My bus fare from Odd Down to the town centre in Bath (a 2.2 mile journey) has just risen again, to £2.10 a single. Let’s say (I don’t know for sure – I rarely get returns) that this means a 2-way journey is, what, £4.00?

Now let’s think about me, my wife and 2 boys, wanting to go down into town on a Saturday. The boys are currently (but not for much longer) free. So for just my wife and I to go down and back into town is £8.00, or thereabouts.

Car parking in Bath isn’t cheap, but I know that I can park ours for an entire day at a central location (I’m not telling you where it is in case you find it) for £4.00.

The sum  is already looking pretty weak in support of Bath’s buses, but let’s add in some other bits of the equation: on the plus side, travelling by bus is greener. On the minus, the journey time is the same in bus or car and comfort (getting 2 kids + pushchair etc onto crowded bus) is much better in a car. There are a whole load of other things on the periphery too: endlessly rude and suicidally fast bus drivers and bonkers passengers among them, but I won’t bang on here.

Now, we’re reasonably green, and like to think about the environment as much as possible, but the equation is looking pretty badly balanced to me. Not only do we have to suffer a worse journey but we’re also asked to pay double what we’d pay in the car. Double. And that is only going to get more expensive as the kids get older.

I know that X councillor at  BN&S or Y worker at First is likely to point out that buses are an expensive bit of infrastructure and that pointing at London or Manchester or any other big city who seem to manage to do this stuff right is somehow irrelevant because of the scale involved. But to them I just say – if you have to, run the buses at a loss – because that is the only way that you’ll get people to really embrace their use. Or maybe less radically, try some other pricing models – for instance loyalty cards or “every 100th person wins an ipod” – anything – just not this horrific, creeping, ever-increasing ticket price for a transport mode which represents absolutely nothing to normal people apart from some far-away notion of “being a bit more green”.

For buses to work, the price point either needs to be the same or more attractive than the alternative. We’re a middle class not badly off family who cares about green issues and we quite often choose the car. What possible hope is there of attracting a single mum with 3 kids and a minimal income at these prices?

I’m probably not supposed to say this, and will probably not be saying it when our mortgage triples or we all lose our jobs, but I’m actually kind of glad we’re having to think a bit more about our money and lifestyles in these “troubled economic times”.

For a long while now, I – like many people – have felt an increasing sense of unease at the obscene cheapness of  some of the things us Westerners can get our hands on. From Asda jeans for £3 to Argos kettles for just under £5, to DVD players (yes, players) for £16; less than the DVD’s that go in them.

Cheapness is compelling. I’d be lying if I said my wife and I didn’t have some of these clothes for our two boys. They grow their way through jeans at about one pair a month. We try not to do it, but sometimes we crack in the sheer face of price. Spend £20 on jeans or get 7 pairs for the same money? Not an easy place to do the right thing.

But – do we, here in our comfortable houses, being paid at least a minimum wage, with a whole range of different clothes in our wardrobes to choose from – need many of the things that we buy? Do we need clothes at £3 when – really – we could afford (and in the past, have afforded) a spend of £10 or £20?

These things are so cheap they have to involve a terrifying level of exploitation somewhere in the chain. The economics of scale only answer part of the question. This exploitation might be of people or exploitation of oil, or both. It might, actually, be exploitation of our incredible greed in wanting to JUST BUY STUFF all the time.

There’s an Ellis family story which is slowly edging its way into legend about my lovely (if slightly cantankerous) gran and how – shortly after the war – she dropped a cabbage by mistake onto her local train line. Rather than just leave it, she went to the effort to go to the signal box, found out that the train wasn’t due and then got staff to retrieve the cabbage for her.

Whether this is true or not, the point is that our current understanding of value in the Western world is skewed in a badly unrealistic, exploitative and damaging way. Tim O’Reilly quotes from the now-famous Fake Steve Jobs post about the suicide of a Chinese worker. Both posts are well worth a read:

We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives

Maybe a good old recession might help even the balance a little bit. It probably won’t have us hunting on train lines for cabbages, and some might argue it’ll mean we look for even cheaper jeans, but maybe we’ll also start looking closer at the reality of the value chain and begin to re-use rather than re-buy.

We had a slightly unusual format at BathCamp this week: 3 minutes to describe one technology “that has blown you away more than any other”.

There were a whole bunch of great presentations. Mine was all about the piano, one of not many constants in my life for (cough) 30 years.

[slideshare id=1757414&doc=bc3minutesonetechnologyme-090723021137-phpapp02&w=500]

It was a fun format, and I enjoyed finding out some stuff I didn’t know about pianos…

One of the interesting – and hugely mentally destabilising – things about capitalism is that there is no top to it. No matter how hard you work, how important your social circles are, how big your yacht, your bag of coke, your circle of A-list celeb mates, there is always a nagging just one more. And there’s no top to it, none at all. Bill Gates? He’s rich, but hey, let’s get richer.

