A couple of years ago I started, and failed to complete a ‘Photo 365′, where I attempted to take a photo everyday. I failed to complete the year, as after I’d missed the odd day it soon became easy to just give up totally.

In 2012 I decided to revisit this with a difference. I’m trying to publish a new picture each day on my Flickr page.

A lot of these pictures will be older pictures, my idea being to give me a chance to publish some of the many pictures I have taken over the years.

Then at the end of each month I plan to post on my site here a review of the months pictures with a commentary on the pictures, this being the January review.

Jan 01

The interior of the BBC Quay House at Media City UK, looking down from the top floor.

Jan 02

I originally snapped this one just to show the apparent 7 hour train delay, however if you ignore the actual content of the board I like the picture with the trees and sky. This is the first you’ll see of my ongoing theme of sky and clouds in pictures.

Jan 03

Another train station themed picture, with the same theme of the trees and sky.

Jan 04

This one was taken in the early evening in late Autumn, I like the lighting on this one, with the mixture of sun and shadows. I think there is a nice composition of traditional pub building, and the modern road.

Jan 05

Not the best photo in the world taken on my camera phone, however the slight graininess nicely mirrors the analogue nature of the machinery of these cart machines.

Jan 06

A result of wiling away a few minutes playing with the Photoshop Express Android App – despite it’s Photoshop name it’s not really a photo editor, more of a collection of fixed filters and effects.

Jan 07

The first of a couple taken in Blackpool last year. This one from the end of Central Pier, spot my favoured sky against a menacing sea – a typical Blackpool summer day!

Jan 08

A view towards the Tower.

Jan 09

A nice effect on this one with the foreground in focus and blurred computer screen .

Jan 10

Sign at Wythenshawe Forum – one of my less favourite pictures from the collection, at this point I was scratching around for something to upload for this date.

Jan 11

This is a picture from a couple of years ago, a snow covered train track on the approach to Oldham Werneth station. Nice colours in this pictures.

Jan 12

The Wheel of Manchester on a miserable January day.

Jan 13

Continue on a theme – around a year before the previous photo I took this picture of the Capital FM Routemaster bus in Piccadilly in Manchester.

Jan 14

Multicoloured ‘slinky’ toy under neon lighting.

Jan 15

Another from the collection of pictures I took before the closure of the Oldham Loop line. Nice contract of sign and brickwork in this picture.

Jan 16

The first of a series of sport stadia linked pictures. Here a temporary radio studio set-up at football ground (can you identify the football club?)

Jan 17

There is a vague sport stadium link in this one. Taken from the roof of the Salford Lads Club. Nice clouds yet again on this (the vague sport link is Old Trafford in the distance.)

Jan 18

A somewhat less glamorous sport ground, The Whitebank Stadium.

Jan 19

Another glowing toy.

Jan 20

The beach at Rhyl, North Wales – continuing my love of cloud formations.

Jan 21

Wythenshawe Forum Centre – drawing an interesting comparison to this 70′s picture .

Jan 22

A panoramic photo of Media City UK at Salford Quays, stitched together in Photoshop from several individual photos.

Jan 23

For some reason I feel like titling this one ‘simples’ .

Jan 24

Washford transmitting station.

Jan 25

“Caution Radio Transmitters Operating” – one on my theme of signs, again at Washford.

Jan 26

Another view of radio transmitting aerials.

Jan 27

No prizes for guessing this is an older picture. Nice autumn view in Tandle Hill Country Park.

Jan 28

The summit at Tandle Hill – great mostly clear blue sky.

Jan 29

Peacock at Heaton Park..

Jan 30

Another phone snap for the amusement of extra signage to ‘press to exit’.

Jan 31

Heaton Park, grass and clouds yet again.

Lets start with the formalities and wish you all the best for the 2012, if you’re watching this site like an hawk then you should read this just in time for the New Year in the UK (please provide your own Auld Lang Syne music, but you can have the fireworks display above.) If you happen to reading this in the middle of July in which case ignore this first paragraph.

I titled this ‘Things have changed around here’ as I’ve taken the opportunity of the Christmas break to make a few tweaks to this website. Most of this has taken the form of me twiddling with the code in the background, learning all about child themes in WordPress and their pitfalls , so there’s only a few things you’ll notice as an end user which I highlight below.

