Cerrie Burnell – a pretty children’s TV presenter who, it seems, has managed to upset some parents by only having one arm. Er… what?!
I keep thinking that I should cancel my Campaign for Actually Thinking*.
After all, nobody really cares what I say. I’m just some guy, running a small web business. I code a little (a very little these days) and I talk to people. I carry little influence. So it’s hard to motivate myself in the face of rampant stupidity, but this one really got me:
Cerrie Burnell. Look, she’s lovely, OK? (pic lifted from a BBC site, hope they don’t mind…)
I’ve no idea if Ms Burnell is a great kids presenter or not, but chances are she can’t be bad if she’s got the job with CBeebies. But that’s not the point. And so what if her dodgy arm scares some kids – I’ve had one kid in tears at me because I had dark hair. Little children can be scared of practically anything. I used to be scared of the space under my bed. Terrifying, it was. To be honest, far less scary than an attractive blonde girl could ever be.
So, to the parents, bigots and dolts who complained about her… please, do us all a favour and go away and keep your opinions to your fellow BNP members. Either that or try thinking for a change, but I suspect that’s not likely.
Well, we’re going to try! WordCamp is a small, informal conference all about WordPress and its people.
Wordcamp UK 2008 was held in Birmingham last year. The current list of nominated venues are in Liverpool, Cardiff and London. Read the pdf attached below, and see what you think. Feedback would be great, but if you really want the WordCamp to take place in Liverpool on the 18th and 19th of July you’ll need to pipe up on the official mailing lists. More info at Tony Scott’s blog.
St. George's Hall, Liverpool - not the likely venue. Pic by Me.
At the risk of sounding like an MS Fanboi, I thought I’d bring up Microsoft Office OneNote. I’ve been using this package for general note-taking for some time now, and I’m finding it to be an incredibly useful piece of software.
Thing is – it’s quite hard to explain. It’s a freeform note taking application, but with a number of tricks up its sleeve. It allows for very easy video and sound recording, pen use if you have a tablet PC or a graphics tablet handy, and a neat screen capture tool. Throw in handwriting and image text recognition and you have a pretty potent utility.
And… AND… You can even post notes direct to your blog. In fact, here’s a screenshot of what I’m doing right now – and I’m going to try posting this to my blog to see what happens:
Screen clipping taken: 26/01/2009, 20:26
I can see this as being especially handy for certain collaborative tasks.
Total cost? Well it depends, it comes bundled with a lot of versions of Office, but if you don’t have it you can get it from Amazon and the likes. I’ve seen it on offer for £6 for certain academic licences but for most people it’s going to cost between £36 and £72, give or take a bit.
I feel strangely apologetic for bigging up some Microsoft Software – funny how that’s happened, they clearly have some failings to address with regards to how people feel about them. I do feel they’re improving on this now, and I have to remember that if it wasn’t for MS I doubt I’d have got into coding as it was their excellent yet affordable BASIC that got me started in 1982. And yes, I am that old!
It’s worth noting that in posting this it does do some things slightly strangely – I’m not sure why it adds a one point margin to the left of each<p> tag, for example, but otherwise all seems well. I’m guessing the margin could break some themes – not ours though ;o)
Blah blah blah fascinating introduction blah blah read this blah blah simple list, should only take a few minutes blah blah oh come ON you swines… just click on the link, OK?!
Success is getting something like this - courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
I’m getting tired of lists that make out that ten simple things will make your blog/company/online business/facebook profile a massive success.
What I’m going to post is no doubt contradictory, possibly inflammatory, and may well annoy some people who follow me. But let’s give it a whirl – with the tip, followed by why it won’t make a difference:
1. Blog Daily
Why? After all, if your ramblings are tedious, doing it five times as often won’t necessarily bring you five times the traffic. 90% of the daily traffic on this blog goes to just three posts and two are nearly two years old. And one of Interconnect IT’s clients has a blog that gets, typically, 20x-30x my daily traffic yet he updates his site just once a month. The site? Sniff Petrol, if you were wondering.
2. Create quality content.
Nope, didn’t work for Ebaum. All he did was find stuff other people had created and make it easy to find. Oh, and he slapped his logo over everything to make sure he got brand awareness. He’s not a top ten site, but he doesn’t care… he’s rich.
3. Run affiliate adverts.
Just makes your site look cheap. Doesn’t stop me trying it out every now and again, but I’m a hypocrite.
