Red line on the treadmill
I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to stay healthy can be, well, unhealthy. My reasoning being somewhat recently influenced by the experience of getting a routine ECG during a recent check on my health.
Medical people (aka chief torturers) recently stuck me on a treadmill with various parts hooked up to ECG and blood pressure. Keeping the pads hooked up involved shaving certain parts of my chest, something that seemed fine at the time (but that which subsequently left me with a very itchy patch or day for days afterwards).
So it starts. First three minutes at a slowish stroll. Easy says I.
Next three at a faster stroll and steeper incline. Still okay although out of the corner of my eye I see my ticker is getting a bit busier.
Next three minutes the pace and incline is upped again. Still okay. But before end of that the man in the white coat is saying “it would be good to get your heart to max bpm of (for my age) 173, can you manage faster?”
The macho bit kicks in and I say yes. Now Hollamby’s little legs are a blur, the chest is heaving, things are turning to jelly and I hit 180 one minute in. “It would be REALLY good if you could manage another minute” the techie says with a taunting “go on, real men can do it” look on his face that I just about register through sweat-stung eyes.
So I go for it…and experience the longest minute in my life!
ECG and blood pressure all fine and techie supposedly impressed.
“That was the best test this month” says he. “That was the only test you’ve done this month on someone under 80″ croaks I. He smiles, nicely, but doesn’t reply, which tells me all I need to know.
What does it prove. Well they can push me past my red line without, apparently, my valves hitting my pistons. Fortunately they don’t measure my ability to drive legs in a straight line afterwards…
Lionel Bart’s Blitz 5-9 May
Lionel Bart's Blitz
My next show is looming large and to maintain a 2009 theme it is one that I have not seen or worked on before.
Lionel Bart is, in the eyes of many, a bit of a one-hit wonder and Oliver! appears to have as much appeal today as it ever did. It is often forgotten that the original London production of Blitz ran for nearly 600 performances and set some new benchmarks for musicals including massive staging (Broadway baulked at it) and the much more obvious use of lighting than was currently in vogue. The score was subsequently lost for many years but the show is now enjoying something of a mini-renaissance, at least with amateur companies.
The Sainsburys Singers production will use a much simplified set, which promises a useful area to light. Unlike a lot of musicals where getting a lot of colour onto the stage is the order of the day, this one feels that it should be smokey and monochromatic. The gel swatches are now well thumbed ahead of receiving final stage plans and seeing the run-through next week.
Grand Tour 10 years on
Missing Link entering Port Solent 17 April 1999 at the start of the Grand Tour
This day 10 years ago I set out on the journey of a lifetime, a 4100-mile 147-day trip around Britain and near continental harbours.
The bit I remember most about this day, which started at Port Solent and ended at Haslar just a short run away, was the disquieting feeling that I had called my own bluff. Was the plan, largely conceived on scraps of paper while rail commuting, really going to work out?
I now know I wouldn’t have missed what followed for all of the world. And I would do it all over again, one day, if circumstance allows. Perhaps though with a couple of years to enjoy the many places that we have right under our noses when cruising UK waters.
Meantime I’ll be re-living the experience by restoring my Grand Tour stories here.
Marine customer service heroes and zeroes
Formanda being relaunched in August 2008
What a difference a good customer experience can make.
I’ve often said you can eat an average meal at a restaurant accompanied by well-judged attention from the staff and it will far outweigh Michelin-standard fare accompanied by care-less or haughty delivery. It’s also a well-known fact that faulty goods put right by service above expectation will engender greater customer loyalty than a product that works right out of the box.
So what prompts this blog?
Well we’ve been buying rather too much kit for our boat over the past few months and the experiences have often been polarised between extremely good and disappointingly poor. I had a day of that today with one supplier outperforming to an extreme level and another requiring to be chased for goods that should have been despatched last July.
Here’s a selection from experiences of the past 18 months:
Heroes
- ASAP Supplies - good customer service throughout the team and reliable delivery.
- Avis Engraving - friendly and fast turnaround of Formanda’s custom engraved switch panels.
- Barden - weird inclusion this as we have yet to buy anything significant from them for Formanda. But everytime we have got in touch or, as per this week, recommended someone to them customer service has been excellent.
- Batman UK - cheapest supplier we could find of Trojan batteries when ordering in 2006 and 2008 - quick to answer emails too.
- Cablecraft - brilliant supplier of cable accessories, next day delivery, good support and an excellent customer service experience today.
- Comfort Afloat - Gosport-based marine upholster, friendly service when discussing requirements and allowed us time with sample books to sort requirements. Then good quality cushions and excellent post-sale support for a couple of adjustments.
- Haslar Marina - great confidence in the staff and fair well beyond expectation (or contract) when we couldn’t occupy our rented hole in the water as planned last April.
- Peter Kennedy Yacht Services - keen prices on Blue Sea Systems’ kit with helpful customer service. US-based but happy to deal with UK.
- Skene Yacht Services - David Skene is a skilled and talented craftsman and wooden boat construction specialist who we would trust with our life, as indeed we have given the amount of work he has done on Formanda. Honesty like this is rare.
