Ducks, Dance, Network Theory, Pricing Models, Insulation, Two bog seats Prescott

A tedious week at work. I reflected on the way the English language has been debased by commercialism when I read the words “Loyalty payment” and “Highly competitive exclusive offer”.

The ducks are still on the pond. The two males can be seen most days and mid week the female waddled out of her hut

2 ducks

and the two males sped after her. A tremendous fight ensued and at first we were unsure what was occurring. It became obvious that one male was earnestly pursuing the female while the other male tried strenuously to fend him off. After a while the female achieved some distance and the two males finished their fight with one chasing the other away. The hierarchy restored the female was left alone and the two males returned to being good buddies. A Pakistani colleague commented: “Just like the America, once their authority is established they want to be your friend”.

I watched an interesting documentary on Network Theory on Tuesday evening. Six degrees of separation and all that.

This year I ensured that I would see some of The Brighton Festival by drawing up a plan and booking in advance. Mostly this has been theatre but I was asked by some friends if I wanted to see some dance and I thought: what the hell, I’ll give it a go.

So on Wednesday evening I saw Aphasiadisiac at The Dome. This was not what I had expected and was inspiring. There was not much that most people would call dancing about it. The performance was created by a guy named Ted Stoffer and performed by a Belgian dance company named Les ballets C de la B.

I know very little about dance so I don’t really have the vocabulary to describe it. I was impressed by the ability of the performers to use their bodies to communicate. I was amazed at their ability to create a mood or a feeling by the choreography. They played the music themselves using a trumpet, a saxophone, drums and an accordion. The music itself was very good and at one particular point the performers all came together and sat and stood in a very tight group of five directly in front of us while they played. I found the proximity disarming and became self conscious. It felt strange to go from being a passive observer to somehow being observed and almost part of the performance.

Other parts were good in different ways. The awkwardness of a couple sitting together was portrayed perfectly through body language and facial expressions. A girl played an instrument and looked around while two of the men ran around as though desperate to remain in the spotlight of her gaze. Extraordinary stuff which opened my eyes to the world of dance. The Youtube vid below is of a different performance.

On Friday British Gas turned up to survey my loft prior to getting it insulated. B&Q are currently doing some very good deals to insulate your loft with parts and labour included for £198.

I began cogitating on how it is not really in the economic interests of the gas company to insulate my loft. It is in their interest to encourage me to consume as much gas as possible while it is in my interest to consume as little as possible while ensuring I am conformably warm.

I read somewhere that companies are much better at cutting their costs than individuals are. This makes sense. Companies makes plans and prepare budgets to control costs whereas most individuals are not so rational.

But panning back a bit and considering climate change and The UK’s dire economic condition it is in the Global Interest and National Interest that I consume as little gas as possible.

So surely we have the pricing model wrong. The model is currently configured so that the agent which is most efficient at controlling consumption (The gas company) actually benefits from excess consumption.

I recall a similar conversation on the subject of taxation. Our politicians tell us we should be saving energy and cutting CO2 emissions yet the greatest part of our taxation is placed on work. Taxation has two effects, firstly and obviously, it raises money to be spent by the government but secondly it deters the activity which is taxed. This has been known for centuries from windows to tobacco.

So the effect of our taxation system is to deter work. Surely we want people to work so why not lift all income tax and place it on petrol? If it were done intelligently I could still afford to drive my 2 litre car 90 miles a day to work. It would just make it painfully clear how much money, and therefore petrol, I am wasting.

It seems to me that there are three entities who can control costs: The seller, the buyer and the government. With conventional pricing models the economic motivation are for the seller to increase sales and the buyer to reduce sales. The government is the third entity and currently pays for services which are deemed communal such as waste disposal.

And waste disposal too has a dodgy pricing model. It is currently in the interest of retailers to bulk our their products with wasteful packaging as this helps to sell more product and the waste disposal costs are bourn by the tax payer. There have been attempts to makes consumers pay for the amount of waste that they produce but the problem with this is that consumers can cheat by fly tipping. Far better to charge the costs of waste disposal as a tax to be paid by retailers.

I have thought for a while that the main deficiency with socialism is the lack of a feedback mechanism. Command economies continue to manufacturer products which consumers do not want and fail to manufacture products which they do want because the production is not influenced by the consumer. Capitalism gets around this problem but the current capitalist model encourages and rewards over production.

