text:
Champion of the Seas. Photo by Southworth & Hawes ca.1854.
|United States
|Port of registry:
|Donald McKay, East Boston, MA
|19 April 1854
|In service:
|United Kingdom
|Port of registry:
|September 1854 (re-registered)
|Abandoned in leaking condition 3 January 1877
|General characteristics
|Class and type:
|Tons burthen:
|252 ft (77 m)
|45 ft 6 in (13.87 m)
|Depth of hold:
|29 ft (8.8 m)
|Sails (6,250 sq yd (5,230 m2))
|Sail plan:
|Full-rigged ship
Champion of the Seas was the second largest clipper ship destined for the Liverpool, England - Melbourne, Australia passenger service. Champion was ordered by James Baines of the Black Ball Line from Donald McKay. She was launched 19 April 1854 and was abandoned 3 January 1877, off Cape Horn.
Champion of the Seas set a record for the fastest day's run in 24 hours: 465 nautical miles (861 km) noon to noon 10–11 December 1854 under the command of Captain Alexander Newlands.[citation needed] This record stood until August 1984, nearly 130 years.[citation needed]
Champion of the Seas was "fuller aft than forward", and her strength of construction was an improvement over the Lightning, which Mackay had built the previous year. The frame was white oak, diagonally cross-braced with iron, planking and ceiling of hard pine, square fastened throughout.[3] She had 3 decks.[4] Her sail area and spars were roughly the same as Lightning. Her working suit of sails required 12,500 yards of cotton, 18 inches wide.
Upon completion, Champion of the Seas was towed from Boston to New York by the steam tug R.B. Forbes.[1][3]
Champion of the Seas's figurehead was the full figure of a sailor "with his hat in his right hand, and left hand extended ... It was certainly a most striking figurehead, the tall square-built mariner, with dark curly hair and bronze clean-shaven face."[5] Her semi-elliptical stern was ornamented with the coat of arms of Australia. She was painted black on the outside, white on the inside, with blue waterways: the colors of the Black Ball Line.
James Baines ordered Champion of the Seas from Donald McKay of East Boston for the Black Ball Line of Liverpool. She was similar in appearance to McKay's other clippers, Lightning and James Baines, but set no sails above the royals. She set the record for the longest day's run, 465 nautical miles (861 km) on 10–11 December 1854 on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Melbourne.
From her launching to 1868, Champion served in the passenger trade. During the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British government chartered the three Black Ball clippers to carry troops to Calcutta. Before embarking about 1,000 troops, she and James Baines were reviewed by Queen Victoria. In 1868 she entered the general shipping trade. She remained in this trade until 3 January 1877 when she was abandoned, leaking badly, with a load of guano off Cape Horn.
|19 April 1854
|Launched at the shipyard of Donald McKay, East Boston, for the Black Ball Line, Liverpool.
|June 1854
|New York to Liverpool in 29 days.
|Captain Alexander Newlands
|11 October 1854 – 26 December 1854
|Her maiden voyage Liverpool - Melbourne took 75 days during which a 24‑hour run of 465 miles (861 km) was recorded.
|Captain Alexander Newlands
|Melbourne-Liverpool in 84 days.
|Captain Alexander Newlands
|Liverpool-Melbourne in 83 days.
|Captain John McKirdy
|1855 - 25 January 1856
|Melbourne-Liverpool in 90 days.
|Captain John McKirdy
|Liverpool-Melbourne in 85 days.
|10 August 1857
|Portsmouth-Bay of Bengal together with James Baines. Arrived at Sand Heads, Calcutta after 101 days.
|Departed Liverpool 8 August 1858 arrived Melbourne 7 November 1858
Passengers: 16 in Saloon and 298 in Intermediate and steerage.
|Captain John McKirdy
|1 January 1860 – 26 March 1860
|Melbourne-Liverpool in 85 days.
|20 November 1860 to 24 February 1861
|Melbourne to Liverpool
|Seaman William Cuthbert (my great great uncle). Served as seaman although he had a Master's certificate.
|Sold to Thomas Harrison and Thomas Sully Stowe for £9750, but chartered back to the Black Ball Line for three more voyages
|September 1868
|Put into general trading.
|February 1874
|After having found that she was badly affected by dry rot she was subsequently sold to A. Cassels of Liverpool for £7500.
|July 1875
|Arrived at San Francisco-Hong Kong in 39 days.
|Captain Wilson
|5 October 1875
|San Francisco-Callao in 45 days.
|3 January 1877
|Abandoned off Cape Horn in leaking condition with a cargo of guano. The crew was saved by the British barque Windsor.[3][4]
In popular culture
Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) had a practice of naming its airliners "Clippers", as an allusion to the clipper ships of earlier times.[6] Between 1984 and 1991, a Pan Am Boeing 747-121 airliner (MSN 19641 / tail number N734PA) was named Clipper Champion of the Seas in accordance with this practice. The airliner, which had been delivered to Pan Am in 1969, had previously been named Clipper Flying Cloud.[7]
See also
- ^ a b "The New Clipper Ship Champion of the Seas". Boston Daily Atlas. XXII (274). 20 May 1854. Retrieved 4 February 2013.
- ^ Bunting, W. H. (1994). Portrait of a Port: Boston 1852–1914. London: Belknap Press. p. 74. ISBN 0-674-69076-1.
- ^ a b c Lubbock 1921, pp. 73–76.
- ^ a b Bruzelius, Lars (15 January 1998). "Sailing Ships: Champion of the Seas". Champion of the Seas. The Maritime History Virtual Archives. Retrieved 4 February 2011.
- ^ McKay, Richard C. (1928). Some Famous Sailing Ships and Their Builder, Donald McKay. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. OCLC 566052.
- ^ "Chasing the Sun: Pan Am Clipper". PBS. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Retrieved 4 February 2013.
- ^ Steele, John. "Names of the Pan Am Clippers 1934 to 1991" (PDF). Pan Am Historical Foundation. Pan Am Historical Foundation. Retrieved 4 February 2013.[permanent dead link]
- Chase, Mary Ellen (1959). Donald McKay and the Clipper Ships. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. OCLC 570331.
- Crothers, William L. (2000). The American-Built Clipper Ship, 1850-1856: Characteristics, Construction, and Details. Camden, ME: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press; Blacklick, OH: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0071358234.
- Cutler, Carl C. (1984). Greyhounds of the Sea: The Story of the American Clipper Ship (3rd ed.). Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 087021232X.
- Fraser, Rod (1999). The Champion of the Seas. Glen Waverley, Vic: Pilgrim Printing. ISBN 0957720203.
- Howe, Octavius T.; Matthews, Fredric C. (1986) [1st. pub. Salem, Mass: Marine Research Society, 1926]. American Clipper Ships 1833–1858. Volume 1: Adelaide–Lotus. New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 0486251152.
- La Grange, Helen; La Grange, Jacques (1936). Clipper Ships of America and Great Britain, 1833-1869. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. pp. 255–263. OCLC 1471826.
- Lubbock, Basil (1921). The Colonial Clippers (2nd ed.). Glasgow: J. Brown & Son. pp. 53, 72–80, 90, 104, 111–112, 121, 199. OCLC 560917332.
- McKay, Richard C (1995) [1st. pub. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1928]. Donald McKay and His Famous Sailing Ships. New York: Dover Publications. pp. 271–275. ISBN 048628820X.
- Ross, Donald Gunn (III) (2012). The Era of the Clipper Ships: The Legacy of Donald McKay. 1. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 978-1470155605.
- Stammers, Michael (1978). The Passage Makers. Brighton, East Sussex: Teredo Books. ISBN 090366206X.
External links
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Champion of the Seas.
- "The Champion of the Seas Times" Weekly newspaper produced on board ship
- Ships of the World: Champion of the Seas
- Sailing Ships: Champion of the Seas
- The Boston Daily Atlas, Vol. XXII, No. 274, Saturday, 20 May 1854 Description of construction, spars, rigging, etc.
- First voyage of the Champion of the Seas
- Steve Fossett Challenges


text:
You have to hand it to the clever people at Bumble & Bumble they know good hair and the most fun way to get it. For summer, their brilliant Limited Edition Bb Bandball, £16, is back (it was a Christmas sell-out) and this time it comes in acqua, orange, yellow and taupe all perfect shades for summer.
Im already planning to stash it from my dressing table into my suitcase this year and so should you. Not only will this tidy bundle of hair thingamajigs (their word, not mine) mean you never run out of things to tie your hair back with on the beach, but if you get bored of sunbathing you can use it to play a game of catch.
For stockists call 020 7247 5656

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Frequent Links
The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage
|The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage
|Created by
James Wong
Glen Morgan
Stephen J. Cannell
|Developed by
|The Walt Disney Company
|Written by
James Wong
Glen Morgan
Stephen J. Cannell
Jack Bernstein
Gary Rosen
|Directed by
Kim Manners
Tucker Gates
Bruce Kessler
Jorge Montesi
David Nutter
James Whitmore, Jr.
Daniel Hugh Kelly
Steven Williams
Roma Downey
Bert Rosario
Steve Hytner
|Theme music composer
|Mike Post
|Mike Post
|Country of origin
|United States
|Original language(s)
|No. of seasons
|No. of episodes
|Executive producer(s)
|Stephen J. Cannell
|John Peter Kousakis
|Frank Johnson, A.S.C.
|Running time
|42 minutes
|Production company(s)
Stephen J. Cannell Productions
in association with Walt Disney Television
|Buena Vista Television
|Original channel
|First shown in
|March 31, 1991
|Original release
|March 31 – May 26, 1991
Disney Presents The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage is a television series broadcast in the United States by NBC and produced by Stephen J. Cannell Productions in association with Walt Disney Television. This show originated as a TV-movie. The program originally aired in 1991, but lasted less than one season.
