Do you have a Spark File? I do.

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Do you have a Spark File? I do.

What is a spark file?

A spark file is a list of ideas or thoughts that are gathered together in one place. My spark file currently has almost 10,000 words and has been going for about two years. It, basically, contains everything that comes into my head that might be useful for an idea in future. A quick look at my Spark file brings up things such as “The transience of human endeavour”, and “Death is for other people. Not us. Of course death comes to everyone. But this quite is interesting” Also in and amongst there are a number of reasonably fully formed ideas about specific bits of writing. An example of this is the idea for A30 - a One Act play I wrote, directed and produced last year: ”A middle-aged couple decide to drive down the A30 to see Lands End which is where they had their honeymoon. On the way down there they find that their relationship isn’t as strong as they think it is when he admits to not being completely faithful to her.”

How do you use it?

The idea of Spark File has been around for ages. It has been mentioned on numerous writing forums that one of the best ways to get ideas it to always carry around a notebook and pencil with you. That way whenever something occurs to you it can be noted down and dealt with later. This is the ubiquitous capture method. Pencil and paper has been the standard for many years. In a recent documentary from Woody Allen he noted that eh does exactly the same thing. Only he doesn’t use a notepad he just has bits of paper. He jots down notes and gathers them together in a shoebox under his bed. Once he has completely a movie he pulls the shoebox out, consults the notes and find and idea for his next movie. My Spark File is pretty similar. I maintain it electronically (See below), but the concept is the same. If I am out walking - which I do quite a lot - I can be thinking about numerous things at once. Or I might see something that grabs my attention. Then I make a note of it in my Spark File and forget about it.

They key to creating a good Spark File is to make sure you input everything that comes into your mind. The beauty of gathering everything is that nothing gets missed. The problem of gathering everything is that nothing gets missed. There could be some shocking bits of thought captured in there (See my note above about ’The transience of human endeavour’).

So the second key thing to remember about a spark file is that you need to review it regularly. I already mentioned how Woody Allen reviews his once a year when he starts a new film. The thing that he does - and the thing I would recommend - is to take the ideas that you have in there and see if you can merge them together to create something that might be more useful as an idea for a script or a novel (or a comic book. Whatever).

As an example of this I had an idea once which involved dealing with lots of people in a confined space and what would happen if they were trapped together. A few months later I read an article about Full Saturation diving. This is where divers who spend a lot of time working at depth can live in a compression chamber during the work. They compress to the level they are going to work at (say 1000 feet), work there for two or three weeks breathing air that is fully saturated with gases other than oxygen (nitrogen is the big example). Then they take anything up to a week or 10 days to decompress back to surface level. For the whole of that time they are cooped up in a series of compression chambers on board a chip. These chambers are not in the least bit roomy. All it needs is one person to be in a bad mood and you have an issue. These two idea were mashed together to give me the basis for “Pressure’ - a screenplay about full sat divers who encounter a problem which stresses them to a point where they start to turn on each other.

How do I maintain my Spark File?

I mentioned earlier that spark files can be written in notebooks or on scraps of paper and dropped into a shoebox. Personally I want mine to be a little more high tech. I always have my phone with me - especially when I’m out on walks - so it would make sense that this is the thing I use to capture my Spark file idea. I use Drafts on the iPhone as my data capture tool of choice. With Drafts I open the app and I’m presented with a blank screen. I jot down the idea, thought, comment or saying that is running though my head. I simply click the button to send the entry to me Spark file. This is simply a plain text file on a Dropbox folder. Drafts integrates perfectly with Dropbox (along with many other apps). The entry is added to the top of my Spark file and a dividing line is added below it. That way I can separate it form other entries. I can add as many or as few of these as I like and they will all be waiting for me when I get back to my desk. I simply call up the Spark File and scan through it to see what jumps out at me. As part of my implementation of Scrivener I have also linked the Spark File into a Scrivener project so I can go straight from there to my writing.

Where do ideas come from?

I like to quote John Cleese when he talks about where do his ideas come from. He said something along he lines of  

“I get my ideas from a woman called Mavis who lives in Chipping Norton. She gets them from a man called Eric who lives in Brighton. Eric gets his ideas from a man who sits in an alleyway behind the Wimpy in Swindon High Street. Where he gets them from I have no idea” 

The short answer is that ideas come from anywhere and everywhere. I read a lot of on-line articles (I use Pocket to gather them all together and read them when I get a minute). I also read newspapers (mostly on-line) and long form articles which are sent to my Instapaper account. Between them they are many sources of inspiration for ideas.

As I mentioned earlier I also tend to go for walks every day. There are two reasons for this :

1. I get to leave the house, get some exercise, and see the countryside near where I live .
2. The act of taking exercise sparks the brain cells into working better then sitting (or standing) for long periods at a desk .

As I walk I can work through things in my head. Sometimes it’s how to solve a plotting issue in a script I am writing. Sometimes it’s how to get a couple of ideas to merge together to create an idea that isn’t totally pants.

Oftentimes I just go for a walk and ask myself ‘what if’ (“What if all the cars in the country were electric? What would happen to the people who work in petrol stations or oil refineries? What about the petrol tanker drivers? What if one of them saw what was coming and tried to sabotage it?”) With thoughts like this it isn’t difficult to come out with a list of possible ideas to drop into my Spark File. The other beauty of this process is that notes can range from an in-depth idea along with character thoughts and plot to a simple statement.

Nothing is out of bounds.

Does quality matter?

As I mentioned earlier on, there are a lot of entries in my Spark File that don’t make a great deal of sense in isolation. But they are gathered and captured regardless. The beauty comes when you can sit down with them and merge them together to create something that does work. This is certainly a case of the whole being more than the sum of the parts.

Do you have a Spark File (or similar?). How do you deal with it?

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An Inspector Called

This week is the opening of the latest play I am in, "An Inspector Calls'. The classic JB Priestley piece is an indictment on the class system and the ability of people to think on a selfish basis about themselves.

As a quick recap, for those who don't know the general story: Upper middle-class industrialist Mr Birling, his wife and son, and his daughter and her fiance Gerald Croft are all celebrating the engagement after dinner one evening when a police inspector calls and gives them some bad news. 'A young girl swallowed some disinfectant and died after several hours of agony in the Infirmary this evening.' What follows is a savage dissection of the middle/upper class attitudes towards the lower class as each person in the room is found to have known and interacted with the dead girl in some way shape or form.

I first read the script about a year ago. Unlike a lot of school kids nowadays I was never forced to read An Inspector Calls as a set text during English lessons and I must say when I first read it I found it to be quite slow, static and - to be honest - boring. However the group decided that they wished to put this on as a performance and I applied for a couple of roles. I was fortunate enough to be offered the role of the Inspector (In fact in one of those 'It only happens in the movies' moments I was actually on the set of Steven Spielberg's Warhorse' when the call came through telling me I had got the role), and I set about learning the words.

We went into rehearsal shortly before Christmas and after a few weeks of blocking, moving around the set and trying clumsily to act, emote and read with a book in my hand I managed to get off the book and start delivering the lines in a less than amateur manner.