4. Blog about breaking news.
Pfft – if it’s big and important most of the world are going to BBC News or similar. They’ll only go to your site if you were there, took some amazing photos or video, or added some amazing commentary. And even then, the clickthroughs on adverts will probably add up to about $20 of revenue.
5. Keep your blog specialised.
I don’t. I blog about whatever hits my mind at the time, and I’m doing just fi… oh hang on no, my traffic sucks. Maybe you should do that one.
6. Use social networking.
It makes relatively little difference to the majority of the world – really, it’s a fraction of internet users who use StumbleUpon or Twitter or Digg. The best you can do is seed. People get pretty tired of seeing linkbait on social networks and it’ll lose you friends in the long run.
7. Create something of value.
Some content can be incredibly valuable. It can give superb advice and be incredibly informative. However, it won’t bring anybody to your site if they don’t know about it.
8. Use lists.
Lists always suggest an easy-to-read article that can be easily read during a tea-break or while the boss goes to the toilet… but although they bring easy traffic, they very rarely turn visitors into repeat visitors. Most will turn up, read the list, and leave. They won’t be back. Their value is almost inevitably zero.
9. Keep them wanting more.
Actually, this one will make a difference. Peep Show’s next series is being eagerly awaited by everyone because the six episodes they do each season just aren’t enough. In the online world that’d generate a lot of flack… but they don’t hear that, because the recipe is correct. So to that purpose, there’s no number 10 in this list.
Look, blog to make money, to entertain yourself, show off, get better jobs or to entertain your friends. It doesn’t really matter so long as it makes you happy. Traffic doesn’t matter either, and it certainly won’t make you happy when you discover that 1,000,000 have visited and not spent a penny on your Adsense links.
Ultimately, that one visitor a year who decides to pay for you to come advise his company for £1m is way more interesting than a million visitors who’ll pay you nothing. Sniff Petrol has won its owner plenty of business without a single affiliate link or piece of Adsense. The only important thing is that your blog is good for the people to whom it would be important and who are also important to you. If my blog was a huge hit with Uzbekistanese nose-flute players then it’d not make any difference to me in any way because if it does exist, then I probably hate their music.
Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that some big changes are being lined up for me, Interconnect IT and Spectacu.la – watch this space!
I don’t talk much about business on this blog, but I’ve decided to share what I’m doing to increase my productivity at work. So far these changes are making a great deal of difference.
An infinite blogger.
I don’t talk much about business on this blog, but I’ve decided to share what I’m doing to increase my productivity at work. So far these changes are making a great deal of difference.
Dump timewasters like the StumbleUpon or Digg toolbars from Firefox for any work related PC. I love it, but it’s there for entertainment. This is my work PC and I can’t afford the easy distraction.
Use Twitter more. I know it sounds like a potential distraction, but by being selective about who I follow I find it adds to my community connection – and that can make me more productive, rather than less. Don’t be offended if I don’t follow you back – it’s just that what you’re twittering about isn’t connected to what I do, even if it’s very interesting.
Declutter my online life. That means unsubscribing from mail-lists that I’m not really that interested in, and filtering the rest for reading when I’m not busy.
Declutter business. All companies have to deal with them – the small clients that constantly ask you lots of niggling questions which never actually lead to a sale or any real income. Work out a way of politely dumping them. You could consider referring them on to someone who’s just starting up and who needs the small clients.
Implement proper time-tracking. Use a simple grid sheet where you can quickly mark units of time against clients and jobs. That way you can establish where you’re wasting time and money.
Turn off IM except for a short period each day – especially if you have chatty friends.
Use larger monitors. I now use a 24″ screen at the office and a smaller 22″ at the home office. Both are dramatically more productive than smaller screens. And they’re not even especially expensive these days.
Use your laptop like a desktop computer. By that, I mean get to your desk and connect it a full size monitor (see point 7!), keyboard and mouse. Use the laptop screen as a secondary screen if you like, but that’s all. I don’t care what anybody says, but a laptop alone is always less productive unless you’re single-tasking most of the time – and in today’s connected world that’s rare.
Learn to use Outlook. There’s a lot of great productivity features in there. Outlook 2007 is especially neat and brings the game on. Office for the Home or for Small Businesses is pretty cheap these days and well worth it.
Actually, learn to use MS Office properly. It’s got some amazing tricks available to you. Excel can gather data from websites and keep it refreshed, so you can use it in your spreadsheets. Access can make up the basics of a decent CRM system in no time at all. And if you get a decent MS Word template your documents can be clearly structured and indexed in no time at all. In fact, if you join at Spectacu.la their WordPress User Guide has all the styles in it that you could ever need for a comprehensive document.
