23 April 2010

One Little Screw Screwed Me !

Oh I was cursing. It was a good job nobody was within a mile of me on Wednesday of this week. My Alfa was in bits and all because of one stupid little screw.

The weather had picked up - gone was the rain every second day and it looked finally as if summer was about to start. The terraces were starting to look overgrown, my stunning Magnolia trees had lost all of their spring flowers and the oaks were budding all over the place. My nose was twitching with the bud pollen (it’s just recovered from the pine dust), I’m starting to ride my scooters with a heavy jumper instead of Arctic style anoraks and it was therefore time to unwrap the Alfa from its winter cocoon.

When I had ‘wrapped it up’ last October, I’d remembered that there were a couple of problems which I needed to fix; the brake ‘warning lights’ kept coming on (big job) and there was a rattle from the passenger side of the car (tiny job).

Now men hate rattles, particularly on a car. Even more so, they hate rattles which they cannot locate but I was ok because I’d already traced this rattle to the ‘nearside’ wing mirror. That side of the car has never been right since my builder nearly ripped the door off one day (long sad story about two cars crashing in the rain) and so, much of my time is spent on that side of the car.

Simple. There’s a small plate under the mirror which probably covers up the securing screws. Remove that, tighten the screws and that’ll be it fixed – 10 minutes max!

Nope. One of the two screws holding the plate was frustratingly, partially hidden by the bodywork of the car. I’d have to remove the mirror first.

To remove the mirror I had to remove the door panel. To remove the door panel, I had to remove the speakers and the arm rests and the electrics and the …… I’m sure you get the picture and if you don’t - see above.

Luckily, I’ve had the door panel off once before (refer back to crash with builder) so I knew where various hidden fixings were located but it still took a good 90 minutes to get to the wing mirror. One minute later, I had the covering plate off and I was tightening that little screw which had caused the rattle and the rebuilding process started. Another 45 minutes and the door had been rebuilt but hang on – there were a couple of tiny screws left over!

Aaaaagh – I’d left the small covering plate in the footwell of the car. It had been hidden by some tools. Nothing for it – start all over again!

22 April 2010

Facebook

I’ve been on Facebook for a couple of years now. It’s a great way of keeping up with what family and friends are doing – always assuming that they post messages every now and again.

I don’t play these games like Farmville or take part in the quizzes, it’s quite simply a way of keeping up with people on a regular basis but the other day I made an exception and joined the group, ‘No, I will not pay £3.99 a month to use Facebook from July 9th 2010’.

And then it clicked.

The previous week I’d been reading that Facebook as a business, was worth between $10 billion and $15 billion. How could this be – there’s virtually no advertising on the site? Apparently there some but I’ve never seen any. OK – you can buy ‘credits’ and make virtual gifts to friends etc but do you know anybody who’s bought credits? And Facebook is not like Linkedin, the business oriented contact web site, where you can pay a premium to be able to contact other users and of course Linkedin being a business site has quite a few adverts. So how does Facebook work? And where do the ‘owners’ get their money from to be able to afford the huge banks of computer servers which allow Facebook to work? Who funds the computers who allow between 200 and 400 million users to contact each other?

First some background – Facebook was developed by some (US) Harvard students back in 2004. Sounds strange – ‘back in 2004’ – it’s only 6 years ago!

Mark Zuckerberg, the current CEO and co-founder was always the strategist and leading light of Facebook but apparently the idea had already been thought of by the ‘Winklevoss’ twins, a couple of other Harvard students who didn’t quite possess Zuckerberg’s technical abilities and never quite developed their idea.

The story goes, that when challenged about ‘stealing’ their idea, Zuckerberg paid the twins $65 million (between them) and off they went to become graduates again and row for Oxford in the University Boat Race this year. By the way – they lost!

So where did Zuckerberg get the $65 million from and where does the on-going funding come from to keep the 200-400 million users exchanging pleasantries?