But here's the thing I always seem to forget when rehearsing a show: When you've worked with the text for so long you start to learn things about it that you don't pick up on the first reading. You identify the subtly little interplays that go on between characters. You learn the underlying emotional drive of certain roles and can bring them out as and when you wish.

But what you also do is you lose the overarching thrust of the play.

It happens everytime I do a role. Working so closely with the text you lose the major moments that can draw you towards a text. You lose the humour that can be there and you lose the ability to look objectively at the piece you are performing.

That's why when we get to the performance - in particular the first performance as we did last night - It is always a huge surprise when the audience picks up on these things that you had forgotten.

I've directed and acted in classic plays (Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde), modern plays (Alan Ayckbourn), comedies, dramas and even musicals. Everytime I come to the opening night I am always amazed at the differing reactions we get to a particular piece. Of course if it's a comedy and you've read the piece once or twice you know where the main laughs are. There are always the set-pieces and the great one-liners. But you also forget that there are little pieces of business that the director has put in which - although they seem innocent enough while behing performed in a rehearsal hall - become something much different when viewed by 150 people in a performance venue.

It also never ceases to amaze me how much an audience can make or break a performance. If we have people in the audience who are genuinely enjoying themselves (whether in a comedy manner or a dramatic manner ) it can lift the whole performance of the actors. Conversely if the audience sit there like a load of wet fish it's often hard to summon up the energy to make the characters come as alive as they could be. I've had performances where I wanted to go into the audience in the interval and apply the defibrillator paddles to jump start them again!

So we head into the second night of the run tonight. And it is - once again - a discovery. We, the actors, know what the play is. We know the bits we like and we know the bits we don't like (and there are always bits you don't like as an actor). What we don't know is what this particular audience will bring to the show. Will they be suitably liquored up and ride along with us through the rollar coaster of the play, or will we have to drag them kicking and screaming with us to the shocking denouement?

Who knows? And that's half the pleasure of performing.
.

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Could you survive the apocalypse?

I had lunch last week with a friend and ex-colleague of mine who I hadn't seen for about 9 months. He has left the old company and is about to sign a contract with a new firm which will put him into the 'good earners' bracket and allow him to put his youngest kid through university to follow his eldest daughter who graduates next year.

As we discussed the general level of education around in the country, we both went into our best 'grumpy old men' impression and started saying "Kids today... they don't know anything about what it means to live. They don't have the skills to do anything useful. Yada. Yada. Yada". In one sense we were both absolutely right, but what this did lead onto was a further discussion about the underlying change in society's ability to actually provide for itself in case of a disaster.

The example I gave was this: If there was some sort of apocalypse tomorrow and a large swathe of the human population was wiped out, which of today's seemingly simple facilities could you replicate yourself? Could you build a Spinning Jenny? What about a loom? A telephone? Could you make steel from iron? What about petrol from oil? Could you build a car? A plane? A bicycle? A toaster?

It slowly dawned on both of us that we were - like a large proportion of the human population - severely restricted when it came to knowing the principles and design behind a large amount of things that we take for granted. My friend is - by training - a telecommunications engineer, so I asked him if he could design and build a network router. He told me he knew the principles of packet switching but would not be able to build a practical example of this.

We started talking about health and safety (in a traditional "safety of the person and upkeep of health" way rather than the new H&S dictators that have sprung up around the place) and we both admitted that we would have very little idea about how to deal with lots of medical emergencies over and above providing palliative care for someone. We could both probably reset a broken limb, and keep a flu-suffering patient comfortable, but over and above that? No. I asked him if he knew how to filter water for drinking. He said he could. So I asked him if that was filtering water from a stream or would that extend to taking sewage water and filtering it to such an extreme that it, too, could be recycled and drunk again. We both agreed that we had no idea how to do that.

Being a vegetarian I then asked him the one question I like to ask all carnivores: For your morning bacon sandwich, could you kill a pig (humanely), skin and clean it, butcher it and know which part of the pig was used for bacon? He hesitated a little and then said 'I could kill the pig if I had to eat, and I think I know where bacon comes from'. But that didn't seem to me to be a full and complete answer.

As I was thinking about this today I happened across an interesting TED talk about a young man who rose to the challenge of building a toaster from scratch. Despite the fact that a very, very cheap toaster can be purchased in the high street with very little difficulty, reverse engineering this and creating the toaster itself from raw materials and a little external help proved to be virtually impossible.

Of course this isn't anything new. Isaac Asimov wrote about this in his Foundations series back in the 1940's realising that knowledge is the thing that needs to be saved during times of trouble. It is interesting to me, though, how we are losing a lot of the skills we need to survive merely by the fact that we are narrowing down the areas of specialisation.

Is there hope for humanity? :)

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Round St Andrews in the rain...

(Apologies in advance, this is quite a long post, but worth the read, I hope)

I stated in my last post that Irish golfer Rory Mcilroy and I had one thing in common: Neither of us has gone round St Andrews with a score in the 70's. Whilst this is absolutely and completely true, it doesn't tell the whole story.


He's played St Andrews many times and his scores have all been in the 60's apart from Friday at this years open when he shot 80. I've played St Andrews once and scored 103.


But it was worth it.


It happened a little over five years ago. An American friend of mine and his wife had come over for a vacation to Scotland and I agreed to spend a couple of days with them and play some golf. We met in Edinburgh and drove up the following day to St Andrews which is a picturesque drive of about eighty or ninety minutes through the hills of the Kingdom of Fife even in the driving rain we were experiencing. We arrived to find that St Andrews itself was in a state of bussy-ness as it prepared for the Open Championship of 2005. Camera towers were being erected, marquees and grandstands were being positioned and made ready and the huge yellow scoreboards which are typical of the R & A's major championship could be seen dotted around the landscape.


Navigating by 'zen' I found myself directly outside the Royal and Ancient headquarters building - which is the imposing grey edifice that frames every golfer as they drive off from the first tee on the Old Course. We parked nearby and spend a short while in the Golf museum  which is located behind it.


After reading about the exploits of Tom Morris, Tom Morris Jr and all the other Scottish golf luminaries who have made the game their own we were in the mood to go and play a round ourselves.


I had read of the horrors of getting a tee time at St Andrews - the lottery for tee times, having to book months in advance etc. - and seeing as how we had neither entered the lottery nor made reservations I was somewhat resigned to having to watch rather than play. Nevertheless we headed for the clubhouse to check out the situation.


For those of you who have never been to St Andrews it is probably worth recounting a few pieces of 'Did you know' to help frame the rest of this story.


St Andrews Links is actually 5 separate golf courses built on the same land. The first course started outside the R And A headquarters, snaked out to along the sea shore, turned back, and finished outside the building next door to the clubhouse. It is the Old Course and it's the one everyone who watches golf is aware of. The next course to be built - 'The New Course' - was completed in 1895. It is situated adjacent to the Old Course but the first tee is around the dog-leg that forms the gap between the Old Course first- and second-tees. There are also courses which border these two on the left and the right. dating from 1987 right up to 1993. Together they form the St Andrews Links and ALL are public courses situated on public land open to anyone. Recently a new clubhouse was built to manage all these courses and it is situated next to the first tee on the New Course. If you ever watch coverage of the Open Championship you can see the clubhouse when the players play the second hole. It is a low-slung building with a turret at each end and large glass panels along one side.


