Still, I am cracking on with my plan. I have developed a module for Magento that allows store owners to export csv files with lists of what customer has purchased what products, including unregistered customers and which products customers have on their wishlists. All of which is tidily available from the admin panel.  The next two things that will also broaden the magento work I can do are to ‘box up’ a hackish thing I’ve got (making use of the totally bogus method described here in footnote 2). This will end up as a spangly ‘bespoke price’ module that allows for the pricing of goods by dimensions. Height, Width, that sort of thing. Useful but very annoying to the Magento product model.

And by annoying I mean that if you wanted to sell, for example, sheets of wood between 1 and 10 meters high by 1 to 2 meters wide, it would, ideally be a ‘SImple Configurable’ product. This means it would actually have every possible size permutation (lets say 1m increments for the sake of argument but you see how that could easily get complicated by smaller units and larger sizes) as an individual simple product. The configuration would effectively be a select wrapper around whichever simple matched the config requirements. Now, while a max of 2 x 10 in 1 meters increments would be 20 products, the added complication of real-world use – say 2m x 10m but in 1cm increments would be 2000 products. All of which need pricing.

“Ah” you say, “CSV import the lot and do the grunt work on a spreadsheet in Excel”

Well, yes, you could do that. But that’s a lot of prices to maintain and update.

Which leaves either a module or a csv-generating script. The price formula is basically mechanised. An extension module is better than the csv import because the csv import mechanism has been known to be flaky and is just much less elegant than an extension and results in vastly less clutter on the hosting database.  My module hack solution runs here but I’m working locally to put it in a ‘proper’ format. Or at least planning too.

Meanwhile what I’m actually doing is playing with this extension for wordpress-magento integration. There’s work in that, you see.

This is the level-headed and reasonable proposal that has been suggested at HM Treasury’s ‘Spending Challenge‘ website.

If it were to go ahead, I could rent my dog out to provide extra speed/generation during peak times. He’s a Lurcher. He likes cats.

Dizzy has more…

So rather than sit on my arse getting bummed out, or worse, sitting on my arse in the pub getting pissed and bummed out, I’ve got a plan. I’m forcing myself to do three things, as though they were ‘jobs’. I’m ploughing though a Wrox book on coding for Android 2.0, I’m forcing myself to learn a bit about WordPress 3.0 because there’s always WP work kicking about and finally I’m going to aggressively look for work.  That should be relatively productive and keep me out of trouble.

Or something.

I’ve given up twice; yes, I know but that may well happen when you’ve smoked for 8+ years and have all the willpower of a particularly weak willed fruitfly.

The first time I quit for 2 years but then found myself at a trade fair in Germany where people chainsmoked from breakfast and cracked open their first lager at 10am.

Second time out seems to have taken as it’s 4 years + now and I’ve had rough times since (like being diagnosed with MS tho the plus is smoking appears to significantly worsen the outcome of MS or at least correlates to worse outcomes!) so… yeah.

Anyway, word to the wise. Use NRT. Yeah, the patches will give you funky dreams and may make you itch and stuff but you need to know that your ‘addiction’ is as much about the physical habit of lighting up and the rituals therein as it is an addiction to nicotine. You don’t want to be worrying about both at the same time. NRT helps. Plus it’s trendy to medicalise your drug habits in the 21st Century and why pay tax on a payment to Phillip Morris when you can pay a subsidised fee to a Big Pharma instead?

The other thing is that, so far, four odd years out, I never, ever stopped having either the odd ciggie craving or rose-tinted reminiscence. But, I might live longer, or die faster if I just get run over as I continue walking in my dotage and I will definitely keep more of my own money, tax or no!

Right now, she is writing posts that are broadly pro-Lib Dem but her general scepticism of both the party structure and it’s operation and policy make this particularly noteworthy. It’s like when you’ve split up with a girl/boy and  then see them again and they look quite good but you then remember all the shite they put you through. I recognise it well because that is exactly how I feel about the Tories post 1995.

I, more than the Lab-Con party hacks, would actually like to see the Liberal Democrats restore their position as the Whig opposition to the Tories which served the UK so well since the 18th Century until Labour rudely interrupted it.

I dream of waking on May 7th to find that the BNP taking 5% of votes from their erstwhile lefty colleagues Labour, in their Northern heartlands where there is still such a thing as the white working class, causes them to haemorrhage seats to the Libs or Tories. To discover that the SNP have wiped them out in Scotland and with the few seats they cling on to, they total 100 or so in the new Parliament.

I really do.

I would truly love a Lib Dem ‘victory’ in this respect. Sandal wearing beardies with an unhealthy interest in the mathematics of ATV don’t scare me! At least, not as much as ex-sandal wearing ex-beardies with an axes to grind, as found in Labour!

But this probably won’t happen. Remember the phenomenal polling of the Alliance? Go to your constituencies and prepare for government? No? Look it up.

I think the best that can come from this election is either a government, or shambolic coalition, that highlights how fundamentally undemocratic our voting system is. Or one that sees turnout dip below 50%, achieving the same goal.

Only then will the arguments for change become irresistible.

And if the Cleggster can play a part in that, the more the better, I say!

I am, at the age of 36, for the first time in my life, considering deliberately not voting.

Why?

Well, as Ghandi showed, there’s a certain something to the idea of withdrawing your consent to your own oppression.

Oppression? You ask? That’s a bit strong…

Well, no, it’s not. Our ‘democracy’ is like a rigged card game. You can play it as earnestly or as cunningly as you like, but it’s still rigged. Face facts – if 70% of the electorate turnout and a government is returned on 40% of the vote, that’s still only 30-odd percent of the people that support it, which is minority rule of the divide-and-conquer variety. Even if you support the eventual winner, you can’t claim to have ‘the people’ behind you. You’re just less *unpopular* than the rest in that slightly fewer people dislike you than others.

What a great, democratic, institution!

So what is making me think seriously about not voting?

Well, the situation described above will not change until the turnout drops to below 50 percent. Why? Because at that point it becomes a headline and will enter the minds of most people. Until then it just concerns those few people like me interested in both politics AND fairness, not merely team advantage. At that time, it will become obvious that the situation is ridiculous – a government will claim a democratic mandate on an effective 20% (1 in 5) of the electorate (40% of a 50% turnout). Then we can effectively have reform of our system. Then we can reconnect our politics with our people, whatever that will mean.