RSTY

At the grand old age of 22 and three quarters, I’ve still not gotten any form of my own personal, private transport. Most people by 16 and a half are counting down the days ’til they turn 17 so they can learn to drive. I didn’t bother. I rely heavily, if not solely, on the train network to get myself around. I’ve gotten pretty good at trains if such a thing is even possible. I know all the tricks like how to get a seat, which seats have the most room, which carriages for certain journeys are better, which platforms my trains arrive at, etc etc etc.

To a car driver this must sound like hell - but it isn’t, really. I’ve only been truly screwed over by the trains once when trying to get from Reading to Wolverhampton. I ended up stranded in Birmingham at 1AM with no trains (or replacement bus services) to get me to Wolves. A refund was issued for the lack of service and peace was restored. I can only conclude that train travel is surprisingly decent for the vast majority of the time. It’s also pretty cheap, especially if you make use of a 16-25 rail card entitling you to a 34% discount on any ticket. Trains and I get along just fine.

I spend a lot of time on these

Anyone who knows me well will know I’ve got (and have always had) a thing for motorbikes. It started when I was young, watching the British Superbike races on the telly with Dad in the days of Jamie Whitham and Niall Mackenzie. Going to the Motorcycle show at the NEC was a family tradition every November, and Sunday mornings were always earmarked for going out to look at motorbikes at various places around the Midlands. I knew all of the models like the back of my hand and had all the brochures. So just imagine my excitement when in 1997 Dad came home on a brand spanking new Yamaha RD350 complete with full red and white fairings! It had a kick start and everything, and that cult 350cc two stroke engine. Bikes were firmly cemented in my mind as being cool. They still are.

Dad’s Yamaha RD350 (one like it anyway…)

During my time at uni and then moving to the South East my interest in bikes subsided. This was mostly due to not attending the bike shows any more and having no access to Sky TV to watch the bike races on. Last November I went to the NEC bike show for the first time in a good few years. Sitting on the bikes again and seeing the familiar names and models brought back into my mind just how awesome they are.

In December I applied for a provisional driving license because I was bored of using my Passport as ID in bars, but now I realise that my subconscious had more ideas and plans in store for that all important piece of plastic.

A January afternoon rolled around and I found myself at the local KTM dealership with a friend who was looking for a new Helmet. Chatting idly to one of the staff members while drooling over the bikes he quickly worked out I was only dreaming and that I’d not got a bike license. Something happened, not sure what, and I found myself with a leaflet in hand for the local motorcycle training school; Pinewood Motorcycle Training.

After not much thought at all, I rang the number on the leaflet and enrolled on a Compulsory Basic Training course (usually abbreviated to CBT). Before you can ride a motorbike on the roads here in the UK you must first complete a basic training course. Once you’ve done it, you’re entitled to ride a tiny little motorbike on L-Plates with a few restrictions such as no motorway riding and no pillion passengers.

So there, I’ve done it! I’ve started on my way down the path towards being a motorcyclist.

Oh god!

At the start of the year I set out some goals for the year. One of which was to do the British Heart Foundation’s London to Brighton bike ride. I’m a bit late with this, but on March 1st registration opened and I bagged myself a place, along with two friends/colleagues - Riyad and Hugo!

I’m thinking of going all out and doing it on my mountain bike, complete with off road tyres and everything. I did toy with the idea of buying a cheap road bike but I’ve got nowhere to store one at present.

Roll on June 29th

Since November 2007 I’ve been split between two offices - IPC’s London office, the Blue Fin Building, and their Ascot office which is where Trusted Reviews are based. When I’m at Ascot I use the Mac Pro at my desk there, and when I’m in London I use my Macbook and hook it up to a screen, mouse and keyboard. Like most, if not all programmers, I work to music, It’s just how we do things. To get my fill of music every day I’ve been transporting my library around on a portable hard disk - plugging it into whichever machine I’m working on. As you might imagine, the amount of times I’ve forgotten to unplug and pick up the drive before I leave either office is quite a lot, leaving me music-less for the best part of a week thereafter.

