Category Archives: Thoughts

Virgin Active(ly) misleading you on price

  By Site Admin | November 30, 2010 - 7:47 pm | Thoughts, Wankers
3 Comments

If you’ve ever been into a chain gym, like Virgin Active, David Lloyd, Bannatynes, The Village, etc. what I’m about to say will seem familiar to you.

I could do with a gym membership again, it’s marathon training time and during winter sometimes its impossible to run due to snow or ice, so a warm treadmill inside is a welcome alternative. To that end I foolishly wandered into the doors of my very local Virgin Active and enquired about membership.

I won’t prevaricate; these places are a rip-off. For membership you’re paying way over the odds and you’ll regret ever going in there for one reason or another, but what you probably don’t realise is just what an insidious bunch of conniving bastards these people are.

Ask yourself, why aren’t prices advertised on any of the websites for these big brands? Why do they all want you to hand over some contact details in an online enquiry? Why, if you ring, do they refuse all mention of price and try everything to get you in the door?

Many of you already know the answer; it’s because there is no fixed price for membership. The salesmen, and that is what they are, rival second-hand car dealers in the bullshit stakes. The price they eventually quote is based on how much of a sucker they think you are. They determine that during the visit they pressure you to make, where they show you all the equipment, the facilities, the pool, the toilets that gently caress your buttocks, etc. They’re waiting for you to say ‘Gee Stan, that sounds really useful!’, and every time you show appreciation, the price will increase.

Ignore all insistence from them that the prices and deals fluctuate so rapidly they couldn’t possibly post their prices anywhere public – this is a lie, and today I even saw proof of it.

But I digress. I’m there, sat opposite ‘Chris’, a terribly friendly person, while he asks me what I need the gym for. There was no way I was going to give him any encouragement, so I indifferently said I was looking for the occasional use of a treadmill and nothing more. We took the tour anyway. Did I want to use the pool? No, I’m crap at swimming. What about the weight equipment? Nope, I don’t need it. Fitness classes? No mate, I’m here for a treadmill, remember?

With my dead eyes betraying no emotion we quickly head back to the omnipresent health bar while he disappears briefly to ‘check something’. He comes back with a printed breakdown of membership prices. But wait! Printed prices? Well surely I’m wrong then, the prices must be fixed if they’re PRINTED ON PAPER.

No sir, if they had less than half a dozen price permutations printed up I’d be surprised. They merely choose one that corresponds to your impressionability quotient.

I think I did fairly well. The piece of paper has 4 different prices on it, which I’ll recreate here but naturally in no way is this a benchmark or a basis for what the price might be anywhere else in the UK, or indeed to anyone else walking into this very branch on the same day:

Full Flexi: £67.00
Peak-access, on a 1-month rolling contract.

Diamond: £59.95
Peak-access, 12 month contract.

Joint Diamond: £55.95
Peak-access, 12 month contract (and presumably for couples)

Off-peak: £55.00
(9-4pm only)

Like I said, a rip-off. On the same sheet Chris then scrawls ‘3 month – £64.00’, which he assures me is a 3 month contract that flips over to the 1 month contract thereafter, but at the same price. Still with me? Alright.

I think I did well because Chris ignores the line that says ‘Diamond’, crosses out the ‘Joint’ part of the ‘Joint Diamond’ line, and then circles the price that says £55.95, indicating that this is the price that me, the single person, would pay.

Also on this piece of paper is a line that says ‘Joining Fee: £40’. Chris crosses (haha) this out and writes ‘£20’ instead. Blimey, I really *must* have done well. The page also states ‘Freeze Fee: £7 flexi/£5 Diamond‘. A frozen membership is the feature some gyms offer if you know you’re not going to use your membership on a certain month. Instead of paying full whack, you just pay the freeze but obviously you can’t use the facilities. Sounds fair doesn’t it?

I point out the advantage of the freeze feature to Chris, who says ‘Oh you can’t do that within the first 12 months’. Hang on Chris, given the contract shifts to a rolling 1-month deal after that (where if you weren’t using the gym you could just cancel for free, presumably?!), when would this ‘freeze’ feature apply? Similarly, if you’re on a ‘Flexi’ deal which is touted as a 1 month rolling contract anyway, how could a Freeze Fee possibly apply there? The only thing I can think of is that paying this fee is cheaper than quitting only to re-join again and pay the joining fee within 6 months (as after this point you wouldn’t have saved anything on the £40 joining fee), but who is going to do that?

I ask a few questions and push for a further discount but it doesn’t get me anywhere, so I thank Chris for his time and leave. Before I go though I’m reminded that if I want the £20 joining fee I must tell them today because it’s for TODAY ONLY and a TIME LIMITED OFFER that will probably NEVER COME AGAIN. Mmmhmm.

I toddle off home and start looking at Virgin Active reviews online (they average 1.6/5 on reviewcentre.com, for reasons I’ll come to shortly) and my eye is caught by two other local gyms in my area, one of which is £25 a month (price advertised online!) with pretty similar facilities. Looks tempting.

This image has absolutely nothing to do with the content of this article. Nice though isn't it?

