Table Tennis...

Sorry for the lack of posts just lately. I’ve been playing more table tennis just recently, and I have got into coaching, and also taken on the task of remaking the club website so I’ve been quite busy.

Table tennis is a great sport that generally requires a great amount of skill to play at a decent level. I say generally because there is one aspect of table tennis that reduces the need for skill and that is what I’m going to write about in this post.

There are 3 main types of rubber used on table tennis bats. Inverted (or smooth), short pimples out and long pimples out.

Inverted rubbers are good for spinning the ball (provided your stroke is correct), but are also susceptible to incoming spin and therefore you need to adjust your strokes accordingly depending on the spin your opponent puts on the ball. This takes a lot of skill as you can imagine.

Short pimples out rubbers are less capable of spinning the ball, and the correct stroke for these types of rubber is to hit through the ball more. These rubbers are still affected by incoming spin (to a lesser degree than inverted) and also require a good amount of skill to use.

With both of these types of rubbers you can tell what spin is being applied to the ball by watching your opponents stroke. Nothing is hidden from you, it is just up to you to control the spin and make a good return.

Long pimples are a completely different story. You can’t generate any spin with them, but neither are you affected by incoming spin, and so little skill is required to control the ball. What actually happens is the ball hits the pimples, which bend around the ball, altering the spin to something random and unreadable, thus producing errors from the opponent. In the sales pitch for these types of rubbers they emphasize the spin reversal and the deception it creates. This appeals to peoples desire to win at all costs as it gives the user an advantage, regardless of actual playing talent. Basically, with long pimples, you can play the same shot against almost any ball and you will return it with random spin on it, hence the deception.

In my playing career I have seen players transform into difficult opponents simply by putting long pimple rubbers on their backhand side. One such player moved up two divisions after doing so. The other day I was watching a player I knew years ago returning really spinny serves by just pushing the ball with his bat. I was amazed and thought how good he was at returning serves and how much he’d improved. Then I discovered he had long pimples on his bat. He proceeded to tell me how using long pimples really improves your game. This is just rubbish. I have no doubt that at general league standard you will win more games, but it doesn’t make you a better player.

In no other sport would you be able to use equipment that gives you such an advantage and covers up weaknesses in your game. This begs the question, why is it allowed? The answer is money. Table tennis equipment manufacturers sell these long pimple rubbers to people who only care about winning, and there are a lot of people like that out there. It’s a form of legalized cheating, and for financial reasons they are allowed to be sold and used.

Windows Vista

So, it’s been about 5 years since Microsoft launched Windows XP and now we have its successor, Windows Vista. Has the 5 years spent on developing Vista been worth it? Well, yes and no. There’s no doubt about it, it looks nice. The Aero interface is very cool to look at. The glass effect window borders, the 3D tab application selector and the graphical tooltips on the taskbar are all very nice, but what about compatibility and performance?

There are serious compatibility issues with some applications, games and drivers. Some users I know are experiencing regular crashes. Microsoft has done its usual trick of releasing an unfinished product and getting Joe Public to beta test it, report bugs and other issues so they can then release a service pack to attempt to remedy the problems (well, some of them).

What about performance? I have XP and Vista installed on the same machine, and wrote a little benchmark program to test the speed of them, like for like. On XP the program called the test routine 5000 times and took 523ms. The same test on Vista took 2507ms. Almost 5 times longer. No wonder the minimum spec is a 1Ghz CPU and 512Mb RAM. My system is a 3.6Ghz P4 with 2Gb RAM and it runs acceptably, anything less and it would run like a sloth on Valium.

My personal take on the situation boils down to this... If you purchase a computer with Vista installed you’ll probably be ok with most mainstream apps, but if you’re thinking of upgrading from XP to Vista, I recommend you wait till the first service pack to be released before doing so. That way some of the bugs will be ironed out, and driver developers will have extra time to come up with more stable drivers for your existing hardware.

Utility Bills...

