Another relic of the analog age

While having a bit of a clear out, Cathy found this: the last print edition of the Yellow Pages ever delivered to us. I took a photo before we tossed it in recycling.

I was struck how the front cover shows the architect of the Yellow Pages' downfall, a smartphone. 

Time was, every business had to have a listing in Yellow Pages. It was the first piece of advice given on enterprise courses to people seeking advice on setting up a business. We had one when we ran our own business, although nobody ever called us because they saw us there. 

Businesses that relied on their Yellow Pages listing used all kinds of daft ways to be first in the directory - calling themselves AAAAAAAA111 Plumbing or so on. More successful businesses paid for box ads or half page ads or even full page ads. Spots on the cover cost thousands. 

It was worth it too, because everyone had a Yellow Pages and almost everyone would use it to find a tradesman or check where their nearest branch of a given shop was. Yes, there were competitors, like the Thomson Directory, but Yellow Pages dominated the market, an ultimate authoritative information source and able to name its price to advertisers as a gatekeeper of information.

And then smartphones came along and killed that business model. They tried to pivot online as Yell but as search engines got better there wasn't any need for a directory website any more. 

In their heyday, a Yellow Pages directory would have hundreds of pages. The final edition was a stripped down bare bones affair compared to the fat and satisfied versions in its pomp; the advertisers surely placing their entries out of habit rather than any marketing strategy. 

Like other businesses that cornered their now-vanished markets, no-one misses Yellow Pages. It had a good run but the world changed far too rapidly for it to keep up. It's a warning to any hegemony - your reckoning time may come. Will you be ready?

That's Mister Potato to you

I liked this quirky collection of random, obscure internet terms, which they could have been making up.

I was particularly struck by the term POTATO - Person Over Thirty Acting Twenty One (or Twenty-one Online). A cruel smack in the face to those of us who've grown old but haven't grown up.

Still, if you're over 30 and you regularly use 'lolz' you deserve to be called much worse than a potato.

On the subject of potatoes, I'd seen this postcard before Elaine blogged it but have no way of proving that now - the secret of true happiness!

I used to really care about Facebook, now not so much

I'm much more about the Twitter now. Facebook has just got too full of other crap. I don't want to know that people have received fortune cookies, which awkward moments they identify with, or what their daily horoscope says.

You don't get as much of that on Twitter. (Spam followers, yes, but I'm developing a strategy to deal with those.)

So as I become a post-Facebook web-user, this cartoon resonated with me.

Wahey the car has heat.

So last Friday, I took the car into the garage for them to work out why the heater wasn't working. The basic problem, it appeared, was that the heater motor was dead, no more, gone to meet it's maker, shuffled off it's mortal coil etc. etc. And the really bad news was that new one would cost £158.

My mechanic, Phil, suggested I find a replacement online, which they'd then fit. He plucked a figure at random out of the air and said 'You'll probably find one for about £30'.

So, on Monday I went spare part hunting. I found a website which links into 2500 breaker's yards across the country. You type in what part you need and what car it's for, and your details, and then you get emailed quotes. I had about 9 people get in touch with me within about three hours, but I thought I'd wait and see if any came in overnight.

Sure enough, on thr Tuesday morning, there was a new quote in my inbox, from a place which only does VW and Audi spares and it was cheaper than all the others. The price including postage was... £30.

I rang them up. "Yeah, this is for a mark III," said the guy. "It came out of a P reg. Is that OK?" Well, as my car is a P reg, that was perfect. I gave him my credit card number and asked for him to send it to me at work.

On Wednesday, it arrived at work, wrapped up in bubble wrap and a bin liner. "Is that a severed head?" asked a colleague. "Yes," I said, "of the last person who asked me about my parcels." I rang the garage asking if they could fit me in. Phil told me to bring the car in the next day and leave it with them.

So, Thursday I took the train into work (Grangetown station is right opposite the garage - handy!) and then returned after work to find the heater worked perfectly. Woo hoo! No more having to be a human demister with a wipey pad thing. In fact, it works so well I'm beginning to think the old heater motor was broken for the whole time I've had the car.

So, it took me about a week to get the heating sorted, but it saved me £128 and I felt very manly sourcing my own car parts and everything. (I've left out the part where I rang Phil and asked him what the difference was between a heater motor, a heater fan motor and a heater blower motor, only for him to laugh and say they were all the same thing, as that undermines my manly abilities.) So, yeah, it all worked out well.

Good thing Cathy prefers Ernie

According to Snopes.com, that really is Bert from Sesame Street posing with Osama Bin Laden (look just over his right shoulder!). But how he ended up on a poster being waved by an irate Islamist is a whole other story, which really shows the danger of stealing pictures off the internet!

Two things I've learned today

1 - eating crisps and playing Pacman on Facebook gets your keyboard all greasy.

2 - there's still an archive of football articles I wrote about six years ago out there on the inter-web, including the classic Is Football a Religion?

Million dollar ideas

Every so often I get a brainwave for something that would be a ‘million dollar idea’. Recently Irony Boy has been the recipient of frantic emails from me outlining a potential million dollar website – ideas that are usually swiftly rebuffed by the self-appointed Web Tyrant.

Anyway, the other day I had a brilliant idea. In my office the one smoker in the building often nips out the back door for an ‘oxygen break’. Unfortunately this means that his pungent cigarette smoke wafts up through our second floor windows, which are always open because we have no air-con and the office is always way too hot. The other day, when the second hand smoke was being particularly annoying I joked that I was going to bring in a super-soaker water pistol to douse the source of the toxic fumes, and that’s when I had my idea:

Million dollar idea #1: The Smoker Soaker
This would be a small, concealable, but highly accurate, water pistol that you could use to squirt people smoking in annoying places, like restaurants or cinemas. For added irony, they’d come in a variety of colours, all of which looked a bit like cigarette packets, e.g. red/white, gold, purple, white with a royal blue stripe. That would make them collectible as well.

Million dollar idea #2: The Car Trainsporter
I don’t know why we don’t have roll-on, roll-off car-carrying trains in this country. It would make a lot of sense to me to be able to drive onto a train in Cardiff, then have a nice relaxing train ride up to Newcastle, drive off and have all the convenience of having my car with me and none of the six-hour cross-country slog.

I’d envision this working with car-loading points in big cities, away from current stations, as usually there are loads of redundant minor stations in areas ripe for redevelopment (or even using stations just outside big cities but which are right on the motorway). The trains, of course, wouldn’t need to stop in itty-bitty places and because you’d have your car with you, it would be fine if say the nearest car-loading point was fifty miles away from your home, and your exit point was fifty miles away from your eventual destination.

The pros of car-trainsporters:
Not having to drive on Britain’s hellish motorways for hours and hours and hours.
More environmentally friendly than air travel
No check in palaver – again better than air travel
Saves on petrol and wear and tear on the car – lower mileages mean lower insurance premiums; no chance of breaking down on the way
The trains could have buffet/restaurant cars, newsagents etc – this would also be a pro from the point of view of the train operator because they’d virtually have a captive audience
Much quicker journey times, although that is dependent on the reliability of the rail system. Hmmm.

The cons of car-trainsporters
Britain’s railway system sucks and it’s getting worse
Rail travel is already expensive – this wouldn’t be cheap
It can be pretty boring sitting in a car or sitting on a train, so how boring will it be sitting in a car while on a train?
It would take time to load up and unload
New car-loading stations would need to be built, and possibly new motorway junctions

But even so, it’s a million dollar idea. Feel free to use it…