The series followed the story of Black Jack Savage (played by Steven Williams - Stoney Jackson in the pilot), the ghost of a legendary 17th-century Caribbean pirate who teams up with Barry Tarberry (played by Daniel Hugh Kelly), a crooked Wall Street con artist who has escaped trial by coming to the Caribbean. Facing eternal damnation, both of them discover that they need to save 100 lives to compensate for the damage done by their sinful lives, and thus save their own souls.
Any time Black Jack tries to leave the safety of his castle haunt on San Pietro Island, he is fair game for the "snarks". They are entities that can transport Jack to Hell through an entrance at the base of the tree where he was originally hanged. Tarberry has his own difficulties dodging the government agents sent to extradite him back to the United States to stand trial for his crimes. Other characters on San Pietro include the corrupt governor-general, Abel Vasquez (played by Bert Rosario), with whom Tarberry is able to make another deal, and island activist Danielle (played by Roma Downey), who is constantly trying to help protect the locals from the effects of Vasquez's corruption and is not above enlisting Tarberry's help in doing so.
The show follows the misadventures of both Black Jack and his human counterpart as they team up to dodge the law, both supernatural and secular, to make their 100 soul quota and thus win their way to salvation. Each episode ended with a graphic telling the viewers "??? Lives To Go..."
Blackbird powerboat
A regular part of every episode was an appearance of the high tech powerboat. Built by scientist/inventor Logan "FX" Murphy (played by Steve Hytner), the Blackbird was a black trimaran speedboat that resembled a SR-71 reconnaissance plane. It was originally commissioned by the previous owner of Blackbird Castle, a drug runner. After his arrest, Tarberry took possession of the Blackbird from Murphy. When not in use, the Blackbird was moored at a secret dock at Blackbird Castle on San Pietro Island. A 2002 photo of the mockup boat on a Disney backlot can be found at (http://www.disneypix.com/Studios/Street/2002a/ST0402-41.html).
- Brooks, Tim and Marsh, Earle, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows
- Cotter, Bill, The Wonderful World Of Disney Television: A Complete History
External links
- The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage at the Internet Movie Database (Pilot film)
- The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage at the Internet Movie Database (Series)
Template:James Wong Template:Glen Morgan


text:
Broadcast on: Defunct
Active from: 03 Sep 2008
Active until: 31 Aug 2015
BBC Knowledge is a defunct South African television channel which was broadcast exclusively on MultiChoice Africa's DStv platform which was one of four BBC-branded themed channels that replaced BBC Prime and BBC Food in September 2008, which carried factual and non-fiction programmes.
The channel was discontinued along with sister channel BBC Entertainment on 31 August, 2015 to make way for a new slate of BBC channels: BBC Brit (which replaced BBC Entertainment), BBC Earth (which replaced BBC Knowledge) and in October 2015 a new channel entirely, BBC First.
DStv: Channel 184 (previously 251)
Bouquet: Premium
576i (SDTV, 16:9) - DStv
Broaden your horizons with BBC Knowledge, where facts are made fascinating and the truth is as entertaining as fiction.
The channel's award-winning factual and non-fiction programmes are presented by charismatic experts, whose passion for their subjects reveals the world in all its wonder.
When BBC Knowledge launched in 2008 it comprised five strands: The World (audiences can delve into new cultures); Science & Technology; People (explores fascinating aspects of the human body and mind); and Business, which highlights what it takes to stay on top in today's challenging business world.
It now offers the broadest range of revealing programming from natural history to science, technology, adventure and history.
BBC Knowledge, BBC Entertainment, BBC Brit
Reality series in which entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to millionaires willing to invest their own cash if they can be convinced the idea is a winner.
Evan Davis, Rachel Elnaugh, Deborah Meaden
Magazine, Science/Technology
BBC Entertainment, BBC Knowledge, SABC3, BBC Brit
Hosted by comedian Adam Ferrara, drift racer Tanner Foust and analyst Rutledge Wood, Top Gear explores the history of America, one lap at a time.
Adam Ferrara, Tanner Foust, Rutledge Wood
Magazine, Science/Technology
BBC Knowledge, BBC Prime, SABC3, BBC Entertainment
Motoring show featuring a variety of segments including reviews and the "Star in a Reasonably Priced Car", in which celebrities drive timed laps.
Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, Jason Dawe
12 Aug 2015
| Written by:
TVSA Team
| From:
| 1 comment
The abysmal BBC Entertainment is being yanked from DStv after years of torturing us. BBC Knowledge is out too. Three new channels replace them.
11 Jun 2008
| Written by:
TVSA Team
| From:
| 3 comments
In the coming months various new channels will launch across DStv, most notably: BBC Prime and BBC Food will disappear to be replaced with double the viewing.
More activity at TVSA Central
You browser doesn't have Flash, Silverlight, Gears, BrowserPlus or HTML5 support.


text:
Sea N' Things
Hey guys another topic for discussion, what does everyone think of the new 340hp Indmar with the Catalytic Converter. My understanding is that all USA boats has to be equiped with the converter starting Jan 2012 and Canada will follow commencing Jan 2013. Does it really make that much of a difference? Is the 340hp harder on fuel than the 325hp? Is the biggest difference on the top end (speed) or bottom end (power)? I had someone say that the converter produces alot more heat in the engine compartment...?


text:
California's Best Santa Claus For Your Party
Are you looking for a reliable company that offers high quality Real Bearded Santa Clauses and Christmas party entertainment in California? Our Santas will WOW you and your guests. Fill out the form to the right or email us email@example.com to reserve your Authentic Bearded Santa Claus.
All year round, people anticipate the holidays as it is the season for gift-giving and merrymaking. Months prior to Christmas, people already start planning their holiday activities, vacations, outfits, gifts, home decorations, and parties. Everyone gets so excited when preparing for these events because it only happens once a year, so the mindset is that it has to be as perfect and magical as it can be. A great way to liven up your event is to hire a Real Beard Santa performer who doesn't use fake stuffing and only wears well-made costumes. Our California based naturally bearded Santa Claus impersonators are the perfect way to liven up your Christmas party! We have terrific Los Angeles Real Bearded Santa Claus actors that have appeared in TV commercials, print advertising, and of course, appeared in parades, community events and home visits. We basically have professionally trained actors throughout CA! In fact, some of the country's best Authentic Santas are based in San Francisco, San Diego, and Stockton, California.
HireSanta offers Real Bearded Santa performers who are ready to visit or make an appearance at your reunion, house party, charity, and so much more. Our Santa Claus actors are highly experienced, well trained, insured, and background checked. They are dedicated to bringing joy and reminding everyone of the spirit of Christmas.
Get ready to wow your guests and surprise your kids with your very own California Santa Claus. Just send an email to email@example.com and fill out the form above so you can secure a slot in Santa's busy calendar. If you are hosting a Beverly Hills children's party and needing a world class Santa Claus with a real beard and a jolly laugh to read stories at a pictures with Santa event, then we can help make the event a success with our Santas.


text:
Continuing in my spammer Hall of Shame series, here's an persistent (and ongoing) series of spam from Spencer Mains at a company called LiveRamp. Spencer, being the hipster type, is fond of "bumping his way to the top of my inbox", in an effort to just "circle up" and "hop on a call."
Category: Rants
Rants — Bitching and moaning
Spam from Designstraw
Since 2011, I've been receiving spam from this company, Designstraw, and always with the same, "We're looking to take on a few extra projects…"
May 9, 2011
May 10, 2012
June 26, 2013
Feb 17, 2015
June 3, 2015
Dec 14, 2015
June 14, 2016
Just another day in Spain
To give you a sense of life in Andalucia Spain, I present to you the short journey from my office in Marbella, to the small restaurant where I frequently have lunch.
We begin with the city employee doing some trimming. As we all know, safety equipment—i.e. a face shield and ear protection—are best left sitting off in the distance somewhere.
You can also see that the weed-whacker has no shield itself, so I feel fortunate to have made it past without having my life brought to a sudden end with a stone shot through my forehead.
(What's actually surprising about this photo, is that there's not five other city employees watching this guy do his job. My guess is that they're around the corner somewhere on break.)
Now it's time to cross the road. But as you can see, the driver of the Spa Experts van felt the zebra pedestrian crossing made an excellent parking place instead. (BTW, this van is parked here nearly every day.)
One last obstacle before arriving at the restaurant—the Mapfre driver evidently forgot what the purpose of a sidewalk is for.
All in all, just another day in Spain.
Disappointing support from WooThemes
Makalu was recently hired to redesign an e-commerce site running on WordPress, and implementing its shop using the WooCommerce system.
To begin the process, we mirrored the production site to a staging server, and over the course of a week or so redesigned the site using a new theming framework. The customer approved the new design, giving us the green light to launch. Unfortunately, launching wasn't as simple as flipping a switch.
The problem was that while we were working on the redesign, the production site's WooCommerce data progressed with respect to the data on the staging site—i.e. some new orders came in, and several of monthly subscriptions renewed. So before launching the redesigned site, we needed a way to selectively update the staging site with just the WooCommerce data from the production site.