Yesterday we received two utility bills... gas and electric. We get both from the same supplier. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw them. The electric bill was for £561, and they were going to up our direct debit to £160 a month. This was an estimated bill, based on a previous estimate when we first became customers. They had some real readings (someone came to the house and actually read the meter) but they were so much lower than their estimate they decided to disregard the actual readings and send another estimate. Apparently the reading was lower than their first estimate which they based on our usage with our previous suppliers and so they thought the actual reading was an error. No, we don’t live in Buckingham Palace, it’s just a 2 bedroom terrace.

The gas bill was even worse. The bill was for £1021 and they wanted to put our direct debit up to £290 a month! Yes, it was another estimate, presumably based on the supposition that we heated the whole town. As it turns out, the actual bill was for £83. Just a slight discrepancy.

The ridiculous thing is, when the sales rep originally called and convinced us to switch to them, he “personally guaranteed” that our utility bills would be cheaper (yes I know they all say that), then we receive bills totalling over £1500 for a quarter. Not quite the bargain prices I was expecting. At least after contacting them (and being on hold for 20mins) the situation seems to be resolved, but not without a great deal of stress.

It just infuriates me that they employ people to read meters, then ignore the readings, preferring instead to scare people to death with their outrageous estimates. So much for privatised utility companies providing a better service for customers (I intend to blog about this in the future).

Web Design... The Deeziners

First of all, my apologies for the lack of posts recently. I haven’t been in the best of health but things are a little better now so here we go...

If you have read my previous post about web designer "Purists" you will know I am now going to write about the second type of web designer... The "Deeziners".

Deeziners are the kind of people who would have absolutely no consideration for the viewing public. They use the proliferation of broadband as an excuse for bloated sites that consume bandwidth like a voracious jungle beast, much in the same way as Microsoft do with Windows (I will blog about this subject in due course). With every increase in internet speed, web sites become more and more technically demanding... unnecessarily so. They seem to think it's "kewl" making 500kb Flash Animations just for a simple button, like we care. The extremely annoying "Splash Pages" that are becoming prevalent just serve to make your internet experience a whole lot less informative as you spend 10 minutes watching an epilepsy inducing corporate logo fly around your screen.

Other Deeziner inconsiderations include site navigation that doesn't work without Javascript or Flash. There are some users that don't have these things installed for various reasons, and therefore you make your sites content completely unavailable to them. Don't get me wrong, I like some of the inventive site navigation that is developed, but some sort of contingency plan should kick in when these technologies aren't available. Deeziners don't care about that though... they're too busy trying to force feed their latest "creations" to clueless companies that think people are impressed by microscopic text. I mean, what is it about websites where you need a magnifying glass to read their uninspiring mission statements? It's not "kewl", it's an inconvenience at best. Worse still, are the Deeziners that render text as graphics to maintain the same look across the different spectrum of browsers in their unreadable nano-font, forgetting that search engine bots can’t read graphics, thus preventing the site being indexed properly. These morons don't think about the flow of a document, they are trying to make the World Wide Web like a glossy magazine, forgetting that people use different browsers, on different resolution screens, in different sized windows. A good website can be visually appealing whilst retaining flexibility for different viewing situations, not that these cretins have any consideration for that.

Deeziners consider themselves to be at the pinnacle, the summit, the leading edge of web design and that everyone else is inferior. These sages of the profession are aloof to the point of rudeness. Anyone who dares to upload a website not containing several megabytes of pointless animation, an annoying soundtrack and a labyrinthine navigation system, is subject to a full dose of their imperial scorn.

The typical Deeziner uses new technology for the sake of it. For example, they will use Flash to display several paragraphs of text, when a simple <p> </p> would suffice. Why? Because it doesn't endear him/her to the elite community they so desperately want to belong to. This group of self-professed experts is an exclusive club of techno-wannabes, and instead of imparting any wisdom to a newbie, they come slamming down on them with the full force of their "Flash for Dummies" manual. These people are truly unpleasant, for whom the term "prat" is woefully inadequate.

