Pete Ashton’s Blog

I’m off to my mum’s tomorrow to help her and stepdad pack up the house before their move to New Zealand (which still hasn’t really sunk in, truth be told) and given that everything will be in boxes I probably won’t be able to get online for a week. This won’t be a problem and I’m quite relishing the break but it does mean emails and site maintenance won’t be dealt with.

I’ve also done the blogging equivalent of making sure my cat is fed. Every day Andy will switch on my computer and let NetNewsWire update my feed subscriptions. (Yes, I stopped using Bloglines a while back - it wasn’t updating Flickr feeds regularly enough and eventually I just preferred having feeds in a separate app).

So barring any semi-drunken postings in the early hours I’ll see you all in a week. Be good.

Third in an ongoing harvest of Birmingham-ish based musicians found on MySpace. If you want to be on this list then friend me.

The Big Bang do a stomping, throbbing rock thing with echos of 80s Matchbox. Apparently they’re really good live.

Deluka are very interesting. Couldn’t put my finger on them until the words “New York Punk” filtered through my brain, but even that’s not quite right. Hmmmm… (ta)

The Nameless In House Jam Band. They jam. No two performances ever the same. Have the audacity to put a really long jam session on their MySpace page. Respect is due.

Destroy Cowboy - interesting shoegazer-type stuff with an experimental edge. Need to see live to be sure.

Thee Moths - this seems to be close to the Avrocar / Magnetophone style but with a hefty lump of guitar/folk thrown in. Very slow and atmospheric and quite beautiful. Hmm…

Chrissy Van Dyke - powerful female singer-songerwriter stuff at an intriguingly high standards. One to check out methinks.

Robin - more of the singer-songwriter stuff. Not quite sure about this one - some good moments…

Perception - grinding dirty grunge rock stuff.

Previous Brum Roundups: 0, 1, 2.

Alex from the band Devil and Casey Jones emailed a while back ostensibly to tell me about a gig they were doing (which, as usual, I couldn’t attend due to work…) and informed me of a book that mentions the Number 11 Outer Circle bus route in Birmingham which, as you know, I’m planning to write a book about.

The book was Clare Morrall’s Astonishing Splashes of Colour. Since I’m on a perpetual budget I was a bit wary about forking out for a novel but I noticed Amazon had it listed as second hand for a quid which, with postage, worked out at £3.75, which seemed reasonable, so I ordered it. A couple of days later it arrived - an ex-library copy with the first few pages falling out but what do you expect for a quid.

And it turned out to be really good indeed. Not much useful Outer Circle stuff (it’s more a plot device than a description of the route) but a thoroughly enjoyable read and quite unique. I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone, Birmingham based or not.

Having enjoyed the book I starting thinking about the fact that it had cost me a quid of which the author would see nothing. Admittedly if I’d bought it new the author would only have seen about 50p, if that, but those royalties add up over time. Since the book is still in print I’ve also done the publisher out of a sale which, when you’re printing in bulk, can be a significant thing.

Jeanette Winterson wrote an article in the Guardian recently (which of course I can’t find online for looking…) the gist of which was how Amazon’s listing second hand books was really not a good thing at all and tantamount to stealing. It’s not like I stumbled across the book in a dusty shop - I was actively looking for it and contemplating paying full price but was given the opportunity to buy it for next to nothing with the profits going to some dealer in The Wirrall.

But, as usual, while raising an interesting point Winterson is wrong. I probably wouldn’t have paid full price (my Amazon basket is overflowing with full price books I’m probably never going to be able to afford to buy) and having enjoyed the book have recommended it to others, including you. Nobody loses, everyone wins.

That said, it would be nice to have the option of financially compensating Morrall for the work she put into writing the book. If Amazon, or someone else, set up a system where I could pay another quid of which a decent percentage would go to the author I’d probably do that. A system, the Public Lending Right, already exists for library books where authors get around 5p each time their titles are borrowed so it shouldn’t be too hard to piggy-back this. Make it simple with a link on each eligible title on Amazon, something like “I have read this book second hand and would like to pay the author”, and I’m sure a reasonable number of people would be up for it. And naturally the commission on those donations would be another revenue stream for Amazon.

