Steven Mooner Usher

So, I haven’t posted for a long time, 19 days in fact, and there is a very simple reason for that, a lack of motivation. When i first set this blog up I foresaw me making daily contributions about all kind of interesting and crazy subjects, but frankly that just hasn’t transpired.

Without having a designated field about which to write, a designated field that was also a passion of mine, then anything I put up here would hold no merit, no interest, and no relevance, so its become apparent that I need to center the blog in on a subject close to my heart, music.

The basic plan at this early stage is to focus it on reviews of local bands or artists in the Somerset area, post details/reviews of their shows, do my own band bio’s, provide contact information etc, and just try and give the little guy a little lift. I will back this up with some reviews of other great bands, from any place or time, most likely restricted to bands that I personally love, and hopefully you do/will too.

For an idea of what to expect, see my post regarding Ryan Inglis, a local musician who’s working towards a record deal, and keep your ears posted if you already haven’t for bands similar to Far, New End Original, The Kinks, Dry Kill Logic, The Dismemberment Plan, Reuben, Rainer Maria, At The Drive-In, De Facto, Arms Bend Back, Sebadoh, and many many others, which I may list at a later date so you know better what to expect from the site, and to decide if it’s something you care to join in with.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the site will still see posts relevant to my work and other passion, technology. A popular post from my archive, the Google Chrome Review is probably a good snap-shot of the flavour of the technology orientated material you will see here. Coming soon will be a full browser review, pitting the new boys against  each other in some of the key criteria, following the release of Mozilla’s Firefox 3 and Google Chrome in quick succession.

I think that’s pretty much it, I’m off to enjoy some more music (and technology!).

This is a shockwave file from a client of mine.

So Andy Murray lost the US Open Final to Roger Federer, big whoop. I’ve had more exciting diseases than the Scotsman’s run to the final. That’s not to say he hasn’t done well, because let’s face it, I have as much chance of reaching a Grand Slam final as, well, Tim Henman ever did, and Murray has done well. The lad is obviously talented, and will go further in his career than any of the last mediocre generation of British tennis players, but ultimately we need to ask ourselves why we are supporting him.

He has publicly stated he is not British, he is Scottish. So either his history is terrible, or he is making a point of his ancestry, and it is manifestly the latter. No self-respecting Scottish person would ever claim to be associated with the English, which in declaring yourself British you would very much be doing.

The English press are fantastic at choosing when to be British and when to be English. Note Andy Murray, and Team GB of Olympic fame, but as soon as the English football team do well (do not hold your breath) they will be laughing in the face of the Scottish national team as they drip out of another qualifying campaign.

The greatest example of this patent ambivalence comes in the form of this years Junior Wimbledon champion, the ‘English’, ‘Home-grown’ Laura Robson. My solution is to do away with one of the other, to remove all borders and merge as one United Kingdom with no alternatives, or to eradicate any doubt of identity by obviating the monarchy, killing off any suggestion of United Kingdom, Great Britain, or any other unifying term that might be out there that these days solely acts as a way of tapping in on sporting success for media sales. Clearly define the lines, and we can start to gloat with genuine reason.

There are many controversial practices within certain industries, cosmetics have animal testing, sports events have ticket touts, cinema has DVD piracy, and farming has seal-clubbing…don’t worry, I’m joking. No, possibly the worst of these (excluding seal-clubbing) is that arm of marketing and advertising that leaves us so infuriated that we often resort to abuse, Tele-sales.

As with everything maddening, there are degrees of annoyance. I would much rather receive a sales call than, say, see my house burgled, by a Big Brother winner, on a Monday, in Hemel Hempstead, whilst the salient realisation dawns on me that I am in fact naked. Thankfully that can never happen, as it almost technically illegal to move to Hemel Hempstead, but nevertheless, there are degrees. So where does telemarketing stand on the great scale of vexation? Do we really hate these calls as much as we claim? Or are they just an excuse to vent our daily angers at a faceless innocent?

We have within our power the ability to hang up the call at any moment, so why do we make such a drama of how these calls are the plague of our existence, steaming like a pot of mussels after each and every call we receive? The main reason I can attribute this to is the interruption, the glacial nonchalance of the sweaty, spotty post-grad student sat in a call centre somewhere in between a village called Affluence and a city called I Wasted Three Years On A Degree.

Having had first hand experience of working in a call centre, for which I apologise and feel remorseful to my very core, I can unequivocally declare that there is a beating heart of unalloyed malevolence pumping nothing but a disgustingly nefarious ethic in to the minds of their staff, many of whom are still relatively impressionable. On a day to day basis we would be taught how to deal with the anger and retaliatory nature of a large percentage of our unsuspecting victims. We would be trained to react with politeness but determination, and to keep selling until the potential customer had hung up. That for me was the hardest element of the job, I have no objection to speaking to strangers, and to some extent I have no objection to a hard sell, but I could not bring myself to bludgeon my way in to these peoples lives, pretend to be their best friend, and worst of all act as though I was working for someone I wasn’t.

Without naming names, I was told that my introductory speech should read something akin to “Good morning sir/madam, my names Steve and I’m calling on behalf of xxxx”. Like i said, naming no names, but for the xxxx you can replace with Google, O2, Microsoft, and many more.

‘On behalf of’, what a ridiculously ambiguous statement, and I completely understood the callers need for clarification, which happened a large number of times. The largest chunk of my time was spent appointment setting, and seminar booking, which is the easier end of the scale in terms of the product you are trying to sell. These seminars were aimed largely at the technology sector, so I was calling IT Technicians and Directors, who frankly will have known of my ‘products’ beforehand through alternate media if they were in the slightest interested, and the bookings I made I can only accredit to luck.

