60000

Following the euphoria of iPad heaven and the move over to Wordpress, I failed to mention that my blog(s) had also reached a milestone – 60,000+ hits or visits or people who had searched for something completely different and had Google mistakenly divert them to my ramblings.

I started the blog on the 2nd April 2007 with an account of my move from Nanjing HQ to the new MG Production facility in Pukou. (First Day in the New Factory).

I felt that this episode in MG’s long history should not have been missed and even if it was down to someone who had only ever written cheques before, the next chapter in this famous British brand needed capturing.

Since I started blogging it has been enjoyable, sometimes painful, but has almost always been done with a sense of release. However for every blog published there are another 10 sitting on my hard drive. These are the blogs about what I really think of the Pheonix Four (Five), the car with Zero ENCAP rating, my explanation for the demise of Longbridge and MG-R, the time I met the people investigating the ‘missing millions’, exploding Taxi’s, the real reason why Chinese Senior Managers have male PA’s, journalist tantrums, sharing showers with 10 other men and all about Li ShuFu, the man, the entrepreneur, the lunatic, to name but a few. The blogs will have to wait until I am either financially secure or have been entered into a witness protection program, for now they sit guarded on my hard drive waiting for me to grow a new set of balls.

One of the fascinating things about my blogs, is that I haven’t got a clue who reads them, my wife confesses to have never found them interesting – which is amazing since she has made this assessment without ever actually reading them, there isn’t enough death, blood and guts in them for my Xbox crazed son to bother with, and the rest of my extended family cant understand how to change the web page from facebook. I don’t have what you could traditionally call ‘friends’ as I have always been such a miserable bastard. So I guess it could be past work colleagues, as I have had enough of those to form an army equal in size only to Kim Jong II’s. Who reads my blog has always been a mystery to me, so I employed the help of IP technology! A little piece of software that sits on your web site and records everything about who, when, where, what and how.

The application I have been using is called ‘sitemeter’, and scarily it can hunt down whoever visits your website. I only take the free offering which only identifies new IP addresses (for those who are not network literate – this is the individual address assigned to a computer on a network) and how many times they visit, stay online etc. whilst I only see the city, state and country of my visitors – I only subscribe to the free service, god knows what you can find out is you actually pay for the search?

So now I know that people in:

USA
Allamuchy, New Jersey and Laurence, Massachusetts

Australia
Caboolture, Queensland, Brisbane, Melbourne and Ashfield NSW

Canada
Picton and Belleville, Ontario

Auckland, New Zealand

France
Limoux, Languedoc-Roussillon

And, all over the UK people have at least mistakenly ventured onto these pages, and a whole host of "location unknown" which I presume are from behind the great fire wall of China? The fact that at least someone out there reads this, makes me continue to spend the odd couple of hours putting finger to keyboard, but before I get carried away with the popularity i did some simple maths;

60,000 hits in 38 months or
1578 per month or
394 per week or
52.6 per day
2.3 per hour or
0.04 per minute

If I take away down time, the hours people sleep, all of the times I have posted, edited, looked at and read my own blog then i come up with a figure closer to 1 hit every every week - so I was right, nobody does read it!

(Just in-case anyone does - drop me a note, and cheer me up, after all it is fathers day!)

Speed

The arrival of the postman these days nearly always means another bill, or a flyer from someone trying to sell you insurance cover for the pet gerbil you haven't got. since the introduction of mobile phones, text messaging, and email took over the worlds communication the art of writing with ink on paper has become the sole domain of school children and doctors, the fact that in both cases whatever written is barely illegible, probably makes most of us thankful for the cell phone, computer and printer.

It was predicted that the explosion in alternative communication would decrease direct contact with others and a drop in interaction, however talking, sharing views and exchanging ideas has increased in volumes way beyond anyones expectations, and in ways that none of us could have anticipated or even dreamed of just a few years ago.

I started traveling abroad with work about 15 years ago, and on those week long trips we were allowed a single phone call back to our families to say that we had arrived safely. more frequent interaction would have required either computers the size of your average industrial estate, or smoke, a blanket and a high mountain. Soon after this I did a stint in Georgia, USA, this involved spending 3 months or so at a time in a place just around the corner from the dark side of Jupiter called Brunswick, and aside from the initial phone call the only other means of communication was via a 56k dial up modem and email, although as we never had a computer in our home this proved fairly pointless for communicating anything other that telling work that you were still alive, and hadn't spent all of your company expenses - yet.