While I’m sitting there musing my options, my mobile rings. By jove, it’s Chris from Virgin Active ringing to inform me of a super deal ‘that’s just been released by Head Office’. Wow Chris, I’m shitting myself at the prospect of this deal, what on earth could it be?! Oh it’s good, it’s very good. I’m being offered the first month FREE with the only thing to pay being the £20 joining fee, and he assures me it’s for a one-month contract so I’d be under no obligation thereafter. A £67 monthly membership for only £20?! How can I resist?

Except I do, and tell Chris no thanks, but I make a point of thanking him for thinking of me and I assure him that I appreciate it. Chris responds as if I’ve just taken a dump in his lunchbox, but moodily says ‘no problem’ and rings off. He called no more than 45 minutes after I left the gym. Evidently he was nervous because I didn’t cave at the time, and was then annoyed when I wasn’t tempted by the deal he’d made up on the spot.

Now, interestingly PruHealth (private health insurers, similar to Bupa), offer reduced rate gym membership to their ‘Vitality Partners’, which includes Virgin Active. I’d been reading up on their site earlier that day and could see they offer around 25% off membership if you have an insurance plan with them. Given the membership fees I’ve noted above, I worked out that I could take out a private insurance plan AND a gym membership for around £5 more a month than the gym would be alone, so on that basis it’s clearly better to go through PruHealth, right? Wrong.

I mentioned this to Chris during our meeting but was obviously quite vague about my knowledge and asked for more details. He basically shat (to use the most appropriate word) all over his ‘Vitality Partner’ and said that PruHealth members ‘weren’t real members’ and that the Pru had recently whacked up their prices so much so that a lot of people were leaving and coming to them separately. Talk about fostering corporate business relationships there Chris. I was given no information on the expected discount, and was basically told to not do it. Nice.

A further note regarding Virgin Active, purely in the interests of full disclosure. In researching them and trying in vain to get a comparison on membership prices, I saw an awful lot of people complaining on forums about the difficulty in getting out of their 12-month Diamond memberships. Apparently the verbal assurance that after 12 months it switches to a ‘rolling 1 month’ arrangement did not materialise in the fine print. Consequently many people have found their 12 month membership renewed for another 12 months without their consent, only to be told they had no recourse and could not cancel. Some people (and if you wish to search online, you will find plenty of anecdotal evidence on this) were offered deals to pay-off their remaining term at 50% of the regular rate, but during that time were not allowed to use any of the gym facilities. Paying 50% for nothing on a contract extension you didn’t want? Good lord.

So, to summarise: There is no fixed price, it’s a rip-off even if you insist you’ll never turn up or use any of the equipment. Be wary about contract terms. Never agree to anything on the day. Get the contract in your hand, take it home, and read it carefully. The trouble is, everything about this process involves pressure, and even knowing every trick and deceit used against me I too felt some level of desire to sign up on the spot. Your average consumer has no chance against such an onslaught, and like so many things in this world, it’s just plain wrong. A reputable organisation wouldn’t need misdirection and deceit to sell their service; it should stand alone on its own merit without the need for tactical selling bordering, in my humble view, on fraud.

One final thought. A counter-argument I’ve seen against the whole ‘My membership prices don’t match those of other members’ insisted that membership prices change daily, and so any variation is simply members taking advantage of different offers on different days.

I wonder why, then, while I was sitting there at the Health Bar, I observed a young lady being sold her gym membership, concluded by the salesperson with the words, ‘So, how would you like to pay your £75 today?’.

Get out, girl, get out while you still can.

The Transplant Trust (formerly Transplants in Mind) – What Happened?

  By Site Admin | August 20, 2010 - 3:42 pm | Thoughts
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If you have come to this page wondering what happened to The Transplant Trust (formerly Transplants in Mind) but don’t wish to read the whole article, I’ll cut to the chase: They don’t exist any more.

Transplant Trust Logo

If you’d like to know why, read on. I’ll start by mentioning that I am a former supporter of this charity and, for reasons I’ll come to shortly, I withdrew my support in late 2007. Out of curiosity I recently decided to see what they’d been up to lately, and the answer was: Nothing. Not just nothing, but their website had disappeared, and I could find no meaningful reference to them online or any indication as to what had happened. For a charity that had existed since 1990, to suddenly disappear without trace or explanation is unusual, but knowing this charity as I do, I am not surprised in the least. So what went wrong?

I became involved in Organ Donation awareness in 2007, though not for any particular reason. I have no personal connection to transplantation and hitherto had never known anyone needing a transplant. I did however think it was a worthy cause and found Transplants in Mind (as they were then called) to be the single national charity concerned with raising awareness. To that end I raised around £1000 for them by running in a 10k and a couple of other personal fundraising drives. Having made myself known as a supporter, I was then invited to an awareness-raising event (Donor Day North) in Manchester in late March 2007. I was proud and pleased to have been invited, donned my suit and went along keen to see the charity at work.

Disappointing Event

To say I was disappointed is an understatement. Donor Day North is supposed to be a major, prestigious awareness-raising event, and the main venue for the day was the Manchester Science and Industry museum. As far as locations in Manchester go, this could hardly have been more secluded from the busy footfalls of the city centre. My impression is that they’d merely pulled up their Donor Bus outside (and I’ll get to the bus more shortly) , and had stood around all day hoping to capture the relatively few visitors to the museum. The evening event promised a presentation of the charity’s work and a speech from a representative of the Donor Family Network. Wearing my suit with my girlfriend at my side, I could hardly have felt more overdressed and out of place. The staff and supporters from Transplants in Mind (and for ease, I’ll merely refer to the charity as ‘TTT’ from here on) were all dressed in casual t-shirts, but the most appalling aspect was the sheer lack of attendance to the event. Aside from myself, a handful of disinterested students, and the TTT team, there was nobody there. Aside from myself nobody appeared to have been pre-invited and those that weren’t appeared to have been visiting the museum on the day and convinced to come back for the presentation.

