Alex Muir

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.
If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: “Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!”
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life’s been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
He’s a man who won’t fit in.

by Robert Service

Born in England to Scottish parents, Robert William Service held down a variety of jobs before emigrating to North America in 1894. He drifted from job to job for several years before finding employment in 1903 with the Canadian Bank of Commerce. In 1905 the bank transferred him to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.

In less than five years, Service had gained worldwide fame as the storyteller of the Klondike gold rush. He wrote and published his first book of verse, “Songs of a Sourdough,” in 1907 to almost instant acclaim. “Ballads of a Cheechacko” was published in 1909, shortly after the bank transferred him from Whitehorse to Dawson City. During this time he also began work on his novel, “The Trail of Ninety-Eight.”

Although he left the Bank in 1909 to devote full time to his writing, he never again published a book about “The Land that God Forgot.” He left the Yukon in 1912 to become a war correspondent and Red Cross worker. He married a French woman, settled in France after the end of World War I, and over a long and productive life published two memoirs, six novels, and more than 45 collections of verse. He died in 1958.

Last week I created an icon for a car spring and listed it at The Noun Project. They approved my icon and now I am listed as a designer! I’ll never sell a copy but it’s a nice feeling.

Looking at the icon, I wish I’d gone with a flatter bottom.

Sadly I can’t figure out how to embed an SVG into this blog.

Brick and mortar retail has been declining for a while, and we’ve been unsure what the future landscape would look like. What would be on the high street and in the shopping centres?

With the recent failure of Comet, I think the reality can be seen fairly clearly now, at least in the UK. There will remain exactly one large brand in each of the retail sectors. Here’s progress so far:

Books: Books Etc. / Borders / WH Smiths / Waterstones

Entertainment: Ourprice / Music Zone / VirginMegastores / Fopp / Woolworths / Zavvi / Blockbuster /HMV

DIY: Focus DIY / Wickes / Homebase / B&Q

Electricals: Powerhouse / Currys / Best Buy / Comet / Dixons

Sportswear: All:sports / JJB Sports / JD Sports / Sports Direct

The lists are in order of failure (or predicted failure). Italics indicate that a brand is already leaning close to collapse. My prediction for the winning brand is in bold.

Some of these brands have be reincarnated multiple times but a clear trend is that the surviving brand never drops into any form of insolvency.

Rather than the high street being obliterated, we’ll see one business with the ability to set prices. Want it in your hand today? Then pay what we ask. Want to wait for it? Pick from dozens of online retailers. These surviving businesses will enjoy lack of competition, lower rents due to the surplus of units left behind and the pick of their failed competitors’ prime sites.

There are unknowns - clothing, bric-a-brac pound retailers. And all the sectors face some competition from supermarkets who stock a narrow range of their products.

I’m curious about the longevity of mobile phone retailers - middlemen by definition in a technology driven business. Virtually every shopping centre contains (sometimes multiple): o2, Orange, Vodafone, Three, T-Mobile, Carphone Warehouse, and Phones4U. I cannot see this persisting.

Disclosure: I hold shares in Kingfisher - the parent company of B&Q. I was the founder and editor of Insolvency News.

A friend was over for Christmas and his iPhone’s camera LED flashed when it rang. I thought it might be a jailbreak hack but it’s actually one of dozens of features in the accessibility section. Which I’d never looked at - go and take a look if you haven’t seen it. It’s a phenomenal piece of work, and one that Apple, and any other manufacturers who have taken similar care, deserve recognition and praise for.

Here are some things I discovered exploring:

• Some deaf people like video-calling because they can use sign language - so front-facing cameras have been revolutionary for them. Others prefer texting - iMessage, WhatsApp and BBM have dropped this cost nicely.

• The iPhone can be connected to a braille display (an amazing device in itself) and blind users can interact without seeing or touching the screen. Just think how incredible that is - it’s a device which is defined by its TOUCH SCREEN, but can be used by people who neither touch, nor look at, the screen. It’s mindboggling - see this video to see this in action.

• Siri and voice assistants have really opened up touchscreen devices for the blind. Setting an alarm or a calendar appointment is now effortless (when they work).

I tried out the VoiceOver feature while squinting my eyes. I think it’s intended for the partially sighted rather than the completely blind as you still need to aim your fingers onto targets but text is read for you. Try it out Settings > General > Accessibility > VoiceOver.

The basic mechanism is that you tap an item (eg. an icon on the home screen) and it is highlighted and its label is read out loud. You can then double tap anywhere on the screen to open the icon. There’s a nice touch when you highlight the Calendar icon - it reads out the date as well as the label. I had to look up how to scroll (swipe three fingers up the screen).

I am not a believer in the effectiveness of most mainstream advertising. Even though I pay attention, I can rarely recall any adverts after a day.

The UK advertising industry turns over £16.8bn annually. That seems a huge number but it’s only £264 per person.

Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. - Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad

I first read that quote a few years ago and liked it from the angle of unremarkable businesses having to pay to get attention. But more recently I’ve appreciated it from a different angle. Advertising is a tax. It pays for services that we, the public, want. Big Brother, Downton Abbey, Facebook , commercial radio, free newspapers on the tube - all paid for by the tax of advertising.

I’d be interested to see independent research on the effectiveness of ads though. It seems to me this is an industry with enormous vested interests in the status quo. Publishers, advertisers, agencies, audiences, the state - all have an enormous incentive to perpetuate the idea that advertising is effective. There really isn’t anyone who benefits from saying it doesn’t work. The only conflict is between different forms of advertising for share of budgets - and I think this will become more commonplace and we’ll see the likes of Google and Facebook going head-to-head with TV.