At the moment it appears you can make a lot of money from writing flash based facebook games that basically turn people into clicky automatons.  So we’ve been thinking, there must be a way for us to enslave people in our own version of a flash based sweatshop – but first we needed to work out just what makes them so successfull.

Drudgery: people apparently enjoy virtual versions of labour intensive jobs that advances in modern machinery and technology has all but eliminated.

So how about Dishville? Where you have to wash the dishes?

Reward: Ruth thinks this won’t work because you need a ‘reward’. Apparently in a certain farming game “oh look i have a picture of some grapes” constitutes a reward, so we need to find a game that gives people a reward.

Sweepville? where you clean the street and at the end you get a reward from a local councillor? … humm maybe not

So what else do we need? Oh yes, the game has to enslave your friends too. Again drawing inspiration from a certain agricultural game, you can apparently guilt people into playing by doing their farming for them. Personally I don’t see why this works but hey ho.

Anyway, we’ve had a bit of a scuba in our thinktank, and ran a couple of things up the ideas runway; and now I can announce the next big thing in the world of doing a boring job on the internet:

PostVillie!

You are a postmaster – so you have to deliver letters, occasionally sell stamps and maybe every once in a while deal with an aggressive pensioner whose pension book has gone missing.

The main bit of the game however will be the enslaving delivery system;

• using the names of everyone playing the game (i reckon we’ll get around 70million) you will get a letter to deliver to someone who might or might not be a friend
• but you can only send it to one of your friends who will then send it on
• when it gets to the right person – the postage cost will be divided between everyone who handled the letter
• so if the letter goes through 5 people you get a fifth of the money

This, I think, is a winner. It has the drudgery of running a post office, combined with the reward of someone saying ‘I got a letter’ and the enslaving of your friends to send the mail.

Now I just have to learn some flash….. but I can’t be bothered, oh well I need another money making scheme.

more piccies over here.

It’s questionable that we ever were; we we’re never the party animals, concert goers, clubers and even most movies just passed us by – but we were at least keeping up with the TV, comings and goings in most of the things ‘other’ people talked about, and then we went to India.

India – is (well it was in 2003) a bit different to the UK (well the 2003 version of it) – it was a culture shock, not as much as you think; because well you always just cope when you’re in the thick of it; it was however quite a life event, ‘an expericene’ is the best way to describe it – coupled with the near abandonment thing in New Delhi airport when our return Kergystan flight was cancelled, did make it one of those things we annoyed almost everybody with for many years to come.

We did however return from the ‘experience’ back to the lovely cosy – fast driving western world, and to recover from the shock we went to Bowness-on-Windermere – the most diametrically opposite place to Delhi we could find -it’s just looking back what we’re not sure of is if we ever returned from Bowness.

Here we are now in 2009 (apparently) as we are just so out of touch with everyone else – we’ve never seen x-factor (2005) – we don’t even watch strictly come dancing – and the last film we went out to see was I-Robot (2004); apparently there are all sorts of trendy bands and stuff now. increasingly conversations revolve around things we have little or no idea about – someone mentions how X on strictly has just done Y -

• “who’s X?”
• “o you know the one off – (some programme i didn’t even realise was still on - usually Holby City – which is some form of Casulty spin off i think)”

It’s not that we are living in the past – we’re very technically literate, and absorbing all sorts of things from the world, they just don’t appear to be the things everybody else is absorbing – so culturally we are stuck in bowness on 15th october 2003 – and if i’m honest – it’s quite nice.

there was some ‘nearly’ classic Winnie-the-pooh on playhouse Disney this morning, which had us all watching, especially as it’s coinciding with the reading of the Winnie-the-pooh stories at bedtime. they where mixing there stories so we had eeyore in the river, then his birthday.

Anyway I was interested to see just when we where talking about, so i did some interneting, and got to a few interesting things, including the fact that disney makes $1 billion dollars a year from pooh! also in 2000 the Canadian Medical journal published a paper about what was wrong with everyone in the hundred acre wood.