The main idea is when accessing the site via your desktop to use front page to highlight some of the more ‘in depth’ pieces that I’ve written, allowing the other bits to be a little less ‘in your face’.

What is new if you access the site via a mobile phone browser you should see a ‘iOS app style’ interface which lists all the blog posts in a more mobile friendly style.

Naturally if you read my content via the RSS feed in something such as Google Reader you’ll continue to just get my new blog posts as they are posted. Talking of google in the main desktop version of the post pages there is now Google+1 buttons as well as Tweet buttons.

Finally to note in my introduction to 2012, back in 2010 I did a ‘Photo 365′ experiment, where I took a picture everyday and published it on Flickr - where I failed miserably part way through the year. In 2012 I’m going to repeat the exercise, with a twist of just posting a new picture everyday, which could be contemporary or from my personal photo archives of pictures I’ve taken over the past few years.

I’ve been a T-Mobile UK customer for donkeys years since when it was One2One. In fact until a few months ago when I finally retired my GSM SIM card and rather late joined the 3G Smart Phone party (as opposed to the LG KS360 2.5G ‘blackberry style pay as you go phone for teenagers who can’t afford a blackberry’) my phone display still showed ‘One2One’ as the operator. Now I’m long past a teenager and the specifics of the handsets in questions are an irrelevant detour on the way to the subject of these blog posts.

Now ‘back in the day’, now it’s probably no longer cool to use this phrase, but never mind, back in the day listening to your voice mail messages would be free. However for many many years T-Mobile have charged you to listen to your voicemail.

You could pretend you were a Sunday Newspaper journalist and dial your own phone from another cheaper line and insert the pin number (which of course you had changed from the default) and listen to your messages.

Now paying 12p a minute was a minor inconvenience when I was a ‘Pay as you go’ customer. But when I switched to a pay monthly contract (on a SIM Only deal on the afore mentioned LG device) I find that listening to voicemail is not included as part of your inclusive minutes. I’m paying 12p a minute to listen to my voicemail no matter what.

Therefore the aim is to find a way to avoid this, so the obvious answer is a voicemail to email service, but if only life was that simple.

I purchased a nice 03 number from my normal supplier of such services, Flextel, this cost me a couple of quid for the number, plus a quid top up of ‘call credit’. I wouldn’t be using any of this as I configured the number as voicemail.

I set my call diversion on my phone to my new 03 number. When a message us left on the voicemail Flextel email me the message as an email attachment, which I can then listen to on my phone at no cost, the files are tiny as not to worry my “acceptable use” none specfic data allowance.

This threw up a problem. The email attachment is a ulaw formatted wav file. The native android media player doesn’t recognise this codec.

This is fixed with a 99p app called WavPlayer.

So for the price of a pint down the pub there’s no paying 12p a minute to listen to voicemail……..or THAT’S what I thought until I examined my phone bill……. Wait for part two to find out the next T Mobile plan feature I hadn’t spotted….

A couple of stories I read this week got me thinking.

Steve Penk owner of Oldham’s Revolution sacked one of his jocks over a row over Armistice day silence. This got a front page splash in the local rag.

Meanwhile on air and on the revolution’s website all reference to the departed DJ disappears overnight.

Meanwhile while browsing through the blogs I subscribe to I spotted this one, not only is one of Absolute Radio’s jocks leaving we are getting advanced notice.

I know this is not exactly the fairest of comparisons one being sacked the other just moving on (or coming to end of contract or whatever it may be) but taking it wider what do you do when someone moves on?

In this connected age there are a number of interesting things to consider.

In the old days it was a lot simpler. I recall in my more youthful days back in the summer of 1991 listening to an entertaining young jock on MFM by the name of Mike Toolan who announced he was leaving for a new job in Leeds. Nice and simple, the listeners were not going to suddenly tune in one night to find him missing and in the pre web streaming days the station was not going to loose any listeners with fans following him to an out of area station. The jocks who followed in his place, the likes of Elliot Webb and Gregg Burns were even able to make reference to their predecessor. I’m afraid twenty years on the exact chronology of the MFM line up escapes me – see my footnotes, but it worthy of note of that the above jocks, and others, spent formative years in local radio in Wrexham before moving onto to bigger things.