But the problem with that is that Woo orders, being just another "content type" in WordPress, are found in the WordPress "Posts" table, and live alongside the short-code based definition of the site's web pages—meaning that if we copied over the entirety of the Posts table from Production to Staging, we'd lose all of our redesign work! (The architecture of WordPress is so brittle in that regard, but that's the subject of another post.)
I decided to contact WooThemes support, and after 10 days have gotten nowhere, as you'll see below.
Here's the question I posted on March 4th:
Four days later, Constantin Schneider replied, explaining that an FTP client is needed to synchronize files and a database plugin needed to synchronize the database:
So Constantin answered a question I didn't ask—i.e. how do you completely mirror one WordPress site to another. So I reminded him that I'm asking specifically how to move just WooCommerce data:
Two days later, I got a follow-up reply from Constantin saying he did understand my question, and that I should migrate only the tables containing Woo data. To help with that, he linked to a document which basically lists all tables prefixed with "woocommerce" as belonging to WooCommerce.
Of course, this completely ignores the point I raised about Woo orders being located in the Posts table, and therefore mixed in with the site's layout information. The needed update isn't as simple as moving the WooCommerce tables.
So I replied, pointing that out:
Four days later, Mindy Postoff replies, that yes, the Woo orders data does live in the Posts table:
Heavy sigh. Evidently, she didn't take the time to read the thread's history; otherwise, she would have known that by answering "yes" to that questions, that my original question remains completely unanswered!
So here we are, 10 days after my original post, and we have no progress at all. This is what happens, I guess, when your support staff try to blow through a backlog of requests at the speed of light. People don't take the time to understand what the customer is actually asking, nor do they take the time to understand the background context of a thread they're jumping into the middle of.
So disappointing. Thanks Woo.
Update: Woo makes things right
I notified Woo about this blog article, and credit where credit is due, they responded by acknowledging the deficiency in the process, apologizing for it, and taking some actions that went above and beyond what would be necessary to make things right. Hopefully this experience will allow Woo to re-consider how support is handled (which these days isn't just a challenge for Woo, but all providers trying to figure out how to scale support), but thanks and hats off to Mindy Postoff for her response, and I'm again a happy Woo customer.
Update 2: How we ultimately did the migration
Ah, for those of you stumbling across this article, and interested in how we finally migrated the data: Unfortunately, even with the extensions offered by Mindy as part of their effort to help, it turns out there simply does not exist a straightforward way to migrate only the WooCommerce data from one site to another. This is almost shockingly surprising, since one can only imagine that an occasional re-design would exist as part of the lifecycle of any WooCommerce-based site.
In the end, though, we had to actually take the production site offline, while we manually re-built it according to the work we did on staging. In our case, this was possible because of two things:
The new site is built using Divi, which provides a mechanism to export saved layouts, and then import them in another site. Not quite as convenient as something like "export this whole theme setup", but certainly better than having to manually re-build each page in Production. So the way this worked was, I exported a saved layout for each page in the site, and then imported that layout into the corresponding page on the Production site.
Our customer's site only has about 10 pages in total, and so it only took us about an hour (during which the site was offline) to completely rebuild it.
Get a Yahoo homepage when you install Java!
Seriously, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. While updating Java 8 to version 73, the Java installer presented me with this screen — offering me, a Yahoo Homepage & New Tab.
What has the world come to?
Those knee-jerk app reviews
The navigation app, Waze, changed their external access mechanism, which broke apps like Rego, that used the old access mechanism. While no fault of Rego, we updated the app as soon as were were notified of the problem. But that didn't stop a certain Rego customer from rushing off to leave a one-star review. Continue reading Those knee-jerk app reviews
Redactor II — It is difficult to describe the potential with words
A hybrid platform for your inventions…
Judging from the copy in their announcement of Redactor II—a rich-text editor—you'd think Imperavi just solved teleportation.
It is a good editor—but this is just a wee-bit over the top.
Need to remove PGP Whole Disk Encryption from a Mac
In dire frustration, I just posted the following to the Symantec forums:
I have a mid-2011 iMac, with an SSD startup drive. At some point during the lifetime of this Mac, I installed—and thought I uninstalled—PGP Whole Disk Encryption. Certainly the startup drive has not been encrypted for years.
It's now 2015, and I can't upgrade this Mac to OS X 10.11. When I try to reboot the machine after an upgrade, the strike-through circle is shown, indicating that there's no OS installed. The problem, I'm discovered, is related to this:
Apparently, the startup partition is of a scheme type:
Trying a clean install, I've determined that no combination of disk formatting or re-partitioning using Apple's Disk Uitilities can fix this. It seems the disk is instrumented with WDE in a way that simply can't be removed.
Trying to get this solved through Symantec support is a nightmare — the support portals have been migrated so many times since 2011, that the account information I see when logging in makes no sense. And just like the work-flow for posting in this forum—PGP for Mac isn't listed, and I have no idea what "community" to choose—all of Symantec seems designed for large corporation IT departments, rather than individual consumers.
The last PGP product I owned, was licensed back in 2011.
I'm hoping with this post, that someone here might be able to help me figure out how to get PGP definitely off this drive, so that I can upgrade the operating system. Thanks so much in advance.
Best regards,
Matt Henderson
Update — Symantec support on Twitter hooked me up with a great support engineer at Symantec named Mike Ankeny. His suggestion was:
- Boot to the OS X installer.
- Open the terminal utility.
- Run the following command in terminal: fdisk -u /dev/disk0
- Install OS X or restore from backup.
- Boot the system.
Can clarified that the reason for doing this was:
That command is actually going to rewrite the entire boot sector. The partition showing as com_pgp_wde_GUIDPartitionScheme_v2 is a false positive. The actual issue comes from an incomplete uninstall of PGP. The boot partition still retains some PGP flags, which try to redicrect the boot to the PGP configuration files, which no longer exist, so no operating system is found. Even though new boot information is written to the disk, the PGP data stuck in there gets in the way. A standard reinstall of OS X does not clear the boot partition first. After clearing the boot sector and reinstalling OS X, you should be back to a normal partition scheme.
I tried this, and ran into an error:
Could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory. Do you wish to write new MBR? [n]
I answered the second with "y", hit return, and was returned to the prompt. Running the fdisk command again resulted in the same thing. All my data remained on the disk, and so it seems nothing was done to the disk.
So I'm waiting for Mike to follow up.
Poor user experience design at CapitalOne
During the past few years, the financial institution CapitalOne hinted at the importance they give to design, through the acquisition of design companies Adaptive Path in 2014 and Monsoon in 2015.
My guess is that they've been focusing their efforts on the recently-released CapitalOne mobile app, which I have to say reflects some wonderful design work.
My hope is that in the future, they'll turn their attention to the website, which still suffers some usability problems like the following.
Curious whether my credit card auto-pay is properly configured, I visited the CapitalOne.com website today, and clicked on "Manage Auto-Pay". Here's where that led:
I was almost certain that I already had auto-pay setup, but it looks like I don't. In that case, let's click "Get Started" to set it up…
The red alert—cognitively communicating that I did something wrong and, furthermore, am attempting to do something disallowed (adding more than one AutoPay to an account)—reveals that in fact I did already have auto-pay setup, and so all my confusion and frustration was unnecessary.
The Deck's Updated Privacy Statement
Via DaringFireball, The Deck's updated privacy statement reads:
On rare occasions, we have allowed specific advertisers to use a simple 1×1 tracking pixel for limited periods of time. Given the current environment, we're not going to be doing that any more.
Saying your tracking was limited to an itty-bitty 1×1 tracking pixel, is like saying your lie was little and white. Tracking is tracking, just like a lie is a lie.
The Deck forgot that trust is like a piece of paper—once it's crumpled, it can't be perfect again.
John Gruber thinks this isn't complicated
John Gruber wanted Marco Arment to whitelist The Deck, because "it's not crap". When someone asked Gruber what Arment should do about other "non crap", his reply was to whitelist those too, as "This isn't complicated."
So what's Arment to do when the email arrives from the guy in Brazil saying, "Hey, you whitelisted The Deck. Can you whitelist this Brazilian ad network as well? I know you can't read the language, but take my word for it — it's not crap either." And then the request from Turkey. And then the request from China.
Gruber's view on this issue seems a bit short-sighted to me—It IS quite complicated.
PS: Of course, we all know by now that Arment pulled Peace from the App Store. And as expected in his usual passive-elitist style, he writes (paraphrasing):
What a success Peace has been—amazing! But having earned a bucket of money in 36 hours, I decided to pull the app from the store because—it just doesn't feel good. I'm getting heat from my buddies. I'm "winning", but I've not enjoyed it. And fortunately for me, I'm in a position such that I don't even need the success! And in case you're wondering why I couldn't figure all this out 36 hours ago—you know, before you all actually bought the app—don't bother asking, because I'm not going to reply to any mentions on Twitter. (Of course, any of you that have ever emailed or Tweeted to me before with a question about any other product of mine you bought, already know I don't reply — unless you're a buddy.)
Oh how I hate Intuit — Awful behavior from QuickBooks Online
Oh, how I hate Intuit. For lack of any decent alternative, I use QuickBooks Online. This morning, when opening the Mac app, I'm notified that an update has happened, and I find this giant un-dismissable block front and center in the UI:
Apparently I've been assigned a "Task" to complete some bloody setup. Clicking, I arrive to this screen:
I'm offered two "preferences" for QuickBooks Payroll, neither of which is, "I don't fucking want this service". Leaving the default selected, and clicking, "See your plan" leads to:
I don't want the "recommended" service, but there's only two links on this screen, "Back" or "Next".