Web Designers... The Purists

I thought I'd write a bit about web design, as it is becoming a more and more popular choice of career. I have been involved in some sort of web work for over 10 years, and I've seen internet technology blossom during this time. The main thing I have learned is that there are two main types of web designer. I try and settle myself somewhere in between these two extremes. In this post I'm going to tell you about the first kind of web designer.

The first type is what I call the "Purists". Purists consider themselves experts in the subject of HTML. Well, "expert" is too tame a word. They each believe themselves to be the The Master, The Overlord, the Lord God Almighty of HTML. If your webpage doesn't strictly conform to RFC 2070* they come wading in to strike you down with their mighty flaming Lynx scimitar. In case you're unfamiliar with Lynx, it's a DOS based browser that displays text only. These Purists use Lynx as an excuse for their pathetic websites and unwarranted critiquing of others work. 10 years ago these Purists websites were the norm, HTML being in its infancy without much control in the way of formatting and presentation, but today, with new technologies available, companies want their corporate websites to reflect their technical prowess and professionalism. A plain text site with the occasional graphic just doesn't cut it anymore for corporate websites. Don't get me wrong... primarily text based sites have their place. After all it's often the content of the site you want, not window dressing. This site for example is fairly minimalistic, but it's enough (in my opinion) for its purpose, primarily text. The Purists would try telling a company that they should forego their fancy graphics, animations and snazzy layout because people with a text-based browser won't be able to see it. It's like telling TV companies to only produce programmes in black and white because people with black and white televisions can't see the colour. As long as the content is available to all browsers, the rest is personal preference. Try telling any of these Purists that and they dismiss you with their magisterial scorn, as if graceful fallbacks are beyond the ability of a modern day web designer. They see any new technology as effrontery to their voluminous knowledge of HTML.

One other trait of the Purist is the opinion that new technologies such as Javascript are evil and should be disabled in any capable browser. These Purists are so paranoid they should live in a Faraday Cage. Javascript for example, can be extremely useful, and save much bandwidth on the busy internet. Input validation is just one example. Have a client-side script validate a forms content before submitting it to a server stops erroneous data being submitted and rejected and resulting in more traffic. Or even just setting the focus on an editbox ready for typing. Things like this make the internet more user friendly, but that doesn't stop the Purists from maligning Javascript as a security risk. At worst, Javascript in malicious hands can be annoying, but you'll only find things like that in the less savoury side of the internet. It's the equivalent to walking down a dark alley where it is a known place for muggers to attack. Don't invite trouble and you probably won't get any.

The Purists complain when websites don't conform to the specs, but they do things like spoof their USER_AGENT headers** to make the server deliver content designed for a different UA, and when it looks like crap they complain. This is hugely hypocritical, as they are breaking the specs because they're afraid someone will detect which browser they are using. Well, big freaking deal... get a life... no-one cares what browser you're using. The website designer is trying to cater for as many browsers as possible and that is it. No malicious intent, just trying to make the visitors experience a good one.

An argument used often by the Purists is that websites that don't display well in Lynx are discriminating against users in some way, as if it is someone’s inalienable right to access your websites content. What about non-English speaking people? Am I discriminating against them because I don't provide translations in many different languages? Of course not. This is a stupid claim made by people stuck in an internet time-warp. Companies I have done web work for couldn't care less if their site looks crap in Lynx. The type of people (the Purists mainly) that use Lynx are not part of their target demographic. They are trying to appeal to your average Joe Public who don't know what Lynx is, what HTML is and what validated markup is... and don't care. If you showed them a site in Lynx, the likely response would be that "Teletext*** is better than that" and "why on earth am I paying for internet access to view sites that look like they're from some 80's TV programme?"

Basically, web design has moved on, whilst the Purists haven’t. They really need to get out more and stop arguing over things like the use of the <blockquote> tag.


