London Blogger Meetup - Paramount

At work I had to tell someone off cos their hair was sticking out from under their hair net and in a food preparation environment, that sort of thing is bad, however, it didn't go well as they pointed out that my hair was sticking out too. So, I've remedied this by having my head shaved.

I'm crap at telling the barber how to cut my hair, always have been, and so I talked myself into having it shaved number two all over. This'll be like the third time in my life I've sported such a hair cut. The first time was in 1995 when I was trying to join the army and then in 1997 when I got cute Genny from my course at uni to cut it.

Every time I underestimate how cold it is without a thick heid of hair.

Anyhoo, London Blogger's meetup the other night, down at Doggett's Coat and Badge, just over the water from Blackfriars. This month sponsored by Paramount Home Entertainment, those lovely people who bring us films such as Indiana Jones, Star Trek and Transformers.

They had raffle prizes of a Transformers skateboard, all of this season's Paramount Home Entertainment releases on DVD and a 32" telly, alas I won none.

Also there was a rather fun talk from Marko Saric about 58 ways to promote your blog, my favourite was (21) "Stop Planning, start blogging". Here's one of Peter Marshall's photos from the evening of me enjoying the talk.


So, as usual with my write-ups of this sort of event, here's a list people I spoke to, with links

1. TomTiredOfLondon - From TiredOfLifeTireOfLondon its a blog about things to do in London
2. Nina - Who writes Mapapay Dhow Trips
   
3. Aref-Adib - Has a wonderful visual online diary of arty thing in London and lookalikes
4. Cristiano Betta - On Tech and Life
5. Mikal D - Aref-Adib, Cristiano and Mikal were chatting about Google Wave, I still have no idea about what it does, how useful it is or how to use it, can it send traffic to my websites?
   
6. Hayley - The drummer from Witness to the Beard
7. Andy Bargery - The Marketing Blagger and organiser of these meetups, some kind of benevolent dictator for life perhaps
8. Marko - From HowToMakeMyBlog.com its a blog about how to blog
9. Zubyre Parvez - From 'Freedom for China' which collects music and artworks from around the world all expressing a need for China to be free from the Chinese Communist Party's oppressive rule.
10. John C - I think this the right link, he was called John according to his badge. We didn't chat for long, in fact, "hi" was pretty much the extent of our discourse. He's from YourBlogTools.com
11. Godwyns - who writes poems at EroticFantasies
    
12. Harry Wood - From OpenStreetMap its the Wikipedia of Maps
13. Selena - She's into social media and meetups
14. Pete - TheLondoneer
15. Antony - Fresh Plastic
16. Tom Flashboy - Haven't spoken to him in ages, and I was on my way out when I spotted him
17. Kate- who was talking to Tom
    

And here's a list of people who I saw but didn't speak to

1. Sheryl - Sartorial Pervert
2. Andy Roberts - From DistributedResearch
3. Pete Marshall - My London Diary, neat photography from around the capital
4. Bruce Bird - the niche market blogger, proving that you can make money from blogging
5. Miss Geeky
6. Tiki Chris
7. Al Robertson - Have seen him around at these meetups for months/years, but never really chatted to him, at this meetup he overheard me talking to FlashTom about naked chicks and indiebands which is the essense of every conversation I've ever had at meetups.
8. Caroline - From Caroline'sMiscellany
9. Rachel Clark

I think I've set myself a new personal best record for people I've spoken to at a London Blogger's Meetup. Here's the graph of my progress over the past year or so.
There's still some way to go.

Other blog posts about this meetup that you might be interested to read:-

• The Londoneer - featuring a photo of me gazing at a drink
• The Seldom Seen Kid
• Life as she knows it
• Fresh Plastic
• Niche Market Blogger
  

Blog stat pron - October

Good evening and welcome to my regular first day of the month blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for October, this blog got:-

1,132 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,924 Pageviews

Compared to September's

1,054 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,769 Pageviews

Whilst not quite at the heady heights of traffic that this blog was getting when I was a full time blogger unemployed, but up a healthy bit from last month when I resumed full time employment. To be honest though, its mostly old posts that are getting interest, rather than the newer tranche of cookery-orientated posts. Statcounter reckons I have 1,667 Unique Visitors, and an average of 66 pageloads per day, completely whupping the ass of my target of 65 pageviews. On the back of that phenomenal success, for November I'm aiming to beat 67 ppd.

