A day in the life of a Middle Manager...

According to the book quiz...

You're The Catcher in the Rye!
by J.D. Salinger

You are surrounded by phonies, and boy are you sick of them! In an ongoing struggle to search for a land without phonies, you end up running away from everything, from school to consequences. In this process, you reveal that many people in your life have suffered torments and all you really want to do is catch them as they fall. Perhaps using a baseball mitt. Your biggest fans are infamous psychotics.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Printer Cartridges

WHY are they so flippin' expensive?

I bought an Epson Stylus CX3200 around 6 months ago to replace an aging printer and I'm very happy with it in general. However, the cost of ink cartridges is pure extortion!

I mean, I paid < 100 quid for the printer (95 to be exact) and the carts cost

• Black - 30 quid
• Colour - 25 quid

each! Excuse me? Have I wandered into some bizarre parallel universe? Epson expect me to pay one third of the cost of the printer itself for a black ink cartridge that holds 17ml of ink? I know what they'll say -- "Our ink is specially designed to work flawlessly with our products and if you use any other ink you're taking a risk that you may break your printer." Yeah, right!

It's perfectly obvious this is a classic example of baiting a customer in with a low price on the hardware then making the main profit on the consumables.

To attempt to make it even harder Epson use a system called "Intellidge" on the cartridges -- this is essentially a small chip that the printer reads to say whether the cartridge is full / empty. If you buy a clone cartridge that doesn't have one of these chips the printer won't recognise it. Even worse, if you buy one of the refilling kits you see at computer fairs and refill the cartridge it won't work. Not unless you've bought another small piece of kit to reset the chip! This is because the chip on the cartridge has set itself to tell the printer that the cart is empty...

So, what to do?

Personally, I just cannot bring myself to pay the extortionate prices for genuine Epson cartridges so I've bitten the bullet and bought some clone carts that already have the "intellidge" chip fitted. In doing this I've saved > 50% of the cost of buying Epson carts.

All I can do is hope they're fine... I'm sure they will be.

Animals on the Underground!

This image (clicky for larger) is part of Animals on the Underground which is an interesting site all about the animals that can be made out of the London Tube Map. Must admit, I'd never quite looked at the tube map that way before. ;)

Then again, when in London and needing to take the tube somewhere I tend to use Métro on my (comparatively) ancient Palm Pilot IIIc rather than looking at the map. :)

(and for all those who have seen this a million times before, I hadn't so it was worth a quick entry)

Illuminating...

I saw this photo on the front page of the Guardian on Saturday and meant to blog about it then. However, the BBC have beaten me to it so here's a link to their story.

Hundreds of fluorescent tubes have been "planted" in a field in an art event demonstrating electricity fields under power lines.

Rows of lights are flickering into life each evening as a result of emissions from the cables above.

I think it's thoroughly astounding and, for me, raises all sorts of questions about living near power lines and the electrical fields they emit.

Scary stuff

Thanks to this entry on Frank's blog I found this BBC online story. Obviously I'm not the only one to find this a scary prospect...

The US Army is building a second version of Earth on computer to help it prepare for conflicts around the world.

Oh deary me... "So, what happens if we bomb this country into oblivion?" "Hang on, no point bombing there -- no oil!"

They'd be better off concentrating on climate change, as this story shows all too graphically. I remember seeing a documentary about this not too long ago and thinking "God help us," hopefully America is finally waking up to reality -- you can't carry on the way you have been. Doubt it though, doubt it very much.

The Thermohaline conveyor is the only reason that the UK, which is on the same latitude as Labrador gets such a mild temperate climate. The prospect of it shutting down is scary, and there is already evidence that it is starting to at least slow down...

So, Singles sales are down...

... but album sales are up. At least according to the BPI.

Interestingly, according to this press release

Between 1998 and 2002 (the last full year for which data is available) worldwide sales of recorded music fell by 18%. Over the same period the value of sales in the UK rose by 6%.

Well well, so the UK consumer is buying more music. Of course, as with all things, it ain't necessarily so... Note that they say the value of sales in the UK rose by 6%, not the volume -- that only rose by 4.9%. Being the cynic that I am I fully believe that the only reason the value of sales rose is because we're being gouged out of every last penny by the money-grabbers in the music industry. In the press release they also say

Albums by artists such as Dido, Busted, Will Young and the Darkness helped drive the increase. Meanwhile price-cutting means 62% of single CD albums now sell for £9.99 or less.