* The technical reference for the HTML protocol.
** A User Agent Header is a piece of information containing the type of Browser requesting the webpage. It is part of the specifications and is required data for the www to function properly.
*** A service provided with British TV displaying information on request.

Michael Schumacher...

So, Michael Schumacher... the world’s best? I don’t think so. “BUT MR GRUMPY HE WON SEVEN WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS LOL!!!” I can hear keyboards being battered already. Well, there’s a difference between the best and the most successful. I wouldn’t deny he’s the most successful F1 driver, but he’s certainly not the best. Let’s look at the facts... Over the last decade Ferrari have had the best car by a mile, not to mention that as the number one driver, Schumacher gets the best of everything. Best engine, best gearbox etc. The car is designed around Schumacher’s driving style and the number two driver just has to live with it. But look at the number two drivers... Rubens Barrichello for example, outperformed Schumacher several times despite having the second best of everything. Now he's driving for Honda he's pretty much out of contention. Conversely, Felipe Massa was absolutely nowhere before he came to Ferrari, since then he's outperformed Schumacher on occasions and won races.

What about Schumacher’s sportsmanship? He has none whatsoever as has been conclusively proven over the years. In Adelaide in 1994, he deliberately took Damon Hill out of the race to prevent him winning the championship. Schumacher had made a mistake and hit a wall, damaging his car. But instead of parking up, he drove back onto the track and cut Damon Hill up on a corner, damaging Hill’s car and preventing him from finishing the race. In 1997 he side-swiped Jacques Villeneuve in a blatantly foul move but failed to prevent the Canadian collecting the title. Most recently was the fiasco in qualifying at Monaco 2006. To stop Alonso from getting the opportunity to achieve pole, he parked up on a corner and deliberately stalled, bringing out the warning flags. F1 rules forbid drivers to set a fastest time on a part of the track where there are warning flags for an accident. Pole position at Monaco is nine tenths of the way to winning as everyone knows how hard overtaking is there. Why would the “world’s best” need to do things like that? Simple... now Ferrari have some competition in Renault, he hasn’t got the best car so he can’t win fairly. What was the punishment handed out for this blatant act of cheating? Starting from the back of the grid. Pathetic. He should have been disqualified from the race altogether, if not more, but oh no, not the Great Michael Schumacher. Why are people so quick to forget incidents like that? Any other sport and you're branded a cheat and never live it down.

He is surrounded by sycophants at Team Ferrari, like Ross Braun, who when Schumacher was overtaken on a corner by Montoya, and then spun himself, called Montoya a classless and reckless driver, despite there being no contact between the cars... yet when Schumacher runs another driver off the track and onto the grass he is praised by Mr Braun for "brave" driving. What a hypocrite!

Ask a typical Schumacher fan about things like that and they have trouble answering, presumably finding it hard to talk with their lips attached to Schumacher’s ass. It begs the question... who are they going to worship now that he's retired? It has been said that he will be missed greatly and the sport will never be the same... Too right it won’t be. I'm glad to see the back of this pretentious, arrogant character who brings the sport of Formula One into disrepute on a regular basis.

Telesales Part II

I know I’ve written about telesales before… specifically about T-Mobile, but after today’s episode I felt I had to share the experience. This call was from some mobile phone supplier (I don’t know which because I could hardly understand a word that the operator said). It started with a couple of questions… “Do you have a mobile phone?” and “Is it on a contract?”. I answered in the affirmative to both questions. I initially thought this was some sort of survey, but after the operator had repeated every sentence twice I was able to ascertain they were trying to sell me a new phone on a new contract. Normally, saying I already have a contract phone is enough to end a conversation of this nature, but not today though. I once again explained I had a contract that still has 10 months to run, and therefore I don’t want another one. “I’ll just pass you over to my supervisor” came the response. The conversation went like this:

Supervisor: “Hello, how are you today?”

Me: “I was fine until you called.”

Supervisor: “Pardon!?!”

Me: “Never mind. What do you want?”

Supervisor: “My colleague says you want a new contract phone”

Me: “No… I never said that”

Supervisor: “Does anyone in your family want a new phone?”