It was to this building that we headed to see what the chances of a tee time were. I walked into the lobby and over to the young lady at the front desk.

"Any chance of a tee-time today?" I asked rather tentatively.
"Yes, of course. Which course would you like to play?" she replied cheerily. "The Old Course is in the middle of a practice round for a competition being held tomorrow so that's not available, but all the others are open."

Hiding my slight disappointment I elected for a round on The New Course and we were told we could tee off in 30 minutes.

We quickly headed back to the car, grabbed the clubs and shot down to the luxurious and well appointed changing rooms to put our golf gear on. From there we were directed round to the starters hut which is at the side of the building. In the hut a friendly starter asked us what time our tee was and we told him. He then gave us each a ceremonial score card plus a 'scratch' scorecard. ("Make your scores on the scratch scorecard as you go round then transfer the final scores to the ceremonial one when you've finished. Save's you making a mess of it") AND a yardage booklet - complete with full colour photographs, and a small piece of paper with the pin positions of each green. "You're ready to go" he said, pointing us around to the first tee.

All this for £55 per person.

Walking around to the first tee we were confronted with the first major obstacle of the round. The first tee is situated directly outside the clubhouse underneath a balcony and adjacent to the plate glass windows. In other words everyone has a good view of you teeing off.

There was a group on the tee before us and we watched as they teed off, all of them striking crisp drivers down the middle of the fairway. We waited nervously as we decided amongst ourselves who would be the first to tee off and I drew the short straw.

Plucking up my courage I walked onto the first tee and addressed the marshal waiting there.

"Have you played the Old Course before?" he asked, in a gentle St Andrews burr.
 "No, Sir. First time" I stammered in reply.
"Well the ideal line is down the left hand side of the fairway making sure you stay clear of the mounds about 250 yards up"
"I'm pretty sure they won't come into play" I replied as I teed up a ball on the square.

The marshal stepped back and I started my pre-shot routine: Stand behind the ball, identify the line I want to play, locate an aiming marker about a foot ahead of the tee, place the clubface behind the ball and step into the address pose.

As I wiggled my hips and prepared to make a swing I made one fateful mistake - I glanced up. I could see a swarm of people watching me from the clubhouse. Peering through the plate glass window or standing on the balcony - despite the slightly inclement weather. Then it hit me: I was on the first tee at St Andrews - the home of golf - and I had an audience waiting to see what  a mess I would make of the tee shot.

My knees turned to jelly.

It was the weirdest feeling ever. I almost literally lost the ability to stand up. It was only by dint of the fact that my legs had locked into an upright position that stopped me from collapsing. I stepped away from the ball for a second and took a deep breath. Blocking the crowd from my mind I went through the pre-shot routine again. This time there was no problem and I sailed one right down the middle of the fairway landing just short of 200 yards with my 7-wood.

My two friends didn't fare too well. One sliced her ball into a huge gorse bush on the right of the fairway and the other hooked his shot so badly he ended up playing his next shot from the second fairway of the Old Course (I secretly think he did it deliberately so he could say he'd played the Old Course). As we discussed it later we all agreed that it was a very imposing tee shot with the clubhouse overlooking the tee and that no doubt contributed to their bad shots. My next shot should have been a 9-iron onto the green but I duffed it and it rolled about 25 yards along the fairway. Luckily for me nobody in the clubhouse was paying attention as they were all watching the next group of folks going jelly-kneed on the tee.

As we walked down the first fairway (or hopped over the divide between the Old and New Courses as the case may be) we were fortunate enough to find that the rain stopped falling. There was still a wind blowing - and it stayed with us for the next 4 hours as we wound our way out to the turn and back again.

As with the Old Course, the New Course is a very simple course to play. There are very few areas of rough (although we found every one of them) and there are not a huge number of bunkers (although we did find ourselves in some interesting pot bunkers with sheer 4-foot walls). There are no trees and due to the nature of the course it is very difficult to hit an out-of-bounds shot. But the deceptive nature of the course, coupled with the gusting wind, made it a great challenge.

There were a number of highlights of the round. Firstly there was the ability to play a putt from a hundred feet off the green and still control it. The fairways and greens are hard to distinguish apart. Each has immaculate grass which is very closely cropped and smooth to putt on. It completely alters the way you can play a hole. In fact for some of the par three holes it is actually just as easy to play a low running shot which scoots along the ground rather than try a high shot that lands on the green and stops.

Secondly was the incredibly helpful people we met on the way round. There are marshals situated at strategic locations along the way and they will all give you 'caddy' advice on the best way to play a particular hole ("This fairway widens out to the right so you can go as far over there as you want", or "Stay clear of the left hand side of this fairway, the gorse is impenetrable")

At the end of our round we arrived on the 18th green, putted out for pars and - as soon as we picked up our balls from the grass - the heavens opened and let out all the rain that had obviously been holding back while we were on the course. We sat in the clubhouse watching the hardy souls tee-off from the very same place my knees had turned to jelly 4 hours earlier and laughed at them as they hooked, sliced and bobbled their way down the first fairway.

If you are a golfing fan and manage to find your way to St Andrews it is well worth the time to go and visit the clubhouse and see if they have tee times available. It might not be on the Old Course but - with 4 other great courses all built on the same links land - there is no reason why you can't tread the hallowed turf at the home of golf.

But bring an umbrella.

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Are Share Options Worth it?

I have in the past worked for a company that gave share options to its employees. The theory was that when the employees did well the company did well. When the company did well the shares did well and everyone benefited. For a number of years this was true. The shares vested at a price of around $30 and at one point the share price went up to $120. A lot of people made a lot of money on them (One employee working in an Eastern European affiliate apparently retired because the options made him so much money compared with his usual salary).

Then the next lot of shares were vested. They were priced at $70. The market was still at $120. Everyone was anticipating good things. People were rubbing their hands in glee and greed.

Then the company lost the exclusive patent on their biggest single product.

A cheaper company took 90% of their market share and the share price dropped to around $70. Since then the company has hit a number of issues - a lot of which are regulatory but some of which are just general downturns in the market - and the shares are now hovering around $30.

So where does this leave the employees who were gifted the share options? At the moment they are worthless. But still the senior management are using them as an incentive to try and encourage people to work harder. But what they don't see is that the hard work being put in by the employees is not having any impact on the share price. This is because the share price is not connected to the level of work put in by the employees. It never was. The correlation back in the early days was merely coincidental and not causal. But the management can't see that. Or won't see that

But here's the problem. This type of reward will start to encourage the wrong type of behaviour. Let's take a hypothetical example:

Assume I am working in a biopharmaceutical laboratory. My aim is to synthesise and test drug candidates before sending them out to market. One of these drug candidates could be the cure for cancer, or the next Prozac. It could be worth literally billions of dollars in profit. And profits like this will bump the share price - and hence my options value - into the stratosphere. But today I notice that the clinical trial results I am seeing indicate a severe adverse side effect caused by taking this candidate drug - people die.

