Win7exit.

Forget getting Brexit done this Christmas we have to get Win7ext done after clinging onto it for as long as possible. Daunting. With the help of a friend I got a laptop converted to Lynux Mint; pretty simple and fast. And it’s lovely, clean simple and fast, so happy there. But for my desktop I needed Windows so installed 10. It’s still free if you have a bona fide Win7 installed. But it took hours in fact days including the failed attempts, and it’s slow, a nag compared to Lynux. Then needed a new MS Office 2019 to replace my 2000 version. £9.87 on Amazon for life compared to their new yearly subscription 365. Deal! Again slow, bloated and submerged in features one rarely needs. Basically computers are now designed for people who don’t really use computers especially the Win10 start menu. (get Classic from Ninite) Then Sonar6 stopped working (not bona fide) so got Sonar8 second hand for £12, coming soon so hope it works. The only consolation from this up(down)grade is I’ve saved over £500 in new price software which is kind of a result.

Climate Change Negotiations.

It’s evident to some but not all that climate change may threaten our world and our existence on it. In negotiations to mitigate its effects countries take different stances. Some have already taken action while others are either in denial or don’t want to lose out in the scrum for power and economic advantage but if all were convinced of impending world demise power and economic advantage would be of zero significance. So how can we create a framework for these negotiations that harmonises these different points of view?

            When some see the possibility and want to move fast while others don’t and see an advantage in moving slowly the process is governed by the slowest, which might in the long run be too slow. So what to do?

            There seems a need to level the playing field between the two such that all are motivated to the same degree independent of their stance whilst remaining free to choose their course of action. One such levelling would be to structure a framework whereby prompt action is rewarded and slow action incurs a cost. You can choose but by increasing the possible jeopardy of the whole by moving slowly one incurs a cost.

            Climate change already has a history of some twenty to thirty years. In that time science has established a timeline to possible extinction that is currently still deniable. If these predictions are true there will come a point where denial becomes unsustainable, where to cling to it becomes patent insanity. This point of no return I’ll call the hinge point. Before this point actions are rewarded and beyond it the then undeniably necessary actions must be done but also incur a penalty for their lateness. But it remains open to all to choose the time and extent of their actions dependant on their beliefs either before or after the chosen hinge point.

            As a suggestion the hinge point might be agreed to be say 2035.

            In the first instance to create this framework each country is required to contribute to an action fund possibly per head of population. Going forward drawing from the fund to take action will include a timing multiplier. This would be an agreed multiplying factor dependant on timing that governs the size of the withdrawal relative to the contribution. As an example this factor might vary from 200% for immediate action to 100% at the hinge point to a percentage less than 100% thereafter. Thus early actors would gain and late actors lose out. At the chosen hinge point on or close to the point of undeniability late actors would have to take action but with less funds available to mitigate their situation.

            With this framework clearly laid out there will be, prior to the hinge point, growing social pressure on the government of each country to act quickly. Governments will still be free to act as they believe but under the growing realisation that late action will have negative consequences ‘if’ their beliefs prove wrong. At no point though is any government restricted in its chosen course of action. 

Boris the Pizza Delivery Guy.

The only positive out of all this is Boris now has more than enough rope to hang himself. After Corbyn lost the narrative, (he doesn’t even understand the concept), he was more like a bank manager attempting an open mic stand up contest against Tommy Cooper. “I have a document here that…” against, “Just like that, hahaha”, or a computer expert explaining how to get rid of a Windows ‘Error code: 8000327’ to 99.9% of the public. Maybe Dom Cummings even got the power of the three-word narrative from Tommy. Even ‘You’re a twat’ would have percolate better into our language than some fully costed squirrel training policy. So here we are on Friday the 13^th chanting we got Brexit done, ‘we did it!’ We finally got the baby out of the bathwater by smashing the fucking bath to bits. (new one on back order because it’s made in Belgium) but does Boris, our real live Pinocchio, have the promises to keep the baby warm? Well yes but delivery is another matter. Like Chamberlain Boris’s successes aren’t worth the waved note they’re printed on. He will succeed by capitulation, which isn’t a difficult prediction to make because on its own the UK has as much clout on the world stage as say Wales. Maybe our only hope is the Conservative Party. It’s still split and it may recognise which side its electorate bread is buttered. Even in the midst of this success it’s still prone to the biggest backlash since the end of WWII. Its progress to the 2020 cut off and an EU trade deal is far from a shoe in and a quick US trade deal will be straight out of the disaster politics playbook. So will Boris break the habit of a lifetime and deliver and/or will the Labour Party find an Obama type leader who can deliver a three word narrative like, “Just like that, hahaha”? For some strange reason I feel far more optimistic than I thought I would, due in no small part to the size of Corbyn’s disastrous defeat. 