Here are the metrics of of my RSS feeds on various feed readers:

21 subscribers - GoogleReader (same as last month)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
6 followers - Blogger (same as last month)

These are my top referers for October (not including google wanderers)

1. Twitter - 70 visitors
2. Facebook - 48 visitors
3. UK Bubble - 21 visitors
4. EUReferendum - 17 visitors
5. Mark Wadsworth - 16 visitors
6. Boy Trouble - 10 visitors
7. Daniel1979 - 5 visitors
8. Fitlads - 5 visitors
9. Zath - 4 visitors
10. Anorak Forum - 3 visitors

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during November.

1. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam - 239 views
2. Origami flapping bird animation - 77 views
3. No idea about pornography - 52 views
4. London Bloggers - Havana - 51 views
5. Facebook Scramble graphs - 42 views
6. Facebook IQ test gubbins - 36 views
7. Facebook ChainRxn graphs and hints - 32 views
8. Does Shisha kill - 32 views
9. Job Vacancies update 17-Aug-2009 - 32 views
10. Names of the dead in Gaza - 27 views

That top post there, "What Have I gotten myself into", about the training academy scam thing has been steadily growing in traffic since I posted it in July, clearly the organisation is still going and still roping people in. Using the wonders of Google's graph API, here's a bar chart showing how the hits on that blogpost have increased to date:-

Actually, due to the overwealming nature of old blogposts in that list, here are the top ten blogposts that I actually wrote in October:-

1. No idea about pornography - 52 views
2. London Bloggers - Havana - 51 views
3. SongKick Meetup - 26 views
4. Just like Delia - 22 views
5. BNP on Question Time - 19 views
6. Probably been to more gigs than you - 16 views
7. Blog Stat Pron - September - 13 views
8. Job Vacancies Update - 12 views
9. On the Minimum Wage - 12 views
10. I hate gigs that run late - 10 views

I have Aref-Adib to thank for retweeting the pornography post on Twitter and Facebook, cheers.

Another thing which has occurred to me that I ought to add in these regular stat pron updatey posts is a pie chart showing what I've been blogging about most.


Thats it for November's blog stat pron. If there's any other metrics you want to know about this blog, let me know in the comments.

Ooh, and before I depart for other topics to blog about, I ought to mention that I've started a SongKick-specific blog just here, called SongKick Dreams, so I shalln't be boring my regular blog readers with that sort of thing round here. If you're on SongKick, or like both statistics and going to gigs, then check it out. I think its awesome.

Wizarding

I lost the internet the other day, it was my day off from work, my weekend, and I had not much to do, so I rummaged through all the old videos on my hard disks and found this one which needed editing up.

I think the levitation technique is called 'wizarding' or 'the wizard'. I filmed it in about 2006, one Saturday morning doing unpaid overtime at work, so it wasn't really wasting work time.

Just Like Delia (part 2)

Another attempt at making something from Delia's cookbook in order to impress.



Should make a fine breakfast to snarf on the way to work tomorrow.

The last of the Potatos

My third crop of potatos:-

The smallest so far, and probably the last of the year, I think they were maris piper in the end.

I made them into mash to go with my sausage beans 'n' mash dinner.

The growing my own spuds thing was a fun adventure. I dunno if I'm going to have a garden to grow them in next season.

SongKick Dreams

I used to go to lots of gigs, hundreds of them, four or five a month, just any live music really, friends' bands, bands people talked about, regular promoter's nights. But I have a job, and my hours are grim, I need to be up at 4:30am in the morning sometimes, and I'm too old to be able to handle going out the night before.

So instead of going out, I stay online, scanning SongKick, and have SongKick Dreams.

At some point I'm going to start another blog, running commentry about SongKick, answering questions like:-

• How much traffic does SK get?
• How many members do they have?
• How many users?
• How fast is SK's membership growing?
• What's the spread of gig counts like?
• What's the spread of band tracking?
• What sort of messages to people leave each other?
• Why sign up to the site without clicking on any gigs you've been to?

That sort of thing.

It'll be neat if it was on a site of it's own, a blog about SongKick instead of a blog by SongKick, like you get blogs about Facebook or about Twitter, but this one will be mine, I made this.

But can I really be bothered?
Would it get much traffic?
After answering those initial questions would there be any 'news' to report or interesting 'mash-ups' that people have created?
Is writing about the posts on SK blog acceptable?

Is there more to life than this?

Glasgow - The Bowlie years

I was trying to find the video I did from Indietracks of Davyboy Pope playing "If You Don't Pull" in the marquee on the Saturday night, but there's only a brief clip of it in the middle of this. Maybe I'd slung the full length video on some other video hosting site, for a few moments I tried to remember the names of other sites I used.