Meanwhile the representative from the Donor Family Network proceeded to tell us a truly warming and genuine story about his decision to donate his daughter’s organs shortly after her death, helping no fewer than 7 people needing transplants in the process. It was a very moving speech and would certainly have convinced anyone undecided on the issue to have signed up to the organ donor register on the spot. I felt it a complete waste that the gentleman had made the trip up north to convince a pitiful few that hadn’t really needed convincing.

The worst, most damning part was saved to the last. After the presentation the catering appeared. Not just catering, but expensive-looking individually prepared bowls of food, dessert, and plenty of wine. For the numbers that had turned up and the tone of the venue, there was far too much food presented in an incongruously expensive manner. My worry over the cost of such a spread was worsened when I witnessed the TTT staff tucking into the food, and more importantly the wine, with gusto. By the end they had all downed several glasses each and for all appearances were having a jolly old time.

I was utterly appalled. I saw the event to be a wash-out, entirely ineffective, and a shocking waste of the charity’s money spent on food and alcohol that benefited  TTT staff and close supporters more than it engaged public awareness. Before I left, I was given a tour of the much-touted Donor Bus.

The Donor Bus

The Donor Bus was a 40-year old Routemaster that once cris-crossed the streets of London and served as the centre-piece of TTT’s awareness campaigns. For reasons that remain a mystery to me, the existence and presence of this bus was consistently seen as a fascinating and novel conversation piece purported to assure the success of any event. Such was the inexplicable hype about the bus that TTT later went on to employ a full time ‘Donor Bus Manager’, to better utilise the valuable resource that this old broken-down heap was seen to be. The bus itself was nothing – dull, old interior, with nothing gracing it but a few leaflets and not particularly utilised on awareness days except as a large thing to look at and drape a banner from. It was also famed for being an expensive maintenance nightmare, suffering regular breakdowns.

It was at this point I decided to support the charity no more. The money I had raised was being wasted on feeble lip-service attempts at raising awareness but seemingly doing more to keep TTT staff in free food and wine. It was the last they heard of me, although I continued to pay attention to the charity for a little while afterwards.

The appointment of the Donor Bus Manager, as previously mentioned, is a particularly sore point worthy of further scrutiny. This was advertised as a full-time post to basically manage the bus and ensure it was dragged to various events around the country. Why the charity felt they needed someone to manage a single resource on a full-time basis is beyond me, particularly when at that time the charity had only one full-time member of staff, the Communications Officer, and a part-time Chief Officer. It was of grave concern when it transpired that the job was then given to a man who was introduced to me at the Donor Day North event as the long-term partner of the Communications Officer. A cynical person might speculate there to be an extreme conflict of interest in such an appointment, but I’ll let you make up your own mind about that.

Worrying Trends

At this point I was actively supporting another Organ-donation group, and in July 2007 we had planned an event in Birmingham to coincide with National Transplant Week. We were aware at that time that TTT were also in Birmingham the day before, and that the Donor Bus was in attendance. Because, if nothing else, the bus was a good place to hang a banner, we contacted the Donor Bus Manager to see if the bus, which wasn’t due to be used that day, could be brought to our event to help with awareness-raising. Incredibly, we were told that no, it wasn’t possible, because there wasn’t a driver available for the bus. Now, as the bus manager I’m going to go out on a limb and presume that he was capable of driving the bus, and given we knew they were holding no events on that day yet were still in Birmingham, I assumed at the time the rejection was more down to resentment at our ‘competing’ event, coupled with general apathy towards anything requiring effort. Of course, there could also have been a legitimate reason for the bus’ unavailability, but we’ll never know. It was certainly a missed opportunity to capitalise on what should have been our shared-interest – raising awareness.

There are other foibles to mention: the TTT poster advertising National Transplant Week – the one with the TTT telephone number on it. Given that UK Transplant handle the actual registration of donors to the register, putting TTT’s phone number on an advertising poster would just mean that when the phone was picked up – never a guarantee with a single member of staff – they’d be instantly told to call another number. Precisely the kind of needless obstruction that would make a wary person not bother to make that call.

For the 2008 running event – the one I did not attend, I noticed that the charity’s runners were wearing charity-branded t-shirts (something most credible charities do), except theirs were unusual on account of the fact a large company logo was emblazoned across the front. On investigating further I saw that the company advertised was one belonging to one of the charity’s trustees. Presumably provided by that company in return for the advertising – again, surely, a conflict of interest? What charity seeking credibility allows their runners to wear an advert for another company as the primary message?

I had originally suggested to them that they sign up to Just Giving, and also Missionfish (the company that allows eBay to receive charity donations), because they had done neither of these ball-breakingly basic things that any charity worth their salt would already be on to. The rest of what I know is just a catalogue of disappointment and failings of a charity that really did not seem to be honouring its mandate. At one point I did consider writing a letter to the Charity Commission pointing out the more worrying aspects of the behavior I’d witnessed, but in the end I did not, unconvinced that what I knew could simply be put down to either incompetence or ignorance, rather than criminal misconduct.