The NHS Dustbin.

Four million Americans are personally bankrupted by medical bills. With  $10,000 for the birth of a child, as is likely under Boris, I imagine most of us would be in the same boat. But that’s not the point here. Since 2010 the demands on the NHS have skyrocketed. This has been put down to us getting older and OK living longer. But that run up to our universal final option, death, hasn’t changed that much. You’re healthy, your body gives up and you die but I feel there’s something else contributing to this rise in demand. In those ten years after 2010 (financial crisis and Conservative austerity) our whole life cycle as changed. Kids have poorer education, don’t have opportunities and throughout their working lives get stressed and depressed; homelessness and food banks etc etc.  All of this contributes to ill health, not in our last days but throughout the sixty years of our adult life. I suspect this harmful social malaise expresses itself in a myriad of physical illnesses. Put any organism under pressure and it will get ill. On holiday in Greece we’ve had to see a doctor twice. Once a home visit, doctor arrived in an hour and the other time his waiting room was empty and he treated Mothermouse on the spot with all the time in the world. Contrast that with trying to see a doctor in the UK. It’s like a high-pressure production line. It’s not inefficiency it’s that we’re all getting ill far more often due to a sick society. It’s not about throwing money at the NHS it’s because the NHS has become the dustbin of our sick society. If we address that the NHS crisis will melt away. AND we’ll all feel a lot happier to!

Life as a Toy Designer

(written years ago) I joined the toy industry around 1970 fresh from art school, albeit after six months unemployment and a previous degree in Maths and Physics. I was an Industrial Designer who’d failed to get ‘a proper job’ designing products for adults. In my case though it was a perfect match being high on inventiveness, and low on good taste. In fact in one interview the head of the prestigious design house fell asleep, overpowered by my abuse of yellow, purple and pink. So I started five glorious years in Matchbox Toy’s drawing office in Hackney. It was like having a minor part in ‘Only Fools and Horses’ with other cast members being Smole, Smello and Smutly and the Catford Cocker who was never fully forgiven for living south of the river but admired for his impressive tally of children. Back then it was all pencils, magic markers and drawing boards. Perhaps for the current crop of designers I should explain what a pencil is. It’s like dancing with a young size-zero model between your finger and thumb trailing lines of graceful physicality across white linen bed sheets. It’s glorious. They don’t crash, they auto-save continuously and aren’t protected by a frustrating oft-forgotten password.

There I slowly learned to be a designer, how to suggest to draughtsmen they need more than just a ruler and circle template and to listen to model makers because they deal with the physical reality, which is a very bendy place compared to the deceiving rigidity of a drawing. Also, when arguing over a costing with a project engineer one should first ask what the saving would be from taking a grommet out. Once you’ve established that this would be negligible then add the grommet for the same negligible amount.  I guess more importantly I learnt that work can be play and you still get paid for it!

I learnt that every department in the production process will suggest their failure was due to the ineptitude of the preceding department or the stupidity of later ones, and that the designer, which in industry was tantamount to being an openly gay ballet dancer, being the first in this chain of events is the font of all possible troubles. It is therefore paramount one foresees them before some unfortunate child manages to insert a miniature diecast forklift truck into a 13 amp socket. I learnt that being innovative is close to Buddhism, that by regarding the day-to-day obvious meaning of things as merely a distracting veil, one might see some deeper, more relevant reality beneath it; like looking for the really obvious in the apparently obvious, or a needle in a pin factory.