It was then I came to Vimeo, and rather than an old Just Joans vid, I found this that I'd started putting together last year.

Bowlie in Glasgow 2000 to 2007 rough edit 4 from Chris Gilmour on Vimeo.

I'd lost interest before I finished it properly, and now I guess I'll never get round to it. Its most footage of a jaunt I took up to Scotland in the middle of last year, to film my old haunts in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

What it represents is my life from 2000 to 2007 in sequence. The places I've lived, the places I'd been to meet folk from the old Bowlie messageboard, places we'd gone for gigs and drinks and just hung out.

My eyes moistened up a wee bit when I was watching it. Of course, its all in the past, places I may naver go to again.

There's this supermarket near where I grew up in Manchester, I think it's closed now. I can't remember the last time I went there, when I was young we'd go there all the time, and now I feel a little sad that I can't remember the last time I went.

Its the same with places in Glasgow. Places I used to go to loads, I may never go there again.

People too.

I had a schoolchum who died in an accident. We'd drifted apart a bit, but I still remember clearly the last time we met, outside Sainsburys, near the Donald Dewer statue in Glasgow, in the pouring, we just bumped into each other by chance. And a few months later he was gone.

Anyhoo, that video there, that's me remembering Glasgow, in a certain time, in a certain state of mind, from a certain internet messageboard.

Job vacancies update - October 2009

Good day and welcome to this edition of illandancient's Job Vacancies Update, your regular occasional amateur analysis of the UK's job vacancies scene from ground-breaking attack blog illandancient.

Total vacancies in the UK

438,228

Up 2.7% from last month
Down 1.1% from last quarter

Here's a graph showing how many job vacancies are listed on reed.co.uk, the Job Centre Plus, The Guardian's Jobs pages, GumTree's London pages and all of Gumtree's regions added together. I've ripped up the y-axis a wee bit so they all fit, and you can see how much each has changed in relation to each other.

And here is a graph showing the total number of job vacancies in the UK extrapolated out from ONS figures and how each job vacancies agency has changed from day to day:-

Or, perhaps a nicer graph would be this one which has what I've extrapolated is the monthly average, compared to the published ONS figure.

What does it all mean? Well, I reckon my calculations are close enough to the ONS figures to be considered reliable. The ONS get theirs from sending out surveys for a sample of companies to fill in each month. I get my figures from counting actual job adverts.

I'm somewhat sceptical that Gumtree just keeps growing and growing. I figured that maybe they don't delete filled vacancies, and so it just keeps on accumulating, but in some place the number of vacancies is falling, so that can't be right.

Anyhoo, most of the websites show an increase in job vacancies over the last month

• Guardian Jobs +0.6%
• Gumtree +6.8%
• Job Centre Plus -5.8%
• Reed +4.9%
• CareerJet +2.6%
  

As I have some really neat in-depth data for each sector on Reed, here are some graphs of declining and growing sectors:-



Out of all the sectors on Reed.co.uk, best performing ones over the last six month are:-

• Manufacturing
• Transport
• Motoring
• Charities
• Apprenticeships
• Banking
• Estate Agency
• Hospitality
• Customer Service
• Retail

I can only speculate on the reasons:-

• Manufacturing is growing due to the poor value of sterling, it helps exports.
• Transport and Motoring are growing sectors because of the government's car scrappage scheme.
• Charities I'm guessing is because of the fakecharity filter, that is charities that depend on public donations have suffered, but those that depend on government money have had constant income.
• Apprenticeships are presumably again promoted by the government.
• Banking and Estate agency, whilst almost dying at the start of the recession the banking sector was bailed out by the government and now they're raking in the cash which huge margins between borrowing and lending rates, which in turn, according to Burning Our Money, is pushing up the property market
• Hospitality, Customer Service and Retail I guess are doing well as a result of both the end of the recession, improving manufacturing and people being more chosy about their purchases, leading to companies providing better service.

From Gumtree I have data on job vacancies by region, and its showing some mighty healthy growth, the number of jobs listed on Gumtree has grown by 5.62% in the last month, (from 177,759 to 189,513). Of course it could be that some of the jobs are listed twice where regions overlap, but because we're comparing it to itself, that's just dandy.