It seems that some ‘low-profile’ investors have been pumping money into the company in the expectation that one day, Facebook will float on the stock market and make them even richer than they are today.

And then of course, we find that Facebook now plan to charge it’s users anywhere between £3.99 and $14 a month although Zuckerberg denies this. So let’s say after the charges start there’s only 50 million users left on the site and that the charge is a ‘piffling’ $5 a month. That’s $250 million a month or a whopping $3 billion a year. Bingo !

21 April 2010

So Who Would You Invite To Dinner ?

I suppose it was last week’s post about possibly, maybe sleeping in the bed slept in by Marilyn Monroe (and possibly JFK at the same time – oh my God !!) that has prompted this blog article.

It’s also something I’ve used at dinner parties and client dinners to liven things up – who would you have to dinner – no restrictions – dead or alive?

I remember I first used it when I was hosting a dinner of the ‘great’ and the ‘important’ at Oxford University. Perversely my director had decided that we wouldn’t host our own clients, we’d host other department’s clients (I hope the moron was sacked) and so I was left trying to entertain clients from obscure parts of the British economy when all I wanted to do was have a good drink with my customers from the more ‘important’ parts of the economy – banks, oil companies and breweries!

And so when the Chief Executive of Thames Water looked at me for some sort of inspiration to start a table discussion, I said, right off the top of my head, who would you invite to dinner – dead or alive?

For a guy who was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to make strategic decisions, he couldn’t answer and turned the question back on me.

Now this was probably about 1993-1994 and so the people who I chose that evening might not be so relevant now, but back then, they certainly were. The rules were: you could invite up to 10 celebrities, famous people or friends to join you for dinner – and just assume that they would accept and turn up - even if they were dead!

I chose the following people (not in any particular order):

Joan Bakewellthe ‘thinking man’s crumpet’ and she still is despite being well over 70! I just thought she’d bring a bit of intellectual stimulus to the dinner – she was into the arts and was a regular on TV at the time.

Pamela Anderson the Thames Water guy thought I was being fatuous but I said anybody who had a smile and boobs like hers (she was in her prime then) would be welcome at my dinner table any time – he was not impressed! Good job he wasn’t my customer!

JFK for obvious reasons.

Ghandi for obvious reasons

Margaret Thatcher the woman who single-handedly changed the UK - for the better.

Leonardo da Vinci – a man centuries ahead of his time.

John Grieg – the Glasgow Rangers (football) captain for years and years and who was probably their most important player during the 60s and 70s.

The Pope – I forget who it was at the time but it’s not important – it would still have been interesting especially if I’d seated him next to Pammie or even John Grieg!

Jeffery Archer – a British MP and novelist. Wrote the best “can’t put it down” books until Dan Brown came on the scene.

My Mum – she died in 1965 and it would have been wonderful just to see her in fabulous company – she would have held her own.

So – who would you have to dinner?

20 April 2010

La Réunion Or Martinique ?