So what do we need to consider these days?

The average listener (not just the anoraks and industry bods) can not only very easily get info on where the DJ has gone on the web, they may well be actively interacting with the DJ on social media and can find out before they even tune into the radio station.

Therefore as a radio station you need to ensure the station is as big as the individual personalities. Why should the listener stay with you and not follow the jock to their new gig? Just pretending they never existed is putting all your faith in the strength of the station brand at the risk of alienating listeners by treating them with contempt.

How to handle succession is an interesting one. Every so often you’ll read the press coverage mulling over what will happen when Moyles eventually leaves the Radio One breakfast show. How many of his fans will be lost to Radio One? How many of those who interact with Radio One via social media will be lost. Similar experiences can be drawn of when Chris Tarrant left Capital, and how will they handle Johnny Vaughan leaving?

The same applies on a smaller stage. To take my 90s jock example and bring it up to date. Now Toolan is a major attraction as breakfast host on Key103. My unchecked reckoning sees Mike, in his two stints on Key breakfast as the longest serving breakfast host in Piccadilly / Key 103′s history. When he moves on will Key have to deal with things differently than MFM did?

Question one is the obvious question of what to do on-air, however the further, more interesting questions are to do with social media.

One thing that Key are arguably doing right is channelling social media through station and “Key103 Breakfast” accounts. However it’s fun to see that Facebook recommends ‘Capital FM’s’ page as similar to Key 103.

Say in our example that Toolan follows in his Key breakfast predecessor, Steve Penk and buys his own radio station, assuming it’s local to Manchester he could be promoted right on Key 103′s prime outlet for social interaction with their listeners. No simple answer to this one, but food for thought.

I must point out I’ve absolutely no information about his career plans, I’m using Toolan here as nothing more than an hypothetical example to illustrate the point by way of bringing us full circle to were we started with Steve Penk.

Footnotes
I’m recalling the MFM line up from memory and may have my evening and late shows mixed up.
I wrote the first draft of this article last Friday morning on my phone while commuting. It’s a shame I never completed it as this would have made this even more timely as later that day Capital Radio announced Johnny Vaughan had just done is last show, where from what I’ve read he didn’t acknowledge on air he was leaving. It also shows it is a small world as we hear that Gregg Burns is depping in the slot in the meantime.

For the benefit of any non UK readers ‘Children In Need’ is a charity who hold an annual ‘telethon’ on BBC Television. This is happening as I write this.

Normally on Children in Need day when you walk through Manchester City Centre you are sure to encounter people collecting for Children In Need (CIN). Strangely today I didn’t see any (not to say there was none – I probably just wasn’t in the right location at the right time).

Watching the show tonight knowing first hand that CIN does support projects that do good work I thought I’d be generous and give some money. (Disclosure I work for organisations that have received CIN funding in the past.)

I didn’t fancy calling the number they kept promoting (incidentally a 03 ‘non geographic – geographic rate’ number) – mainly as I didn’t have my credit card to hand – which I assume they would want, plus didn’t really fancy sticking a donation on my card.

One failing this year – they didn’t promote SMS text donation on air very much.

However the rest of my experience was excellent.

Opening the bbc.co.uk/pudsey address, which was constantly on screen, on my mobile phone, the site detected I was using a mobile, and gave me a nice mobile friendly page.

I found the ‘how to donate’ link fairly clearly – which then gave me a list of links including donation by phone, post, paypal, you name it – plus donate by text.

Following the ‘text’ link gave me clear instructions to text a short code (plus explanation of costs etc.)

The short code was a hyper-link – pressing which opened my text message composer pre-entered with the shortcode number and relevant message keyword.

Hitting send and I’ll be relieved of £5 on my next mobile bill (well I bet it will be £5.12 – as the ‘one text at standard operator rate’ last time I did something like this did not come out of my free texts allowance.)

The confirmation text I received gave me a nice link to a special page to ‘gift aid’ the donation. Another mobile friendly webpage to confirm my mobile number and name and address in order to register for gift aid (where the charity can reclaim the tax on the donation).