So where is the defence for telemarketing? I don’t believe this case is quite finished just yet, although I know I can not metamorphose the truth in to something truly acceptable.

If we remove all inimical thoughts and take a look at the calls through set of clean eyes, or should that be ears? We see that in most cases there are offers here that would be beneficial to us, they would enhance our life should we accept them and give these calls a fair chance. One of the most common calls I receive is from Vodafone trying to extend/modify my contract, and recently I came to the end of my contract and predictably got that call to renew. I took this as an opportunity to see if I could work this to my favour, having heard many stories of people bartering a good deal. I was originally paying £40/month on a fairly comprehensive package, and had just a couple of months previously received a new phone from them, the model of which I forget, but suffice to say it was nothing remarkable. Having nothing to lose, I said I would renew so long as they sent me a Nokia N95 8Gb, and dropped my monthly rate for the same package, and to my joy this is exactly what they did. I am now on exactly the same package, with a rather brilliant phone, and paying precisely half of my original monthly fee.

This is just one example, but I’m sure if we were all truthful with ourselves, we could admit to other examples of this nature of experience, an experience that would never have happened were it not for some sweaty, spotty post-grad student sat in a call centre somewhere in between a village called Affluence and a city called I Wasted Three Years On A Degree.

My view is that rather than instantly becoming irritated at hearing that overly polite introduction, is to disregard the voice, and listen to the words, to take away from the call the information to make an informed decision as to whether their offer will benefit you or not. This is not an easy achievement of that I am acutely aware, but the person on the other end of the phone may be someone just like me, who needs an injection of cash after a relocation and actually doesn’t want to ruin your day at all.

Anyone that uses Google, (the qualifier for this is the fact you are human) will have noticed that beneath that iconic search bar is a new link, directing you to Google Chrome, a Google web browser that as with all things Google, comes with a hype that could perhaps be hugely unmerited.

Before we get to the ins and outs of its functionality, appearance etc, let’s just take a look at the history of the web browser, and why Google would take this route.

The web browser was really born in the late 1980’s, when a variety of technologies, most famous of course the WorldWideWeb, laid the foundation for the first web browser, which brought together a variety of existing and new software and hardware technologies. Web browsers communicate with Web servers primarily using HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) to fetch webpages, which are located by means of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). In simple terms, they interpret the information that webmasters want you to see, and present it to you in the form of a webpage.

Historically, Microsofts’ Internet Explorer has dominated the market, and currently still holds approximately 75% market share, Mozillas’ Firefox pulls an impressive 20%, and the rest divided between the likes of Safari, K-Meleon, Flock, Konqueror, and Opera.

The market is packed with perfectly capable alternatives…ok, perhaps perfect capable is stretching their achievements, but there are many variations out there that offer you slightly different takes on the idea, and personally Firefox is my browser of choice, but thats largely due to the fact it is not IE.

So why a browser? Well, Google have a suite of Applications, Programs and Indentures (API’s), most notably Google Maps, Android, Google Earth, and Gears, in addition of course to their search services. Could Google be aiming to unify their API’s with Chrome? This is an opinion I’ve seen and heard touted about the internet, but I feel there is a far bigger picture here.

Google Chrome may appear to have its teeth cut for a battle with Internet Explorer, but the Microsoft product that Google is ultimately setting its itself up to destroy is the Windows operating system. In reality, the search titan hopes that its browser, in the short term, will simply make it easier for businesses to deploy their online applications.

Anyway, that’s one for the future, right now we have the issue of where Google Chrome fits in to the current landscape, and my suggestion is that we tuck it discreetly behind a bush and forget about it for the foreseeable future. With it being Google, that may prove to be more difficult than it should be, but in the core elements of its functionality it offers nothing new, nothing exciting, and certainly nothing to challenge Firefox for my attention.

Google’s first major publicity of Chrome came in the form of a 38-page comic that resembled the in-flight instructions of a plane more than it did the release of a major weapon in Google’s considerable armoury. Suffice to say Marvel will sleep easy. The sedate nature of its release suggests Google really aren’t all that bothered about the success of this project, at least not in the near future, and were really just hoping for a little bit of the limelight following Yahoo’s protracted kissing and cuddling with Microsoft before their acrimonious fall-out and subsequent fisticuffs and chest-pumping. Google love a headline, if they were a film star they’d surely become Scientologists and marry some failed actress from Dawsons Creek, but where they normally maneuver that attention well, here I feel they fail on the basic principle of the product letting them down.

They have introduced something called an Omnibox, which is just the search bar wearing a tutu, and fails miserably as a nonpartisan addition to the browser. People have the option with most other browsers of selecting home page etc, but this bar doubles as a search engine on … you’ve guessed it, Google. The merging of the address bar and search bar gives Google too much control over navigation. It separates companies and website operators from their website addresses and brands. Companies spend heavily to establish and maintain brands. Google has just imposed itself between consumers and businesses. Direct navigation has now become proprietary search, whereby Google uses its discretion to filter out web addresses and domains that it deems less relevant. I object heavily to this and see it as no less than bullying, so for this alone I have boycotted the browser, but more poignantly, they have thus far failed to release a Beta version for the Mac. As a Mac user i find this rather insulting, and as an opponent of Microsoft and every filthy moral they stand for I am infuriated.

I shall leave it at this: as a writer/consumer this story is fun, it sometimes even shakes hands with endearment, but as an employee of a web development company, and having test-driven it on a PC, I am more excited by the recession thats’ somewhat fallaciously drowning the spirit of a perpetually melancholic UK. Chrome will not affect things for my employers within the next 3 years at least, and I predict that it probably never will.