Unbelievably, "Next" takes me back to the home screen of QuickBooks Online, giving the impression that nothing has happened, and STILL there is no way to cancel that giant damn "You have a task" block.
But here's the kicker — An email from Intuit arrives confirming that I'VE JUST SIGNED UP TO QUICKBOOKS PAYROLL for $30 per month, and if I want to cancel I HAVE TO CALL THEM!
So a "Next" button actually signs you up. No confirmation. No, "You're about to make a purchase."
Fuming that I had to spend my time with this, I called, and was told that the subscription has been cancelled. While they couldn't give me a cancellation confirmation code, they did say I'd receive a cancellation email in about 5 minutes. Well, 5 minutes later, here's what arrived:
Un. Fucking. Believable.
Reaching out to @QBCares on Twitter, they tried their best to help, and after DMing them my company ID, they did manage to cancel the payroll subscription, and I did then receive cancellation confirmation emails.
But then, unbelievably, 10 minutes after that I received a new set of welcome emails! OMG, and even the @QBCares people were face-palming. They did some more digging and reported it was a "v2" software bug, and they were immediately rolling back to "v1" to fix it.
I will repeat — Oh, how I hate Intuit.
Unbelievably bad experience with Skype (You just can't make this stuff up.)
Today I received an email from Skype, informing me that my Skype Number was about to expire, and that I didn't have enough "credits" to process the renewal:
My first inclination was change the payment method, but clicking that button in Safari did absolutely nothing.
Next, I tried to purchase some credits. Amazingly, the site doesn't tell you how many credits you need, so I tried purchasing $25, returned to the page, and it continued to report that I don't have enough credit. Same thing after another $10 purchase. And again after another $10 purchase!
When my account finally had $51 in credits I thought, "Jeez Louise! How much does one of these Skype numbers cost!?!"
At that point, tired of losing time, I thought I'd give Chrome a try, and see if the change-payment button issue was a browser incompatibility. Sure enough, it was, and I switched to credit card payment for the renewal.
Wanting to get my previous Skype-credit purchases refunded, I started a chat session with Skype Support, during which I was actually told that:
- It's not possible to know how many credits are needed to renew a Skype Phone number
- Even after purchasing enough credits to cover the renewal, the website will continue to report that you do NOT have enough credits.
- She's going to report this to the developers, so they can "add that feature".
You really have to read the following transcript yourself to truly appreciate the insanity.
You are now chatting with 'Karen E':
- Karen E: Hello! My name is Karen. Welcome to Skype Live Support! What can I help you with today?
- Matt H: Hello, to understand the problem I'm having, please see this screenshot: http://d.pr/i/1beKy
- Karen E: Hi there! I do apologize but I cannot see any screen shot here.
- Matt H: Are you telling me, you are unable to use a web browser while we are talking? The link I sent is to a web page that contains an image
- Karen E: Yes, I can use it, however, the screen shot you provided is blocked here in our end.
- Karen E: But I can send you an email now and you can reply to it and attach the screen shot.
- Matt H: Can you just try to open the link in your web browser?
- Karen E: I already did that, but again, it is blocked.
- Matt H: Ok, please sent the email.
- Karen E: Sending it now. By the way, may I have your Skype name and email address?
- Matt H: Before entering the chat, I was asked for my Skype name and email address. It seems sad that you don't have access to that information.
- Karen E: I understand. However, since we have new process now, we do not see your account information now. That's why we need to get your Skype name and email address. We do apologize for the inconvenience.
- Matt H: OK, you'll now sent the email? Can I attach the screenshot image to that email in reply?
- Karen E: Yes, please. I already sent the email and you can reply to it now.
- Matt H: OK, you should now have it. So here is the problem: When logging into Skype, I'm alerted to the fact that my Skype Number will expire in 2 days as I have insufficient Skype Credit. So my first question is: How much credit is needed? But guess what? — There's no way to know how much credit is needed.
- Karen E: As I can see here, your skype number is worth $24.00. You will not be informed on how much Skype credits you needed. This is because Skype credits has fixed amount. Do not worry, I will take note of this and will forward this to our developers.
- Karen E: As I have also noticed on your screen shot, you mentioned that when you click on change payment method, nothing happens after. Does something pop up or did you get any error messages?
- Matt H: Nothing happens. It's broken in Safari on the Mac. You would imagine it would be tested on such a common browser, but evidently not.
- Karen E: Oh I understand. Do you have any browser? Can you try to change the payment method again using IE? This is for us to isolate the issue.
- Matt H: Since the website doesn't inform the user how much credit is needed, I started purchasing credits, hoping to eventually see this screen update with a message like, "OK, you now have enough credit." Eventually, after two purchases, the website reported that my credit balance was $51 And this screen STILL reports I don't have enough credits. So I finally tried it on Chrome, and found that the Change Payment Method works And so I switched it to credit card.
- Karen E: Oh okay, I understand.
- Matt H: So now, I would like my purchases refunded, as I don't need $51 of credits.
- Karen E: All right for your first concern, yes, you will not notified if you already have sufficient funds. For Skype number that's payment method is Skype credits, you just need to add credits on your account (make sure that it will cover the amount of your number) then your number will automatically renew within 24 hours.
- Karen E: I am adding this now to the lists that I can forward to our developers. And for the browser, we really cannot assure that your browser will work, so if that happens we highly suggest to use different brower.
- Karen E: I can process a refund for you. Do you have an order number for those Skype credits?
- Matt H: There were three orders, for $25, $10 and $10
- Karen E: Thank you very much, is that all? Let me refund this for you now.
- Matt H: I still have a question: If you're going to tell the user that they don't have enough credits to renew their number, and you're not going tell them how many credits they need, then why doesn't this alert clear itself after they've purchased enough credits? You said my phone number needs $24, but the alert remained active even after I purchased $51 of credits.
- Karen E: As mentioned, Skype credits has fixed amount. Meaning once you purchase it, it will show you the amount you purchased. No worries, I have already forwarded this to our developers, currently, Skype does not have the option to alert you once you have reached the amount of your number.
- Matt H: What I'm saying is, once my credit balance was $51, why does the alert still say, "You don't have enough credits". If the balance on my account is $10,000 would it continue to report that I don't have enough credits?
- Karen E: Yes, that is correct, that option is not available in Skype yet. But do not worry, we are already aware of this and our developers are working on this feature. We do apologize for this inconvenience.
- Matt H: Ok, well, it will be really great when that feature is available, so that if I have enough credits on the account, the website will not report that I do NOT have enough credits. Please tell the developers I appreciate the effort for going the last mile to consider such subtle details.
- Karen E: I do understand that. Thank you for raising this up. Hopefully, this feature will be added soon.
- Matt H: I hope so, too. And thank you for your the help today.
- Karen E: You are most welcome Matt 🙂 It's been a pleasure assisting you today. I hope you continue to enjoy Skype. Have a great and safe day!
Poor 4G network performance with my iPhone 6
While traveling this past week, and staying in a hotel with awful wifi, I tried working with my MacBook Air tethered to my iPhone 6. The network performance seemed almost as bad as the hotel wifi, even though presumably I had a good 4G connection.
By chance, I tried tethering to my iPad mini, connected to the same Vodafone 4G network, and the performance was much better.
Running SpeedTest on both devices revealed terrible performance on the iPhone, compared to the iPad:
As you can see, download speeds of 37 megabits per second on the iPad, but only 0.5 megabits per secondfor the iPhone. And a similar story with upload speeds.
Both devices are connected to the same Vodafone 4G network. Both are running iOS 8.4. The only difference I can see is the carrier profile settings — version 20.0 on the iPad and 20.1 in the iPhone.
After resetting my iPhone to factory settings, which allowed me to revert to carrier settings version 20.0—a process, btw, that took a few hours, since a full restore-from-backup is required—the network problems went away, and I again had 40ms ping times, and 50+ Mbit of download and upload.
A few days later, though, getting tired of having to cancel the carrier update alert, I allowed it to update the carrier settings to 20.1 and immediately experienced the networking problems again. I noticed, however, that if I activate a VPN over 4G, everything is fine.
A friend of mine has an iPhone 6 with the 20.1 carrier setting, and his iPhone's 4G networking works fine. So it seems to be some problem with version 20.1 settings specifically on my iPhone.
Unfortunately, I can't find any way to revert carrier settings, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to reset and restore the phone again. 🙁
Awful experience ordering from Timbuk2's European distributor
Update — Timbuk2 is really a great company. After posting the story below, the head of Timbuk2 European operations reached out to inform me that the company operating the Timbuk2.eu website is unaffiliated with Timbuk2, and that later this year Timbuk2 will have its formal Europe-wide distribution channel in place, hopefully putting an end to this confusing situation.
And in the meantime, they've dispatched to our office the bag that my colleague intended to order. Even if it's not their fault, they don't want any such situation to be associated with their brand. What great customer service!
As a long-time satisfied Timbuk2 bag carrier, all purchased back when I lived in the US, I convinced my Finnish office colleague to give their products a try. As we live in Spain, he ordered a bag through what appears to be Timbuk2's European distributor, timbuk2.eu. The experience was absolutely awful.
- One hour after placing his order for an XS-sized bag, he realized that the material was different than the same-colored S-sized bag he had been looking at when deciding what to order.
- He immediately emailed Timbuk2 to change the color of the order, so that his XS-sized bag would at least be made of the material he wanted.
- His email, and three follow-ups went unanswered.
- Doing some googling, he found a second website apparently operated by the same people. That website listed another email address, and so he tried there.