Writing on the wall

My knowledge beyond this point gets a little sketchy, as I stopped payment much attention. The name was changed from Transplants in Mind to The Transplant Trust at some point in 2008/2009. I think this change was an attempt to clarify and insinuate themselves to be the primary UK transplant charity, having come under increasing pressure from other awareness-raising groups that were doing a much better job without a tenth of the support, and frankly embarrassing them in the process.

I am vaguely aware that a Fundraising Manager was latterly employed in an attempt to boost their finances, but this doesn’t seem to have worked, and it appears that money was the ultimate cause of the charity’s downfall.

Time for some numbers, c/o the Charity Commission website. The accounts for TTT for the following years:

Financial year end (FYE) Income Spending
31 Mar 2009 N/A N/A
31 Mar 2008 £107,995 £149,441
31 Mar 2007 £186,477 £161,103
31 Mar 2006 £149,548 £100,718
31 Mar 2005 £62,963 £42,321

We can see an ever so slight £41,500 deficit for the financial year ended 2008. Accounts for 2009 have not been received and are overdue. The record for the charity states that it ceased to exist on 3rd March 2009. Given it is now August 2010 I don’t think we can expect any final year accounts any time soon.

The accounts remain freely available on the Charity Commission website here. While I haven’t the patience to delve very deep to compare figures, we can easily see that income for the year ending March 2008 is significantly down on the previous year, while relative costs are up, creating a large black hole. The only piece of analysis I’ll hand you is that the Donor Bus expenses (including salaries) cost £18,559 for 2007, and £50,383 for 2008.  Total cost of salaries were up to £71, 608 in 2008 from £49, 416 in 2007.

The question of these increases is further compounded by the drop in income – evidently a financial reality that resulted in the immediate cessation of all activity. And it has been immediate – the website just dissapeared. No warning, no notices, no statement explaining the situation but wishing well to the supporters of the charity over the last 19 years – nothing. The only presence The Transplant Trust now has online is an outdated Facebook page, where erstwhile supporters of Organ Donation still go occasionally to identify themselves to the cause, completely unaware they’re talking to the spectre of a dead horse. One person even asks when the TTT website will be back online – and that’s ultimately the reason I wrote this article. The complete and undignified collapse of The Transplant Trust has left a confusing void and while I have speculated at length, this is just an indication of what has probably happened, rather than a definitive statement of what has.

What now?

TTT’s loudest trumpet was their ‘organisation’ of National Transplant Week, which is usually the first week of July every year. Thankfully other supporting groups are more than capable of taking this nationally-appointed week and using it for their own awareness-raising drives, and I would argue the greater majority of donor signups were always a result of activities entirely peripheral to The Transplant Trust. The work will go on.

A quick call to UK Transplant to formally enquire as to the fate of The Transplant Trust didn’t get me too far. The belief of the chap on the other end of the phone is that ‘their activities have been absorbed into the Transplant Support Network‘ as of ‘a few months ago’. I am not sure what this entails.

The Transplant Support Network (TSN), is also a registered UK charity albeit smaller in terms of turnover, taking in some £46,000 in income for the 2009 year. Cheerfully their finances look a good deal more viable than TTTs were, implying that they’re small but steady. They don’t appear to have a website. I found a link for transplantsupportnetwork.org.uk but as of today it is non-functional. The domain name expired at the end of June 2010 and has not been renewed. The phone number I was given appears to be for a residential address and was not picked up when I called. I don’t imagine charities of this scale have dedicated offices (and indeed, it’s probably best that when being this small, they do not), so I have left a message explaining my enquiry and will update this article if I hear anything back.

I do not know if the absorption of TTT’s activities is a correct statement, or the extent to which this might be true, but I hope for their sake that they’ve driven that damn bus off a cliff.

I am happy to make corrections or post updates to this article if you have any additional information.

Update – 1st December 2010

I have just stumbled across an article from Third Sector dated February 2010 that states the Transplant Trust were taken to court by the PR company they’d engaged to help promote National Transplant Week (held July 2009). This damning article rather speaks for itself, and the charity did eventually pay the outstanding £3650.00 after a court warrant. It also notes that the charity received £84,000 of public money to ‘in part to help fund the National Transplant Week campaign’, but that despite this  ‘The Department [of Heath] was satisfied that it had been appropriately spent’.

I don’t know about you but given the Charity Commission insists that the charity ceased operation in March of 2009, I think that serious questions must be answered as to what happened to the money, and not for the first time I’d like to see those overdue accounts for 2009.

MSN Windows Messenger – Error Code 80040200

  By Site Admin | May 19, 2010 - 8:53 pm | Internet, Thoughts
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In my experience this error code occurs when Messenger tries to connect when a Wireless network is inactive. Since msn is stupid, it assumes that rather than the internet not being available, it thinks the service is down, and refuses to connect.

In a further example of stupidity, MSN will continue to report the error even when the network is reconnected and working perfectly. It continues to retardedly assume that the network is down.

The solution is easy albeit annoying – close and restart messager and shock, it then decides to start working. Can’t believe that in 2010 an application can’t differentiate between no connection available and service down, and then be unable to clear that assumption until the application is restarted. Ugggh!