That’s enough for now, but needless to say that a little investment can reap incredible benefits to your work life. Yes, you’ll need to devote a little time and/or money, but if you gain more of both within a short while then everyone’s happy, no?
Health & Safety - not new, and not unique to the UK (public domain poster, thanks to Wikipedia.org)
The UK Health & Safety Executive is run by largely sensible, clear minded folk that want to help us to keep doing what we do, but ideally without losing fingers, testicles or lives.
So why do they get so much flack? Why do we keep hearing tales of children not being allowed to play in snow, in case they slip and get hurt? What about risk assessments that prevent village fetes from selling cups of soup in case visitors get scalded?
Mostly it’s bullshit. Stories made up or inflated, often with important facts removed by right wingers or libertarians who want to discredit the whole idea that people do, sometimes, need third parties to come along help protect others.
Food is supposed to be hot. If you burn yourself by drinking a soup that’s just out of the pot then that’s you’re look out. Health & Safety accept that common knowledge exists.
Health & Safety Bullshitting Consultants
So how do the more ridiculous, and genuine, cases arise? Because any damn fool can set themselves up as a Health & Safety consultant. There are no qualifications required, no accreditation enforced. There are, of course, bodies that provide qualifications in the subject, but they’re not compulsory.
So if you want to use a H&S consultant, find a real one – with experience or genuine skills and knowledge of the area concerned. When I’m racing I quite appreciate it when I’m advised that my harness is incorrectly tied into place, because I don’t want to die in an accident. It won’t be an H&S consultant, but somebody who understand both the risks and the technology.
Don’t Use H&S as an Excuse for Non Thinking
If you’re someone like a teacher who’s looking after kids and you’re scared that if the children in your charge could get hurt, don’t use H&S as an excuse for stopping them from getting outside and doing stuff. Parents present their fears without using Health & Safety as an excuse, so teachers should present them a bit more intelligently too.
If, as a teacher, you start getting scared that if your kids get hurt, you’ll end up in court, then that is a valid reason to express doubts about your involvement with these children. I can understand – some parents are morons (there is no license required to become one) and they believe their children are the unflawed product of their loins. Of course, children are actually manipulative, scheming little brats that haven’t yet learned how to behave in real company. Exposing them to risks, other people, and a bit of actual life helps them to develop. So for God’s sakes, let them play conkers once in a while, even if there’s an occassional bruised forehead.
But if you try to avoid conflict by blaming a large and relatively misunderstood public body then you’re doing us all a disservice and deserve to be severely hurt in a workplace paper-cut accident. If H&S can’t work properly, we’ll all be at more risk from exploding fuel tanks and sharp, pointy hood ornaments.
Automatic Rising Bollards – in my opinion a dangerous hazard that can cause serious damage to property and injury to car occupants. Come on guys – you can think of better ways to keep traffic out….
Image by Eric “Pause” Weigle on Flickr – cc sa
I’ve already expressed my distaste for rising bollard barriers (but the video I linked to then has long gone, sorry), and it’s not difficult to see how dangerous putting strong barriers out of the line of sight of a driver can be. You can say he shouldn’t be there, but the guy in the video attached here was just turning up to service a lift. He didn’t need to have his day ruined, and a company car wrecked, because of a poorly thought out barrier design.
Inflate a problem, lie about it, redefine some words, and hey presto! You have a way to make a new law that will probably cause a lot of harm but will tick the boxes of certain voters whilst not alienating others.
From Wikimedia - image by Julia Costa, Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5
There’s some subtle xenophobia in all this too, which people forget. The notion of this law will make life a lot harder for already vulnerable foreign prostitutes, but that particular reality is completely missed because… well, knock-on consequences for foreigners are never well considered when setting legislation.
So just a short post then, something bigger to come soon. I’m getting my teeth into this subject matter – there are so many easy targets in the Campaign for Thinking.
As part one of my campaign to introduce the concept of actually thinking to UK media, pundits and government, I’m covering the nasty little idea of automatic speed limiters being introduced to cars – so that people can, basically, stop thinking about the speed they drive at. That’ll work…
This subject has been rolling along for some years now. Basically the technology now exists to be able to instruct a car what speed it should travel at.
Now, if you’re a control freak, this is like a gift from heaven. If you’re a control freak in power (yes, that includes you Jacqui Smith) then it’s even more wonderful, because it hands you a whole ton of power.
Like everything, of course, it’s not all bad. There are plenty of good reasons for speed limiting cars, trucks and even fire engines. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea.
