August 2007 Archives
August 30, 2007
Reckless Records RIP - Part 11: Afterburner
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') My recent series of posts about my time working at Reckless Records was prompted by the fact that a few weeks back I found out that, after 24 years, the company had ceased trading and the shops had been closed, including the branch at 26 Berwick Street which I helped open in...
August 29, 2007
Reckless Records RIP - Part 10: Expansions
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') I've been writing over the last couple of weeks about my experiences working for Reckless Records in their 79 Upper Street and 30 Berwick Street branches during the 1990s. In the previous part of this series I was looking at the sometimes difficult relationship between staff and customers. In 1998 Reckless expanded...
August 28, 2007
Reckless Records RIP - Part 9: Keep The Customer Satisfied
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') Over the last couple of weeks I've been writing about what it was like to work at Reckless Records, and, last week, in the previous part of this series, I was looking at the fact that potential customers used to write in with long lists of impossible to find records. I'm now...
August 27, 2007
Diana remembered on the BBC - nine years on from the 'One Year On' special
Over the next couple of days there will be acres of print, air time and online space dedicated to the anniversary of the death of just one of the 30,000 or so British people killed in road accidents in the last ten years. Since we'll be wallowing in forced nostalgia for the nineties, I thought I'd look back at how the first anniversary of Diana's death was covered online by the BBC in 1998.The fledgling online service followed up 1997's...
August 24, 2007
Reckless Records RIP - Part 8: Future Sound Of London
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') In the last week or so I've been writing about the time I spent in the 1990s working for London based secondhand record retailers Reckless Records. This week I've been explaining how I used to be able to work from home on the company's website, and recalling when the shop was featured...
August 23, 2007
Reckless Records RIP - Part 7: Television Personalities
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') Since the beginning of last week I've been writing about my experiences working at Reckless Records in the 1990s. Right at the end of my time there I built a new website for Reckless - a pretty damn ugly melange of frames, Flash and purple as it turned out. Aside from the...
August 22, 2007
Reckless Records RIP - Part 6: Digital Penetration
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') Last week I started a series of posts writing about my experiences working at Reckless Records during the 90s. I wrote about when Record Collector ruled the world, serving customers nick-named 'Wig Wearing Wanker' and 'Wee-Wee Reggae Man', relationships via fax with record stores in Japan, and the sometimes insane UNIX based...
August 21, 2007
Truth isn't just a Casualty at the BBC, Richard
I had a moment of some surprise today when I read Richard Littlejohn's column in the Daily Mail and realised that he was being quite nice to Animal Rights Activists. Well, I say quite nice, I mean in the sense that he was saying they were less barbaric and murderous than extremist Muslim suicide bombers. It's a small start, I guess, but I assume the ALF may have now moved to a slightly less serious circle of the hell Littlejohn...
Thoughts on being 'outed' as ex-BBC staff in comments on The Telegraph
My dabbling with community interactions over on The Telegraph's websites haven't exactly been a smooth ride so far. Previously I've had my comments edited to change their context - although The Telegraph very quickly moved to restore them when I blogged about it. My latest experience was over the weekend when I left a comment about the BBC vs CIA Wikipedia editing propaganda war - as I call it anyway - where I was immediately outed as an ex-member of...
August 20, 2007
My Sony and BBC Wikipedia editing shame
There has been quite a fuss this week about edits made to Wikipedia from within the BBC. Changing George Walker Bush to George Wanker Bush using a BBC IP address is pretty damn stupid, but writing an article accusing other organisations of manipulating Wikipedia in a bad way, without first checking whether you had your own IP address related skeletons in the closet was even sillier. The story feeds wonderfully into the paranoia of those who believe the BBC is...
August 17, 2007
Reckless Records RIP - Part 5: OK Computer
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') This week I've been writing about my experiences working for Reckless Records during the 90s, and yesterday I was looking at the UNIX system the shop used to run, and how it got me back being interested in computers again. I moved to start working in the Soho branch of secondhand retailer...
