charity stuff

puchi puchi
My “I don’t believe it award for best product of the year has to go to this: the Puchi-puchi


It is – no kidding – an electronic keyring device which replicates the sound and feeling of popping bubblewrap.

Priceless…

Charity
Ok – I’ve been banging on about a charity project, so I need to work out what it’s going to be? Well, here are a few ideas I’m toying with:


Run for water
Quite simple this one – I run the marathon to raise money for getting fresh water to remote parts of Africa.

Pros
It’s a clear, tangible, measurable benefit
In some ways it’s the easiest idea to set in motion.
I really need to get fit, but I don’t seem to be able to apply myself to doing it without a target – this provides a target.

Cons
I’m told running a marathon is quite tiring
I’m pretty lazy


Baby podcasts
I had this idea a few weeks ago: babies seem to be mesmerised by repeating shapes, colours and motions… it seems to be their way of learning about the world – trying to figure out how patterns, rhythms and repetitions work seems to give them a way of working out the world. Later, when they’re older, they look for more complicated patterns, objects, and eventually letters.

I thought it would be fun to create a video podcast for babies – in other words, a set of animations that you could download to your ipod, and show to a baby – they’d love watching the moving shapes and colours and it would keep them quiet (it certainly works with George). It’s a little like having a book to distract them, but it would be abstract animations designed for their level…

I’d upload them to the Internet and charge a couple of quid for downloads… I think it’d be simple to do, get a lot of publicity and, be fun.

Pros
The animations would be easy and fun to do.
There are mechanisms for creating paid downloads pretty simply – I could set it all up online.
Cons
I’m not a charity, so I’d have to find a way for it all to get paid to a charity without my intervention.
It might not generate any income at all
The babies would almost certainly eat the ipods



Stock-Aid: Ok – pay attention because this could get complicated. When a magazine, newspaper, book publisher or designer is looking for pictures, and they can’t afford to hire an illustrator or photographer, generally, their first stop is a stock library. The idea here is that they can buy (for anywhere between £1 and £500) royalty free pictures. The stock library takes about50% and the rest goes to the photographer or illustrator.

Stock isn’t just pictures, it can be music, 3d models, video footage or a range of other creative works. Once the user has paid for them, they can use them in whatever production they’re making and they don’t have to worry about copyright….

Now, I’ve got my work on a whole range of stock sites… here are a few:
http://www.alamy.com/
http://www.sciencephoto.com/
http://www.istockphoto.com/
http://www.dreamstime.com/
http://www.renderosity.com/
http://www.pond5.com/
http://www.photographersdirect.com/
http://www.shutterstock.com/
http://www.oceanfootage.com/

From these I get payments every time anyone downloads one of my pictures, models, video clips, etc. earnings from these range from a few pounds to thousands per year…

Now, here’s my idea:
Get these sites to set up an account into which I and any other artist who wants to contribute, can upload pictures, etc. we want to donate. At the end of every month, the money earned gets sent to a charity (I’m suggesting Oxfam).

Pros
Setting up an account with these sites is easy and quick to do and it wouldn’t require the site owner to do anything very much to do it.
Once set up, artists from all over the world could contribute and any proceeds would go to the charity.
It would keep on earning indefinitely – and the payouts would increase as more images were added.

It’s an established system which I know works

Cons
I suggested this to one site (shutterstock) a couple of years ago and they reacted very badly against the idea for some reason - they even threatened to close my account.



I also have a mad idea involving satellites and rainforests – but I think that’s not one for the moment…

Press days
When George was in hospital I wrote in this blog that I was restricting my ipod listening to happy songs… It would be a while, I said before I played any Bob Dylan. Well, I’m in a good enough mood – so I played some today on the way to the Autodesk press event I attended.

This was an event to promote the new releases from Autodesk – primarily from my point of view, 3ds max – the main 3d package I use. As I write about the software for various magazines, I get asked to go to these events and see what the company’s up to.

What they’re usually up to, and this was no exception, is renting some rooms in a very posh hotel, and spending the day going through powerpoint presentations about market sectors and growth opportunities. They soften the blow with a nice lunch and a bag of promotional pens.