Overall an excellent user experience which is worthy of note. I feel that “I’ve done my bit”  with minimum effort and at no point feeling that I should stop the process as it was too complicated or unclear.

I guess if you wanted a totally seemless experience this gift aid form could have been pre-populated with details like my mobile phone number (even name and address) – but that would mean that my phone company would have to pass on my personal details to a third party – I may ‘trust’ BBC CIN – but certainly wouldn’t trust some other companies who work in the mobile arena with getting my personal details from my telco. So I’ll live with filling them in myself.

Those of a certain technical bent will be familiar with the concept of of the ‘hello world’ exercise when learning a new programming language or technique. Thus many moons after signing up for twitter, I’m going to try and actually use it a little bit.

Thus if I’ve clicked all the correct buttons, downloaded all the correct software and inserted all the correct codes my first tweet should be a ‘hello world’ announcement linking to this blog posting. Not only that but any future blog posts I make should be tweeted in the same way – thus guaranteeing me sending some tweets without ever needing to go to touch a twitter client (though strictly speaking that’s not true as philedmonds.com is now registered as a twitter app.)

I got sent an invite to google+ the other day. As everyone is raving how good it is, I thought at least I should check it out (even if I don’t go onto use it very much).

So clickly click on the e-mail link and get asked to sign into my google account and….

So I can’t use Google+ without a  Google profile, but ‘my organisation’ doesn’t allow me to have a profile…… as I’m the admin I didn’t know I was stopping myself having a Google profile.

A little searching later shows multiple results such as this, showing that I’m not the only one encountering this. I have a Google Apps account and I can’t have a Google Profile with this, therefore I can’t join google+ (or at least I’ll have to set-up a new google account to use google+) This comes just weeks after I finally merged my ‘personal’ google account with my google apps account with the same e-mail address with all sorts of fun and games.

So  it’s back to the drawing board before I can create my “circles” and “hangout” with people….

So at what many people would deem to be “tea time” I embarked on what I thought would be a nice simple, and relatively swift job.

Your starter question, how many ‘Windows Updates’ would you expect to be pulled down onto a XP Pro laptop that hasn’t seen an internet connection since mid December 2010?

Your answer – 64!  (This will include MS Office updates as well as Windows) -  that is before the countless other updates in the way of Firefox, Flash Player,  Adobe Reader, Java and other countless sundry bits and pieces – though thankfully these are all automated.

Next uninstall some of the assorted junk that’s found itself onto the machine and I’m two hours down the line before I get to the main task in hand, loading the 500MB download of Quickbooks 2010 software. Quickbooks is a popular accounting software package.

Now my experience in the past is that Quickbooks is notoriously fickle. However on reading up on-line while I was waiting for the myriad of updates to load it seems that Intuit have finally come into the ‘real world’ of corporate computing and made Quickbooks run as a ‘limited user’ (I guess because they’ve got to do this to have vista/7  support were even an Admin user is not running ‘administrator’ rights all the time).

Good news after much loading time (including various .net frameworks, some Office 2003 integration tools and other various bits and bobs as well as Quickbooks itself) all seemed to work, bar the fact that the install was anything but ‘quick’. I’ll stand-by to eat my words about it “all working” once our finance guy has got his mits on the laptop.

So onto the other two points of my title for this post.

All this extended evening activity lead me to a couple of listening opportunities, the first was to a radio programme that I’d not normally tune into and found myself fascinated by an Iranian drama piece on the Persian Seda programme. I didn’t understand a word of it, but found myself drawn in by the drama of the different tones of voices. Although it was spoken word there is almost a musical quality to the delivery.

This is a great example of were radio works uniquely. I’d never think of downloading a Persian podcast or search out such content on a streaming audio service, but did discover something I enjoyed via the radio.

Once I’d concluded my software wrangling duties at what some may call “supper time” I could finally jump on the train and got out my Walkman (by such I don’t mean I’m retro and playing cassette tapes, rather it is my Sony ‘iPod clone’) and “discovered” – Burst of the Worst – which gave me some much needed light relief and a few chuckles. Now this was another nice discovery but in a different way. I’d made a deliberate decision to download these podcasts, most of which are somewhat different to this “Christmas tape” edition. An interesting thought for podcasters why not occasionally throw in something a little different. The listener can always just skip past it. Obviously in this case Jonathan Marks is podcasting archive radio programmes, so perhaps decades ago him and his team were doing just this on the radio.