August 16, 2007
Is Britain’s brightest A-Level student a boy or an anonymous photogenic teenage girl?
This one is as regular as clockwork on the currybet.net site - the A-Level results come out, and I start moaning about the depressing and sexist coverage of it - here’s one I made earlier in 2003. Who’d think that boys even took A-Levels these days? And if teenagers do manage to perform well in the exams, well, then they are obviously worthless bits of paper anyway. And everybody wonders why teenagers in Britain appear to suffer from low self-esteem...
Reckless Records RIP - Part 4: Computer World
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') This week I've been writing about the experience I had in the 1990s working for the secondhand record shop Reckless Records in London, which sadly has recently closed after 24 years of trading. Yesterday I was looking at how the Islington branch was the inspiration for Nick Hornby's 'High Fidelity', and recalling...
August 15, 2007
Reckless Records RIP - Part 3: High Fidelity
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') This week I have been writing about my experiences working for Reckless Records in London during the 1990s. Yesterday I was writing about the relationship the shop had with Record Collector magazine, and the perils of under-pricing very rare records. The Islington branch of Reckless is generally thought to be where local...
August 14, 2007
Reckless Records RIP - Part 2: Happiness In Magazines
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') Yesterday I was looking at how I got a job in the mail order department at Reckless Records during the early nineties, and how the working month revolved around the sending out of the mail shot. The other big deadline each month was getting the copy finalised for the two, three and...
The Sun's Dream Team debut nightmare
One of the most exciting weekends of the year has just passed - the start of the football season. And it all went pretty well for my teams. Well, if the best you can hope for is to finish the weekend on -12 like Leeds did, that is as good as it gets anyway. This year I've been dragged into doing The Sun's Dream Team Fantasy Football and joining one of the mini-leagues with a few friends back in the...
August 13, 2007
Alt tags reveal what is on the Daily Mail's mind about child sex offenders
Alt tags on images can often reveal what is going on in the minds of the people building a website. Designed to assist accessibility, most browsers display the contents of the tag as placeholder text whilst an image is loading. And since here in Greece I generally view the internet through 28.8Kbps spectacles, I tend to see this more than most. The Daily Mail has had a wonderful example during today in the promotional strip for their 'Femail' articles which...
Reckless Records RIP - Part 1: An End Has A Start
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') I found out, only via a brief mention in an article in the Guardian - "The Vinyl Frontier" by Adam Webb - that my old record shop Reckless Records had gone out of business in London. A quick check of the Reckless website, which back in the late nineties I used to...
August 10, 2007
Using the BBC iPlayer outside of the UK
This article doesn't explain how to use the iPlayer from outside the UK, it is about what happened in 2007 when the iPlayer was first launched and the BBC thought you were outside the UK. An official international version of the BBC iPlayer is now available. I was hoping this week to be able to write a piece about how the BBC's iPlayer beta performed when I took it out of the country on my laptop. I was all geared...
T-Mobile MMS addicted to Internet Explorer on the web
A friend sent me a picture message from the UK the other day. It originated from the T-Mobile network, and made its way across Europe to arrive on my non-MMS enabled Vodafone network phone in Greece. It appeared as a text message with a link and a password. I was very impressed with the whole cross-platform, cross-network, cross-national boundary operation. Until I got to the web bit of it course. The first thing that greeted me when I tried to...
August 9, 2007
Doctor Who and the Vanishing Plaques
Presumably, at some point during the 1970s, there was a mental tipping point moment for me when, faced with Tom Baker's boggle eyes on my TV screen, I decided that one day I would like to work for the BBC on futuristic computer stuff. That's my explanation anyway, and I'm sticking to it. I still remember the frisson of excitement I got when, during my full-time days at the BBC, I ended up wandering through the labyrinthine prop store behind...