- AES Wakefield - friendly and helpful supplier of Harnessflex conduit systems.
Zeroes
- Marine Megastore - two orders placed, they declined to supply half of the first one (I presume because they got the price wrong), supplied one out of two items on the balance and still have another outstanding. On the second order (placed last July before I realised how bad they were) nothing turned up. I got a refund today on some of it but will not order again.
- Mariners Hardware (US company) - late fulfilling our order for two custom boat vents and then hit us with an unquoted $200 delivery charge.
- Power-store.com (Merlin) site takes orders for items that have lead times of several weeks, but with no indication at time of placing order and no follow-up communication. Not good.
- Ropes and Twines - bale of 16mm nylon rope that wears very quickly and yellows in rain confirmed what we should have known, you often get what you pay for with prices that perhaps were just a little bit too amazing.
- Royal Clarence Marina - we had two good years there but the ownership changed and we were faced with an arbitrary 30% price increase (on a tatty photocopy with a compliments slip) while the place was still a building site. Original marina manager Tony Dye is back there now so that is a bonus but Castle Marinas’ sharp practice has put us off spending a penny with them.
- Seaglaze - actually not an entirely zero entry as we liked the initial attention to detail and the windows all fitted when they eventually turned up. The last part of that sentence provides the clue though…we could have been left seriously in the lurch if we had not decided to re-engine and thereby add several weeks in the shed.
G-force tests over Yeovil
G-force test over Yeovil by a Yeovilton-based jet
Amazing sight over the office in Yeovil on Tuesday. A fast jet, presumably a Harrier or Hawk out of Yeovilton, painted this Cumberland sausage of a contrail while performing a G-force test. The test started from the outside and got tighter as it went. The received wisdom is it was a trainee pilot being tested, not the plane.
Whatever the result was something to admire and the contrail remained visible for many minutes.
Now if that jet had completed matters with a low pass to shoot up the seagulls on our roof the whole day would have been perfect. Our resident poo hawks manage to bomb my car with an accuracy that would be the envy of any air force.
Toilet humour
Puzzling signage in the male facilities at Waterloo
It’s a slightly odd business, trying to take a picture with an iPhone in the gents at Waterloo station in London. I contemplated the folly of it for a moment or two. But the new signage above the urinals got the better of me.
Fortunately there was a lull in the steady flow of discharging vessels and so my snapping could not be overseen nor misunderstood (”it’s for my blog!” he was heard crying when lead away by British Transport Police).
I’m sure ’stop cock’ was a well intentioned indicator for the resident plumber (or more likely the sub-sub-sub-contractor). But with the natty little symbol being placed above every other urinal you just have to wonder if someone didn’t have evil intent. After all, in these days of doing everything by the letter is there a chance, even a small one, that it will catch one of the more diligent users out?
Imagine Fred, with bladder full to bursting after discovering all the usual ‘on-train’ service levels are being met ie all loos being out of action on the 06:53 from Ruralville. He anticipates relief, vows never again to have that second cuppa before leaving home, then glances up and…
I think I’ll stop (cock) there.
Hebron becomes Double First
Double First's new logo
Busy few days moving the whole company from its previous brand identity of 21 years, Hebron UK Ltd, to Double First Ltd.
Intensive sales efforts in the Middle East over the past few weeks are adding to the list of schools that are using our management information system Engage. But sharing our company identity with the name of the largest city in the West Bank has created some concerns that we might be misunderstood in some way, a reaction that was never foreseen when Hebron was founded.
So we’re moving the corporate brand to Double First, a name that originally featured on a successful suite of software written by the company a decade or more back.
Thought has been given to continuity: the butterfly symbol of the old logo has been adopted on the new identity and typography and colourways have been retained. Most of the brand treatment work is being handled by our marketing manager, Simon Jones.
I was able to fiddle around the edges by dusting off some old skills and suggest kerning tweaks on the type elements. The guy who taught me about typography and showed me the big difference small changes can make was Motor Boats Monthly’s original art editor, Patrick Kelley. He is sadly no longer in this world but I felt his keen eye nevertheless.
Judging from previous experience of brand changes I suspect some might not notice at all that the logo has acquired an additional syllable and is somewhat longer.
The brand switch operation within the team has been pretty slick and a good many of the changes are already in hand; everything from the legal side through to the smallest printed element that carries a logo. Much burning of midnight and weekend oil.
It’s also been an opportunity to refresh web skills in terms of transiting old site to new. The last time I read Matt Cutts on site migrations he seemed to admit the business of taking an existing site with Page Rank to a new one without any history is a bit of a lottery, even if you follow the script, which adds a certain salt and pepper as to how we will do.