Martinique
Be prepared to be bored. Sorry!
The French car number plate system was always quite straightforward. The notation was along the lines of XXX ABC XX, where the first X’s were numbers (obviously in the range of 001-999), the ABC was anything from A-Z, and the final X’s were based on where the car was registered. In my case the final two X’s were 06 representing the department of Alpes Maritimes.
Then one year ago they changed the system. They allowed people registering or re-registering their cars, or even just buying new number plates, to choose whichever region they wanted and the numbers representing that region would be put in the blue box you can see in the picture.
And what do you think happened? The Parisians, who even the French dislike intensely, have all changed their number plates so nobody on the roads can tell they are from the capital. Since the new plates began, two thirds of capital dwellers getting new number plates have given up their entitlement to the '75' at the end that denotes the city of Paris. Instead, they are choosing numbers from the départements of their holiday homes, family roots or even exotic destinations, such as Martinique.
The simple explanation for the disappearing ‘75’ is that many Parisians have origins elsewhere. But it also stems from the desire to avoid the stigma of being seen as an arrogant Parisian when they drive out of town. In the provinces, a ‘75’ plate advertises you as a city slicker and road hog and can ‘encourage’ car vandalism, car burglary or even arson. The new system is all very simple. If you’re a Parisian and you spend your holidays in the Marseille area, you simply register your car with a ‘13’ at the end to denote that you’re from the Bouches-du-Rhône region where Marseille is the main city.
Similarly, the Times reports that also out of favour are the départements of the inner suburban sprawl around the capital, especially the ‘93’ that denotes Seine-Saint-Denis, home to the immigrant-heavy towns that are occasionally prone to riots. Ninety-three, pronounced police style as "Le neuf-trois", has become code for urban jungle. Even Parisians give "93" cars a wide birth.
The favourite département for changed regional numbers is Le Nord (59), the old industrial region around Lille. Next in favour are the Bouches-du-Rhone (Marseille) region and the Rhone (69), the department centred on Lyon. Then follow the Gironde (33)- the Bordeaux area and Seine-Maritime (76) around Rouen.
The number plate-makers are reporting a new, but lucrative wheeze. Parisians often buy two sets of plates, one with ‘75’ (for Paris) and the other with the province of their choice for their trips out of town, which is legal.
I actually fancied getting my scooters ‘registered’ to La Réunion (number 974), those exotic French islands in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Madagascar but I wasn’t quick enough and ended up with the rather boring ‘06’. C’est la vie as they say in ‘75’ – Paris.

19 April 2010

Iceland’s Revenge







Some unpronounceable volcano (Eyjafjallajökull) erupted in Iceland last week. That was bad enough but as it exploded under a glacier and the rock and ash spewed into the air above the north Atlantic, the cooling ice turned much of the ash and rocks into glass. This is bad news for planes apparently. Whilst modern jet engines can cope with some bits of dust, they don’t particularly like bits of glass flying through the engines and so last Thursday and for the next four or five days, virtually every flight in UK air space was grounded.

It doesn’t take much for today’s airlines just to cancel every flight and leave passengers stranded but in this case, it seems like a higher authority (and I don’t mean bits of glass at 20,000 feet) deemed that no flights should take off. Why then was the 11.30am from London Gatwick to Iceland’s Reykjavik airport simply delayed, rather than cancelled?

Anyway, there were some interesting observations during the day.

There was the conspiracy theory that Iceland had ‘organised’ this natural phenomenon to get the UK back for freezing its assets when the Icelandic banks went under and thousands of British people and probably more importantly, English councils ‘lost’ their deposits. The UK, or rather Gordon Brown, dictated that the assets could be frozen under ‘terrorist law’ which brought cries of incredulity from the global community, particularly Iceland.

Then there was the guy at Liverpool airport who, when he heard that a volcano had stopped his holiday, said there would be ‘eruptions’ at the check-in desk, completely unaware of his witty observation.

But look at the map above. Whenever there is a northern European disaster, the poor old Nordic countries get the brunt of it. Remember Chernobyl and the nuclear explosion – the elks were glowing in the dark for years afterwards and made easy pickings for night time hunters.

The kids would go to school in the virtually permanent darkness of a northern European winter and they were quite safe on the streets of Oslo and Stavanger as every motorist could see them miles away - like the elks they were glowing in the dark!

Fish from the rivers were cooked long before they saw a frying pan and the snow had an eerie glow to it. The night-time skiing industry, formed around slowly descending a slope with a flare in one hand, virtually evaporated overnight as there was no need for an organized expedition – everybody could do it – without the flares!

PS – my youngest son Tim, who was due to have ‘the holiday of a lifetime’ in Hong Kong and Bangkok has now been stuck at Heathrow Airport for three days and is now reputedly heading back to Glasgow having given up ever getting to the Far East. Keep your chin up Tim – Glasgow’s not that bad for a holiday!