The general public have as much appreciation of manufacture as they do farming. They may purchase a Hitachi cordless drill from a shelf in B&Q but the process of it being created and arriving there may as well be due to the efforts of the Wizard of Oz. Being in manufacturing though gives a very different picture. Here there are pallets full of drills, drills being tested to destruction, drill being used to prop doors open and used as ash trays. There are moulding machines, material specialists, computer simulations, automated packaging machines, marketing experts and designers. Here again it’s down to Buddhism to absorb and absolve a thousands parochial worries whilst remaining true to the new idea. From this I learnt that marketing and sales are quaint souls. Their focus on what sold well gives them a historical perspective at odds with designers. Their view of the future is just a bit bigger, flashier or cheaper than the past. They are of course necessary but their imaginative view of next week only extends to, “couldn’t we make it 8 days?” and their grasp on technology is at best pre-school. (I enjoyed that)

Towards the end of my stint at Matchbox I invented a musical toy, probably the world’s first computer based keyboard, based on a then new Texas Instruments device called a microprocessor. Marketing’s response was enthusiastic but shrivelled like plumbs in ice when asked to commit to quantities. It was dropped and I was headhunted by a new company headed by an ex Texas Instruments guy planning to make the world’s first computer based keyboard. There’s a coincidence. That job lasted just long enough for us to buy a house in Northampton. Thus unemployed again and with a brand new mortgage to pay I called Corgi toys, also in Northampton, and they created a job for me, quite a change from six years earlier when I was lucky to get a rejection letter. In retrospect Corgi were lacking in direction at the time hoping to profit from far east manufacturing. Now the far east are very polite people and don’t have a word for no, so though it may be self satisfying to beat them down on price all you get in return is rubbish. So it was that we had a warehouse full of radio controlled cars that responded about as well as a baby in a temper tantrum. Though I didn’t know it at the time they were making losses and I didn’t do much to reverse that trend. I worked under Marcel Von Clemput a European used to driving on the right hand side of the road, a habit he didn’t lose after he moved to England. They produced the Dragon Computer, probably better than the similar BBC computer, but without the BBC clout it didn’t achieve sustainable sales. Retrenchment was necessary and I was offered redundancy or a job in Swansea. I have nothing against south Wales except I’m not a natural tenor or a lover of sheep. I also got offered jobs by Hornby and Wyman Associates, a toy invention company. With three jobs on offer I decided to go freelance. With the redundancy money and £2,000 from making fifty model National Express coaches to pay the bills for a few months we embarked on a diet of beans on toast. I often wonder about those coaches as the resin I built them from might well have melted in the strong sunshine of a shop window, but hay-ho that was thirty years ago and I haven’t heard anything. I began supplying Dennis Wyman, now my agent, with new toy ideas. I regularly got, “super” which I learnt meant OK and sometimes, “Super, super” which meant slightly better than OK. I think my maximum was three. I then showed him an idea that was met with, “Jesus!” which I took to mean we might even make some money out of this one. We showed it to Milton Bradley, a large American company, and got a tentative yes. They had a meeting in ten days time and would need a full working prototype. There followed ten days in which we achieved well over a month’s work. We got another yes. It was to be called Robotix. There then followed over a year of development that I was paid for on top of royalties. My diet oscillated between beans on toast at home and restaurant fair in London, Springfield Massachusetts and Nuremberg, culminating in my staying in Hitler’s suite in Nuremberg’s Grand Hotel from which he went to rallies and such like. I on the other hand walked the streets trying to figure out how to get a reduction of 1300 to 1 in a gearbox the size of a snuff tin. I succeeded, he didn’t. So much for world domination.

Being a construction toy each set needed pages of build instrutions that the States were doing by hand when it was a no-brainer to do them on computer. So I learnt CAD and CorelDraw and spent a year churning them out. I learnt that as a designer you need a product champion, in this case Roger Ford of MB, UK, to carry the belief forward against all odds. Without one you’re just a nice guy with ideas.

Robotix did well and provided a comfortable pension before it was dropped. After a due period of mourning Dennis set to work selling it again, this time to Learning Curve in Chicago run by a guy who, in negotiation, could steal your trousers without you noticing. He sent a limo to pick me up from the airport, usually a good move except that this one appeared to be an unwise purchase from Trotter Motors having seen better decades. I learnt that negotiating is best left to agents. By this time everything was done on computers, presentation graphics, draughting, model making and tool making.  Robotix made more money and was dropped again.

After brief career mistakes ferrying yachts from New England to Florida, which once involved being roped to the wheel for two days in a storm, and sheep farming in Australia Dennis has semi retired to Florida. I now spend my time doing psychotherapy training, dancing, gigging, mega DIY projects and motorcycle touring. As you can see if you never stop learning toy design equips you for just about anything. So if there’s anyone left stupid enough to offer you a job as a toy designer and you’re dumb enough to take on an ‘interesting’ ride then give it some consideration.Life as a Toy Designer