Fitbug

My employers recently decided to try for a fitter, healthier workforce and gave us all a gadget called a Fitbug. This is a digital pedometer that counts your steps. But it’s not just a dumb step counter that counts your daily steps, oh no, this is a smart step counter. It keeps a record of when the steps were taken, and stores that all in a memory. It can store up to 2 weeks worth of data, but the idea is that you upload the results to a website where it leaves a permanent record of your activity. Through the website you have access to a graphical interface where you can compare across days, or look at the detail of which hours you were active on any given day. Furthermore, if you walk for 10 minutes or more without a break, the Fitbug deems that to be aerobic exercise, and counts the steps as Aerobic steps. They then give you a target for how many steps you should be doing each day, and how many should be aerobic. Then they set you a target for how many of each kind of steps you need to do. Based on your performance against target, they colour-code each day’s activity: grey – not enough steps; green – enough steps, but not enough aerobic; blue – enough aerobic steps, but not enough total steps; pink – target achieved. So you get a graph that looks like this:

Now of course the most obvious question is: what do you do with this information? Well, it beats me! The best use I can think of is that if you’re in the habit of exercising regularly and you notice that you’ve had a very active day, you can skip today’s exercise session and save time. That seems kind of contrary to the spirit of the thing. To be honest, I have actually walked instead of driving a few short journeys recently so that I get the steps. But not enough to make a real difference.

My conclusion – if you’re motivated to get fit, it might help you. If you’ve got a lazy, unfit and out of shape workforce, you need more than a gadget to get them motivated.

Bike or Train

When I first moved to Bishop’s Stortford in 1996 I was working in the City (of London). The only sane means of transport for getting to work was to use the train. So I bought a house a short walk from the station and bought a season ticket each month. Nothing much changed for about seven years. Then my employer announced an office move to Canary Wharf in the London Docklands. For those who don’t know the anatomy of London, Canary Wharf is an office village about 5 km east of the City, and is attempting to take over the City’s position as the financial centre of the UK – an aspiration which it has so far been quite successful in realising.

The problem for those of us living out to the North of London is that public transport links to the London Docklands are poor, to put it mildly. The only obvious route is to go into the City as normal, and use public transport from there. This adds a further 30 minutes to a journey of about 1 hour, giving a total daily commuting time of 3 hours, not to mention an additional GBP50 per month.

The only real alternative is to use the road system. This is another situation altogether. Bishop’s Stortford is right next to the M11 motorway which takes you down to the north east corner of London and connects with the A12 Eastern Avenue and A406 North Circular roads. These are fast dual carriageways taking you further into London, and, crucially, into Canary Wharf without touching any urban roads. Of course using a car is an option, but has two draw-backs: namely that the roads get very busy during the morning and evening peaks, and the size of a car makes it expensive to park during the day.

So the only viable solution is a motorcycle. On a bike I can jump all the queues and park for free in the office car-park. The journey time is as little as 40 minutes on clear roads and seldom more than 50minutes even in the heaviest traffic. A bike is a completely different experience from a train, but I settled into the different routine well enough for the first year. Then, in the spring of this year, I was told that due to overcrowding of the office, we were being moved back to the City for an unspecified period. I still visit the Canary Wharf office a few times each week, but when I have to go to the City, I use the train. This has got me thinking about the relative merits of the two means of transport which are so different in nature. There are definitely some positive points about using the train – I’m writing this on a train, something I can’t do on a bike – for example. But if I had used the bike today, I would have been home by now and I could type this in the comfort thereof. I’v compiled a list of plus and minus points for each of the two forms of transport.

Train:
Plus points:

• Gives me 1.5 hours of time when I can read or use a laptop
• Requires about 30 minutes of brisk walking per day to keep me fit
• Allows me to relax and even sleep when I’m sleep deprived
• Low risk on the cost front – Cost is fixed (unless I forget to buy a ticket)
• Low risk on the safety front.
• Relatively comfortable, most of the time.
  

Minus Points:

• Takes twice as long as the bike
• Costs about twice as much as the bike
• Timetable is quite inflexible, so if I’m 1 minute late for the train I can be 30 minutes late for work.
• When things go wrong they go badly wrong, and you’re helpless.
  

Bike:
Plus points:

• Much quicker than the train
• About half the price of the train (though costs are harder to quantify)
• I’m not tied to a timetable
• Even when roads are blocked there’s a way through the traffic.
  