For the longest time, Napster has only had a PC client for their music service. I’ve had nagging thoughts now and again that I should probably just sign up and enjoy their massive library. Unfortunately, due to it not running on a Mac, it’d be a right faff to get it to work - it’d involve virtualising Windows, which is a lot of resource to dedicate just to playing music.

A few weeks ago Napster announced a new client, and along with it, a web client, which now makes it possible to have Napster independent of your OS of choice. Hurrah, at last, etc! As it happens, I’d also forgotten my hard-drive-music-library on the day I heard about it, so I signed up immediately and enjoyed a good few days poking around Napster’s library, play-lists and radio stations. £10 a month gets you unlimited access to their streaming service, and alleviates me from having to remember my damn hard drive all the time. Over those few days I only came up with a very few complaints - having to remember not to accidentally close the browser window that’s running Napster and the odd tracks here and there that are ripped at a very low bit-rate. All in all, nothing to complain about really, certainly no show stoppers anyway.

I should add I’ve always sort of had a bit of a dislike for Napster. Historically only supporting Windows users and until 2007 only offering music at (or around) 128kbit/s has never really sat well with me, so giving in and signing up did feel a bit… wrong. Indeed, as I’ve said, until a few weeks ago I and other non-windows users were denied the experience altogether! What I’m really saying is that all along, I’ve been waiting for Last.fm to launch a rival service. Why? Well let’s take a look at what Last.fm has at its disposal:

1. A massive user base
2. An established install-base of their application (and it’s available to Windows, Mac and Linux!)
3. An established scrobbling platform
4. Big owners - CBS. In other words, resources on tap and deep pockets to boot

In other words, they’ve had everything in place to launch a rival service to Napster. And yet they haven’t. All they’ve got is a limited ‘radio’ service. You can listen to a select few tracks from an artist, or you can listen to their ‘radio’ service. On the radio service (typically via the app, rather than their website), you choose an artist you like then you hear one track from that artist, and then you get pushed onto ’similar artists’. For example, you might choose Sting, get to listen to one track by him, then one by The Police, then one by Paul Simon, etc… It’s really not all that great at all. ‘Lacking’ is the word that comes to mind.

Skip forward to a week after I had signed up for Naspter. Suddenly, Spotify, a complete unknown to me, is on the scene. For the same monthly subscription price as Napster I’ve suddenly got everything I dislike about Napster solved for me. A Mac native app,  scrobbling to Last.fm, high bitrates (~256kbit/s allegedly)… and crucially, it’s not Napster. Plus their library is pretty damn big too.

I figured that since I was prepared to pay £10 for Napster, I should really pay £10 for Spotify. Paying for the service gets me an ad-free service from Spotify - the ads aren’t bad, but seamless listening is really nice compared to an audio ad every 20 minutes. Plus I’d like to think that £10 is more than they’d collect by serving ads to me instead. I really don’t want Spofity to disappear, so I’m more than happy to throw them a tenner every month.

A couple of things have struck me over the last two weeks when mulling over Spotify and how I use it.

First: Last.fm doesn’t really have anything unique to make me want to keep using their service should I be able to get what they offer elsewhere. Indeed, I only really make use of Last.fm for the scrobbling functionality - sometimes I like to look at what I’ve played this week/month/year, and sometimes I glance at ‘artists you might like’. Honestly, I don’t really care who does this for me. It’s a generic item, just as milk is the same no matter where you buy it. I’m likely to use it wherever is most convenient, just like I’m likely to buy milk at the supermarket rather than bother to go to a local shop. If Spotify build scrobbling into their service, I’ll probably close my Last.fm account altogether. It would be a heck of a lot less hassle to just look at my music listening habits in Spotify than having to go to Last.fm’s web site.