- He received a reply simply stating, "Here's your tracking link", with no reference to the change of order he'd requested.
- To add insult to injury, the tracking link was to someone else's order! (Somebody in Germany!)
- After three more emails went unanswered, he finally wrote, "If you don't confirm my change of order, I'm going to cancel the order."
- That email was immediately answered with, "Here's a different tracking link. Your bag arrive soon." (in broken English).
- All subsequent emails asking, "But did you understand my change of order?" went unanswered.
Today, his bag arrived, and his order had indeed been changed—and completely screwed up. They sent him the wrong color and wrong size! (They sent him an S-sized bag, of another color.)
He doesn't know what to do now. Should he accept the wrong-sized bag, in the wrong color? (He spent a couple weeks with my own XS- and S-sized models, before carefully deciding that he wanted the XS size.) But he can't bear the thought of trying to organize a return with these people.
It's simply hard to imagine that a company with the brand trust that Timbuk2 has in the United States, would condone such awful operations in Europe.
The "repaired" zipper on my Tom Bihn Co-Pilot
The main compartment zipper on my Tom Bihn Co-Pilot zipper broke a month or so ago. To avoid the round-trip cost of sending the bag back to the United States from Spain to have Tom Bihn repair it, they suggested I give a try to having it repaired locally. I paid nearly $20, and here's the result — a "magic' zipper that doesn't close.
Next step will be to reach out to Tom Bihn to ask whether they could ship me a zipper, that I have locally installed.
Why the Flickr Mac Uploader needs to stop auto-creating albums
Recently, Flickr introduced a Mac Uploader application, promoting the idea that with 1TB of free storage, Mac users could now store a copy of all their photos at Flickr, conveniently and automatically. In the interest of redundancy, I installed the Mac Uploader, and pointed it to the "Photos Library.photoslibrary" package file that's managed by Photos.app.
Soon afterwards, I discovered a potential show-stopper in my use of the Flickr Mac Uploader—it auto-creates a Flickr album for every sub-folder it finds within the local folders it monitors. So today, in this tweet, I mentioned that if Flickr do not change this behavior, I'll have to stop using the Uploader.
The folks manning the lines at @FlickrHelp responded in a way that would suggest that they do not understand the distinction between how people locally manage their photos, and how people want to use Flickr.
Flickr needs to understand the following:
- People commonly store their photos locally in a folder hierarchy. That folder hierarchy contains all their photos.
- People commonly use Flickr as a place to create a curated set of albums. These curated albums represent a subset of the person's photos.
FlickHelp's response would suggest that their expectation is that all my photos are stored locally in one big, flat folder.
In my case, within Photos.app on my Mac, I organize my photos into albums like, "2015-06 Trip to Granada". At the filesystem level (inside the package file), Photos.app then stores the Master files in a sub-folder with the same name.
Historically, after organizing my new photos in contextually logical albums in Photos.app, I've always then selected a curated sub-set of these photos—generally no more than 30—and uploaded just those into a new album at Flickr, for personal enjoyment and sharing.
So whereas my local photo storage contained all my photos, Flickr has always been the place for just the best.
But the problem now is that the Flickr Mac Uploader sees all these sub-folders created by Photos.app in its local storage, and then auto-creates albums at Flickr, completely breaking the fundamental purpose for which I've always used Flickr. Now, my Flickr albums now containing all my photos, instead of just the best!
Hopefully this now explains the situation, and hopefully this makes its way in front of whoever at Flickr has the authority to make a change, and remove the behavior in the Mac Uploader of auto-creating albums, or at least provides a preference to disable that behavior.
Update — Having read my article, the folks @FlickrHelp replied with a suggestion that I point the Flickr Uploader to a folder called, "Best":
I get that they are trying to be friendly and helpful, but after reading this, I'm now almost certain that the people behind @FlickrHelp neither manage their own photos, nor use the Flickr service. In a nutshell, here's what he (or she) is suggesting:
- I create a local folder called, "Best", and point the Flickr Uploader to it.
- Within that folder "Best", I create sub-folders for the albums I want in Flickr.
- From within Photos.app, I export the photos I want in Flickr to those album sub-folders in my "Best" folder.
- Flickr Uploader then uploads those photos, creating my desired albums.
And here are the two obvious issues that anyone familiar with photo management and/or Flickr would immediate understand:
- This suggestion kills Flickr's own promoted benefit, of putting all your photos in the service.
- If I only want a subset of my photos in Flickr, using the on-demand Flickr uploader that's built into apps like Photos.app would be infinitely more convenient than the process described above!
Privacy invasion — Vodafone Spain has become the new NSA
This morning, my colleague surfed over to Daring Fireball on his iPhone, via the Vodafone Spain 4G network. Here's what he saw — a strange red bar appearing at the top of the screen.
Tapping the bar revealed a Vodafone Spain security slide-over, with a "Service Access" button:
Tapping the Service Access button brings us into the "Vodafone Secure Net" area—completely with the obligatory system error message (it is Vodafone after all)—and providing access to user-adjustable security settings, including file and virus blocks, and the blocking of web pages that Vodafone considers insecure.
Finally, tapping the hamburger menu icon provides access to an area where a user can view their access records.
It's currently empty—presumably due to the same system error behind the error message on the first screen—but one thing is clear: The intent of the system is to track and record all the websites I visit using my iPhone, and so Vodafone Spain has become the new NSA.
QuickBooks Online and the un-dismissable guide
A while back I switched from using QuickBooks for Mac 2012, to using QuickBooks Online. The online service includes a Mac app, which is little more than an HTML wrapper. As such, it suffers horribly from caching issues, but that's for another article. For today's rant, let's look at what's permanently pinned to the bottom of the Mac app's window:
This is a "Show Me How" guide, that includes three tutorials in which the app will walk you through the process of creating an invoice, customizing a report and adding a user.
I already know how to do all that, so I'd simply like to dismiss this window, since even when collapsed, the "Show Me How" label obscures controls like the "Reconcile" button.
Chatting with the friendly Twitter people @QBCares, I've learned that you actually have to go through the tutorials before the guide is dismissable.
Unlike every other product I've used that offered a guide, there's no option to simply "skip" it!
Online filing of FBARs (FinCEN Report 114) still requires Adobe Reader
Each year, American citizens, residents and green-card holders are required to report their interests in foreign financial accounts on the FinCEN Report 114 form—more commonly known as the "FBAR". This report can be filed online at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network BSA E-Filing System.
(The very name of the website suggests that the government's default position is that you've somehow already committed a crime.)
In the past, filing one's FBARs required the Adobe Reader plugin to be running inside the browser. So this year, I was pleased to find the FBAR website reporting a second option, in which specifically, "Adobe Reader is NOT Required":
Upon submitting the data using the "Online Form" option, the FBAR website provided me with a link to download a PDF document that I'm advised to "retain indefinitely" as evidence of my filing. But here's the kicker—to read the downloaded PDF file, REQUIRES ADOBE READER!
Here's what you see when opening the PDF in OS X Preview.
And this is what the same PDF looks like when opened in Adobe Reader:
So how do we get a copy of this PDF in a format that can be read by something other than Adobe Reader?
Well, the first thing you might think to try is "Print to PDF"—creating a new "normal" copy. Unfortunately, that doesn't work:
Reading this dialog box, your second idea might be to create a new version through the "File → Save" mechanism. Nope, that doesn't work either; with that, you'll just get another PDF that requires Adobe Reader to read.
Turns out, the only option you have for generating a receipt of your submitted FBARs in a form that doesn't require Adobe Reader is to print out a paper copy from within Adobe Reader, and then scan them back into your computer.
Welcome to 1998!
Bank of America Online—Get ready for a major change!
Bank of America are making a change to their website so dramatic they need to continually remind me about it—starting six months in advance.
What kind of change could be so important? Are you sitting down? They are going to put the username and password on a single screen instead of two, and will drop the display of my "SiteKey" image.
Of course I've created a new high-priority OmniFocus project called, "Get ready for the Bank America login change", and will soon fill it with all the actions needed to ensure I'm fully prepared when they finally flip the switch on this at the end of the year.
Thanks for the head's up, Bank of America; I'll be ready.
Auto-creation of albums in Flickr uploader for Mac
For years, my photo management workflow has involved:
- Importing my photos into whatever Mac application I was using at the time—beginning with iPhoto, then later Aperture, most recently, Photos.
- Organizing those imports into a chronological folder structure of events.
For those really special events, selecting a sub-set of edited photos (usually less than 30) and uploading those into a new album at Flickr.
p>And so Flickr was the place that contained our family's collection of publicly accessible, carefully curated photo albums.
Recently Flickr rolled out a new auto-uploader utility for Mac. Like many people, I decided to take advantage of the free terabyte of data Flickr now offer, and use the uploader to monitor and upload all photos from my Photos library. By default, all uploaded photos are marked private, and so I figured this system would serve as a good backup of my photo library.
After uploading some 30,000 images, however, I discovered a huge problem: The Flickr uploader created a new Flickr Album for every single folder of photos I've ever created in the above-listed Step 2.
So now, instead of a carefully curated set of perhaps 100 albums at Flickr, I now have over 1,400!
The situation is made worse:
- There's no way to select multiple albums for batch-deletion.
- There's no way to auto-arrange albums alphabetically in Flickr. So I now have albums with names like "1998 Nepal" listed ahead of albums like "2010 Trip to San Francisco", and the only way to correct this is to manually drag the album around within the "Organizr" interface.