August 8, 2007
'Faked' Bargain Hunt the final straw
I see that the latest television programme to become embroiled in the 'fakery' scandal is Bargain Hunt. Apparently audiences were mislead - events seen on screen often had to be reproduced for the camera, advice was given that was not shown on screen, and the programme isn't recorded in real-time. This latest scandal should be a wake-up call for all British broadcasters, that they need to take firm action to expose this habitual culture of deceit. I propose that the...
Shonky email etiquette after 18 months away from my BBC email address
So I'm now firmly back in Greece after a two week jaunt to the UK to do some work at the BBC and to visit a couple of other clients. I had a really enjoyable trip, with a whirlwind tour of London staying at several different friends houses - which included the ultimate geek-out joy of ordering customised Pizza from Domino's over the internet using the Wii console and a TV. Being back at the BBC was quite a strange...
August 7, 2007
Why doesn't the BBC iPlayer system tray icon use native Windows UI elements?
Well, it's been mostly iPlayer this and iPlayer that around here recently, and today is no different - and this time I have a bit of a user experience gripe. The iPlayer library software does something that really annoys me on Windows machines - not taking advantage fully of the common native UI elements. One of the reasons that any OS like Windows or a Mac OS has a standard set of UI elements is so that they can...
Using 'TEST' as a test search term is quite testing for TravelMail and others
A few weeks back I published some OpenSearch plugins for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 covering British newspaper websites and several BBC related queries, and recently additionally added plugins for the BBC iPlayer. It isn't rocket science to put these little snippets of XML together, but it did take a little bit of fiddling around in order to make them work on both browsers. Most tools to automatically generate these plugins have been written by the open source community...
August 6, 2007
5 quick usability wins for the BBC iPlayer beta trial installation process
Having spent two of the last three weeks sitting very near to the iPlayer development team in the BBC's Future Media and Technology department in White City, I'm aware that there is no shortage of people telling them what they ought to have done with the product. And that is both outside and inside the BBC. From the Open Source Consortium's 'rip it up and use video codec DIRAC instead' vote, to Guardian journalists patiently explaining to commentators on their...
August 5, 2007
Having the internet at Scout camps isn't just for the home-sick
There has been a bit of a brouhaha about the fact that Scouts celebrating the centenary of the first camp run by Baden-Powell were made to eat veggie burgers rather than risk offending any people with special dietary requirements. In fact, the perennial war-cry of "It's political correctness gone mad" can be heard across the land. "If this is true this country is garbage for putting up with this P.C. Rubbish" - Will Smith, Medway England on the Daily Mail...
August 3, 2007
LinkedIn to Jesus
This made me laugh out loud the other day. Due to an unfortunate contraction of a friend's literally Christian name, their request to link to me on "LinkedIn" presented me with an ethical dilemma. Should I add him to my network? Or should I let LinkedIn know that, no, I have never let the Lord and Saviour Jesus into my heart, and that truly, I do not know Christ. I suppose I could have clicked "Decide Later", and popped over...
August 2, 2007
BBC iPlayer search plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox, and an iPlayer Google Toolbar button
BBC iPlayer [Add this search to your browser] BBC iPlayer custom Google Toolbar button [Add this button to your Google Toolbar] Today I've added an OpenSearch plugin and Google Toolbar button for the BBC's iPlayer to the list of plugins and widgets you can download from this site. Since both the OpenSearch standard and the Google Toolbar standard are cross-platform, it means that this iPlayer search plugin should work in Internet Explorer 7 and above, and in Firefox 2 and above....
August 1, 2007
Gary Lineker isn't leaving comments here
I got very excited the other day when Greg The Bunny left a comment on currybetdotnet, and then again, briefly, when I thought that Gary Lineker had. For a split-second from the summary, I though he had left a comment trying to put his side of the Kewell vs Lineker dispute by linking to his official site. (If you'll remember, Harry Kewell sued Gary Lineker for defamation, which they settled out of court. At the time it caused me, not...