Steev's Random Blog

1. Mind - Learn Ruby On Rails Every Day – Failed after 86 days
Started off pretty well on this one, i put in just over 500 hours in 3 months but ultimately learning Ruby On Rails turned into learning; Ruby, Rails, Git, Linux, SQL, Agile and what felt like an ever expanding list of computer science theory. Also the project that spurred this goal fell through – the customer had zero interest in it – which just goes to show Agile is for every project, even non-commercial ones.

2. Body - Don't Drink Calories – Failed after 178 days
I probably could have kept this one up longer but around 6 months in i really missed beer and it didn't seem to be making much of a difference to anything else.

3. Spirit - Write 750 Words Every Day - Failed after 281 days
This one really should have gone the distance – even when i was in Glasgow for 6 weeks and had to go to coffee shops for internet access i kept it going – one day in October i just forgot and that was it, streak gone, game over. Also while it was initially positive, eventually the enforced daily introspection just ended up a circle of the same ideas which was really not positive.

I haven't thought about any resolutions for 2012 yet, so the dividing point in time will be even more arbitrary if i do decide on some.

The Power Of Positive Thinking (aka The Placebo Effect)

2011-01-02T02:48:00.002Z

Now before you go thinking that i'm going to be all negative on the subject, i'll start by saying that i think the placebo effect is highly underrated. If someone was to tell you that in a reasonable number of cases a sugar pill could be as effective in treating illnesses as an expensive medication you'd be pretty impressed. You might even ask why we don't try to treat everything with sugar pills instead of spending lots of money on pharmaceuticals. Alas the placebo per se doesn't do anything and the effect relies on the patient believing the sugar pill will improve their condition, therein lies the link to positive thinking.

I suspect that most of the cynicism about 'positive thinking' is based on the screeds of pseudo-scientific books which propose a variety of far-fetched mechanisms for how it works from auras, to spirits or even quantum mechanics. Some of these mechanisms are occasionally covered in a thin veneer of real science (yes, there is a zero point field) but invariably the mechanism cannot be scientifically proven (there is no hard evidence to indicate that people can manipulate the zero point field with their thoughts). On the other hand there are a number of scientifically proven theories which can shed some light on the benefits of thinking positively.

Psychological - This one is obvious, if you frame everything in a positive light you will be happier; threats become opportunities, something going wrong becomes a chance to do something different. It doesn't take a genius to see that if you choose to perceive things in a positive way you will feel more positively about things, it's simple tautology (circular logic). Furthermore there are a number of cognitive biases which are likely to amplify the feeling that if you think good thoughts, good things happen. The most relevant in this case is Confirmation Bias; "the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.". In other words if you believe something, you are more likely to accept evidence that agrees with your belief and ignore evidence which does not agree with your belief. So if you think positively and believe it makes your life better, you will be more inclined to notice and remember positive things that happen and dismiss any negative things that happen. Now if you want to make optimal decisions or become a being of pure reason and logic, tautology and cognitive bias are to be avoided. On the other hand if you want to be happy, thinking positively is bound to help.

Physiological - Thinking comes from the brain, the brain controls a lot of the processes in the rest of the body, so there could be a link between positive thinking and physical wellbeing. Please don't ask me to dig up the research, but there is ample evidence linking mental state with physiological effects. One example is that if you are stressed (a mental state), your brain triggers your adrenal gland to release cortisol (a physiological response). Now in some ways cortisol is great; in the short term it helps you metabolise protein, carbohydrates and fat, which is pretty useful if you are stressed because you are being chased by a tiger. On the other hand in the long term it suppresses your imune system and slows bone growth, both of which are less than ideal. I don't propose that we fully understand how mental state effects physiology. However given that your brain regulates a large number of hormones and systems, from an evolutionary standpoint there is a good chance that being happy and relaxed is better for you than being depressed and stressed.

Interpersonal - So the above covers why thinking positively can be beneficial to your mental state and physical wellbeing, but if it doesn't translate beyond you as an individual then it is borderline delusion. Fortunately there is scientific evidence which supports emotions - and hence positive thinking - being contagious between people. Let's try an experiment; the next time you are outside, smile at a random person. Nine times out of ten they will smile back, unless of course they are in a really shitty mood. While that of itself is quite impressive, what is even more impressive is that by the mere action of smiling that person will feel slightly happier. This reciprocation is caused by mirror neurons in the brain, you don't just mirror movements but emotions as well. There is no need to invoke spirits or psychics or quantum mechanics, it is simply neurobiology. Humans are social creatures and have been long before the advent of language, it makes sense that our ancestors would have had an evolutionary advantage if they could understand and influence other individuals. So if you think positively and are therefore happier, that happiness/positivity is likely to rub off on people you meet, which will result in better outcomes from those interactions.

The three paragraphs above are my best attempt at remembering and summarising the science at 3am after a few beers. The examples are limited, the explanations imperfect and they are distinctly lacking in citations. If you would like more detailed information on anything above, or suggested reading, please leave a comment.

Conclusion - Do i think that peoples positive vibes somehow propagate out through the zero point energy field and change the universe? Or that you can manifest a new Lexus by thinking positive? Hell no. On the other hand i do think that there is good scientific evidence for why people with a positive outlook on life are happier, healthier and have better relationships.

Some related Wikipedia links:
The Placebo Effect
Physiological Effects Of Cortisol
Tautology
List of Cognitive Biases
Mirror Neurons

2011 Arbitrary Dividing Point In Time Resolutions

2011-01-01T19:49:00.002Z

I decided to change a couple of things this year compared to 2010. Firstly I have restricted myself to 3 resolutions, the 7 last year were probably a bit much and diluted my focus. Also as i mentioned in my 2010 Summary, i think focusing on daily habits that will enable future goals will be more successful than listing longer term abstract goals that might change or disappear.

The main reason for posting these online is so that i am accountable and i will be trying to tweet daily updates on the success or failure of the above with an #ADPITR hashtag. If you notice that i fail to tweet or fail any of the above resolutions please kick my ass!

Here are my Arbitrary Dividing Point in Time Resolutions for 2011:

1. Mind - Learn Ruby On Rails Every Day
About half way through last year i started learning the Ruby On Rails framework. While i have completed a couple of books and Rails For Zombies i don't think i have retained much of what i learned as i haven't been using it regularly. I have stopped learning for weeks (occasionally months) at a time and during those breaks i'm sure i forgot a lot. So by making sure i learn/use RoR daily, i should hopefully learn and retain more. I considered putting a time requirement on this resolution, but while it would be nice to do 2-4 hours of programming every day, i suspect just by thinking/reading about it every day, i should achieve the desired effect.

The flip side of this is that i need to plan what i am going to learn better. Last year i ended up on some pretty epic tangents; learning about version control (Git), setting up servers (Fedora) and lots of other somewhat related things (RVM, Vagrant, Amazon Web Services etc). While these tangents were interesting and potentially useful in the future, they aren't strictly relevant now. To start with i need to learn more about Ruby (Why's [Poignant] Guide To Ruby, Programming Ruby etc), refresh what i know about Rails (re-read Head First Rails and Agile Web Development With Rails) and deploy an actual application.

2. Body - Don't Drink Calories
One of the first pieces of advice in The 4-Hour Body is not to drink calories and it tends to be the foundation of a lot of other diets too. While it might seem a relatively easy resolution, it is bound to cut out a lot of calories from my diet (Red Bull, Fruit Juice, Beer and Wine) and i can always add other restrictions to it throughout the year if it gets too easy. On the upside it means that i will still be able to drink nice black coffee along with plenty of water and herbal tea. On the downside it means that i will have to give up alcohol as even spirits contain calories.

Interestingly this was the last resolution i decided on and only came about due to the next resolution.

3. Spirit - Write 750 Words Every Day
I think this will be my favourite resolution, it kind of combines last years Moleskine and blog writing with an awesome website (750Words) and Morning Pages. "Morning what?" you might ask, the best summary is from the 750Words About page:

Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in "long hand", typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It's about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day.

Seeing as my handwriting sucks and i normally only manage around 50 words per page in my Moleskine, i'm glad that 750Words is there to save me time and money.

So far i have done two days (did a practice run yesterday) and it has been useful. I had decided on resolutions 1 and 3 over a week ago and i though i should have a third. In my morning pages today not only did i spot the potential for a Mind, Body & Spirit link but they also helped me narrow down and chose resolution 2. So far both sessions have taken just under 30 minutes each and it seems like a worthwhile investment in time.

The main reason for this resolution is coming across 750Words.com, however it is so awesome it deserves a post all of it's own!

Summary - 2010 Arbitrary Dividing Point In Time Resolutions

2010-12-31T16:58:00.002Z

Well it is that time of year again, i figured i would review the successes and failures from this years Arbitrary Dividing Point In Time Resolutions before i publish new ones for 2011 tomorrow.

1. Develop a business that makes £2000/month after tax - Failed ... Miserably.
Don't think i've earned £2000 from the business all year, never mind per month.

2. Develop a business that is location independent - Technically succeeded ... but really failed.
Technically i have a business and technically it is location independent. However as noted above it doesn't make any money, so while the work could be done anywhere, i couldn't afford to live anywhere else.

3. Visit at least 4 new countries - Failed ... mostly.
Only managed to visit one new country (The Netherlands) this year, which i suppose is better than none, but not looking good for 30 by 30.

4. Read 1 book per week - Success
Ideally i would have preferred to be more regular in my reading - starting and finishing a book each week - but i suppose averaging a book a week will do.

5. Write 1 Moleskine page per day - Success
Over the course of the year i missed a few days for various reasons, but the overall number of pages was right.

6. Watch a maximum of 1 TV episode per day - Failed ... Miserably.
I'm not sure this resolution lasted a day, instead i have ended up watching more TV than ever. In fact even when there was nothing on i have been getting whole series to watch (e.g. The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood etc) which resulted in watching up to 12 episodes in a day.

7. Write a blog post once a week - Technically succeeded ... but really failed.
According to the rules of the Blog Duel each week missed had to be caught up on, i missed 18 weeks in a row and then caught up on them all this month, so i technically succeeded. On the other hand the real purpose of the Blog Duel was to write regularly - and in my case improve my writing - in that regard i failed miserably.

Unfortunately the failures don't really fall into neat patterns of recommendations for resolutions: I failed on a frequent feedback resolution (daily TV) and a publicly accountable one (weekly blog posts). I also succeeded on a frequent feedback resolution (daily Moleskine page) and a publicly accountable one (weekly book). Maybe the mistake was not combining frequent feedback and public accountability?

I suspect the first 3 were doomed to failure almost from the start: Resolution 1 was predicated on a certain plan i had for starting a business, when i gave up on that plan the resolution didn't seem important or feasible. Resolution 2 was based on the plan from Resolution 1 and Resolution 3 required the success of Resolutions 1 and 2. It was a bit of a cascade failure really, once the first domino failed to fall, nothing else happened.

I think next year i will focus on relatively simple daily habits that can be publicly accountable and will assist me in implementing wider goals as the year progresses.

Tomorrow i shall unveil my Arbitrary Dividing Point In Time Resolutions for 2011 ...

2010 Reading List

2010-12-31T16:56:00.004Z

1 - The Collaborative Habit by Twyla Tharp

2 - 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman

3 - The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield

4 - The (mis)behaviour Of Markets by Benoit Mandlebrot

5 - Drive by Daniel Pink

6 - Velocity by Dee Jacob et al

7 - The Art Of The Start by Guy Kawasaki

8 - Brave New World (f) by Aldous Huxley

9 - Linchpin by Seth Godin

10 - Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson

11 - The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart

12 - The 4-Hour Work Week (r) by Tim Ferriss

13 - Maverick (r) by Ricardo Semler

Q1 Bonus - The Dice Man (f) by Luke Rhinehart

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

14 - Confessions Of A Public Speaker by Scott Berkun

15 - The Man In The High Castle (f) by Philip K Dick

16 - Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds

17 - Neverwhere (f) by Neil Gaiman

18 - The End Of Faith by Sam Harris

19 - The Knowing-Doing Gap by Pfeffer and Sutton

20 - The Design Of Business by Roger Martin

21 - Speak Human by Eric Karjaluoto

22 - Childhood's End (f) by Arthur C Clarke

23 - Outliers (r) by Malcolm Gladwell

24 - What The Dog Saw (r) by Malcolm Gladwell

25 - Blink (r) (a) by Malcolm Gladwell

26 - The Elements Of Style by William Strunk

Q2 Bonus - American Gods (f) #1b1t by Neil Gaiman

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

27 - What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

28 - The Upside Of Irrationality by Dan Ariely

29 - Foundation (f) by Isaac Asimov

30 - Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard

31 - The Big Short by Michael Lewis

32 - Foundation And Empire (f) by Isaac Asimov

33 - Leading Change by John Kotter

34 - Second Foundation (f) by Isaac Asimov

35 - Into The Wild by John Krakauer

36 - Delivering Happieness (a) by Tony Hsieh

37 - The Complete Stories Of Sherlock Holmes (f) by Arthur Conan Doyle

38 - Roomanitarian by Henry Rollins

39 - Win Without Pitching Manifesto (e) by Blair Enns

Q3 Bonus - Tell-All (f) by Chuck Palahniuk

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

40 - The Bootstrappers Bible (e) by Seth Godin

41 - Neuromancer (f) by William Gibson

42 - The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain

43 - Then We Came To The End (f) by Joshua Ferris

44 - Fascinate by Sally Hogshead

45 - Player One (f) by Douglas Coupland

46 - Notes On The Synthesis Of Form by Christopher Alexander

47 - Head First Rails (e) by David Griffiths

48 - Agile Web Development With Rails (e) by Sam Ruby et al

49 - Pragmatic Version Control With Git (e) by Travis Swicegood

50 - Unbearable Lightness of Being (f) by Milan Kundera

51 - The Art Of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau

52 - The Metamorphosis (f) by Franz Kafka

Q4 Bonus - The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Key:

(f) = Fiction

(r) = Re-read

(a) = Audio

(e) = Electronic

My Hikikomori Year

2010-12-24T23:28:00.001Z

Well it is exactly a year to the day since i left my last job and i can tell you one thing; i really don't miss it.

Unfortunately in the time since, i have come to realise that the same issues i had with the job are endemic to most money-making endeavours. This realisation has caused me to become what the Japanese would refer to as Hikikomori; a hermit who does not go outside. While i probably don't meet the technical criteria - due to ocasional visits to the supermarket (when internet shopping isn't fast enough) and a trip to Barcelona - i like to think i conform to the spirit of the term.

Sidenote: The post title is a slightly obscure reference to the My Hotel Year story from Douglas Coupland's Life After God.

New Additions To Best and Worst Airports

2010-12-22T16:43:00.002Z

Last year i put a couple of posts together on the best and worst airports i have been to. While i didn't do much traveling this year, there are two clear additions to my lists:

Best - Barcelona [BCN]
Terminal 1 in Barcelona is what Terminal 2 in Charles De Gaulle should be; BCN has the same open light feeling as CDG, but with a host of decent shops, restaurants and executive lounges. Security and check-in was nice and efficient, plenty of seating near the gates and theoretically there was free wifi though i couldn't find it.

Worst - Schiphol [AMS]
Ok it's not as bad as the Top 5 Worst, but i would still avoid transiting through it again if possible. The first issue is that it is a single terminal, normally this is a good thing, but when it is one of the largest, busiest airports in the world, that means a lot of walking. Maybe it's just because i had a sore foot, but it seemed like i had to walk from one end of the airport to the other for my connecting flight. I also found it quite difficult to navigate, not sure if it was the layout or the signage, but it seemed like a lot of concentration was required. The only upside was that all of the staff - even security - were very friendly.

Unique Password Generation System

2010-12-21T17:34:00.002Z

After last weeks hacking of Gawker Media's passwords, we have yet again been warned to use unique passwords on every site. While I appreciate the security reasons for this, there is no way i can remember 75+ unique, 9-digit alpha-numeric-symbol passwords - henceforth referred to as a 'strong password'.

