Archive for the 'Shopping' Category

Crock

Published
by
Jon
on March 11, 2008
in Shopping
. 0 Comments

Crock o compostAm I being a curmudgeonly crosspatch? I expect so. The RSPB has this kitchen compost crock in their Reuse and Recycle section. It is for putting your peelings in on their way to the compost heap. That’s fine. I wouldn’t buy one but if you’ve got a Georgian kitchen it would probably fit in very nicely.

The only problem is that it has an added feature. To keep your kitchen smelling fresh the crock has a carbon filter inside the lid. It’s a disposable plastic filter that can’t be recycled and will be regularly replaced. So now you’re actually creating more landfill waste than you were before you bought the thing.

I’m tempted to think that this is pretty characteristic of certain rural greens. They want to be eco-friendly but they also want things to be ‘nice’. So they object to wind-farms when they spoil the view and they love living in splendid isolation where public transport isn’t an option and we city dwellers must subsidise their local Post Office. But of course that’s very unfair, it’s just a bit of thoughtlessness on the part of the RSPB and I’m sure they’ll sort it out as soon as they can.

Political Playmobil

Published
by
Jon
on March 7, 2008
in Politics and Shopping
. 2 Comments

playmocop.jpgThanks to Giles for pointing out to me the excellent collection of humorous and political comments that are collecting on the Amazon page for this Playmobil Security Check-Point. Here’s an example:

Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it’s a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times. Little children need to be aware that not all smiling faces and uniforms are friendly. I noticed that my child is now more interested in current events. Just the other day he asked me why we had to forfeit so much of our liberties and personal freedoms and I had to answer “well, it’s because the terrorists have already won”. Yes, they have won.

I wonder if Amazon will allow this commie protest to continue. It’s supposed to be a super-store not a community centre!

Playmobil meta

Published
by
Jon
on November 23, 2007
in Shopping
. 1 Comment

Meta CastleIf you have children under ten then you’ve probably got some Playmobil in your house. It was my very favourite range of toys for a long time so I’m pretty used to their weird German ideas. This one really takes the biscuit though. One of the most extravagant items they sell is the Fairy Tale Palace. It costs about eighty pounds and it’s enormous; three stories high with loads of columns and staircases, chandeliers, mirrors and rose-tinted windows. Now they’ve made a toy toy castle so that the little Playmobil children who live in the castle can play with a model of their own castle, complete with tiny figures of themselves. You can see where this is going can’t you? I’ll stop now before we all disappear.

Stupid Sweets

Published
by
Jon
on November 3, 2007
in Shopping
. 1 Comment

Child CatcherMasterfoods, who produce many of the shite sweets that make so many people in this country unhealthy, have started using animal rennet in their waxy, flavourless chocolate. I am mostly pleased about this because now I won’t have to even discuss the possibility of my daughters buying or eating this crap; there’s no way they will want anything to do with something that is extracted from the tummies of dead baby cows. The fact that the chocolate in Mars Bars, Twix, Maltesers and Milky Way was already offensive because it is made from cocoa that is the product of a ruthlessly exploitative and unethical trade that causes suffering and deprivation for many children in Africa obviously wasn’t enough for these scumbags. I suppose once evil becomes your main interest in life you just have to keep trying to push the envelope.

Postal Strike

Published
by
Jon
on October 7, 2007
in Politics and Shopping
. 3 Comments

Postman PatThe postmen are going on strike, and the news story about it didn’t really say why. On the postal union’s site there was a Message to the Public which I didn’t find persuasive. They talked about how they were faced with the prospect of arriving at work and being told to do a completely different job to the one they usually do and of having their hours of work changing from day to day. These are things that I and many other people have been used to for years. They also talked about how Royal Mail want to reduce their pension benefits and increase their retirement age.  At the moment the Royal Mail pension scheme is so expensive to run that Royal Mail have to pay an extra 730 million pounds a year into it in addition to its member’s contributions. The CWU are in the enviable position of having the government underwrite their pension scheme if Royal Mail eventually go bust. Meanwhile final-salary pension schemes are closing in most companies in the UK.

