subliminal and neuro-linguistic programming of a Tote teller forced her to pay out on a losing dog wager. Some of his stunts, barely rising above Victorian Conjurer and Children's Party Entertainer have been lambasted and ridiculed on the Internet.

One of his (appropriately enough) Music Hall shows is a case in point. He picked a victim in the audience - lets call him the 'mark' to use a Grifter's parlance. The mark is questioned initially to gauge his susceptibility - Brown is needing a brash confident lad out to impress his girlfriend. The mark is then presented with a purported 50/50 question - there's a box on the stage which may contain either £500 or £5000 and if the mark guesses correctly, he gets to keep the money. The mark, with a unfounded swagger, immediately proffers £5000 in the mistaken belief that he's outwitted Brown, the assertion being that Brown thinks "everyone will play safe and guess £500 so I'll put £5000 in the box". If the mark had been more considered, more thoughtful, less confident, less man-about-town, in fact less of exactly what Brown identified when selecting him, he would have picked the opposite. Just think about it for a minute. Why would Brown jeapardise £5000? He would have to be wrong 10 times more with £500 to be out of pocket! Add to that Brown's nifty psychological profiling of the mark and you suddenly realise he can't be beaten - or worse, the mark's own personality lost him £500.

Fast forward a few years and Brown's shows have escalated to grand extravaganzas with equally portentous claims and promises. "Tune in on Wednesday and I'll predict the Lotto numbers live just before they are drawn, and furthermore I'll tell you how to do it yourself". Well, that's some claim Mr Brown so lets see whether the show lived up to its billing.

Sure enough, Brown did have the Lotto balls lined up on a rack, and there was a live feed to the BBC's Lotto draw. But hold on a minute, the balls are facing the wrong way so it is impossible for the viewers to actually see the 'predicted' numbers. Brown dismisses this trifle with a breezy "We don't have rights to broadcast the winning numbers before the BBC". SAY WHAT??? You are not doing that buster - you are merely showing a prediction on air which may or may not be correct!! Here we go, this smells worse than a sack full of kippers in the midday sun. The Lotto numbers are drawn on the adjacent TV, and then with great fanfare and the usual lashings of Brown bluster, he swivels the balls around to reveal - to reveal - to reveal - SIX CORRECT BALLS!! A JACKPOT!!

What a letdown. Well done Mr Brown - you have succeeded in nothing more difficult than a cheap conjuring trick. What a phony. To paraphrase veteran magician Paul Daniels' quote 24 hours later, that trick could be accomplished 1000 different ways by any magician worth his salt. So we're off to an inauspicious start, but there's more. The main thrust of the show is used to explain how those six Lotto numbers were 'correctly' predicted.

Brown took a bunch of 20-somethings (hardly a cross-section, but hey, they looked good on TV and who wants to look at grey-haired wrinklies?) and trotted out a cod theory whereby if a group of individuals guess a sequence of Lotto numbers, should those numbers be averaged out, they will represent the actual numbers which will be drawn.

Now this is totally unrelated to a published popular science book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki but Brown peppers his rhetoric with references. Core to this book is a wonderful anecdote in its first chapter concerning Edwardian mathematician Francis Galton. Galton wandered to a livestock fair in 1906 and noticed there was a 'Guess the weight of an ox' competition. 800 people attempted to guess the weight, and rather unsurprisingly no-one got the weight spot on at 1198 pounds . But what was surprising was the mean weight of all those guesses was 1197 pounds! Absolutely incredible! Evidence such as this lead James Surowiecki to consider the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.

So what does Galton's and later Surowiecki's brilliance have in common with Brown's Lotto number guesswork? It doesn't have anything. Nothing at all. Not one iota. There is no connection between the crowd's collective wisdom of guessing the weight of an ox with Brown's bunch of sycophantic pinheads guessing non-tangible random numbers. Brown posits that anyone, should they assemble a few friends for the purpose, be able to replicate Galton's work, only for ox replace random number somewhere between 1 and 49.

This is complete tosh, and Brown knows it. He has been commissioned to deliver a grand wheeze on television and, to maintain public interest, has promised wealth through Lotto wins to all those willing to sit through such nonsense.

Harping back to Brown's assertions, he says I am often dishonest in my techniques, but always honest about my dishonesty. Sorry Derren, you are a busted flush. You are patently dishonest with your claims.
Did you predict the Lotto numbers? No, you did not.
Did you show the public how to replicate for themselves? No, you did not.
Did I believe beforehand you would deliver on either of these promises?No, I did not.

Sorry Derren, but you have tumbled in my estimations. Please go back to performing rock-scissors-paper - I have spent hours trying to figure that out and not succeeded yet.

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