While my current password system wouldn't succumb to the normal guesses for passwords, or probably even a brute force attack, i am certainly guilty of using the same 5 or 6 passwords over most sites. I have been thinking about how to diversify my passwords for a long time and have looked at various options but they all seemed to have problems:

Write Passwords Down - Back in the day (pre-1996) you were always advised never to write your passwords down. Two things have changed since then: 1) People have way more passwords to remember now and 2) The primary threat is remote (via the internet), rather than requiring physical access to your machine. The rationale for writing down passwords is that you get more security from having unique strong passwords, than you would with re-used weak passwords that you can remember. The only downside - and it's a doozy - is that if someone does get physical access to you computer or even just your password list, you are screwed. You also can't access your passwords remotely if you are travelling or away from your desk (unless you take them with you everywhere which would be pretty dumb).

Encrypted File Storage - Building on the above, how do you make it harder for someone to read your written down passwords? ... easy, encrypt the file. Write down all the passwords in a text or excel file, then encrypt the file with TrueCrypt - whatever you do don't use the built-in encryption in MS Office, it's terrible - using a really strong password. Now you only need to remember one password to open the file and get access to all of your other passwords. Alas it only solves the problem of someone getting access to your passwords, but doesn't fix being able to access your passwords from anywhere because you need admin rights to run TrueCrypt (no use for internet cafes).

Encrypted Online Storage - For a long time i thought PassPack was going to be the best option. Your passwords are double encrypted, stored on a website and there are various nifty security (one-time keys) and management (automatic logon) features. This means the passwords are securely encrypted AND available anywhere. I really wanted to use PassPack, but ultimately two things killed it for me: 1) If the site disappears (goes bankrupt, gets sold), so do my passwords and 2) A website containing passwords has a giant target painted on it for hackers and nothing is 100% secure forever.

Encrypted Hardware Storage - So on top of security and portability, it turned out i also want to have ultimate control over my passwords too. It seemed that the easiest way to have the most control would be to use hardware. I remembered i had seen the Mandylion Password Manager on Think Geek, it is a physical token that generates and securely stores your passwords. Two problems though: 1) Inputting site names or usernames to it with only arrow keys looks to be a serious pain and 2) If you lose or break it your passwords are gone. I also looked at things like: 1Password (not sure about security), Roboform (don't trust it) and Iron Key (expensive) but ruled them out.

Repeatable Online Generation - Ultimately i think i am just uncomfortable trusting my clear text passwords to any hardware or software, nothing is secure forever. I came across a website called PwdMkr which allows you to repeatably generate unique random passwords for websites. It checks almost all of my boxes: self-hosted (so quite obscure and controllable), lots of options (character sets, length, salt), the website can be encrypted for backup and best of all the password isn't stored, you just need to remember how to generate it. My only issue is that i can only protect the site with an .htaccess password. Ok so an attacker would have to break my .htaccess password AND work out my system for generating passwords, but still a worry.

So after years of research and thought, i was still stuck doing what i have always done, then a couple of nights ago i had an epiphany, go back to the future with a Book Cipher!

Book Cipher - A book cipher is a classic espionage technique for passing covert messages. In it's simplest form there is a numeric code which refers to a specific word; e.g. 040 15 07 would refer to page 40, line 15, word 7, but there are a number of ways it could be used to generate a password. Maybe just have a code that refers to the page and line, then use the first letters from each word in the sentence for the password. Alternatively you could refer to a page, then some words on that page could be joined together to make a password. The possibilities are endless. Similar to Repeatable Online Generation, the password is never stored, instead you store a key which allows you to generate the password from a specific book. There are a few things to keep in mind: 1) Make sure you know the edition of the book you are using because if you lose the book, a different edition will probably have different page numbers etc. 2) Portability can be achieved either with a small book you can take everywhere with you or by storing an e-book online (make sure your generation process is suitably obscure). For me this brings together a lot of benefits: 1) I just have to remember a process and not even a single password, 2) There is plenty of redundancy built it - multiple copies of books, multiple storage of keys etc. 3) Security through obscurity. There may not be any fancy encryption, but unless you have Bletchly Park or the NSA working on it, a book cipher is a tough code to crack.

In the end there is always a balance between security and ease of use, how far you go to either side is up to you. Really any of the techniques above will leave you better off than the average person and a book cipher is perhaps a little onerous and obscure.

Hardware is Hard ...

2010-12-20T21:54:00.002Z

A little over a year ago i read about an awesome product called Wakemate, it monitors your sleep patterns and sends a signal to a mobile phone to wake you at the optimum time. I almost always wake up feeling groggy so it seemed like something i would find useful. At the time the release date was listed as January 2010 so i didn't pre-order one because i didn't know where i was going to be in January.

I didn't think much more about it until i got back to the uk and stumbled on a story that the release had been delayed until April, at which point i decided to put in a pre-order. At least two release dates have come and gone since then (late june, late september) and still no product. Each time there was an explanation; the IC they wanted to use was no longer available, design issues, manufacturing issues, certification issues etc etc. Well they are finally shipping - though not to international customers - almost a year late.

The title of the post is a classic technology aphorism, software isn't always - or even often - easy, but hardware is definitely hard.

Writing pt2

2010-12-18T22:05:00.000Z

Yup i like the idea of conveying ideas, it just takes longer than expected and i'm never as clear or as convincing as i'd like to be. Had two ideas and drafts today and yet neither posted.

Writing

2010-12-17T20:03:00.000Z

... or lack thereof.

I find myself reaching the conclusion that i am not meant to write. It just seems like a lot of effort and i am never happy with the end result.

SNOW!

2010-12-16T22:02:00.000Z

Perfect Twitter

2010-12-15T21:26:00.000Z

Today i finally found the perfect Twitter - All the benefits of New Twitter (on-page photos, better use of width etc) with none of the useless junk (random images, Trends, Who to follow etc).

Alas this beautiful new design is only available if you use Chrome or Safari, if so you can download the extension from: http://www.chrismasterson.me/feather/

Before - Ugly, Cluttered & Nasty

After - Clean, Simple & Minimalist

Missed Post

2010-12-14T21:27:00.000Z

Well somehow i managed it, only 10 posts in to my 18 Days of Blogging and i managed to miss a post already.

Lessons from this:
1) Daily routine is best for building habits - I've been pretty good at writing in my Molie every day, but i think taking the weekends off from posting in this blog breaks the habit too much. I guess my issue with posting every day is that i end up with a lot of crap (see most of the last 10 posts) but without the daily routine i fail miserably (see the last 5 months). Perhaps as a resolution next year i might try to write for an hour every day and use that time to build up to a decent weekly blog post.
2) Going to bed too early wrecks my routine - There is a high correlation between going to bed too early and breaking routine. Missed Molie entries and blog posts are almost always on nights i go to bed before 9am.

Other than that i guess i'll have to post on saturday to make up for yesterdays lapse.

Sleep Sucks

2010-12-10T23:01:00.000Z

Or more to the point the time wasted asleep sucks, but i can't see myself doing less of it.

Follow Through On Books

2010-12-09T22:26:00.000Z

I read a lot of books, i don't actually take action based on most of them, they change what i think but not what i do.

I guess it's like Pfeffer and Sutton have observed in The Knowing Doing Gap, there is a big gap between knowing and doing.

The reason this came to mind is The 4-Hour Body. Lots of interesting advice, will i follow it? Maybe.

Philosophical or Scientific Question?

2010-12-08T21:26:00.002Z

When you leave the fridge door open, do you let the cold out or the heat in?

Slightly worrying things ...

2010-12-07T22:49:00.000Z

1) I spent the evening watching a TV show about statistics (check out The Joy Of Stats on iPlayer if you are in the uk) and getting slightly toasted (beer, vodka and sambuca [though not at the same time] is a strange combination).

2) There is no 2.

3) Put down your brains any your entrails, it's time to stop and learn some rails [jingles] ... see video in post below.

4) What i should have posted tonight was titled: Lessons from Zombies and it would have been rather more interesting/amusing.

Programming for Zombies! Redux

2010-12-06T21:11:00.000Z

I finished the tutorials on Rails For Zombies and while they were fun i'm not sure how useful they really were.

I picked up a few snippets of code which will be useful and there were some interesting Rails 3 features, but looking beyond the catchy theme, there isn't much there. I said in the original post that i didn't think it would replace Agile Web Development With Rails, but i don't think it even replaces the first example in Head First Rails. The goal of Rails For Zombies is to allow people to get their feet wet with Rails without having to worry about configuration, but the depth of information is more like dipping a single toe in the water.

What blew me away in the first example in Head First Rails was that i could create and run a functional (though not pretty) web application with 4 lines of code. You never quite get that level of "wow" in Rails For Zombies; unless you have programmed extensively in another language you don't really appreciate the brevity and simplicity of the code in the examples. The coding at the end of each tutorial is fine and provides a good way to check comprehension, but you are never dealing with more than a couple of lines of code so it is hard to know where everything fits in. You also never get to actually play with the application you are supposed to be working on, which is a large part of the feedback.

What would have been more useful is a mashup - Head First Rails For Zombies. Combine the lack of configuration worries and fun theme of Rails For Zombies with building an app from the ground up like in the first Head First Rails example.

The one thing that has really stuck with me is the jingle:

Quite funny and disturbingly catchy.

Programming for Zombies!

2010-12-03T21:09:00.001Z

Today i found the single greatest tutorial site for learning programming; Rails for Zombies!
(Go check out the video on the homepage)

While the awesomeness of adding zombies to anything should be obvious - Pride, Prejudice and Zombies for example - in this case it is awesome for learning.

If you have ever learned any programming language you should be familiar with the cliched "hello world!" example, unfortunately in most 'learn to program' books the examples don't get much more exciting than that. Infact a lot of books on programming don't even get to that stage, instead they have some arcane and obscure steps that you have to get through to even start programming. You can fall at this step for a number of hard to identify reasons which cannot be easily troubleshot in a book. The same is true once you actually start programming the examples, from being on a different version of the software to having a single symbol in the wrong place, your program might not work for a non-obvious reason.

Based on the above Rails for Zombies gets a number of things right:

1) Unique and light-hearted examples - No more boring twitter / ebay / webstore clone examples, while building an app for zombies isn't that useful (until the zombie apocalypse of course) it is certainly different and entertaining. In my experience humor is highly underrated in education, it is amazing how much more memorable an example is if it is funny.

2) Web-based programming environment - This kills two birds with one stone: 1) The programming environment is just there; nothing to install, configure or otherwise go wrong. 2) You know you are using the right version of the software for the examples.

3) Instant interactive feedback - Nothing is more frustrating when learning to program from a book than hitting a brick wall with an example and not knowing how to fix it. Most books assume everything has gone right and only offer tips on the most obvious mistakes. If you happen to use the wrong type of brackets or put a full stop or a capital in the wrong place it can take hours to find and fix. Rails for Zombies provides interactive feedback on what you are doing (useful error messages) and has small enough examples that errors are easy to track down.

4) Reward at the end - Maybe it is just because i love obscure t-shirts, but being able to order a Rails for Zombies t-shirt at the end is a serious incentive for me to finish the course. A lot of books get more complicated and obscure towards the end and are never finished, at least this gives a good reason to make it all the way through.

At this stage my biggest concern is whether you would learn enough to enable you to create an actual application. Sure installing and configuring ruby, rails and SQLite can be a pain, but if you can't do that then you can't actually build anything. Also Rails for Zombies jumps in at a slightly strange point - CRUD operations - without really covering MVC or databases which i think i would have found confusing without having read some books. I suspect i will be able to comment on this more fully when i finish the tutorials.

I'm sure Rails for Zombies isn't a replacement for Agile Web Development With Rails but it is an entertaining way to reinforce what i'm learning elsewhere.

I <3 Beer

2010-12-02T22:28:00.000Z

That is all.

PS It's a real post because i had to look up & lt ; to get a < symbol in the title.

Technological Nemesis

2010-12-01T23:34:00.000Z

Everyone has something technological that just never quite works for them, for me it is trying to setup an FTP server. What should be the simple installation of a piece of software, never quite goes to plan. Doesn't matter what software i use, what operating system i'm on, what router i'm using, where i am. It just doesn't work without days of frustration.

18 Days Of Blogging

2010-11-26T15:13:00.000Z

By the end of November i will be 18 blog posts behind in the Blog Duel...

Frankly this is a rather poor show given my lack of other commitments and the relative ease of the challenge. Even more embarrassing is that i managed to post on a near daily basis for 5 months on my older blog (Late Feb to Late July 2007) and yet this year i couldn't even manage weekly. Sure i managed to write a couple of decent posts - by my standards at least - but that wasn't the challenge. So in an effort to kind of meet my seventh arbitrary dividing point in time resolution, i need to make 18 blog posts before the end of the year.

It just so happens that there are exactly 18 working days in December before Christmas, so instead of the 12 days of Christmas or an advent calendar, i will be closing out my year by catching up on my blogging.

Things I Learned Today Pt 2 ...

2010-07-31T22:22:00.000+01:00

1) Achieving a nice looking finish on MDF is like trying to polish a turd; as Mythbusters proved, it is possible, but it requires more time, effort and cost than a sane person is likely to commit to the task.

2) As a corollary to the above; real wood looks amazing with very little effort, a bit of sanding and a couple of coats of varnish and it is beautiful.

Following on from the above:

3) Instead of spending a load of money on stain for the MDF, i should have taken the hit up front and bought real wood for the shelves. It would have ended up costing the same, taken less time and would have finished looking much better.

4) After around 40 hours of work, i have realised that i probably would have been better off just buying a couple of bookcases from a shop. Ok it is nice that the bookcase i made fits perfectly in the space and maximises the number of books i can store, but it took a hell of a long time and is far from perfect.

I wanted to capture what i had learned incase i forgot, there will be a full blog post on my bookcase project within a week or so.

Things I Learned Today ...

2010-07-29T23:25:00.000+01:00

1) Trying to varnish a large flat surface with a brush is an exercise in futility; you - or at least i - cannot escape brush marks.

2) Trying to precisely cut-in varnish along a 2 metre length is equally futile; it won't end up straight … ever.

Following on from the above:

3) My new favourite thing in the whole world is a small foam roller for applying goss finishes. It gives an awesomely smooth coating and is seriously quick to use.

4) Masking Tape is your friend. It might take 2 hours to mask off the trim on 4 shelves, but combined with point 3 it takes 5mins to put a coat of varnish on a shelf instead of 30mins with a brush.

To explain the above - shortly there will be a post about my experience designing and building a bookcase, be afraid, be very afraid.

Previous Post Update

2010-07-09T15:17:00.001+01:00

In April - holy crap where have the last 2 months gone? - i wrote a couple of posts about backing the reprint of Art Space Tokyo on Kickstarter, well it finally arrived!

Package Contents - Letter, Signed Uncut Signature & Book

My Name In A Book (line 14)

So far i'm really impressed with the quality of the book, more of a review when i get a chance to read it.

PS I was going to shrink the photos a little, but i actually kinda like how they run outside the content box ... thoughts?

Nihilism

2010-07-02T16:38:00.001+01:00

"When we find out that the world does not possess the objective value or meaning that we want it to have or have long since believed it to have, we find ourselves in a crisis." - Wikipedia Page on Nihilism

The Bizarre Appeal of Sports Events Pt2

2010-07-01T18:51:00.000+01:00

An interesting observation relating to last weeks *cough* post.

It appears that a large part of the appeal is frequency. I noticed a significant decline in my interest when it went from 3 games a day to 2 and now that there is a 2 day gap before the quarter finals, i knida don't care anymore. When it is easy to become immersed in the event for a reasonable amount of time every day it seems much more interesting. Alternatively i may have just watched so much football that i will have no desire to watch any more for the next 4 years ...

The Bizarre Appeal of Sports Events

2010-06-18T16:47:00.000+01:00

I'll start by saying i am not a football fan. I really couldn't give a rats ass about watching it 99% of the time and yet somehow i have watched 20 of the first 22 matches in the World Cup ... I'm not even just talking about having it on in the background or channel hopping past it, i have sat and watched all the way through twenty full 90 minute matches. That is 30 hours of my life that i am never getting back.

