Conservative candidate Terry Dos Ramos and Lib Dem incumbent Geoff Dunne both picked up 674 votes, well ahead of the third placed Labour candidate. Turnout in the ward – 38.12%.

As a result, one ballot paper marked for each of the tied candidates was placed into a ballot box, and Three Rivers District returning officer Steven Halls picked out the winner, Conservative Dos Ramos.

Source: Adam Binnie

Actually, I lie, I’ve already used my postal vote.  And I didn’t vote for a party that hadn’t been in touch.  If you want me to vote for you it might be a good idea to tell me you are standing and what your policies are before I see your name for the first and only time on the ballot paper.

It seems to have been rather a quiet year for election leaflets this time round, though I suspect this may be because in the Watford Borough at least there is only a single role up for election, that of your ward’s Borough councillor.

On one side there are the Lib Dems who seem to be leading on a Save Watford Met/introduce controlled parking zones everywhere ticket alongside their usual promises.  On the other, the Conservatives seem to be leading with with an opposition to development in the area – particularly that proposed for Cassiobury Park – and of course Save Watford Met.

Photo by realpaulsmith

One step on from Tesco promoting their own car insurance offering on the side of Orange Juice. What is it with breakfast time advertising?

There’s even a company specialising in helping brands find their way on to your table in the morning, the rather aptly titled Milkmedia. It’s quite clever really since there will be repeated exposure to the advert every morning and whenever you make a cup of tea.

The start of “Somebody that I used to know” by Gotye [yt] sounds like the music from Monkey Island.  On that subject, here is a representation of the evolution of computer sounds cards as demonstrated by the Monkey Island theme.

Someone ate 16 courses (and drank 12 glasses of wine!) at Colette’s at the Grove.

The Warner Brothers Leavesden Studio tour opened yesterday. After several weeks of adverts in the Metro, Evening Standard, local press and posters at tube stations. Wonder what their market budget was?

The Tube (BBC 2) was good wasn’t it!

While walking down Watford High Street past the Clements building a man successfully caught my attention and drew me into his pitch. I’m certainly no expert on selling but I admired his techniques.

The rules he was working to… (possibly!):

Approach
He led with an open question – “When did you last go paintballing”. It made me think. Out loud. He’d nabbed me. It was pretty obvious he was going to try and sell me paintballing now which I wasn’t really interested in buying off the highstreet, but I suckered.

Familiarity
The salesmen was very friendly. So much so that it put niggling doubt in my mind as to whether or not I actually knew this guy.

In fact he was cunningly disguised as an ordinary citizen!
He wasn’t an obvious salesperson – Unlike the usual High Street menace of Chuggers the chap who approached me didn’t outwardly appear to be accosting shoppers. In didn’t see him approach anyone else, he certainly wasn’t moving up to passers-by, in fact I didn’t even notice him until I heard him.

He wasn’t wearing a brightly coloured tabard and didn’t have ID hanging on an oversized lanyard from his neck either. In fact he appeared totally non-uniformed, although this probably helped him draw me in I certainly wasn’t going to hand over £50 “in cash or by card” to some guy I’d never met before on the street in exchange for a cardboard flyer containing a code I would need to use to later make a phone booking to redeem his offer.

Ownership
He was only too pleased to pass me the three dual sided cardboard sheets he had outlining the offer. Once he had suckered me in it was one of the very first things he did, he wanted me to hold this while he spoke to me. I guess this would give me some sense of “ownership” and a belief that I was going to buy these – in effect I would be giving him something if I rejected his offer of handing him £50.

Digging for Information. And using it.
One of the first things he asked me was my name. Then if I preferred to be called Phil or Philip.
He asked me where I lived.
Where I’d been paintballing before, London Bridge: “that used to be one of our sites”.
Where I worked. What I did. (oh shut up and get on with your selling already, I came to town to buy shoes not to go paintballing or explain my life story…)

I’m sure this was meant to make it personal but whereas he may have started to come across as genuinely interested (clearly fake) it seemed like he ended up crazily stalkerish with the whole “getting to know the customer” thing.

Scarcity
He said he had only 3 packages left to sell before he could go home, or “back to Farringdon” as he put it. This was at 11:30. His pockets looked pretty full to me. Pressure selling eh.

He didn’t reveal his full hand at first
I’m not sure if this worked in his favour or not. He was certainly slow to give out his information with extra benefits of the deal introduced very slowly in the conversation and once it had progressed quite far.
- Lunch would be included
- as would entrance to a comedy club.
Was this to persuade me to stick around and build up some kind of rapport with him? To make people think the deal is getting better and better? I don’t know, it just seemed strange that some of the major selling points weren’t been shoved in my face. They certainly made the deal sound better.

What let him down was lack of knowledge
I asked him where the nearest paintball centre was to Watford. A perfectly reasonable question since he was selling to people in Watford Highstreet.
He rattled off a couple of placenames (Borehamwood was one I think, I forget the other) before uttering something along the lines of “Maidenhead’s quite far innit”.

When he mentioned entrance to a comedy club was included he added “Two in Watford” but he couldn’t tell me what the club was besides Jongulers (Highlight I expect) and I had to prompt him on the Jongulers.

He didn’t volunteer me the name of the company he was working for. “Ministry of Everything” he tells me, eventually. I spot “Ministry of Paintball” on the card and mention I’ve heard of them. He doesn’t mention their name at all.