Hold the phone

  By Site Admin | June 15, 2009 - 5:07 pm | Anger, Thoughts
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I take back everything I said about Hewlett Packard having decent technical support.

After I reported on the error I’ve had on my replacement unit I rang HP support and spoke to a nice IT guy. We ran through all the troubleshooting problems and when they didn’t work, they agreed to replace my unit.  They took all the details and assured me my replacement would be delivered within 5 working days. Great!

Except, not great. After receiving and hearing nothing for more than two weeks, I rang HP back. I foolishly assumed that giving my name and address would be sufficient to identify me, but they wanted the customer number and insisted it was impossible to find me any other way. I didn’t have the number handy so I had to hang up and call back after I rooted around and found it.

So, I call back armed with my customer number, but it turns out this isn’t enough to identify me either. Or rather, they know its me, but they don’t have a record of the serial number of my printer (which I provided during my original tech call), and so cannot help me at all unless I provide that too. Unsurprisingly I don’t have that to hand either, so I hang up yet again and call back when I’ve read the number from the printer.

Except this time when calling back to their delightful and barely comprehensible indian call centre, I find out that actually, no, I can’t replace the printer because they have determined that its out of warranty. I can’t remember the exact date I received the replacement but I’m pretty sure its been about a year, so if I’m not in warranty, it’s only by a whisker.

But wait, hang on, the lady then tells me that my replacement unit only comes with a 3 month warranty from the date it’s replaced. What? The original printer was covered for a year, and the replacement is only covered for 3 months? Given that my original printer fucked up only 6 months after getting it, this means my total warranty has been a mere 9 months. How the hell does that work?

Since they’re not moving on the idea of replacing it, I ask what my options are now. I’m told that I can either get it repaired, or they’ll give me a discount voucher to buy a replacement. So, I ask, ‘How much to repair it?’. ‘ one three one pounds sir’. £131?! THE FUCKING PRINTER DOESN’T COST THAT MUCH TO BUY NEW.

With little other option, I then ask about the voucher. Turns out that’ll grant me a mere 20% off an HP printer I can buy elsewhere. 20% off a printer that might fuck up within 6 months, only to have a replacement under warranty fuck up less than a year later? Fuck that.

I feel another letter coming on.

“Who’s Watching You?”, no-one probably

  By Site Admin | June 8, 2009 - 11:16 am | Thoughts
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The BBC are running a show at the moment called “Who’s Watching You?”, hosted by Richard Bilton, about privacy concerns in the UK. Because it makes good TV, the show does its utmost to convince you that not only are you being watched right now, but you’re also being watched the rest of the time too. Despite the fact that you, reader, are in no way interesting, significant, or unique, you’re actively told that someone out there has a vested interest in what you are doing.

The idea that the BBC presents things in an impartial manner is just laughable – this show is completely skewed towards portraying all of the negative aspects of technology, making out like ‘big brother’ (and christ, how I hate that term) is watching you at all times. You’re told that you’re being tracked, that every use of your phone, your credit card, your tv, your movements by CCTV are all being monitored, building up a picture of your life.

See this camera? This camera doesn't give a shit about you.

See this camera? This camera doesn't give a shit about you. Unless you're raping a pensioner in a public place, perhaps.

I feel a powerful need to hold up a giant UTTER FUCKING BULLSHIT sign to help counteract this absurdly inaccurate portrayal. Yes, banks hold transaction data, phone companies store call data, your Sky box might anonymously transmit usage data, and CCTV might be in public streets and thoroughfares for a variety of, mostly security-related, reasons, but none of this means for a second that any of it will be nefariously used against you. Think about it – it’s not like someone is sitting at a computer and all they need do is type ‘Tell me everything about Bob Simmons’, and boom, they know all about your life. The fact the data exists somewhere doesn’t mean it can be easily analysed into a single, coherent profile. The fact that a myriad of different companies hold this information makes it near impossible to get it all together in one place, and even that would have to be after some kind of police warrant or demand that circumvents data protection legislation.

Assuming they went through this mammoth task just to get a look at all this information about you, what are they going to find? That you bought some salt & vinegar crisps at the station before getting on the bus to work? Horror! Privacy invaded! No, they’re not going to do that. Unless they have some extreme reason for suspecting you of something seriously criminal, nobody is going to bother working out what you get up to on a daily basis. You are not important, and the suggestion that someone has already collated your personal data, and is sitting on a complete breakdown of your life and habits is just a complete fallacy. It’s a well-used adage but true, “if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear”, mostly because it’s too much fucking hassle to investigate you unless there’s a seriously compelling reason.

The show also implies “Don’t search on Google, they’re watching you! They record all your searches and build up a profile of YOU!”.

Ugh. It’s just so stupid. Google might record the fact you’ve searched for ‘dogs’ and ‘pet chocolate’, and so you might get automatically generated ads for dog chocolate, but there isn’t someone sitting there, looking at your search terms and working out what you’d like. It’s a complicated and automated algorithm that applies itself anonymously to millions of people, purely for the purposes of showing relevant adverts. Since I never click on adverts, I don’t really care what they show me or how they’ve worked out that information, because I know it’s not really recording anything about ‘me’ at all. It’s all metadata, stored, analysed, with results returned all without human intervention or prejudice.