I read an article in The Economist a while back about the British aviation engine manufacturer Rolls Royce. This was deemed a successful company because of the innovative pricing structure it had adopted. Rolls Royce does not make it’s profits from the sale of engines and can make a loss on engine sales. Instead it charges it’s customer (the airlines) for engine air time. Each engine is fitted with various computer systems which relay telemetry back to a control centre in Rugby. Engineers can then detected potential problems early and perform preventative maintenance when an aircraft next lands.

This is an excellent idea. Rolls Royce can become a successful engine maker, gain market share and earn greater profits. But at the same time the manufacture of engines is not the driving force. In fact it would be in Rolls Royce’s interest to keep engines airworthy for as long as possible and therefore restrict engine manufacture.

I suggest that we could do with this sort of thinking when designing pricing models for all sorts of goods and services. We still use capitalism but design the system in such as way that production is not the driving force for profits.

On Saturday afternoon I visited The Old Municipal Market to see an artwork by Anish Kapoor entitled The Dismemberment of Jeanne D’Arc

The Dismemberment of Jeanne D’Arc

Yeh Anish, nice name!

The big blobby bits are the bits I’d seen clips of but I found the big red elipsical hole in the ground most effective. It appeared that Mr. Kapoor had opened up the ground to reveal that beneath the first few inches of dirt the living flesh of the planet Earth had been exposed. The Earth is alive!

On Saturday night I saw another small theatre production named Bane at The Three and Ten in Brighton. This was described as a “One-man comedic film noir parody.” Part thriller, art comedy the single actor played a plethora of characters and pulled it off brilliantly.

No round up of last week can be complete without mentioning the MP expenses scandal currently bubbling away in British politics. Last week The Daily Telegraph revealed that John Prescott had claimed for repair of a broken toilet seat twice. – You couldn’t make it up.

I’m a banana, I’m a banana

Infosec 2009

On Thursday I visited an Information Security Exhibition at Earl’s Court. Infosec 2009. Hundreds of stands from various suppliers of information security products including big names like IBM, Cisco etc.
For some time now the trend in the Information Technology industry has been to switch from selling products to selling services. Old fashioned hardware suppliers such as IBM and HP have attempted to turn themselves into 21st century equivalents of business consultancies and indeed some companies have teamed up with business consultancies.
The upshot of this is that the people attending the stands are of little practical use to a potential customer. I walked past several stands with teams of serious, earnest young men viewing the exhibition attendees the way a wolf might view sheep. It is seemingly impossible to approach a stand and discuss their products or services. Instead one’s questions are met with vague industry standard platitudes and buzzwords. The salesmen seem to have little grasp of their brief and continually try to turn the conversation to discovering what your projects are and then pretending to be experts on just that topic. This is usually followed up by a request for a meeting to discuss how they can assist.

The weather was “overcast with occasional sunny spells”. Sitting in a pub at lunchtime I watched the world go by and thought that perhaps London is a beautiful city. People walked past from all over the world, each one a potential friend. Each one a story.

On Saturday I saw a play named “A Month of Sundays” at a pub named the Three and Ten in Brighton. A low budget 4 actor production reminiscent of Brighton Rock. A thriller involving murder and a lost past. The production was notable for a technique to allow the audience dual perspectives on one scene and thought simple this was very effective.

Anish Kapoor is playing a big part in this year’s Brighton festival and on Monday I thought I’d visit a piece entitled C-Curve which was publicised as being at The Chattri. Disliking planning I drove up to Patcham looking for some kind of country house named The Chattri where I imagined the piece to be on display. After a while I found some cars parked next to a field with a sign saying that there was no vehicle access and directing me to walk across a field. After about a hundred yards I rose over the brow of a hill and could see the sculpture and a bunch of people a mile away on top of another hill. – “I see, so that’s the way of it”, I thought and continued on.

C-Curve

I first saw Kapoor’s work in what is now Tate Britain. What appeared to be a slab of rock with an opening directly on to the void of space. He seems to be attracted to illusions and uses polished metal surfaces quite a bit.

Curve is a very large curve of what appears to be polished chrome. The picture of the C-Curve in the brochure showed it positioned in some kind of room reflecting other items in the room but placing it in a field on the top of a hill in Sussex gave it a completely different feel.
Of course we all approached it and looked at out large distorted faces but the overcast sky was quite bright and the C-curve took this in and threw it out again. A child had realised that if he stood in the middle of the piece his face was stretched and his voice reflected back at him. “I’m a banana, I’m a banana”. – Hang on, long faces, talking bollocks, this reminds me of Infosec.

The Chattri

It turns out that The Chattri is a memorial to soldiers from India who died fighting in the first world war and is built on the spot where the bodies of many Sikhs and Hindus were cremated after dieing while in hospital in Brighton.