I have two options:

1. I can reveal the results as they are and effectively kill the drug, thereby causing the share price to drop again along with the values of my options.
2. Or I can hide the results  massage them to not look as bad as they actually are. This will allow the drug to be put onto market and the profits will roll in. The share price will rise. My options will vest and I can then afford the new house/ kids education fund/ care home for my elderly mother that I dearly need money for.

Which option should I take?

The answer is obvious: I should take the morally correct choice and publish the full results.

Now which option will I take?

That answer is less than obvious. When a company rewards people according to certain criteria or standards then people will tend to ensure those criteria or standards are met. This is the same reason call centres will answer phones within x rings and deal with your query within y minutes. It isn't because they are efficient and want to help you, it's because they don't get paid if they don't meet the metrics.

So if my reward (in the form of a well performing share option) is based on good profits and these profits are dependent on candidate drugs coming to market, then the chances are that certain unfavourable information relating to a drug that will impact its marketability is going to get 'lost' or 'hidden' amongst other non related pieces of data. After all I want to be able to afford to send my kids to somewhere that will educate them correctly, so I need money to pay into their education fund. In a couple of years when the truth gets out about the adverse clinical trial events I will be either in a  completely different part of the company or I will have vested my options, cashed them in and left. There will be no personal accountability back to me. Sure, the company may get dinged, but by then my kids will be in good universities, or my mother will be in a comfortable, expensive care home, or my family will be living in the new designer home with pool, games room, wide screen TV and access to the best golf course in town.

(Before I go any further I just want to say that the above example is completely hypothetical. No link is implied to any company I have worked with or know about. It was purely an example to indicate the nature of the problem. Having said that there are several pharmaceutical companies that have recently been the perpetrators of (alleged) clinical trial cover-ups.)

Nevertheless, it is incumbent on senior management in any organisation to ensure that they are rewarding their employees in a manner which will not encourage unethical behaviour.

So, are share options worth it? Yes, if they genuinely reflect the state of the company and are not being used as a carrot to promote unethical behaviour - especially in a downturning market.

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On the nature of perception

I have two stories to tell you about perception (and the reason that so many things that appear straightforward to you don't appear straight forward to other folks). One of these happened to me, the other one I read in a book.

Here's the one I read. A salesman was trying to convince his boss that selling should involve going out to people's houses on a Sunday. You would make the appointment with them and be guaranteed they would be home. His boss - a rather upper class gentlemen - couldn't see this idea working. His reply 'This will never work. Sunday is the day everyone is out watching the polo matches"

The following one is true and happened to me.

A number of years ago I had a casual spot lecturing at Purdue University in Indiana. A good friend of mine was on the faculty and asked me to come in once a semester and give my talk 'Project management in a multicultural, multi-lingual environment' The whole idea was to try and instill in some of the computing students he was teaching that things need to be looked at from a different perspective. The reason this example sticks in my mind is for two reasons


1) The first time I did this talk I was introduced, rather tongue in cheek, as 'Lord Gary Of London'. I duly did my talk, wandered up and down the aisles asking questions to the students, got through my slides and - with a sigh - asked the group if they had any questions on anything they had heard in the last 45 minutes. A sea of hands shot up. I picked a young lady from the front row. 'Is it true your a Lord' she asked? I told her that I wasn't and if I was I would be addressed as either Lord Comerford or Sir Gary not Lord Gary.


2) The next time I did the course I managed to get my friend to introduce me as just 'Gary' and I repeated the same thing as last time: did my talk, wandered up and down the aisles asking questions to the students, got through my slides, only this time I spent a little bit more time talking about one particular aspect of the role which was travel. In particular I talked about the social implications brought on by working in another language. As part of this I mentioned that I had done a lot of business in Frankfurt. "In fact," I said, "I think I've been to Frankfurt over 400 times". At that point a couple of the local boys from Purdue shook their heads as if to say 'So what?'. They didn't seem that impressed. This was coming from a nation where the vast majority of the inhabitants do not posess a passport and many have never left the continental United States.

It was then that I realised the error of my ways.

"When I say 'Frankfurt' I mean Frankfurt, Germany. Not Frankfort, Indiana" I told them. Frankfort, Indiana is about 30 miles away from the Purdue campus.

The morale of the story is that regardless of what you say people will hear things differently. it's the reason there are different perceptions. It's the reason you can listen to an idea from a totally motivated speaker who thinks this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and think 'Huh?'. That's the reason the sales manager in the first story couldn't get his head around the idea of visiting people at home on Sundays - he had a different frame of reference to the salesman. In my Purdue example it was forgetting that the frame of reference of the students I was talking to was limited  in the geographic scale. When they heard 'Frankfurt' they immediately thought 'Frankfort, IN' instead of 'Frankfurt, Germany'.

Remember this when taking to anyone. Just because you say things clearly, and just because they hear exactly what you say, doesn't mean they understand or interpret the words in the same way you do. It's true what they say: If you stand in the middle of a public library and shout 'Fire' people will look at you like you are crazy. If you stand in the middle of an aircraft aisle and shout exactly the same thing at 30,000 feet the reaction will be totally different.

But the key thing to remember in both of these cases is that the problem with the perception does not belong to the listener, it belongs to the speaker. It is up to the speaker to realise that there is a perception issue and to correct it. Hence when I spoke to the Purdue students I was able to clarify the geographic location as Germany not Lafayette County, Indiana.

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On the nature of young love

I had a rather interesting experience the other day.

Taking advantage of a free Friday I went with a friend of mine to the Victoria And Albert Museum in London. If you've never been there you really should. It's a marvelously huge, over the top, building with literally dozens of halls and galleries displaying everything from vintage gold-covered snuff boxes to displays of Metropolitan Police fakes and forgeries. We wondered around for hours and only saw a fraction of the items on display.

However that's not what I wanted to tell you about. By the time we finished at the V&A it was slap bang in the middle of the Friday night rush hour and we decided that rather than brave the masses on public transport at that time we would wait for a another hour or so and head out after the rush. To while away the time we headed to a nearby coffee house.

The coffee house was next door to Harrods and had a street level seating area and a subterranean level. Because we fancied a comfortable sofa seat rather than a wooden chair we headed down to the basement where we were the only people there.

Almost.

At another sofa were a couple of schoolkids. He was smart, well dressed, preppy and looked and spoke like he came from a wealthy upper class family. She was also smart, very pretty and of Indian or Pakistani origin. They were both about 14 or 15 years old judging by the fact they were both in school uniform. Nothing untoward or peculiar about this, I thought. Until I watched them.

It was obvious that they were very much into each other. She was lying across the sofa with her head in his lap. He was leaning over whispering at her and stroking her hair. At one point they pulled her long, dark school coat over the two of them and started doing heavens-knows-what underneath there. I suspect his hands had a bit of a mind of their own and started working their way from her face and neck down across her throat and upper chest. She appeared to offer no resistance.

The phrase 'Get a room' sprang to mind. Until I realised that they had already done that.