The nice thing about the other direction is that there is a finite horizon. Nothing is simply nothing. There’s no less about it – if you have nothing, you’ve arrived at a stability which can’t be denied. Gandhi wandered around with a stick and a bowl. It doesn’t get a whole lot simpler or more stable than that.

There’s something to be said for stability, for avoiding a world in which the just one more endless receeding horizon is there in your face every single day. I guess that’s why Eckhart Tolle resonates with so many people. He resonates with me, too, which – to be frank – is quite annoying as he’s dangerously edging towards the MBS section of Waterstone’s.

Here’s to simplicity, and the stability that comes with it.

I love this quote.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

I thought this was from Goethe, but according to this page, not so…

I finally got around to recording a brief snippet of piano to use in Ableton.

I don’t know why this has taken me so long – probably I thought that miking a piano would be hard. In fact I went lo-fi by opening the lid and popping the mic in the top. Job done.

The un-effected, untreated, warts and all piano line is here. You can hear all the creakings and hi end noise that presumably comes from throwing a cheap mic into the top of an old piano.

I recorded onto my MacBook but DropBoxed across to my PC to do the Ableton stuff – I’m in a kind of transition period between PC and MB for doing tunes – all my VST’s are on my PC but I’m loving the ease and portability of the Mac.

Once in Ableton, I did some effectmagic (technical term) on the piano line, removing the high end noise and hopefully most of the creaks (most of which are actually a pedal which badly needs oiling..) and then chucked in some quick samples to pad it all out.

As always, it’s unfinished – in fact, it’s downright lazy – but then hey, my neck hurts and it’s time to go do something else. So for now, here it is. Hang around until the piano line comes in about half way through – it gets better.

For other [mostly unfinished] stuff, go to the tunes page on my website.

I’m a haver of ideas. I always have been. Most of the time, this is a good thing and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But sometimes, it just becomes way, way too much.

The first problem with ideas is that they’re like some kind of virus that you can’t shuffle off. You have one, another breeds, a third follows shortly after that and mutates into something even bigger. Before you know it, your head is absolutely and completely rammed.

The second problem is that unless you’re a well-funded entrepreneur or self-made billionaire, you will never [ever] have the means to make all your ideas happen.

The third problem is that if you’re an ideas person, you’re jealous of your ideas. Intensely jealous. “First girlfriend is talking to my best mate” jealous.

The fourth problem is that if you’re an ideas person, you may well not care (or be very good at) about the implementation of your idea. You just care about the beauty (or at least the beauty that you perceive) of the idea, not the “funding” or the “business plan” or the “route to market”. You couldn’t give a shit about the bit that follows the idea.

The fifth problem is the internet. It makes you uneasy, aware, open. It makes you fickle. It makes you think you can do it – because, hey, building a website is easy, right?

The sixth problem is that your idea has been done before. And you hate that. You hate that the differentiator isn’t the idea, it’s the damn “implementation” of the idea. And although this has always been the case, the internet (see problem five) makes it even more readily apparent that someone else has done it already. Better.

I have to be honest. This is another way of saying this: I’m being eaten up. My head is in danger of going somewhere I don’t want it to go. I need an outlet, and I need it quickly.

So my idea (hey, another one!) is to take my ideas list – my coveted and beautiful ideas list – and just chuck it out there. Stop hiding, make it available. See what happens. I’m expecting nothing. And you shouldn’t, either. (I never said my ideas were any good, did I…)

It’s here, if you’re interested.

As an information and visualisation junky, I’m always on the look out for data that hasn’t yet been used – or even data that is used, but unnoticed, and could be cut in new and potentially interesting ways.

When I used to work at the Science Museum, we, like many companies had an internal mail system based around those orange envelopes – the ones (I don’t know their name, apart from “internal mail envelope”) with maybe 40 boxes to show who to send the envelope to next.

I always liked these – firstly, because it’s a simple, economical solution to a problem – but mainly because they get more interesting the longer they’re in use. Not only do you get the feeling that this thing is being sent around all four corners of an institution and somehow gathering a story as it goes (imagine the confidential missives, bills, invoices, letters, love notes!?), but there is also a real, hand-written audit trail of the journey as well.

So. I thought it’d be interesting to take one of these at the end of their journey and see where it’d been and think about ways in which I could map that journey. I’m no longer at the Science Museum, but my current company uses the same envelopes – and although it probably won’t be as interesting a journey (we are only 100 people in two sites, as opposed to the 800 or so split over three sites at the museums), it’s still worth a punt.