Ok part of the reason i have been watching must be that i am currently of limited employment, which means that i actually have the time to watch 3 football matches a day. But it still doesn't explain why i can't think of anything better to do, i'm not even sure that i actually enjoy watching football.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there must be some psychological reason (or subliminal messages in the tv coverage) that makes people enjoy watching big sporting events, but the exact mechanism - or how i can avoid it - elude me...

WSIDWML? - Typical Example

2010-06-11T15:09:00.000+01:00

Last week I wrote about trying to work out what I should do with my life [WSIDWML?]. While I outlined, in general terms, my problems with answering the question, I didn’t provide any actual examples. This week I will run through an example of my typical train of thought, from inception to dismissal.

Inception
A common suggestion for how to decide what to do with your life, is to think back to what you wanted to be as a child and do that. I presume the theory is that what you wanted to be as a child is more reflective of your true desires, unencumbered by adult worries like pay, practicality and status.

As a child I used to love to draw and in particular draw things that I had designed, so architecture seemed like a logical career choice. At the start of secondary school I tried to work out what the best architecture course was by researching which one had the highest entry requirements - Strathclyde - and I decided that I was going to apply there. The entry requirements drove which subjects I would take in school and what grades I would need to get in exams. When I was 14 I spent a week in an architects office for work experience and loved it. Then when I was 15 I applied to the architecture course at Strathclyde, attended an interview and was offered a conditional acceptance (i.e. if I got the required grades I was in). However at the interview they recommended that I wait a year as I would only be 16 when the course started. Waiting a year would make it easier to live away from home and avoid the isolation of not being able to socialise with peers who would mostly be 18 and over. Both of those points made sense, so I decided I would stay at school for another year.

Somehow during that year I convinced myself that Architecture wasn’t technical and scientific enough - too much airy fairy subjective art - and I would rather study Physics. It turned out that Physics was a little too ‘technical and scientific’ and not practical enough, so I ended up switching to Mechanical Engineering.

In retrospect, throwing away 10+ years of aspiration seems like a rather rash decision, so maybe I should go back to university to study architecture ...

Excitement
Once I have an idea in mind I quickly move to thinking of all of the great reasons to follow through with it. In the example above I would quickly imagine:
That I would love to go back to university and make the most of the opportunity: actually turn up to lectures, study, go to the library, take more varied elective classes etc.
I still really enjoy designing things and I think my broader perspective from the last 11 years would be useful for designing buildings.
How great it would be to design something that everyone can see and will probably still be standing after I’m gone.

Depression
Just as I am getting really worked up to follow through on the idea, somehow everything flips and all of the positive things from the excitement phase are cancelled out by negatives that spring to mind:
Will my enthusiasm fade and I therefore end up as lazy a student as I was the last time?
Would I be able to cope with the artier less technical aspects of the course?
How would I support myself financially?
What would I do after the course, do I really want to be an architect?
The most depressing thought of all is; what if applied and didn’t get accepted? What would it say about how I had spent the last 12 years, if they would have accepted me on the course back in 1998 and wouldn’t now ...

Dismissal
By this point I have totally talked myself out of the idea. If there are that many reasons against doing it, how can it be something that I could conceivably spend the rest of my life doing? So I dismiss the idea and start the cycle again.

No sooner have I talked myself into a direction, than I talk myself out of it. Most of the reasons against pursuing the idea could theoretically - and often easily - be overcome, but I just can’t muster the same enthusiasm for it anymore. Hopefully the above should illustrate why I am having such a hard time narrowing my options.

[740 Words]

What Should I Do With My Life?

2010-06-05T16:35:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I read What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson. While I enjoyed the stories and it was vaguely inspiring, I was initially disappointed that it didn’t help me answer the question posed in the title. Throughout the book the author emphasised that answering the question was not something that could be achieved by reading a book, but I still held out hope that somehow it might. Sure enough when I reached the end - regardless of the frequent warnings - I felt slightly cheated that I was no closer to working out what to do with my life. Having reflected for the last couple of weeks, I still don’t know what I should do with my life, but I think I have worked out what the first step is.

The first step for most of the people profiled in the book was to reduce the number of options of things they could do. “Keeping your options open” is something that a significant number of people seem to aspire to. Having ‘infinite possibilities’ is appealing in the same way that buying a lottery ticket is and is flawed for the same reasons. As things stand my options are about as open as they possibly could be; I have very few commitments tying me to a specific path or location. Unfortunately I am also naive and arrogant enough to think that I could try to do just about anything with my life if I wanted to, I might not succeed but I could try. With that many options, working out what I want to do - and more the point, what I could be good at - is rather difficult.

In hindsight a quote from High Fidelity seems apt:

“I can see now I never really committed ... I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and... I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that's suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.”

Everything I have done in the last decade, I have stumbled into on a whim and had one foot out the door. From university, to hobbies, to jobs, to geographic locations, I never set out intentionally and always had an exit strategy. Maybe I committed for the first few months, but then found that I could successfully coast along without trying which meant I ended up bored. After a while being bored I would stumble off to the next option.

There has also been an element of fear of failure in my decisions or lack thereof. If I didn’t try, then when I succeeded it felt like luck and when I failed it didn’t matter because I hadn’t tried in the first place. Either way I was damned: Attributing success to luck is a surefire way to feel like you don’t deserve what you have achieved. Attributing failure to not trying means you will always wonder what would have happened if you had tried. This has been true for me, both on the scale of micro-decisions and also on the largest scale of working out what to do with my life. By not narrowing my options and by not deciding what I really wanted to do, I made it impossible to fail, but also impossible to succeed.

Now that I have worked out that I need to narrow my options, the hard part is working out how to actually do that. The two obvious ways - deep analysis or random chance - both seem like cop-outs. Deep analysis seems like a cop-out because it would be very easy to spend a lot of time analysing as a way to avoid making a decision. Random chance seems like a cop-out because random chance is always a cop-out. There are other ways ranging from mixing analysis and random chance, to asking people who know me well what they think, to trying to remember what I wanted to be as a child, but again none of those options seem quite right... I know what the first step is, I just don’t know how to take it.

If anyone has any suggestions for how to start narrowing my options or what I should do with my life, I would be really grateful if you could leave a comment.

[731 Words]

Free Advice For TV Executives - Part 1

2010-05-28T14:45:00.001+01:00

I was watching the final episode of FlashForward this morning and it occurred to me that, while it wasn’t a perfect show, it did have potential. Given that there are a lot of TV shows which have no potential, are mediocre at best, then why had FlashForward been cancelled? The easy answer is a lack of viewers; not enough viewers means less advertising dollars, less advertising dollars means that the show doesn’t cover its costs. A simple business decision that anyone would make.

The next logical question is why was there a decline in viewers? According to TV studio executives it is all down to the viewers: people don’t like heavily serialised shows, people don’t relate to the characters, people find the plot too confusing, people can’t start watching in the middle of a series. What the execs universally fail to consider is that it might be their own fault, not the viewers. I have therefore come up with some free advice for TV executives to make good TV shows more profitable.

The first nail in the coffin of any good TV show is a lack of consistency in scheduling. With this in mind can I suggest the following:

No Hiatuses
Nothing is more frustrating when watching a heavily serialised show, than a gap of 3 months in the middle of a season. I’m sorry, maybe it is just me, but when I get into a story I don’t appreciate it being put on hold for long enough that I forget what was going on. Not only is it hard to remember what happened before the break, it is hard to remember why you watched the show in the first place and therefore why you start watching it again.

I don’t think there has ever been a show that has fully retained its viewership after a hiatus. The reasons for this are simple: 1) Loss of momentum - the show has to build interest and momentum from scratch, 2) Lack of caring - the audience forgets why they watched the show in the first place, 3) It is a good sign that the show is about to be cancelled - so why bother watching it again.

The only time a show should ever be put on hiatus is if it has already been cancelled and the network has finished episodes to show. If the show hasn’t already been cancelled the hiatus is almost sure to kill it anyway.

No Random Skip Weeks
Similar to the above, it is incredibly annoying when you tune in for a show only to find it not on. I understand that sometimes networks need to skip a week for special events: Christmas, the Superbowl etc but the disruption seems to be maximised rather than minimised. It isn’t too bad in the UK, generally only the network covering a sporting event interrupts its programming and there is a maximum of one weeks interruption for things like Christmas and Easter. American networks on the other hand, just seem to randomly decide not to air shows for the sheer hell of it. I can just imagine the program scheduler sitting in a meeting and saying; “It’s Bob’s dog’s birthday this week, better run repeats so he doesn’t miss anything.”, it genuinely seems that arbitrary.

Knowing that a show will be on from week to week makes it much easier to build momentum and for the audience to get excited about it.

No Day/Time Changes
This has to be the most obvious observation of all time, but if you change the day or time you air a show, you will definitely lose viewers. Put simply a lot of people watch TV when they have free time, if that free time no longer coincides with your show they will stop watching. Furthermore you won’t pick up viewers who’s free time now coincides with the show because they have missed the start of the season. It would be bad enough if there was one change, but some shows are shuffled around at random.

The first step in retaining viewers is simply not to annoy the hell out of them by making it difficult for them to continue watching the show. Next time I will look at how - heaven forbid - networks could attract viewers mid-season.

[712 Words]

2010 Reading List - Quarter 2 Update

2010-05-21T16:11:00.000+01:00

This is just a quick summary of my progress towards one of my Arbitrary Dividing Point In Time Resolutions. Some of you may have noticed the 2010 Reading List in the sidebar of the blog, i'm using this to keep track of what i have been reading each week.

You might be thinking: "But Steven, Quarter 2 isn't finished until the start of July, why are you updating now?". Well unlike the first quarter, i have been reading more than 1 book a week consistently since the start of April and consequently have finished my 14 books for the quarter in 7 weeks. There are a couple of reasons for this:
1) More Fiction - This quarter i read 4 fiction books and i finished them more quickly as they require less concentration (so i can read later into the night) and are generally more compelling than non-fiction books.
2) More Re-Reading - I re-read 3 of Malcolm Gladwell's books; other than the fact his writing is almost as compelling as well-written fiction, it is always faster to re-read a book than read it fresh.

The theme of 'influencing, marketing and sales' that i predicted in the Quarter 1 Update didn't quite materialise. The closest i came to those topics was Speak Human, which is almost an anti-marketing book - in a good way. In fiction i have made a start on reading some Sci-fi classics (more to come in Quarter 3) and two Neil Gaiman books (Neverwhere recommended by @TFerriss and American Gods as part of #1b1t) both of which were excellent. In non-fiction, the only lose theme i could claim is epistemology - how to we know what we think we know. While i had not previously made the connection - and it is not explicit - most of Malcolm Gladwell's work relates to epistemological failures; why what we think we know is wrong. The Knowing Doing Gap, The End of Faith and The Design of Business could also fall under this category.

I'm much happier with my reading rate now and am really enjoying it, so no predictions for a theme next quarter.

Other Arbitrary Dividing Point updates:
1. Business - No progress other than starting company.
2. Business - No progress other than starting company.
3. Travel - No progress, but expected it to be back-weighted in the year.
4. Reading - See Post Above.
5. Writing - Managed to write in my Moleskine every day since the last post.
6. Watching - Still watching 2 or 3 shows every day. Quite a few of the shows i watch just now are finishing and i will not be picking any up next year, so that should help.
7. Blog At Least Once A Week - Recently most of my posts have been pretty weak, but there have been a couple that i am reasonably happy with.

Note To Self:

2010-05-14T15:16:00.001+01:00

Stop leaving blog posts until Friday.

There were at least 3 points throughout the week when I had a good idea for something to write about and some momentum, but decided to just wait until Friday. Now it is Friday and not only have I wasted the morning and a good part of the afternoon doing not a lot, but I just cut the tip of my left ring finger, making it rather painful to type (damn 's' being a common letter). So for the second week in a row, there will be no half-decent - or at least effortful - attempt at a post.

The worst thing is I finally have a desk and keyboard at a sensible height for comfortable typing, but I can't appreciate it due to the cut on my finger.

< / whinge >

Been Electioneering

2010-05-07T16:51:00.000+01:00

Yesterday i posted this digram just before going to vote:

And i think it maybe it requires a little more explanation.

Firstly i do care about democracy, voting and the results of elections. What i find it hard to do is care about something which i have an incredibly limited ability to change. Maybe it is because i'm not involved in a political party. Maybe it is because in the UK there is so little relationship between the overall percentage of votes in the country and the actual power of the political parties. Maybe it's because national democracy is such a huge averaging of public opinion that it is hard for anything to stand out.

So what would make me care more about party politics?
If there was more polarisation between the parties and i found myself strongly agreeing or disagreeing with their policies. (e.g. it is easy to disagree with the BNP).
If politics was more meaningful on a smaller scale and my communities preferences were less likely to amount to nothing because of the preferences of other areas (e.g. if Scotland became independent).

Who knows, maybe being able to be apathetic about political parties indicates a positive convergence in politics and policies...

Writing On Writing - 30 April 2010

2010-04-30T19:54:00.003+01:00

After reading Put Your Money Where Your Mouth is again, i realised that i am a hypocrite.

In that post, i used a great photo that i got from the Flickr Creative Commons pool. For anyone unfamiliar with Creative Commons, they are a suite of licenses for intelectual property (photos, writing, software etc) which are far more flexible and less restrictive than the more common Copyright licensing. With Copyright all rights are reserved, which means that the author must give explicit permission if you want to copy, share or reuse the intelectual property. Creative Commons on the other hand has a whole range of licenses covering just about everything between Copyright and Un-copyright. For example, you can allow someone to freely copy and alter your photo, as long as they credit you and don't use it for comercial purposes with an 'Attribution Non-Commercial' license. A complete list of the licensing options can be found here: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

So how does this make me a hypocrite? What i realised was, that although i was happy to use Creative Commons photos from Flickr, all of my photos on Flickr are Copyrighted. I remember when i signed up, the choice for the default license came up and i thought i would go for Copyright just to be on the safe side. The safe side of what i'm not quite sure, but i suspect like many other people i just stuck with what i knew. Revisiting that decision, i am pretty sure that i am never going to make money from my photos, so why bother restricting their use? In the unlikely event that someone did use one of my pictures to make money, it would only be because i had licensed it as Creative Commons, no-one would pay to license one of my pictures, so i would not be missing out. Realistically, like blogging i think i would be pretty stoked that someone liked something i had created.

In conclusion i am going to change all of my photos on Flickr from Copyright licenses to Creative Commons ... now i just have to hope that there is a way to change them all at the same time!

In other news, i am a bit happier with this weeks post than last weeks, i think it flows better and i am more clear in the point i am trying to make. The part i am really not sure about is the personal appeal at the end. Is it effective? Does it come off as too preachy? Is it annoying? Again i would be very grateful if you could comment with any thoughts on the above questions or the post in general.

PS You should check out the rest of danielle bigtooth.'s photos on Flickr, they are awesome.

Update 22:15GMT 30-April-2010: Batch license changes can be made on Flickr by logging in and going to: http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/batch/

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

2010-04-30T16:35:00.004+01:00

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems impossible to turn on the news without seeing a story bemoaning the decline of some institution or another. From local shops, to community groups, to companies, there is never a shortage of members of the public prepared to whinge about how things are changing. The typical interview is so common and frequent that it has become a cliche; “Oh it’s terrible that < insert institution here > is closing”. However what most of the interviewees seem ignorant of, is that in a majority of cases they - and people like them - are the ones causing the decline.

I will never forget an interview for a news report on the decline of local shops. The reporter stopped a woman outside a new supermarket and asked her what she thought about the loss of local shops. Of course the woman spoke at length about how awful it was that high street shops were closing and that local jobs were being lost. Finally the reporter asked her whether she would continue to shop at the supermarket. To which the woman replied; “Of course, it is more convenient, cheaper and there is better parking”. She showed no inkling that there was a complete disconnect between what she claimed to believe and her actions.