Here are my summary actions thus far:
- new site set up, initially with a ban bot instruction on robots.txt and then with a block on all IP addresses except our own to prevent spidering of the site and potential duplicate content penalties;
- inward link research on old site so we know who to contact to request a URL rename;
- keyword performance reports created on old site so we can tailor content to rank for key phrases and benchmark performance of new site;
- pre live tests on new site include broken links crawl to minimise search engine index issues;
- analysis of new site versus old, matching equivalent URLs and creating 301 redirects to match like-for-likes;
- creation of new xml sitemap;
- removal of IP filter and change robots.txt;
- make live 301 permanent redirects;
- validation site and of xml sitemap with Google and Yahoo;
- monitoring of analytics to ensure traffic dead on old site and that no unexplained behaviour seen on new;
- monitoring of Google Webmaster to spot any early errors and correct.
And the mistakes thus far:
- In the haste to do all tasks on Wednesday I didn’t follow my own script and validated the site on Google Webmaster prior to changing robots.txt from
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
to Allow - Google promptly cached the robots.txt for 24 hours and I suspect we’re being held back a little as a result.
We did the switch on Wednesday and so far Google has yet to index the site. The Hebron pages are still in the index and redirecting traffic through. Given that we have a relatively modest number of site pages that are simple in make up it will prove fascinating to see how fast we will be able to get www.doublefirst.com fully established on Google. I might well update the list above on a subsequent blog, to reflect any subsequent action, feedback and hindsight thinking.
Now pass me the drill…it’s time to switch from virtual to physical to put the new sign on the wall.
l’Hermione: seduction and discovery
French replica frigate l'Hermione, pictured in build by Philip Plisson
A couple of years back, when IPC Media moved into its Blue Fin building on London’s South Bank, I wound up in an office with a blank expanse of wall that was crying out for a picture. A few weeks later I found the solution…a Philip Plisson picture of the near symmetrical skeletal innards of a large wooden ship. The geometry of the picture seduced me each day I walked past the.gallery@oxo and eventually I weakened and bought it. My walk to the office was rather odd after that, somewhat hampered as it was by hugging the five foot or so of substantially framed purchase.
When I left IPC the Plisson print left with me; which was a story in itself as my earlier pedestrian efforts suggested the need for a car collection and I forgot to pay the congestion charge the day I picked it up; an easy way to lose £60.
In the year or so I had possessed it I had not even looked at the name of the ship, let alone thought about what it was.
The replica l'Hermione in the Corderie Royale dry dock at Rochefort, September 2009
Fast forward another month to the point where Michelle and I grabbed a few days in France. Visiting Rochefort we happened across a covered over dry dock with just enough of a glimpse through the sheeting to see that something interesting was happening inside. Parting with five euros each we found ourselves looking at the partially constructed replica of l’Hermione, a 26-cannon frigate.
The original was built in the same location in 1778; she entered history books two years later by transporting 21-year-old Gilbert Motier, Marquis of La Fayette in a 38-day Atlantic crossing to Boston. It was there that he met General Washington to announce the commitment of French forces against the British in the American Revolutionary War. As things went it was a bit of a tipping point for us Brits, a touch ironic given more recent relations between the three countries.
The view of l'Hermione's gun deck from aft, September 2007
The reconstructed l’Hermione was commenced in July 1997 by the Hermione-La Fayette association. The original took 11 months to build but progress this time around is much slower and more considered. The “100 carpenters, blacksmiths, drillers, caulkers and convicts” originally employed not being available in such quantities this time around.
If you look at the ends of the dry dock l’Hermione occupies you see a large earth bank separating the ship’s timbers from the waters of the Charente beyond. But the plan most certainly is to sail away one day; perhaps even to cross the Atlantic.
The capstan for the replica of l'Hermione
The association has done a great job of getting you as close as possible not just to the ship but also the workshops alongside where all of her iron and oak components are being formed, painstakingly, one by one. In all a gargantuan Airfix kit of 400,000 pieces, mostly formed using traditional tools.
Of course you know where this is going. A sneaking suspicion permeated thinking that the vessel in front of us was a more fully formed iteration of the ship that Plisson had captured a while before. My first act on getting home was to check the picture inscription, which confirmed my suspicion. It seems we were destined to meet, one way or another.
Nanny state bans baked beans for underage eaters
Sainsburys caution against the dangerous effects of consuming baked beans
As perverse as it might seem here is photographic evidence from our local branch of Sainsburys that the humble baked bean has been identified as a major threat for the British juvenile population. Proof of age will now be required to purchase.
A Heinz spokesman was believed to have said that the company was lobbying not to have their 56 other varieties suffer a similar fate.
Meantime it is not clear what activist youths will make of the government’s alternative proposal: namely that under-18s be provided with a half-baked bean, in keeping with current policies.
La Belle Hélène: 3-7 March
Reading Operatic's production of La Belle Helene
I am currently scheduled to create the lighting design for four shows this year, all of which I have not worked on before, or even particularly know well, which should be an interesting challenge. They span everything from classical 19th Century opera to 1950s, 60s and 80s era musicals.
The first of them is Reading Operatic’s production of Jacques Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, a light-hearted comic opera set in Sparta before the Trojan war with a cast of mythical Greek heroes, among others. This show is in three acts and is packed with a lot of music, so am anticipating technical rehearsal time will be at a premium. On the other hand it should be a conventional rig with no complications, an easy way of getting started on 2009 shows after a brief break from the theatre.