As they were wearing school uniform it was obvious that they had come straight from school. It was Friday night around 5.15 so there was no reason for them not to be on their way home if they weren't staying for extra-curricular activities at school. So why were they hidden in the basement of a coffee shop in Knightsbridge canoodling under a jacket? The answer was obvious: This was the 'room' they had found. They needed somewhere they could interact which was generally out of the public eye - hence the basement room with no windows - and they apparently couldn't go home because that activity would have been frowned upon at either of their houses.

Or was it something more than that? Was there some sort of stigma attached on either side to a multi-racial relationship? Had her parents forbidden her to bring home a white boy? Did his parents make it clear that he was expected to marry a WASPy girl from his parents social circle? Obviously if they were both attending the same school then financially her family must at least be in the same strata as his, but maybe they were 'new money' that was frowned upon by the old money ruling classes?

Whatever the reason was it was apparent that this coffee shop was the place they felt comfortable spending tie and doing the things that mid-teenagers do when interacting with members of the opposite sex.

Maybe I thought they were just whiling away the time until a parent arrived to pick them up. But then I realised that they were the only schoolkids we had seen in our journey from the V&A to the coffee shop. All the other kids had gone. If this was 'innocent' then maybe they would have had friends with them or at least there would have been other school kids hanging around in the coffee shop.

I found that the whole situation disconcerted me a little. If their parents frowned upon the relationship then the lies and deceit involved would be painful when things were discovered. If they just wanted to keep their relationship quiet for a while then why would they do it in a public place like a coffee shop (albeit underground and out of the eye of passing traffic)? If they were just waiting around for the traffic to die down - as we were - then why not sit upstairs where they could watch people? We were downstairs because the sofa's upstairs were full but these two had been there longer than us, and besides we weren't canoodling under a coat like they were.

There was obviously something not quite 100% kosher about this situation.

It was all very mysterious

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Making your iPod Touch a useful productivity tool

Over the festive season I treated myself to an iPod Touch. There were basically two reasons for this:

1) I don't want to have to spend the additional amount per month for a phone contract for the iPhone when I already have a perfecttly good phone.
2) I had enough American Express points accumulated to receive one as a reward.


The reputation of these gadgets are that they are little more than game's machines that you can play your music on, but having now spent a couple of weeks working with it, I find it an extremely useful tool from a productivity point of view and I wanted to let you know my working methods for how I use it.

The Touch, remember, is effectively a stand-alone system with no connection to the internet unless you are within a wi-fi zone. Therefore it cannot be defined as 'always-on' in the same way that the iPhone can. However there are enough apps and tools to make that almost an irrelevancy.

Here's a typical day for me on the Touch:

My house is wi-fi enabled so I use my time in a morning to make sure I have everything I need on the Touch before heading out.

1) I use Appigo's To-Do ($9.99/£5.99) to manage my task list. This links in with the  Toodledo web app.(free or $14.95/year)  I can load my to do items on either of these apps but before I leave the house I hit the synch button to ensure the Touch is up-to-date.

2) Simplenote (free or £2.99/year). This is the favourite tool for the Touch. It is a simple note taking application which will instantly synchronise with a web site to ensure that both Touch and 'cloud' version are kept up to date. If I need to remember something or jot some important information down (Ideas for blog posts etc) I can either drop them onto the web app or into Simplenote on the Touch and they are synched with each other as soon as a connection is made. This is useful if I have information I need to take with me everywhere because it doesn't rely on having a connection to work. I can drop, for example, Paid wi-fi passwords onto it and use them when I need to connect in a cafe or something.

3) In the morning I check the web. I use Morning Coffee on Firefox (free) to pick up a list of web sites I read regularly. There are usually one or two pages on there that I wish to read later so I hit the 'Read Later' bookmark which automatically downloads them into my Instapaper account. The Touch has the Instapaper app (free or £2.99/$5.99) loaded and these two synch together to ensure I have those pages available for reading off line. Further more Instapaper (pro version) has a twitter and email function which means I can take a web page from Instapaper, read it, select text I like, and create an email based on that text. I can send the email to my Posterous account and it will be automatically posted whenever I reach a wi-fi connection. The Twitter function works in a similar way by storing the tweets up until you go on-line. This effectively means I have mobile blogging.

4) DropBox. I have the DropBox app (free or $9.99/month) installed. If there is any attachment or anything that I have received from my email that I want to save and read later I can save it into my Dropbox account. I then use the Touch Dropbox app to favourite that entry and it is downloaded onto my Touch for off-line reading. (Note: if you are wanting to read a PDF it is also useful to install the Aji Reader app ($0.99) which will allow you to select a PDF from the web, download it to your Touch and have that available for full zoom-in-and-out rotatable reading later on).

5) Evernote (free or $45/year). All my notes and various things are loaded into Evernote. Again with the 'favourite' option I can physically download the ones I am interested in onto the Touch and use them offline. Of course I can also add new ones while off-line and they will be automatically synched when I get a connection again.

6) Email. I use the inbuilt Touch Email app which is great because it is synched to my Gmail account. In the morning when the wi-fi is attached I can download all my mail from the Google server to the Touch and I'm ready to go. The mail app works equally as well without having a network connection and all mails are kept on the Touch until the connection is remade and it can synch them all back up.

7) NewsFeeds. I have 111 feeds that I read on a daily basis. They are stored in the Google reader account that I have. Using MobileRSS I can synchronise them all in the morning and have them on my Touch when I am off-line. This does rely - of course - on having full feeds from your sources and not just summarised one- or two-liners.

8) If I decide I am ready to post a blog entry I can write it in BlogPress (free or £2.79/$2.99). The lite version supports Blogger only and the paid version supports other platforms too. This is a streamlined blogging application which can create posts, schedule them and publish them. If you are off-line you cans save them in a draft form on the Touch and then publish them when you get back on-line.


I also run an iTunes synch to update any apps and ensure that both my calendar and contacts list from the Mac have been updated to the Touch and I'm ready to go. I use Plaxo to manage my calendar and this is set to automatically synchronise to iCal which then synch's to the Touch. Contacts are managed in Google which also synchronises via Plaxo to the Mac Address Book.

So, using about 5 to 10 minutes of time in the morning I can identify the main pages I want to read on the web, the Dropbox files, email, Evernote entries and feeds that I wish to have, synch them all while at home and then head off to work with enough material to read on the train that I don't have to worry about not buying a newspaper.

On the train (or plane, or anywhere I have a few moments) I can read my email. If there is something in there that requires an action I can either create an entry on ToDo directly or - using a fabulous e-mail in function - I can email the details to my Toodledo account and an entry will be created automatically. As soon as I hit a wif-fi zone the email will be sent and I can then synch up my ToDo account on the Touch.

Using Instapaper I can read those web pages I identified earlier. If I find something I want to keep a permanent record of - such as useful website -  I can open Evernote, create a new entry and tag it. If there is a piece of information I wish to use directly - something which sparks the idea for a new blog posting, for example - I can make a new Simplenote entry there and then or mail it directly into my posterous account or create a draft post in BlogPress.

When I next hit a wifi zone I can synch up Evernote, Simplenote, Instapaper and ToDo and make sure I am completely up to date.