The bottom line is that - as in the example above - there is normally a good reason for the change. Supermarkets take business away from local shops because they have everything under one roof, they are cheaper and they have more space for parking. Community groups break up because people aren’t prepared to put effort in to maintaining them. Steel mills close because they are more expensive than their rivals and customers demand the lowest prices regardless of where the money goes. Complaining about changes is not going to reverse them, only action will and it seems as though a lot of people are not prepared to back up their words with actions.

If someone is not prepared to put their money where their mouth is, then they should lose the right to complain.

I try to put my money where my mouth is. A recent example of this is the Art Space Tokyo project. I might not know much about art, or plan to go to Tokyo any time soon, but I was still prepared to spend $100 to back the project. I believe in the publishing model, I believe in high quality books and I believe in supporting people who provide excellent free information online. A couple of years ago The Flashbulb offered their latest album for download on a bit torrent website, but asked that you buy the CD if you enjoyed the music. I downloaded the album, enjoyed the music and bought the CD. I paid for something I could have had for free because I believe that people should pay for content they enjoy, even if they can get it for free. In both instances it would have been easy to avoid spending money, but I would have felt like a hypocrite for not acting in line with my beliefs. Last week I was tempted to complain that a book shop had gone out of business. Then I realised that if I had cared about it that much, I would have shopped there more and in reality it was not that big a loss. In that instance I changed a belief because the evidence showed that the belief was incorrect.

I urge you to look at your beliefs and ask yourself; am i prepared to put my money where my mouth is? Maybe you are unhappy about the decline of newspapers, but don’t buy newspapers regularly. Maybe you hate the boring hollywood blockbusters that monopolise cinema screens, but don’t go to see independent films when they are shown. Maybe you claim to support local music, but only go to see international bands. If your actions don’t reflect your beliefs, then you either need to change your actions or your beliefs. In an age when most non-essential needs can be met for free or very cheaply, it is important to put your money where your mouth is and support good ideas, even if they aren't perfect.

Like democracy, a small contribution to what you believe in might not make a difference alone. But if enough people put their money where their mouth is and actively support what they believe in, the things that really matter to society will be improved.

[750 Words]
Image by danielle bigtooth. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Writing On Writing - 23 April 2010

2010-04-23T22:14:00.001+01:00

A Story Of Unconventional Publishing was my first attempt at two things I have posted about previously: planning and shipping.

To be honest, I’m not that happy with how the post turned out. While the plan did help focus and structure things somewhat, by the end even I’m not sure what my point was. I think I spent too long on the introduction and not long enough on what should have been the body. Shipping certainly helped me get something posted in time, however again I’m not terribly happy with the result. Even with the amount of time I set aside I was still rushed prior to the deadline.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it was better than it would have been without a plan and shipping on time is important. I also think I have learned a few useful things:
1. I need to have a very clear idea of what my point is first, then plan around that.
2. I need to leave more time for editing and proofing.
3. While working to a maximum word count was good, I found myself not only worrying about how to get under 750 words, but also that I would cut too much out.

It will be interesting to re-read the post tomorrow and see how I feel about it then.

I would really appreciate any feedback on A Story Of Unconventional Publishing, was there anything you liked? Anything that wasn’t clear? Anything that was just plain bad?

A Story Of Unconventional Publishing

2010-04-23T16:55:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I read an article on Signal Vs Noise about two people who were self-publishing books. The first book had an interesting story behind it. It had sold out of it’s initial print run, however the publisher wanted to release the next edition as a cheap paperback. As the book contained numerous maps, illustrations and had been designed as a hardback, the author was reluctant to release it this way. Instead he decided to purchase the worldwide publishing rights, so that he could reprint as it was originally intended.

I followed a link to get more details about the project and ended up on Kickstarter. The idea of Kickstarter is quite simple; creators post projects with a minimum amount of money to be raised before the project will go ahead. They also offer various rewards for individual pledges above certain thresholds. In this case, due to the expense of printing a high quality physical book, the minimum pledge total was set at $15,000. Normally the creator would have to get this money from a bank, venture capitalist or publisher in exchange for a share of the profits, or at least interest payments. With Kickstarter the middleman is cut out, the customers put up the money, all of which goes to fund the project.

I love books, so I was blown away when I saw the photos of the first edition of Art Space Tokyo. From the silk screened cloth cover, to the impeccably set glossy pages, I knew I wanted a copy. I might not be terribly knowledgeable about art (far less Japanese art) and I have never been to Japan. At this point, even the prospect of going to Japan is a vague thought for the future, rather than a firm plan. So based on the subject matter of the book, I knew that justifying the purchase was not going to be easy.

I loved the idea of someone self-publishing to maintain the integrity of a book and I loved the idea of using Kickstarter to raise the money, however I couldn't quite bring myself to order a book I only had a tangential interest in. The average book I buy is around $20, so spending $65 on Art Space Tokyo seemed a little excessive. I read the Kickstarter page a few times, looking for an excuse to stump up the cash for the book, but it wasn’t until I realised who the author was that I knew I had to back the project.

Just after I finished my Books Vs E-Readers series of posts, I came across an article on Books In The Age Of The iPad. In an eloquent way it laid out the primary problems with e-book readers and the instances where physical books would still be the medium of choice for reading. It was presented in a very well designed manner, with custom diagrams to illustrate key points. Even the webpage containing the article supported the points being made. I also discovered that the author had written the best product review I have ever seen on the web: GF1 Field Test - 16 Days In The Himalayas. The review was interesting, engaging and presented in a very different way to most product reviews. The quality of the content and design of both of these web pages made the decision to back Art Space Tokyo obvious, so I pledged $66.

The interesting thing about Kickstarter is that the backers are almost as invested in the project as the creator. As a backer I want the project to go ahead, so I checked in regularly to see how the pledge total was progressing. After 15 days of hitting ctrl+r on the Kickstarter website and watching the total steadily rise, finally it broke the minimum funding. There are still 8 days before the deadline and because the minimum amount has been achieved the book is definitely getting made. Right now I am debating whether to increase my pledge to $100 so that I can get my name in the credits ... I think it would be really cool to have my name in a book. Unfortunately I am not sure if ‘being cool to have my name in a book’ is worth an extra $34. Thoughts?

The book is scheduled to be printed next month and dispatched in June, so not too long to wait. Check out the Kickstarter Page.

[746 Words]

The Benefit Of Forced Focus

2010-04-16T16:52:00.000+01:00

For the last few of years i haven't been watching a lot of films. I would occasionally go to the cinema, but i didn't really watch films on DVD or TV nearly as much as i used to. I was worried that spending a lot of my time on the internet and watching TV shows had degraded my ability to concentrate, to the point that i could no longer focus on one thing for 90 minutes or more.

There was however one strange exception to the rule, i really enjoyed films when i went to the cinema. My original thinking was that i enjoyed movies at the cinema because i was going to see films that i cared about seeing enough to make the effort to go to the cinema. That my enjoyment was related to the quality of the films rather than some innate property of the cinema. On reflection i think it is more likely that i enjoy films at the cinema more because i am forced to focus on the film completely. No internet, no instant messages, no e-mail notifications, no talking and no other distractions. Even the size of the screen and volume of the sound discourage other distractions. Don't get me wrong, i don't think i would enjoy a bad film just because i saw it at the cinema, but for good films i think focus has a big impact on my enjoyment.

While the cinema is great for films and concerts are great for music, i wonder if there is a way to force focus on computer based tasks and activities? Obviously there are software solutions like Rescue Time but there are always other things to distract you on a computer. Ever since computers became able to multi-task people tend to as well. It is interesting that currently the iPhone and iPad only allow you to run a single application at a time. They might be good devices for focus ... until iPhone OS 4.0 is released and they get multi-tasking.

Balls!

2010-04-09T20:12:00.000+01:00

Balls, managed to miss the blog duel deadline today.

In fairness i have been rather distracted by my dad starting a business. I spent the morning designing a logo, business cards and letterhead. Not being a graphic designer, the process was rather time consuming, at times frustrating, but ultimately quite satisfying. The logo isn't anything fancy, but trying to get everything pixel perfect in vector format was a challenge:

A large part of the afternoon was spent arguing accounting terms, styles and requirements with my mum, then prototyping various spreadsheets that will be required for cashflow, mileage and invoicing. Again time consuming and at times frustrating, but i think we have come up with a pretty good system.

Tomorrow i need to actually create the final versions of the spreadsheets and then design a really basic single page website. After all that is sorted, he should be good to go. I may have done hee-haw so far with my own business, but at least my training and research hasn't gone to waste ;-)

In other news, the votes are in and my blog posts will be a maximum of 750 words from now on. Hopefully it should be sufficiently challenging for some of the longer posts i have planned.

Seeing as i missed the deadline and this is a bit of a non-post, i will do 2 proper, real, hopefully interesting posts this week.

Blog Post Word Limit?

2010-04-02T14:10:00.000+01:00

One thing i really enjoy about Twitter is that the limit of 140 characters really forces you to refine exactly what you want to get across in a tweet. You have to cut out all of the superfluous crap, be concise and often have to rethink how to write what you want to say.

I find that often my longer blogs posts are rather rambling and i indulge in as many words as i think i need to get my point across. One of the things @37Signals are always saying is; 'embrace constraints', so i suspect my posts would be better if i imposed a word limit on the length of any individual post.

My gut feel at the moment is to limit to 1000 words, but i am concerned that this might still be too long. I think my longest post was around 1400 words and the average is less than 1000, so it wouldn't really be a substantial cut.

I have put a poll at the top left of this page and will abide by whatever length gets the most votes.

2010 Reading List - Quarter 1 Update

2010-04-01T19:05:00.000+01:00

I haven't been quite as consistent in this resolution as i would have liked, a couple of times i was more than a week ahead and at least once i was a couple of weeks behind. Though overall i have averaged a book a week this quarter. Why quarterly updates? Well monthly seems like too frequent, at most there would be 4 or 5 books and it would be quite likely I would be ahead or behind where i should be. Also around the middle of March I was looking at my reading so far this year and i noticed a pattern in what i was reading.

In the first quarter of the year, most of the books i was reading were inspirational for what i want to achieve in business. Some books were successful at inspiring me; The War Of Art, The Art Of The Start and Rework. Some ended up being downright depressing (The Management Myth) but all were interesting. After i noticed this pattern i decided to to finish the quarter with the book that originally inspired my interest in business improvement; Maverick. While i now know a lot more about manufacturing and business, it is still as relevant and inspirational as it was 5 years ago.

I have decided that the theme for my next reading (though it might not last a whole quarter) is going to be; influencing, marketing and sales. It fits in with what i need to do with my business and is an area that i am currently not very well versed in. I will continue to update the reading list in the sidebar and am considering doing a summary of each book as i go.

Overall i could have read more, but i'm happy that i managed to squeeze in a bonus book this quarter, as my fiction/non-fiction ratio was getting a little skewed.

Other Arbitrary Dividing Point updates:

1. Business - No progress other than starting company.

2. Business - No progress other than starting company.

3. Travel - No progress, but expected it to be back-weighted in the year.

4. Reading - See Post Above.

5. Writing - Missed quite a few days when i got back from Australia, but managed every day in March.

6. Watching - I have cut down my TV viewing a lot, but still watching 2 or 3 shows every day. This should come down over the summer.

7. Blog At Least Once A Week - Although not originally on the list, in light of the Blog Duel it seems logical to include it. I've had a few crap cop-out/short posts, but also had a pretty epic series too. I'm aiming to be more regular, more consistent and better crafted going forward.

(un)Employed For 3 Months

2010-03-25T16:57:00.000Z

Well i have now been - while technically not unemployed - not working for 3 months.

It hasn't felt like a holiday, it hasn't felt like work, it has just seemed empty. I haven't accomplished a lot and despite having nothing major to do i haven't breezed through nearly as many books as you might expect.

Upsides: I have cultivated quite a healthy beard and a hermit-like lifestyle.

Downsides: I haven't really made any progress towards making money or working out what to do.

Part of me thinks this is a bad thing, i could have been working and earning and suchlike for 3 months. Heck even if i hadn't been doing anything financially beneficial i could have been doing something more traditionally 'constructive'. On the other hand i have spent a lot of time thinking about some important issues that would have come up sooner or later (a future post perhaps), so the time hasn't been totally wasted.

If Only Publishers Would Listen

2010-03-16T23:15:00.001Z

The Future of Publishing:

I must admit i was never a huge fan of the original Palindrome For A Lost Generation it all seemed a little trite and obvious, though that is not to say that the above isn't too. I guess the difference is that the original was preaching to the converted, you would be hard pressed to find a member of Generation Y who didn't agree with it. On the other hand the above video is preaching a message to the publishing industry that they don't want to hear, but if they don't hear it they will end up with the future they fear.

Heck, maybe i just like it because i also don't care what Lady Gaga is wearing.

!Experiment!

2010-03-13T21:51:00.000Z

I'm in the middle of reading Linchpin by Seth Godin and i'm pretty sure i have a problem with 'shipping' on this blog.

Unlike a lot of people i don't have a problem with staring at blank pages, i have no issues with starting blog posts. In fact as things stand, i wouldn't have to start a new post for the next couple of months if i didn't want to because i have that many drafts saved. Where i have issues is finishing posts. Most of the time i get quite a bit of content down but get lost in the middle and don't fill in parts of the outline. Sometimes i get stuck in a read-revise cycle that i am never happy with. Either way i end up not publishing what i could and should.

In an effort to tackle this problem i am going to start setting deadlines and posting what i am working on at (or before) the deadline, regardless of the overall quality of the post. The upside for me is that it should force me to start working on posts earlier and prepare me to post something that i am maybe not 100% happy with. Unfortunately if you are one of the 3 or 4 readers who aren't me, the quality of the posts will likely take a serious dive over at least the next couple of weeks. Sorry. Hopefully you can put up with some poor(er) grammer, some inadequacies in structure and some very incomplete thoughts, until things start to improve.

We're On A Break

2010-03-12T17:00:00.000Z

Me and veganism that is.

I've been fully vegan for the last 6 weeks but i'm taking a break this weekend because i have been really craving pizza and beer. Ok i know it's bad for me, i know i shouldn't but damnit i want pizza and beer.

Monday will see reveganisation for at least another 6 weeks.

(un)Structured Writing

2010-03-05T15:25:00.000Z

Even after last weeks Cop Out, i still haven't managed to finish my next installment of Bloggers Vs Journalists. At first i couldn't understand it, for two or three weeks at the start of February i was knocking out three or more posts a week, now i am struggling to finish one. I think i have finally worked out what my problem is; a lack of planned structure.

Most of my previous posts on this blog have been reasonably short, so it has been easy to keep all of the key points and an overall structure in my head. The notable exception to this trend was my Books Vs E-Readers series, there was an overall arc and the posts were fairly long. What made that series easier to write without a planned structure, was that each post was relatively discreet and was purely my personal opinions on the topic.

However Bloggers Vs Journalists is a much more complicated proposition, the posts will be long, highly interlinked and trying to build up a single solid argument. So far i have been trying to write this from some rough notes of key points, but i keep getting bogged down with new ideas and trying to work out where they fit within the wider scheme of things. What is lacking is a planned structure; what do i want to say, when do i want to say it and how does that build into a cohesive whole.

Obvious i know, but i need to prepare a plan to structure the writing and store ideas. I'm not really sure of the best way to go about this, i have previous used outlines and mind maps, any other thoughts?

Cop Out

2010-02-26T15:59:00.000Z

No i'm not writing a review of the latest Kevin Smith movie, instead I am posting just to post.

I made a fairly good dent in writing my second Journalists Vs Bloggers post, however I left it too late and there is no way it will be finished in time. So in the interests of not missing a post in the Blog Duel, i will post this now and then put up a proper post later today or tomorrow.

Journalism Vs Bloggers - Introduction

2010-02-17T00:20:00.000Z

After a recent discussion with a newspaper journalist, the lasting impression i got was her general pessimism, both about the curent state of affairs and the future of the industry. The main thoughts i had on the subject were about why blogs are having such an influence on the decline of newspapers, why professional journalism is still important and what journalists can do to prosper going forward. I was originally going to cover all of that in one post, but it became rather long and unwieldy so i will split it out into a few posts.

