Jan 12
28
Car maintenance
This morning I planned to do some simple stuff on the car. Maintenance has never been an issue for me and I’ve been working on engines since I was about six, to this should have been a piece of cake. What I wanted to do was:
- Change the air filter
- Change the fuel filter
- Change the oil and oil filter
- Replace the thermostat
When I came home from dropping the kids off at school I popped the bonnet to start getting ready and realised that the thermostat on the engine looks nothing like the one I bought. Great. I must have picked the wrong one. So I went back and checked that I had the one I’d ordered, then when that was right I went back to the Halfords site and checked the number, then looked around a load of other places. EVERYTHING shows the same part listed, and that part is the wrong shape. Hmmm.
The one I ordered that does not fit
I then phoneed my local motor factors who have a trade database. They showed three different ones for my car - none of them like the one I have on my table – so I start looking at pictures and eventually work out which one it is. The trouble is it’s pretty much four times the price of the one I bought: Price of original (wrong) part… £24 inc VAT. Price quoted for correct part… £75+VAT.
The one on my car looks like this
I’ve managed to find it cheaper now (around £45) but all online and with a week or so to wait. Not helpful for a job today. At that point I gave up with the thermostat and started on the other stuff.
The air filter and the fuel filter were relatively straightforward, but the oil filter took an invented tool made from a pair of pincers, an adjustable spanner and a long steel bar to get it to shift. As for the drain plug, well that never came out at all. Fortunately there is a temperature sensor down there that I could get out and drained it through that.
Planned time… 30-60 mins. Actual time… 2 1/2 hours (and the thermostat is still not done).
Ho hum.
Posted in Random Ramblings by .
Oct 11
25
What is ‘SFW’?
I’ve just been updating my photography blog, a site I describe as “not entirely SFW” in the header, and it struck me just how arbitrary a definition that is. SFW – ‘safe for work’ if you don’t know the acronym – is by no means an absolute anywhere, and varies wildly from place to place.
I work in two very different worlds, one arty and creative where the unusual is usual, and one corporate with strict rules for everything. Things that are perfectly normal
in one may get me fired in the other, and yet I want my web published content to be viewable in both places. So how do you judge what is acceptable content to put on a website when the target audience is so diverse?
The best solution that I have come up with so far is to avoid the problem by splitting my content across multiple sites. My generic, personal, and hopefully non-offensive material is on this one; my photography is on grahamguyphoto.com which includes nudes that might upset some cultures or corporate policies; my business information is on thelacunaworks.co.uk. That way there is less chance of someone visiting one accidentally stumbling onto the other. They can even block one if they like (although I’d rather they didn’t). It’s not an ideal solution, but it is the best I can think of right now.
I’m sure that some people would rather I stuck to the boring, the inherently ‘inoffensive’, but, and here’s the rub, that in itself would offend me.
Oct 11
6
The end of an era
I have been sitting at my keyboard for some time now trying to think of a suitable way to start this article. All the obvious ‘great man’ openers seem wrong somehow, and will be done far better by people who actually knew him, so it is left to the rest of us to comment on what the death – the very early death – of a man who indirectly affected so much means to us.
He was a businessman, someone who understood how to grow something small into something huge. But whilst other people in similar positions have grown technology businesses based on features and toolsets, or by tracking supply and demand, Steve Jobs realised that the way to stand out was to be creative. He included art into his designs, and made technology something that was approachable. From the early Apple II through the first Mac (now known as the Classic) and onto the latest iThis and iThat, the Apple brand has taken technology and turned it from being something you hid away in the corner to something you proudly displayed in the middle of your living room. It is as if whilst all the other companies were vying to see who could cram the fastest processor into the biggest boxes, Apple started by designing something that looked fun, sleek, or futuristic, and then fitted the tech into the available space.
But the Steve Jobs effect did not stop at the edge of the Apple campus. As they started to produce sleeker and more desirable equipment, other companies followed suit, and soon technology companies everywhere realised that the art of the product was as important as well. Whether you have an iPhone or an Android, a PC or a Mac, the ‘lifestyling’ of technology was led by Apple, as they realised that whilst what people needed was a powerful tool, what they wanted was something that looked more like a designer accessory than an industrial workhorse.
| “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Steve Jobs |
Steve Jobs changed the way that the world looked at technology, and it will never be the same again. We can only wonder what he would have achieved with longer to develop his ideas and see them to fruition.
Posted in IT Random Ramblings by .
Sep 11
5
Paperback writer
I haven’t posted anything on here for a while as I’ve been busy with filming and writing, photography and building stuff. But today the first copy of my book in paperback form arrived for proofing and I have to say that it’s quite a strange – and blogworthy – moment.
When I published Through the Square Window on the Kindle platform earlier in the year that was quite something. I moved from being one of those people who talked about writing a book to being one of those people who had actually written a book. And I had published it. Ok, so the fanfare around the launch was mostly a bit of a buzz on Twitter and a few shouts on Facebook, and the posters on the tube and busses were noticeable entirely by their absence, but it was a launch of sorts and people started buying the book. I was a published author, and people who weren’t me seemed to like what I had written.
But fan as I am of the whole eBook concept, there is something very traditional about a physical paperback that is missing in a download. Now I’m a firm believer that the way things are going it won’t be long before the majority of commercial fiction is distributed in electronic format, but we are not there yet, and we seem to be even further from a time when it is possible to hand out copies of your eBook when you meet your friends or your clients. The paperback is not quite dead.
So when I got the chance I worked out how to self-publish (in the UK, and to actually make a profit, which was a bit of a challenge I can tell you), and set the wheels in motion to get Through the Square Window available in paperback form. And that is what arrived today.
The funny thing is that until I held it in my hands I had no idea really how big a book it was. Had I written something that was actually quite short, or was it about right for the genre? Actually as it turns out it is bang on the money; at 18mm thick in standard form factor it sits nicely in the hand, and looks worth a read. It is an actual book.
And the other main thing that separates physical books from their e-counterparts? Every physical book published in the UK has a copy lodged in the British Library, in physical form for at least 40 years, and then in scanned archive form theoretically forever.
It is very weird to think that if someone in two hundred years wants to read my book they will now be able to do so.
Now that’s publishing.
Graham
ISBN: 978-0-956990-0-9
Posted in Writing by .