Of course I could send a cheque to the publishers (or just look her up in the phone book and stick a quid through her letterbox) but am I, or anyone else, realistically going to do that? Of course not.

The other obvious place this sort of thing would work is for music, not just CDs bought second hand but for stuff downloaded via P2P. However I suspect the record industry would consider this sort of enlightened initiative akin to negotiating with terrorists…

I don’t watch BBC TV so I don’t pay the license fee. This is fair.

I also don’t watch ITV, C4, Sky, Living or any of the other countless commercial TV stations. But I do pay for these with the products I buy, a significant percentage of which goes towards paying for adverts on these channels. This, it strikes me, is not fair.

Can I get a rebate?

This is probably more revolutionary that you care about but Ben Hammersley has stopped using Movable Type for his blog. He’s moved to iWeb, the Apple app for making web pages with the minimal of effort. What’s interesting is that Ben is no slouch when it comes to blogging - he’s responsible for the current implemetation of blogs on the Guardian site (powered by MT) and has written a book on RSS. He’s one of the people I’ve looked to regarding what’s going on it blogging over the years, and he’s moved to Apple’s version of FrontPage for his personal site. Web standards and semantic markup be damned. What’s that all about?

As he explains in these two posts, he’s having fun. iWeb allows him to play about with typesetting and layouts that a template-driven site with strict validation won’t allow. The text in that second post is just a big PNG image for heaven’s sake! But the thing is, it looks really good. Each post is crafted as a unique object where photography, type and content work together. (And yes, there’s still an RSS feed.)

Last year I designed a site for my mate Dave to host the trailers for his short movie. Being a professional Photoshop user with a good design sense he sent me the designs as fully realised screenshots which I tortuously adapted into reasonably compliant markup. It was a pain in the arse for both him and me but we got there in the end. A month ago he got hold of a copy of iWeb, threw together a new site in a couple of days and uploaded it. And he enjoyed the experience. He now has a site that looks exactly how he wants it to without having to involve a 3rd party “expert” who repeatedly tells him that sort of thing can’t be done “properly”.

Have you noticed how weblogs all look the same these days? Not the Blogger ones with the standard templates - the so-called A-list blogs. They’re all very simple column layouts with minimal clutter and a lot of white. Now, simple is good and very hard to get right, but I suspect there’s another reason. If you want to do anything other than the basic text-document layout with CSS it’s a monumental pain in the arse and when you get it right nobody notices. So why bother?

As it happens I still like playing about with raw HTML and CSS occasionally. I’m slowly working on a new blog at the moment based on some designs by a friend of mine and it’s going to be pretty much standards based. And this blog is going to stay with MT for the forseable future because I like it. But I’m a pseudo-expert, a dilettante who likes getting under the hood and understands the limits. Normal people don’t get that. They want it to look the way they want it to look and bollocks to the “right way”.

And, if I’m honest, that saying bollocks is a damn good thing. All the great leaps in design (and granted a whole heap of messy shit) came from someone saying bollocks to the right way. There wasn’t a standards council for the wild world of zines back in the day and for good reason - every zine was a unique object from the words inside to the way it was stapled it represented the person who made it. “You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” If web standards suit what you want to achieve with your internet presence then use them, but if they don’t then fuck ‘em.

Which is one of the reasons I’m no longer doing web design for hire. The way I see it, if your content is good enough it does’t matter what the layout looks like so get over to Blogger or LiveJournal. And if the design is that important to you then Do It Yourself. Either learn the hard stuff or get iWeb or some other point-and-click design package and get on with it.

I wrote something similar on this topic last year

One of the things I miss about working in a bookshop is having a stash on dumb-assed customer stories. Flatmate Andy had a doozy today which I’m sure he won’t mind me nicking.