The result of this is that I can emulate an 'always connected' paradigm whilst only being connected for a short amount of time. As long as I can get 5 minutes of wi-fi connection to enable synching up there is no reason for me to be connected 24/.

How do you use your Touch? Have I left out any important applications?

(Costs are for either the free option (where available) or the cheapest paid option if more than one exists. All prices are accurate as per the iTunes store at the date of the posting)

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Go Colts!...........(?)

Despite the six hour time difference and the fact that it didn't finish until three am, I stayed up last night to watch my Indianapolis Colts beat the living stink out of Drew Brees and the 'Aints.

Except it didn't quite work out like that.

In the space of one quarter Peyton Manning and the Colts effectively managed to stamp their mark on a clearly inferior and more nervous team. They passed the ball at will, ran Joseph Addai up the middle for some huge gains - including his longest run of the season, and put up a first quarter lead of ten points - something that had only ever once been surmounted once before in Superbowl history.

And then they went to Disneyland.

For the next three quarters they were run ragged by the Saints in all sections of the game. The Saints had the better quarterback, the better running back, the better defence and the better coach. Sean Payton played a much better game tactically than Jim Caldwell and his team executed much better. The onside kick to start the second half was a prime example of a tactic which caught the Colts unaware and which they turned into points.

And just when you thought Manning and his team were going to engineer their eighth come-from-behind win of the season the Saints come away with an interception returned for a touchdown.

In reality the game was much closer than the final score suggested. As with a lot of games between two good teams the difference came down to two or three plays. The onside kick was one. The interception was another. A number of third down conversions for the Colts were negated by drops when they were needed and overall the Saints deserved to win this and the Colts didn't

I'm not too concerned, though. Even thought Colts are my team I am also a Purdue fan and Brees - who I watched when he QB'd the Boilermakers back in the day - was a worthy winner of MVP and the first New Orleans Lombardi Trophy in franchise history.

It bodes well for next season.

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What are your top five movies (and why)?

For no particular reason - other than the fact that I wonder if anyone will rise to the challenge - I want to share my top five movies and why, with the hope that you will respond in the comments with yours.

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1. The Godfather:

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A classic of modern cinema  Powerful in the way modern movies tend not to be. So many memorable scenes, from the horses head in the bed through 'Luca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes', Sony's death at the toll booth,  Michael assassinating the cop and the don in the restaurant, right up to the finale montage of Michael settling all the family debts as he becomes godson to his sister's son. This is also a movie that set the tone for the definitive gangster flick. Elements of this movie were taken later by Scorsese and used in Goodfellas as well as any number of pastiches and rip offs. The language itself has fallen into the vernacular. How many times have you heard someone say 'I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse?' or the aforementioned 'sleeps with the fishes'?

This was, of course, the movie that brought Brando back from the wilderness. In a role he studio didn't want him the play he created one of cinemas most memorable characters and deservedly won an Oscar for it (one of three the movie earned along with nine additional nominations, although Brando refused to pick his up sending instead an actress playing a Native American in his place).

From first frame to last this is an absolute pleasure to watch and stands up very well to repeat viewings

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2.The Shawshank Redemption: 

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A severely underrated movie on it's release, Shawshank has developed a cult following which currently puts this 2 and-a-half hour long movie at the top of the IMDB poll of favourite movies of all time. Based on the Stephen King short story 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption' it makes for grim viewing potential. A movie about a wrongly convicted man and the life he leads with the inmates and wardens at the Shawshank prison, somehow it rises up above the limitations of the premise to deliver a movie which is both entertaining and uplifting. And it does all of this with virtually no sentimentality or saccharin. For a movie costing $25m to make and earning only $787,000 on its release weekend this has defied all expectations to become a seminal movie. And an absolutely superb one at that.

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3. Alien:

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"In space no one can hear you scream." So said the poster when this movie was released back in 1979. Audiences flocked to see this small movie and were blown out of their seats by the whole affair. From a pure scriptwriting point of view it is a shocker. Based on the old staple of a few people trapped in a confined place with a scary and deadly adversary, it is a plot which has been attempted many times since and not always with the same level of success. The beauty of this script is that the top billed people in the movie - people such as John Hurt and Tom Skerrit - were killed off early on in the action leaving you to wonder whether anyone was safe in this movie. When you were finally left with the relatively unknown Sigourney Weaver to save the ship (and the cat) it became something a little different. It added a frisson of excitement to the whole movie.

The setting itself is novel (for it's time). The spaceship was beautifully done and - with the help of H R Giger to create the alien and the look of the film - it became an instant classic. Why do I like it? It is well written, looks great and always entertains me when I watch it. What more can you ask for?

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4. When Harry Met Sally:

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This is a fairly controversial movie to have on the same list as 'Alien' and 'The Godfather'. After all it is a slight and light romantic comedy of the 'boy meets girl boy loses girl boy finds girl' variety. But where it distinguishes itself from the pack - and merits a place on my list - is through the writing and the peformances. Based on the lives of the director Rob Reiner and the screenwriter Nora Ephron it is a delicately balanced tale which carefully balances each side of the male vs female equation. The lovely little vignettes which separate the various scenes are all genuine stories gleaned throgh interviews with the Director although they are played by actors. Couple this with some great performances by the two leads (Who can forget Meg Ryan in the Deli? - "I'll have what she's having") and you have a heart-warming movie that isn't sentimental but warm and lovely.

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5. Toy Story:

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From the guys at Pixar who have yet to produce a bad movie my personal favourite is Toy Story. When it was first released almost 20 years ago it set the standard for computer generated animation. And - while the state of the art has moved on considerably since then -  Pixar have proved the old maxim that it's not what the movie looks like that counts, it's the story that really matters. The simple conceit of toys that come alive when the kids aren't looking and try to welcome a new Space Ranger toy who thinks he's real is an absolute classic.

This is another film which stands up to repeated viewings and it also added something which - to me anyway - is an absolute classic touch - the end-credit bloopers. Treating the animated film as if it was live action they had characters fluffing their lines, missing marks, running into the camera and dropping out of character mid-sentence. It was so successful a gimmick that they even created a separate set of bloopers to go onto later reels to encourage folks to go see the movie a second time. As with all the best animations the movie can be watched by children and adults alike, both of whom will read different things into the script. ('Laser envy' anyone?)

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SUMMARY

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Having looked back at my list one thing that stands out is that three of the top five are movies where the immediate sequel is widely regarded as being as good as - if not better - than the original. But as with all these movies the problem with sequels is they they don't have what the original had - originality. I loved 'The Godfather II', 'Aliens' and 'Toy Story 2'. They were all excellent films and fully deserve to be on my list of top movies. But they don't make the top five for that reason.

Honourable mentions: The Lord of The Rings Trilogy. The Terminator Movies (1 and 2 only). The Usual Suspects. Goodfellas, Fight Club, Leon, The Matrix, Some Like it Hot.

Over to you folks....

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The Passage of Time

I was writing my first Musings Cafe post of 2010 recently when I started to think about the milestone that 2010 itself is.

2010 is the first year in a new decade and the first new decade of the new century, nay the new millenium. Remember all the hoopla about the Y2K bug? That was 10 years ago.

Other things to make you go 'Huh!'