I would like to preface this series of posts by saying up front that i am in no way a professional writer, which should become obvious quite quickly. Furthermore i harbour no aspirations of overthrowing traditional journalists or making money from this blog. On the other hand i think i have something interesting to say on the topic and i am grateful that even a small number of people will read it. The above 3 sentences contain the seeds of why newspapers around the globe are failing, but they should also give professional journalists hope for their future.

A lot of the commentary on this topic from traditional journalists, is really just whining about the demise of newspapers and looking for someone to blame. They blame everyone from the general public, for not caring about good reporting anymore, to MTV for shortening attention spans. But mostly they blame bloggers for making so much content free - how dare they! The more objective perspective, is that technology has fundamentally changed the landscape of media, rendering the old business model of newspapers unsustainable. No-one is at fault, it is simply evolution.

Bloggers can be equally sensationalist, proclaiming newspapers to be dead and professional journalists an anachronism. This is at best a partial truth. Newspapers are certainly in decline, but there is a good chance that they will continue on - in some form or another - for quite some time. Sensationalist bloggers are also guilty of being unable to separate the medium (newspapers) from the work (journalism) and it is an important distinction.

In this series of posts, i will specifically be discussing journalists and newspapers, but the points are applicable more generally to any traditional media industry (music, film, publishing; books and magazines). In the first post i will look at why blogging is killing newspaper reporting and why this isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the second i will move on to why there will always be a place for professional journalists. Thirdly - and most importantly if you hope to be a professional journalist - what professional writers will have to do to survive and thrive in the future. Finally i will post a round-up of the main points and some conclusions.

I would appreciate any comments on what i write in this and future posts, particularly if you disagree with me.

Some More On E-Books ...

2010-02-15T08:03:00.001Z

It would appear that i'm not the only one pondering e-books at the moment.

The Great E-Book War
This article takes a look at the recent skirmish between Amazon and some publishers. Apple seem to have given the publishers a better deal in the iBook store and they are looking for similar concessions from Amazon. Interestingly it looks like Amazon may have already been implementing some of the things i suggested, but the publishers are trying their best to replicate the mistakes made by the record and film companies.

Confessions of a Book Pirate
This article consists largely of an interview with an old-school book pirate. By old-school i mean he scanned the books, performed Optical Character Recognition on them and then distributed them in rich text documents. This is compared to the more new-school piracy of disabling the DRM on existing e-books. It covers a lot of the same ground as i did in my Books Vs E-Readers Series (see below) and makes many of the same suggestions, just in a more concise manner. Also as i mentioned, with the increase in availability of e-reader hardware at a sensible cost, e-book piracy is set to skyrocket. For me the ironic thing is that publishers had the opportunity to learn from other industries, to stop this before it started and yet they are obstinately staying the course that has already failed miserably for everyone else.

The one excellent point made in both of these articles, that the publishers are stubbornly refusing to accept, is that they cannot charge the same for an e-book as a physical book. Aside from the fact that an e-book is much cheaper for them to sell and distribute, customers simply do not get the same value from an e-book as a physical one, so they expect pay less for it.

This is a bit of a filler post, but rest assured i have quite a few irons in the fire. Books Vs E-Readers has lead me to think more about old media Vs new media in a couple of other specific areas, but also more generally about disruptive technologies and why people can't seem to learn from previous changes.

Books Vs E-Readers Series
1 - Introduction
2 - The Benefits of E-Readers
3 - My Reservations About E-Readers
4 - Why E-books Are Not The Same As MP3s
5 - Conclusions
6 - Redux - An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

Shocking Book Piracy Exposed!

2010-02-13T14:07:00.001Z

I am posting today, to tell you about an insidious and terrible threat to the publishing industry.

I was wrong in a previous post, when i said that book piracy was currently very low. It turns out that book pirates have been operating with impunity for decades, costing the publishing industry trillions of dollars in lost sales. These terrible crimes against intelectual property, are committed every day of the week around the world, often in full view of law enforcement and nothing is done. In plain sight, they offer people access to entertainment and information for free. No-one gets paid; not the publishers, not the distributors, not the authors - think of the poor starving authors. How can the publishing industry hope to survive in the face of such institutionalised theft?

Ladies and gentleman, who are these scurrilous villains, freely roaming the streets? I give you librarians!

Service Is A Differentiator

2010-02-12T00:51:00.000Z

If your product is pretty much the same as your competitors, all you are competing on is service.

In my last company i had an argument with one of the owners about whether 'service' was a differentiator for a business. He was adamant it wasn't and i must admit i still haven't read Killer Differentiators to find out why he thought this, but i had an experience last week that proves that not only is service a differentiator, sometimes it is the only differentiator.

When i was looking to open a bank account for my business, i did a little research online and found that most business accounts were similar. So i was pretty sure i would end up going with the same bank where i have my personal accounts. I have never had problems with them, i like their online banking and i thought being an existing customer i might get preferential treatment. As it turns out, when i wandered round branches of the main banks, the service was pretty bad in all but one ... and that one was not my existing bank.

All of the banks now seem to employ greeters, who approach you as you enter to find out why you are there. Generally all of these greeters are smiling and try their best to be helpful. How helpful they actually are, very much depended on the bank. I will cut the list down to 3 banks that were illustrative of the levels of service i received:

Bank 1 - Bank Of Scotland

This is who my mum has her business account with and she seemed to think they were ok, so i decided i would check them out. When i walked in and said that i was looking to open a business account, the greeter looked like i had just asked her to hand over all the cash. She seemed genuinely shocked. After overcoming her initial panic, she tracked down a more senior person, who told me that they no longer opened business accounts in branch and i would have to signup over the phone.

Let's see, i would probably spend ages on hold, followed by a lengthly phone call, with lots of trying to explain and spell things, probably with a call centre in India and either have to post my passport away or go into a branch to hand it over anyway. Not my idea of a good time, thanks but no thanks.

Bank 2 - The Royal Bank Of Scotland

It has to be said that my business was theirs to lose. By this point i had been to a few other banks and had similar experiences to the above. I decided; stuff it, i have my personal accounts with them, i might as well go with RBS.

The greeter was slightly less terrified than the one in Bank Of Scotland, but she also informed me that they didn't open business accounts in that branch. She did tell me that they had a business consultant at another branch in town, at which point i said i would just go there then. This did not go over well, she insisted that i stay so she could take my details to pass them on to the business consultant. Why? I'm really not sure. Maybe the greeter got some sort of bonus for referrals, or maybe she thought she was being helpful. Either way, i would have rather gone to the other branch to see someone who could actually help me. So after a bit of waiting while the greeter attempted to find some brochures and forms, she proceeded to ask me questions to fill in a form that replicated my account details. What a waste of time, both mine and hers. I was then told that the business consultant would call me later in the day ... or maybe tomorrow. Very reassuring.

Totally dismayed at the poor service, i thought i would try one last bank, which lead me to ...

Bank 3 - HSBC

Things i knew about HSBC before last week; 1) They have a lot of international branches, 2) They have a lot of intelligent adverts, particularly at airports and 3) Absolutely nothing about their accounts. It was a long shot, but i figured i might be traveling or living abroad, so international branches could be useful.

I went in and the service was radically better than i had received anywhere else. The greeter was pleasant and helpful, she told me that they had a business consultant in branch and she would check if he could see me there and then. While she went to check, she sat me down in a comfy seat, asked if i would like tea or coffee and quickly returned to let me know the business consultant would be out shortly. The business consultant was very helpful. While he couldn't open the account on the spot as he had appointments for the rest of the day, he did juggle some other appointments around so that i could open it as soon as possible. He listed everything i would need to bring with me, gave me a business card with the appointment details on it and i left. The whole experience made my decision easy and obvious.

Ok my company is unlikely to turn over a vast amount of cash and make HSBC lots of money. But consider how many people will be pissed off with other banks and open an account with HSBC, then square that number to account for all of the people they tell and that adds up to a lot more business.

Now there is a good chance i will never be back in a branch again (i do all of my personal banking online and i suspect my business banking will be the same) but it is nice to know that should i need to go in the service is good. It may seem slightly irrational to base a very rational decision (opening a bank account), on something as ephemeral as customer service in one particular branch at one particular time. But in the absence of any other meaningful difference in the product, it was all that mattered.

Service may not be the best or most secure thing to differentiate your business or product on, but it is definitely a differentiator in the eyes of the customer.

How To Alienate Customers With One Question

2010-02-10T08:01:00.002Z

On Monday i went to the cinema and was asked the following question; "Are you a Friend of Eden Court?" and i was tempted to reply with; "Well technically no, but i didn't realise we had to be enemies".

Ok the cinema is called Eden Court and they have a membership program called 'Friends of Eden Court', but taken out of context the question seems a little harsh. If i didn't know about the loyalty program, i would certainly have felt alienated, heck even knowing about the program i still felt a little sting. While i'm sure people on the program get a warm fuzzy feeling when asked if they are a friend and get to reply yes, anyone who is not a member isn't going to feel great.

Maybe that is part of the plan, to make customers who aren't members feel guilty until they join. But if so it seems like a pretty poor plan, sure some might join out of guilt, but the rest are just going to stop coming back because they are made to feel guilty when they do. What they need to do is give loyal customers the warm fuzzy feeling, without alienating new/returning customers who haven't joined.

The funny thing is that by making a subtle change in the wording of the question, you would still get the benefit for members and be less confrontational with non-members. I propose; "Are you a member of the Friends of Eden Court?". Ok it is not quite as snappy, but it makes it clear that you can become a 'friend' and doesn't make you feel quite so bad about not being one.

Books Vs E-Readers - Redux - An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

2010-02-08T07:56:00.002Z

Dear Jeff,

I am a long-time customer and fan of Amazon, even when I was in Australia I still bought all of my books from you. Every so often I am tempted to look through my receipts and add up all of the purchases I have made over the years, then I decide the number would scare me.

It saddens me to think that, as things stand, Apple are about to blow you out of the water in terms of e-books. This really should be your domain, you started off selling books, you brought the first viable e-reader to market and you have a large market share. Sadly all of that will cease to matter, when Apple bring out their shiny new hardware and iBook store.

There are some things you just can't beat Apple on:
Industrial Design - I'm sorry but all of the versions of the Kindle have been kinda ugly. Sure they're thin and light but the keyboard on the bottom makes it look ridiculous. The screen may have the same form-factor as a book, but the device as a whole does not, you need to ditch the keyboard.
Multimedia Content - With the LED-backlit IPS display, they will crush you at displaying colour magazines, movies, tv shows and websites. This gives them much greater flexibility on content.
Simplicity and Elegance - In terms of the overall user experience, you just can't beat Apple on making things easy for people.

So can we agree, that going after the tablet computer market is a waste of your time? What you need to do is out 'book' them! Where they go wide and try to do everything for everyone, you need to go narrow and do one thing really really well. Their success so far has been with products that take an existing model and make it shinier and easy to use - computers, mp3 players, phones etc. With e-books they have to totally change the way people use and interact with books, which is a much harder task. Just look at the difficulty they are having with the AppleTV. So if you focus on books and offer significant benefits to customers, you might just be able to take Apple on at e-books and win.

What do you already have in your favour?
E-Ink - Ok there are some issues with the refresh rate for page turns and lack of colour, but for reading it is still much easier on the eyes than an LCD. It also leads to ...
Great Battery Life - You get one week of reading on a Kindle on a charge Vs 10 hours on an iPad. That is another major advantage and a big benefit for travellers.
Database Of Reviews and Recommendations - This is a huge advantage for existing customers, from the start you can recommend the best content for them and you have a wide selection of reviews. Apple will have to build all of this from scratch.
Physical Distribution - You can sell both physical and electronic versions of books, they can only sell electronically.

Based on the above, what could you do that would offer significant benefits compared to Apple?
Free Downloads Of Books People Already Own - You have an enormous database of people's book purchases, why not combine that with the Kindle and offer them free versions of electronic books they have bought previously? It wouldn't have to be every book, but if you gave people say 20 free books that they had previously bought from Amazon when they got a Kindle, that would be a big incentive. Rather than paying for the hardware and having to pay again to get content, you could give them some free content, that you know is of interest to them, to get them started.
Cheap E-Books With A Physical Book Purchase - If when someone bought a book, they could get the e-book for a low price, say $2, it would be an easy decision. Again this would make a big difference, even if people weren't fully committed to moving completely to e-books, this might get them started on the way. It would also be useful for traveling, you might prefer to own a book, but having a library of e-books on a Kindle would be useful while you were away. Or if like me, they are concerned about not really owning electronic copies, the safety net of a physical book would be appealing.
Set An Open E-book Standard - Ok maybe this goes against the idea of getting paid for both the hardware and the content all the time. But how many people would buy from you, if they knew that they could use other sources of content on your hardware and your content on other manufacturers hardware? It would also give you greater flexibility because other manufacturers could come up with more niche hardware, but people would still buy content from you. Or if you came up with killer hardware, people could use content from multiple stores on it. This would break down people's resistance because they wouldn't feel locked in to a single ecosystem. The trick would be, to then build an ecosystem so good that people wouldn't want to go elsewhere (see Music - iPod + iTunes).

None of the above would be a panacea, you will still have to continue to improve the Kindle hardware. But what the suggestions above do, is reduce people's resistance to buying and if you can get more people started on your hardware and ecosystem, you have a much better chance of competing. Remember, you need to focus on adding value for your customers NOT trying to make more money for publishers. Though if you get the former right, the latter will follow.

I will certainly continue to buy my physical books from you and if you implement any of the suggestions above, there is a good chance that I (and many others) will buy e-books from you too.

Thanks,

Steven

PS Please feel free to check out the rest of my blog posts on the subject of physical books Vs e-readers.

Books Vs E-Readers Series
1 - Introduction
2 - The Benefits of E-Readers
3 - My Reservations About E-Readers
4 - Why E-books Are Not The Same As MP3s
5 - Conclusions
6 - Redux - An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

Books Vs E-Readers - Conclusions

2010-02-06T09:57:00.002Z

After having looked at the benefits of and issues with e-readers, along with Why E-Books Are Not MP3s, i think i have come to some conclusions.

I certainly wrote far more on my reservations about e-readers and it should be clear that there are currently some big issues to overcome before widespread adoption. However there are some things - in rough order of preference - that would make buying an e-reader a no-brainer for me.

If buying a physical book entitled me to a free (or very cheap) electronic version.
With this option you get the best of both worlds and a lot of the reservations are mollified. I would be happy to accept restrictive DRM because i would always have a hard copy to fall back on. While the publisher might be concerned that you would sell the physical book and keep the e-book, the DRM would at least prevent you sharing the e-book. It would cost the publishers a negligible amount in terms of distribution and I would be happy to pay an extra pound or two for the benefit. What really irks me at the moment, is that e-books cost the same as physical books, despite not having any printing or distribution costs.

This could be where Amazon can fight back against the iPad. They have physical distribution as well as electronic. So if they were to offer me a Kindle download of a book that i purchased as i was checking out, for say £2, i would jump at the chance. It would drive hardware sales, it would provide extra revenue for minimal effort and it would make customers happy.

If e-books were encapsulated in a non-proprietary, DRM-free file, that was mine in perpetuity.
Similar to the above, this would remove a lot of my objections. If e-books were all a common standard (PDF for example), without DRM and the files could be downloaded, stored and used on any computer or e-reader, i would be happy to buy.

Though this is very unlikely to happen because there is currently a low level of e-book piracy (compared to music, films and tv) and distributing DRM free files, would increase piracy exponentially. But it could also be argued that it won't be long before people break the DRM on e-books and piracy becomes more common anyway.

If i could get electronic copies of the books i currently own, for free or at an extremely low price.

This would be similar to being able to rip your CDs to an iPod, it would make the hardware more valuable to me because i could use content that i already own. Ok it is totally pie in the sky because how do you prove that own a book and haven't just borrowed it from a friend or a library. Also publishers would never go for it because in their eyes they should be able to charge you for every different format of the content. While this makes sense for audio books, where there is additional cost for recording, it makes little sense for an e-book, which has no additional costs.