Me: “No… goodbye… <click>”

These calls are really becoming tiresome, and I’m getting less and less polite, but then I’m not called Mr. Grumpy for nothing ;)

Reality TV...

We are in an age where Reality TV shows are making up a high percentage of what is available to the viewing public, particularly the shows that have public voting. Over the last few years we’ve had a plethora of shows that get the public to vote, including such gems as “Big Brother”, “I’m a Celebrity”, “Popstars”, “Pop Idol”, “Soapstar Superstar” and “X-Factor”. All of these shows are like a licence to print money for the producers of this drivel. The X-Factor for example received approximately 8,000,000 votes just on the final show, and at 35p a vote, that makes £2,800,000. Now call me cynical, but it would appear that TV producers have caught on to this and are trying to come up with new shows with the same format and same public voting, most recently for example, “Dancing on Ice”.

“Dancing on Ice” is just like the rest with the “Ice Panel”, public voting and long and drawn out revelation of the results. When Phillip Schofield announces the couples that are through to the next week, the dramatic pauses are so clichéd, as is the “and we’ll reveal the next couple through after the commercial break” thing he does every week.

Another thing these shows have in common is that out of the panel of judges, you always have one nasty judge. People like Nigel Martin-Smith (Star for a Night), Nigel Lythgoe (Popstars), Simon Cowell (X-Factor), Billy Sammeth (Soapstar Superstar) and Jason Gardiner (Dancing on Ice), are obviously doing this for a reason... and that reason is to generate controversy and get the newspapers and the public talking about the show. The agenda is purely publicity driven in an attempt to get more viewers, more votes and thus more money.

An unfortunate side-effect of shows like “Big Brother” is it propels talentless nobodies into stardom. A perfect example of this is Jade Goody. Her only ability is to say incredibly stupid things and for that she lands her own TV series. Another example of a no talent celebrity wannabe is Lizzie Bardsley, from “Wife Swap”. What this scrounging old bag has to offer a paying audience is beyond me. She recently had to repay £5,000 in benefits for failing to declare her TV earnings, demonstrating her world-class insensateness. Now she's a "Celebrity", she's booted her husband out, obviously not needing his dole money to scrape by on.

However, back to the subject in hand... While these shows engender such financial remuneration for the TV producers, we the public will be deluged with more Reality TV shows like Love Island, Celebrity Fit Club (not “Fat” Club as it was previously known when it had “ordinary” people on it, as that might upset the precious celebrities) and Hells Kitchen, and only when they fail to make the huge sums of money they currently generate will they stop this rubbish.

Telesales

Is there anybody out there that isn’t plagued by telesales? They are the bane of modern day living… audio spam if you like. I’m not keen on using the telephone anyway, but when you receive these aggravating calls where the sales operator recites from a script regardless of what you say it really p***es me off.

The worst offender in my experience has been T-Mobile. I purchased a mobile phone from them, on an 18 month contract, and was fairly happy with things. What has become more than annoying though, is that they keep calling me to offer me a new deal, even though I have a contract, with them, and I don’t want another phone. Every time it’s the same. Now, I’m not a racist by any means, but the sales operator (yes, it’s always the same person, I recognise the way he speaks… he ends every sentence with the word “right?” which gets annoying very quickly) has an extremely strong accent which doubles the length of the conversation as I need him to constantly repeat himself because I can’t understand him. The call usually goes something like this:

Sales: “You have been specially selected to receive a brand new mobile phone, right?”

Me: “No thank you, I already have a phone.”

Sales: “But this phone is better. It’s a brand new <insert name of current super-phone>, you’ll want it, right?”

Me: “No thank you I already have a phone. It's a contract phone, and I don't want another one as I can't cancel my current contract can I?"

Sales: “Why don’t you give your phone away and get this new one, right?”

Me: “Everyone I know has a phone, and I’m not paying for two phones.”

Sales: “What about your wife? She would like this phone, why don’t you get it for her, right?”