This guy actually purposefully has secret cameras installed in his flat to show how terrible it would be to be filmed without knowing it. What? Yes. He had cameras installed with his knowledge, and then expresses his ‘shock’ later when he was shown images from those cameras. The ones he knew were there. The point he was trying to make, I think, is something about how if someone did put cameras in your house, you’d feel your privacy had been invaded. Thanks for that Richard, if you weren’t here to tell me these things I’d never be able to realise them by myself. Remembering again that you’re a boring, average individual, how likely is it that someone is going to install secret cameras in your house? Please try to scare us about things that have a remote possibility of actually happening. Squirrels could conceivably be trained by the government to knife me if I fail to renew my car tax, but I’m not going to make any tv shows warning against it yet.

The big problem this show has is that it muddies the distinction between the ‘big brother (ugh) nanny state (double-ugh)’, where the government is apparently interested in what you bought at Sainsburys this week or how long you spend pairing your socks, and personal surveillance and identity theft. These are two distinctly different concepts but its just all mish-mashed in together without any proper definition. They’re too concerned with trying to scare your balls off about who is watching you, while failing to say ‘these are public data collection methods, those allowed by law, aren’t they scary?’, or later say ‘Hey now, these are private data collection methods, some are legal but you might not know about them, and others are the illegal purview of criminals’.

The poorly formed message obscures what are the actually useful parts of the show – the bit where it reminds people that they’re spack-faced morons who don’t protect their own data properly, and so leave themselves open to identity theft or having their bank accounts compromised. If the producers stopped shoe-horning in the ominous ‘sneaky’ background music, and the constant and annoying cuts to pictures of cameras overlaid with lens-zooming sound effects, they might have thought to give you, the viewer, a few basic tips on how to better secure your personal data. But that doesn’t fit in with the ‘scare you shitless’ message the show is about, and so is ‘conspicuously’ absent.

At best it’ll give those groups who are surveillance-phobic something to hoot about and stand behind, while once again failing to properly convey the reality of mass data-collection. Most businesses have a hard time querying their own, small databases without cocking it up, so the idea that the government could effectively query huge amounts of information about you is pretty unlikely.

The part about criminals and phishing is interesting, although for some reason they call phishers ‘blaggers’ and while they give a small example of someone ringing up on the phone trying to ‘blag’ private information, they omit the widespread phising on the internet. The only nod they give to the internet is that it too is WATCHING YOU in some vague but omni-present manner, oh, and if you download illegal stuff you might actually get collared by the copyright owners who log your IP address with their evil and unscrupulous surveillance techniques.

It’s just very poorly-done bit of ‘investigative’ tv, mostly because it’s all over the place, presenting inaccurate, scaremongering information in a disorganised haphazard manner that’ll just leave the average person feeling scared. Probably because the government now know they occasionally buy white bread instead of the healthier brown option, or that local CCTV shows you going into JJB Sports and coming out wearing a white shellsuit and chavcap. Admittedly, these are things to be ashamed of, but since nobody is actually paying attention I really wouldn’t worry about it.

The ‘new’ Star Trek

  By Site Admin | May 16, 2009 - 1:16 am | Thoughts
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I  seem to be strangely alone in my intense dislike for the new Star Trek film. The critics have bafflingly given it an enthusiastic bumming, but I really can’t see why.

The most important thing to realise is that this is not supposed to be Star Trek canon. While it is set in the time between ‘Enterprise’ and ‘The Original Series’, it features time travel and irrevocable changes to critical elements of the established trek universe, and so everything that happens must be considered an alternative reality, where all the events contained therein have no bearing on the integrity and continuety of the star trek we’ve always known. This is just as well – to attempt to rewrite nearly 50 years of established canon, where everything that’s ever been written suddenly becomes non-applicable, would never be accepted by the fans.

That being the case, this isn’t really Star Trek then, is it? It’s a reimagining (or ‘reboot’ as the tedious nerds call it) of Star Trek from square one, that merely diverges into an alternate reality where everything happens differently. It has the advantage of being able to create a new and diverse plot without having to establish the underlying principles of the universe in which it is set, but conversely isn’t something in which you can really invest yourself. Plenty of episodes of TNG dealt with alternate realities (‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’ was particularly good), as well as the ‘alternative universe’ referenced in TOS and DS9.

Kelvin, both a USS starship and an angsty teen.

Kelvin, both a USS starship and an angsty teen.

Those were good episodes that added a little spice now and then, but they were nothing more than an occasional curiousity that didn’t really affect the overall core of the series.

So why do we care about an alternate reality where Kirk starts life as a bit of a reckless arsehole? Where is this going? Are we going to have a series of new films that go down this alternate path? When the producers tire of reinvented ‘original series’ cast, are we going to have some kind of absurd alternate TNG later on?

We’ll ignore that for the moment and have a look at a few basic elements of the film itself. While a modernisation of the original design was a given, the Enterprise looks like it was made by Apple Mac. It’s not technologically gritty (which, for all its failings, ‘Enterprise’ was), everything is a little too crystallic and clean, and in me doesn’t engender a lot of familiary with the original. I could get used to it, I suppose, but as a long time and moderately faithful fan, I wasn’t immediately drawn in by it.