[Phone rings]

Andy: Hello, Waterspoons, how can I help?

Customer: I’m need a book.

A: Yes?

C: I’ve got a code for it.

A: Okay.

C: It’s Eye… Ess…

A: [rolls eyes, waits for actual ISBN number to begin]

C: Bee… En…

[Silence]

A: Um…

C: Do you have it?

A: Sorry, I need the number that follows that.

C: But that’s all I have.

A: [Realising that this is a no-hope case] What’s the title?

What’s genius about this one is the customer had narrowed down her search to every single book ever published since the ISBN system was introduced. I can picture her coming into the shop, picking up two books and realising to her horror that they both have the same code.

Okay, maybe you need to have been a bookseller to really appreciate this…

So I’m sitting on the bus wondering why I’m having trouble writing a fricking blog entry about my weekend in London when it occurs to me that, other than the gig (which I intend to write about separately later) I didn’t actually do that much. This could be a damning indictment on my ever-so-exciting life these days that a weekend not really doing much in a different city to the norm is such a radical thing that I feel it must be blogged about at length. I was even contemplating a series of posts.

So here’s my weekend in point form.

Friday

Arrived at Marylebone 5pm. Took tube to Whitechapel. Kath isn’t home yet so go buy bagels on Brick Lane. Kath comes home, have dinner, Kath goes out on date, I go for walk around City and riverside at night taking photos.

Saturday

Get up around noon. Go to Spitz to help set up gig, pausing to take some photos around Spitalfields. Discover they don’t really need my help so go for another walk through City, over Millennium Bridge and into Tate Modern to check the Rachel Whiteread exhibition. Like this a lot, but then I have a thing for cardboard boxes in absurd quantities. Spend about 10 minutes there and go back to gig.

Gig occured. It was great. More later.

Go home, chat with Kath about stuff and she introduces me to the frightening concept of using two points in the Photoshop Curves tool to create an S curve. Brain explodes. Can’t sleep due to work shift patterns and got to sleep about 5am.

Sunday

Walk to Angel for Flickrmeet at 12.30. Was meeting Anna but she was late. Thought I spotted the actual meet itself but turned my back at they’d all gone. Give up on Anna and phone Andy Konky Kru, arranging to meet at the British Museum. Anna arrives and locates the Flickrmeet which has decamped to a pub due to the weather. Since Andy is mobile-free can’t cancel so set up a proxy meeting with Anna for later.

Meet Andy in the Great Court. Pop over to Gosh!, the comic shop, for an hour or so, discovering that cartoonist John Chandler works there now. Realised I’m terminally out of touch with what’s out in comics and could easily spend a grand in there just on graphic novels and reprint volumes.

Anna turns up and we go to the pub for a bit. Turns out Ade Brown has a spare ticket for a Jeffrey Lewis gig on Monday which Anna’s also going to so make more proxy plans to go. Go back to Kath’s flat, forgoing my strict walking rule and taking the bus as it’s raining and I’m getting tired.

Monday

Got up and felt a bit lousy. Wondered what I would do before meeting Anna at seven or whenever our proxy meeting might happen. Realised I wasn’t going to arrange to meet anyone else and was about to spend the next few hours moping around the cold empty house so decided I wanted to go home. I was missing Birmingham. I was missing my flat. Thought this somehow significant.

Got bus to Marylebone, got on train, felt a strange sense of rightness about arriving in Birmingham, got home about 6pm. Spent next 36 hours in Photoshop.

And that, dear friends, was my exciting weekend in London. As you can tell, it was mainly spent taking photos and I really should just let them speak for themselves, so here they are (first 26 in this set).

I really fucking loved living in London. From 2000 to 2003 I made my home there, gradually moving from Finchley in zone 3 via Mile End in zone 2 to a flat near Waterloo Station in zone 1. I remember once when Jez was down from Brum for some work thing and we met up for a drink. At the time I’d split up with my fiancee, was taking anti-depressants, would be shortly signed off work for stress and was drinking a fair amount and Jez asked something along the lines of “do you think it might be London that’s the cause of all this?” The thought had never occurred to me. How could this be London’s fault? This city is great!