Agreed, the price of albums I really don't want to buy has come down. Even then I suspect that the prices of these albums have only come down because people were choosing to buy from places like CD-WOW or waiting til they went abroad to somewhere like the USA or Canada where albums are also very cheap (comparatively). I know when I'm in Canada I tend to buy lots of albums. On one memorable occasion I remember walking round A&B sound with C carrying around $500 CAD worth of CD's between us. The security guard was taking a keen interest in us that day! ;)

The point is that all those CD's would have probably cost us £500 or so over here so we were essentially getting them for half-price.

Anyway, carrying on with the press release ;)

The one cause for concern in the year end figures, says Jamieson, is the singles market in which unit shipments were down 30.7% to 36.4m and value was down 33.6% to £64.4m compared with 2002.

"Paradoxically all I can really see in the singles market is growth, sadly, however, most of it via illegal downloading. If we can transfer this theft to the new legitimate sites, we could see soon a return to the golden age of singles sales.” says Jamieson.

Wow. Singles sales are down? Really? Perhaps that's more to do with them being close to half the price of an album and the consumer getting virtually nothing in return? If you look at the top 40 singles chart on HMV's site you'll see that yes, a lot of the singles are £1.99 but many of them are £2.99 or worse, £3.99! Given that I can buy an album for £8.99 from CD-WOW why on Earth would I buy singles? Perhaps if they were 50p, 99p at most.

Note also that they're blaming 'illegal downloading' for the decline in singles sales. Bzzzzttt! Wrong again! No-one is buying singles because they're crappy value!

It's time the BPI embraced technology and saw that all singles are are teasers for albums. The BPI should encourage record companies to showcase singles as MP3's on their websites, this (IMHO) would encourage album sales and everyone would win as album sales would increase and the consumer would know they were going to buy something they liked.

In addition, albums should be no more than £9.99 for single albums or £12.99 for double albums.

If this doesn't happen (and it won't) people will continue to download MP3's from wherever they can get them so they can listen to new music. I, for one, have bought a number of albums I would never have even looked at because I heard snippets of them on MP3. I'm guessing that this experience is not unique.

It is also interesting that while album sales were declining recently (by all of 0.1%) the BPI also blamed 'illegal downloading' for that.

I am Charlie Brown!

You are Charlie Brown!

Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Encounter

This image (clicky for larger) is "Encounter" by Stephen Broadbent. Carla wrote about it ages ago but this is the first time I've managed to get over to where it is (right by a roundabout on a busy motorway) to get a photo. I had to risk life and limb to snap this shot but I thought it showed the sculpture in a reasonable light.

It also shows how large it is (91 feet). Thankfully today was a nice day so, apart from the other street furniture (the lighting/signs etc) there are no real distractions. The box directly underneath the sculpture appears to be a huge power supply of some description (I guess for the lighting and the mobile phone mast that's hidden inside).

I'm not sure that they've succeeded in their aims of "creating that sense of ownership within the area, to give locals a sense of identity" either. Birchwood, and Warrington as a whole, struggle with identity being -- as they are -- slap bang in the middle of the two major cities of the North West (Liverpool and Manchester.)

Still, it's nice that someone is at least trying to encourage people to identify with the area. Then again, as an "outsider" myself having come from Oldham originally I've never felt like I identified with Warrington. If we weren't moving to Canada, hopefully in the near future, we'd probably move back to Lancashire somewhere -- possibly Bury.

Bandwidth Theft

Some people call it hotlinking but in reality it's bandwidth theft. I've been suffering for a little while with a couple of graphics used over our blogs being hotlinked in other sites. I've finally found the sites (one is a russian bulletin board and the other is someone elses blog).

As a temporary measure I renamed the graphics but anyone with a braincell can easily find the new URL (just look in the HTML for the page) so I needed a more permanent solution.

As I had a bit of time on my hands today I implemented a proper solution using .htaccess so hopefully the bandwidth theft will stop as anyone attempting to hotlink a graphic should just get a broken link.

We'll see.

The best thing about this is I know more about htaccess now than I did before! :)

I'm a cynic

At least according to this quiz on the BBC website.

Not sure I believe that! :)

Well, actually I do. Everyone I know knows I'm an industrial-grade cynic... ;)

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

Please see our latest post on Migratory Meanderings for details.

