Archive for the 'Shopping' Category

Builders’ Tea

Published
by
Jon
on June 17, 2006
in Media and Shopping
. 3 Comments

Builders' TeaMy dad is an architect so I used to read the RIBA journal, Building Design, a lot when I was a youth. I am still very interested in the more technical aspects of building, despite having a pretty low opinion of the skills of most builders. So when I was in Travis Perkins buying some floorboards last week I picked up a free copy of Professional Builder magazine.

It is a surprisingly good read and not nearly as bland as I thought it would be. There’s an op-ed on the dangers and hidden costs to the nation of DIY. It claims that members of the Great British public, inspired by irresponsible TV makeover shows, are rushing out to buy unsafe products from DIY sheds (ie B&Q) and costing the NHS a great deal of money when they inevitably injure themselves. They suggest that there should be a special Health Duty on all DIY products. I admire their cheek (and we all know about builders’ cheeks!) and it is more entertaining than most building industry writing.

There are also articles on women builders, why wooden windows are better than plastic, how a new product from Polypipe can enable rainwater to soak away into the ground instead of going down drains and causing flooding and all sorts of other new products. There are also lots of give-aways, including a rather puzzling competition to win an ‘England Van’ by joining the Budget Van Insurance England Van Club. The prize, a van painted with a ‘unique’ St George’s flag design’ is made by Fiat, in Italy. Very patriotic.

My favorite article though was about the launch of a new brand of tea. “Make Mine a Builders” has been devised specifically to slake the thirst of British Builders, the tea is ethically sourced (although not Fairtrade), the box is very industrial looking, a portion of the profits will go to a charitable foundation and it will be sold in builders’ merchants. I certainly intend to give it a try despite the missing apostrophe in the name.

UK music fans can copy own tracks

Published
by
Jon
on June 7, 2006
in Politics and Shopping
. 4 Comments

ScroogeSee, the British Phonographic Industry isn’t so behind the times as everyone thought. They have very generously announced that we are now allowed to listen to tracks from our own CDs on MP3 players. I predict that this unprecedented and generous move will cause excitement all over the country as people are finally able to rip their CD collections into iTunes. I am now waiting breathlessly for an announcement permitting people to listen to music while other people are present, at a small party, say, or in a motor vehicle carrying passengers.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | UK music fans can copy own tracks

Come back Pirate Bay

Published
by
Jon
on June 2, 2006
in Media and Shopping
. 1 Comment

Sharing is CaringI have a friend who has never pirated any software. He’s not an imaginary friend, he genuinely doesn’t have anything on his computers that he didn’t pay for. He regularly tells me about the latest way in which he’s been stiched up by the companies that he so generously supports. The most recent purchase was Kore 1.0 from Native Instruments. It is full of bugs and misfeatures, he paid a fortune for it. I’m sure it will get more reliable and work properly sooner or later, I just hope he doesn’t have to pay again for the ‘upgrade’ to the fully-functional version.

Meanwhile I have been known to occassionally use someone else’s copy of a program, just to make sure that it works properly. And so I have sometimes been a client of the Pirate Bay. This Swedish torrent tracker helps you download things like programs and music for free via bittorrent (I know, it hardly needs explaining these days). At least they did until the Swedish police raided them and took away their servers, despite the fact that what they were doing was apparently legal in Sweden. I hope they come back soon.

One of the great things about their site was that they published all the letters and emails they got from tough-talking software lawyers and companies. They also published their replies, which invariably smacked of dumb insolence.