The actual offer which for him seemed secondary to the conversation
I don’t really want to get in to their business model/what they offer since there is a load of information and reviews of their package already available with a quick Google. Except to say that the salesman remained pretty quiet on the whole issue of price throughout his pitch. Near the start he mentioned the £50 deal. Later he briefly muttered something about £11.50 and “obviously you’ll have to pay for your paintballs”. I didn’t follow up on this with him but a quick search online reveals that if I took them up on their offer as well as paying Ministry £50 for 8 tickets, these 8 people would then have to pay them £11.50 each in order to confirm the booking and get their first 100 paintballs. Apparently they got into some trouble with Groupon over this.

After perhaps 3 minutes of chatting his pitch and personal information digging/fake interest began to bore me so now irritated, mostly at myself for initially engaging with him, I told him I wasn’t interested and turned to leave.

Last chance
“Philip!” he called after me. In an authoritative voice. So much so that I thought, however unlikely it may be, that I had dropped my wallet or done something else silly. I hadn’t. Annoyed that that he had caught me out to once again gain my attention, he was playing with my emotions, the “social compliance” rule certainly stood true here. He commanded my attention and I gave it to him.

He offered me two 8-person passes for £50. I declined.

No really last chance
“Phil!” he called after me, louder than before. But he was slow this time, I had just fallen for the trick once and this time I had already made about ten paces away before I slowed, turned round, shook my head and gave him a dirty look. He would have offered me all 3. I don’t like it when people call me “Phil”, and he knew that. He had mined that information out of me earlier.

The 8 person Ministry of Paintball pass he was trying to flog me costs £50. The company is a middleman, keeps this fee for themselves and their partner paintball site owners give you a free basic package hoping you will spend money with them for more paintballs. A quick Google revealed someone even managed to obtain 4×8 passes from a Ministry of Paintball street seller for £50, and you can pick them up for far less on eBay. You’ll have to pay Ministry an additional £11.50 per person on top of whatever you pay on the street to actually book the deal though, so the £50 deal actually costs £142. I don’t like that pricing strategy.

As an aside they really need to work on managing the results that show for a search of their name:

After spending my uni years with my trusty Dell Studio 1535 – well I write trusty, that is aside from an intermittent INCREDIBLY LOUD fan problem I had to solve on at least a couple of occasions and the replacement batteries I needed to buy in order to keep using the computer – I decided I wanted a bigger screen so I could see two documents side by side.

Since I started work at Found six months ago I have had two monitors (although it should be noted here that they are entirely different aspect ratios and hence resolutions and height…) I started to have monitor envy at home.

Since my laptop has remained pretty static since I moved back home – no lectures or nearby computer lab to take it to – a desktop was the obvious choice. I spent far more money than I needed to on the computer opting for a Dell XPS with many of the upgrade checkboxes on offering gubbins I will probably not make use of for the next 3 years or so judging from my past gaming experiences*

The monitor was good value though – less than £130 from Amazon for a BenQ. Unexpectedly I had to resort to manually entering (i.e not from a drop down box) the screen resolution in to the computer though to get the desktop showing at a decent size.

So the computer arrived on Tuesday and it still has Windows Updates to install despite being restarted umpteen times yesterday. It came bundled with the usual crappy manufacturer software and a “reduced functionality” version of Microsoft Word and Excel 2010. I had a 2007 disk for the full Microsoft Office but for some reason this didn’t read, thankfully this one was covered as entering your licence key on the Microsoft website will let you download the full versions. Installation didn’t work until I had gone through a few update-restart sequences though and no explanation or warning of this was displayed. Of course once I had installed the version downloaded from Microsoft I then had to update it to Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1, why this was not in the original download I do not know.

Google Chrome has a Sync option so I thought this would be a great way to transfer all my data whilst retaining it on my laptop for when I use that. Big mistake. Easy to setup but it didn’t work. My bookmarks went across but despite ticking the boxes to sync everything nothing seemed to even after updating Chrome, restarts, enabling and disabling the feature and changing settings several times. At one stage it decided to claim I had no passwords stored on my old machine – nice scare. In the end I just copied the darn password file across.

The computer came with the Dell Standard keyboard which lacks media buttons – something I obviously become accustomed to on my laptop but completely overlooked when looking for a new machine. This’ll need fixing sometime soon.

One smart thing I almost forgot – when I was setting up the computer and had connected to WiFi it told me it had found a printer. I can now print remotely to this if the computer it is connected to is on and it isn’t even a fancy printer. Nice!

*downloaded Command & Conquer 3 from Steam recently. Other top gaming titles include OpenTTD.

I’m sure I’ve seen plans for a renovation of the “civic quarter”, just north of this, before but nothing seems to have come of them.

Landscape architects BDP are behind this latest spruce-up-your-town plan and have set up a blog WhatIfWatford as part of the consultation process.

Over recent years through reports in the local paper there seems to have been somewhat of an obsession with reducing the size of the pond and talk of urban beaches and outdoor icerinks so I expect whatever happens we will see the pond shrink.

The consultation comes amid accusations from the Police that nightlife has left the town centre is out of control – still it appears the actions of drunken revellers have a lot to compete with for the prize of worst behaviour in Watford town centre.

Perhaps one of the most obvious changes in recent years in this area has been the overhaul of the underpass in summer last year. It is now brighter, lighter and actually not too ugly in its latest incarnation as a white walled “art gallery” showcasing scenes and people from around Watford.

The consultation boards can be found here. Designs are due to be completed by the middle of the year for feedback with work commencing in 2013.

Photos: Underpass – staticgirl, Pond- Jamie Moore. Both CC BY-NC 2.0.

Hang on a minute. Wasn’t this predicted for 2011?

What about 2010?

2009?

Yep.

Good content attracts visitors. Nothing new. I think people know this by now.

These photos cover my last semesters at University, my graduation, starting work at Found, various seasonal and local photos, skiing and lots of food. Most images have descriptive alt text.