Movies: 2010 marks the

• 21st anniversary of the movie 'When Harry Met Sally'
• 17th anniversary of the movie 'Jurassic Park'
• 19th anniversary of the movie 'Terminator 2'
• 21st anniversary of the movie 'The Abyss'
• 35th anniversary of the movie 'Jaws'
• 33rd anniversary of the movie 'Star Wars'
• 42nd anniversary of the movie '2001 A Space odyssey'
• 26th anniversary of the movie '2010' - (Ironic eh?)

World events: 2010 marks the

• 25th anniversary of the Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia
• 25th anniversary of the creation of Comic Relief
• 30th anniversary of the creation of the Children In Need effort
• 28th anniversary of the creaton of the compact disc
• 15th anniversary of the creation of the DVD
• 19th anniversary of the invention of the digital cellphone network (2G)
• 22nd anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland 
• 30th anniversary of the opening of Les Miserables 's original production in France and the 25th anniversary of the London opening.
• 29th anniversary of the opening of Cat's original production in London
• 24th  anniversary of the opening of Phantom of the Opera's original production in London

Many years ago when I used to go visit my fathers relatives in Ireland they would talk about people they knew and things that happened when they were younger. I used to listen to these stories and wonder about the people they were discussing and what life was really like 'all those years ago'. Nowadays I have the same conversations with people and I can actually remember the folks they were discussing. The discussions we are having now concern people in my lifetime - but they still talk about things that happened 'all those years ago'

The years are passing quicker than you think.

Don't waste them

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Shopping on-line? Would you be willing to pay these three new taxes?

I had an interesting conversation with my next door neighbour over the weekend. I was telling him that I did all my shopping for Christmas in 30 minutes by using Amazon wish lists. He then started to explain to me the ramifications of this for the government.

Listen up and see how much of this rings true.

If I purchase things on-line there is a knock-on effect for the government of a country as follows:

• Parking income in city centers is reduced as fewer journeys are made.
• Income from taxes on petroleum is reduced as less gasoline or petrol is used in purchasing things
• Bricks-and-mortar companies have reduced income (and therefore reduced corporation taxes) because fewer people are shopping in the high street.
• As shops close down, inner city rates are reduced and the income to the local government is reduced accordingly.
  

As a result the government will find itself with a smaller than expected income in coming years as a direct result of more people buying on-line.

So my neighbour's hypothesis was that the government will need to find alternate methods of  filling that shortfall. We started to think about how they would do it.

There are a number of easy alternatives that could come up:

1. Taxing Internet use - At the moment this has already been proposed in the UK. It is nominally to pay for increases to the broadband infrastructure, but that could change. The charge is a small one at the moment but I can see that increasing.
2. Charging an internet purchase tax - At the moment a large number of transactions in the UK (and indeed around the world) are subject to a sales tax. In my mind the sales tax (Or VAT) is the single most unfair tax in existence. The government is effectively saying ‘Every time an individual purchases anything from a company (or a company purchases something from another company) we will charge you an amount of tax on the value of that transaction’. In other words when I take the money I have earned from working- and on which I have paid income tax already - the government will charge me to exchange that money for goods or services that the government does not, actually manage or control, and the profit on which the recipient company will then have to pay corporation tax. We’re caught three ways there. In the UK the VAT rate is currently 15% (and due to go to 17.5% on Jan 1st). So every internet transaction is charged that amount anyway (Although usually in the UK this amount is already incorporated into the price of goods or services that are purchased rather than being added on at the checkout). Now what would happen if an internet purchase tax was added to the transaction? It might be a nominal amount per transaction, meaning that purchasing ten different things in a single order would cost the same as purchasing one thing in the same order. Or it might be a cost per item, which means  that purchasing ten items would incur a larger tax than purchasing one item.
3. Eco Tax - With the Climate summit in Copenhagen still fresh in our minds would the government think about adding a carbon levy to each transaction? Obviously if purchasing physical goods from the internet there will be a transportation aspect to get the goods to the delivery address. Maybe each transaction should have a carbon tax. The tax could be varied according to the size of the package and the distance travelled? Or what about adding a carbon tax to every transaction regardless of whether it was a physical purchase or not? After all ebooks, software downloads and music all use electricity either in creating them, storing them or playing them. The electricity has an associated carbon footprint. Shouldn’t this be paid for?

So the question is “How many of these taxes would you be prepared to pay for the privilege  of on-line shopping?”Can you think of any other taxes or indeed any alternate way of raising government revenue?

Feel free to comment below

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Movie quiz (The male edition) - The answers

Image via Wikipedia

Here are the answers to the movie quiz posted last week. Remember a couple of these were tricky!

1) Benjamin Braddock - Dustin Hoffman - The Graduate
2) Albus Dumbledore - Richard Harris - Harry Potter And the Philosophers/Sorcerers Stone
3) Captain Benjamin Willard - Martin Sheen - Apocalypse Now
4) Roy Neary - Richard Dryfuss - Close Encounters
5) Ray Ferrier - Tom Cruise - War of the Worlds
6) Capt. John Miller - Tom Hanks - Saving Private Ryan
7) Amon Goeth - Ralph Fiennes - Schindlers List
8) Matt Hooper - Richard Dryfuss - Jaws
9) Bud Fox - Charlie Sheen - Wall Street
10) Craig Schwartz - John Cusack - Being John Malkovich
11) Sam Witwicky - Shia LaBeouf - Tranformers
12) Joe Buck - John Voight - Midnight Cowboy
13) Harris K. Telemacher - Steve Martin - L.A. Story
14) Tommy 'Five-Tone' Messina - Danny Aiello - Hudson Hawk
15) Rupert Pupkin - Robert de Niro - The King of Comedy

How many of you got John Cusack as Craig Schwartz? What about John Voight as Joe Buck (not the American Football announcer!)

If you didn't try the female version of this and would like to, here is that quiz.and here are the answers.

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How I use a tomato to increase my productivity.

I like to read up on the latest time management techniques. Being productive with the least amount of effort is something that I aspire to. Alternatively getting as much as possible out of a given amount of effort is a similar aim.

Over the years I have looked at a number of different methods of trying to be productive. As with all these methods they have their own focus and their own areas of strength and weakness. My own personal favourite for task tracking is the Todoodlist which is paper based, completely portable and incredibly simple.

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Who on Earth Is that ? - The male edition: A movie quiz.

I recently did a quiz here on the Musings Cafe which asked you to identify a movie character and name the person who played that character first, and in which film. That quiz was focused on female actors. At the time I said I would do a quiz focusing on male characters.

So here goes.

Remember the rules are easy: For every name below identify the name of the actor who first played this character, and the name of the first film that character appeared in.

1) Benjamin Braddock
2) Albus Dumbledore
3) Captain Benjamin Willard
4) Roy Neary
5) Ray Ferrier
6) Capt. John Miller
7) Amon Goeth
8) Matt Hooper
9) Bud Fox
10) Craig Schwartz
11) Sam Witwicky
12) Joe Buck
13) Harris K. Telemacher
14) Tommy 'Five-Tone' Messina
15) Rupert Pupkin

There are a couple of real teasers in there (10 and 12 in particular) so put your thinking caps on.

