Stu's Place

I was recently sent an email from Nokia telling me they’d created an account for me at their Nokia Music site and credited it with £4, which works out at about 5 free tracks at the 79 pence each they charge. So I promptly flagged it for looking at later and forgot all about it.

It’s now a couple of weeks later and I decided to log into this account I never asked for to see what gems I could find, my ultimate goal being to find an old classic album and download the lot for my free £4.

After installing their odd software (which I wouldn’t normally do, but since I will be re-installing the operating system on this machine shortly I’m not too bothered), I managed to browse around their store, but to my disappointment no albums could be found for less than £7.99, and no individual tracks for less than 79 pence.

So basically, CDs which I could got into HMV and buy for £3 will cost me over twice as much, without the physical expense of a tangible product which I could (arguably) format shift onto MP3 anyway.

So I’ve decided to spend my £4, then never return unless they ever decide to give me more free credit, at which point I may repeat the process if I can be bothered. The design of the site itself is not intuitive and it took me just under 5 minutes to work out how to download the tracks I’d selected. If I’m confused, what’s Mr. Average Joe going to do.

Sorry Nokia, but your store deserves to fail on both price and design.

And that brings me onto the second part of my rant – the greed of the music companies.

I used to have some sympathy for the record labels, after all they often spend large amounts of money promoting new groups, and don’t always get it back. But their business model for electronic delivery is just crazy.

When CDs came out we were told how they would be cheaper than Vinyl or cassette as the breakage rate would fall and they would become super cheap to manufacture. This did eventually happen, but only after the percentage ‘reserved’ by the publishers for these breakages was doubled from the previous formats, and only in recent times since imports via the web, and the demand for music has dropped has price followed suit.

Why has demand dropped? I’d guess that there’s just too much choice for other ways to spend our cash now, be that DVDs, video games, or any number of fancy gadgets that simply didn’t exist ten years ago.

I’m wrong of course, it’s actually down to all the pirates out there illegally downloading music for free from drug dealing gangs to make more money. Silly me.

I’d imagine any gang dealing in drugs that makes more money through distributing torrents for free is probably not that big a risk for the DEA. Of course, I understand there needs to be methods for money laundering used by these imaginary gangs, but I always assumed the point of these was using a legitimate business as a front, not another ‘criminal’ activity, after all, what would be gained? How silly I am…

So instead I’ll pay £7.99 for an electronic copy of an album I could get cheaper on CD anywhere else, or pay 79 pence for a single of one track, when I could have four or more tracks on a CD single for £2.

Except I won’t, I’m not that silly after all.

I don't know how, but I managed to miss all the fuss surrounding Cerrie Burnell when she joined CBeebies. The problem? Cerrie is that she only has one hand, the other missing from the elbow down. This is how she was born, it's not through an accident (something which I had wondered).

The 'fuss' was from parents whose children were frightened when she appeared on their screens, and the parents, rather than calming them down and explaining that people are different, sadly chose instead to complain to the BBC.

Sorry, but I can't believe this level of ignorance. Well that's not strictly true, I'm more accurately saddened that they can be that ignorant, and suspect the children were responding to the parents reactions.

Obviously Adam is far too young to notice anything different about Cerrie, but if he had been I would have explained to him, and I dare say at some point he's going to ask, and I look forward to reassuring him if necessary, but hopefully he'll be smart enough to work this all out on his own, which children usually are.

You can see the piece on Disability Cerrie did for the One Show here.

But to be honest it’s sometimes a chore to get writing long and at least semi-cohesive entries, add to that that I’ve got other more important things that I’m also not doing and it’s no surprise this blogh gets neglected.

So where can you find me now?

Well the facebook pages gets updated once in a while: http://www.facebook.com/imorital

The twitter page gets a similar level of service: http://twitter.com/imorital

And that’s largely it. My local web site has been sorely neglected, but there’s a couple of things I’ll be posting there soon.

In the real world: I’ve been at the new job for a couple of months now. It’s going OK at the moment but is hard work (another reason why I’m too tired to keep this page up to date, but we covered that already).

Adam is walking around confidently now. He still has the occasional tumble, but it’s a joy to watch him getting around, and he also loves to dance:

Other than that everything is much the same. Yeah, I know.

Here’s an interesting thought, Google have taken down music videos from YouTube in the U.K. (and some other countries) as they say the artists are asking for too big a rate increase to play there works.

Conversely in this article on CNET Pete Waterman says he’s only earned $16 for the 150 million times “Never Gonna Give You UP” by Rick Astley has been played.

If that’s the whole story then this is a disgrace. But it does raise lots of questions, including:

• Pete only got $16, but what did everyone else in the food chain get?
• What did Google earn from the associated advertising (by which I mean profit after costs)
• How much is a fair rate?
• Should YouTube charge to view ‘Premium’ content.

From my point of view I think a lot of this is down to interpretation, and essentially it should be the artists who decide on the rate, and then Google can decide if this is acceptable or not and act accordingly on an individual basis, more or less what I understand has happened (with the exception that it appears to be a blanket ban).

At the end of the day I usually have little sympathy for the Music Industry, they often appear to be acting against their artists best interests or wishes, but they are a business and everyone deserves to be fairly paid.

At the same time Google as owners of you tube are under no obligation to show these or any other videos, they too are a business and deserve to make a fair profit.

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. At the moment, from a promotional point of view, I think the music industry has more to loose. Until then I guess I have to BitTorrent my music videos (just joking, I can gladly live without them, but the old skool rave videos were a nice diversion on an occasional Saturday night).