Now, the ways in which you could do this vary. I punted a couple of thoughts about this experiment on Twitter and two or three people suggested RFID readers, barcodes or other gizmoid style solutions. This is all very well (and thanks!), but the requirement here is something quick and dirty; low cost, easy, minimal (no) impact to end users. So instead of opting for hi-tech, I’ve simply written “Please return this envelope to Mike Ellis” in the last box on the envelope. That’s it.

So. There’s nothing left to do but send a few of these envelopes out into the wild and see what happens. I’ll also add my return message on any orange envelopes I get from now on, and hope that they find their way home.

It’d be fascinating to see what would happen with this experiment on a much bigger scale – @psychemedia (Tony Hirst) suggested hospitals – or what about the whole NHS? Or Google? Or Microsoft…

Data-wise, here’s a quick braindump of five things you could map / visualise:

> mapping the path (only really relevant across disparately located organisations, although could “heat map” a floorplan of a company?)
> time taken for envelope to get “used up” (requires a timestamp on the first address box)
> most commonly mailed people
> most commonly mailed departments
> success rates (how many envelopes sent out get back to source..?)

If you’d like to take part in the experiment in your organisation, or have any ideas for how we could cut the data, let me know in the comments – and maybe add #envelopetravels to any tweets, blog posts or pictures that you take..

We were away on holiday with some friends recently. We’d landed up in a luxury villa, more by hard bargaining and negotiating a late deal than having huge wads of money to spare. The villa came with everything and anything you’d want – or not – from a week in the sun: swimming pool, hot tub, pool table, Wii – and…a dishwasher.

Now I know that to many, a dishwasher is no longer considered a luxury item, but we don’t have one at home (and never have) and it became a bit of a running joke while we were away. The couple we went with know that I’ve got a few weird foibles (I don’t have – and never have had – a credit card or microwave, for example), and so some good humoured piss-ripping took place all week as we negotiated the “is a dishwasher a good thing?” discussion.

People, it turns out, are very passionate about this debate, both on the “against” side, but more surprisingly on the “for” side, too. When I mentioned it to some friends at work, the vigour with which they defended their love of dishwashers surprised me almost as much as my dislike of dishwashers appeared to surprise them.

So just for the record, here’s where I’m at.

First, there are two things that I should make clear about the Ellis family viewpoint (and yes, my wife shares my opinions on this…):

1. We’re not militant about it. Although, having said that, I actually think we (all) should be, for very obvious environmental reasons laid out below.

2. More importantly for this post: We don’t mind washing up. In fact, I would almost – but not quite – say that we quite like it. No, I’m not mad: actually, there’s something quite relaxing about the process and the down time that washing up gives you.

The second point is most important. Whatever else is said about dishwashers, I (provided I don’t have some kind of epiphany) just don’t care enough about the apparent horror of manual washing up to consider an alternative. So now we’ve got that out if the way, here’s how I see the Incredible Myths Of The Dishwasher:

Myth 1: It saves time.
Truth: You have to load it, run it, unload it. Time spent: way more than hand-washing. Myth busted.

Myth 2: Dishwashers are more convenient
Truth: See above, PLUS you invariably have to hand wash a number of items anyway, PLUS you have to sort out breakable or non-dishwasher safe items. Not to mention those moments when you need a plate or mug and it turns out they’re all stuck mid-cycle in the damn machine. Myth busted.

Myth 3: Dishwashers are more green.
Truth: hard to tell on the basis of running the thing given all the contradictory reports – but consider the common sense: given the water has to be heated to a higher temperature, a motor has to run and a pretty nasty set of chemicals have to be added, it seems unlikely. And that’s before you’ve thought about the impact of manufacture, shipping, replacement parts, etc. Myth, surely, busted.

Myth 4: Dishwashers sterilise your wash.
Truth: who fucking cares? I mean, really? Sterilised plates? Cmon. Better go back to your oxygen tent in case you catch something..

Myth 5: Dishwashers are cheaper to run
Truth: Personally, our family of four might spend – what – £3 a month on washing up liquid. If your dishwasher cost – I dunno – £300? then that’s two years of running without even taking into consideration the initial outlay, the soap tablet cost, the maintenance / insurance. Myth busted.

If five clearly busted myths aren’t enough for you, the ‘over-spec’ one is surely the nail in the coffin: a dishwasher is a clumsy bit of mechanical engineering that will go wrong (and to my delight, the one in our villa broke halfway through the week, just to prove my point). A washing up bowl is about as simple as it gets. You don’t need insurance, or an engineer. Simple, surely, is good.

So there you have it. You’re probably busy stacking your dishwasher, but please feel free to vent in an hour or two when you’ve finished

I just found some sketches I did for cards a long while ago.

I do have a vague memory that I turned these into real cards (i.e. got them printed and eveything), but absolutely no idea where the buggers ended up. Must ask my mum – probably got a couple of thousand lurking in her loft…

Anyway. I’ll stick em on here over the next few days in case anyone cares enough to look at them…