Again Amazon would be in a good position to do this. They know which books you have paid for, so they could offer those books for free if you bought a Kindle. Perhaps you have sold the book, or given it away since you bought it, but the bottom line is that at some stage you paid for it and it costs them nothing to give you it.

Alternatively e-books could be priced more sensibly to reflect the real sales and distribution costs (next to nothing) and a small profit. If e-books were suitably cheap and you could afford to re-purchase content you already owned, again this would make an e-reader much more tempting.

I realise that the latter two are almost certainly never going to happen, but sadly even the first most realistic option is unlikely to happen because publishers are; 1) Protectionist. They are trying in vain, to protect the existing business model and margins. They are doomed to fail in exactly the same way that the film and record companies have. 2) Terrified of piracy. This is already an issue and no amount of DRM or lock-in will fix that. The only way to make piracy less appealing, is to provide extra value for purchasing the product. 3) Greedy. They are determined to try to extract every penny they can from you and by doing so, they make you spend less overall.

When i first drafted parts of this last Sunday, i was going to conclude that i was likely to get an e-reader anyway. But after looking at it in more detail over the week, i think i have talked myself out of buying one. As things stand, i don't see any major benefits and there are a lot of issues with the current system. I may well buy an iPad at some point as a tablet computer, but i won't be buying e-books for it any time soon.

Books Vs E-Readers Series
1 - Introduction
2 - The Benefits of E-Readers
3 - My Reservations About E-Readers
4 - Why E-books Are Not The Same As MP3s
5 - Conclusions
6 - Redux - An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

Books Vs E-Readers -Why E-Books Are Not The Same As MP3s

2010-02-05T08:08:00.006Z

In previous posts, i have looked at the benefits of and issues with e-readers. However many people extrapolate from the success of digital music, to suggest that the imminent dominance of e-books is inevitable, i disagree.

I think it is fairly safe to say that MP3s - or more generally digital downloads - are the future of music, however this was not always certain to be the case. Poor sound quality and restrictive Digital Rights Management (DRM) could have killed or constrained the adoption of music downloads, however both of these issues have now largely been resolved. E-books currently have similar problems (screen quality is not as good as print and DRM is almost always used for e-books), they also have some even bigger hurdles to overcome compared to MP3s. Below i will outline the additional barriers to adoption of e-books compared to MP3s.

DRM and Poor Sound Quality were only a problem for legal MP3 downloads.
Looking back to the late 90's, MP3s did not become popular because the record companies offered digital downloads, they became popular because people could copy their own music and share it with their friends. Without this initial growth in usage, it is unlikely that MP3 players or digital downloads would have become popular. Furthermore if you ripped your own CDs or obtained copies from friends, they could be CD-quality and could be played on any device due to the lack of DRM. This offered a clear advantage over the legal sources at the time.

If the Napster/Morpheus/Kazza era was utopia, then why did legal MP3 downloads gain traction? In my opinion it was a perfect storm of 3 factors. 1) The record companies poisoned illegal sources with fake MP3s. There was a time on file sharing programs, when it felt like every MP3 was blank, looped or fake, which made things a bit pointless. Which lead to 2) Increased convenience and sensible pricing in the form of the iTunes Store. Ok you had to pay for the music, but the selection was vast and you knew you were going to get the right track. Finally, more recently 3) The availability of high sound quality, DRM-free downloads. It is much more palatable to pay for music when you know that you aren't locked into specific hardware or software. Also while you are paying the same price as a CD, the sound quality is as good.

Unfortunately e-books will be crippled by restrictive DRM and lower quality for the foreseeable future. Worst of all, because there are very limited illegal alternatives, there will be little pressure for publishers to improve the situation, they are in total control whether you like it or not.

MP3 is a common standard, e-books are not.
Fairly early on in the history of digital music, people settled on MP3 as a standard format. It was flexible - offering a variety of encoding qualities - there were also a wide variety of encoders and players available.

Over the years companies have tried to push proprietary competitors - WMA from Microsoft and M4A & AAC from Apple - however they are not widely used due to incompatibilities with hardware and software. In fact, they are almost never used voluntarily. They are either forced on customers due to DRM, or are used out of ignorance, as they are the default ripping options in Windows Media Player and iTunes. There are also some more open file types, most notably OGG and FLAC. While they offer many advantages over MP3 in terms of quality and a lack of license fees, they have never become widely used as MP3 is the established standard.

E-books currently do not have an established standard, each hardware manufacturer and store are pushing their own proprietary format. So while you can buy any MP3 player and be pretty sure that your files will work on it, there is a good chance if you switch e-reader manufacturer, your files will no longer work.

You can rip a CD you own to an iPod, you can't copy a book you own to an iPad.
An MP3 player made your existing music collection portable. Ok ripping CDs took time, but it meant the usefulness of your iPod was not totally reliant on making new purchases and a single source for content. You could copy your own CDs to it and acquire MP3 files from other sources, both legal and illegal. People were prepared to pay for the hardware because it meant that they could use their existing content in a new way, even if they never spent a penny after the initial purchase.

With e-readers you have to start from scratch, if you want to read a book on your e-reader you need to buy it, even if you already own it in paper format. This means that the usefulness of the device is limited to future purchases and does not make your historic purchases more valuable. This is the most significant difference between e-readers and MP3 players, the latter adds value to what you already own, the former requires you to spend and keep spending.

An MP3 player adds value to what you already own, an e-reader devalues what you already own.

You might only want to buy one track from an album, you almost never just want one chapter of a book.

Popular music is highly episodic in nature, each track can be enjoyed in isolation and sometimes there is little benefit to hearing the whole album. However historically you had to buy a whole album even if you only wanted one song. Therefore being able to buy only the songs you wanted, was highly beneficial to customers. Much to some artists dismay, being able to buy individual tracks changed the way people buy music.

Books on the other hand - with the exception of collections of short stories, poetry and some academic books - rely on the whole composition. No-one wants to just buy the start or end of a book, or a random chapter from the middle. The bottom line is, that other than increasing availability, e-readers will not change the way people buy books.

MP3s changed they way people could buy music, e-books do not change they way people buy books.

A book in isolation is useful, music has always been useless without hardware and power.
Since the demise of gramophones, you have needed a power source to listen to music. People accept that if they buy music, regardless of its format, they will require some hardware and proximity to a power supply to make it useful. Switching from cassette tapes, to CDs, to Minidiscs, to MP3s, the basic economics and function did not change. The paradigm was the same, people were using music in the same way they had been using it for decades. The advances in portable music players have been in making devices smaller, carrying a larger catalogue and increasing battery life.

This is not the case for books, people are used to the fact that they can use a book whenever and wherever they want. They don't have to charge it from a socket or buy hardware to read it, it just works. Moving to e-books relies on completely changing the usage model. While there is the benefit of being able to carry a larger catalogue, people still have to be convinced to buy additional hardware and accept the restrictions that requiring a power source brings.

A CD without hardware and power is a shiny coaster, a book provides value by itself.

I guess you can't stop progress and for some people e-books will make sense, but i think the adoption of e-books will be far slower than the adoption of MP3s. And while the progress of MP3s has been relatively fast, keep in mind that even after over a decade, you can still get just about any music you want on a CD.

Tomorrow i will post a round-up of my conclusions and most importantly what publishers could do to make e-readers a no-brainer purchase.

Books Vs E-Readers Series

1 - Introduction

2 - The Benefits of E-Readers

3 - My Reservations About E-Readers

4 - Why E-books Are Not The Same As MP3s

5 - Conclusions

6 - Redux - An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

Books Vs E-Readers - My Reservations About E-Readers

2010-02-03T07:48:00.007Z

In my last post i focused on The Benefits of E-Readers, however there are some issues with them, that for me, are potential deal breakers.

You Never Really Own The Product - Your use of an e-book is not absolute. Effectively you pay a company to borrow the book indefinitely and they can chose to take it back whenever they want. You might think, that in the same way that you own a book, you would own an e-book. This is not the case, last year Amazon released a version of 1984 on Kindle and shortly thereafter withdrew it from sale. However it didn't stop there, in an ironically Orwellian twist, they also removed the e-book from the Kindle of everyone who had already bought it too. Ok they refunded the people who had bought it, but how would you feel if your favourite book one day disappeared from your e-reader? Worse still, that case was handled well. People got a refund and a replacement was offered quite promptly afterwards, but that is unlikely to always be the case. There is no reason an unscrupulous provider couldn't chose to selectively censor content or just decide to arbitrarily remove books on a whim. Even if the provider was not being malicious, many of the e-readers rely on a connection to a server to authenticate content. If that connection is lost, the content ceases to work. It could be a temporary outage, or the company could go bankrupt, either way you would lose access to something you have paid for. This is easily my biggest concern with e-readers and unless it is addressed, i can't see me making important purchases only electronically.

Useful Life - As with all computer files, how sure are you that you will be able to access an e-book in 3, 5 or 10 years time? A physical book, provided it is kept well, should be just as readable in 100 years time as it is now. An electronic file? ... who knows. Software and hardware change so quickly, that you cannot be sure that it will be easy to read the file in the future, especially if it is in a proprietary format or uses DRM. Similarly to the above point there is a good chance that you could lose access to something that you have paid for.

You Rely On Power - You can use a book anywhere, anytime ... except in the dark. An e-reader on the other hand is always reliant on having a power supply. It might only last 10 hours between charges like an iPad, or it might last 7 days like a Kindle. Either way if you lose/forget the power adapter, there is an extended power cut or you are somewhere remote, you are screwed. The same could be said for an MP3 player or a mobile phone, however the alternatives to those technologies require power too, a book does not. Power outlets are popping up all over the place these days, due to the prevalence of laptops and mobile phones, but it is still less flexible than a book.

You can't flick through an e-book - This is a minor point, that i'm sure could be adequately overcome with a good way to search the e-book. However one of the advantages of books is that you can flick through them quickly. You might remember roughly what the page looked like or where it was through the book and a quick flick will help you locate it. Certainly with e-ink, this is not feasible on an e-reader, the refresh time is a few seconds, so potentially it could take quite a while to 'flick' through an e-book. This is less of an issue with more traditional LCD displays, however it still wouldn't be as fast.

Hardware cost - A book is self-contained, you don't need anything else to use it, an e-reader requires additional hardware. Now that would be fine, if the purchase price of the e-books reflected the lack of printing and distribution costs. Unfortunately they don't, at the moment e-books generally cost the same as (if not more than) hard copy books. So there is no ROI, there is no tipping point where spending £300 on an iPad will save you money, if you buy more than say 60 books a year. The e-reader system, under the current pricing, will always be more expensive. Things become even more expensive if you don't read a lot. For example if you only buy 5 books a year and e-reader hardware lasts 2 years, you are paying an extra £30/book for the privilege of getting an electronic copy.

Second Hand Sales / Sharing - Unlike a real book, there is no way to sell or lend an e-book. Once you have paid for an e-book you are stuck with it. It might suck, you might never want to look at it again, but there is no way to recoup any of what you paid by selling or trading it. You also can't lend a great e-book to a friend, while it would be technically feasible, it isn't really in the publishers interest. In their view, as the printing and distribution costs are zero, why shouldn't your friend just buy a copy. Even if there was a system where you could share e-books, it would rely on your friend having the same (or compatible) hardware as you. With a book you can sell, trade or lend it at your discretion.

Regional Restrictions - For me the most annoying thing in the iTunes store is; "this content is not available in your region". Why the hell not? What does it matter where i am located, i am prepared to pay, it doesn't cost them any more to send it to me, so why turn down a sale. The only reasons for regional restrictions are; 1) With physical products you have to ship them, sometimes you don't have enough to ship or it takes longer to ship to certain places. In this case regional restrictions make some sense, why serve 2 markets poorly when you can serve one, then the other, well. However this is not even remotely applicable for electronic products, they cost nothing to reproduce or deliver, so why restrict their sale. Which leads us to; 2) It allows content providers to gouge certain locations at different rates. If a company has enough control and can charge twice as much in one place as another, why wouldn't they. In the past this worked acceptably, but only because it was not easy for people to find out if they were being gouged or find lower cost alternatives. With the internet people are immediately aware if they are being charged more and are often able to source cheaper alternatives. It is a global economy so why are there still regional restrictions?

Availability - I know i listed this as an advantage on Monday and while availability would generally be improved, there are a number of situations where it would not be as good. Provided a book is available in your language, you can have it shipped anywhere and use it. I used to get books shipped from the UK to Australia, because even including the postage charges, they were half the price and there was a better selection. That would not have been an option if i had a Kindle or an iPad and was stuck with the Australian store. It is also likely, that many older or more obscure books are not available electronically and therefore could not be purchased. That will improve as it becomes more economically viable to scan and digitise books, but it may never be economically viable for some titles.

So as you can see, there are as many problems with e-readers as benefits. Next I will look at barriers to the adoption of e-readers and in particular Why E-books Are Not The Same As MP3s.

Books Vs E-Readers Series

1 - Introduction

2 - The Benefits of E-Readers

3 - My Reservations About E-Readers

4 - Why E-books Are Not The Same As MP3s

5 - Conclusions

6 - Redux - An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

Books Vs E-Readers - The Benefits of E-Readers

2010-02-01T08:05:00.003Z

As an avid reader, i can think of lots of benefits that an e-reader would provide:

Backup - While i am sure a physical book is more robust overall than an e-reader, books are vulnerable - in a very permanent way - to fire, water, loss, theft, wear and tear. An e-book can be backed up and re-downloaded should the worst happen.

Portability - Books are heavy. As someone who had to ship 25kg (a years worth) of books from Australia to the UK, life would have been much easier if they were all on an e-reader or in the cloud. There may be some battery life issues in terms of portability, but physically an e-reader is far more portable. This also applies to travel, i normally carry 4 books in my hand luggage and a couple in my hold luggage, a total of around 3kg's. If i had an e-reader, i would only need to carry 1 book (for emergencies) along with the e-reader.

Multi-function - A book just does one very specific thing, you can't browse the web, watch a film or listen to music using a book. Really this is just additional portability beyond books, removing the need for other devices.

Searchability - I don't know whether this is a current feature, but how useful would it be to be able to search every book in your library from one place? In the past i tried to setup a system of note-taking and blog posts, to make some of the books i had read searchable. It failed for a number of reasons, most notably; there was a lot of effort required to take notes and the fact that what seems important to note at the time, may not be what you are looking for in the future. Having a global search of your books would be seriously useful.

Cashflow Optimisation - I currently buy books in batches and they can sit on my shelf for weeks, months or in some cases years. With an e-reader, i could just queue up books i want in my saved items and only buy them once i was ready to read them. With physical books, you never know when the mood to read a particular one will strike, so i keep a few on hand 'just in case'. By purchasing on-demand when i was ready to read a book, i would save a considerable amount of cash sitting on the shelf unused.

Availability - There will no longer be any need to worry if a book is in print, or whether it needs to be shipped from the states. Print runs will cease to have any meaning, as once a book is written it can be distributed electronically an infinite number of times. Also the lead time to anywhere with an internet connection shrinks to minutes rather than days or weeks.

Condition - Most books end up in worse condition after repeat reading and i am a little anal-retentive about keeping my books in top shape. No more worrying about cracked spines, or people folding over pages or tears or sweat from my fingers. An e-book is always in pristine condition.

There are probably some positives i have forgotten, so if you think of any please comment. Unfortunately there are also some significant issues with e-books, which will be discussed on Wednesday.

Books Vs E-Readers Series

1 - Introduction

2 - The Benefits of E-Readers

3 - My Reservations About E-Readers

4 - Why E-books Are Not The Same As MP3s

5 - Conclusions

6 - Redux - An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

Books Vs E-Readers - Introduction

2010-01-31T00:26:00.008Z

I read ... a lot.

With the advent of the Kindle and more recently the iPad (i still maintain it is a stupid name), i have increasingly been thinking about e-books. My first reaction was; 'great an iPod for my books'. Then i started to get nostalgic about having physical books on a shelf and worried about never really owning electronic products. Most recently i have felt guilty for not embracing the change and moving with the times. Today i realised that i still really don't know where i stand on the subject.