Minus Points :

• Takes all concentration, so I can’t read or work in transit
• Can be quite uncomfortable in the rain or in cold weather
• Relatively high risk of death or serious injury
• Relatively high risk of financial loss due to accidents or speeding fines

On balance, an impartial reader might think that train has the upper hand. If you gave all the points equal weight you’d probably come to that conclusion. But the one point that clinches the deal for the bike is that it gives me an excuse to ride the bike every day. For those not familiar with riding, you probably won’t understand that; if you compare it to driving a car you won’t see the connection. There is a saying that if I have to explain it, you won’t understand, and that applies very well to riding a bike. Those who don’t ride, don’t know. It might be chucking down with rain; it might be freezing cold, but I’d rather be on my bike than in a comfy train. Riding into the City I don’t enjoy it so much – the urban traffic is an acquired taste – but whenever I can find an excuse to go into our Canary Wharf office, I’ll be there on my bike.

Smallcreep's Day

Following yesterday's posting regarding Smallcreep’s Day, I did a bit of searching with Google, and came across this little gem:

It’s someone reading an extract from one of my favourite parts of the book. It’s not exactly as it was written; the words are in fact a montage of two conversations into a single (almost) monologue, performed in a menacing, distorted voice.

At this point in the plot, Smallcreep has found the factory offices, where he clumsily stumbles in on first a salesman and then the Managing Director. Both characters give him their view on life which is, I believe, the central message of the book. You may be tempted to view this critique of life as highly cynical, but I would suggest that it is quite the opposite. The acknowledgement that, if you have a dustbin, you condemn a man to empty it for you, is irrefutable. Here he faces up to the reality of capitalism, not in a sentimental hand-wringing way, but with a totally genuine and bluntly honest way. Well enough of my views – listen to it for yourself

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And if you now want to read the book, pre-order it now on Amazon – it’ll probably be cheaper than a second-hand copy on ebay.

Smallcreep and the internet

When I was very young – just a baby – my father wrote a novel and was successful in getting it published. The book is not really the subject of this post, but here’s a brief summary of it: The book is called Smallcreep’s Day, and follows the exploits of a factory worker, Pinquean Smallcreep during a very unusual day in his life. Mr Smallcreep, having become obsessed by an idea, leaves his machine and goes exploring through the strange world of his factory. On a quest to find meaning in his monotonous existence, Smallcreep experiences many surreal and disturbing situations. Each scene explores some of the author’s ideas about human relationships, freedom and the value of human life. Some of the scenes are hilarious, some depressing and some macabre. The final two pages are taken up with a powerful vision of the futility of factory work and a passionate cry for the lost dignity of the craftsman. (It is not hard to guess, reading this conclusion that the author very soon left his life as a factory worker and became a craftsman potter.)

The book was originally published by Gollancz, and later issued in paperback by Picador and Panther. Many years ago it was discontinued and can now only be found occasionally on ebay, paperback copies often fetching a tenner or more. Needless to say, this book has become the stuff of family legend. I cannot remember a time when there was no Smallcreep, and my three siblings and I have always been enormously proud of our father’s work. You sometimes meet people who have read it, and they always turn out to be interesting people who were very impressed by the book. Mike Rutherford, the guitarist, used the story as the inspiration for a concept album in the 1980s (though he sold out the true meaning of the book and gave it a happy ending). Having been out of print for so many years, it’s becoming less and less frequent that I meet anyone who’s heard of Smallcreep.

One morning this year I received a phone call at work from a number I didn’t recognise. The caller ran a small publishing house in London, specialising in out-of-print works by authors with interesting views on life, and wanted to know if I was related of the author of Smallcreep’s day. He was interested in contacting him with a view to re-issuing the work. I was delighted to put him in touch with my father. I was also delighted to learn today that the book will be re-published by Pinter and Martin in May 2008. Order your copy now

You might expect that this would be the end of the story, but it gets stranger yet. A couple of months later I got a message through Friends Reunited, from someone interested in … contacting my father with a view to writing a screen play for Smallcreep’s Day. Luckily Friends Reunited had not managed to remove her email address from the message, so I was able to make contact without having to shell out to join their service (which I wouldn’t have done).

So the interesting thing is that there is enough information on the internet to track down the children of the author of a work which was published over 40 years ago. (My father does have his own web-site, but it would have been impossible to find him, as he now goes by a stage-name.) I asked the 2nd caller how she had reached me, and how she knew it was me, from the thousands of David Browns on the Friends Reunited site. She had apparently heard of the connection through an old school friend of mine who writes a blog – Random Burblings. He mentions me and the town where we grew up, so it was then easy to find the right Brown family from that information.

I’m very pleased that I can be traced via stuff that people put on the internet. Arguably the first caller did a better job, as he found the switchboard of my company and asked for me by name. Despite there being about 20 David Browns in our Global Address List, he still managed to get through to the right one. However, if you have any reason not to want to be contacted by strangers - skeletons in the cupboard perhaps, or worse – be very wary about posting information on Friends Reunited or other sites. It might pay to Google your own name and town of birth from time to time, just to see what’s out there. Don’t think of it as vanity; it’s identity protection.