In contrast I am now able to tell my family when I am about to go to sleep, when i have woken up, what I had for lunch, how bad the taxi driver smelt, and how soft the toilet paper is in the hotel, in fact technology allows us all to record, display and share every second of our day to anyone anywhere in the world, as it happens, and in full colour. Whilst I can not deny helping my son do his maths via msn, as I travel in a taxi somewhere in the middle of Swaziland is useful, or that checking-in online for a flight to allow yourself the luxury of an extra 30 minutes in bed is a great treat. However i do think that this can all go too far, first we had email, then text messaging, instant messaging, blogging and now twittering.

As a blogger myself it may seem hypocritical for me to dispel twittering as a fad or a craze that doesn't have any real merit. However (although it may not always seem like it) I only use email, texts, or instant messaging if I want to tell somebody something, or conversely find something out. You could still argue that blogging in this context is pointless? I suppose, my original purpose was to let family and friends know what I was up to, However i found that I enjoyed writing and have used it as a way to capture what was going on in my life, my thoughts, ideas and at least it gives me something to do at the airport.

I don't twit, or twat or whatever the correct term is, and I don't post pictures of my shoelaces on Facebook. The idea of twittering doesn't fill me with any excitement, knowing the precise time when your next door neighbour has emptied his bowels or brought a new dishcloth, isn't top of my "things to understand before I die" list. I can see the appeal of following a 'celebrity' if that's your bag, but trying to fit my life into 120 words would be a big problem for me, and besides I have enough problems trying to make my blog interesting using 1000+ words each week, let alone making every 5 minutes seem at all worthy of publishing.

So for the moment I will still to my blog, although a couple of things will/have changed recently, the first is that I am slowly defecting to wordpress, after several years of sticking with Blogger, i have grown tired of not being able to access it in China without engaging the type of technology used by the worlds espionage fraternity. I have also had many problems with reading blogger via Internet explorer and having to revert to the more accommodating Mozilla. Which despite being superior to Microsofts offering, isn't as widely used or even known by many people.

The other event is one that I am bursting to tell, just like a small child would be when wishing to tell everyone where the last friend is hiding in a game of hide and seek, or if his brother had just kicked the football through the kitchen window and his burgeoning desire to denounce any responsibility to his parents. Some people in the press have suggested that the event I am talking about can compare with the feeling they had at the birth of their first born, how stupid - it is far more important and emotional than that, and it doesn't require feeding every five minutes, it doesn't smell like the devils armpit and isn't subject to screaming fits.

Of course the event is the introduction of my new new toy, I am writing this blog on the equivalent of Moses tablets of stone - the Apple iPad. Yes I must be crazy to buy into an unproven technology and of course this isn't as revolutionary as we may have all hoped and dreamed of during the longest labour in history, but it is pretty spectacular.

But surely it's just an overweight iPod touch? But that's like saying the Bugatti Veyron is just a faster Fiat Panda, Concorde was just a sleeker Bi-plane or Buckingham Palace is just a large house. the iPod touch and it's brother the iPhone reinvented the mobile phone market, love or hate Apple you cannot deny the impact these products have had on the industry - especially now that everyone is running to try and catch up.

I have had all 3 generations of iPhone and despite the obvious limitations have loved each one, the iPad just does everything the same just bigger and better - ask any women if size matters, and if they say no, they are trying to protect your ego!

With a desire not to sound like an Apple nerd I won't jump into a 5000 word essay on why it's brilliant, but I will sum my views into one word - speed. Any one who has lived with a windows laptop, will know that the boot-up time can feel like passing a kidney stone, as can the time to find a document, or switch between applications. I can now understand why Steve (The Messiah) Jobs couldn't understand the need to run multiple applications at once, he obviously hasn't used one of Mr Gates windows products, if you don't keep your applications all open at the same time, you die of boredom between waiting for one to open up. The introduction of running multiple applications on the next OS 4.0 may make some people happy - I just hope it doesn't kill the ipads single biggest advantage - speed!