On this occasion, it was a 2 day event involving a stayover in the very posh hotel (this was on Hyde Park Corner). I only went for the 2nd day, and didn’t take them up on the hotel offer. I thought it would be a bit cheeky to ask for a family room for George and Lisa – but maybe next time!

Most of the day was spent listening to customer testimonials -which was more interesting than it sounds, because they were actually people like top architects, games designers and film effects people talking variously about the fact that the cars in TV commercials are almost never real cars (because the real cars often haven’t been made when the commercials are put together!) and the fact that new buildings can now be made more environmentally friendly because the architects can know exactly how much glare they’re going to get from the sun in any room before the building is built by using a light meter in a 3d model – so workers in the buildings don’t have to close their blinds and turn the lights on.

The day ended with someone demonstrating the features of the new release of 3d studio – he was very apologetic and thought we all wanted to go home, although in reality, it was his part of the event that we’d all come to see.


Pathways
The event started at 9am so going to it involved me joining the shuffling hoards of commuters on the London underground. A daily migration I’ve successfuly arranged my life to avoid.

As a single, paranoid body, we shuffled an inch at a time through Bond Street Station, each worrying that everyone else in the crowd was planning to barge us, pickpocket us or
Blow us up.

I changed trains and got off a stop later at Marble arch expecting the same crush there, but instead, the platform was all but empty. The stairs and the escalator stretched away in front of me with just a couple of travellers dotted over it.

Marble Arch is a short walk from Bond St, so why do people not just get off there and avoid the crush?

We get so used to following the tracks of our habits that we follow them without thinking – and never look up to see if there’s a different way or something else going on. Nowhere is this more obvious than the London train networks…

A couple of weeks ago, a famous children’s TV presenter hung himself in Paddington Station. It’s one of the busiest places in one of the busiest cities in the world and yet nobody noticed him going in, and his body lay undiscovered for a week.

A million people didn’t see him.

Maybe I shouldn’t listen to Bob Dylan on the tube.

not high enough
Friday night we went for drinks at the top of the Gherkin – courtesy of Sam’s new flatmate who works there. Looking down on the whole of London, we drank champagne and watched the sun go down (or would have if it wasn’t so cloudy).

From the top bar, you can see the whole city stretching out in every direction, but you can’t talk about it because the pointed dome of the roof creates terrible acoustics – turning the chatter of the bar into a deafening row.

Looking down on the city you really get a sense of how it’s laid out, but what I noticed most of all was how flat it all is. Spreading out from the Thames, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of gradient anywhere – everything for miles around is just a few feet above the level of the river. When you pass over the Thames at high tide, you can see how close it comes to the top of its metal banks.

If the Thames ever flooded, it really wouldn’t take much to sink this city. Global warming doesn’t need to do much.


The weekend
With my 40th party and work deadlines looming, and our house due to be full for the next week or so – with us having to meet people and do things every day – we decided to take this weekend away.

Now, we’ve tried this before with mixed results… booking into a cheap hotel, we’ve discovered is often worse than staying at home. We’ve found various places where we’ve been given single beds pushed together, hotels where we had to eat our breakfast in our room because there was no dining room, and even one hotel room in Manchester where when I drew the curtains, I discovered the room had no windows!

We’ve come back from these weekends away even more tired than when we left.

We decided not to risk it this time and we shelled out for an expensive hotel room in a cheap town (Malmaison in Reading).

Sometimes you just have to be extravagant. This weekend we were, and it was great. They’d just had the hotel fitted out and we couldn’t fault any of it It was so relaxing – we even got a babysitter to come to the hotel room so we could go down and have dinner in the restaurant where the wairess seemed to already know so much about us already that I thought she was going to ask about the party!

However, I’m glad she didn’t…. Lisa and I had to spend at least some of the weekend diffusing an argument which threatened to stop my 40th birthday party in its tracks… I won’t go into details here, but suffice to say our negotiating skills have been put to the test and we’ve now taken over organising the night’s itinerary….

Anyway, hopefully we’re back on track and I’ve now got to go down to the venue tonight to try to persuade the pub to get appropriate drinks in.