Out of the 46 regions on the site, the top ten regions on Gumtree by growth in the number of jobs listed are:-

• London - 2,361 more vacancies (8.74%)
• Glasgow - 909 more vacancies (13.70%)
• Manchester - 804 more vacancies (6.58%)
• Leeds - 495 more vacancies (9.97%)
• Birmingham - 465 more vacancies (5.01%)
• Edinburgh - 438 more vacancies (9.77%)
• Southampton - 436 more vacancies (9.60%)
• Guildford - 417 more vacancies (9.72%)
• Leicester - 377 more vacancies (8.37%)
• Bournemouth - 348 more vacancies (6.17%)

Hmph, whilst Gumtree shows an average increase of 4.3% in the number of vacancies listed, there are a few places that aren't increasing:-

• Hull - 5 fewer vacancies (-0.52%)
• Ipswich - 11 fewer vacancies (-0.77%)
• Newcastle - 12 fewer vacancies (-0.46%)
• Middlesbrough - 37 fewer vacancies (-3.92%)
• Aberdeen - 42 fewer vacancies (-1.60%)
• Inverness - 53 fewer vacancies (-4.35%)
• Exeter - 55 fewer vacancies (-2.45%)
• Plymouth - 89 fewer vacancies (-5.35%)
• Stoke - 96 fewer vacancies (-8.56%)

Thats it for this thrilling job vacancies update. All the data I've used here has been ripped by hand from the various websites listed near the top of the post, and for your own enjoyment I keep it on a google docs spreadsheet here.

Take care space cadets, and good luck.

BNP on Question Time

That'll teach them to think they can come onto civilised political talk shows.

The coverage of the BBC Question Time BNP special on the blogosphere seems to be a little divided into two groups. On the one hand Nick Griffin was crap and well done they wiped the floor with him, and on the other hand Nick Griffin was crap and oh dear they wiped the floor with him.

I think my favourite paragraph of coverage, which resolves the issue for me is this from Raedwald:-

Anyone who has employed inarticulate unskilled white working class labour will be sensitive in avoiding the key provocations; talking down to them, being too clever and above all taking advantage of their inability to frame arguments even when they know they're right. When the carefully designed QT panel and audience did all of this to the clumsy and inarticulate Nick Griffin on Thursday watched by 8m voters they scored another spectacular home goal.

Ambush Predator neatly digs into the very centre of problem with the current fight against the BNP:-

But it’s the UAF idiot that reveals the true danger in our society today.

And that isn’t the temporary political success of a small left-wing nationalist party:

Martin Smith, the Unite Against Fascism organiser, who directed protesters to the gate at Television Centre through which many surged, had vowed to resist police attempts to break up the demonstration and insisted it was essentially peaceful. But he did admit that one far-right supporter had been attacked earlier in the afternoon. "A guy came with a BNP banner. That was ripped from him and he was hit on the head, but you have to expect that if you come to an anti-fascist demonstration with a BNP banner," said Mr Smith.

No.

No, you don’t, any more than a black man or woman has to ‘expect’ to have racist violence directed at them because they inadvertently wandered into a BNP rally.

Both are wrong. And the fact that you can’t see that makes you even worse than Griffin…

Constantly Furious's spoof transcript is remarkably like how I remember watching the program

Dimbleby: "Good evening. I'd like to welcome our panel tonight. Well, all of them bar one, of course"
[audience laughs nervously]
Griffin: "I .."
[audience boos enthusiatically]
Dimblebore: "That's really quite enough from you, Mr Griffin"
[applause. Cries of 'quite right']
Dumbledore: "First, I must just apologise for the screaming and breaking glass you may be able to hear. I'm told that the UAF have peacefully stormed the building and are now peacefully smashing the place up".
Dumbledore: "..and so, to our first question. Gentleman with the cross face.."
Angry Asian: "Nick. Is it that you love Churchill and hate Muslims, innit?"
[wild applause, jeering]
Griffin: "I didn't ..."
Baroness Wassup [interrupting]: "Yes, you do, don't you, you do"
[prolonged applause]
Dumbledore: "Moving on now. I've got photos, Mr Griffin, of you standing near a man from the Klu Klux Klan. Does the very existence of these photo's not prove, beyond doubt, that you'd very much like to strap a black man to the front of your pickup and drive all round the bayou at high speed?"
Griffindor: "Well, I ..."
Bonnie Greer [interrupting]: "Don't you try to tell me about no KKK. I'm a 'merican."
[rapturous applause, cries of 'Right on', 'mmm hmmm']
Dumbledore: "I must just apologise for the smoke the audience may able to smell. I'm told that the UAF have peacefully ripped open the filing cabinets, piled up all the scripts and books in the building, and set light to them".
Dimblebore: "..and now, for another question"
Lone non-nutter in audience: "Is it not possibly the case that some of our problems with immigration stem from Labour's policies in this area?"
[audience falls silent, confused]
Chris WhoHe: "What? Is it me? Sorry. What was the question?"
Jack Straw: "I'd like to answer that by reading out a long list of Labour's achievements, allowing the audience to refill their glasses and go to the toilet."
Baroness WhoShe: "Well that's not true is it, and ..."
Dimbleby [interrupting]: "I'm sorry, we'll have to move on. Mr Griffin is just sitting there, smiling, and no-one has booed him for nearly five minutes"
[applause, booing]

Captialists@Work's rendering of Hitler on Question Time is a also pretty amusing

Question time 1936. Live from Alexander Palace.