To: law@iprights.com
Subject: Re: URGENT - FOOTBALL MANAGER TRADE MARK INFRINGEMENT
On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 law@iprights.com wrote:
> Dear Sirs
> Our client: SEGA Europe Limited
> We act on behalf of SEGA Europe Limited in the enforcement of its Intellectual Property Rights in the United Kingdom.
> As you will be aware, Sega is world famous and is recognised as being an industry leader in interactive entertainment. Sega, and its software developer Sports Interactive Limited have recently announced that its new football management PC game FOOTBALL MANAGER 2005 is due to be launched later this month. As a result of the recent publicity our client and Sports Interactive enjoy a substantial reputation and goodwill in the FOOTBALL MANAGER name.
> Further, SEGA developer, Sports Interactive is the owner of a UK trade mark registration for FOOTBALL MANAGER under number 2,169,952. We attach details of the UK registered trade mark for your information.
> thepiratebay.org website / FOOTBALL MANAGER 2005
> It has come to our client’s attention that through the service provided by your thepiratebay.org website, users are able, by clicking on a link on your website featuring the FOOTBALL MANAGER trade mark, to download an unauthorised and illegal version of our client’s new FOOTBALL MANAGER 2005 PC game. In this regard, your website is currently listing FOOTBALL MANAGER 2005 as number 1 in its Top 50 and a substantial number of UK users used your services to download this game in the UK.
> By providing this service to UK users using the FOOTBALL MANAGER name, you are infringing the FOOTBALL MANAGER trade mark in the UK. Further, our client is concerned that due to the volume of illegal copies of our client’s FOOTBALL MANAGER 2005 PC game being provided via your service our client is losing substantial sums of money in lost sales.
> This email is ask that you immediately remove the link complained of, and to confirm that there will be no further misuse of the FOOTBALL MANAGER trade mark in relation to your services.
> In the meantime, our client reserves its rights in respect of any causes of action available to it in this matter and in respect of any claim for costs and/or damages against you. In this regard, your speed in complying with our requests will be taken into account.
> Yours faithfully
> Willoughby & Partners 

Dear Sir(s), Madam(s), and/or Slimemold(s), I have the distinct pleasure of informing you that no Swedish trademark and/or coypyright law is being violated, regardless of how the situation may or may not be under UK law. I would advise you to read up on Swedish trademark law, more specifically Varumarkeslag (1960:644), as this might save you a great deal of future humiliation. I would also advise you to a) not write the subject all in UPPERCASE, as it makes spam filters go nuts b) not attach meaningless data from trademark registrys in PDF format and c) stop lying.

Of course I can see Sega’s point, they’re trying to be reasonable. But there’s something in me which admires the outrageous cheek of the Pirate response. The word, I think, is Chutzpah.

Those theiving b***ards

Published
by
Jon
on June 2, 2006
in Shopping
. 0 Comments

So, let’s get this straight. Europe’s mobile phone operators were charging extortionate fees for calls made and received while people were abroad. The European Commission asked them to reduce their outrageous prices and they argued that people should be grateful that they had already reduced prices, by 8% last year. Gee, thanks guys. But the EC wasn’t impressed. It threatened to pass a law forcing the operators to charge the same prices whether or not customers were roaming. Surprise, surprise, the operators suddenly found that they could actually make much bigger savings. The boss of T-Mobile even had the cheek to say that this shows “that market forces in the mobile industry function and do not need regulatory intervention”. Somehow I don’t think that’s the conclusion most people will be drawing.

I Love Germany

Published
by
Jon
on May 20, 2006
in Politics and Shopping
. 1 Comment

A post from Giles on Other Machines about an apparent lack of German interest in the World Cup has reminded me of how frequently I favour Germany over my own corner of the UK. It is amazing how the English don’t realise that if it wasn’t for Germany we’d be the obvious candidates for their role in the world of stereotypical characters. We deride their humour as bitter or obscure while ours is more so. We joke about their desire for order while obsessively trying to clear our streets of ‘anti-social’ behaviour, our government going so far as having a policy of trying to make people more respectful. We dream of excelling in those fields where Germany excels: Engineering, architecture, design, football. We care about the same things. As Giles says in his blog, on the surface England and Germany look very similar. That’s because we are very similar in our aspirations and our values.

One of the big differences is that people in Germany have come to terms with their history much more effectively than we have. Your rarely hear people in Germany going on about how great their country was in the past because they’ve been made to face up to it. But Churchill was voted the greatest Briton of all time in 2002 and any discussion of the British Empire is likely to include right-wingers like Andrew Roberts who argue that we should dwell on the merits and not the failures of our empire.

This is what I prefer about Germany. They have been there, seen that, they’ve got the brown-shirt. They are in a better position to understand thuggery, nationalism and mass-hysteria because they accept that they’ve been there. The English, in the main, don’t and that’s what makes English nationalism so objectionable.

The Bavarian toy-maker who got the contract for making “Goleo”, the bare-bottomed 2006 world-cup mascot has now gone bust because nobody was buying. Whether the reason was a healthy disinterest in the World cup or an unhealthy dislike of the fact that the mascot was a lion and not an eagle it is hard to tell. I just wish that I could go the rest of the summer without seeing one more white van sporting a pair of Chinese-made flags. Maybe it’s not too late to get a summer job in the Playmobil factory.