Speed
On the way to Reading, there was traffic all the way out of London and although George is great in the car travelling at above 20 mph, as soon as you drop below that speed, he goes off like a bomb, screaming and crying.

I finally realised where the absurd plot from the movie Speed originated.

The writer was obviously travelling through a city with a baby. It’s so obvious to me now.

When we stopped, I was mortified to discover that I’d put him into the car seat with one of his legs trapped in a really uncomfortable position– so he had every right to cry….



Things that aren’t advertised
Why is it that some things are advertised to death and others never get any airtime at all? There doesn’t seem to be any logic in the products that are and aren’t advertised…

Loads of ads for toothbrushes… none for scrubbing brushes.
Loads of ads for cars… none for motorbikes
Loads of ads for beer… none for wine

Who decides?
There was a time when lawnmowers were all over the airwaves… but now it’s vacuum cleaners… do people use mowers less now, or hoover more? I don’t think so.

Suits you sir
Over the weekend, I tried to buy a suit for the party… in the end I got three pairs of jeans and no suit… it was a pretty close call, and involved an abortive visit to “Suits you”… by the time five different people had asked me whether I was after something special, what size I was and how they could help me, and I’d tried to tell them all as rapidly as I could to bugger off, I was so annoyed by them, I never even got to find out whether they had anything I might have wanted to buy.

If they’d maybe got out of my way for long enough for me to see the rails, I might have bought something, but that was never going to be an option.

“can I help you?”
“yes, I’d like somebody who’s never met me, doesn’t know what I’m looking for and doesn’t have any idea of what I wear, to sell me whatever they’re trying to get rid of, please”


In fact, actually…. Just leave me alone. Maybe I could try making my own mind up.



The first wave
We’ve been trying to drop George’s night feed and it seems to be working… he wakes up occasionally but it seems to be working. We’ve also just introduced him to the idea of breakfast (an idea he seems to like as much as he liked the concept of Lunch and Tea).

Last night, putting him to bed, I showed him (as I always do) his reflection in the mirror so that he could say goodnight to it. It’s part of our bedtime routine which involves splashing in the bath, eating, drinking and saying hello to Mr. Elephant…. The whole process takes about 45 minutes.

Anyway, I said goodnight to Mirror George and waved as I turned the bathroom light off, and suddenly George waved back! So cute… he’s now waving hello and goodbye to everyone and everything…. Mainly because Lisa keeps encouraging him to!

I looked after George on Thursday during the day. I think I’m getting better at it because I actually managed to do some things around the house rather than just looking after him! – Lisa got home early and we went to see her new flat (looks good) – then she went out for the evening with some other new mothers!


finishing the book
I finished the book today – or at least the initial version. There are bound to be changes and a few bits to add, but it’s great to get it off my list of current projects for the moment.

The section I left until last was the introduction… it’s much easier to write the intro to something once you’ve done the rest of it – by then you ought to have some idea of what it’s about.

It took a while though because I couldn’t work out what I was trying to say… or maybe it was just because I somehow felt more precious about the last section I wrote – as though the whole book hinged on it – which of course it doesn’t.

When writing’s difficult like that, you just have to work your way through it – get down at least something that’s roughly right – after all, you can change it later, and you’ll have a much better idea of what you need to change once you do.

I sometimes hear other writers talk about writer’s block. I’m not sure I take it too seriously. I think it’s a luxury you only allow yourself if you don’t have a deadline. How many writers on daily newspapers fail to deliver copy because they’re not feeling inspired? Not many… and certainly not twice.

Yes, everybody has bad days and everyone has times when they don’t deliver their best work, but I think it’s a bit self indulgent to simply grind to a halt for days or weeks at a time…

After all – most of the time, when you read back the work you’ve struggled over, it’s just as good as and sometimes better than the work you do when things just flow.

When you find writing difficult, it can be for a few different reasons. Sometimes it’s because you’re worried about the work and just need to get over it. Sometimes it’s because you’re thinking about other things and just need to focus. And sometimes it’s because writing just IS difficult – it requires you to solve problems and work out exactly what you want to say and how you want to say it – in which case, whether you do it now or in six months time, you have to buckle down and solve those probems.