Honey from Africa

I recently came across a charity called Hives Save Lives Africa (HSLA)which seeks to help people in developing countries to develop independence by providing them with beekeeping equipment and training. Traditional African honey production techniques are several hundred years behind western methods, which results in a honey with a smoky flavour (caused, they argue, but the excessive use of smoke in the harvesting process) that is difficult to sell on the world market and fetches a low price. HSLA argue that if they can provide African apiculturalists with the hardware and knowledge to produce top quality honey, they can increase income from bees and provide more independence.

I bought those arguments and donated some cash to HSLA. I then wondered what African honey would taste like, so I set out to find some in Waitrose. There I found a jar of Tropical Forest Honey, a fair-trade label with a different take on the African honey situation. Tropical Forest buy the honey from the traditional honey harvesters, smoky flavour and all. I tried it, and sure enough it does taste of smoke! The Tropical Forest view is that the smoky flavour is natural; not caused by harvesting – they put it down to the presence of pollens which the western pallet is not used to. They use this flavour as a unique selling point, claiming that it is enjoyed by true honey connoisseur. They argue that the traditional methods are better suited to the African situation, with lack of infrastructure and lack of capital making western-style honey production impractical and inappropriate.

So here are two opposing views of African development through honey production: the HSLA approach of giving hardware and knowledge to allow honey farmers to produce western style honey to compete on the open world market; and the Tropical Forest approach of buying the low quality product produced by traditional apiculture and trying to find a market for it in the west. The HSLA approach could be accused of forcing western style development on situations where it is not appropriate. The Tropical Forest approach could be accused of creating a dependency on a small market which will limit future development. Ultimately the judgement has to be which is the most effective at providing poor communities with an independent and reliable source of income.

Meanwhile the Tropical Forest honey jar languishes in my cupboard, half-finished, while I’ve gone through several kg of English and French honey and a several jars of - my favourite addition to yoghurt – acacia blossom honey from various countries. I can‘t see myself buying any more of the Tropical Forest honey in a hurry; but I’d love to know what the honey from the HSLA projects tastes like.

No such word as “blog”.

I did a Google search for “no such word as blog”. I was expecting to find many people writing treatises on the decline of the English language and where on earth have all these new words come from. I was disappointed! One poet complained it was such an ugly word, and couldn’t we use a word with more syllables (though he didn’t propose one), but mainly it was people speaking in the past tense about how “when I started this blog there was no such word as blog” etc. So how exactly did the word get into the language – and in the language it jolly well is, whether or not it’s in any particular dictionary or spell checker.

When new things are invented, we need to give them names so that we can talk about them without having to describe them each time. In the “good-old-days” inventions were made by inventors, or at least by companies, who then had the privilege of inventing a new name for their new article. This could be new word – like “television”, a combination of existing words (e.g. “Compact Disk”), or a new use for an existing word (“record”, to stick with the recording media example). But since the web era, things (like blogs) have been happening without being invented as such. And people start using words to name these things, and those words are then part of the language. But for a word to mean something, the speaker and the listener both have to know what it means. So how does a new word get into common usage? Well the answer has to be the media. Unless we’re really on the cutting edge of technology, we hear these new terms used in the news. Then we go and look them up and find out what they’re all about. And when we tell people about them, we use the term we heard in the media.

So why are so many of the new internet age words so dreadful; for example “phishing” to describe trying to get someone to reveal their password. Who thought of that and why on earth would anyone journalist give it the dignity of actually passing it on. Well I suppose the answer is that journalists are not very creative people. They just read a press-release, or someone else’s news story, and they repeat it parrot fashion to their readers/listeners/viewers, and so the words get passed on and used, whether they deserve it or not. But it doesn’t always happen that way. The decade between 2001 and 2010 still needs a name, and we’re already more than half way through. Several different names have been proposed for this decade, including the unbelievably crass “noughties”. Why on earth would anyone think of that, let alone use it? We don’t say “two thousand nought seven” do we? For two digit dates it’s more likely “oh seven”. And there’s nothing particularly naughty (which I assume is the allusion they were looking for) about this decade compared with any other. So I’m pleased to say that while I’ve heard a few people in the media attempt to create this term, I’ve yet to hear anyone use it seriously.

So where does that leave my blog. Actually I hate the word. It’s a rubbish word with a rubbish etymology and only one letter away from “bog”, the English slang for a lavatory. But it’s undeniably the word that we use to describe this kind of internet journal. (I checked the meaning of “journal” in the Oxford Dictionary, and apparently you have to update it every day to qualify as a journal.) So “blog” it is – it could have been worse!