Let’s have a look at the characters. Kirk has gone from being a serious consideration to a rebellious dick with a superiority complex. The transition just doesn’t fit – Kirk is a temeritous cadet and a late starter, but for some reason gets promoted to acting first officer by a captain that just happened to like his dad. That wouldn’t happen, for fucks sake. Picard was breaking the mould when he made Weasily crusher an acting ensign in TNG, so the idea of making a cadet an acting, ranking officer is just not credible.

The United Federation of Planets has a fairly well established hierarchy of command that rewards performance and experience over the course of many years, so suddenly bumping someone up to a high rank is just absurd. Moreso the fact that this cadet somehow manages to wangle becoming the acting captain by pissing Spock off momentarily, and the biggest objection we get is from Uhura; “I hope you know what you’re doing”.

It just doesn’t work, and in that vein Bones the cadet is suddenly Chief Medical Officer after the other one gets killed. Do these people have no hierarchical redundancy? Isn’t there a Second Officer, a Deputy Medical Chief, someone slightly more senior than mere third year cadets?

The new Enterprise uses fast-moving swarms of fireflies to transport matter across space.

The new Enterprise uses fast-moving swarms of fireflies to transport matter across space.

As I watched the film, hoping and trying to like it, a growing sense of bullshit came over me. Nothing I was seeing was believable, even if you take into account the alternate reality wonkiness of it all. I mean, Spock is banging Uhura.

I say again, Spock is banging Uhura. Where on earth (or Vulcan, for that matter) did this come from? It’s like JJ Abrams was sitting around with dolls of all the major characters, idly musing about how he could shake things up for the purposes of the movie, and casually picks up the Spock and Uhura doll and pushes them together, making kissy-kissy noises. I can’t fathom any other basis for these two characters suddenly being in a relationship.

I understand the crop of available characters was small, with very few female roles to choose from, but to create this utterly unlikely partnership just heaps another shoval of shit on my perception of this film. It’s doing something for the sake of it, and it certainly doesn’t add any value. Spock banging Uhura, by god.

I appreciated the attempts at interlinking previously established trek history with the emergent parts of the film. Sulu fencing made me chuckle, and Christopher Pike being the original captain, with his experience on the Romulan ship being the cause of the paraplegia seen in his appearance in TOS. Still, it doesn’t feel natural. It smacks of a writer trying to link together things that were never intended to be linked. Explicitly shoe-horning in explanations of classic trek lore, because you happen to have the opportunity in a prequel film, detracts from their worth.

Take the Kobayashi Maru test that Kirk ‘cheats’ on. This is a well-referenced piece from what remains the best film of all time, The Wrath of Khan. Kirk cheating to win the unwinnable test was believable with Shatner, but seeing the new upstart eating an apple and chatting casually really ruins my original impression of what it was ‘really’ like.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

We must remember this is an alternate reality, and so I have to hope that the original Kirk whose father didn’t die was much less of an insufferable twat, and my precious ideals will be preserved.

Let me just skim over a summary of the plot before I finish up this piece, which is dragging on already.

In the future, at a point a few years after our last ‘known’ experience of the Trek univerise, Spock attempts to save Romulus from the supernova of a nearby star. To do this he uses a never-before-seen element called ‘Red Matter’, the physics behind which are not explained, except that it creates a singularity in order to absorb the energy.

Spock cocks up and the Sun goes Nova early, and destroys Romulus. For some reason a singularity is created anyway, and is now a convenient time-travel device that ships can travel through without being destroyed by the gravitational forces. Spock goes through along with a pissed off Romulan miner, whose ship is, for some reason, enormous beyond the scale of anything previously seen in your average alpha-quandrant species, along with powerful fragmentary weapons that beat the shit out of anything it feels like.

For some reason, this miner is entirely clued up on both Red Matter and how to use it, and despite the fact his passage through the singularity was accidental, is unpeturbed by the knowledge that he has gone back in time, and contentedly waits around somewhere in space for 25 years, awaiting the eventual appearance of Spock. Why he’d have any reason to think Spock would appear at all isn’t explained, but suffice to say that 25 years later he’s still just as motivated by anger and angst as he was before, and plans revenge.

To this end, when Spock appears, he captures him, and instead of killing or imprisoning him, merely chucks him on an ice planet so he can see the destruction of Vulcan (via another singularity, c/o the captured Red Matter) from a great distance.

Christ, this explanation is taking too long. Blahblahblah, Kirk and young Spock make another singularity and the miner ship goes in it and presumably explodes, THE END. Kirk, despite only being a cadet, is promoted to full captain of the Enterprise and Spock is perfectly content to sit under him as first officer.

The whole thing is just ridiculous, a million miles away from the realms of possibility. The writers have made up a load of non-sensical shit and thrown it together into a claptrap of plot macguffins and needless exposition in order to create a film that is essentially a lot of standard bang-bang explosion action. Phasers now apparently shoot in pulses instead of beams, by the way. Funny that.

Roddenberry, hopefully spinning fast enough in his grave to create a singularity that'll suck this bag of shite out of existance

Roddenberry, hopefully spinning fast enough in his grave to create a singularity that'll suck this bag of shite out of existance

One of the things that has always run through Star Trek like lifeblood is its awesome and instantly recognisable music (‘Enterprise’ as the major exception). James Horner and particularly the Star Trek II soundtrack is a feat of sheer brilliance. In that film when the Enterprise clears moorings (and has a theme track of the same name), my hair stands on end and I’m completely entranced in the majesty of the scene. It’s just fucking awesome.