You don’t get to be a writer by talking about writing. You only get to be a writer by writing. When it’s easy. When it’s hard. And when you’re on a deadline, hung over or just bored sick of it.


More pics
Nature got in contact again today – looks like just as I got ahead of myself by completing the book, I’ve got another tight deadline looming….

Still, that’s for next week.

For now, Lisa, George and I are taking a break – we’ve booked into a hotel in Reading and as a big luxury, we’ve got a babysitter to come to the hotel room and look after George on Saturday night.

Mary arrived back on a visit from China - as usual, she was rushing around trying to see friends and family. She stayed over Monday and Tuesday. Looks like this is going to be the last chance she’ll get to come over before the whole of China goes mad in an attempt to make the Olympics into something other than a PR disaster.

As a foreign journalist there, it’ll be a tricky time – it sounds like the government are taking their first faltering steps into becoming PR savvy and it’s not working out very well. They’re typically heavy handed and it’ll be a while before they’re as sophisticated as our lot.

However, they are at least learning that there are different shades to getting your PR right – it’s not just about having one message for one audience – you have to balance a whole lot of different people and peoples.

And that’s important because PR isn’t just propaganda – it’s only a short step from seeing spin as central to your ability to do politics to making public feeling one of the drivers behind your decision making….. and China could do with a bit more of that just as much as the west could do with a bit less of it.

Spent the day on Tuesday with George – Gillian came over and we took him for a long walk in the park which was nice. In the evening I met up with Mary again and some of her friends – which is always interesting as they tend to be a pretty politically active bunch.

One of them was a mover and shaker in one of the charities (War on Want I think)…. He might be good to talk to once I decide what I’m going to do – but he seems to be more about the political side than the money raising side – he seemed to have more fingers in more pies than just being part of one charity….

Still wondering what I am going to do in terms of a charity project, but it will probably involve Africa… I look at the “local” charities and worthy as they are, we’re just so much better off to start with than the developing world that our problems really pale into insignificance…

When we got home – about midnight – George decided to give me about an hour an a half before waking up and starting to cry.

I couldn’t stop him and ended up leaving him to cry and just shutting the door so I couldn’t hear him! Actually, I could probably have got him to sleep if I’d persevered, but he has to learn to do it himself. Anyway, I was so tired and if I’d stayed with him much longer, I’d have got annoyed with him – so I thought it was better to just leave him.

This week is hard at work and in the evening, so we could really do without George waking up…. I guess that’s not his problem though! He’ll do what he’ll do.

Lisa is trying to book us into a hotel for the weekend – we need to get away!


Today was one of those Front Crawl days – where you take one look at the finish line, dive in and just keep swimming with your head down until you hit the other side.

Late last night, I got an email from a client in America who wanted an animation of a bottle (with a personality) for part of a video for children on recycling. The trouble is, they wanted it by Thursday (and I’m looking after George on Thursday). Adding that to the carbon nanotubes I had to get finished (the animation was rendered overnight) for the documentarymakers who were asking Science Photo Library for them (although whether they’ll be used, I still don’t know), you get a busy day.

Unfortunately, I still also have the book (another two chapters on my list to grab pictures for today) and the animation for the ethical investment fund manager and things begin to look hectic.

By the end of the day, I’m pretty well there on most of it. The book chapters are done (but not posted), the bottle animation is previewed and confirmed with the client – but now needs to be rendered in full size). The fund management animation looks good, but needs a little tweaking - right now the animation (which is quite complex) just starts up all guns blazing immediately. It needs to slow its pace a little to give viewers a chance to get orientated within (pompus phrase coming up) “the world of the story” before everything starts animating all over the place.



That’s a day’s work….

We both needed this weekend to be a relaxing one. And it sort of was…. We didn’t do much on Saturday except visit Darren and Kate for dinner (and our first ever game of Wii tennis... Wii Games are really simplistic (effectively tennis was just pushing one button) but because you actually have to move as though you’re playing tennis, it’s great fun…

Anyway, Sunday we also didn’t do much – except walk round to Peckham so I could take a look at Lisa’s new flat (she got the news this afternoon that her offer has been accepted – so we just have to find the money now).