On the panel tonight... Sir Arthur Bastion, Minister for Gasworks.
Lord Beaverbum, proprietor of the Daily Announcement
Lady Helena Ashcroft-Osbourne-Reynard, Socialist MP for Whitechapel and slum areas.
Field Marshal Alexander Blimp, Inspector General of the cavalry ,
And Adolf Hitler ,Chancellor of Nazi Germany.

First question, The gentleman in the top hat.
"Does the panel think that we should have closer ties with Europe?"

Herr Hitler?

Absolubtely. I fully believe that we should have a single currency, a single administrative system, and a single trading area. A single transport policy and a single representative body. I fully support closer European unity." {Applause from the audience} And if great Britain and the Commonwealth doesn't want to join? "Then we will bomb you into dust!" {smattering of uncertain applause}

Next question. From a Mrs Trellis. Should this country still be engaged in a police action in the middle East. Field Marshall?

Erm, well I can't say anything political, but our Armstrong Whitby tri-planes should have been withdrawn in 1920. Our 1903 Lee enfields are getting on a bit and their isn't enough head armour for evey soldier. Some still just have forage caps instead of tin helmets.

Herr Hitler?

Its an outrage. The armed forces are being denied the equipment they need.
{Applause} This feeble recession hit government spends money on immigrants, claiming to flee oppression in,erm,Germany and Austria, yet they cannot support their own troops. I would spend {voice rises} Three -Four - five -five hundred - five thousand times on armaments. I would provide work for our national socialist brothers in the Panzer and Messerschmidt factories by making our armed forces the best in the world. {Applause}

It does however remind me of a thing I noticed on EU Referendum a few months back, you'll of course be familiar with Godwin's Law and Reductio ad Hitler

The fallacy most often assumes the form of "Hitler (or the Nazis) supported X, therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad,". For example: "Hitler was a vegetarian, so vegetarianism is wrong." The tactic is often used to derail arguments, as such a comparison tends to distract and to result in angry and less reasoned responses.

The first twenty minutes of Question Time were about the BNP playing the Churchill card. Its like Inverse Godwins, Churchill did X therefore X must be a good/desirable. EU Referendum had this:-

That is [Adrian] Michaels's idea of journalism, preening that, "It's all good debate fodder on day three of our Europe series." He is so "pleased", he tells us, "that people like Barroso are happy to engage with the sceptic crowd and fight their corner in interviews," then throwing in his own little bit of ego-massage by declaring: "Intelligent debate normally beats name calling."

Actually, that is debatable. Winston Churchill was a great one for name-calling, consistently referring to Hitler as "Corporal Hitler" – one of his more favoured jibes.

I understand that Churchill's Islamophobia takes the form of this quote from a book he published in 1899, "The River War", in which he describes Muslims he apparently observed during Kitchener's campaign in the Sudan:-

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science - the science against which it had vainly struggled - the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome."

Crikey!

Anyhoo, the other night's Question Time - Two Minutes hate has never seemed so long

Process Engineering on the Postal Strike

From the Guardian today

But if the industrial dispute between Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) drags on and more strikes are called, some letters stuck in the system will take even longer to reach their destination.

Jonathan de Carteret, founder of broker Post-Switch, said that Royal Mail was using special warehouses to house the undelivered mail which will get topped up as and when more strikes take place. Letters waylaid by the first strikes will be the last to get delivered because they will be literally at the bottom of the pile.

"While Royal Mail works through the backlog of letters, it's unfortunately a case of first in, last out," he said.

It shows blatant disregard for their customers that they're using 'first in,last out'. It doesn't take much to have a door each end of the warehouse, or some kind or circular system marked out on the floor and a guy wheeling trolleys round.

Really, its not difficult, but for some reason the Royal Mail are just pissing on their customers. This tiny thing isn't much to do with the strike, it just how the organisation wheels round trolleys, they do it in the way that's less hassle for them rather than providing decent service for the customers, the folk who pay for stamps and expect their mail to get through on time.