October, 2007 – David Hughes

26 October 2007

1 Million Pay Mortgage With Credit Card

Rising housing costs forced more than a million householders to use a credit card to pay their mortgage or rent over the past 12 months, a poll for the housing charity Shelter reveals today.

It says a growing number of young people are turning to expensive sources of credit to hang on to a home.

The survey, conducted by YouGov for the charity’s magazine Roof, polled 2,000 households last month after the run on Northern Rock. It found that 6% of householders paying mortgage or rent reported using a credit card to make payments, rising to 7.5% of younger people aged 18-24, who were trying to keep a foothold on the first rung of the housing ladder.

Full article.

Simply amazing and terrifying.

I’m beginning to wonder if my children will actually be able to afford to buy a house when the time comes. So, what is the solution to the UK housing problem?

12 October 2007

The Scum Career Development Model

I watched Scum for the first time recently. It is a great film, tough to watch in places, and confirmed to me what I had always suspected – I wouldn’t last 10 minutes in prison.

However, it did make me think about the hierarchical, structured environment in which I find myself daily – the corporate world. How interesting would work be if ‘prison rules’ applied to the workplace?

For example I could decide that I want to run my department; now normally that means working my way to the top through hardwork and ‘networking’ over some years but not with ‘prison rules’.

Under the “Scum Career Development Model” I would simply need to find the VP and batter him round the head with two snooker balls in a sock.

The Senior VP would be in the toilets (if copying Scum exactly) and that would require no more than bashing his head into the sink a couple of times, kicking him around and informing him that “I’m the Daddy now”.

Hey presto I now run my department.

3 October 2007

iPhone Hands On

I’m at the Future of Web Apps conference today, more of which later, and have just had my first “play” with an iPhone and it is niiice. Very niiice…

Much smaller than it looks in photos, it feels marvellous in the hand. The screen is awesome and the UI… the UI is completely and utterly compelling. You just wanna play with it; zoom in, zoom out, flick through the music or the lists of contacts – hell just do stuff with it for the sake of it.

The only wrinkle I could see in my fairly brief play was potentially quite a big one – text entry. The keyboard is, I think, an acquired taste – everybody says you get used to it and essentially your body learns to use it. I hope so as I struggled; it probably took me 5 attempts to enter a URL.

So the big question… will I buy one?

Yes, but I’ll still wait for the 3G version.

1 October 2007

Cheese Delivery Devices

I had a particularly scrumptious blue goat’s cheese this weekend, whilst polishing it off I realised that crackers, biscuits, bread, rolls etc. are in fact little more than cheese delivery devices.

Think about it for a moment, when was the last time you ate cheese with something, for the sake of the something?

Cheese delivery devices are merely a way of getting the cheese to your mouth for you to enjoy and so you don’t feel “bad” for eating chunks of cheese on their own.

Although I’m sure we’ve all done so on occasion…