The flat is a modern one right near Peckham Rye station. It’ll be a good rental investment although it’s not at all what Lisa would usually go for.

More on that later….

Even though we managed to get most of the weekend off, it doesn’t seem to have been enough. This whole week is going to be very busy – we’re hardly going to see each other and have things on every night as well as both being busy at work… I think we’re going to try to book into a hotel somewhere for the weekend for a bit of a break before the onslaut of next week (with the deadline for the advert, my book and the run-up to my 40th party.


Over the weekend, I had a little time to think. And I think it’s about time I did some charity work…. Not sure what yet, but some ideas are emerging…..

The BAFTAs
Was pleased to see my next door neighbour was on the BAFTA television awards last night. She presented one award and won one as well. I’ll have to make a point of watching Gavin and Stacy (she’s Stacy) – it sounds as though it’s doing very well.

housing market - time to buy

loft extension
We got a strange letter from the council a couple of days ago. Apparently someone has complained about our loft extension – asking the council to check whether planning permission has been granted for it.

Of course, we sought all the required permissions before we started and were told it only needed building regulations permission – however planning say they don’t have anything to do with the building regulations department (which sounds absolutely preposterous if it’s true).

Anyway – they’ve got to come and see the extension, which isn’t a problem. The only thing we’re left wondering is who decided to complain to the council and why?

It would have to be someone living nearby… there are a couple of candidates I can think of, but I don’t want to think too much about it – no point getting paranoid about your neighbors if you can help it.

The thing is, there are two other newer (and identical) loft extensions which have gone up in our road since ours – one by the same contractors – the other still being done. So if ours is being complained about I wonder if theirs are too? Perhaps someone’s just fed up with the number of loft extensions being put in….

Our next door but one neighbour – who had theirs done just after ours was actually threatened in the street by the guy living opposite just for having his loft done. This guy also decided that since my neighbour’s house didn’t have a roof, his car shouldn’t either… so he took a sledgehammer and smashed it to pieces… it was a Porsche too (I didn’t laugh).

Anyway, the attacker was sectioned, so it’s unlikely to be him.

He also told the police when questioned that he’d been making bombs, so the bomb squad cordoned off the street – but like almost all terrorist enquiries, nothing was found….he’ll probably have added to the statistics that are being used by the government to persuade us that the terrorist threat is real and immediate!

Self fulfilling prophecies and all that…


George
Lisa’s mum has been looking after George yesterday (because Lisa was at work) and today (because she’s got a private occupational therapy assessment job).


Houses
Meanwhile, Lisa’s put in an offer for a flat in Peckham… The offer is a lot lower than the asking price, but they’re considering it seriously… the sellers are builders and they probably just want to get out of the market as soon as possible (they’ve got an entire block of 8 flats to shift).

If she gets it, it’ll be a good investment.

Ok – given that the housing market is plummeting by all accounts (except the accounts of the estate agents who all seem keen to blame the press – until I tell them I’m a journalist) and given that I think it’ll go a lot further down – why is now a good time for Lisa to buy another flat?

Well, bizarrely, this is actually quite a cautious move for us.

Lisa made a good profit from selling her flat in Chiswick and if the housing market was in a better state, we’d probably be thinking about buying two or maybe three properties with it – so that their rent covered their mortgages.

As it is, there’s a good chance prices will drop before they rise and that mortgages will be harder to get and the interest rates will go up. And that would leave us in a difficult situation – if the rates went up, the rent wouldn’t cover the mortgage and we’d have to put in extra money every month…

Not good.

And especially not good if we have another baby and Lisa finds herself unable to work… (two children in nursery comes out at £120 per day around here – and taking tax into account that means you have to earn £40,000 per year or more just to break even!)

Instead we’re going for one small flat in an upcoming area which Lisa can virtually buy outright… that means no mortgage to speak of and whether prices or mortgage rates go up or down is pretty much irrelevant.

Lisa will still get an income every month which if she’s not working, can be used to help offset the effects on us.

So really, this time it’s about reducing exposure to the markets not increasing it.