I recognize the convenience in auto-creating albums, and so I can't really complain that Flickr chose to do that. But for goodness sake, Flickr, please improve album management, so that I can reasonably clean-up the particular mess I've found myself in.
It's confirmed—Garmin is out the game
A couple of days ago, I wrote about Garmin losing their way in UI/UX design. Then yesterday, I tweeted a feature request feature request to them.
Garmin is one of those companies whose tweets all end with a weird sort of abbreviated signature of the person tweeting—"^AJ" from Bank of America, or in this case, "*CG" from Garmin. I've always wondered whether these companies are all outsourcing their social media to the same provider, or are all using the same "hook-up-Twitter-to-your-customer-support" platform.
Either way, a common characteristic of these companies is that you'll never get anything done through Twitter, and that was the case here. "CG", rather than passing on the feature suggestion, pointed me to a web form where I can "submit my ideas to their engineers". (I might have an idea now why design has suffered at Garmin…)
The suggestion form at Garmin asks me to categorize my idea, and, get ready for it, here are the options:
As a consumer, I'm asked to pick whether my idea relates to "On the Road", "Into Sports" or "On the Go"? Seriously, what's the difference between those? And do they expect a consumer to even know what "OEM" means?
I find myself wondering whether it even matters which category I pick. With choices like these, surely it can't. And if it doesn't, why show me this in the first place?
After submitting your idea, Garmin are diligent about making it abundantly clear that (a) you're not going to hear back from them, and (b) don't try following up.
Good job, Garmin. You've officially lost it.
The Philips phone that's going to cause me to lose my hearing
After years of using Siemens phones at work, I replaced the last phone with this one from Philips—and as a consequence I'm going to lose my hearing.
Every phone I've owned has worked in the following way: The act of pulling the phone out of the base answers the call—i.e. it rings, you pull it out of the base, put it to your ear, and start talking.
Not so with the Philips. With the Philips, you actually have to press the green telephone icon to answer the call.
The consequence of that, of course, is that now when the phone rings, I pick it up, put it to my ear, say "Hello" and then…the phone blasts the next ring directly into my ear!
Philips — The company all about Innovation. Design. Change.
PS: If you've called me recently, and I seem to be in a bad mood when answering, you now know why.
What happened to UI/UX design at Garmin?
From the design of recent Garmin products, I'm guessing they fired their UI/UX team and delegated this activity to overseas outsourcing or something. To understand where I'm coming from with that sentiment, let's fire up the new Garmin Express for Mac app and take a look.
At launch, you're presented with this distinctly non-Mac, way-too-tall yet unresizable window (it's long, so be sure to keep scrolling):
The design of this window, and importance given to the "Add" action, suggests that Garmin believes the average customer owns several devices, and adds them frequently. I have only one device, so this screen just slows me down. Let's click "Forerunner 910XT".
I'm comfortably reassured that my device is syncing my queue—as opposed to, say, someone else's queue.
And thinking about it, I have no idea what other activities could happen here in parallel that would even justify the use of the word "queue". Perhaps it's related to the assumption that I'm using multiple devices? Is the expectation that I would typically arrive to my desk with an armful of Garmin products needing to be synced? Anyway…
Syncing is now complete, and we see that my queue was last synced "@ 7:16 AM". The slight cognitive load of having to interpret the symbol "@" is presumably justified by the saving of one character on the screen compared to just writing out the word "at".
And although I last synced "Today" @ 7:16am (capitalized, of course, because Today is special), it appears that I last "checked" @ 7:12am—an unexplained discrepancy that, if nothing else, serves to conclude the sync workflow leaving me feeling slightly uneasy.
Now let's go visit the Garmin Connect website, where my data has been sent.
The Connect website presents me with an environment of multiple "dashboards", each containing multiple informational "cards"—configuration and flexibility taken to the extreme.
I've created a new "untitled" dashboard, so let's go see if we can figure out how to add some cards to it.
Well, it's not done by clicking the dropdown menu to the right of "untitled". That's for renaming and deleting the dashboard.
And it's not done by clicking the "plus" icon to the right of the screen; that adds an entirely new dashboard.
What about that hamburger menu control on the left? If we hover over that, a menu slides open exposing three gray-colored, and unfortunately unlabeled, icons.
Since I've otherwise run out of things to click on, I'm expecting that surely one of these options allows adding of dashboard cards. But clicking each in succession, I unfortunately discover that's not the case.
I'm guessing at this point most people would give up—but I'm a product guy dammit and I know there has to be some way add cards to this new dashboard!
In a frustrated flurry of clicking, I finally crack it — It turns out that the hamburger menu control icon has a double function! If, after hovering over it, you actually click the menu control icon itself, a sub-menu appears containing a list of cards that can be added to the dashboard!
So here we have a hamburger icon that, on hover, triggers the opening of a slide-out menu—a common UI pattern we've all become accustomed to nowadays from mobile apps. Inside this menu, we find three gray-colored icons—visually communicating access to three functionalities. But in reality, although it's visually hidden, this menu area actually provides access to four! And rather than simply adding a fourth gray-colored menu item, the designer of this interface chose to hide the fourth, perhaps most important, functionality behind the menu control icon itself.
So confusing, so illogical, so undiscoverable—it's honestly quite difficult to imagine how one could even come up with that. But on reflection, perhaps it's not so surprising coming from a designer who would abbreviate "at" with "@" elsewhere in the interface. In any case, this is a prime example of the deterioration of design at Garmin. And for a company that's likely to find it increasingly harder to compete on hardware, software design is pretty much all they have left!


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Corporate America's well-oiled compensation machine is running like a dream.
Browse the proxy statements of the nation's largest corporations and you'll find the instruction manuals for this apparatus explaining how to finely calibrate the pay of top executives with company performance.
The Coca-Cola board, for example, lays out the formula that set the 2013 cash bonus for Muhtar Kent, its chief executive (base salary x base salary factor x business performance factor). It explains how a failure to achieve certain goals helped limit the bonus to $2 million, but also describes how Mr. Kent got millions more in stock and options. It notes that under his leadership, Coke had "continued to gain value share globally in nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverages," and tells shareholders why the board might require him to fly on the company jet ("to allow travel time to be used productively for the Company"). What was all that worth? A tidy $18 million.
But putting aside whether those particular metrics for aligning pay with performance make sense (or, rather, turning over that discussion to Gretchen Morgenson in her Fair Game column), the elegant machine itself would seem to have a dark side. Some say, in fact, that it is the main engine of inequality in America today.
The current system of executive compensation, with its emphasis on performance, can theoretically constrain pay, but in practice it has not stopped companies from paying their top executives more and more. The median compensation of a chief executive in 2013 was $13.9 million, up 9 percent from 2012, according the Equilar 100 C.E.O. Pay Study, conducted for The New York Times. The 100 C.E.O.s in the survey took home a combined $1.5 billion last year, a slight rise from 2012. And the pay-for-performance metrics — particularly the idea of paying executives with stock to align their interests with shareholders — may even have amplified that trend. In some ways, the corporate meritocrat has become a new class of aristocrat.
Economists have long known that high executive pay has contributed to the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else. But the role of executive compensation may be far larger than previously realized.
In "Capital in the 21st Century," (Belknap Press), a new best seller that is the talk of economics circles, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics makes a staggering observation. His numbers show that two-thirds of the increase in American income inequality over the last four decades can be attributed to a steep rise in wages among the highest earners in society. This, of course, means people like the C.E.O.s in the Equilar survey, but also includes a broader class of highly paid executives. Mr. Piketty calls them "supermanagers" earning "supersalaries."
"The system is pretty much out of control in many ways," he said in an interview.
This is not to say that boards always bow to C.E.O.s; some boards will swat executives who fail to meet their metrics. Among C.E.O.s of the 100 largest companies (by revenue) that had filed proxies by April 4, some 26 had been given a pay cut, according to Equilar, an executive compensation data firm. One was Mr. Kent of Coca-Cola, who took a 16 percent cut and may not ultimately get all of his 2013 award if targets aren't met. But even if they made less money, chief executives were making extraordinary sums. Some received substantial raises: David N. Farr, the C.E.O. of Emerson Electric, the industrial giant, took home $25.3 million, up 264 percent from 2012. (Mr. Farr got most of his pay, $21.6 million, in stock.) Mark Polzin, an Emerson spokesman, said that if the company is doing well, the structure of the package might cause a spike in Mr. Farr's pay every few years.
The stocks of many companies posted robust performance in 2013, which could also help drive C.E.O. pay higher.
The pay of John T. Chambers, the long-serving chief executive of Cisco Systems, jumped 80 percent, to $21 million, most of it in stock. The strong returns on Cisco's shares — up 63 percent during the company's 2013 fiscal year — played a substantial role in determining his raise.
Rupert Murdoch of 21st Century Fox made $26.1 million for the 2013 fiscal year, during which his company's stock rose 46 percent. Disney's shares didn't fare quite as well, gaining 23 percent, and its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, was given a 7 percent pay cut. Still, he made $34.3 million, the second-highest total in the survey. Zenia Mucha, a Disney spokeswoman, said in an email that 93 percent of Mr. Iger's compensation was based on performance.
(Many large companies had not filed proxies by the April 4 survey deadline, including CBS, which filed last week. The CBS chief executive, Leslie Moonves, made more than $65 million in 2013, according to the filings. In June, results of an additional survey, including companies that file through the end of May, will appear in Sunday Business.)