So in an effort to try to work out what to do - buy books or buy e-books - i will write a series of blog posts on the subject. At this stage i plan to post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, about the following topics; Firstly The Benefits of E-Readers because they could be very useful. Secondly My Reservations About E-Readers because there are some serious issues with them. Thirdly i will post about Why E-Books Are Not The Same As MP3s because while it seems like a straight forward comparison, it really isn't. Finally i will post some Conclusions about where i stand on e-readers. Though the posts may well expand into next week if i think of any more topics.

I'm sure i will find this useful for working through my own thoughts and hopefully it will be useful to anyone else reading the posts who loves books.

Books Vs E-Readers Series

1 - Introduction

2 - The Benefits of E-Readers

3 - My Reservations About E-Readers

4 - Why E-books Are Not The Same As MP3s

5 - Conclusions

6 - Redux - An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

Slipage

2010-01-30T20:03:00.000Z

Since i got home from Australia i have experienced some slippage in my Arbitrary Dividing Point In Time Resolutions, slippage of course being management speak for totally screwing up.

While i technically posted in time on the blog last week, it was a particularly poor effort. A top 5 list isn't really a proper post, it took next to no time and is somewhat against the spirit of the challenge. So going forward i need to make more of an effort to do real posts.

I have also let my reading slip rather badly too. By reading The War Of Art in an afternoon, i got 1 week ahead on my reading. I did start The (mis)behaviour Of Markets, however i have not made any progress on it since the flight last week. So going forward i need to stop watching junk on TV (yes actual junk, on an actual TV :-O) and start reading every night.

Finally i have badly failed on writing in my Moleskine. Again i was sticking to the resolution well until i moved home and since then i have only written one page while at a lecture. Part of this was lacking a pen (lame excuse i know), part was being lazy and mostly it was a change in routine. So going forward i need to make writing in my Moleskine part of my new routine.

So now that i have identified the fact i have been failing on these less than a month in, i really need to do something about it. Previously i would have accepted the failure, ignored what i had committed to doing and moved on. This time, i am going to recommit to these resolutions and work them into my new daily routine from Monday.

Inconsiderate Travellers

2010-01-20T11:29:00.001Z

Almost the only thing, that causes me to totally lose my shit when traveling, is inconsiderate people.

There is a thin veneer of civility when traveling, it allows people to be crammed in to small spaces without killing eachother. Most people maintain this civil manner, but some people are just totally inconsiderate. It manifests in many ways; from screaming at staff, to jumping queues, to being totally clueless at security screening, to boarding before your row number is called. However the number one inconsiderate thing people do while flying, is to recline on top of you.

The bottom line is, in economy space is precious. I am sitting in the largest passenger plane in the world and yet there is still barely enough space to use my 13" laptop, even without someone reclining on me. If someone did recline right now, not only would it render my laptop unusable in the space, but there is also a good chance it would crack my screen.

Sure you say, but what if you aren't trying to use a laptop? Well even with the tray table up, reclining makes it next to impossible to do anything else either. Try holding and reading a book, in the 6 inches remaining between you and a seat. Try getting something out of the seat pocket, that is now compressed against your legs. Heck even try getting comfortable, when the top of someones head is in your personal space. It just shows a total lack of respect and consideration for the person behind you.

Worst of all, reclining begets more reclining. If someone reclines onto you, most people then think it is ok to recline onto the person behind them. So the reclining cascades back through the plane pissing everyone off. There are rare people who try and break the cycle, who don't want to be inconsiderate to the person behind them, but they are in the minority.

I fully appreciate that i could be considered inconsiderate, for wanting to deny the passenger in front the right to recline. But the bottom line is, while they want to do it, it affects me too. It is the same as passive smoking, a lot of people smoke without any consideration for those around them. Ok maybe reclining is less likely to give me cancer, but it is still something that makes my life miserable without my consent.

So what is to be done? From my perspective, there are a few simple options:

1. Fix the root cause: Design the seats so that reclining doesn't affect the person behind.

2. The liberal-paternal approach: Try to nudge passengers to be more considerate with; "ask before you recline" (or similar) stickers on the back of the seat in front.

3. The flexible approach: Offer everyone a 'recline lock' so that they have control over their own space.

4. The totalitarian approach: Superglue all of the recline buttons and just don't offer the option.

A380 A Love Story

2010-01-20T11:22:00.000Z

This is the first time I have ever sat on the tarmac, before a 13 hour flight and wondered; "Will i have time to do everything i want to … ?".

As things stand right now, it looks like i'm going to miss my connecting flight to Inverness and have to spend the day in London … a city i hate with a fiery passion. However all i can say is that it will totally be worth it (both the hassle and expense), to have flown on the A380. As a passenger in Economy, it looks just like any other wide-body plane (747, 767, 777, A330 etc), but the modern details really make all the difference.

Let me count the ways I love you:

1. You have carbon fibre seats. Not carbon fibre effect, but real honest-to-god; 'these things are like a race car', carbon fibre seats.

2. You have the best entertainment system in the world:

a. It is a massive, high resolution, touch screen.

b. There are literally 101 (probably more) movies to watch.

c. There are more CD's and radio stations than i can count.

d. There is a whole business section, with audio books, news and even training by DeLoitte.

e. The map of the GPS location of the plane is interactive, it's like Google Earth, you can wander wherever you want.

f. There is a live camera from the top of the frickin' tail. Ok not hugely useful right now at night (black, black, more black), but in the day it would be awesome.

3. You have wifi/ethernet for e-mail and IM, sure its not full web access, but still damn useful.

4. You have power for my laptop (though not working right now) and my iPod (USB plug in the armrest). So i can actually use both of those things for the full flight, rather than having to try to ration the battery life.

Sure, i might not be feeling so euphoric about the whole situation, if there was someone reclining on me in-front and i was wedged between 2 people (Economy seats are still the same size). We'll also see how traumatic and slow the deplaning of 450 people is. But damn, i have been spoiled for every other plane i fly on from now on, at least until the 787 arrives, maybe longer.

Sadly despite being awesome plane, it doesn't make airline food any better ;-)

Things I Will Miss About Bunbury/Australia ...

2010-01-09T08:14:00.000Z

In no particular order these are some of the things I will miss about Bunbury/Australia:

1. The People
Since I arrived here, I have met some really awesome people. In fact I would go as far as to say almost everyone I have met has been pretty cool. Don't get me wrong, a few have been a bit crap, some have been downright crazy and dangerous. But on the whole, the people I've met and worked with have been excellent. I have made more good friends and am more likely to come back for a holiday here, than anywhere else I have lived.

2. Being A 'Regular'
Somewhat tied in with the above, it has also been cool being a 'regular'. I think the only other time I have been a regular was the campus pub when I was at uni. It is just really nice going in places, having a chat with the people who work there and occasionally getting preferential treatment ;-) The other benefit is getting to see how a business is run over a medium timescale. A big part of deciding to start my own business, was seeing that problems in business are similar in every industry and having the confidence that my experience was relevant.

3. Being (somewhat) Anonymous
The flip side of the above, is that I could be a regular because I wasn't worried about running into people I know, but don't like. The biggest reason I try not to go out in Inverness is because of the above. Actually 'don't like' is a bit strong, I just have no patience for small talk with people I only have a passing acquaintance with, from years ago. This hasn't been a problem in Bunbury. Sure it is a small town and you run into people quite a lot, but they are all people you have seen somewhat recently, so there is less of the inane; "So what have you been up to?", nonsense.

4. The Coffee
I don't think I have been anywhere else where there is such an abundance of places selling decent coffee (by decent I mean anything better than Starbucks). Ok I have not spent much time in Italy, but compared to everywhere else I have been, Australia is excellent for coffee. Before I moved here, I hadn't had a cup of coffee for 6 years, that is how irresistible it is.

5. Clothes Drying Ridiculously Quickly (in summer anyway)
This is a really random one, but it is just so handy when you hang clothes up to dry and 30mins later they are totally dry. I can think of no other benefit of it being 35C and 30%RH outside.

6. The Wine
This is probably not true throughout all of Australia, but generally there is an awesome selection of wine here. It might have something to do with living an hour up the road from Margaret River, one of the best wine growing regions in Australia. I'm still hardly a connoisseur, but I do enjoy a nice red more than I have in the past.

7. Long Drives
Driving in general would probably end up on my 'Things I Won't Miss About Bunbury/Australia' list, but I really love long drives in the outback. The scenery can be rather monotonous, but there is something strangely zen-like driving for hours through an unchanging landscape. It is so much less boring and stressful than similar long drives on motorways in the UK. The traffic is generally light and there are plenty of opportunities for overtaking. The other great thing is that you can listen to a whole long audio book (or two or three) without really missing anything. It would be cool to hire a camper and drive around Australia ...

7 Reasons Today Was A Good Day

2010-01-07T08:38:00.000Z

1. Productivity

Again I managed to do all of the things on my list of things to do.

2. Letting Agent

Met with my letting agent about leaving, she seemed cool with everything and I think it will be easier because I met with her.

3. Tax

By sheer luck leaving work when I did, has dropped me into a lower tax bracket, so I should be getting A LOT of money back from them.

4. Sleep

Despite yet again getting <6 hours sleep, i feel fantastic, much less tired than ususal, dunno why.

5. Business

I found out when and where I can get some free business startup training when I get home. Even better the timing of the training means I can get started really quickly.

6. Books

My 10 copies of the Revised and Updated version of The 4 Hour Work Week arrived, now I just have to give them away. Anyone want one?

7. Serendipity

No, not the fairly rubbish John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale film, but the literal meaning of the word; "The effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate".

As you probably know, I am flying back to the UK in just over a weeks time. I was offered a lift up to Perth from a colleague the Saturday before I leave, so I figured I might as well spend the weekend in Perth. Today I decided I would look for a hotel in the CBD, I was looking for something nice but not excessive, alas there were too many options. So I e-mailed my colleague to see if he had any recommendations, he suggested I check out the 'mystery hotel' listings on www.wotif.com.au. I figured, given that the issue was too many options, taking a punt on getting a random hotel at a good price was worth a try. I narrowed my search down to the Perth CBD and there were 3 'mystery hotel' listings. They were all around the same price so I picked one at random, once the booking was confirmed I found out that it was the Novotel.

The reason this is serendipitous is because it was the hotel I stayed in on my first night in Australia. Furthermore it had been my first choice, but I had ruled it out because it was too expensive! Its funny how these things happen :-)

Blogging Duel!

2010-01-03T15:08:00.000Z

The challenge; Upload a blog post by Friday every week in 2010.

Rules:

Set aside 1 hour a week to write the post (everyone can find an hour somewhere).
Note down ideas (and details) when you think of them, so that you always have material to write about.
Just write, it doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't even have to be interesting, it just has to be uploaded.
Podcasts and Video Blogging also count.
No excuses! Going to be away? Schedule a post. Really busy? Come on it only takes an hour. Really stuck for ideas? Do a Top 5/10 of something.

PS This post doesn't count ;-)

Arbitrary Dividing Point in Time Resolutions

2010-01-01T04:16:00.000Z

Here are my Arbitrary Dividing Point in Time Resolutions for the year:

Develop a business that makes £2000/month after tax.
Develop a business that is location independent.
Visit at least 4 new countries.
Read 1 book per week.
Write 1 Moleskine page per day.
Watch a maximum of 1 TV episode per day.

The first three are longer term goals that will need to be broken down into smaller segments. The latter three are ones that i can track on an ongoing basis.

The main reason for posting these online is so that i am accountable, i.e. If you notice i am not following through on them, please kick my ass!

Books Read This Year

2009-12-24T22:50:00.000Z

In chronological order, these are the books I read in the last year:

Non-Fiction
1. The Choice by Eli Goldratt
2. Plugged In by Tamara Erikson
3. Personal Development For Smart People by Steve Pavlina
4. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
5. Pro-Blogger by Darren Rowse
6. Moneyball by Michael Lewis
7. On Writing by Stephen King
8. The Dip by Seth Godin
9. Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
10. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
11. Emergency by Neil Strauss
12. The Power Of Less by Leo Babauta
13. Liars Poker by Michael Lewis
14. How To Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff
15. Ahead Of The Curve by Philip Delves Broughton
16. The Lean Manager by Freddie and Michael Balle
17. A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink
18. The Game by Neil Strauss
19. The Myths Of Innovation by Scott Berkun
20. What Every Body Is Saying by Joe Navarro
21. The Balanced Scorecard by Robert S Kaplan and David P Norton
22. The Strategy Focused Organisation by Robert S Kaplan and David P Norton
23. Strategy Maps by Robert S Kaplan and David P Norton
24. Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
25. What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
26. Nudge by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein
27. The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss*
28. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton
29. Indexed by Jessica Hagy
30. Isn't It Obvious? by Eli Goldratt
31. Career Renegade by Jonathan Fields
32. Oops! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money by Aubrey C Daniels

Fiction
1. Lunar Park by Brett Easton Ellis
2. Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
3. My Sisters Keeper by Jodi Picoult
4. Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk
5. Dexter By Design by Jeff Lindsay
6. Generation A by Douglas Coupland
7. Lord Of The Flies by William Golding
8. Dealing With Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
9. Searching For Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
10. Calling On Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
11. Talking With Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
12. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

Top 5 books of the year to follow shortly.

Steev's Guacamole Recipe

2009-12-12T04:39:00.000Z

Ingredients:

2x Haas Avocados

1x Small Onion

1x Red Chilli

2x Limes

1x Garlic Clove

Fresh Coriander

Directions:

Finely chop half of the Onion,
De-seed and finely chop the Chilli (it won't be too spicy),
Crush and very finely chop the Garlic,
Finely chop the Coriander leafs,
Halve and de-stone the Avocados and scoop the insides into a bowl,
Cut the Limes in half and squeeze the juice over the Avocados,
Mash the Avocados into the lime juice with a fork,
Mix in the other chopped ingredients,
Cover the Guacamole tightly with cling-film (squeeze the air out) and place in the fridge for an hour or so to marinate,
Open some Tortilla Chips, dip and enjoy!

Top 5 Worst Airports

2009-09-27T12:39:00.000+01:00

1. London Heathrow (LHR)
I can barely put my hate of this airport into words. The words that spring to mind are; disorganised, crowded, dilapidated (or large portions of it) and crap. Three of the terminals are straight out of the 60's. The layout of everything from checkin, to security, to the gates, to baggage reclaim, is appalling. Security checks are painfully slow and in Terminal 2 bits are falling off the wall. The transfers between terminals are slow and awkward, the bus transfer to Gatwick is nigh on impossible to find. Terminal 4 is barely adequate and Terminal 5 - when they get it working right - might be ok. The problem is invariably you are never confined to the ok terminals and have to spend time in the awful ones. Sure there are renovations going on (which makes the current situation even worse) but most of it is so bad they should just level everything and start again. The worst part is that business travel agents insist on transferring you through Heathrow, regardless where you are coming from or going to, as if it is some sort of treat. I would rather transfer through the 7th circle of hell than Heathrow.

2. Sydney International (SYD)

A recent addition to my 'shit list' of airports and the criticism is equally valid for Perth (PER) and Melbourne Tullamarine (MEL). The long and the short of it is; the terminal designs are awful, the shops and restaurants suck and in the case of Sydney, security don't know their ass from their elbow. While transferring between the domestic and international terminals at Sydney, i was on a bus with a lot of people whose connecting flight was being held for them. Only once we got off the bus, we spent 30 minutes stuck behind a locked security door, while people continued to pile off more buses. There were no CCTV cameras, so security had no idea where we were, the space was small cramped, rapidly filling up and the whole thing was just a shambles. I dread to think how poor the security is in general if they can't even unlock a door. Once i finally made it into the terminal, no-one knew where my flight was supposed to leave from. My ticket said one thing, security said another, the transfer desk another still, oh and screens that are supposed to display the information were all wrong. It was not until i ran into some sort of manager, that i or anyone else, knew what gate the flight was supposed to leave from ... 10 minutes before boarding. It is suddenly clear why so many people are prepared to pay $770/year to get into the Qantas Club. It is less of an executive lounge and more access to the standard of airport everyone should have. Finally Australia is the only country in the world, where they screen your baggage on the way out of the airport too. It should not take an hour after you get your luggage, to get out of an airport. Australian airports suck!