I’ve been meaning to write a blog article similar to this for some time, but have been spurred on by replying to this posting made by an old friend of mine.Take a deep breath, and prepare to flame me if you will:

I'm not sure if I've posted a similar comment to this in the past, but I thoroughly recommend reading 'Tricks Of The Mind' by Derren Brown, he of Channel 4 illusionary. Apart from being entertaining in the same way as (I at least) find his shows, he also goes into detail about how his own personal beliefs have changed over the years, and does this with much humility.

In one section penned by the good Mr. Brown, he mentions the impact caused by 'The Silent Spring' published by Rachel Carson in 1962, at least as he (and I after a very little additional background reading) see it. At the risk of breaking copyright, I'll quote the relevant section (taken out of context of the argument for/against GM crops):

"Rachel Carson famously wrote The Silent Spring in 1962, and in it 'exposed' the environmental dangers of the pesticide DDT. She claimed it caused cancer of the liver, and offered anecdotal evidence of other damage to health. For many years in Bristol I was informally lectured by an organic-obsessed neighbour on the evils of pesticides. Clearly DDT was the great, moustachioed, cat-stroking, chair-swivelling Evil One of them all, compared to which all other bad pesticides were mere shabby-coated, fingerless-gloved villains sat on upturned whiskey crates playing gin-rummy in an episode of The Red Hand Gang. I was amazed to read in Taverne's book that no tests have ever been replicated to show that DDT damages the health of human beings. However, DDT is a fantastically effective way of preventing the spread of malaria. Between the 1940s and 1970, DDT prevented around fifty million human deaths from the fever. In 1963 there were 17 cases of malaria in Sri Lanka, and in 1968, after DDT was banned, there were over a million."

Now I know that is only one side of the story, and I did go on to read Taverne's book which he quotes (The March Of Unreason), along with a couple of others recommended by Brown, which again would inevitably show some bias such is the want of the hidden human psyche, but at least backed up by some(?) science, and I was left with pretty much the same conclusion.

To me, with my little knowledge (a dangerous thing?), Carson is worse than Hitler, or at the very least responsible for more deaths. As I write this, last Friday was Comic Relief 2009, and one of the main focuses was the heartbreaking effects of malaria. The situations shown had me close to tears on several occasions, but also made me angry that this is an necessary situation in the first place.

Science does indeed get things wrong, but peer review is a great thing and eventually the wrongs are righted with the net result that our life gets better, however the mass hysteria perpetuated by the press is shameful, and the MMR debacle is just another example of this. My son turned one last week, and as soon as he is offered it he will be having the MMR vaccine to protect not only himself, but those around him (I think we all know how the spread of the insidious disease measles has rocked since this shambolic MMR episode began). As has been repeatedly proven, MMR is safer than the individual injections!

In the meantime I will also be keeping my Low energy light-bulbs with their mercury poison, the plastic bottles with their various other nasty chemicals (where does the list stop on this one?), and if it's all right with you I'll also leave my mobile phone charger plugged in, but turn my central heating and hot water on 30 minutes later. Of course, that means I'll save more energy on the heating in one day than turning the charger off for many, many years would achieve, but it's hardly worthy of press attention is it?

Well, last time it was through choice, but this time the current economic climate is being used as an excuse to add me to the statistics, yes, I’ve been crunched as I expected I would be in my previous posting, so I’m officially on notice now.

It’s certainly an interesting state of affairs we’re going through globally at the moment. As to when the current economic turmoil is going to be over, this time around the guess of the man on the street (or out of work and almost on the street) is probably as good as the experts. I’m sure it won’t last for ever, but I genuinely do hope things change and we come out stronger. Unfortunately I think that opportunity may already have been missed.

I don’t blame the banks for bringing on the crunch, well not the banks alone anyway. The way I see it, they only did what they could get away with and it became a self fulfilling prophecy, which turned into a house of cards. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Blame the traders for their massive bonuses if you want, but really are they any worse than any of us? Honestly, I can’t see many people when presented with the opportunity of making massive amounts of money (in this case for effectively gambling) turning it down. At the end of the day I believe they just did what anyone else would do, the only difference is that they had the opportunity, others didn’t so it’s easy to feel cheated. The fact they still often seem to reward themselves so highly is a bit rottern though.

So whose fault is it?

I don’t know, probably all of us. The government is a popular answer for most, but they were benefiting from the excess, and as oblivious to the consequences as anyone else at the time. There were warning signs, but I can grudgingly understand why these were ignored.

What about the shareholders of the banks, shouldn’t they have been protecting their investments? Well, think who the major shareholders in the banks are…

So my take on it is that no one person or sector is to blame. We all enjoyed the cheap credit, the rising house prices (actually I’m not so sure about that), and the general trappings of living in a prosperous economy at the time, we just didn’t realise quite how badly it was being supported.

What does upset me is how the money is being squandered trying to get out of this situation. Sure some money needed to go into the banks, but it looks like it’s being done in such a way that no lessons will be learnt. It is a bail-out isn’t it?

I would have liked to see greater regulation in the banks, and more importantly some of this money going to making the country a better place, for example some of those billions could go towards improving our infrastructure, building road and rail links, investing in new power, funding new science, more efficient hospitals and the like. Then we may have a stronger country when we come out of the other side.

Should banks have been allowed to go under – probably not, it hurts too many innocent people. But it looks like some were bailed out a little too readily.

I don’t know how I’d fix things, I just wish I believed the lessons would be learnt.

And when’s it all going to be over? That depends if you’re talking about my individual troubles or that of the globe.

Either way, if I had a dollar…