How The Pro Speed Limiters Present Their Argument
Slow, yet also lethal - public domain image with thanks to Wikipedia
There are currently a lot of fears in society, especially Western society. We’re scared of global warming, the economy, terrorism, and dying in a fiery ball of fire when some chav in a misguidedly tuned Vauxhall Nova comes careering head-on towards you as a result of massive overconfidence and a lack of skill. Throw those arguments into the air and you have some pretty strong arguments as to why we should introduce speed limiters.
Here’s a quick list of their key points:
Safety – you’ll hear this a lot. And it’s true. Go slower and if all else is equal safety will go up.
Economy – by being forced to go slower, you’ll drive more economically and be able to save the world from Global Warming at the same time.
Reduced need for thirsty, fast cars – true to a degree because what’s the point in a big V8 if you hit speed-limited wall at 70mph?
Reduced load on drivers – no need to think about speed, or worry about speed cameras.
It’s optional, there’s no need to fit a speed limiter if you don’t want it.
If you do have it, there’s an override button for those rare occasions you may need to go faster than strictly legal.
If only a minority of cars have this limiter, the effect will be to slow down others without it.
Lot’s of people are killed or injured daily, and anyone arguing against speed controls must be in favour of those deaths.
The arguments are mostly presented by different types of organisation. You have the emotionally irritating Brake, and the more calm but government funded (don’t forget this fact, they may sound independent but they aren’t) Motoring Forum, the UK Commission for Integrated Transport, and various other safety campaigners.
I can’t find a quote from Jacqui Smith on this subject, but I’m sure she’ll be along soon.
And The Argument Against
Well there has to be some rational argument against this, but unfortunately we’ve only got Safe Speed getting all the media attention on the other side. Holy Fucking Shit. I mean, really. Have you seen them? You wouldn’t trust these people to decorate your house, so why would you trust them with setting the agenda on speed limits and motoring policy?
Instead, why not get a psychologist who’s studied driving onto your show? Or, at a stretch, someone from the Institute of Advanced Motorists? But no, instead you get to listen to a muppet from Brake arguing with a muppet from Safe Speed. I suppose there’s only so many pundits to go round and the radio and TV stations pick the easiest ones they can find.
Sheesh.
But here we go – this is other people’s arguments, don’t forget. Mine come later.
It’ll encourage zombie behaviour, which is almost certainly true – in the US where freeways were once limited to the mind-numbingly dull speed of 55mph, you get to see a lot of this.
It’s a symptom of control-freakery – yep, almost certainly.
Speed doesn’t kill, it’s inattentive driving, which kind of cycles back to the first point.
It’s the thin end of a wedge which will end with all cars having compulsory speed limiters.
It probably won’t affect KSI (Kills and Serious Injuries) rates in the positive manner the pro side would like to see.
Slowing down can cause more accidents.
Thankfully, spokefolk from the RAC, AA and the likes are occassionally wheeled out to discuss such issues and they tend to be a bit more rational and thought out. But they’ve become rather dysfunctional resellers of insurance and recovery services these days, rather than the clubs and associations that they originally started out as. Consequently they have to toe a fine line between keeping customers (many of whom are the unthinking fools I worry about) and not upsetting the government (filled with the misguidedly thinking fools I also worry about) into adding more restrictions to both their customers and their businesses. So they tend towards making statements rather than take the risk of getting involved on radio or TV.
Of course, avoiding radio or TV is a sensible move for many. I’ve listened to myself on Radio and I’m clearly a rambling buffoon who doesn’t know when to shut up and who talks over others. Heaven knows what would happen if I found myself on TV. Of course, it’s not totally bad to be a buffoon – look how well Boris Johnson’s done out of it.
The best argument against this, so far, comes from the easy to respect Derek Charters, from the Motor Industry Research Association, who believes limiting speed automatically could cause accidents.
“The last thing you need is one car to be overtaking and then pull back in, in front of the cars in front, because that braking event will then cause everybody to start to slow down, which will then compress the traffic, which then causes an incident.”
The Dave’s Attempt to Think on this Subject
Oh Jesus, do we need the government controlling us just a bit more?
Would government controlled GPS units eventually be used to track our cars’ every movement?
A world full of cars doing identical speeds is so horrifically soporific that I suspect we’d be having massive pile-ups in no time.
The unthinking are the worst people to get this technology – they’ll just turn into motoring zombies.
Going faster is fun. Sometimes it’s good to be able to have a bit of fun, you know, even if it does make the world ever so slightly less safe.