Tomorrow: I Love Traffic Wardens.

Easter

Published
by
Jon
on April 16, 2006
in Religion and Shopping
. 0 Comments

The children of food Puritans like me are usually only allowed to eat sweets and chocolate on special occasions, and even then only in moderation. So today when we gave our daughters colossal chocolate eggs with the inevitable accompanying gigantic bars of Dairy Milk they may have been slightly unsure about what was going on. Once they’d started eating the chocolate though and nobody had told them to stop it was as if the walls of society had come crashing down. They responded in a way I never would have foreseen; they took all their clothes off. Then they ran round and round the garden shouting and waggling their bottoms. I was relieved that the bacchanalian orgy pretty much stopped there, probably because they are too young to be able to think of any other uninhibited things to do. Actually, Amelia did do a wee in a toy wheelbarrow but they’re too little to tie their parents up and barbecue us. I still haven’t found a reasonable way of reconciling this clearly pagan Easter with the other Easter I’d like them to know about, the Christian one with suffering, resurrection and hope. I tried to bring the subject up but I might as well have been talking about the relative merits of nicely indented html versus optimised text with no carriage returns or formatting. I favour the former, by the way, if you’re interested.

Local Shops - f**ckem

Published
by
Jon
on April 26, 2005
in Shopping
. 1 Comment

I decided to shop locally - it’s convenient, I thought, and probably not that much more expensive than buying over the net. Sandpaper, glue and a clamp - about seventeen pounds. If I’d bought them from Screwfix the exact same things would have cost a pound more including delivery. I’d have got twice as much sandpaper, twice as much glue, the clamp I wanted rather than one that is slightly too small and I wouldn’t have got wet when it rained.

XXXX GALUMPIA ADULT XXXX

Published
by
Jon
on April 14, 2005
in Art and Shopping
. 1 Comment

Warning, this site contains images. I just wish I’d thought of it.
XXXX GALUMPIA ADULT XXXX

Cool or what?

Published
by
Jon
on March 15, 2005
in Art and Shopping
. 0 Comments

Comic publisher Drawn & Quarterly are republishing a book by one of my favourite comic artists, Julie Doucet. Unfortunately their printer has thrown away some of the film of the book and the original artwork was sold, a while ago, to ME! So they emailed me and asked me if they could have a scan of it. Do you think I could get away with scanning it and then changing it a bit, maybe put my face on one of the characters? Would that be a bad thing to do?

Children ‘harmed’ by vegan diets

Published
by
Jon
on February 21, 2005
in Shopping and Technology
. 2 Comments

This idiotic story is so ironic it makes me laugh. American scientists criticising Vegan parents as unethical. Scientists have consistently used science on behalf of their big-business employers to persuade and coerce parents all over the world into feeding their children with poisonous chemicals. The examples are so numerous that one only has to look at this week’s crop of stories to see a representative sample.

“War Of Words On Cancer Food Scare” This UK story is about a cancer causing food colouring that found its way into lots of supermarkets. Nobody is quite sure how much the recall of the poisoned products will cost the supermarkets. Nobody is discussing the costs to the people who ate the contaminated food. I had a look to see if Sudan Red 1 is banned in the USA, I couldn’t work out its status from the US Food and Drug administration site.

I also saw a story in the Observer magazine which mentioned Triclosan, an antibacterial agent used in many products. “The subject of an Environment Agency investigation, Triclosan is an anti-bacterial or antimicrobial agent which kills all bacteria instantly, even the beneficial ones. Cropping up not only in chopping boards, but in dishcloths and even toothpaste, it is part of the armoury now used by consumers to tackle those dangerous germs we see on adverts for cleaning products. However, alarmingly, it has also been detected in breast milk, and there are concerns that widespread use fosters antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.”

And then of course there’s childhood obesity. A group of scientists at the Social Issues Research Centre have been sending out press releases to the media about a new report which claims that the Obesity Epidemic is not as bad as it seems. I’ve already seen several news stories that appear to be inspired by these press releases. However, if you take a closer look at the SIRC you’ll find they are a gang of scientists for hire and they are working on behalf of several multinational food companies. According to an article on lobbywatch.org SIRC are nothing more than a thinly-disguised Public Relations company who frequently work on behalf of the food, drink and drugs industries.

Of course not all scientists are as cynically immoral as the ones who work directly for big business, but I am certain that far more children have suffered and continue to suffer from the work of scientists than have suffered from the dangers of veganism.