Ladybird PostmanSo I don’t really feel very sympathetic towards the postal workers. In attempting to explain their grievances they have simply highlighted how out-of-touch with the real-world they are. Since their members’ pensions are protected if Royal Mail become insolvent maybe they’re calculating that it would be better to protect their cushy benefits and drive the company under than it would be to negotiate a less advantageous deal. It is of course the job of a union to protect its members’ interests, but sometimes that involves looking at the long rather than the short-term and even the CWU recognises that the current pension scheme is too expensive.

The amazing popularity of online shopping should have been a bonanza for the Royal Mail but instead they are in deeper trouble than ever. This may well be because the management is useless, or it may be because the organisation is bureaucratic and inflexible and many of the people who work there are unimaginative jobsworths, I have no way of knowing. In any case, this strike won’t help their situation. Like Millie Banerjee of Postwatch, I find it hugely disappointing to watch a great British institution tear itself apart. But on the other hand, maybe the demise of the Royal Mail will create a brilliant opportunity for a new, much better mail service. Here’s some things I’d like them to offer:

  • Destination tracking - Every time a parcel addressed to me is processed they should check to see if it is too big for the letter box or if it needs a signature. If that’s the case they could send me an email or text asking if they should deliver it the next day or on some other day when I am going to be at home.
  • People who are at home all the time could act as mini local post offices. Big parcels for anyone in their street would be left with them at the start of the day, outgoing parcels could be collected at the end of the day.
  • Tracking the delivery man. It would be so easy to put a GPS receiver on each delivery person and then track them so that I could see an ETA for them.
  • Smarter redelivery. I’m going out for the day but I still want my eBay parcel to be there when I get home so I go to their site and ask for all today’s mail to be delivered to my friend up the road.
  • Parcel aggregation. It’s daft for several delivery companies to all be calling at the same address. Why don’t they set up a clearing-house for data and then they could all deliver each other’s parcels.

Crikey, I could go on all day with this. Anyone fancy going into business?

Northern Rock

Published
by
Jon
on September 19, 2007
in Shopping
. 1 Comment

Account ClosedIt is so irritating to read that Northern Rock ‘managers’ are now whining that the government should have done more, earlier, to prevent everyone from taking all their money out. The company’s own response to the problems has been unbelievably useless. On Friday, when I went to their site to see what they had to say about their situation, there was absolutely no mention of any problem at all. I found that very disconcerting so I cycled down to the Maddox Street branch to take my money out before it was too late. There was a queue, in part because only two out of the three counters were open. If there hadn’t been a queue I might have felt reassured, but since there was and since I’m English I obviously had to join it.
Northern Rock is unavailableOnce I’d closed my account I checked the Northern Rock site to see if online customers were having any luck logging in. I couldn’t even get the log-in page to open. It continued to be unavailable every time I checked, over the whole weekend. This must have been unbelievably frustrating for all those customers who had online-only accounts and couldn’t withdraw their money at a branch. By Saturday there was a very small link at the top of the home page leading to a mildly reassuring notice. By Sunday the link had got larger. On Monday they finally got around to replacing their front page with a big apology note. It they had done that on Friday, and if they’d thought to send all available staff to the counters, and if they’d properly managed their online account access then maybe there would have been no queues, no panic and no hours of frustration and stress for all their customers.
I am delighted that I’ve closed my account, it was only paying 4.8% and I would have closed it earlier if I’d noticed, but there must now be thousands of people who’ve got a whole load of money that was in a tax-free ISA and will now have to go into a tax paying account instead. They are victims of a combination of greed and incompetence on the part of the management of Northern Rock and those managers should now be committing Hara-Kiri, not whinging about how the government should have bailed them out sooner.

