Alex Hardy

We’ve had a clear out of the loft at work, throwing away literally a truckload of stuff. There are many reasons why an agency might pursue a client relationship with a company: money (obviously), prestige etc. I think this is an opportune moment to discuss an often overlooked consideration: freebie potential.

The ‘owt for nowt’ haul today was rather disappointing, with a couple of prototypes from [well known manufacturer of kitchen appliances] being about the best on offer. These were quickly snapped up by certain members of the office who are more enthusiastic about cooking than myself.

Based on experiences of friends and colleagues, I believe it is important that an agency coordinates as much of the product photography that it uses as possible. Not only does this guarantee creative oversight, but possession of the items in question. A friend of mine who did many projects for [well known toy and board game maker] found that the return in expensive robot toys and board games was considerable.

Ian also tells of working for [well known luxury ice cream brand], who supplied them with a freezer full of ice cream, lollies and such. The possibilities when working for a brewer and distributor of alcoholic beverages should go without saying.

I’d like to open this discussion up. Dear reader, who do you imagine would be the best kind of client by this measure?

So it begins all over again… I want to get back to the condition of weight and general fitness that I was at when I did the run last May. That means losing about half a stone in two months by forgoing the deli at lunchtime and getting some exercise.

I went to the gym last night, and ran for 25 minutes and had two 15 minute sessions on the bikes without any difficulty. I am fitter now that when I started training for the run last year so really it should be easy this time.

I’m going out for a run after work with Stuart and Dani. We went last week, hopefully this will become a routine up to the run and beyond.

Wish me luck, and don’t forget to sponsor me!

So the videogame industry’s worst-kept secret of late has finally been officially announced: the Xbox 360 Elite.

Back in Black with a 120Gb hard drive and HDMI port, this machine doesn’t replace the Premium edition (though it makes its name a little silly), but occupies a position at the high end of their range. Despite of all the grumbling on various games forums from existing owners, this isn’t a reason to buy a new 360. It does present an intriguing option to those of us who have yet to buy one however.

I’ve nothing against the PS3 but I do consider it to be unpolished and overpriced, with scant few exciting looking exclusive games. Time will take care of the first two, and LittleBigPlanet is shaping up to be phenomenal. In two to three year’s time it will be an entirely different proposition.

I prefer to live a little closer to the present though, and the 360 looks like it has more going for it in the here and now.

I’ve been mulling over buying a HDTV this summer. I might find a place for an Elite alongside it

We’ve just had a bit of a techno swaparound, and now I’m getting used to the rather compact keyboard of a Core Duo MacBook Pro. It’s a very nice machine, and will be even nicer wen i gET USed t0 typng n iT.

We’re going to install Parallels Desktop and Windows XP on it. I look forward to finding out how good a solution that really is, or whether I’ll be scampering off with the Acer off Ian’s desk every so often.

Widespread reports and a post on Michael Bay’s blog all point to Agent Smith himself, Hugo Weaving, playing the Big Bad in the upcoming Transformers movie.

There’s bound to be some complaint from the hardcore fans that Frank Welker (the actor who voiced Megatron in the 80s cartoon and animated movie) wasn’t cast, but those guys will be impossible to please.

I think that is a superb bit of casting.

In any case the important thing is that Peter Cullen has been cast. It won’t matter how different he looks from our childhood toys and imaginations – when he speaks he’ll be Optimus Prime and I’ll be 8 years old.

I continue to have difficulty with wildly different numbers reported by Mint and Google Analytics. I’m using the Google plugin by Semiologic for WordPress because it tracks outbound links in a handy way, but I just added the Mint JavaScript include code to header.php of my theme.

So far so good, the Google plugin even disables itself when I’m logged in. Alas, the same cannot be said for my Mint include. So all the time I have been logged in to WordPress, writing my fevered thoughts, Mint has been diligently recording pageviews that Google has not. D’oh!

A little poking around in the WordPress source finds my solution: the global variable that holds your user ID while logged in. So a little bit of PHP like so…

global $user_ID;

if (!$user_ID) {
	// Put the Mint JS include here
}

… and presto, one more discrepancy sorted.

I expect it will take a month or two for the stats to even out and for me to be able to confirm that.

iLounge has a balanced and well-written piece on the newly released Apple TV called Top Ten Reasons You Don’t Need Apple TV (Yet).

In brief, those reasons are:

1. You have a fifth-generation iPod with video
2. You don’t have a HDTV, or don’t use one as your primary set
3. Your movie collection isn’t in one of its two supported formats
4. iTunes doesn’t sell movies or TV shows in your country
5. You want to protest Apple’s pricing and bundling policies
6. Apple TV doesn’t have a DVR - or you already have one
7. It doesn’t have a DVD or other hi-def disc player
8. You’re budgeting for another Apple purchase, like a Mac mini
9. You want to hold out for a version with higher resolution or more capacity
10. You want to wait until the reality distortion field dies down

Since I’d raise my hand to reasons 1, 2, 4, 6 and 10 I think I’ll pass for now. I’d also add a couple more of my own:

1. Having to turn your telly on to control your music seems a little, well, odd…
2. I can’t honestly imagine using it to browse my photo collection
3. It’s yet another box to fit among the cable box, broadband router, amp and videogame console

I have an iPod dock connected to my amp. That will do nicely.