News

Three issues dominated the headlines this week, all of them fairly big stories and each significant for different reasons.  The largest of the stories was of course the ongoing war between the UK and Iceland, not content with emptying what was left in our children’s piggy banks they decide to perform the single largest act of Eco-terrorism the world has ever seen.  The grounding of the entire UK airspace for over 3 days (so far) has only ever happened twice before, once during 9/11 and during the second world war – when let’s face it the only planes flying then were painted green and had Browning machine guns bolted to their sides.  The unpronounceable volcano (Eyjafjallajökull) which translates as “up yours international airlines” has decided to retaliate for the millions of tons of CO2 spewed put by airlines each year and the melting the glaziers that entomb the country. 

The second big story was the inaugural Televised political debate between the three main parties contesting this year’s election in the UK.  At this point I have to admit that I have never voted before, which I know is deplorable and would cause all of those that died for democracy and fended off the Nazi’s all those years ago to be spinning in their graves, but since Margaret Thatcher’s era – what is the point? Not since the ‘Iron’ ladies days have we had any variation on a theme.  Political parties have merged, policies have become mirrored and the leaders have morphed into clones.

Gone are the days when one party stood for the Gentry, One stood for the workers and one stood for the trees.  Their policies were divided into more money for the rich and keep the dirty rotten foreigners out; higher salaries for clip board holding union officials and keep the dirty foreigners out, and more land for the trees and vegetables rights.  These days it is hard to identify differences between the parties, the old face of socialism, communism,  conservativeness, fascism, liberalism and capitalism have all morphed into parties politics that bend with public opinion, relying more on Big Brother style polls, public relation campaigns and hair gel. 

This week’s televised debate has done nothing but dilute the differences between the parties even further. The fact that viewing figures were comparable with ‘X-Factor’ or ‘Big Brother’, could be seen as a positive move in engaging more peoples interest in politics, however we all know that the reasons for watching were more to do with seeing if Gordon Brown ‘s facial twitch was still as pronounced , or would the Botox under David Camerons eyes droop at the last minute.  The potential for one of the 3 contenders to swear on national TV, drop a bullock, or be belittled by their opponent was too much of a temptation to be missed.

In reality what we found was 2 and a half men professionally groomed, rehearsed and surprisingly respectful of each other – but then why wouldn’t they be?  To be respectful is to walk down the middle line; to criticise or disagree strongly would be to object to at least one potential voters view.  To be a contender you need to support everyone’s football teams with a passion, like all kinds of food, have no allegiance over Coronation Street or Eastenders, and see the virtues in Lady Gaga’s lyrics.  Oh and also support constraint whilst seeing the need to invest, making harsh decisions albeit protecting jobs, reducing emissions, but not stopping progress and supporting basic values whilst recognising independence – basically you need to have more faces than a Deltoidal Hexecontahedron (look it up!).

Which is why the only differences we now have is how they look, and what this debate has done has refined politics into facial features rather than policy, just imagine if it was Tony Blair instead of Gordon Brown! We would have been introduced by three individuals from the Satchi and Satchi school of politics, each groomed within an inch of their lives, hair gelled millimeter perfect, teeth shiny enough to advertise tooth paste and ties so straight they must have been painted onto their crisp white shirts. This isn’t so much of a debate, more of a beauty pageant.  Not surprising then that Dicky Clegg won hands down over corny Cameron and Bland Brown, forget politics show us those dimples. 

The final piece of news had a traumatic effect on me and millions like me, news that caused suicidal tendencies to surface and moments of extreme depression.   For over a year reports emerged that would change our lives, at first it started with rumors on the internet, these developed into accusations and counter claims, sneak peeks and spy shots.  After all of this the messiah of modern day technology finally announced the second coming on January 27th 2010.

Steve Jobs put is all out of our misery and announced that Apple would launch the iPad in April.  Ever since the birth of my iPhone, I had longed for her to have a brother or sister, the announced pregnancy in January meant a birth in April; this led to sleepless nights, anguished days and untold accessory preparation.  Then as the delivery came closer we heard that they had got the conception date wrong, and we wouldn’t be receiving our little packages of technological joy until the end of May.

Too much to bear I hurried to find an importer and scoured eBay.  Sure there were plenty of them for sale, it wasn’t the Jack Sparrow sellers that but me off, nor the over inflated prices, but the thought of leaving the handling of something so precious to Fedex or Parcel Force caused the most concern.  This led to only one alternative, I would have to travel to the states to collect and hand deliver back to the UK, of course the price would be extreme, but the use of all of those airmiles collected would mean it was only time that would be given – and after all what price can be put against delivering a new life?  So decision made, time booked off, cash prepared ...... yes you guessed it those bloody Icelandic's!