Political correctness gone mad

From page 10 in The Times for today and probably not an online story.

We Three Persons

The three wise men were not necessarily wise and may not have been men, according to the Church of England's General Synod.

The visitors who followed a star to the child Jesus must henceforth be referred to as magi in prayers, the Church decreed, thus removing any hint as to what gender they might have been.

Honestly! The world is going mad! :-/

Employment in Warrington and in general

Yesterday, while working where I do (no names, no pack drill), I heard a news piece on the local radio station (which is detestable but this blog isn't about the crappy music they insist on playing all day)...

The story, which I've tried in vain to find sources for and failed, was about how employment in Warrington had improved massively over the last 12 months and how the town was now, employment-wise, a much better place to be than most other places in the north-west of the UK.

Unsurprisingly, I beg to differ...

Warrington, for some reason, has become the Bangalore of North-Western England with a very high percentage of call-centres. Don't quite know how many but whenever I see jobs advertised in the local rag they are almost inevitably for people to staff the phones at call centres for various companies.

These jobs are high-pressure low-pay roles which some people will excel at and some will hate. I'm in the latter category. Thing is, you see these jobs advertised every week which must mean that staff turnover is absolutely through the roof.

The other main employer to have come into Warrington in the last 12 months is Tesco who have built a huge store in the middle of town. Supermarket jobs are also low-paid and generally part-time.

The person they brought onto the radio was saying that all this job creation was good for Warrington. Again, I beg to differ on this point.

How do they expect anyone to be able to get ahead in life when all they are earning is existance wages? The wages that are earned at the jobs described above are generally in the £5.10 -> £5.50 per hour bracket. This means that for a 38 hour working week (which, remember someone working in a supermarket would struggle to actually get) the gross salary is approx. £200.00. Take away the government's tax take and you'd be left with around approx. £170.00 for a week's work! For my North American readers this is the equivalent of earning around $300 US a week.

You can't do much with that. You can barely pay bills and afford to eat.

And there, in essence, is the point. HOW does the government expect people to be able to save for their retirement or generally get ahead in life if the majority are only earning just about enough to scrape by with no extras?

Perhaps the low-pay culture and the debt culture go hand-in-hand?

According to this story from the BBC on 8 September last year the total owed on unsecured personal debt in the UK was £140 BILLION (around $250 BILLION US). This total represents every man woman and child in the UK owing over £2,300 in debt.

Am I really the only person who finds that an incredibly scary statistic?

We have droves (and I mean the vast majority) of people in the UK in low-paid jobs where they're struggling to get by on a day-to-day basis so they're using the credit cards that they're being offered on a basically day-by-day basis to get through. Eventually they borrow so much they can't service the debt with their earnings so they end up having to go to one of these debt consolidation companies that advertise non-stop on TV throughout the day. These companies then hold a charge over their homes and if they fail to pay BAM they're out on the street.

The country appears to be locked into a vicious cycle with seemingly no end in sight.

Possible name change

I'm thinking of changing the name of this blog again...

Currently thinking of just shortening the name to

A day in the life...

which is how I tend to refer to the blog anyway.

I'm inviting comments for a few days before I make the change (which will only take about 30 seconds!)

Take back the web

Goodbye Firebird, Hello FireFox!

Yes, another update another name for the next generation Mozilla browser. Because of copyright issues again... Hopefully they've found a name that will stick this time. Just downloaded and installed v0.8 here and it works fine and seems much faster than Firebird 0.7. Update now! Just be aware that lots of extensions don't seem to be ready yet but they'll no doubt come on-stream over the next few hours / days.

GI

This looks like extremely good news for diabetics in the UK. From just-food.com.

UK supermarket company Tesco is to label its own-brand foods with a 'glycemic index', which ranks carbohydrates according to their effect on blood glucose levels.

The information will be useful to those following a low-carb diet, as well as athletes who need to restore blood-sugar levels after exercise and diabetics, reported Marketing.

Tesco is reportedly in talks with Olympic rower Sir Steve Redgrave about appearing in an advertising campaign to back the new labels. Redgrave is vice-president of the Diabetes UK charity.

As Tesco are the UK's largest grocery retailer by quite a large margin this is definitely one area where they lead and others will follow.