…you spend half an hour banging your head against the virtual wall.

Many months ago on my blog I suggested that I would do “Tuesday technical tips” – quick little bits of advice. It’s been ages since I’ve done so, then today – being a Tuesday I came across the problem as described in the title and first line of this post. If they mean nothing to you then stop reading (there will be something less geeky coming along soon.)

Here’s the senerio:

Linux server running Samba 3 as Windows Domain Controller
“New” windows xp pro workstation I want to add to the domain

All very simple – go into ‘network identification’ on the windows box, type in the relevant computer name and domain, click okay, get prompted for user name/password of an account with permissions to add workstation to the domain, type in ‘root’ as username and my carefully crafted password and rather then getting the ‘Welcome to the<NAME OF DOMAIN> domain’ message I’m expecting, I get an ‘Access Denied’ error message.

So I though, as I’m adding a ‘new’ machine, but reusing an old computer name, perhaps I need to delete the ‘old’ machine’s ‘workstation trust account’, so off I go and delete the <MACHINENAME>$ account in both the linux users and samba users list and so that the system would recreate them automatically. Still no joy.

Many tweaks later I suddenly twigged. As a good system administrator I recently changed all the passwords on our systems. This included the root password on the server. What I’d done is changed the linux ‘root’ user password, but not the password of the user ‘root’ in the samba password file. On entering my old root password into the windows ‘join domain’ window it all worked as expected.

Lesson learnt – if you change your linux passwords you need to change your samba passwords as well (or take measures to sync the two if needed or one of many other permutations of actions you might like which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.).

Here’s an e-mail I recently sent to the Community Media Association’s mailing list you may find of interest:

Again my personal views….

On 23/04/2011 20:56, ROBERT TYLER wrote:

In any event, all of national advertising is sold based on RAJAR data,
in other words, no RAJAR no interest.

Just pondering – in the last RAJAR figures, ‘other listening’ counts for 6% reach.

This ‘other listening’ consists of:

Non RAJAR subscribing stations – i.e. many Digital only, Community, Student, Hospital and Pirate stations.
‘Out of area’ listening (i.e. if I ticked Liverpool’s ‘Radio City’ as a Manchester listener I’d be in ‘other listening’ as I’m outside their TSA).

Also RAJAR state that 25% of listening is via Digital Platforms.

Therefore you could argue that discounting 25% of the 6% of ‘other listening’ – leaves us with Community Radio having ‘the best part of’ a 4% audience reach.

Of course some Community Radio listening is via Internet – which is Digital in the RAJAR survey and there are many other non Community ‘other’ stations.

The biggest, of many, blows to the statistical validity of this 4% figure is that there is not universal enough coverage of Community Radio. We are all so different that if a respondent in Town A listens to a Community Radio station, we can’t justifiably assume that a similar demographic non surveyed listener in Town B listens to their local Community Radio station.

Even if you take a margin out of the ‘other listening’ for listeners to non Rajar, non Community Radio, a 2% reach brings us in line with the reach of BBC 6Music – but still this is pretty dodgy ground to claim with any validity. In any case in the commercial world there’s only Premier Christian Radio, Kissmat, Buzz Asia, Gold Devon and Yorkshire Radio at such low reach figures (the first three being niche broadcasters, the last digital only and we can only assume Oldies on AM is not a mass market attraction in Devon.)

So depending on how you spin it 2% may or may not be that ‘attractive’ a statistic.

However I believe the reach of Community Radio will be greater than this – but a significant audience will only tune in for one or two specific programmes.

The Rajar methodology will never work for this as the survey size is just many a factor (I’d argue at least hundreds times) too small to catch all these niche one or two hours a week listeners. BUT it is perfectly “statistically valid” to “gauge” the audience of large mainstream radio stations.

Anyway this is some food for thought – I’m sure some Rajar gurus might be able to pull apart some of this argument as I don’t claim to be any expert!

Phil.