And three years later I still stand by that. Whatever the many causes of my woes London wasn’t one of them. Living in London, especially living right in the centre of London, is brilliant because you can walk everywhere. Bankside was on my doorstep, Soho a 20 minutes walk over the river and the City half an hour away. Because you’re walking you can stick to the back streets and avoid the crowds and walking is the only way to see London properly. And when you start seeing it properly you start to appreciate the stupendous history of this place. London, frankly, rocks.

The thing is, while I still have a great fondness for London I’m 100% a Brummie these days. This is how my brain works. When I move somewhere new I pretty quickly become a native, probably because I don’t have a “home town” like most people. I’m not really “from” anywhere so wherever I happen to be, that’s where I’m from. It’s all very Paul Young. Birmingham is where my passions lie at the moment. I’ve adjusted to the pace and the character of the city and gotten interested in the history and current culture of the place. Birmingham, too, is brilliant and I fucking love living here. The scale of the place, especially when you bring in the Black Country and Solihull, is massive yet it feels small and cozy (thanks in part to the disproportionally tiny city centre) and while it has a lot to be proud of in it’s relatively short history the people are modest and self-depreciating, in a good way. It’s a top place to live. And I know that if I ever moved to Manchester or Liverpool I’d initially be skeptical but after a year or so I’d be shouting from the rooftops about how wonderful it all is. I’m just like that.

I started writing about the weekend and this came out instead. It doesn’t go anywhere and it’s not about the weekend but what the hell. I’ll see if I can write about the weekend tomorrow…

Went to London for a long weekend and was intending to write about it in all its glory today but having spent a good day sorting through the hundreds of photos I took I’m a little wiped out and need to get to bed soon.

So in the meantime, here are the general photos taken while walking around on Friday night and Saturday afternoon (this is a set for general London photos which I’ll be adding to - the current ones are the first 26), while these are the photos from the Celebrating Andy gig which start off okay and get better towards the end as I got used to the venue.

Unless something desperately exciting happens on the bus journey tomorrow or at work itself I’ll write more tomorrow night. So I’ll be writing more tomorrow night then.

If you go to a gig and have a look at the back of the stage you can be sure to find an amp sitting atop a beer crate. This is the law. What’s interesting (if that’s in any way the right word) is that there’s a damn good chance that beer crate will be yellow and have “Holsten” written on the side. Except the pub doesn’t sell Holsten and probably hasn’t since the 1980s.

Since I first spotted this in one of my photos I’ve been seeing them everywhere and it’s probably time to start recording them in one place. Maybe this’ll turn into a whole ‘nother blog celebrating the wonder of the Holsten crate and its amp-supporting genius. Who can tell?

Here’s one, and here’s another. I shall add more as I find them, as can you in the comments for this post.

—

Here’s another one - not an amp but the context is right.

Haven’t written much about work at the depot this last couple of weeks, mainly because it’s been very dull indeed. Due to the shifts I very rarely see my housmates and when I do it’s about 11pm and they’re ready to go to bed so conversations aren’t exactly high level. “How was your day?” they ask and I have nothing to say at all.

Since Polish Rob was “let go” I’ve been working exclusively in the big lorry at the end of the conveyor belt on my own. The boxes come up the belt, I take them off the belt and stack them. As the lorry fills the belt retracts and then I move to the next lorry. They have a capacity of 40 tonnes and while I’m sure I’m not lugging that much weight I am filling an average of three of them in a night. That’s a lot of boxes. All the parcels sent from Birmingham as it happens.

While it’s tiring work I actually quite like being in the lorry on my own. I can work at my own pace without having to work around someone else’s stacking strategy and more importantly I don’t have to make inane talk with anyone. We don’t go home early like we did when Rob added to the numbers but that’s not the end of the world.