Secondly: I hope Last.fm pull their finger out and launch a rival service. There’s no reason why they can’t. Just sign the licences and get on with it. Competition is good. Napster is as good as dead in the water for me for their lack of desktop app for Mac, crappy bit-rates and slow response times. So it’s all between Last.fm and Spotify right now.

Thirdly: Maintaining MP3 libraries; those days are over for me. I’m a fully paid up member of some brilliant torrent sites (illegal, I know) but ‘cloud based’ music is just so much more convenient (and isn’t potentially goning land me with a fine either).

Finally, let me pay £5 extra to keep the music, or some amount of music, on my HDD for offline play. I’m sure this is down to licensing again, but really, just get it sorted out. Transfer to external devices I’m not so fussed about at the moment.

My predictions are as follows for Spotify/Last.fm:

Spotify are already collating my music listening habbits because they’re able to generate ‘artists you may like’ lists fairly accurately. I think they’ll launch a scrobbling service available through both the web and their app.

As for Last.fm, they’re probably pooing themselves a bit. I suppose they didn’t even see Spotify coming. They’ll launch a rival service and compete on price and size of library.

So that’s my 2p on the topic! It’ll be interesting to see where we are a year down the line…

If you follow the news at all, you may have heard in the last few days that Short Selling has been un-banned by the FSA. But what is Short Selling, and why was it banned in the first place?

Everyone (I hope) probably knows a little about how making money on the stock market usually works at its most basic level. You buy stock (shares) in a company when they are cheap, and sell when they are expensive, and you profit on the difference between the two prices. Easy and straight forward. However, this model assumes that the company’s value (and hence share price) is going to increase.

What happens if you want to make money off a company losing value? This is where short selling comes in.

Short selling is explained, briefly, by the following sequence of events:

Imagine that you know someone who owns some shares in a company. What you do is pay them a fee to borrow their shares for a set amount of time. So, you might borrow 1,000 shares in Imaginary Company Ltd from a friend, and enter a contract to return them within a month.

After you borrow the shares, you immediately sell them. Let’s say you borrowed 1,000 shares and sold them for £10 each. You now have £10,000 in your pocket (and no shares). Three weeks later, a rumour surfaces that the CEO of Imaginary Company is ill, and the market loses confidence in Imaginary Company. The share value drops from £10 to £5 for a few hours. Being the clever person you are, you buy 1,000 shares back at £5 each, and return the shares to their owner. Congratulations - you just successfully bet that the company’s value would go down, pocketing £5,000 minus the £100 fee in the process - a nice, tidy profit of £4,900.

That’s short selling.

So why was it banned?

When HBOS announced it was in financial difficulty, we get much the same situation as above - uncertainty. Suddenly, a lot of confidence is lost and share prices begin to plummet. Short sellers would then immediately see an opportunity and start borrowing and selling shares, looking to make a quick profit off the drop in share value. Hence, the value of HBOS drops dramatically. The FSA banned short selling in an attempt to artificially keep value in the system. Keep the supply limited (no shares for sale) and according to simple supply/demand rules the price, and hence value, will (theoretically) remain in the system. Shares in 16 other financial institutions along with HBOS had a ban on short selling placed on their shares, however it is widely believed that the ban had no effect as share prices fell regardless.

Short selling was un-banned on January 16th, 2008, by the FSA.

Earlier today, Safari crashed on me at random. I fired it up again and suddenly PithHelmet wasn’t working at all. Each time I started Safari I was greeted with a SIMBL error.

The error message was:

SIMBL Error

Failed to load the PithHelmet plugin. Column identifiers used with NSTableView autosave feature must conform to NSCoding protocol.

After some faffing around I fixed it by deleting my Safari preferences file which is located at:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.safari.plist

Once deleted, PithHelmet worked again. You will lose some Safari preferences, but not any bookmarks, cookies, etc.

If you’re having the same problem with PithHelmet, this will almost definitely fix it for you