Wall Street executives are still royally rewarded, but the C.E.O.s of financial firms did not often figure in the upper echelons of the pay survey. Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, who made nearly $20 million, was the highest-paid chief executive at a regulated Wall Street firm. But Mr. Blankfein's compensation was a mere fraction of some of his peers' in the so-called shadow-banking sector, where regulation is much lighter. Publicly traded private equity firms like Blackstone and Apollo Global Management were not included on the list because their revenue was too low, but their chief executives made a fortune last year. Leon D. Black of Apollo earned more than a half-billion dollars in 2013, according to data in company filings, though that included income that would not have been counted in Equilar's survey.
Of the 100 executives on the Equilar list, only nine were women. The highest-paid, Phebe N. Novakovic of General Dynamics, earned $18.8 million, an amount that placed her behind 20 men in the ranking.
The two lowest-paid executives in the survey were Warren E. Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway and Larry Page of Google — with Mr. Page earning a symbolic $1. But they aren't hurting financially: Both are founders and own stakes in their companies that are worth many billions.
No Perfect Incentives
Executive pay has undergone many changes in recent years to make it more shareholder-friendly. As well as including a plethora of performance metrics, proxies have become more transparent and easier to understand. And shareholders have been given ways to express dissatisfaction over compensation in "say on pay" votes.
"We have pay for performance as we've designed it," said James E. Kim, a managing director at Frederic W. Cooke, a compensation consulting firm. "And it is much better than it was when I started in the business 15 years ago."
But to some skeptics, the new metrics have become an elaborate means to rationalize excessive pay. "The problem with the pay-for-performance approach is that it is simply impossible to create perfect incentives," Lynn Stout, a law professor at Cornell and a critic of the current compensation system. "And if you try, you may in fact create bad incentives."
Ms. Stout places much blame on a crucial tax-code change made in the early 1990s. The rule eliminated tax deductions on compensation above $1 million that wasn't linked to performance. The change, she said, helped prompt widespread use of pay-for-performance metrics. But as that trend grew, pay kept climbing even when shareholder returns suffered.
"I think it's fair to say that the experiment has failed," Ms. Stout said.
Stock-based compensation — options and shares combined — has risen as a percentage of overall pay in recent years. It was 63 percent of the total in 2013, up from 60.2 percent in 2006, according to Equilar. This is meant to be a good thing: Paying in stock can motivate executives to get the share price higher, which, of course, will benefit shareholders.
But as corporate boards place their faith in stock-based plans, they may decide to award even more stock, and when the market is rising, that can lead to enormous paydays when executives eventually cash out. The compensation apparatus, despite its checks and balances, ends up pushing pay ever higher.
"It has always been difficult for shareholders to properly control their managers," Mr. Piketty, the economist, said. "I am not sure that has changed much."
Government policy makers can continue to leave the pay machine alone, in the belief that they should do little to influence the rules of business. But that stance may be harder to maintain if executive pay continues to be the main cause of income inequality, as Mr. Piketty says.
In 1960, the top 10 percent of earners in the United States took in 33.5 percent of all income, which includes wages and investment returns, according to data in Mr. Piketty's book that is derived from decades of income tax records. By 2010, that share had risen to 47.9 percent. Higher wages were behind two-thirds of that increase, according to his data. Mr. Piketty says that a ballooning of senior executive pay can explain a large proportion of that wage climb.
One remedy might be to extend potentially attractive stock and options awards deeper into the ranks. That already happens at some technology companies, but is not as widespread in companies with lower-paid work forces.
Coca-Cola's new stock plan, for instance, is available to only 5 percent of its work force, a point raised by a critic of the company's compensation, David J. Winters of Wintergreen Advisers, an investment firm. "That's worrisome," he said. "You want people who are motivated and you don't want people who resent the top people."
In response, Gloria K. Bowden, a Coca-Cola associate general counsel, said, "This plan covers a large number of employees — 6,400 employees, currently — and it's just one method we have to provide stock ownership to employees." The company, for instance, encourages stock ownership through its 401(k) plans.
Some rank-and-file employees aren't interested in gambling on the upside of stock. They would just like to be paid more in cash. One is Charles Jordan, a longtime part-time worker for United Parcel Service at a depot in the Bronx, and a shop steward for the Teamsters union. U.P.S.'s chief executive, D. Scott Davis, earned $10.3 million last year.
"I don't think there is anyone who's doing a job that's worth that amount," said Mr. Jordan, who favors more profit-sharing for workers. "The business structures in this country have just got to change so there is more profit-sharing."Andy McGowan, a spokesman for U.P.S., said that "we are 107 years old and we've always been a pay-for-performance company."
C.E.O.s vs. Average Joes
In coming months, a new corporate disclosure could add fuel to the debate over executive pay and inequality. In 2010, as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress passed a rule that requires public companies to disclose the ratio of the C.E.O.'s pay to the median compensation at the firm. The main objective was to give shareholders a yardstick for comparing pay practices across companies, said Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who sponsored the provision.
But he acknowledged that the ratio could serve another function. "Productivity can't come from the person at the top of the pyramid alone," Mr. Menendez said. "You want a well-compensated work force to bring productivity and the execution to improve the bottom line."
The ratio has plenty of opponents in corporate America, who argue that it will be expensive to calculate and won't provide useful insight into how companies are really paying workers. Even some people who are skeptical about the status quo don't like it, including Ms. Stout at Cornell. She suggested an alternative ratio that would compare the chief executive's pay to the federal minimum wage, a number that would not cost companies anything to calculate. It could also serve another function: She proposes eliminating any tax deductibility for executive compensation that is more than 100 times the minimum wage. "It is simple and sweet," she said.
Mr. Piketty favors a measure that has a bit more tang.
He supports a substantially higher tax rate for top earners. And while he acknowledges that this is an imperfect tool, he rejects the argument that such a tax could dent the morale of executives and cause their companies to underperform.
"It is possible to find hard-working managers who are willing to be paid 20 times the average wage at their company rather than 100 to 200 times," he said.
(For another tax suggestion for reducing inequality, see the Economic View column by Robert J. Shiller.)
The fact that Congress is highly unlikely to approve a higher tax rate anytime soon does not discourage Mr. Piketty.
"Things," he said, "can change faster than we think."


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Today I thought I would share a few things I have been loving through out this month. Not only have I been really enjoying many makeup and beauty products but I also have been loving some foodie items!
Since the weather has been so lovely here in England, I've been all about that GLOW, and to help me achieve that I've been really enjoying the Topshop pressed highlighter in 'Cresent Moon'. As a fairly pale lady (when I say pale, I mean white like paper) it's a fab champagne toned highlighter full of micro glitter that leaves a very intense sheen which is perfect for my fair skin! At a pretty decent price of £10.00 for 6.5 grams, it's a must have in my everyday makeup kit.
Keeping the makeup theme, I have recently discovered the new Loreal cushion foundation in the shade '01 porcelain' which I have found to be the perfect coverage for the days I am at work, when I need a little something but not too much coverage. I apply the product with a buffing brush and usually layer it up to 4 or 5 coats. The great thing about this is that it's so light that you can apply as many layers as needed and it will never cake up. It costs £9.99 and comes in a handy little compact with a mirror and a flat sponge.
Lastly on the beauty section I've been obsessed with this huge pot of loveliness from the brand Calcot Manor. The Lazy Evening Moisture Soufflé is a gorgeously scented body moisturiser that I use after my bath in the evenings after a long day. The deep woody with a slight fruity scent really helps me to wind down and relax for the night and for a mere £6.00 you can get this massive 500ml tub at your local Tesco! I defiantly have to check out more of the Calcot Manor products as I'm in love with this body butter!
On the flip side, over the past few months I have been trying to get into more of a healthy lifestyle by eating more fruit and vegetables and going to the gym more. I've also been loving snacking on raw veggies rather than impulsingly buying crisps or chocolate, but I will go into depth in another blog post, I may even do a what I eat in a day or healthy recipes sort of post!
That's it! I hope you've enjoyed this months favourites. This month should be a good one as its my birthday month (woohoo) ((21st on the 10th of June)) and it's also officially summer so expect lots of summery outfit posts!
Post soon,
Love Danielle xoxo


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House Ag Committee Hearing: SNAP (Food Stamps)
At a House Agriculture Committee hearing on Wednesday that focused on the SNAP program and nutrition issues, Chairman Mike Conaway (R., Tex.) indicated that, "[The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)] is the largest program under the Committee's jurisdiction, and today's hearing marks the beginning of a top-to-bottom review of the program. We will conduct this review without preconceived notions and with a commitment to strengthening the program so it can serve as a tool to help individuals move up the economic ladder."
Chairman Conaway added that, "We can all agree that no one ought to go hungry in America, and SNAP is essential in protecting the most vulnerable citizens during tough times. For many it is a vital lifeline to keeping food on the table. What we don't want is for this program to hold people back from achieving their potential. I believe there is a role for SNAP, but we need to have a complete and clear understanding of its mission and purpose."
Robert Greenstein, President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and University of Maryland Professor Douglas J. Besharov were the only two witnesses at Wednesday's hearing.
In prepared testimony, Prof. Besharov noted that, "I applaud this committee's multi-faceted re-examination of the program, its past, present, and future. Based on my research and analysis, I think the key challenge is to modernize a massive program that started as a small program of food assistance to become the primary US program of income support."
Prof. Besharov added that, "That would mean coordinating the SNAP program with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Unemployment Insurance, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and other tax credits. In doing so, there should be an effort to rationalize the current patchwork of programs that make up the US safety-net in a way that balances what looks to be long-term weak demand for labor economic with the need to minimize the work and marriage disincentives in current law."