[EDIT] In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the potential of it is immense, but untapped in this first generation. Here are some features that I would like to see it gain in future:

1. At £199 and with a good selection of AV-out options, it is dying for a software update that enables it to play PowerPoint, Keynote and Flash files. Hooked up to a projector, it would make a killer no-fuss presentation machine
2. With a HDTV and a broadband connection, it would only take an optional camera (like an iSight or a Sony EyeToy) to make video chat a mass market proposition
3. A selection of cheap downloadable games that people who don’t have a dedicated console might play

A battle between Apple, Microsoft and Sony to make a meaningful and effective whole of your devices is definitely on and heating up. It will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years.

Top London cop, Police Constable Nicholas Angel, finds himself reassigned to the sleepy West Country village of Sandford.

With garden fetes and neighbourhood watch meetings replacing the action of the city, Angel struggles to adapt to his situation and finds himself partnered with Danny Butterman, an oafish but well meaning young Constable.

Just as all seems lost, a series of grisly accidents motivates Angel into action. Convinced of foul play, Angel realises that Sandford may not be as idyllic as it seems.

Steph and I went to see Hott Fuzz at the Lowry last night. I’m a fan of Simon Pegg, having loved both Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, so I expected to enjoy myself.

Written by Pegg and Edgar Wright, Hot Fuzz is an affectionate homage to the American buddy cop movie, British murder mysteries, John Woo and apparently anything else that came to mind. It is self-indulgent and geeky, but also very funny. I should also mention surprisingly violent, with comic gore as seen in Shaun of the Dead as villagers meet their grisly ends. It’s also a bit of an excuse to get their mates involved, with Bill Bailey, Bill Nighy, Martin Freeman and Steve Coogan (to mention but a few) getting some face time.

It was also nice to see Timothy Dalton on the big screen. I always felt that he was one of the better Bond actors, regrettably saddled with two quite weak films. He makes an entertaining bad guy.

This is one of those “If you liked [previous work by same], you’ll like this” kinda films. We had fun watching it, but I hope that Pegg diversifies before his brand of comedy outstays its welcome.

[rating:3.5]

I installed Mint 2 on this website in January, so I thought I’d post my observations.

“Why have you waited so long to post?” one might ask. Well, I’ve actually been using Mint for rather longer than that. At the last count I’d put it on four websites and it’s one of the best browser-based applications that it’s been my pleasure to use.

Shaun Inman is a very talented developer and, based on a couple of exchanges I’ve had with him, a jolly nice chap. His following of web designers who lavish praise upon his every pixel and line of code is quite large enough without my joining it however, so I decided to wait and post something more objective than “I heart Mint.”

I’m using Mint in tandem with Google Analytics. Each has its pros and cons:

Mint

The most immediate difference is that it costs $30, but that’s peanuts. Get over it, and get your credit card out.

Mint is hosted on your own website, recording its data in a MySQL database. This means that the numbers you see are up to the moment, rather than generated on a schedule. It also means that you need to install and maintain it yourself, but that is a simple matter.

It is supported by an enthusiastic and creative group of users and developers, who create plugins (called “Peppers” thanks to Inman’s penchant for puns) and other tools as well as providing advice. This community vibe is entirely absent from Google, and will probably always remain so.

The user interface is clean, considered and understated. Compared to the complexity and ugliness of Google, it’s a breath of fresh air. It also makes it strangely addictive to take a peak at your stats on a frequent basis.

Another reason why I wanted to wait was that I felt rather hasty in buying Mint 2. Compared to installs of Mint 1.2 that I made, I experienced a short-term loss of functionality as Peppers that I’d come to rely on hadn’t been updated (this is now resolved).

At the time of writing I’m using Mint 2.02 with the following additional Peppers:

• Blog Comments and Trends by Ronald Heft
• Downloads and Locations by Till Krüss
• Feedburner Stats by John Nunemaker
• Geo Mint by Christoph Lupprich
• Outclicks (with this fix) by Andrew Sutherland
• Real Estate, Secret Crush and User Agent 007 by Shaun Inman

I plan to give it another couple of months before I update again, to be fairly sure that the initial flurry of changes and fixes is done and dusted…

Google Analytics

Firstly, Google is free. One of its primary functions is to track the success of your AdWords, and the revenue from this scheme supports the Analytics project (which is based on the Urchin software that Google acquired).

I mainly use it for its graphing capabilities and superior geo location reporting. I have plans to implement goal tracking, but that is something for the future.

Compared to Mint, it is powerful but ungainly. I tend to open Mint when I want to have a quick glance, and Google to see stats in more detail.

After originally setting up some filters (I set Mint to ignore my visits and Google to ignore my work IP address), I have removed them. I found it too problematic to reconcile the data between the two applications. Since they don’t seem to track figures in quite the same terms, I now just take the data as a ballpark indicator of activity.

Horses for courses. I recommend using both.

Postscript: I’ve also applied to the beta test programme for Reinvigorate, another free analytics tool. When I receive my invite, I’ll post about what I find.

The very talented Jo has done a new caricature of me for this website. Personally, I think it’s a little on the flattering side – more reminiscent of me last May when I was fit as a whippet. Still, it gives me some motivation to get back to the gym in preparation for this year’s Manchester Run.

I’ll be rattling the collection box on here very soon, so start putting your pennies aside. I’m raising money for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust this time.