However, in the new film (and who thought to call it ‘Star Trek’ anyway? It’s stupidly indistinct), the music just ran right off me. It was immemorable and insignificant, and fuck me if I didn’t think I’d wandered into a repeat of Spiderman, so similar that it sounded. Throughout the entire film there was not one faithful melody to the original music, save for the end credits where they play a re-styled TOS theme, except by that point I’m already on my way out of the cinema cursing the film as a fucking joke.

The Romulans aren’t well represented here, because to look at them they don’t look like any kind of Romulan that’s ever been seen in Star Trek before. Why they all needed to look like bald-headed, tattoed white guys was lost on me. Throughout the film I had trouble identifying captain Nero (famous on Romulus for his CD-burning skills) from any of his other cloned crew members. As a character he’s badly explained, and to use the word again, not believable. The whole combination of the random plot elements is just stupid.

So there we go, my ‘review’, which its really not, sounds like a bit of a rant, but so confused as I am as to why this film has received almost universal critical acclaim has compelled me to set the record straight, at least in one tiny corner of the web. I can’t see anything in the film that I’d want to see again in an alternate-reality sequel, and if you’re the kind of drone who is impressed by fluffy nonsense like the new transporter effects, or the standard staple of ‘special effects’, then you’re welcome to it, but I hope to christ I’m not the only fan who regards this as another trek installment that has flown far wide of the mark.

To my mind there are only two trek films worth watching. Wrath of Khan, obviously, and First Contact, although if the two were in a footrace, the latter would be far behind.

Alan Sugar doesn’t like Northerners

  By Site Admin | May 10, 2009 - 2:20 pm | Thoughts, Wankers
1 Comment

As the ostensibly best candidate gets fired from The Apprentice this week, anyone with a keen eye will have noticed that Philip Taylor was a crackingly proud Northerner.

alan_sugar

Get aaaaaaught!

There have been a few of those over the course of the UK series of The Apprentice, and yet strangely they never seem to get very far no matter how well they do. Sugar always seems to find a reason to criticise their good work and takes every opportunity to heap scorn on any failings.

The only conclusion I can come up with is that Sugar, the ‘allo laaandan geeeza, just doesn’t like Northerners. There are plenty of people like that about, with the old North/South rivalry making people biased, and I’m surprised nobody has really called him up on it. He is, after all, just a man, just as flawed and fallible as anyone else.

A shame really, now that the most viable candidate has been fired the rest of the season is a bit academic. None of the rest have enough personality between them to be a worthy win, and we’ll probably end up with an apprentice who is a superficial and pasty as Simon Ambrose was – a man whose profile since winning The Apprentice last year has been distinctly underwhelming. He wasn’t a winner from the start, he was just what was left over when Sugar make bungle after bungle, firing all of the decent people one by one.

Like the man uttered as he walked out, it’s a joke.

Calories burned by thinking

  By Site Admin | April 21, 2009 - 6:27 pm | Thoughts
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The interwebs tells me that the human body burns between 90-110 calories per hour when idle. We all know that actually getting off your fat fucking arse and exercising is the best way to burn calories, but I wonder why I can’t find anything about how many calories are burned by thinking.

At a basic level I assume that a brain works like a CPU, when it’s gunning at 100% usage it heats up and uses more power than it does when idle. Surely a brain is the same? Staring slackjawed at Gladiators on TV must burn less calories than solid concentration on mathematical problems.

Google is contaminated by thousands of websites that discuss ‘thinking yourself thin’ and the mental attitude required to lose weight, so I can’t find anything that mentions any actual research that gives a clue as to what bearing sheer thought has on calorific burn. I managed to find a couple of Yahoo! questions, but all of the answers are unscientific opinions by individuals who don’t quote sources. Those people say the effect of thinking is miniscule, but given the lack of evidence I’m not going to accept that as fact.

Is this why the archetypal nerd is thin and gangly? I read or watched something (can’t remember where, it’s very unscientific of me) which stated that a weight variation of half a stone can be affected by as little as 7 calories per day over the course of a year.  While that might sound a bit improbable, it could certainly explain why ‘smarter’ people who use their brains more are generally thinner, because the brain really wouldn’t need to burn very many more calories per day in order to affect the weight of a person over a sufficiently long time period. Over the course of your life, the possible impact cannot be ignored.

Obviously there are limits to this theory. If your eating pattern is variable or you’re just a fat git, working your brain won’t make much visible difference because there are too many other factors in play. But, if you’re an average person who eats a fairly consistent amount of food, it makes utter sense that someone who taxes their brain with complex and profound thoughts will weigh less than someone who, say, reads the Daily Mail.

Given the multitude of studies and news articles that bang on about weight loss factors, I wonder why this hasn’t got a scientific footnote somewhere. Suffice to say if you, person reading this, have any idea or can quote me a study, I’d be very interested to read it.

Now I’ve written all that, I’m sure I’ve burned at least enough to justify a small ice cream. :)

Update: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=381608 – some answers!

Interesting reading, it looks like this is indeed the case, although most calories are burned when learning something new, rather than engaging mentally in something you already know.