3. London Luton (LTN)

Another airport straight out of the 60's and falling to bits. Crappy shops and the worst part is that it is in the arse end of nowhere and a pain to get in to London. The only upside is that it is quite hard to end up there unless you are flying Easyjet.

4. Paris Charles De Gaulle (CDG)

The thing that really irks me about CDG is that even the brand new Terminal 2 sucks. Rubbish shops, rubbish restaurant (singular), no access to executive lounges in large parts of it. Terminal 1 is worse of course, similar to most of Heathrow in its dilapidation. Oh and the easiest way to get their is by train ... unless of course there is a rail strike ... then you queue for an hour only to be crammed like a sardine onto a train and arrive 4 hours late. The only thing it has going for it, is that allegedly it isn't as bad as Paris Orly (ORY), though i can't confirm this as i haven't been.

5. Newark Airport (EWR)

Firstly this airport is not in New York, no matter what your travel agent tells you. The executive lounge is pretty much the same as the rest of the airport, but with very limited free snacks. Also they feel the need to show you a video on the plane when you are landing, telling you to only use official taxi's. Only they don't keep the unofficial taxi drivers out of arrivals area, so it is almost impossible to tell whether they are official or not, until you are at the car. Finally the TSA there deserve special ire, they strip searched a friend of mine because she has a muslim name. Despite the fact she was wearing western clothes, despite the fact she has a French passport, despite the fact she was returning from company training from an american multinational and most surprisingly, despite the fact she was flying Virgin business class. I mean really.

Top 5 Best Airports

2009-09-27T12:11:00.000+01:00

1. Vancouver International (YVR)
Amazing architecturally, loads of awesome shops and the view from the flight in or out is breathtaking in all but the worst weather. The waiting areas are expansive and offer great views to the mountains, it also feels very relaxed compared to a lot of the american airports i have been to. The immigration hall could use some tweaking for when multiple flights land at the same time, but overall easily my favourite airport.

2. Hong Kong International (HKG)
Just pipped Shanghai to the number 2 position, due to slightly better restaurants and being able to get Twitter on the free wifi. There is an amazing selection of shops, it is about as compact as it could be, good selection of restaurants and best of all free wifi with full access. Not as architecturally impressive as Shanghai but very pleasant.

3. Shanghai Pudong International (PVD)
The only airport in the world where my luggage has beaten me to the reclaim carrousel and i wasn't slow off the plane either. The first thing that strikes you is the size both horizontally and vertically, it just seems to go on forever. It is very architecturally impressive too, i stopped at the top of the escalator from arrivals to stare at the ceiling. It has an ok selection of shops and restaurants and is very pleasant to be in. The only two complaints are: It is the opposite of compact; it is a serious hike between the domestic and international terminals and woe betide you if your gate is at the end of one of the stupendously long terminals. Secondly the internet is 'chinese filtered' so no Twitter, Blogger or for those of you who like it, Facebook.

4. Reykjavik International (REK)
I'll lead off by saying it isn't huge and the shops suck. What makes this airport are the views and the architecture. From the flight in or out and the terminal there are some amazing views. The building is almost exclusively made from laminated wood and it is not a small building so very impressive also. As long as you bring a book or an MP3 player if you have a long layover, its great.

5. Bristol International (BRS)
Easily my favourite small airport. It may be a bit of a pain to get to if you don't know the area, but it is compact, has some decent shops and is quick to get into and out from. There is also a good selection of domestic and an ok selection of international destinations. What more could you ask for?

Top 10 Fiction Books

2009-08-01T03:32:00.000+01:00

1. Girlfriend In A Coma by Douglas Coupland

2. Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis

3. Rant by Chuck Palahniuk

4. Without Remorse by Tom Clancy

5. The Stand by Stephen King

6. Dexter In The Dark by Jeff Lindsay

7. Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower Book 4) by Stephen King

8. Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein

9. American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis

10. 1984 by George Orwell

For some unknown reason i hit a real mental block when it came to compiling this list. Part of it is because i tend to read a lot more non-fiction than fiction. The other part is that my fiction collection is back in the UK and i have probably forgotten some awesome stuff. Lastly i found it really hard to put into words why i liked these books, they defy definition, so i just left it as a straight list.

Also i didn't include any more Douglas Coupland books in the list because they would have been above everything else. It would have become a Top 10 Douglas Coupland list ;-) Lets just say i love his stuff.

Top 10 Albums

2009-07-30T08:01:00.000+01:00

1. The Postal Service - Give Up [2003]
There is just something undefinable about this album. I like Death Cab For Cutie and i like DNTEL, but combine the people behind them and the music is 10 times more awesome. Very mellow, great melodies and great lyrics. This is one of those albums you can recommend to anyone, from metalheads to ravers and there is a good chance they will like it. I just wish Gibbard and Tamborello would get their act together and release another album!
Stand Out Track: Such Great Heights

2. Tool - Lateralus [2001]
This is my go-to album for coming up with great creative ideas. I don't know what it is, but my brain just seems to work better when listening to it. I wasn't a big fan of Tool back when this came out, but after getting into A Perfect Circle it was the next logical step. It is also one of the few 'metal' albums with sufficient depth that it compares well to classical music. Next time you are stuck on a problem, put this record on and i bet you come up with an awesome solution.
Stand Out Track: The Grudge

3. Biffy Clyro - Blackened Sky [2002]
The first and only Scottish band on my list (sorry Aereogramme). I still remember seeing them play in half-empty pubs in Glasgow. So it is kind of trippy to see their album for sale in Paris and hear them on the radio in Australia. This was their first and i would argue best album. A superb rock album, some mellower stuff, some seriously heavy stuff but all tied together with catchy riffs.
Stand Out Track: 57

4. Marylin Manson - Mechanical Animals [1998]
I'll start by saying i'm not a Marylin Manson fan other than this album. I can stand some of his other poppier stuff (Beautiful People, Tourniquet etc) but i wouldn't buy any of the other albums. Mechanical Animals on the other hand really breaks away from his normal style. It is much cleaner, less heavy and almost 70's glam. Maybe its just the memories of listening to it during an awesome holiday in the Canadian Rockies, but whenever i put this album on i feel better.
Stand Out Track: The Last Day On Earth

5. Foo Fighters - The Colour and the Shape [1997]
I still remember the day i first heard Everlong on the radio. I had just pulled into the driveway and i had to sit in the car until it was done. I went out and bought The Colour and the Shape the day it was released and have loved it ever since. For me, this is the peak of the Foo Fighters. The first album was a little rough and everything that came after feels like a pale imitation. With tracks like Everlong, Monkey Wrench, Wind Up and My Hero you can't get better. Extra props for spelling 'colour' properly despite being american.
Stand Out Track: Everlong

6. Pendulum - Hold Your Colour [2005]
Simply the best electronic album i have heard. For a long time i was militantly 'rock' in my music tastes. I associated anything electronic with the terrible dance music they play in clubs. My attitude slowly started to change after The Postal Service and somehow i ended up getting a Drum 'n' Bass album. What differentiates this from most, is that while it has the incessant 'beat and repeat', it has great melodies and lyrics too. My one disappointment is the recent re-release dropped Still Grey and ruined one of the best album endings ever.
Stand Out Track: Hold Your Colour

7. Bush - The Science Of Things [1999]
After the Nirvana-esq 16 Stone and dire Razorblade Suitcase most people ignored The Science of Things. At Uni, this tour was the first gig i went to (i nearly blacked out due to dehydration) and the album really stuck with me. Written and recorded during their breakup, this album is like Gavin Rossdale's version of Gwen Stefani's The Return Of Saturn. It has much of the same cynicism about relationships but with a much darker and edgier tone.
Stand Out Track: The Chemicals Between Us

8. The Cardigans - Long Gone Before Daylight [2004]
The Cardigans went through 3 distinct phases; The first two albums sounded pop but had cynical lyrics, Gran Turismo was well Gran Turismo and the last two albums are similar to the first two without the poppy sound. This is a great chillout album, it is very mellow, with some really great acoustic tracks. While it lacks the urgency of Gran Turismo, it is much more consistent and enjoyable. I also listened to this album a lot while reading Stephen King's Dark Tower books, so some good associations.
Stand Out Track: And Then You Kissed Me

9. Kenna - New Sacred Cow [2003]
The one and only album i have bought after a recommendation in a book. It was featured in Blink by Malcolm Gladwell as an example of something that experts love but the general public don't understand. With hindsight it was about 5 years ahead of its time and hearing it now, it wouldn't seem like anything that different. Again leaning slightly towards electronic, synth and new wave, it is an excellent album that again has many fond memories attached to it.
Stand Out Track: Freetime

10. REM - Automatic For The People [1992]
I accidentally bought this CD for my parents before we even had a CD player. One of the very few albums from my childhood that i still enjoy as much now as i did then. Almost every track could have been a single. Some are so interwoven into my mind that even after a good few years of not listening to it i still remember all the lyrics.
Stand Out Track: Try Not To Breathe

Honourable Mentions: Aereogramme - A Story In White , No Doubt - The Return of Saturn (i was tempted to sneak it in instead of Kenna, for full 1997 to 2005 annual coverage), Transformers The Movie [1986] OST, Pink Floyd - The Wall, Black Sabbath - Paranoid, Our Lady Peace - Happiness Is Not A Fish That You Can Catch, Billy Talent - Billy Talent, Orgy - Candyass, A Perfect Circle - Mer de Noms, System of a Down - Mezmerize/Hypnotize and Wildtype.

NB The 'Stand Out Track' selections aren't necessarily my favourites, just a good song to decide if you will like the album or not.

Top 10 Movies

2009-07-25T05:05:00.000+01:00

1. Fight Club [1999]
I don't know whether it was because I expected it to be awful due to the adverts, (Brad Pitt + Soap seemed like a bit of a chick flick), but it was a total revelation when I saw it at the cinema. It is also one of the few films that are as good as the book they are based on. I suspect it is due to Chuck Palahniuk's involvement in the script, but the movie actually adds to the book and vice versa. The dark humour, the subversive theme, the amazing twist and the awesome ending, make it easily my favourite film.

2. Dark Knight [2008]
For me this is the ultimate comic book movie. Before it came out I was torn, Batman Begins had been an excellent reboot of the series, but Heath Ledgers death meant that the film was being hyped to the point of insanity. In the end it is one of the few movies that lived up to the pre-release hype, I left the cinema with goose bumps. Dark tone, amazing effects, superb villan, great story, what more can you ask for?

3. Leon (Canadian Cut) [1994]
Gary Oldman, Natalie Portman and Jean Reno at their best. While that should be enough for anyone, this film also has an excellent plot, moody cinematography, plenty of action and a superbly non-hollywood ending. The Canadian Cut is well worth tracking down for the extra 30 minutes, it fills in some gaps in Matilda's training and flows a lot better than the regular cut.

4. Chasing Amy [1996]
I knew I had to have a Kevin Smith film in my list and it was a hard choice. In the end I picked Chasing Amy because it is what all romantic comedies should be like. Forget the standard saccharine - 'everything will magically work out in the end' - nonsense peddled in most romantic comedies. This film is genuinely hilarious but also touching and romantic at points. Ok the plot isn't hugely realistic, but if you take it as an overstated metaphor for relationships it is very insightful.

5. Black Hawk Down [2001]
One of the few realistic war movies. Even Saving Private Ryan which was lorded for its brutally real opening, eventually devolved into a typically heroic war film. In Black Hawk Down the real horror of war is shown and unlike most american war films the morality of the situation is left to the viewer to decide. In the end no-one wins, lots of people loose and you have to wonder what was accomplished. One of my favourite moments at the cinema was seeing a girl - clearly expecting Josh Hartnett to be in another 'Pearl Harbour' style film - vomiting in the aisle.

6. Dirty Harry [1971]
The original action movie, copied by many that followed. Clint Eastwood at his best; "You have to ask yourself do I feel lucky? Well do ya punk?".

7. Serenity [2005]
Joss Whedon at his best, truly one of the great sci-fi movies. He manages to walk the tightrope of making a film for extremely loyal fans of the series and yet accessible to people who hadn't seen it. A perfect 15 minute opening that caught up people who hadn't seen Firefly and the rest of the film answered questions for fans of the prematurely cancelled series. I think it should have been the next big sci-fi franchise.

8. High Fidelity [2000]
This movie made me realise that in relationships, most people don't see themselves as the bad guy. It always seems to be the other persons fault and never yours. Of course given some time and introspection, a lot of it probably was your fault. Also a great reminder to be grateful for what you've got. Combine the above with a superb soundtrack, Jack Black at his least annoying, John Cusack at his most charming and you have a great film.

9. Transformers: The Movie [1986]
Classic movie from my youth, I watched it so much when I was a kid that I wore out the video. Unlike most other things from your childhood it still stands up now. Awesome soundtrack, good animation, good story, one of the most shocking deaths in any film (if you've seen it you'll know) and Orson Wells's last film. Truly puts the recent Transformers movies to shame.

10. Into The Wild [2007]
Beautifully shot, wonderful soundtrack, based on a real story. It really takes the romance out of the idea of dropping out of the rat race and living in the great outdoors ... which is a good thing.

Just finished writing all of these films up and some themes are emerging, see if you can spot them and drop me a comment.

Top 10 of other random stuff to follow.

Steev's Random Blog

2011 Reading List

Summary - 2011 Arbitrary Dividing Point In Time Resolutions

The Power Of Positive Thinking (aka The Placebo Effect)

2011 Arbitrary Dividing Point In Time Resolutions

Summary - 2010 Arbitrary Dividing Point In Time Resolutions

2010 Reading List

My Hikikomori Year

Top 10 Books I Read in 2010

New Additions To Best and Worst Airports

Unique Password Generation System

Hardware is Hard ...

Writing pt2

Writing

SNOW!

Perfect Twitter

Missed Post

Sleep Sucks

Follow Through On Books

Philosophical or Scientific Question?

Slightly worrying things ...

Programming for Zombies! Redux

Programming for Zombies!

I <3 Beer

Technological Nemesis

18 Days Of Blogging

Things I Learned Today Pt 2 ...

Things I Learned Today ...

Previous Post Update

Nihilism

The Bizarre Appeal of Sports Events Pt2

The Bizarre Appeal of Sports Events

WSIDWML? - Typical Example

What Should I Do With My Life?

Free Advice For TV Executives - Part 1

2010 Reading List - Quarter 2 Update

Note To Self:

Been Electioneering

Writing On Writing - 30 April 2010

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Writing On Writing - 23 April 2010

A Story Of Unconventional Publishing

The Benefit Of Forced Focus

Balls!

Blog Post Word Limit?

2010 Reading List - Quarter 1 Update

(un)Employed For 3 Months

If Only Publishers Would Listen

!**Experiment**!

We're On A Break

(un)Structured Writing

Cop Out

Journalism Vs Bloggers - Introduction

Some More On E-Books ...

Shocking Book Piracy Exposed!

Service Is A Differentiator

How To Alienate Customers With One Question

Books Vs E-Readers - Redux - An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos

Books Vs E-Readers - Conclusions

Books Vs E-Readers -Why E-Books Are Not The Same As MP3s

Books Vs E-Readers - My Reservations About E-Readers

Books Vs E-Readers - The Benefits of E-Readers

Books Vs E-Readers - Introduction

Slipage

Top 5 Books Read Last Year

Inconsiderate Travellers

A380 A Love Story

Things I Will Miss About Bunbury/Australia ...

7 Reasons Today Was A Good Day

Blogging Duel!

Arbitrary Dividing Point in Time Resolutions

Books Read This Year

Steev's Guacamole Recipe

Top 5 Worst Airports

Top 5 Best Airports

Top 10 Fiction Books

Top 10 Albums

Top 10 Movies

!Experiment!