Because that sum is equivalent to 1 year’s salary, and it was paid in shares. Now, if you received a bonus equivalent to your annual salary in shares in your company, and you were in charge of the company; you’d most likely be VERY CAREFUL to run it well, and get your shares to appreciate in value.

So that is why I am not up in arms about a £1M bonus.

(Or, of course, you could ditch the shares and run!)

What’s that? I hear you say.

It’s certainly not an ‘all in one day’ kind of thing. Just a plan to visit all the pubs in Loughborough. All of them. Even the ones you really would rather not go in (chiefly the Mundy Arms in 1994, and the Cherry Tree in 2005). The only rule is to have a drink (half of squash, pint, shot, whatever) in each. There is an unwritten rule that if the first person orders a shot, you all order a shot, drink up and get out of there. Except now it’s a written rule.

Anyway, the first step is research, and for that I would like to appeal to Loughborough readers. Do you know of any pubs that are in Loughborough, currently operating, and not on the list?

1. 12 Degrees West
2. The Albion
3. Amber Rooms
4. Bar Europa (is this still operating?)
5. Beacon Inn
6. Beauchief Hotel
7. Boat Inn
8. Custard Bar
9. Custard House
10. Druid’s Arms
11. Forest Gate
12. The Gallery
13. The Gate Inn
14. The Generous Briton
15. Greyhound Inn
16. Griffin Inn
17. Hobgoblin
18. Hunters Moon (is this still operating?)
19. Jack O’Lantern
20. The Maltings
21. Hayley’s Bar (did this turn into the LapDancing club?)
22. Maxwell’s
23. The Moon and Bell
24. News House
25. Old English Gentleman
26. Old Pack Horse Inn
27. Orange Tree
28. Paget Arms
29. Peacock Inn
30. The Phantom
31. The Plough Inn (I haven’t been past here since last time… still open?)
32. The Print Room
33. The Priory
34. Revolution
35. The Roman (I think this is closed down)
36. Ring ‘O’Bells
37. Royal George Hotel
38. Royal Oak
39. @TheOffice (What happened here? Turned into a curry place, is it a pub again?)
40. The Station Hotel
41. Swan in the Rushes
42. Tap and Mallet
43. Three Nuns
44. Unicorn Hotel
45. Varsity
46. Vice Versa
47. Warwick Arms (a curry place last time I looked… is it still not a pub?)
48. Wheatsheaf Harvester
49. White Hart
50. White Horse (Noodle Bar)
51. Windmill

I think, at best guess, we’re now at 46 pubs. Of the seven unsure entries, I reckon The Plough is probably still fine, and I think The Hunters Moon was open last time we passed in the summer. The rest, I’m pretty sure are gone.

The numbers were 64 in 1994, and 59 in 2005. Wow, that’s a 28% reduction in pubs over 11 years.

Interestingly, the line forms a direct connection between Inverness and Carcassonne, so it is most likely a ley line*

(*or most likely not, eh?)

Anyway, looking at a satellite image in the cold light of day, it all becomes clear…

What I realised is that just south of the school pictured, there is an old railway track. A pipeline crosses the track on a raised bridge. So my educated guess is that this is a long, very straight pipeline that has successfully stopped having anything built on it. I’m not sure how pipelines work, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want to knock down a house to make repairs to it.

Mystery solved!

When I was a simple employee, I used to reel at the management BS, renaming things in politically correct ways. I’m pretty sure some employees have perfectly healthy cynicism. In fact, as an engineer, I needed cynicism to make sure things worked and weren’t just pipe dreams.

But, oh how things are different for a business owner. You need to be realistic about threats and problems, but you must never get bogged down by them. Everything you do, even solving difficult problems, must be done with a postitive attitude.