Prof. Besharov pointed out that, "Today, instead of hunger, the central nutritional problem facing the poor, indeed all Americans, is not too little food but, rather too much—or at least too many calories. Although there are still some pockets of real hunger in America, they are predominantly among populations with behavioral or emotional problems."
In his testimony, Prof. Besharov explained that, "As I have described, states are financially and politically rewarded when they move people off UI and TANF (programs with at least some activation requirements) and on to SNAP. This incentive was not created deliberately, but, rather, is a historic accident of how and when the programs were established…[R]eal reform probably requires that the states be made financial partners of the federal government. States should have a more direct financial stake in the proper governance of SNAP programs, including of eligibility determinations. Given that all program funds come from the federal government, a substantial liberalization of eligibility determinations was predictable. State officials have little reason to be cost conscious—as long as program funds seem available."
During the discussion portion of Wednesday's hearing, House Ag Nutrition Subcommittee Chairwoman Jackie Walorski (R., Ind.) had this exchange with Prof. Besharov:
Rep. Walorski: "And I guess as we've talked about today, we've talked about the issue of how do families, how do single moms and how do underemployed families pay for food, and healthcare, and lodging, and daycare, how does all this happen. And my question is, when they finally get to a point where they have figured all this out, what then does the government do to really help these families?
"Has the SNAP program historically been just a Band-Aid to pass them on to the next…somebody else to deal with them or is there a sense that, you know, there's an opportunity to actually look at what this government can do, should do, and actually getting real help to the financial challenges and how this happened to begin with? So I guess just historically, where do you see this? Has this always just been a Band-Aid to try to get people along or is there a long-term solution that's been talked about?"
Prof. Besharov: "Well, I think the world's changed. Before 1996 we would have had this conversation about TANF. And what happened was when the Congress reformed TANF and the case loads went way down, the SNAP case loads, over time, over a 20 year period, went up. And as I said in my testimony, some people on the right, especially, call SNAP welfare 2.0, which is this is the new version of that.
"The difference is that within the SNAP program, the states don't have an incentive to really reform, to provide those kinds of uplifting services because of the formula. The formula is if a state wants to provide services to people in your district in Indiana, it has to pay 50% of the cost, but if it wants to just give out SNAP benefits, it only pays the administrative costs, and those are very low.
"So my recommendation is that whatever the incentive is, whether it's giving the states a bounty every time they get somebody from SNAP a job or an advanced degree or whatever, give them a financial incentive to help the people on SNAP. It's not there now."
A video replay of Rep. Walorski's complete remarks at Wednesday's hearing can be seen here:
Subcommittee Chairwoman Warloski also made the following tweet on Wednesday:
I will chair my first @HouseAgNews Nutrition Subcommittee tomorrow to discuss the #SNAP Program.
— Jackie Walorski (@RepWalorski) February 25, 2015
In his prepared remarks, Mr. Greenstein noted that, "As of the end of 2014, SNAP was helping more than 46 million low-income Americans to afford a nutritionally adequate diet by providing them with benefits via a debit card that can be used only to purchase food. The benefits are relatively modest. SNAP participants receive an average benefit of $1.42 per person per meal."
Mr. Greenstein added that, "SNAP targets benefits on those most in need and least able to afford an adequate diet. Its benefit formula considers a household's income level, along with its essential expenses such as rent, medicine, and child care needed to work. Although a family's income is the most important factor affecting its ability to purchase food, it is not the only factor; a family whose rent and utility costs consume two-thirds of its income will have less money to buy food than a family that has the same income but receives a rental voucher to cover a portion of its rental costs.
"The program's targeting of benefits adds some complexity. However, it helps to ensure that SNAP provides the largest levels of assistance to the poorest families with the greatest needs, and lesser assistance to those whose level of need is less severe."
Mr. Greenstein pointed to research that "found that adults who had access to food stamps as young children had an 18 percentage point higher high school graduation rate than the children who hadn't had access to food stamps. The children with access to food stamps also had significantly lower rates of 'metabolic syndrome' (obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes) and better health in adulthood. In addition, women who had access to food stamps as young children had higher earnings and lower rates of welfare receipt in adulthood."
Mr. Greenstein also pointed out that, "SNAP error rates now stand at record lows. Fewer than 1 percent of SNAP benefits are issued to households that do not meet all of the program's eligibility requirements."
Also at Wednesday's hearing, House Ag Nutrition Subcommittee ranking member Jim McGovern (D., Mass.) raised questions about the hearing, noting that: "You know, today's hearing is described as the start of a top to bottom review of SNAP, and I'm certainly a proponent of rigorous oversight of all programs. But I have to say, at the beginning, I find it a little bit curious that we seem to be singling out SNAP for review, especially at a time when the most recent CBO projections show that SNAP case loads and spending is moving in a downward direction, and CBO also says that payments to farmers could be nearly $5 billion more than was originally expected in the farm bill. I don't know why we're not beginning with a top to bottom review of that, but…
"And I appreciate you being here. And I hope, if we're going to do a top to bottom review, that we also, at some point, have a panel of beneficiaries, people who are on the program, who can testify firsthand what works and what doesn't work. And maybe we should also have someone from [the Food and Nutrition Service] here as well, because they administer the program. I hope that this is not going to be an exercise in another attack against poor people because I fear I've seen this movie before, and I didn't like it the first time. But it is what it is."
Keith Good


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We Are Hiring!
We Are Hiring!
Harmonic Media – Denver
Pre-Press Professional PART TIME- Immediate need
Large Format Printing, Signs, Displays, Vehicle Wraps, Trade Show, etc
Harmonic Media is immediately looking for highly motivated part time pre-press designer to join our
Potential candidates must have a minimum of 1 year experience working in large format printing, custom
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– big or small. Areas of expertise must include, but not be limited to:
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Qualified candidate will be a self -starter that is highly motivated to set and exceed production goals. This
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our Production Manager. Compensation will be hourly and based on skill set, experience, and fit.
- Strong work ethic and aspires to contribute to the success of the company
- An understanding of graphics installation and the tools required
- Think strategically and creatively with outstanding analytical and problem solving capabilities
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- Must be highly educated in the use of Adobe Creative Suite, Mac platform
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At Harmonic Media our vision is to partner with our clients to provide you with unique solutions. We
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Spaces available: 0
This number may include spaces booked, but not yet paid. Payment is required to guarantee your space.
Date(s) - Saturday, 01/17/15 - Saturday, 02/07/15
1:30 pm - 3:30 pm iCal
Coos Art Museum
Title: Introduction to Watercolor with Liv Drahos
What: watercolor classes
Dates: Saturdays, January 17, 24, 31, February 7, 2015
Time: 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Age Range: adults only
Skill Level: beginner
Media: watercolor
Where: Coos Art Museum, 235 Anderson, Coos Bay, OR 97420
Workshop Fee: $75 CAM members / $90 non-members
Registration Ends: January 9, 2015
For more info: call (541) 267-3901 or email email@example.com
Unlock the mysteries of watercolor in this four week, adults only Introduction to Watercolor class designed for participants who are new to watercolor or need a basic skills refresher. Guided by Liv Drahos' extensive experience in teaching both drawing and watercolor painting, participants will learn elements of design, composition, and color theory. Combined with knowledge in selecting the right tools and materials needed to successfully mix colors and apply flat, graded and wet-into-wet washes on a variety of different surfaces an optimal foundation for painting with watercolor will be achieved.
The fee for the four-week Introduction to Watercolor series is $75 for CAM members, $90 for non-members and takes place on Saturday, January 17, 24, 31 and February 7, 2015 from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. 6 participants min./12 participants max. Registration ends January 9, 2015. For online registration use the booking form below or contact the Art Education Dept. at (541) 267-3901 or firstname.lastname@example.com.
Please review our Art Ed FAQ prior to registering.
BookingsAfter you submit your booking you will receive an automated "Pending Booking" email with payment instructions. Once payment has been received your booking will be approved by our administrators after which time you will receive a "Booking Confirmed" email guaranteeing your space. Your booking will not be confirmed until payment has been received. Booking does not guarantee your space. Booking AND paying is required to hold your space. You may lose your spot in class if you register, but do not pay promptly and someone else registers AND pays. Please review our Art Ed FAQ prior to registering.
This event is fully booked.


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Charts the rise and fall of the spin culture of the last two decades… Every decade has its own identity, key values and needs. The 1990s were the age of spin, when the materialism of the 1980s, the desire for instant communication and soundbite democracy came together in the spin culture. This spread throughout society from business and politics even to charities and the church. Somewhere in these polished communications the message was lost. In this fascinating and highly readable work George Pitcher tells the story of the rise and fall of the spin culture, predicting its final death in the early years of the twenty first century. He examines methods of communication as a reflection of and within the context of the values of society and the process of democracy, before drawing on his considerable experience both as the giver and receiver of spin, to examine how we can move beyond the age of spin. * A zeitgeist work that captures the quest for meaning in the current age and a desire to progress beyond the heady days of spin culture. * Charts the history and rationale of spin throughout society from the early days of Margaret Thatcher to the death of spin in the hands of the masters of the spin culture. * Interspersed with the author's own diary entries as a journalist covering major events of the past twenty years * Discusses methods of communication, how they reflect the values of the age and the relationship between business and politics * Discusses the way ahead: how politicians, businesses and institutions can communicate with the general population in the post spin age. * Author offers a unique perspective with insights both as the giver and receiver of spin.
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