Answers at the end of next week.

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A retrospective on... Raiders Of The Lost Ark

It’s been almost 30 years since the first Indiana Jones movie - “Raiders of The Lost Ark” -  was released. In the intervening years the character has gone on to bigger and better things - including chasing alien skulls and avoiding gophers in last years 3rd sequel - but most people remember the original with a great deal of fondness. From the spectacular opening scene with the little gold buddha and the rolling rock, to the fight under the flying wing aircraft, the capture in the snake-infested Well of Souls, the valiant escape by shooting the sword-wielding attacker, being smuggled aboard Katanga’s boat and shimmying across to the submarine when the German’s boarded it, to the climax at the end when the Ark is opened and the faces melted, to the final shot of the ark disappearing into seemingly endless warehouse of similar boxes. Absolutely classic!

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Hindsight and retrospect

Jaws was a great movie. I still love it as a cinematic experience. Being able to imagine the shark in your minds eye without having to be able to see it (technical difficulties meant it wasn't ready when needed) made it much more than it would have been had the shark been visible all he way through.

But is it actually a scary movie?

People didn't want to go swimming for ages after watching. But if you watch it nowadays it actually seems pretty tame. Can you imagine anyone who wasn't genuinely scared of sharks already deciding not to swim in the sea as a result? I can't.

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Random Musings on life 'n stuff

Occasionally things occur to me that I have to write down:

• Why is it if I throw a kitten into boiling water I am an animal abuser but if I throw a lobster into boiling water I am a chef?
• Maggots are said to be good to put into a wound because they only eat dead tissue. How do they know it's dead? Maybe if they bite and nibble at live tissue for a while it 'becomes' dead. You could lose an arm that way.
• If we descended from the apes, how come there are still apes on the planet? Crocodiles descended from the dinosaurs, apparently, yet the dinosaurs disappeared.
• What is all this commotion about X-Factor? So what if someone got voted off? So what if it's talentless twins remaining? IT'S JUST A TV SHOW. Get over it, folks.
• Who can we believe about Global Warming? Is it really getting warmer? Feels pretty cold outside at the moment. Is it right that global warming can resulting the planet getting cooler?
• If we do need movement on the global warming front, surely the best way to do this is to make it financially attractive for businesses to adhere to set standards. Reward adherance to standards, penalise non-compliance. It works every time. 
• PC vs Mac. Who really cares? iPhone vs Android. Who really cares? Friendfeed vs Twitter. Who really cares? If that's all you've got to worry about then you're in a pretty good position in life.
• If we run out of fossil fuels, will this make us more dependent on non-fossil fuels, or will we go back to a world where we had less dependence on energy altogether? Will we completely stop flying, for example?
• Ugg boots. Are they the ugliest things ever for a woman to wear? 
• If the oil producing counties of the world run out of oil and some small island in the pacific discovers oil, will that island become a world superpower?
  

That's your lot for today.

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The best business idea I've come across

I recently came across a site that has a business concept so stunningly simple it is amazing nobody else has thought of it already

The site is called Swoopo and it is an auction site. Before you start telling me ‘ebay has cornered the market on auction sites’ let me tell you the differentiator for this company: Swoopo doesn't make money with the items it sells. It makes money selling bids themselves.

Let me explain.

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Will the real Avatar trailer please stand up?

Image via Wikipedia

A few thoughts on Avatar

Like a large proportion of the civilised world I am anxiously looking forward to the December release of James Cameron’s “Avatar”. A movie destined to change the way we think about movies (or so the hype would have us believe).

The publicity machine has been gearing up over the last few months or so starting with Avatar Day in August where cinemas across the US showed select clips from the movie totalling about 15 or 20 minutes in length. Since then there has been the main trailer - which was underwhelmingly received in general - along with a number of smaller trailers destined for television.

The general opinion of folks who have seen the footage in 3D (and I don’t count myself in that group but do include a close friend) is that it is a game changer. A lot of the previous problems associated with 3D - discomfort in watching, convergence issues etc - have gone leaving you with a fully immersive experience allowing you to experience the beauty of Cameron's location planet Pandora completely.

This is all well and good but what’s the story going to be like? I read a very early treatment of Avatar which was circulating on the internet and - like a lot of James Cameron movies - it was very detailed, visually stunning and well thought out. It is, at heart, an eco tale (and as such maybe an allegory for man’s destruction of his own planet), but told with Cameron’s typical style and flair. Remember this was a guy who took a love story set aboard a disaster movie about a sinking ship and parlayed it into the highest grossing movie of all time. My respect for this man and his abilities is of the highest level and I will generally watch anything that he’s involved with.

The problem that I have has arisen as a result of the latest TV trailer I’ve just seen. And it all relates to  Fight Club.

Fight Club is a David Fincher movie that came out in 1999. I was an avid theatre-goer at that time and saw the trailers for this movie for several months in advance. You may recall that they showed a lot about the ‘fight’ part of Fight Club, including a bronzed, Adonis-like Brad Pitt wondering around an underground room giving out the rules of ‘Fight Club’ ('The First rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is that you DO NOT talk about Fight Club’) There was a lot of blood, a lot of fighting and a brief glimpse of Helena Bonham-Carter wondering around looking distinctly non Merchant-Ivory. Other than that there wasn’t a huge amount about the plot or anything else.

I stayed away from the movie. As did quite a lot of people. It wasn’t particularly well received on it’s theatrical release. It came and went and I forgot about it. A year or so later as I was building up by nascent DVD collection I came across the 2-disc Special Edition DVD version and - being a fan of special editions - bought the film. Finally I got around to watching it and was completely blown away by the movie. It was nothing at all like I had expected. The fighting was only a minor part of the movie and the Brad Pitt character - Tyler Durden - was absolutely mesmerising. It’s now one of my all-time favourite movies.

But the trailer was atrocious.

As I look back on it now I realise that the reason I didn’t watch this movie in the cinema was because the trailer was totally misleading. I wonder how many other people had the same problem.
(For a great dissertation on the link between 'Fight Club' and 'Calvin and Hobbes'. Click here)

Which brings me back to Avatar.

The previous trailers I have seen have been gung-ho ‘military on the move’, smash-em-bash-em type trailers meant to appeal to the key demographic of 18 to 24 year old males. They’ve shown military hardware, buff fighting men, lots of monsters and beasties and the hero being heroic. However the new trailer is different. The new trailer is.. softer. More feminine. The music has been toned down and has an ‘E.T.’ sort of quality to it - gentler, soothing, peaceful. Sure there are still shots of monsters and fighting and military hardware, but we’ve seen them before. The new shots are more of plants, and forests, cute flying insects, and the Na’vi. And every shot I see like this makes me think that one of the trailers we are seeing is like the trailer for ‘Fight Club’ - misleading. Am I seeing a trailer for a film that is a gung-ho military action adventure set on a pretty planet, or am I seeing a trailer for an Eco- friendly, touchy-feely, love story between two smurfs that is book-ended with a couple of battle sequences? Which trailer is accurate?

Will the real Avatar trailer please stand up?

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