Consumer News

Published
by
Jon
on April 23, 2007
in Briefly and Shopping
. 0 Comments

Equifax collect credit data about you and then sell that data to financial institutions who are considering lending you money. If you want to know what they’re saying about you, you can pay them £17 to see a copy of your own records, which seems a bit cheeky to me. However, thanks to the Data Protection Act, you can also ask them to give you a copy of all the data they hold on you by demanding a Statutory Credit Report from them, and that only costs £2. You can even pay by credit card, an idea I find ironically appealing, for some reason. Equifax.

Flash Recorders

Published
by
Jon
on March 23, 2007
in Shopping and Technology
. 3 Comments

Sony PCM-D1I am a sound engineer by profession and so I get asked pretty frequently why on earth I’m still recording things with a titchy Sony minidisc machine rather than one of the fancy new Flash recorders. For those of you who don’t do recording, Flash recorders, or more correctly solid-state recorders, are the next big thing in portable recording equipment. They store the sound onto a memory card and you can then import that audio into your computer extremely quickly, much faster than real-time. The reason why I still use a minidisc is that although I’ve looked at loads of Flash recorders I still haven’t found one that is better than what I’m using at the moment once you consider size, cost, quality and convenience.
However, minidisc is dead as a format, thanks to Sony’s insane money-grabbing policies, so I know that I’ll have to get a Flash recorder eventually. Since I’m sure that there are plenty of other people with the same dilemma, I’ve put together a collection of my thoughts on all the Flash recorders that I know about. You’ll find it on the Flash Recorders page. If you have any opinions or facts to add, please tell me so that I can incorporate them into the article.

American Ties

Published
by
Jon
on February 9, 2007
in Shopping and Technology
. 3 Comments

Cable cordEveryone thinks that the US consumes too much. Even Americans think so; in conversation they frequently bring the subject up themselves, just to get it over and done with. I am currently working in a giant US art gallery, MASS MoCA in Massachusetts, and I have found evidence, small but significant, that all is not as it seems.
Here it is: In American theatres they don’t tend to use cable-ties! When they want to bundle up cables neatly or attach them to scaffolding poles they use thin black cotton cord. Backstage there’s a great reel of the stuff. It’s biodegradable, reusable, easy to undo and a great deal more attractive than cable ties. In the UK we use cable-ties in theatre, in broadcasting, for gardening, for mending our cars. Most of them can’t be re-used, they never rot away and they are ugly as heck.
OK, it’s not a massive thing, but I have been using cable-ties for all sorts of things for ages and it never even occurred to me that it would be better to use string. I thought I was going to be leaving the US with a load of cheap shopping, I didn’t realise I’d be coming home with ideas for saving the planet.

I Heart Yamaha

Published
by
Jon
on January 17, 2007
in Shopping and Technology
. 3 Comments

Broken KeysWhen I’m writing music I usually set up a studio somewhere around the house with whatever equipment I need. At the moment it’s in the spare room and I’m using my most rare and valuable keyboard, a Yamaha VL1. It is a physical modelling synthesiser, great for woodwind sounds, and was so expensive (£4000 in 1994!) when they brought it out that they didn’t sell very many at all. You hardly ever see them for sale but I was lucky enough to be feeling rather flush when my friend Rick Chew decided to sell his about ten years ago. I don’t use it very often and about five years ago I knocked it off its stand and cracked the LCD screen. I thought it was doomed but the brilliant people at the Yamaha Music service department shipped over the last remaining spare screen from their head office in Japan.
Anyway, jump forward to yesterday. It’s my little daughter Amelia’s birthday party. Children all over the house. Boys. One of them comes and says that he wants to show me something that one of the other boys (who shall remain nameless) has done. I go into the spare room and there, on the floor, is my precious VL1, shards of broken keys lying alongside. I felt faint and sick, not metaphorically but actually like being sick. I didn’t shout at anyone but I was grieving all night.
This morning I phoned up the Yamaha spares department with not much hope in my heart. “Which keys do you need?” said the woman, “An F and a G? We have them both in stock, £3.25 each.” I couldn’t believe it. I was so overjoyed I could barely contain myself. So hooray for Yamaha and don’t forget when you’re shopping that it sometimes pays to spend.