All speeds are dangerous – being crushed to death by a 2mph Audi Q7 isn’t much fun either – stop people from realising how dangerous cars are and boom! more dead people.
It’ll probably mean the end of the fantastic Top Gear show.
It’ll make moving to South America far more appealing.
The key arguments for or against this idea are really just noise. The question we should be asking is at what point should drivers give up responsibility for the movements of their cars? Lane sensing technology has matured enough that you could conceivably place your Honda at the beginning of the M6 and drive all the way to Scotland without touching the wheel, brakes or throttle again, coming to a stop when the traffic in front does so, and accelerating to a set speed when it’s possible to do so. I remain to be convinced that all this is a good idea, but at least it’s entirely within the control of the driver – he can choose what is and is not switched on, and where.
GPS technology is constantly improving, as are sensors. It’s only a matter of time before we can simply climb into our cars, shout “take me to work, autocar!” and climb into the back for a nap. Sounds like a wonderful idea to me and I wouldn’t care what speed the car travelled at so long as it woke me up on arrival and neatly parked itself while I go for a pee.
Partial implementation, on a wide scale, of speed limiters or even smart cruise control could be lethal. Each car would end up driving at ever so slightly different speeds. Overtaking moves could be measured in miles, and it wouldn’t matter if you didn’t have a speed limiter – you’d be stuck behind those with them fitted. And those who choose to have them fitted would be sitting in a smug pool of self-superiority, knowing they’re driving at the maximum safe speed. They’d be wrong, of course. 70mph is safe when it’s clear and dry. It’s safe even when it’s wet. But in a deluge it’s lethal. But having given up the act of thinking about speed they would just keep their foot mashed down on the carpet. Until they eventually plough into the back of the car in front that they couldn’t see.
And that’s why this topic has made it into the Campaign for Thinking. Full automation is a good thing, it means you can go and think about something else. But a world full of drivers who believe thinking about speed is only for the government… God preserve us!
Now, could the government get on with thinking about things they could help us with? Infrastructure, international security, the economy, tax… that kind of stuff? The big, hard problems that they have the power to do something about? 3,000 people a year die on the roads. 60,000 people a year die from murders in South Africa. And providing assistance to unstable or impoverished countries could save the lives of millions. Unfortunately it’s hard to get elected on the promise of saving the lives of AIDS stricken Tanzanians, but you could save or dramatically improve the lives of more than 3,000 of them with the millions spent on speed limiter studies. Yes, I know it’s a straw man argument, but a little sense of perspective on the point of all this would be useful.
Introducing my personal, one man mini-crusade – the Campaign for Thinking. It’s going to be a scattered stream of consciousness thing. It might be good therapy for me. Who knows?
This is where my campaign to encourage people to Use Their Frickin’ Brains is starting. It’s a personal crusade, but now that 2008 has come to an end I’ve come to the conclusion that far too many people are choosing to abrogate their personal responsibilities. Possibly because the world is too confusing and complex for them, but more likely because they’re just too damn lazy to actually think for a while.
The Inspiration
Where on Earth do I start? But the item that got me the most, recently, was a story about think-tanks encouraging the use of speed limiting devices in cars. I’m not going to go into detail about it all, as that’s for a post in this section, but it’s a completely bat-shit insane idea. I can see the logic behind it, but what we have here are people who have looked at the small picture and either deliberately or inadvertantly missed the big picture. And I see it All. The. Time.
It’s driving me insane. If I see one more group of parents protesting against Wi-Fi being installed in the schools of their mobile phone toting progeny I’ll be tempted to just mow them down with my Bluetooth device. Clearly, for their safety, I need to find a release. And this is it.
The Agenda
I can’t possibly hope to pin-point every possible case of not thinking. I mean, that would need all the thinking people to devote their entire lives to the job. No, I’m going to highlight items and people in the media and political spheres who are cheerfully spreading or pormoting misinformation, rumour and displaying the primary symptoms of non-thinking.
Basically, I’m going to target the following:
People who protest
Over-zealous non-thinkers who adopt any idea like it’s a religion
Religion
Authoritarians
Libertarians
Jacqui Smith
Actually, any sod who can’t be bothered to think
Even if it was just a momentary slip
Obviously it’s all going to depend on the time I have available, but hey, I need the release.
Some articles are going to be carefully thought out, illustrated and cited. Others will be the incoherent ramblings of a guy who should probably think more too. If you don’t like what I say, tell me in the comments sections after each post.
_1955.jpg "hk_industrial_safety_poster_keep_clean_1955")