You don’t know what you’ll do ’till you’re put under pressure

Last week began quietly. I have been receiving emails from the German office. My boss speaks very good English but uses German idioms. He insists we should be “marching in step”. Our Emails are in English of course but the Germans prefer to end their sentences with an exclamation mark rather than a full stop. A caricature perhaps but it seems to be true!

I don my earphones and resort to an MP3 player. I select Across 110 Street by Bobby Womack.

I was the third brother of five,
Doing whatever I had to do to survive.
I’m not saying what I did was alright,
Trying to break out of the ghetto was a day to day fight.

As the strings swoop and Bobby sings the chorus I get goose bumps. God knows why! It’s not like I live across 110 Street and I don’t suppose Mr. Womack was thinking of quarterly reporting when he sung “You don’t know what you’ll do until you’re put under pressure”. My mind wanders sideways and I consider my colleagues and I, a group of mainly white forty something males sitting at desks in Surrey pushing buttons while showing not a glimmer of emotion as our souls soar and we dream of being black teenagers in  Harlem.

Due to the Credit Crunch (CC) our work load is reducing and this has given everyone more free time. General Managers use this time to scrutinise cross charging and we are now under pressure to justify everything we do.
With little work and unemployment never far from our minds, we spend more and more time on elaborate spreadsheets detailing exactly what we are doing. The more time we spend on the spreadsheets the more tortured the figures become. So Mr. Womack, we now know what we’ll do if we’re put under pressure: we will develop spreadsheets. It’s just as well we have this distraction as HR have just issued a Communications Policy restricting us to 15 minutes of personal web browsing a day. Without the web we need something to keep our brains ticking over as we stare vacantly at our screens.

I have been investigating loft insulation and making calls to companies to get quotes. Of course I never get to speak to anyone who actually knows anything about insulation. I usually get a temp with 2 days training on a list of questions that they’re supposed to answer. As all companies appear to have outsourced their call centres I am probably speaking to the same person each time. When I try to end a call I am asked “Is there anything else I can help you with?” – No, no there isn’t. No, that’s why I said goodbye. Uh, I’m going to hang up now.

The ducks returned a few weeks ago and last week there were ducklings. For many of us the spring batch of ducklings is the high point of the year. Sadly the crows got them all again within about a week. By now my MP3 player is onto Cortez The Killer by Neil Young. My goose bumps rise again and I ruminate on the feeling of irretrievable loss that this song summons up. All rubbish of course. According to Bernal Diaz del Castillo a soldier serving under Cortez Montezuma’s Aztecs were a blood thirsty bunch.

The Daily Telegraph had a picture of the new Jaguar XJ Saloon. Not a very revealing picture but it neatly demonstrates my argument that car design is being led by the mobile phone industry. I’d wager that the chief designer of the XJ saloon sported a Nokia 6310.

Jaguar XL Saloon

 

Nokia 6310

Driving to work one morning the local radio station tells me of a scheme named Community Payback in which young offenders are forced to remove graffiti or clean street while wearing high-visibility orange bibs embalzoned with the words COMMUNITY PAYBACK. The scheme is run by The Department of Justice and I am invited to nominate some work for the offenders. We British may not have achieved a totalitarian state by 1984 but New Labour still have it fixed firmly in their sites and we stagger onward toward it.

On Thursday evening I attended a chapter meeting of the IT governance organisation ISACA in The City. IT Governance has never had and will never have a glamorous image and ordinarily the attendees are a motley bunch. However, there we all were on Thursday night. The room overflowing with the sharp suited and the eager. I guess the recession is starting to bite. The declining standard of the nibbles at the networking session is further evidence of a tightening of belts.

On the train home a man about one row in front and to my left was assaulted in a very British way. My head in a novel, I overheard a vague expression of mild indignation from someone in front of me. I ignored this but further mutterings followed and I noticed that the man to my left was standing and leaning over the seat in front. The gentlemen in front of him then rose and walked away toward the front of the train. It was then that I notice that the man next to him had a bleeding nose.

In the developing world public confrontations result in intervention by everyone within a hundred yards radius. You can’t just assault someone and walk away. The assault on the train was amazing for it’s British reserve: “Yes, I’ve just had my face punched in but I don’t like to make a fuss and disturb anyone.” Even the assailant had had the good manners to perpetrate his crime quietly and then depart.

After vague and half hearted consolations from his fellow passengers the red nosed man retrieved his cell phone and called the police to arrange for them to wait at East Croydon station to detain his assailant.

I thought that was Americans that said “Don’t get mad, get even.”