We had a staff meeting today. A “WLM” which I assume means “Weekly Line Meeting” but I’m just guessing. The manager wanted to let us air any grievances and issues we might have whilst reminding us not to clamber over the belt like monkeys, especially when visitors from head office were in. It was a nice gesture but it did put us back a good 20 minutes which is not handy when you’re on task-and-finish (get paid for the full shift no matter when you complete the job). Amongst other things he said that stacking was really good at the moment. That’ll be me then. I guess I should have some pride in that but to be honest I’m just being anal. There are some key rules - heavy at the bottom, light on top, not too high, slot everything in efficiently - and it’s satisfying to play by them, especially once you get to know the different varieties of boxes that come down. But of course I don’t care because I’ll be gone soon. I’m taking a long weekend and in a fortnight I’ll be in Winchester helping mum and stepdad put their house in storage and then I have this book to start writing, so someone else will take my place. Maybe they’ll also be anal, but they probably won’t.

It’s interesting how agency workers are such a normal thing in the workplace these days that we get treated as part of the team. They seem to assume I’m going to be there for the next few months if not longer, which many temps are. I once worked with someone who’d been “temping” at the same place for three years with no sign of being taken on full time. They could be let go with a few hours notice with no recourse, which is kinda sucky, but they probably won’t because this is how it works these days. It’s telling that we’re rarely referred to as “temps”. It’s “agency” with no indication of time.

So I’m something of an anomaly in the agency game. I’ve been with the agency for nearly two and a half years but I’m definitely a temp. Sometimes I feel I need to remind people of that. I’m a temp, as in temporary, as in probably won’t be here in a month’s time. By all means make the most of me while I’m here but don’t get too comfortable else you’ll miss me when I’m gone.

(And no, I’m not boasting. You should see the state of some of my fellow “temps”.)

Off to London today, for the first time in ages, and back Monday evening, so no updates (and probably lots of retarded comments on the blog so just ignore them). Busy Saturday at the Celebrating Andy gig/event and Sunday is a Flickrmeet but feel free to text me if you fancy meeting up.

While I’m on the subject of teeny things that irk me in blogging (and I’ll keep it brief this time)…

Feedburner…

Lovely service, used it myself for a couple of projects and highly recommend it, but they do have this annoying option to satisfy the stats junkies. You can use Feedburner to track how many people are subscribed to your feed, which is fine, but you can also track how many people click from your feed to your actual site. Why you’d want to know this I have no idea, but they do it like this.

Say your permalink looks like this:

http://www.yourblog.com/06/02/17/blog_entry.html

Feedburner can replace it with this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourID?m=123

Then whenever that link is clicked on Feedburner makes a note and redirects the clicker to the correct URL. Simple.

The problem is this isn’t at all accurate, but not because of anything Feedburner does. When I post a link that I found on your feed I’ll credit it with a (via) link, but I cannot be arsed to go the extra mile and find the real URL for your post. I’ll just simply copy the URL that appears in my feed reader and paste it into my blog, just like I would with every other feed. Then when someone clicks on the link to your blog Feedburner assumes they’ve come from the feed and does a +1 to your stats. Except they didn’t. They came from my site though you wouldn’t know that because Feedburner is sitting in the way. And I’m sure I’m not the only blogger to do this.

Also, these are not really future proof. I’d imagine the feedburner URLs aren’t intended to last for years so there’s a significant chance they’ll change the format at some point, or you’ll change your ID, or reset the count or something. Then all those links scattered around the web are broken. And not just broken in the sense that they’ll go to your site and produce a 404 not found, but broken in that they’ll go nowhere near your site.

So if you’re that concerned about your stats be aware that this service is a false god. And if anyone can explain the advantage of knowing how many people brought up your post in their browser when the full post is already in the feed I’d love to know.

End of the world? No. Mildly irritating? Yes. Therefore worthy of blogging.

Sorry, not as brief as I’d hoped. Normal service will now resume.