Apparently pooh bear has ADHD and OCD, Tigger is hyperactive and owl is dyslexic : yes, but it’s quite depressing to then read that given the chance the people who did the study would be drugging up half the forest – mainly to cure these problems. I don’t see why ?Pooh is perfectly happy with his lot, why does he need drugs, and if you took the bounce out of Tigger then everybody’s life would be sadder.

why ?

because you type in life expectancy for me at 33 and it gives you are rather precise 78.43 years.

then you type in your birthday + 78.43 years and you get

10:48.00 pm, Saturday, October 24th 2054 – which means I’ll miss Match of the Day

a page i might not bookmark because it also has a countdown timer on it

So after some stumbling, stuttering and well general headless chickening, the government has decided it might, maybe depending on if it’s right, step in and pass retrospective laws to strip t

it's my pension, and i'll...

he former RBS chairman of his £600,000+ a year pension. yippie? right?

I’m not convinced, I think it’s terribly shaky ground to start taking people’s pension of them – especially changing the terms of a pension scheme, so you can take revenge on somebody after the fact. just think about it this has two possible problems: 

1. the government will decide that, in general pensions for X are to high and having sent this precedent change a pension scheme for a whole swathe of people, no matter if they have 38 years in the scheme, because they are in the derided scheme of the day – you can’t change the terms of pensions – it under-minds the whole premise.
2. attacking peoples pensions will become an accepted way of getting revenge for perceived problems they might have been involved in during their career. Yes you might think their is a clear cut case with the RBS man, but think about it – he hasn’t actually broken any laws, committed any crimes, or acted beyond his remit, he just is perceived to be the person who messed it all up, if we can take this sort of action based on moral – no let’s say populist opinion, isn’t that dangerous-when you retire do you want the value of your pension going to a public vote based on what you did – before you answer remember the electorate have a 6 month memory, you will have a 40 year career. 

So as you can see, it might seem simple, it certainly is a vote keeper (there is no winning votes in this anymore) but it’s really not the simplest wisest thing in the world.

Once there was someone – probably on radio 4 – who said you should always think about laws that are passed, not in the context of the current government are interpreting it, but how it could be interpreted by future governments just because you trust the current lot, doesn’t mean the next lot won’t exploit it.

Bank: “we’ve been looking at your account, and we feel that the level of your current overdraft is high given the current economic climate”

Me: “yes, i understand your concern, but we are putting in measures to reduce our dependence on the overdraft and increase our liquidity going forward – soon we should be able to do something about that.”

Bank: “well we feel it would be good if you could reduce your overdraft”

Me: “yes, well we intend to start our process of quantitative easing once we’ve gotten the finer details of the process sorted”

Bank: “I see, well tecnically that’s not …”

Me: “Can you just remind me, it’s postman pat on the £20 note isn’t it?”

click.

my head yesterday, today...

I’ve been looking over the last few (hundred) posts from me, and well most of them are naff, don’t come close to being coherent, or make any point that i may have been trying to make in my head.. sorry if you’ve read through all that trash.

The blog has been going for six and a half years now, and it’s fair to say the content has varied in quality quite a lot in that time. Not that it’s been about the quality – the rules of blog are almost 5 years old, and have always been true; if you can be bothered you can blog it.

One thing you might not know is that when you blog, there are many more unwritten rules in your head, don’t upset relatives, make sure you don’t say something that might get sacked, don’t offend friends, and depending on your mood – only blog if you think it makes sense.

I’ve probably bent all of those rules during the last 6 years. It’s just good fortune combined with the fact that no-one reads the blog, that everyone is still speaking to me and I didn’t get sacked. 

Anyway the reason i think the blogging has been so poor recently is down to two things time and spaghetti – I so often don’t have the time to write, and because my head is full of spaghetti it should take longer for me to untangle, except i don’t have the time. 

so maybe i will have another unwritten rule for a while, take time to think about what you want to say, and take time to write it. If only to save people from the randomness in my head. 

*just because I’ve said all this doesn’t mean i consider this post to be well written, or for me to have taken enough time over it.

it was originally going to be a decorating holiday, but a sore shoulder changed all that, so I’ve basically floated about disrupting the routine and getting in the way a lot. 

I’ve had time this week, not just to read random bits of the internet and become paranoid about global finance, but also to think, that’s been nice. Henry waking up at 5:30 every morning hasn’t but we can live with that. 

What we aren’t sure of is how we continue to live the life we do: I.E. how long can i keep going in a super stress job? is our lifestyle working with the family we have now become ? should the milk in the fridge go blue, green, red or red, green, blue? it’s all heavy stuff i tell you – but as the benches on the south bank say (last time i saw them) “everybody needs a place to think” and I think this week has helped us restart that thinking process again.