This can only be good news for diabetics, as the principles of the Glycaemic Index should be well known to all with diabetes. Essentially the lower the GI number the lower the rise in blood glucose and the longer the effect lasts. High-GI foods like white bread / white rice etc should be pretty much avoided or eaten very much in moderation with careful testing afterwards.

When you're diabetic carbohydrates are your enemy... Well, simple carbs like sugar are. Complex carbs are OK-ish, again in moderation. Eating a high-carb diet is a no-no. This doesn't mean you can just do an atkins-type diet and eat protein only for the rest of your life as I reckon you'd get pretty sick from that in all sorts of other ways fairly quickly.

As I was only diagnosed as type 1 last year I'm still learning lots so all the above is MY opinion only. You don't half learn a lot about how your body works when you need to understand it so you don't get really ill!

In other good news for diabetics, Morrisons have declared that Diabetes UK is going to be their Charity of the year for 2004.

Both the above news items mean that diabetes is starting to get a higher profile. As a diabetic I say lets keep it there! Promoting understanding of the disease should get rid of some of the prejudices that are still present. Like the "can you eat that" syndrome...

Where have I been...

... in Britain?

Our upcoming decision on whether to actually move (it depends on whether I get a proper job by mid-March - if not, we go through with it) has had me thinking which is always dangerous...

As of today, which counties of England, Wales and Scotland have I actually spent time in rather than just driving through?

In the following list I am using the county names as provided by the program I used to get the graphic. My personal opinion (coming from Lancashire originally) is that Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and some of Cheshire should be amalgamated back into the REAL Lancashire. You can find out more about the campaign to do just this on the Friends of Real Lancashire website.

If you click on the link below you can see the result in graphical format (the graphic is a bit big to have on the front page) but as text the list is...

Scotland

• Borders


• Dumfries and Galloway


• Edinburgh & Falkirk & Lothian


• Fife


• Glasgow & Renfrewshire


• Lanarkshire

Wales

• Conwy


• Sir Ddinbych (Denbighshire)


• Sir y Fflint (Flintshire)


• Gwynedd


• Wrecsam (Wrexham)


• Sir Ynys Môn (Anglesey)

England - North

• Cheshire


• Cumbria


• Lancashire


• Liverpool & Merseyside


• Greater Manchester


• Yorkshire

England - Midlands

• Derbyshire

England - South

• Berkshire


• Cornwall


• Devon


• Greater London


• Wiltshire

What this has done is made me realise just how much of my own country I have yet to see! This piddly little island country and I've seen what, a third or so of it by county? Better get my skates on if I'm going to see any more of it before we finally go!

I've visited the counties in yellow. Which counties have you visited? made by marnanel map reproduced from Ordnance Survey map data by permission of the Ordnance Survey. © Crown copyright 2001.

CD WOW drop the surcharge

Astonishing... As you'll know if you read my previous entry on this subject CD WOW were pretty much forced by the BPI to up their prices by 2 quid a CD in the UK and Ireland.

I got this email last night...

Dear Member,

WOW! We've been able to remove the additional charges for deliveries to the UK and Ireland on CDs.

We've been working our little cotton socks off to source our Chart Albums within the EU at the lowest possible price and cutting our margins even more.

In simple terms, from today the additional charges are no longer applicable. Chart CDs remain at £8.99* including deliveries to the UK - yippeee!

There have been a few cutbacks in the office, I'm working out of the YMCA and using an etch-a-sketch as my PC was sold.

But fear not - you get our great CD price - and I'm loving the YMCA tomato soup!

Thank you for your overwhelming support!

Warmest Regards,
CD WOW!

Now, either they've managed to squeeze their EU suppliers into matching the prices they got from Asia etc., or they found that their business dropped off the face of the planet when they introduced the surcharge... I'd like to think it's a combination of the two.

In any case it's a winning scenario for the music buyer in the UK so rejoice! :)

UPDATE 05 Feb 04 @ 13:08

Apparently the BPI have won an injunction against CD-WOW so they've had to drop the surcharge, at least until it returns to court on 1 March. More at el reggio.

Diet Coke with Lime!

This sounds yummy! I like Diet Coke with Lemon and hopefully the reformulation will only make it better. Who knows when the UK will finally get it though? Probably next year or something, if ever. If anyone from the US is reading and has tried this (if you've seen it yet) please do leave a comment to let us know if it's good! :)