Me: "She already has a phone and she's very happy with it."

Sales: “Let me speak to her, right?”

Me: “No. Look, we don’t want a new phone and that’s it.”

Sales: “But this is a top of the range phone, right?”

Me: “Are you listening to me?”

Sales: “It has a <insert cool feature>. You’ll want it, right?”

Me: “I DON’T WANT IT!!!”

Sales: “It’s top of the range, right?”

Me: “I DON’T want it. I’m going to hang up if you carry on.”

Sales: “It’s only £30 a month, right?”

Me: <click>

I must have had at least 10 conversations like this over the past year and it’s really starting to wear thin. Trying to stay civil is a real test of ones patience. If that wasn’t bad enough though, the most recent experience tops all previous ones.

Can you believe they actually called me on my mobile phone, to offer me a mobile phone? Now forgive me for being obtuse, but am I the only one who can see the redundancy in this? If they just took a moment to check their records, they would see I have a contract, with them, with the phone I am talking to them on. I pointed this out to the caller, that I already had a phone, hence the reason they were able to contact me on it. The caller took this rather poorly and seemed rather irritated. Not as irritated as I was for getting the stupid call in the first place. The conversation ended and that was that.

Other recent experiences, aside from T-Mobile have been repeated silent calls from an 0800 number, and automated telesales. The first time I got one of these automated calls, I thought I was getting a call from Steven Hawking. Since then I recognise the call and just hang up.

I would like to round off this post by saying I'm not a rude or discourteous person by nature, but these people would try the patience of Jesus Christ himself.

The X-Factor

Now that the X-Factor* is over and the dust has settled, I thought I’d write about the show from a viewers perspective.

This year they decided to have “themed” shows, where a special guest would appear on the show, and the contestants would sing songs by the special guest. Now, call me cynical, but every guest they had on the show, without exception, spookily enough had a compilation album released the week they appeared on the show. This to me, is commercialism of the highest order, spoon-feeding this blatant advertising to the public, rather than a genuine interest in the show and the contestants.

One of the worst protagonists was Rod Stewart. The week he was a special guest and the contestants all had to sing Rod Stewart songs was a joke. Rod Stewart has been around for over 35 years, so you would imagine there is a huge back-catalogue of songs to choose from, and you’d be correct. However, most of his “hits” have been cover versions… like “Sailing” and “The First Cut Is The Deepest”. How this hypocrite could stand there and take the plaudits for the tracks performed by the contestants beggars belief. 8 out of the 11 tracks performed on the night were covers when Rod Stewart released them. Even when he performed himself he did a cover. This man is the paragon of unoriginality. If that wasn’t bad enough… he had the nerve to critique the acts by saying they sung sharp. Sharp? He wouldn’t know sharp if it stabbed him in the ass. He has a novelty voice that quickly becomes tiresome and he couldn’t even sing his “own” song in tune, yet he felt the need to establish his pre-eminent authority on singing by criticizing the contestants who are, let’s face it, much better than him.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he called the acts rubbish on a radio show, undoubtedly trying to gain some credibility by slagging off the show, as it’s not “cool” to like it, yet he wants the publicity from being on the show to rejuvenate his flagging career and promote the entirely unoriginal album he’s just released. It’s as if he was jealous of the contestants because they sang “his” songs better than he can, hence why he couldn’t give credit where it was due and just criticized the acts instead of complimenting them. He just proves himself spineless, greedy and out for what he can get for himself, i.e. record sales.

In stark contrast, some of the other special guests… Bjorn Ulvaeus and Barry Manilow for example, were complimentary without being patronising, and were constructive and helpful, and they at least WROTE THEIR OWN DAMN SONGS!!!

In the end though… the right person won the show, and hopefully will go on to greater things.

*The X-Factor for those unfamiliar with it, is a singing talent competition, where viewers vote for their favourite act and the one with the lowest votes goes out of the competition, and the winner gets a £1,000,000 record contract.