Royal Mail – Doomed! I Tell You.

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Lets not lose sight of the reason why these public spirited workers are taking action, they are being asked to “work the hours they are paid for”.

Commentor Guardian Website

The end of an era is finally here, Labour tried to Privatise the Royal Mail and failed because of Union opposition. Now out of greed and short sightedness the very same union are painting themselves into a corner the business will never recover from.

Amazon, Argos & eBay, The life blood of what is left of the Royal Mail are setting up to drop them like a stone on the back of any industrial action. Small businesses are up in arms and there is even a petition.
Continue reading “Royal Mail – Doomed! I Tell You.”

How I became Inspector Gadget.

There are certain points in your life where you can’t help but look back on the preceding years. Officially I have now left college on study leave, until 20 June, which is my last day ever. So how the hell did I end up at this point.

My first exposure to a computer was a windows 3.1 machine in 1995, it was god awful but I was only five and young kids and technology don’t really get on. It was a good few years before I got a computer of my own, I ended up with a Pentium 1 MX running Windows 95, which didn’t last long. I couldn’t play any games on it, and it was stable as a long pole with a plate on it. So inevetably it was upgraded to a machine running Windows 98 Pentium 2, with a decent graphics card and MPEG decoder card.

 

Its probably at that point that the bug really caught me, from then on in I had a slew of applications and experiments going on the poor computer, which I still have under my desk. Three computers later and I made the big switch to Mac, something which I haven’t regretted, and still manage to keep up with windows excluding Vista which is almost as bad as 3.1. I also managed to pick up Ruby on Rails and a bit of PHP along the way, and ashamed as I am to say it Visual Basic.

People always ask me how I know how computers work. The simple answer is I have been tinkering with them for far too long. Every computer I have owned has been broken replaced upgraded and attacked by me, leading me to come across practically every common error you can get. Its sad to say but I can usually diagnose a hardware fault before the BIOS has finished its self test at boot up, and a software problem by hitting less then 10 commands.

The trend over the last few years is people are using technology every waking moment, but very few know how the stuff works. I love knowing how it works, and couldn’t really care less about using it. I will strip things down take them to bits, rebuild them, and then maybe use them. Because of this I have a collection of gadgets and gizmos that few other people my age can boast. It also means, that college work can sometimes come a distant second to a new gadget or blog post.

I don’t procrastinate as such, I just love technology to distraction. Wait a minute that is technically procrastinating. I don’t know what career I may choose, convergent technologies mean that practically any field is open to me.

Best bit is I know there will never be a boring job, technology is getting more and more exciting the closer we get to the point on the curve we drop off.  

Confessions of a Serial Soundtrack Collector

It seems no matter how good a film is, the music that goes with the film is always under appreciated, while there are exceptions to the rule we really should pay more attention to the music, it will make or break a film.

I don’t really know hoe I ended up collecting soundtracks, but two moments that really standout are; tracking down a piece of music used the in 2004 BAFTAs and another piece of music featured in the South Bank Show.

The music from the BAFTAs was probably the easiest to track down, I just emailed them. It took a couple of weeks but they emailed me back answer: Whisper of a Thrill – From Meet Joe Black – Thomas Newman. Within seconds the CD was bought and on its way. Its OK if you can email the people responsible and get them to tell you the music used but in the case of my second hunt, the emailing method wasn’t so fruitful.

After watching the South Bank Show, I had the I must have that music moment and started on my merry way trying to track it down by google to no avail, I had some idea of who the composer could be Craig Armstrong or Thomas Newman, so I loaded the ITV website and sent them an email. I have found since then both ITV and the BBC hate these inquiries and just brush them off, Channel 5 usually give a better response. I got the typical response, “Due to the nature of the way we create our programming there is no record of the music for each program.” I spent another few months searching, and had all but given up hope on finding the elusive piece of music, when i chanced upon a newly upload Craig Armstrong Album on iTunes. I had found it. Finding Beauty – Craig Armstrong within a couple of seconds it was downloaded.

I am sure that there isn’t just me who has these little quests, I am also sure that many people unlike me will give up on finding the song they were looking for. I wish the BBC and ITV would setup websites that listed all the music from each program. I think music companies should be actively encouraging the publishing of music in film and TV, it would earn them some points and make some money.

Since my first encounter with the wonderful world of soundtracks my library has grown from a mere 5 hours to over 22 days (thats528 hours) So much so I now have so much music that the chances are that I hear a piece of music in a film or TV program, I will already have a copy in there somewhere.

The problem is finding it.

Evolution?

In biologyevolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next – wikipedia

So I thought I would get back to my favorite subject apart weird jokes about people I know. Thats right some more Artilect goodness.

As part of my biology course we are ofcourse studying Darwinian Natural Selection (intelligent design people stop reading here) which is all well and good, but does it still hold true for our evolution now.

At its basic level Natural Selection states that:

Natural selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common.

So taking that definition we could quite easily state that the Human Population is no longer subject to the laws of natural selection, so then what are we subject to. Looking at technology we can see that the computers and electronics we are interacting with on a daily basis, are evolving in a very similar way to how we evolved. Starting with huge vacuum tubes in the 1940s to the miniscule transistors that are in everything today. The pace of the evolution is exponential growing but like most things including house prices at some point it has to stop, but its a long way off yet.

From this it could quite easily be argued that we are stagnant in our evolution and technology is not, we need to evolve to survive, so get them old transistors merged already.