A change I made last week to my systems was to take the following text:

2 Overdue Followups
120231 : Joe Bloggs : Opened 10/12/11 : Followup 19/01/12
120485 : John Dunn : Opened 12/12/11 : Followup 18/01/12

…and changed it to:

2 Followup Opportunities
120231 : Joe Bloggs : Opened 10/12/11 : Followup 19/01/12
120485 : John Dunn : Opened 12/12/11 : Followup 18/01/12

The phone calls are much easier to make, my attitude is better, and conversion rates are improved no end. Isn’t it funny, the little things you can do?

Make a switch to positivity. I dare you!

It’s rubbish.

Reasoning

I liked 6th Sense, I liked Unbreakable, I liked The Village. Signs was a bit rubbish, mainly due to its formula of “Oh no… look, there’s a slightly mysterious peril. Oh, it’s solved.”

I thought maybe that was a bad egg in a patch of, um, good eggs. No… erm, you get the idea. But it seems that the formula was repeated for The Happening. And the acting was rubbish too.

Apparantly, Mr. Shyamalan has claimed he was trying to make a B-movie. If you want a rubbish-good B-movie, then you need to see The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension, and at just over three quid from Amazon what could go wrong?

3:15 gets my vote for the best reaction. So understated, yet so expressive.

Sushi Conveyor Belt

In case you’re wondering, this is a sushi conveyor belt restaurant. The food comes round in small portions on the conveyor, the customers take whatever they want to eat and then pay at the end according to the number (and colours) of the empty plates they have.

I was at a business forum last week, where we were discussing our networking groups and setting goals for the next three months. The group I belong to, BNI, has excellent procedures for measuring everything that’s going on and I realised that I could apply a lot of what I saw there to my business. (A bit late in the day? Perhaps, but better late than never!)

The key characteristics were to a) collect a lot of data; not so much that you get bogged down, but enough that you really get a feel for what’s going on, then b) analyse that data and look for trends.

So where does the ‘power of one’ come in?

By analysing the data, it’s possible to find one item that needs attention. Naturally, it’s usually possible to find more than one item, but by finding and focussing on the most important item, other things will generally fix themselves. You don’t flap about trying to spin plates, you just do what’s necessary to fix issue numero uno.

Web Site

Now that my business website is pretty much up and running, I’ve been looking at some of the data. The regional push has worked nicely—mid-January figures already show a 91% increase in visitors in my key catchment area. There are two areas where I can see possible work required. Firstly, the number of conversions per 1000 visitors is too small to be measurable, so I could look at making the site convert better. BUT what’s also shown up is the direct traffic has dropped between December and January (albeit 2 weeks data vs. 4 weeks, but I have high aspirations for growth).

So, my ‘power of one’ for the next two weeks is to get out there, get my card out there and get more direct traffic.

This is what business is about; very little to do with taking photographs, and very much about knowing what the heck is going on!

Now, this is a great book. Portraits of many people, famous and not-so-obviously-famous, by some of the world’s best photographers. The collection is from GAP’s advertising between around 1988 and 2006, where celebrities were asked to combine GAP clothing with things from their own wardrobe. The results, coming from the safe hands of Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Herb Ritts and the like are stunning and inspirational. They look so simple—as if you could do it yourself if only you had 20 years’ experience.

My favourite in the collection is a picture of Steve Zahn, where his exterior is completely deadpan—as deadpan as you can get. Inside, however, he is clearly having a ball. Amazing work by Christian Witkin.

Interestingly, when you get your copy, the sleeve colour and photo will probably be different. Mine is beige and has Whoopee Goldberg.

Ninety-Nine Pee

If you have any interest in portrait photography, I’d highly recommend it; but you may not need to go to Amazon… I got mine from The Works in Basingstoke for 99p. Go have a look, it’ll be the best 99p you’ll spend for a long time.

You know, it’s ages since I had my stirling engine running. The linked video (also shown below) reminded me how good it was when it was running sweetly. I tried reconditioning it a couple of years ago, but for some reason it wasn’t happy. I guess this goes part-way to explaining why they’re still not in common use—lots of fine-tuning and maintenance required.

That could go on my list of things to do this year… to get it running this sweetly again.