 

Lets rename the UK – Its a Good Idea Trust Me

Union Jack The United KingdomIt is a constant frustration of mine that there is no established international way of putting the UK. Its simple if you live the the USA, France, Germany, because the country cannot be split it to different parts.

You would think this isn’t a big problem and its all about preserving the cultural identity each of us have in the UK. The problem is that whenever you try to buy or submit a form online, it takes 5mins instead of 2mins, just because you have to search for what system the website is using.

The different ways of putting countries in a list:

  • England
  • Great Britain
  • United Kingdom
  • UK
  • Britain

There aren’t that many, but when there is a list box, a couple of hundred countries long its get really really, tedious. Leading you to only one sane solution, if you ever meet the designer of the website (yes thats specifically aimed at the guys & gals who design the CollegeBoard site) tell them the importance of considering there cousins across the pond, and then proceed to batter them over the head with a world atlas. Until they submit to changing their forms to us UK.

Bucking the Trend – London 2012

With all the talk of the new £400,00 London Olympic log, flying around and a building consensus of it being naff. I thought I would wade in and say its good and more importantly I like it.

You may wonder why I like it so much, well its quite simple. There is not another Olympic logo like it. Fair enough other Olympic logos work and indeed look good (see here) Only problem is they all look the same, they all have the same elements and all show some kind of recognisable symbol or mark, that is of the host nation. I like the London 2012 logo because its different, simple and there is nothing like it, even if it was a little expensive.

The Most Helpful Applescript Ever.

iTunes LogoI have a ever growing iTunes library, but sometimes when importing stuff, the ID3 tags go all wrong, or in the in Japanese/Non-English Characters. So like many geeks I hate having to mess with each ID3 tag individualy even if iTunes makes it easy. Solution CDDB and a little script from dougscripts.co. You simply go to the playlist, run the first script which searches CDDB to find the album your playing, then you run the second script that then copies the page details and puts them in your ID3 tags. Voila! your library is nice and perfectly formed.

Switch To Something Other than IE

Browse Happy logo
Devthought – Guillermo Rauch’s Blog » IE7 still creating problems for developers?

5 Reasons to switch from IE to something else:

  1. Its Horrible confusing and counter-intuitive (in versions 5 – 7)
  2. Its unSafe See Here
  3. It causes headaches on a monumental scale, I only play with web design its not a serious job and it give me headaches I can only imagine what it does to the poor developers that design sites for a living.
  4. Pop-Ups – whilst installing Google’s toolbar and using pop-up blockers built into the latest version IE its still not good enough, with a couple of firefox extensions you can block anything you don’t want easily and you can even stop the annoying “Zap Me!” ads
  5. This is the simplest of all the reasons, its made by Microsoft and therefore supports there own proprietary software and activex controls, which should really be named entry points for spyware and nasty painfully hard to remove software that you simply don’t want

Simply put switch and make your life more productive and Kill Off Bills Browser

Podcast Replace Classrooms?

RSS Headphones - Podcasting
In the beginning, the iPod let you listen to every CD you owned, even when you were stuck on the Red Line. Then Steve Jobs said, “Let there be video,” and lo and behold, you could watch “Lost” die a slow, overwritten death on a two-inch screen. But while people seem content to load their little devices with as many songs and TV shows as possible, podcasts (think of them as radio programs that you download) tend to be neglected.
Listen and Learn With Podcasts – washingtonpost.com

The Answer = Not anytime soon
Why? it all falls down to the mentality of the person learning and the fact that listening to a podcast is a passive occupation, were as good learning will always be active.

Increasing technology use within schools, colleges and university’s can do nothing but help the way we learn and consume that learning materials. Being able to access course materials 24/7 is a great resource to have but you don’t remember the stuff you do aswell as you would from a classroom.

I think there will inevitably be some invention that takes podcasting and vidcasting out of the passive domain into the interactive and maybe then we can consider replacing the classroom. Until then I think classrooms are safe.

How the JT Blob was made.

How the JT Blob was made - Screen 5As you can see from the new design, the blob is taking more of a centre stage. So how did I come up with the idea? and how did I make it.

Designing in general can seem complicated and daunting but with just a few photoshop techniques in your toolbox. You can create a logo for you in a couple of hours or less.

You start with a blank sheetHow the JT Blob was made - Screen 1
Like all good things its best to start with no computer, a soft pencil, rubber and blank sheet of paper will do. Start by just randomly sketching something and then start working that into a logo (say you initials for example) You can spend as long as you like making this drawing look something like how you want it, but it doesn’t have to be very neat.

Say Cheese
Next step take a photo of your design (or scan it) I tried drawing my logo free hand straight on the my fantastic Wacom Intuos3 tablet, but it never looked right. This way works best for those of us who aren’t 100% confident with the graphics tablet. How the JT Blob was made - Screen 2

Follow the Yellow Brick Road
How the JT Blob was made - Screen 3Now for the slightly more complicated bit, open up your photo in photoshop and start using the pen tool, to trace over your logo. You can find a fantastic tutorial on the pen tool over on PixelPerfect
How the JT Blob was made - Screen 4You can then continue and play with the path till its perfect (this is why you pencil drawing didn’t need to be perfect)Then fill the path with a gradient by creating a gradient layer and using the path to mask it. Repeat this process until all elements of your logo.

Add a bit of text and you have yourself a logo. Its not that difficult, really. The harder part is making your website match your logo.